BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Sun (Christchurch), Volume V, Issue 1294, 6 April 1918, Page 5 (Supplement)

BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Literature and the Meridian ©f Intellect

ffSfhfifl rf" HERE lies the meridian of intellect? Btf%m£)M& appearing apparently in the London mfiwnJW "Evening News," Sir Edward Clarke, K.C., has a refrence to "writers who irlgßWßU»|f had already reached that age of 37, which marks the attainment of the highest level of the faculties of man." But this is too much for Hall Came. In the following typical letter —a personal communication in the first place, but handed eventually to "The Observer—he protests against any arbitrary border line at all. If his reasoning is far from subtle, he presents an interesting array of facts. "I am prompted to write to you with regard to your opinion that the age of thirty-seven marks the attainment of the highest level of the faculties of man. As 'all knowledge.' is not 'my empire,' I must limit myself to the history of imaginative literature, which only partly, I think, justifies your contention. It is true that thirty-seven does in many cases seem to be the meridian of the imaginative mind. Shakespeare was thirty-seven when he produced 'Hamlet,' Edmund Spenser was thirty-seven when he was writing the last books of ' The Faery Queen,' Thackeray was thirty-seven when he finished ' Vanity Fair,' Zola must have been thirty-seven when he completed ' L'Assommoir.' All this seems to sustain your view, but, on the other hand, I think forty-seven might as justifiably claim to be the meridian of the imaginative mind. Scott was forty-seven when he produced ' The Heart of Midlothian,' Dickens was

forty-seven when he produced 'The Tale of Two Cities,' Charles Reade was foxty-seven when he produced 'The Cloister and the Hearth,' and Hawthorne was in his forty-seventh year when he produced 'The Scarlet Letter.' "A certain number of literary achievements approximate more closely to the earlier than to the later age. 'Macbeth' was written when Shakespeare was forty-one, 'Tom Jones' when Fielding was forty-two, ' Fathers and Children' when Turgenieff was forty-four, 'The Count of Monte Cristo' when Dumas was forty-two, ' Anna Karenina' when Tolstoy was forty-one, • and ' The French Revolution' when Carlyle was forty-two. "But against this there are notable imaginative achievements which belong to a much later period of life. 'Paradise Lost' was published when Milton was fifty-eight, ' Clarissa Harlowe' was produced by Richardson when he was fiftyfive, and ' Les Miserables' was published when Victor Hugo was sixty. I leave various great writers out of question, such as Macaulay, who published his wonderful ' Essay on Milton' in his earliest manhood, but writings of still greater moment in the latest years of his life. There is also the fact that Blake, Wordsworth, Ibsen and Bjorson retained some of their highest qualities to all but the utmost ends of their long lives. "My inference would be that, on the whole, you place the meridian of intellect, so far as the imaginative art is concerned, many years too low, but I doubt if any age can be fixed as representing the period of the highest development of the

human mind without regard to conditions of health, education, and general environment. "It would appear that poetic genius develops very early, as shown in the case of Keats (who had written nearly everything his name lives by before twenty-five), as well as of Shelley, of Byron, and of Burns. But Tennyson's ' Crossing the Bar' was his latest and in some respects his finest short poem. The power of the novelist and dramatist, being dependent upon observation and knowledge of life, usually develops much later, but in general it lives longer. "I remember that some years ago Lord< Rosebery said that the number of authors who had outlived their genius were as the sands on the seashore. The statement was only partly true, or true only in a certain sense. In actual fact, no author can outlive his genius, because no author of genius can outlive his finest work. And if it occurs (as undoubtedly it does) that the work of imaginative writers too frequently falls off in their later years, it does not necessarily follow that their genius has fallen off, but that reduced health, the calls of family, with the usual necessity devolving upon a man as his years go on of living not merely his own life but the lives of his children also, may have operated to hamper the free play and diminish the highest achievement of his powers.

"Thus, it would be quite unfair to charge Walter Scott, in the midst of paralysing financial disasters and domestic troubles in his later years, with failure of genius when he wrote ' The Surgeon's Daughter.'"