The Genus Irritabile

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THE GENUS IRRITABILE.

The late Bulwer¹ and Dickens² and Landor³ matrimonial and literary squabbles in England, have elicited a large amount of comment from the various organs of public opinion, which are amusing as exponents of the narrow views, even of those who ought to know better, upon the subject of literary men and their frailties. And not only that, but they demonstrate the existence of a petty feeling of half jealousy, half depreciation, in regard to men of genius that is sickening to behold.

The men who write for the press and authors in general are divided into two classes—those who have a “patent right divine” to occupy the positions they hold, and those who assume it on account of a mechanical facility of execution and equanimity of temperament which the others do not at all times possess, and who turn out a job of literary labor much as men cobble a shoe or saw a load of wood. There is a constant antagonism between the two, and especially is this the case in England, where literature is even more of a matter of barter and sale, and where it is followed in a greater degree as a regular profession, than it is here. Whenever, therefore, such as man as Charles Dickens has a disagreement with his wife, the fact is straightway trumpeted to the world by penny-a-liners without number, and foul aspersions are thrown upon his character by hundreds of men who have the columns of the press at their command, and who are sufficiently destitute of common decency, to say nothing of esprit du corps, to deliberately calumniate the victim, though he may be pure and blameless as a saint. When Bulwer Lytton was stormily encountered by his termagant wife a short time ago on a public occasion, his feelings lacerated and himself disgraced (inasmuch as the vulgar assailant was yet his wife) public opinion—such opinion, at least, as is made by the men we speak of—sided with her and against him, without a single reliable explanation of the circumstances of the case, or caring to inquire who was right and who was wrong. When Walter Savage Landor—an old man with a brain half-turned and a temper wholly soured by a literary life of more than half a century, with all its labors, encounters, heart-sickness and disappointments, is involved in a suit for libel—whether justifiably so or not, we do not inquire—the veteran was assailed in such a gross and scurrilous manner by the mechanics of the London press as would have better suited a horse thief than the author of “Imaginary Conversations.” And so with a hundred other instances that we might mention.

The world has not yet learned how to deal with men of genius. There should be more forbearance shown, more lenity exercised. Because a man occupies a prominent position in the eyes of the public, and yet is not free from the frailties of humanity, there can exist no good reason why the hounds of the press should execrate him, nor why the public should join in full cry to hunt him down to infamy.

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