a good many plans, with the result of settling down for the last twelve
or fourteen years to one alone. He prefers the daytime decidedly for
mental work, because the brain is fresh and vigorous from the rest of
the past few hours, and because the work produced is lighter and better
and can be sustained longer; and the writer is not exhausted when he
leaves his table. Brilliant work has often been done at night; but when
Fenn has made the trial he has found the results of a month's day-work
better, and there has been more in quantity. He invariably makes an
outline or skeleton of his work, and often with his story first in a
dramatic form, which, he thinks, adds much to the vigor and effect of a
tale. He is in the habit of using tobacco, but has never looked upon it
as a stimulus, regarding it rather as a soothing aid to reflection. He
dines early, so as to have the evenings free. The afternoon is spent in
work, a visit to town, or a chat with friends; he takes tea early,--at
six,--and afterward often writes for two or three hours. For years Mr.
Fenn has been trying to solve this problem: Why can one write easily and
fairly well one day, and have the next be almost a blank? After long
study and much musing, he has come to the determination that he knows
nothing whatever about it, and that the only thing to do is to lead as
quiet and temperate a life as one can. Of course, the stimulated and
excited brain will produce a few weird and powerful bits of work; but,
judging from what Mr. Fenn has seen, the loaded mind soon breaks down.
VII.
Goethe, Dickens, Schiller, and Scott.
Goethe was a believer in the pleasant doctrine that the highest and
freest work can be done under the healthiest conditions of fresh air,
early hours, daylight, and temperance--which does not mean abstinence.
He and Balzac are at precisely opposite pales in their method of
working. Here is the account of Goethe's days at Weimar, according to G.
H. Lewes: He rose at seven. Till eleven he worked without interruption.
A cup of chocolate was then brought, and he worked on again till one. At
two he dined. His appetite was immense. Even on the days when he
complained of not being hungry, he ate much more than most men. He sat a
long while over his wine, chatting gayly; for he never dined alone. He
was fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles. There was no
dessert--Balzac's principal meal--nor coffee. Then he went to the
theatre, where a glass of punch was brought to him at six, or else he
received friends at home. By ten o'clock he was in bed, where he slept
soundly. Like Thorwaldsen, he had a talent for sleeping.
No man of business or dictionary maker could make a more healthy
arrangement of his hours. The five or six hours of regular morning work,
which left the rest of the day open for society and recreation, the
early habits, the full allowance of sleep, and the rational use of food
are in glaring contrast to Balzac's short and broken slumbers, his night
work, and his bodily starvation. Goethe differed from almost every other
great poet in not doing his greatest work at a white heat; and not only
so, but he differed also in constantly balancing his reasoning against
his creative faculties. Those long mornings of early work were not
always spent in the fever of creation. He was a physiologist, a
botanist, a critic; and the longer he lived, the more of a savant he
became, if not less of a poet. His imagination was most fertile before
he settled down into these regular ways, but not before he settled down
into a full appreciation of wine. Balzac would write the draft of a
whole novel at a sitting, and then develop it on the margins of proofs,
revises, and re-revises. Goethe acted as if while art is long, life were
long also. Till the contrary is proved, we must consistently hold that
Goethe was the philosopher before dinner-time, and the poet in the
theatre, or during those long after-dinner hours over his two or three
bottles of wine. That these later hours were often spent socially proves
nothing, one way or the other. Some men need such active influences as
their form of mental stimulus. Alfieri found, or made, his ideas while
listening to music or galloping on horseback. Instances are common in
every-day life of men who cannot think to good purpose when shut up in a
room with a pen, and who find their best inspiration in wandering about
the streets and hearing what they want in the rattle of cabs and the
seething of life around them, like the scholar of Padua, whose
conditions of work are given by Montaigne as a curiosity: "I lately
found one of the most learned men in France studying in the corner of a
room, cut off by a screen, surrounded by a lot of riotous servants. He
told me--and Seneca says much the same himself--that he worked all the
better for this uproar, as, if overpowered by noise, he was obliged to
withdraw all the more closely into himself for contemplation, while the
storm of voices drove his thoughts inward. When at Padua he had lodged
so long over the clattering of the traffic and the tumult of the
streets, that he had been trained not only to be indifferent to noise,
but even to require it for the prosecution of his studies."
