The beginning of Plato's Republic was found in his tablets written over
and over in a variety of ways. It took Virgil, it is stated, three years
to compose his ten short eclogues; seven years to elaborate his
Georgics, which comprise little more than two thousand verses; and he
employed more than twelve years in polishing his AEneid, being even then
so dissatisfied with it, that he wished before his death to commit it to
the flames. Horace was equally indefatigable, and there are single odes
in his works which must have cost him months of labor. Lucretius's one
poem represents the toil of a whole life-time. Thucydides was twenty
years writing his history, which is comprised in one octavo volume.
Gibbon wrote the first chapter of his work three times before he could
please himself. Montesquieu, alluding in a letter to one of his works,
says to his correspondent, "You will read it in a few hours, but the
labor expended on it has whitened my hair." Henri Beyle transcribed his
History of Painting in Italy seventeen times. Sainte-Beuve often spent a
whole week on two or three octavo pages. Gray was so fastidious in
polishing and perfecting his Elegy, that he kept it nearly twenty years,
touching it up and improving it. There is a poem of ten lines in
Waller's works, which he himself informs us, took him a whole summer to
put into shape. Malherbe would spoil half a quire of paper in composing
and discomposing and recomposing a stanza. It is reckoned that during
the twenty-five most prolific years of his life he composed no more
than, on the average, thirty-three verses per annum. There is a good
story told of him, which illustrates amusingly the elaborate care he
took with his poems. A certain nobleman of his acquaintance had lost his
wife, and was anxious that Malherbe should dedicate an ode to her
memory, and condole with him in verse on the loss he had sustained.
Malherbe complied, but was so fastidious in his composition, that it was
three years before the elegy was completed. Just before he sent it in,
he was intensely chagrined to find that his noble friend had solaced
himself with a new bride, and was, consequently, in no humor to be
pestered with an elegy on his old one. When dying, his confessor, in
speaking of the happiness in heaven, expressed himself inaccurately.
"Say no more about it," said Malherbe, "or your style will disgust me
with it." Miss Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Hume, and Fox, have all
recorded the trouble they took. Tasso was unwearied in correcting; so
were Pope and Boileau. The Cambridge manuscript of Milton's Lycidas
shows numerous erasures and interlineations. Pascal spent twenty days in
perfecting a single letter. The fables of La Fontaine were copied and
re-copied over and over again. Alfieri was laboriously painstaking in
composition. We are told that if he approved of his first sketch of a
piece--after laying it by for some time, nor approaching it again until
his mind was free of the subject--he submitted it to what he called
"development"--writing out in prose the indicated scenes, with all the
force at his command, but without stopping to analyze a thought or
correct an expression. He then proceeded to verify at his leisure the
prose he had written, selecting with care the ideas he thought best, and
rejecting those which he deemed unworthy of a place. Nor did he even yet
regard his work as finished, but incessantly polished it verse by verse,
and made continual alterations. Moliere composed very slowly, although
he liked the contrary to be understood, and many pieces supposed to have
been written upon the spur of a royal command, had been prepared some
time previously. He said to Boileau, "I have never done anything with
which I am truly content." Sheridan, when urged by the publisher,
Ridgeway, to finish his manuscript of The School for Scandal, declared
that he had been nineteen years endeavoring to satisfy himself with the
style of it, but had not succeeded. Joubert had a habit from his
twentieth year to his seventieth, of jotting down with pencil the best
issues of his meditation as they arose; and out of this chaos of notes
was shaped, many years after his death, a full volume of Thoughts,
"which," says the translator, "from their freshness and insight, their
concise symmetry of expression, their pithiness, their variety, make a
