IDLENESS OF GENIUS.

I said, not long since, to Mr. ——, “Nobody tolerates, or even likes, a thorough-going, genuine, conscious coxcomb, more than I do—one who has taken up the profession coolly and deliberately, like the Brummels, &c. &c. of old. But I cannot stand your friend: he is such a dull dandy, and nothing but a dandy.”

“No, I assure you,” was the reply; “he is by no means deficient. He has, on the contrary, considerable talent; but he is so indolent. How often do you see great talents rendered inefficient by indolence!”

“Yes, you do,” I said; “it is a pity.” But, suddenly struck with the absurdity, I observed, “What nonsense we are talking. One goes on for ever repeating common places, without reflection. You know, as well as I do, that great talents and indolence are physically incompatible. Vitality, or all-aliveness—energy, activity, are the great elements of what we call talents.”

The idleness of genius is a mere platitude. Bacon, Shakspeare, Milton, Voltaire, Newton, all who have enlightened and benefitted the world, have been no less remarkable for their labour, than for their genius. Physical activity may exist without mind; but the man of talent cannot be idle, even though he desire it; he is mastered by his moral energy, and pushed into activity, whether he will or not. I know not a better instance of the industry and energy of talent, than my friend Shiel. A leader of the great national army of the disqualified, and obliged to a perpetual study and practice of the tactics of defence and offence—a lawyer of considerable business—an orator, standing alone, not only in his own country, where so many are eloquent, but in his age and in Europe—a dramatic writer, long ranked among the first of his day,—he adds to these sources of occupation, which are not sufficient to exhaust his unwearied industry, his frequent contributions to the New Monthly Magazine—those brilliant and fanciful sketches, which, though thrown out in moments of relaxation, are, for graphic delineation and picturesque colouring, equal to the best pages, which have made the reputation of Sir W. Scott.

Then again, there is O’Connell, the head and front of all agitation, moral, political, social, and legal. When we read in the papers those eloquent and powerful speeches, in which the spectres of Ireland’s oppression are called up from the depths of history, with a perfect knowledge of all that has concerned the country from its earliest records, and in which unnumbered “modern instances” of misrule, in all its shades of ignorance and venality, are collected from the storehouse of his capacious memory,—those speeches in which, amidst the fiery explosions of long nurtured indignation, (the petulant outpourings of constitutional impatience,) arguments of logical conviction, and facts of curious detail, come forth, as from an exhaustless fountain,—who but would suppose that the life of the patriot, demagogue, and agitator, was occupied exclusively in the one great and absorbing cause? It is, however, on his way home from the courts, and after legal labours, that have occupied him from the dawn of light, that, (as if to escape from the homage which haunts his steps,) he turns into the Catholic Association—it is after having set a jury-box in a roar by his humour, made “butchers weep” by his pathos, driven a witness to the last shift of Irish evasion, and puzzled a judge by some point of law, not dreamed of in his philosophy, that, all weary and exhausted as he must be, he mounts the rostrum of the Corn Exchange, the Jupiter Tonans of the Catholic senate; and, by those thunderbolts of eloquence, so much more effective to hear than to read, kindles the lambent light of patriotism to its fiercest glow, and with “fear of change perplexes” Brunswick clubs and Orange lodges.⁠[51]⁠

Again, this boldest of demagogues, this mildest of men, “from Dan to Beersheba,” appears in the patriarchal light of the happy father of a happy family, practising all the social duties, and nourishing all the social affections. It is remarkable, that Mr. O’Connell is not only governed by the same sense of the value of time as influenced Sir Edward Coke, but literally obeys his injunctions for its partition, which forms the creed more than the practice of rising young lawyers. It is this intense and laborious diligence in his profession, that has won him the public confidence. Where his abilities as a lawyer may be serviceable, party yields to self-interest; and many an inveterate ascendancy man leaves his friends, the Orange barristers, to hawk their empty bags through the courts, while he contributes his official gains indirectly to the Catholic rent, by assigning to Catholic talent the cause which Catholic eloquence can best defend.

Then, as we are on the subject of the association, there is another of its distinguished members, Thomas Wyse, an antiquarian, linguist, traveller, artist, scholar, painter, and author, no less than an orator and a politician. What industry, what application, what energy must have gone to make up all this acquirement! In a careless and desultory conversation, Mr. Wyse will throw out as much, and as varied knowledge, as would qualify some noble pedant for the chair of what Horace Walpole calls “the old ladies’ society.” Without the aptitude for labour, nothing great ever was or ever will be produced. Poets talk of inspiration; but their finest passages are uniformly the result of the deepest study. Even Sheridan, the man of eminence most quoted for his idleness, has left proofs behind him of the intensity of the effort by which his inimitable comedies were elaborated; and his biographer and countryman might bear his own personal evidence to the great truth, that not even the slightest and most sparkling effusions of the muse, are emancipated from this great governing law of excellence. The supposition of amazing talents, latent in the capabilities of indolent triflers, is like the theory of those elaborate and ingenious machines for producing perpetual motion, which are extremely surprising and admirable, but which labour under a small practical disadvantage, that—they do not perform.