Goethe abominated smoking, though he was a German. Bayard Taylor says
that he tolerated the use of the pipe by Schiller and his sovereign,
Carl August, but otherwise he was very severe in denouncing it. Goethe
himself somewhere says that "with tobacco, garlic, bed-bugs, and
hypocrites he should wage perpetual war."
We learn from Mr. Forster that "method in everything was Dickens'
peculiarity, and between breakfast and luncheon, with rare exceptions,
was his time of work. But his daily walks were less of rule than of
enjoyment and necessity. In the midst of his writing they were
indispensable, and especially, as it has been shown, at night." When he
had work on hand he walked all over the town furiously, and in all
weathers, to the injury of his health; and his walks, be it observed,
were frequently what Balzac's always were--at night; so that, in the
matter of hours, he must be taken as having conformed in some important
respects to Balzac's hygiene. Now, Goethe was also an essentially
out-of-doors man by nature--not one to let his pen do his imagining for
him. He was no slave of the ink-bottle, as some are, who cannot think
without the feather of a goose in their hands, by way of a sometimes
appropriate talisman. There is a well-known passage in one of the Roman
elegies to the effect that inspiration is to be sought more directly
than within the four walls of a study, and that the rhythm of the
hexameter is not best drummed with the fingers on a wooden table; and if
it is true, as the author tells, that "youth is drunkenness without
wine," it seems to follow, according to his experience, that those two
or three bottles of wine are not altogether needless as an aid to
inspiration when youth is gone by.
Schiller could never leave off talking about his poetical projects, and
thus he discussed with Goethe all his best pieces, scene after scene. On
the other hand, it was contrary to Goethe's nature, as he told
Eckermann, to talk over his poetic plans with anybody--even with
Schiller. He carried everything about with him in silence, and usually
nothing of what he was doing was known to any one until the whole was
completed.
Sir Walter Scott was one of the most industrious of writers. He rose
early, and accomplished a good day's literary work before half the world
was out of bed. Even when he was busiest, he seldom worked as late as
noon. His romances were composed with amazing rapidity; and it is an
astonishing fact, that in less than two weeks after his bankruptcy Scott
wrote an entire volume of "Woodstock." His literary labors yielded him
$50,000 a year. Two thousand copies of "The Lady of the Lake" were sold
within a few months.
Many of the more energetic descriptions in "Marmion," and particularly
that of the battle of Flodden, were struck off, according to Mr.
Skene's account, while Scott was out with his cavalry, in the autumn of
1807. In the intervals of drilling, we are told, Scott used to delight
"in walking his powerful black steed up and down by himself upon the
Portobello sands, within the beating of the surge; and now and then you
would see him plunge in his spurs, and go off as if at the charge, with
the spray dashing about him. As we rode back to Musselburgh, he often
came and placed himself beside me, to repeat the verses that he had been
composing during these pauses of our exercise."
In after years, Mr. Cadell, then a guest at Abbotsford, observing how
his host was harassed by lion-hunters, and what a number of hours he
spent daily in the company of his work-people, expressed his wonder that
Scott should ever be able to work at all while in the country. "Oh,"
said Sir Walter, "I lie simmering over things for an hour or so before I
get up; and there's the time I'm dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping,
half-waking _projet de chapitre_, and when I get the paper before me, it
commonly runs off pretty easily. Besides, I often take a doze in the
plantations, and while Tom [Purdie] marks out a dyke or a drain as I
have directed, one's fancy may be running its ain rigs in some other
world."
By far the greater portion of "The Bride of Lammermoor," the whole of
"The Legend of Montrose," and almost the whole of "Ivanhoe" were
dictated under the terrible stimulus of physical pain, which wrung
groans from the author between the words. The very two novels wherein
the creative power of the arch-master of romance shows itself most
strongly were composed in the midst of literal birth-throes. Laidlaw
would often beseech Sir Walter affectionately to stop dictating, when
his audible suffering filled every pause. It was then he made that
grimmest of all bad puns: "Nay, Willie," addressing Laidlaw, who wrote
for him and implored him to rest, "only see that the doors are fast. I
would fain keep all the cry, as well as all the wool, to ourselves; but
as to giving over work, that can be done only when I am in woollen."