rich, enduring addition to the literature of France, and to all
literature." Addison wore out the patience of his printer; frequently,
when nearly a whole impression of a Spectator was worked off, he would
stop the press to insert a new preposition. Lamb's most sportive essays
were the result of most intense labor; he used to spend a week at a time
in elaborating a single humorous letter to a friend. Tennyson is
reported to have written Come into the Garden, Maud, more than fifty
times over before it pleased him; and Locksley Hall, the first draught
of which was written in two days, he spent the better part of six weeks,
for eight hours a day, in altering and polishing. Dickens, when he
intended to write a Christmas story, shut himself up for six weeks,
lived the life of a hermit, and came out looking as haggard as a
murderer. His manuscripts show that he wrote with the greatest care, and
scrupulously revised his writing in order to render each sentence as
perfect as might be. He made his alterations so carefully that it is
difficult to trace the words which he had originally written. In many
instances "the primary words have been erased so carefully that it is
next to impossible to form an idea of how the passages originally
stood." Balzac, after he had thought out thoroughly one of his
philosophical romances, and amassed his materials in a most laborious
manner, retired to his study, and from that time until his book had gone
to press, society saw him no more. When he appeared again among his
friends, he looked, said his publisher, in the popular phrase, like his
own ghost. The manuscript was afterward altered and copied, when it
passed into the hands of the printer, from whose slips the book was
re-written for the third time. Again it went into the hands of the
printer,--two, three, and sometimes four separate proofs being required
before the author's leave could be got to send the perpetually
re-written book to press at last, and so have done with it. He was
literally the terror of all printers and editors. Moore thought it quick
work if he wrote seventy lines of Lalla Rookh in a week. Kinglake's
Eothen, we are told, was re-written five or six times, and was kept in
the author's writing-desk almost as long as Wordsworth kept the White
Doe of Rylstone, and kept like that to be taken out for review and
correction almost every day. Buffon's Studies of Nature cost him fifty
years of labor, and he re-copied it eighteen times before he sent it to
the printer. "He composed in a singular manner, writing on large-sized
paper, in which, as in a ledger, five distinct columns were ruled. In
the first column he wrote down the first thoughts; in the second, he
corrected, enlarged, and pruned it; and so on, until he had reached the
fifth column, within which he finally wrote the result of his labor. But
even after this, he would re-compose a sentence twenty times, and once
devoted fourteen hours to finding the proper word with which to round
off a period." John Foster often spent hours on a single sentence. Ten
years elapsed between the first sketch of Goldsmith's Traveller and its
completion. The poet's habit was to set down his ideas in prose, and,
when he had turned them carefully into rhyme, to continue retouching the
lines with infinite pains to give point to the sentiment and polish to
the verse. La Rochefoucauld spent fifteen years in preparing his little
book of Maxims, altering some of them, Segrais says, nearly thirty
times. Rogers showed a friend a note to his Italy, which, he said, took
him a fortnight to write. It consists of a very few lines. We all know
how Sheridan polished his wit and finished his jokes, the same
surprising things being found on different bits of paper, differently
expressed. Not long before his death Adam Smith told Dugald Stewart that
he wrote with just as much difficulty then as when he first began. The
Benedictine editor of Bossuet's works stated that his manuscripts were
bleared over with such numerous interlineations that they were nearly
illegible. Sterne was incessantly employed for six months in perfecting
one very diminutive volume. Herrick was a painstaking elaborator: with
minute and curious care he polished and strengthened his work: "his airy
facility, his seemingly spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley, were
earned by conscious labor; perfect freedom was begotten of perfect art."
