Essays and Historiettes - new book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THEOPHILE DE VlAU ' I "HERE are some poets, the peculiar sport of Fortune in that capricious mood of hers when she delights in heaping misfortunes on a single head, who are also, for some intrinsic quality, the delight of all mankind. Their works, which they proudly believed would last all time, turn out in the sequel, perhaps, but a shingle monument in painted wood, destined to drop slowly to pieces and disappear; at best only reprinted to complete a collection or to please an enthusiast. But they themselves live longer than their books. Their misfortunes and their faults lend to their lives that touch of the picturesque which is wanting in the histories of well-regulated minds. Byron's troubles throw a lurid colour upon his verse, falling across it like the side-lights in some old cathedral. Chatterton's poetry is clean gone; but we think of his shattered life and that picture of a deathbed where the moonlight covers the lonely corpse like a silvery sheet. The man who has the best chance of being forgotten is the good man, the prudent, the righteous, the [ "4 ] quiet, and the self-denying. Who, for instance, cares to know much about the personal history of Wordsworth, over whose life and letters we actually yawn ? Putting the scrapes and reprehensible behaviour aside, it does seem as if the cold and wintry glory which consists in taking rank as a great writer is a poor thing compared with that inexplicable power which some men, second-rate perhaps in genius, have of drawing towards them the hearts of men while they live, and of keeping that love alive after they themselves are dead. It is a power not easy to understand. So there are some women, not by any means the most beautiful, who have the power through all their lives of making the hearts of the foolish sex to glow...