John Ballantyne, his other faithful amanuensis, after the first day,
took care to have always a dozen of pens made before he seated himself
opposite the sofa on which Scott lay, the sufferer usually continuing
his sentence in the same breath, though he often turned himself on his
pillow with a groan of anguish. "But when a dialogue of peculiar
animation was in progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over
matter: he arose from his couch and walked up and down the room, raising
and lowering his voice, and, as it were, acting the parts."
In this last particular we are reminded of the celebrated Russian
author, Gogol, whose practice it is said to have been in composing a
dialogue to recite all the different speeches in character before
committing them to paper, to assure himself of their being in complete
consonance with what the character and situation required.
So far from affording any argument to the contrary, the history of the
years during which Sir Walter's hand was losing its cunning seems to
illustrate the penalty of trying to reconcile two irreconcilable
things--the exercise of the imagination to its fullest extent, and the
observance of conditions that are too healthy to nourish a fever.
Apropos of his review of Ritson's "Caledonian Annals," he himself says:
"No one that has not labored as I have done on imaginary topics can
judge of the comfort afforded by walking on all-fours, and being grave
and dull." There spoke the man who habitually, and without artificial
help, drew upon his imagination at the hours when instinct has told
others they should be employing, not their fancy, but their reason. The
privilege of being healthily dull before breakfast must have been an
intense relief to one who compelled himself to do unhealthy or abnormal
work without the congenial help of abnormal conditions. Herder, in like
manner, is accused by De Quincey, in direct terms, of having broken
down prematurely because he "led a life of most exemplary temperance.
Surely, if he had been a drunkard or an opium-eater, he might have
contrived to weather the point of sixty years." This is putting things
pretty strongly; but it is said of a man of great imaginative power by a
man of great imaginative power, and may, therefore, be taken as the
opinion of an expert, all the more honest because he is prejudiced. A
need must be strongly felt to be expressed with such daring contempt for
popular axioms.
The true working-life of Scott, who helped nature by no artificial
means, lasted for no more than twelve years, from the publication of
"Waverley" until the year in which his genius was put into harness; so
that, of the two men, Scott and Balzac, who both began a literary life
at nearly the same age, and were both remarkable for splendid
constitutions, the man who lived abnormally surpassed the man who lived
healthily by fully eight years of good work, and kept his imagination in
full vigor to the end.
It is amusing to read Sir Walter's candid avowal, when beginning the
third volume of "Woodstock," that he "had not the slightest idea how the
story was to be wound up to a catastrophe." He declares he never could
lay down a plan--or that, if he had laid one down, he never could stick
to it. "I tried only to make that which I was writing diverting and
interesting, leaving the rest to fate. This habnab at a venture is a
perilous style, I grant, but I cannot help it."
VIII.
Burning Midnight Oil.
That night, and not morning, is most appropriate to imaginative work is
supported by a general consent among those who have followed instinct in
this matter. Upon this question, which can scarcely be called vexed,
Charles Lamb is the classical authority: "No true poem ever owed its
birth to the sun's light. The mild, internal light, that reveals the
fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in
the sunshine. Milton's 'Morning Hymn in Paradise,' we would hold a good
wager, was penned at midnight, and Taylor's rich description of a
sunrise smells decidedly of a taper." "This view of evening and
candle-light," to quote his commentator, De Quincey, once more, "as
involved in the full delight of literature," may seem no more than a
pleasant extravaganza, and no doubt it is in the nature of such gayeties
to travel a little into exaggeration; but substantially it is certain
that Lamb's sincere feelings pointed habitually in the direction here
indicated. His literary studies, whether taking the color of tasks or
diversions, courted the aid of evening, which, by means of physical
weariness, produces a more luxurious state of repose than belongs to
the labor hours of day; they courted the aid of lamp-light, which, as
Lord Bacon remarked, "gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures,
such as would be vainly sought from the homeliness of day-light." Those
words, "physical weariness," if they do not contain the whole philosophy
of the matter, are very near it, and are, at all events, more to the
point than the quotation from Lord Bacon. They almost exactly define
that unnatural condition of the body which, on other grounds, appears to
be proper to the unnatural exercise of the mind. It will be remembered
that Balzac recommended the night for the artist's work, the day for the
author's drudgery. Southey, who knew as well as anybody who ever put pen
to paper how to work, and how to get the best and the most out of
himself, and who pursued the same daily routine through his whole
literary life, performed his tasks in the following order: From
breakfast till dinner, history, transcription for the press, and, in
general, all the work that Scott calls "walking on all-fours." From
dinner till tea, reading, letter-writing, the newspapers, and frequently
a siesta--he, also, was a heroic sleeper, and slept whenever he had the
chance. After tea, poetry, or whatever else his fancy chose--whatever
work called upon the creative power. It is true that he went to bed
regularly at half-past ten, so that his actual consumption of midnight
oil was not extravagant. But such of it as he did consume served as a
stimulant for the purely imaginative part of his work, when the labor
that required no stimulant was over and done.
