Great Authors by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 21, 1884

Great Authors.

By Editor

THE AGE AT WHICH MANY OF THEIR BEST WORKS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED.

A LIST of the men and women of genius who have died at or about the early age of thirty-seven, and secured for themselves an undisputed place in the ranks of the immortals, would occupy not the least brilliant portion of the record of the illustrious dead. It is astonishing how many men, whose names are a household possession in every civilized country, have done all their best work after thirty-seven, and who would never have been heard of, or at the best would have shone only as the smaller lights of literature, if they had been carried off at the age of which Byron, Shelley, Burns, and Raphael closed their careers. And when we come to look at what Milton did after thirty-seven, what Goethe and a thousand others did after the same age, and how little they had done before it, we cannot estimate how much richer the world might have been had those bright intellects which were cut off in their earliest prime been permitted to give thirty or forty years of additional work to the world.

It is certain that thirty or forty more years would have cooled the blood of Byron, and carried him out of what we all know, and what literary history has stigmatized, as Byronism; but it is as impossible to forecast what would have been the result as to predict from "Werther" the development that ended in "Faust." Who can foresee what Shelley would have done, in the full ripeness of his splendid power, during another quarter of a century, and if he had died, say, at the age of Shakespeare? Burns, too, we know, dreamed of great works, and when he died there were literary movements in the air which might have turned his labors and his life into a new channel.

Miss Austen and Charlotte Bronte were rather more than thirty-seven when they died, but they died at an age at which George Eliot had not written a single novel. One or two translations, an essay or two in the Westminster Review, and the "Scenes of Clerical Life," were all that had come from the hand of the subsequent author of "Adam Bede" and "Daniel Deronda." But given a fatal chill or a fever at thirty-seven, and the long series of works with which George Eliot has enriched English literature would have had no existence; in other words, there would have been no George Eliot.

A consideration of this kind should entirely modify our comparative estimate and criticism of distinguished men. Nothing is commoner, for example, among Germans, and among cultivated Englishmen as well, than to ascribe to Goethe a genius far transcending Schiller's. The comparison is made between the whole body of Goethe's literary work, extending over upwards of eighty years of exceptional healthy activity, and the product of poor Schiller's

mutilated existence stretching to scarcely more than one-half that term, with a large portion of it belonging to the period of childhood and youth. But, had Goethe died at the same age as Schiller, he would have had a poorer result to show than Schiller has. He would have had a great deal less than Byron in pure poetical work, incomparably less also than Shelley, and, in respect of genuine poetry expressing the simple feelings of the heart and an apprehension of the beauty of nature, he would have stood at an immeasurable distance behind even the unlettered Burns.

The above, from the London Standard, we publish, not because we are particularly interested in all the names mentioned, but for the important lesson it contains. It seems to be quite well settled that if a person takes proper care of himself, of a long life the last half is the best for good work. And this shows the importance of so regarding the laws of life and health as to prolong life as much as possible, that our lives may be as successful as they possibly can be in efficient service to God and humanity. The world is constantly being robbed of labor to which it has a right, by the imprudence, carelessness, or recklessness of its inhabitants. There are almost countless suicides beside those which are recorded as such. If we shorten our days by our own actions, in any way, we "rob God," to whom we owe the service of our lives and of all our powers.

EDITOR.