A German by birth, an Italian by sympathy and training, an Englishman by residence and conformity, Handel belonged to no school, yet had a style as unmistakably his own as had Dante in verse, Angelo in sculpture, or Raphael in painting. Strong, egotistic, self-willed, the great composer was generally cheerful and good-tempered, but violent when irritated, and indomitably proud and independent. One who knew him well relates that when he was pleased with the way the music was going at one of his concerts, his enormous wig had always a certain nod or vibration, and that at the Carlton House concerts he would swear angrily if the ladies in waiting talked during the music, upon which the Princess would check them, saying, "Hush! hush! Handel is angry." He did not hesitate even to scold the Prince of Wales for being late at a concert and "keeping all these poor people [the performers] so long from their scholars and other concerns." His dealings with refractory singers were summary indeed. When Cuzzoni, the famous vocalist, insolently refused to sing, at a rehearsal of the opera of "Otho," the beautiful air" Falsa Imagine," Handel was instantly enraged, and cried out, "Vat! you vill not sing my mooshic? I vill trow you out de vindow, if you vill not sing te mooshic." "You sal not vex me, Mr. Handel! I vill raise de dev-vel ven I sal be vex!" replied the songstress. "You are te tevil," rejoined Handel; "but, madam, I am Beelzebub, te prince of te tevils! and," seizing her by the waist, "I vill trow you out te vindow, if you vill not sing te mooshic! " Hardly less autocratic was this Napoleon of composers with one of his poets. To the complaint that Handel's music did not suit the words the poet had written, the former replied with Spartan brevity, "Den de worts is bat!" Hardly less paradoxical than that of this Shakespeare of the musical art, was the character of that universal genius, Leonardo da Vinci. The accounts given of the multiplied facets of this astonishing intelligence — so great in art, yet relatively less artist than physiologist, inventor, engineer, and mathematician — almost defy belief. "The disciple of practice," as he called himself, seeing and observing everything, the fall of the wave, the motion of the bird, the duration of the echo, the veins of the leaf, the scintillations of the stars, the conditions of the moon, etc., — inventing everything, such as over thirty kinds of mills, windlasses, cranes, saws, drills, looms; machines for plate-rolling, wire-drawing, file-cutting; instruments for flattening and dressing cloth; a surgeon's probe, a universal joint, a spring to close doors, cowls for smoky chimneys, an artist's camp-stool, a roasting-jack moved by the hot air, the common wheelbarrow, and even a scheme for lifting the baptistery of Florence to a higher level, he reminds one, by the force and flexibility of his intellect, of the elephant's trunk, which with equal facility can rend an oak or pick up a pin. Yet this many-sided and marvellous genius, though he lived in the days of Columbus and Savonarola, took no interest in the world around him, and to all appearance was utterly indifferent to moral truth. Breathing contentedly the atmosphere of the cowardly and profligate usurper Ludovico Sforza's court, he welcomed with him the packs of French wolves under Charles VIII., who first overran the plains of Italy, and, on Ludovico's fall, built with equal readi ness triumphal arches for the entry of Louis XII. into Milan. : Broad as was the sweep of Da Vinci's vision, wide as was the range of his surpassing intellectual gifts, the extremes observable in his character were equally strange and rare. In his art, says one of his most intelligent critics, "he reaches from the subtlest and sweetest beauty to the most unnatural and hideous deformity: in his writings, from the grandest generalities to the most puerile particulars in his daily habits, from the profoundest studies and application to (we are assured) the vainest extravagance and ostentation; from the clearest methods of reasoning and closest accuracy of observation as regards cause and effect, to all the sure consequences of reckless expenditure, disorder, and social degradation, debts, fawnings, unpaid salary, and humiliating beggings, even for clothes: in his life, from the illustrious philosopher who commands the wonder and admiration of all subsequent ages, to the hireling who knew not the meaning of the word 'patriot;' who shifted with every wind of fortune, executed chefs-d'œuvre or invented toys. equally to flatter the French invader or the Milanese usurper; who placed himself, like the mercenary troops of the time, at the disposal of whomsoever happened to be in power, no matter how obtained, and principally served two of the most iniquitous princes of the age, Ludovico Sforza and Cæsar Borgia." Genius and AN English reviewer, speaking of Arthur Application. Clough, observes that he was one of the prospectuses which never become works; one of that class whose unwritten poems, undemonstrated discoveries, or un tested powers, are certain to carry everything before them when they appear, — only, they never do appear." How full the world always is of such foiled potentialities, "mute, inglorious Miltons," who are always very "promising" because they never do more than promise! The late E. P. Whipple, in one of his brilliant essays, finely ridicules the eulogists of these subjunctive heroes of literature, art, or science, who might, could, would, or should achieve great things, but whose persistence in not doing great things nobody can understand. These panegyrists will point to some lazy gentleman, the prodigy, perhaps, of a country village, and tell you that there is a protuberance on his forehead or temple large enough to produce a Hamlet or a Principia if he only had an active temperament. "But," says Mr. Whipple, the thing which produces Hamlets and Principias is not physical temperament, but spiritual power." It is a principle which admits of few exceptions, that what men can do they will do ; and if they fail to do it, it is because they are conscious of their inability. When a man appears to have great gifts, and yet accomplishes nothing, it is because he has no aptitude for any particular thing; no consciousness of ability to push anything, through all - obstacles and discouragements, to a conclusion; in short, no potent will to attempt it. What a man does is the only true test of what a man is; and to declare that he has great capacity, but nothing to set his great capacity in motion, is like saying how powerful a man would be if he only had great strength, or how swiftly a steamship would cross the Atlantic if she only had a bigger boiler and could move her propeller fast enough. Akin to this absurdity is that of deploring as a fault in a man of genius his want of equanimity and constancy, of steady, dogged, unremitting application: men speak of it as a misfortune which he himself could remedy, as a matter wholly within his own control. But while we believe that genius will work, at its own appointed times and seasons; that nine-tenths of what men call genius is only a prodigious capacity for hard work, and only the other tenth is the ability to do great things without hard work; that the disposition to intellectual labor is, in fact, just in proportion to the size and vitality of the thinking principle, we yet do not believe that it will work regularly by square, rule, and compass, and at certain fixed hours, after the pattern of plodding mediocrity. That scorn of mathematical rules, that hatred of the shackles of regular systems of application, that intolerance of uniform thought and resentment of the mind against continuous toil, which we so often deprecate in men of genius, springs from the very sensitiveness of constitution which makes genius what it is. It is the natural compensation by which great things tend to an equalization with little ones. Sir William Temple felicitously says that the abilities of man must fall short on one side or the other, like too scanty a blanket when you are abed: if you pull it upon your shoulders, you leave your feet bare; if you thrust it down upon your feet, your shoulders are uncovered. In other words, all desirable intellectual qualities are not to be found in any one character; but as surely as we find a large degree of one quality, we must look for a deficiency of some other. He therefore, who, looking upon a wayward and unsteady genius like a Marlowe, a Coleridge, or a Poe, exclaims, "What great things he would have done, had he but been regular and methodical!" is hardly wiser than he who, contemplating a dull, painstaking drudge, should say, |