Blake was a painter by day and a poet by night; he often got out of bed
at midnight and wrote for hours, following by instinct the deliberate
practice of less impulsive workers.
Schiller evolved his finest plays in a summer-house, which he built for
himself, with a single chamber, on the top of an acclivity near Jena,
commanding a beautiful prospect of the valley of the Saal and the fir
mountains of the neighboring forest. On sitting down to his desk at
night, says Doering, he was wont to keep some strong coffee or wine
chocolate, but more frequently a flask of old Rhenish or champagne,
standing by him: often the neighbors would hear him earnestly declaiming
in the silence of the night, and he might be seen walking swiftly to and
fro in his chamber, then suddenly throwing himself down into his chair
and writing, drinking at intervals from the glass that stood near him.
In winter he continued at his desk till four, or even five, o'clock in
the morning; in summer, till toward three. The "pernicious expedient of
stimulants" served only to waste the more speedily and surely, as Mr.
Carlyle says, his already wasted fund of physical strength. Schiller
used an artificial stimulus altogether peculiar to himself: he found it
impossible, according to the well-known anecdote, to work except in a
room filled with the scent of rotten apples, which he kept in a drawer
of his writing-table, in order to keep up his necessary mental
atmosphere.
In the park at Weimar we have other glimpses of Schiller; frequently he
was to be seen there, wandering among the groves and remote
avenues,--for he loved solitary walks,--with a note-book in his hand;
now loitering along, now moving rapidly on; "if any one appeared in
sight, he would dart into another alley, that his dream might not be
broken." In Joerden's Lexicon we read that whatever Schiller intended to
write, he first composed in his head, before putting down a line of it
on paper; and he used to call a work "ready" so soon as its existence in
his spirit was complete: hence, there were often reports current of his
having finished such and such a work, when, in the common sense, it was
not even begun.
Lord Byron was a late riser. He often saw the sun rise before he went to
bed. In his journals we frequently find such entries as these: "Got up
at two P. M., spent the morning," etc. He always wrote at night. While
he was the most brilliant star in London society, he was in the habit of
returning from balls, routs, the theatre, and opera, and then writing
for two or three hours before going to bed. In this way "The Corsair,"
"Lara," "The Giaour," and "The Siege of Corinth" were composed. Byron
affords an illustration of a tendency to put himself out of working
condition in order to work the better. "At Disdati," says Moore, "his
life was passed in the same regular round of habits into which he
naturally fell." These habits included very late hours and
semi-starvation, the excessive smoking of cigars and chewing of tobacco,
and the drinking of green tea, without milk or sugar, in the evening.
Like Balzac, Byron avoided meat and wine, and so gave less natural
brain-food room for active play.
The experience of P. K. Rosegger, the greatest novelist of Styria, whose
popular works are read not only in the palace, but also in the hut, is
contrary to that of most writers; he finds that with him lamp-light and
night-work are most conducive to literary fertility, and that he can
work with greater ease on dark, gloomy days than in fine weather. His
manuscripts are generally committed to the press as they were originally
composed, except for additions that fill the margins which the author
leaves for that purpose when writing. Poetry comes to him spontaneously
when he takes his exercise in the field or garden, so that all he has to
do when he gets home is to write it down; but he can compose prose only
at the writing-desk. After a rest of several days he writes with great
ease and velocity; in fact, writing is a necessity to him. On the
average, he writes three hours a day. He is often forced to write while
disinclined, to provide for the maintenance of a large family.