It seems, no doubt, to many a reader of Macaulay's History, as if he
wrote without effort, and as if the charms of his style were the gift of
nature rather than the product of art, so spontaneously do they appear
to flow from his pen. It was the general opinion of his literary friends
that he wrote with great rapidity, and made few corrections in his
manuscripts. On the contrary, we are told by his nephew and biographer,
that he never allowed a sentence to pass until it was as good as he
could make it, and would often re-write paragraphs and whole chapters
that he might gain even a slight improvement in arrangement or
expression. After writing thus carefully, he corrected again
remorselessly, and his manuscripts were covered with erasures. He paid
equal attention to proof-sheets. "He could not rest until the lines were
level to a hair's breadth, and the punctuation correct to a comma; until
every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence
flowed like running water." To Napier, the editor of The Edinburgh
Review, he wrote from Calcutta: "At last I send you an article of
interminable length about Lord Bacon. I never bestowed so much care on
anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half
of the article which has not been repeatedly recast." Carlyle, Miss
Martineau says, erred on the side of fastidiousness. "Almost every word
was altered, and revise followed revise." Giardini, when asked how long
it would take to learn to play on the violin, answered, "Twelve hours a
day for twenty years together." Buelow is reported to have said, "If I
stop practice for one day, I notice it in my playing; if I stop two
days, my friends notice it; if I stop three days, the public notices
it." Leonardo da Vinci would walk the whole length of Milan that he
might alter a single tint in his picture of the Last Supper. Titian, we
are told, after laying his foundation with a few bold strokes, would
turn the picture to the wall, and leave it there perhaps for months,
turning it round again after a time to look at it carefully, and scan
the parts as he would the face of his greatest enemy. If at this time
any portion of it should appear to him to have been defective, he would
set to work to correct it, applying remedies as a surgeon would apply
them, cutting off excrescences here, superabundant flesh there,
redressing an arm, adjusting or setting a limb, regardless of the pain
which it might cause. In this way he would reduce the whole to a certain
symmetry, put it aside, and return again a third or more times till the
first quintessence had been covered over with its padding of flesh. Then
came the finishing, which was done at as many more different paintings,
to say nothing of the innumerable last touches--with his fingers as well
as with his brush--of which he is said to have been particularly fond.
It is a received opinion that Edmund Kean's acting was wholly
spontaneous and unstudied; this is a mistake. A contemporary, writing of
his earlier professional life, says, "He used to mope about for hours,
walking miles and miles alone with his hands in his pockets, thinking
intensely on his characters. No one could get a word from him; he
studied and slaved beyond any actor I ever knew." Neither did he relax
his labors when he had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. It is
related of him, that when studying Maturin's Bertram, he shut himself up
for two days to study the one line, "Bertram has kissed the child!" It
made one of those electrical effects which from their vividness were
supposed to be merely impulsive. His wife said her husband would often
stand up all night before a pier glass in his chamber, endeavoring to
acquire the right facial expression for some new part. John Kemble's new
readings of Hamlet were many and strange, and excited much comment. "The
performance was eminently graceful, calm, deep studied--during his life
he wrote out the entire part forty times--but cold and unsympathetic."
As to orators, the greatest of antiquity were not ashamed to confess the
industry of the closet. Demosthenes gloried in the smell of the lamp;
and it is recorded of Cicero, that he not only so laboriously prepared
his speeches, but even so minutely studied the effect of their delivery,
that on one occasion, when he had to oppose Hortensius, the reiterated
rehearsals of the night before so diminished his strength as almost to
incapacitate him in the morning. Lord Erskine corrected and corrected
his very eloquent orations, and Burke literally worried his printer into
a complaint against the fatigue of his continual revises. Indeed, it is
said, such was the fastidiousness of his industry, that the proof-sheet
not unfrequently exhibited a complete erasure of the original
manuscript. Whitefield's eloquence was a natural gift improved by
diligent study; and Garrick said that each repetition of the same sermon
showed a constant improvement,--as many as forty repetitions being
required before the discourse reached its full perfection. "I composed,"
says Lord Brougham, "the peroration of my speech for the queen, in the
Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes for three or four weeks,
and I composed it twenty times over at least, and it certainly succeeded
in a very extraordinary degree, and far above any merits of its own." He
says that Erskine wrote down word for word the passage about the savage
and his bundle of sticks. His mind having acquired a certain excitement
and elevation, and received an impetus from the tone and quality of the
matured and premeditated composition, retained that impetus, after the
impelling cause had died away. Webster, it is said, was in the habit of
writing and re-writing most of the fine passages of his senatorial and
forensic speeches, and sometimes prepared them, in order that they might
afterward be introduced when occasion should offer. He was wont to say
that the following passage in his speech upon President Jackson's
protest, in May, 1834, had been changed by him twelve times, before he
reduced it to a shape that entirely met his approval. Perhaps it is not
surpassed, for poetical beauty, by anything that ever fell from his
eloquent lips. Speaking of resistance by the United States of the
aggressions of Great Britain, he said: "They raised their flag against a
power, to which, for the purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation,
Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared. A power which
has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and
military posts--whose morning drum-beat following the sun, and keeping
company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and
unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."
