The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of
their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of
their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves.
When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon
sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to
"bring forth fruit with patience" that finally won out and survived the
others.
These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself
to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning
over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the
question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as
compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to
over-take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the present.
I read somewhere a ballade asking--where are the "best sellers" of
yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with
Villon: "Mother of God, ah! where are they?" During the last twenty
years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I
think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even
are still on the lips of men--whereas several quieter books published
during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen
serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament.
What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of
modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the
offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic
rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition
that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that
took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest
periods of gestation?
Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of
best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose _Dr. Nikola_ is perhaps still
remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his
industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern
machine-made methods.
I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writing" by phonograph, and
chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to
invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and
see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without
"side" or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good
literature too well--Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his
idols--to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature
by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning
frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home.
Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels,
where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took
me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds;
and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable
prize fowls.
"These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for
which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to
buy them!"
Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few
of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the
bargain.
Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of
which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had
dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over
to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what
he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up
another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he
had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the
point of beginning it!
Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since
then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards
the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of
production.
I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less
than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among
his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a
novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on
twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred
thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me,
too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to
supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to
not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with
his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?"
Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such
appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like
verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to
writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what
your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared
that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such
rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to
be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and
consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's
recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush
and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending
of all literary rockets.
Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from,
say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive,
and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers.
_Don Quixote_, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively
selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the
writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer,
charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter,
all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as
a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La
Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with
heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart?
Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and
still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten--_Gil Blas_.
Published in 1715--that is, its first two parts--it has now two
centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with
humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer,
over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to
note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years
old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not
published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the
issue of the fourth and final part in 1735.
A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, _The
Pilgrim's Progress_, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in
sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not
Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol.
_Robinson Crusoe_ still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of
its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten,
doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had
concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's
book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous,
solitary life.
"I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though
allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful
representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety
not to be met with in this world."
_The Vicar of Wakefield_, as we know, was no hurried piece of work.
Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it
neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to
the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in
no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to
the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits
"brought forth with patience" all round.
_Tom Jones_ is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the
sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife,
Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you
with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely
be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces,
represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated
experience of Fielding's very human history.
Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all
imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas
for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he
asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a
lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that
constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is
entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant
be their workmanship.
For this reason books like George Borrow's _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_,
failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the
passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their
natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of
life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious
life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a
life beyond life."
Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need
hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two
when he first projected _Paradise Lost_, and through all the intervening
years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his
heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those
seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which
followed his fiftieth birthday.
The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of
all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore,
we may recall Dante, whose _Divine Comedy_ was with him from his
thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion
of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the _Faust_
he had conceived at twenty.
Spenser was at work on his _Faerie Queene_, alongside his preoccupation
with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years
translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's _Elegy_
owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which
Gray polished and repolished it through eight years.
If we are to believe Poe's _Philosophy of Composition_, and there is, I
think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of _The
Raven_, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less
due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their
composition.
But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for
an age of "get-rich-quick" _littérateurs_. On his _Georgics_ alone he
worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the _Aeneid_, he
was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his
friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to
bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately,
Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the
poet's infanticidal desire.
But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the
great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era
of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic
formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson,
we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense
fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease."
"I cannot compete with that," he says--"what makes me sick is to think
of Scott turning out _Guy Mannering_ in three weeks."
Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet
in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must
be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that "training
of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott's
faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in
absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the
vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw.
Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this
speed was by no means all "ease," as witness the almost tragic
composition of _The Bride of Lammermoor_. If ever a writer scorned
delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time
the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth
of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely
read than he is were it not for those too frequent _longueurs_ and inert
paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship.
Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing
three of her best-known novels, _Pride and Prejudice_, _Sense and
Sensibility_, and _Northanger Abbey_ between the ages of twenty-one and
twenty-three. Yet _Pride and Prejudice_, which practically survives the
others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has
again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived."
Charlotte Brontë was a year in writing _Jane Eyre_, spurred on to new
effort by the recent rejection of _The Professor_; but to write such a
book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers
how much of _Jane Eyre_ was drawn from Charlotte Brontë's own life, and
also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from
their earliest childhood.
Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the
writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes
into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the
perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk
of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. "He considered,"
says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and
four an excellent, day's work."
_David Copperfield_ was about a year and nine months in the writing,
having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850.