George Parsons Lathrop thus speaks of the habits of work of Dr. William
A. Hammond, one of the more recent additions to our novel-writers: "Dr.
Hammond's habits of work are something which should interest all brain
laborers. At a moderately early hour in the morning he seats himself in
his consulting-room to receive patients, and he remains indoors until
two in the afternoon. Then he drives out and walks. On certain days he
has medical lectures to deliver. His spare time in the afternoon is
devoted to taking the air, reading, or diverting himself. After dinner
and any social recreation that may be in hand he sits down at his desk
again by ten or eleven o'clock, and writes until two in the morning. 'I
do it,' he says, 'because I like it. It amuses and refreshes me.' How he
manages to endure this constant sitting up is something of a marvel,
considering that so much of his energies must be consumed by
professional work. He seems to be always at leisure and unharassed, and
lives comfortably, not denying himself a reasonable portion of
stimulants and tobacco."
IX.
Literary Partnership.
Literary partnerships are common in France, but in England they are
confined almost exclusively to dramatists. The one well-known exception
was that of Messrs. Besant and Rice. Mr. Rice's partnership with Mr.
Besant began in 1871, and ended with the death of Mr. Rice. "It arose,"
explains Mr. Besant, "out of some slight articles which I contributed to
his magazine, and began with the novel called 'Ready-Money Mortiboy.' Of
this eleven years' fellowship and intimate, almost daily, intercourse, I
can say only that it was carried on throughout without a single shadow
of dispute or difference. James Rice was eminently a large-minded man,
and things which might have proved great rocks of offence to some, he
knew how to treat as the trifles they generally are."
In France, the best example of literary partnership is found in that of
M. Erckmann and M. Chatrian. How these men worked in concert has been
described by the author of "Men of the Third Republic." "M. Chatrian is
credited with being the more imaginative of the two. The first outlines
of the plots are generally his, as also the love scenes, and all the
descriptions of Phalsbourg and the country around. M. Erckmann puts in
the political reflections, furnishes the soldier types, and elaborates
those plain speeches which fit so quaintly, but well, into the mouths of
his honest peasants, sergeants, watchmakers, and schoolmasters. A clever
critic remarked that Erckmann-Chatrian's characters are always hungry
and eating. The blame, if any, must lie on M. Chatrian's shoulders; to
his fancy belong the steaming tureens of soup, the dishes of browned
sausages and sauer-kraut, and the mounds of flowery potatoes, bursting
plethorically through their skins. All that M. Erckmann adds to the menu
is the black coffee, of which he insists, with some energy, on being a
connoisseur. Habitually the co-authors meet to sketch out their plots
and talk them over amid much tobacco smoking. Then, when the story has
taken clear shape in their minds, one or the other of the pair writes
the first chapter, leaving blanks for the dialogues or descriptions
which are best suited to the competency of the other. Every chapter thus
passes through both writers' hands, is revised, recopied, and, as
occasion requires, either shortened or lengthened in the process. When
the whole book is written, both authors revise it again, and always with
a view to curtailment. Novelists who dash off six volumes of diluted
fiction in a year, and affect to think naught of the feat, would grow
pensive at seeing the labor bestowed by MM. Erckmann and Chatrian on the
least of their works, as well as their patient research in assuring
themselves that their historical episodes are correct, and their
descriptions of existing localities true to nature. But this careful
industry will have its reward, for the novels of MM. Erckmann and
Chatrian will live. The signs of vitality were discovered in them as
soon as the two authors, nerved by their first success, settled down and
produced one tale after another, all too slowly for the public demand.
'The Story of a Conscript,' 'Waterloo,' 'The History of a Man of the
People,' and, above all, 'The History of a Peasant,' were read with
wonder as well as interest."
X.
Anonymity in Authorship.