As to compensation, it is stated that Goethe's works were not in his own
time commercially successful. After his return from Italy, the edition
of his collected works, which he had compared and revised with labor and
with care, sold, as his publisher complained, only "very slowly."
Coleridge gained little or no money by his writings. He says, "I
question whether there ever existed a man of letters so utterly
friendless, or so unconnected as I am with the dispensers of
contemporary reputation, or the publishers in whose service they labor."
When Newton lectured, a Lucasian professor, "so few went to hear him,
that ofttimes he did, in a manner, for want of hearers, read to the
walls." The Paradise Lost had a very limited sale, till, fifty years
after its publication, it was brought into light by the criticisms of
Addison. Campbell for years could not find a bookseller who would buy
The Pleasures of Hope. In the first thirteen years after the publication
of Boswell's Life of Johnson, less than four thousand copies were sold.
There were only forty-five copies of Hume's History sold in the first
twelvemonth. Twelve years elapsed before the first five hundred copies
of Emerson's Nature were purchased by the public. Washington Irving was
nearly seventy years old before the sale of his works at home met the
expenses of his simple life at Sunnyside. It has been related that while
Madame Titiens was receiving an ovation for her singing of Kathleen
Mavourneen, the author of the song sat weeping in the audience, the
poorest and obscurest man present. Willis, breakfasting at the Temple
with a friend, met Charles and Mary Lamb. He mentioned having bought a
copy of Elia the last day he was in America, to send as a parting gift
to one of the most lovely and talented women in his country. "What did
you give for it?" said Lamb. "About seven and six-pence." "Permit me to
pay you that," said he; and with the utmost earnestness he counted out
the money upon the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell,"
he continued. "I am the publishers' ruin."
Fortune, it has been truly said, has rarely condescended to be the
companion of genius; others find a hundred by-roads to her palace; there
is but one open, and that a very indifferent one, for men of letters.
Cervantes, the immortal genius of Spain, is supposed to have wanted
bread; Le Sage was a victim of poverty all his life; Camoens, the
solitary pride of Portugal, deprived of the necessaries of life,
perished in a hospital at Lisbon. The Portuguese, after his death,
bestowed on the man of genius they had starved the appellation of Great.
Vondel, the Dutch Shakespeare, to whom Milton was greatly indebted,
after composing a number of popular tragedies, lived in great poverty,
and died at ninety years of age; then he had his coffin carried by
fourteen poets, who, without his genius, probably partook of his
wretchedness. The great Tasso was reduced to such a dilemma that he was
obliged to borrow a crown from a friend to subsist through the week. He
alludes to his dress in a pretty sonnet, which he addresses to his cat,
entreating her to assist him, during the night, with the lustre of her
eyes, having no candle to see to write his verses. One day Louis the
Fourteenth asked Racine what there was new in the literary world. The
poet answered that he had seen a melancholy spectacle in the house of
Corneille, whom he found dying, deprived even of a little broth.
Spenser, the child of Fancy, languished out his life in misery. Lord
Burleigh, it is said, prevented the queen giving him a hundred pounds,
thinking the lowest clerk in his office a more deserving person.
Sydenham, who devoted his life to a laborious version of Plato, died in
a miserable spunging-house. "You," said Goldsmith to Bob Bryanton, "seem
placed at the centre of fortune's wheel, and, let it revolve ever so
fast, are insensible to the motion. I seem to have been tied to the
circumference, and whirled disagreeably round, as if on a whirligig....
Oh gods! gods! here in a garret, writing for bread, and expecting to be
dunned for a milk-score." To another, about the same time, he wrote, "I
have been some years struggling with a wretched being--with all that
contempt that indigence brings with it--with all those passions which
make contempt insupportable. What, then, has a jail that is formidable?
I shall at least have the society of wretches, and such is to me true
society." Cervantes planned and commenced Don Quixote in prison. John
Bunyan wrote the first part, at least, of Pilgrim's Progress in jail.