_Bleak House_ took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851,
and completed in August, 1853. _Hard Times_ was a hasty piece of work,
written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it
cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes.
George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years,
_Richard Feverel_, _Evan Harrington_, _Sandra Belloni_, and _Rhoda
Fleming_ being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, _Modern Love_,
was also written during that period.
George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though _Adam
Bede_ cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as
a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the
course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness
and melancholy." _Romola_, to which she devoted long and studious
preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to
it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with
the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this
paper, is probably a stranger.
It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully
enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give
it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart,
mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was
something--however small--which wanted to be done in this world,
and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work.
Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in
_Westward Ho!_ one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world
will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was
brilliant.
Says a friend who was with him while he was writing _Hypatia_:
"He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in
searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was
there, and which was found there at last."
The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English
language, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was what one might call a
glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied
the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed
to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His
commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was
accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the
notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from
newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled
one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the
inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which
he had found so serviceable.
To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would
seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work,
_The Return of the Native_, was on the stocks for four years, though a
year seems to have sufficed for _Far from the Madding Crowd_.
The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of
his method is worth catching again.
The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier],
Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all
the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably
penned it himself, with exceeding care.... If the first copy did not
please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his
stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared
himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting
his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories
again.
Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional,
spirit of the true artist to all his work, but _The Scarlet Letter_ was
written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ
had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning
is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship
which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it
witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife.
One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than
usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am
turned out of office." To which she--God bless her!--cheerily replied:
"Very well! now you can write your book!" and immediately set about
lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his
work.
The book was _The Scarlet Letter_, and was completed by the following
February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day
after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been
dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good
James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had
anything for him to publish.
"Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would risk publishing a book from me,
the most unpopular writer in America?"
"I would," was Field's rejoinder, and after some further sparring,
Hawthorne owned up.
"As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell
me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript
of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel.
Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions,
they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have
been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one
of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of
the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it
needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of
romance--even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for
him by his "disciples."
George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a
description of her method:
To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated
herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and
only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five
in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself.
Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had
written itself in full and another was unfolding.
Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place
as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure
that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so
confidently left her novels--to write themselves. Different, indeed, was
the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of
_The Human Comedy_, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never
less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business
annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack
of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great
dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream,
"by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the
nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations
of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold."
To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily
expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for
firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been
prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the
Four Hundred.
Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean artists, working, in
Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and
the energy of a volcano. Of his _Les Misérables_--perhaps the greatest
novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest--he said,
"it takes me nearly as long to publish a book as to write one"; and he
was at work on _Les Misérables_, off and on, for nearly fifteen years.
Of his writing _Notre Dame_ (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint
picture has been preserved. He had made vast historical preparations for
it, but ever there seemed still more to make, till at length his
publisher grew impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last made a
start--after this fashion:
He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that covered him from head
to foot, he locked up all his clothes lest he should be tempted to
go out, and, carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied
himself to his labour just as if he had been in prison. He never
left the table except for food and sleep, and the sole recreation
that he allowed himself was an hour's chat after dinner with M.
Pierre Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and to whom he
would occasionally read over his day's work.
Daudet, whose _Tartarin_ bids fair to remain one of the world's types,
like _Don Quixote_ or _Mr. Micawber_, for all his natural Provençal
gift of improvisation and, indeed, from his self-recognized necessity
of keeping it in check, was another strenuous artist. He wrote each
manuscript three times over, he told his biographer, and would write it
as many more if he could; and his son, in writing of him, has this truth
to say of his, as of all living work:
The fact is that labour does not begin at the moment when the
artist takes his pen. It begins in sustained reflection and in the
thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows
them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and
imagination to expand and enlarge life.
Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's
"infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put
to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. Talking
of rewriting, Prosper Mérimée, best known for _Carmen_, is said to have
rewritten his _Colomba_ no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon
Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over.
But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern
times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the _mot propre_,
the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have
broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would
annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages
he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course
of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of _The Temptation of Saint
Anthony_, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136,
even reducing it still further after its first publication.
On _Madame Bovary_ he worked six years, and in writing _Salâmmbo_,
which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and
exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for
documentary evidences.
Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the
point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all
his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was
a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful
bas-reliefs admits of no doubt.
To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well,
such as we find in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_--but that great book, need
one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary,
Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted
as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript
no less than seven times!