The author's talent, no doubt, Guy Darrell once had—the author's temperament, never. What is the author's temperament? Too long a task to defined. But without it a man may write a clever book, a useful book, a book that may live a year, ten years, fifty years. He will not stand out to distant ages a representative of the age that rather lived in him than he in it. The author's temperament is that which makes him an integral, earnest, original unity, distinct from all before and all that may succeed him. And as a Father of the Church has said that the consciousness of individual being is the sign of immortality, not granted to the inferior creatures—so it is in this individual temperament one and indivisible; and in the intense conviction of it, more than in all the works it may throw off, that the author becomes immortal. Nay, his works may perish like those of Orpheus or Pythagoras;[1] but he himself, in his name, in the foot-print of his being, remains, like Orpheus or Pythagoras, undestroyed, indestructible.
Resigning literature, the Solitary returned to science. There he was more at home. He had cultivated science, in his dazzling academical career, with ardor and success; he had renewed the study, on his first retirement to Fawley, as a distraction from tormenting memories or unextinguished passions. He now for the first time regarded the absorbing abstruse occupation as a possible source of fame. To be one in the starry procession of those sons of light who have solved a new law in the statute-book of heaven! Surely a grand ambition, not unbecoming to his years and station, and pleasant in its labors to a man who loved Nature's outward scenery with poetic passion, and had studied her inward mysteries with a sage's minute research. Science needs not the author's art—she rejects its graces—she recoils with a shudder from its fancies. But Science requires in the mind of the discoverer a limpid calm. The lightnings that reveal Diespiter must flash in serene skies. No clouds store that thunder—
"Quo bruta tellus, et vaga flumina,
Quo Styx, et invisi horrida Tænari
Sedes, Atlanteusque finis
Concutitur!"
So long as you take science only as a distraction, science will not lead you to discovery. And from some cause or other, Guy Darrell was more unquiet and perturbed in his present than in his past seclusion. Science this time failed even to distract.
- ↑ It need scarcely be said that the works ascribed to Orpheus or Pythagoras are generally allowed not to be genuine.