Both of these immortal works are the delight and solace of reading
people wherever there is a literature. The latter is said to have been
translated into a greater number of languages than any other book in the
world, with two exceptions, the Bible and the Imitation of Christ. Sir
James Harrington, author of Oceana, on pretense of treasonable
practices, was put into confinement, which lasted until he became
deranged, when he was liberated. Sir Roger L'Estrange was tried and
condemned to death, and lay in prison nearly four years; constantly
expecting to be led forth to execution. Ben Jonson, John Selden, Jeremy
Taylor, and Edmund Waller were imprisoned. Sir Walter Raleigh, during
his twelve years' imprisonment, wrote his best poems and his History of
the World, a work accounted vastly superior to all the English
historical productions which had previously appeared. "Written," says
the historian Tytler, "in prison, during the quiet evening of a
tempestuous life, we feel, in its perusal, that we are the companions
of a superior mind, nursed in contemplation and chastened and improved
by sorrow, in which the bitter recollection of injury and the asperity
of resentment have passed away, leaving only the heavenly lesson, that
all is vanity." Old George Wither wrote his Shepherd's Hunting during
his first imprisonment. The superiority of intellectual pursuits over
the gratification of sense and all the malice of fortune, has never been
more touchingly or finely illustrated, it has been well said, than in
this poem.
"Can anything be so elegant," asks Emerson, "as to have few wants and
serve them one's self? It is more elegant to answer one's own needs than
to be richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few,
but it is an elegance forever and to all.... Parched corn, and a house
with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may
be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and girt and
road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good-will, is
frugality for gods and heroes." Said Confucius, "With coarse rice to
eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow,--I have still
joy in the midst of these things." "For my own private satisfaction,"
said Bishop Berkeley, "I had rather be master of my own time than wear a
diadem." "I would rather," said Thoreau, "sit on a pumpkin and have it
all to myself, than to be crowded on a velvet cushion.... If you have
any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not
something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the
old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way,
that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be
like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of
fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary
ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the
caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for
clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil.... It is desirable
that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the
dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly,
that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk
out the gate empty-handed without anxiety."
"You see in my chamber," said Goethe, near the close of his life, "no
sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks
ago, have permitted even a leaning place for my head to be added. If
surrounded by tasteful furniture, my thoughts are arrested, and I am
placed in an agreeable, but passive state. Unless we are accustomed to
them from early youth, splendid chambers and elegant furniture had best
be left to people who neither have nor can have any thoughts."
Rogers, the banker poet, once said to Wordsworth, "If you would let me
edit your poems, and give me leave to omit some half-dozen, and make a
few trifling alterations, I would engage that you should be as popular a
poet as any living." Wordsworth's answer is said to have been, "I am
much obliged to you, Mr. Rogers; I am a poor man, but I would rather
remain as I am."
Thomson solicited Burns to supply him with twenty or thirty songs for
the musical work in which he was engaged, with an understanding
distinctly specified, that the bard should receive a regular pecuniary
remuneration for his contributions. With the first part of the proposal
Burns instantly complied, but peremptorily rejected the last. "As to any
remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for
they shall absolutely be the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm
with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee,
hire, etc., would be downright prostitution of soul." Thomson, some
time after, notwithstanding the prohibition, ventured to acknowledge his
services by a small pecuniary present, which the poet with some
difficulty restrained himself from returning. "I assure you, my dear
sir," he wrote to the donor, "that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary
parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savor
of affectation; but as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor
kind, I swear by that honor which crowns the upright statue of Robert
Burns' integrity--on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn
the by-past transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger
to you! Burns' character for generosity of sentiment and independence of
mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants which the cold,
unfeeling ore can supply; at least, I will take care that such a
character he shall deserve." His sensitive nature inclined him to reject
the present, as proud old Sam Johnson threw away with indignation the
new shoes which had been placed at his chamber door. "I ought not," says
Emerson, "to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he
is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without
his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither by comfort, neither by
pride,--and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him,
that he is the poor man beside me."