Part 2 (2/2)
The Austrian poet, Rudolph Baumbach, is partial to daylight, and never writes at night. He always makes an outline of his work before beginning in good earnest. When meditating on his poems he walks up and down the room, but gives the open air the preference. He likes much light; when the sun does not s.h.i.+ne his work does not progress favorably. In the evening he lights up his room by a large number of candles. Literary labor is pleasure to him when the weather is fine, but it is extremely hard when clouds shut out the sunlight. The poet has no fixed rule as regards working-hours; sometimes he exerts himself a great deal for weeks, and then again he does not write at all for a long time.
Otto von Leixner, German historian, poet, novelist, and essayist, composes prose, which requires logical thinking, in the daytime, but does poetical work, which taxes princ.i.p.ally the imagination, in the evening. He makes a skeleton of all critical and scientific compositions, indeed of all essays, and then writes out the ”copy” for the press, seldom making alterations. But he files away at poems from time to time until he thinks them fit for publication. He is a smoker, but does not smoke when at work. Whether promenading the shady walks of a wood or perambulating the dusty streets of the city, Leixner constantly thinks about the works he has in hand. Literary work has no difficulties for this author; he penned one of his poems, ”The Vision,”
consisting of five hundred and eighty lines, in three hours and a half and sent it to the printer as it was originally written; and he composed the novel ”Adja,” thirty-nine and one-half octavo pages in print, in nine hours. But he often meditates over the topics which go to make up his novels, etc., for years and years until he has considered them from every standpoint. After composition he often locks up his ma.n.u.script in his desk for half a year, until it is almost forgotten, when he takes it from its place of concealment and examines it carefully to detect possible errors. If at such an examination the work does not prove satisfactory to him, he throws it into the stove. Being the editor of a journal of fiction, he is often compelled to work whether he wants to or not. From 1869 to 1870 he worked sixteen hours a day; from 1877 till 1882 about thirteen hours, even Sundays; at present he spends from ten to eleven hours every day at the writing-table, unless kept from work by visitors. He retains his health by taking a daily walk, rain or s.h.i.+ne, to which he devotes two hours. Leixner lives a very temperate life and hardly ever imbibes stimulating drinks.
The greatest of all Southern poets, Paul Hamilton Hayne, had no particular time for composition, writing as often in the daytime as at night. Whether he made an outline or skeleton of his work first, depended upon the nature of the poem. When the piece was elaborate, he outlined it, and subsequently filled up, much as a painter would do. The poet used to smoke a great deal in composing, but was obliged to abandon tobacco, having had attacks of hemorrhage. He used tea instead of coffee sometimes, but took little even of that. Wine he did not use. Hayne composed best when walking, or riding upon horseback, and as he was seldom without a book in hand, wrote a great deal on the fly-leaves of any volume he chanced to be consulting. He frequently had to force himself to work when he did not have an inclination to do so.
V.
Writing under Difficulties.
It is an exceptional mind that enables an author to write at his ease amid interruptions and distractions, lets and hindrances, of a domestic kind. Heloise gave this singular reason for her constant refusal to become Abelard's wife--that no mind devoted to the meditations of philosophy could endure the cries of children, the chatter of nurses, and the babble and coming and going in and out of serving men and women.
Of Abelard himself, however, we are told that he had a rare power of abstracting himself from all outward concerns; that no one knew better how to be alone, though surrounded by others; and that, in fact, his senses took no note of outward things. When c.u.mberland was composing any work, he never shut himself up in his study, but always wrote in the room where his family sat, and did not feel in the least disturbed by the noise of his children at play beside him. The literary habits of Lord Hailes, as Mr. Robert Chambers remarks, were hardly such as would have been expected from his extreme nicety of diction: it was in no secluded sanctum, or ”den,” that he composed, but by the ”parlour fireside,” with wife and bairns within very present sight and sound.
Cowper describes himself at Weston (1791) as working in a study exposed to all manner of inroads, and in no way disconcerted by the coming and going of servants, or other incidental and inevitable impediments. A year or two later he writes from the same spot, ”amidst a chaos of interruptions,” including Hayley spouting Greek, and Mrs. Unwin talking sometimes to them, sometimes to herself. Francis Horner relates a visit he and a friend paid to Jeremy Bentham at Ford Abbey, one s.p.a.cious room in which, a tapestried chamber, the utilitarian philosopher had utilized for what he called his ”scribbling shop”--two or three tables being set out, covered with white napkins, on which were placed music desks with ma.n.u.scripts; and here the visitors were allowed to be ”present at the mysteries, for he went on as if we had not been with him.”
The fourth of Dr. Chalmers' Astronomical Discourses was penned in a small pocket-book, in a strange apartment, where he was liable every moment to interruption; for it was at the manse of Balmerino, disappointed in not finding the minister at home, and having a couple of hours to spare,--and in a drawing-room at the manse of Kilmany, with all the excitement of meeting for the first time, after a year's absence, many of his former friends and paris.h.i.+oners,--that he penned paragraph after paragraph of a composition which, as his son-in-law and biographer, Dr. Hanna, says, bears upon it so much the aspect of high and continuous elaboration.
His friend,--and sometimes a.s.sociate in pastoral work,--Edward Irving, on the other hand, could not write a sermon if any one was in the room with him. Chalmers appears to have been specially endowed with that faculty of concentrated attention which is commonly regarded as one of the surest marks of the highest intellect, and which Alison so much admired in Wellington--as, for instance, on the day when he lay at San Christoval, in front of the French army, hourly expecting a battle, and wrote out, in the field, a long and minute memorial on the establishment of a bank at Lisbon on the principles of the English ones.
We read of Ercilla, whose epic poem, the _Arancana_, has admirers out of Spain, that he wrote it amidst the incessant toils and dangers of a campaign against barbarians, without shelter, and with nothing to write on but small sc.r.a.ps of waste paper, and often only leather; struggling at once against enemies and surrounding circ.u.mstances.
Louis de Cormantaigne, the distinguished French engineer, composed his treatise on fortification from notes written in the trenches and on the breaches, even under the fire of the enemy.
Delambre was in Paris when it was taken by the allies in 1814, and is said to have worked at his problems with perfect tranquility from eight in the morning till midnight, in the continued hearing of the cannonade.
”Such self-possession for study under that tremendous attack, and such absence of interest in the result of the great struggle, to say nothing of indifference to personal danger,” is what one of his biographers confesses himself unable to understand. Small sympathy would the philosopher have had with the temperament of such a man, say, as Thomas Hood, who always wrote most at night, when all was quiet and the children were asleep. ”I have a room to myself,” exclaims Hood, triumphantly, in a letter describing a change of lodgings, ”which will be worth 20 a year to me,--for a little disconcerts my nerves.” Mrs.
Hood brought up the children, we learn from one of them, in a sort of Spartan style of education, on her husband's account, teaching them the virtues of silence and low voices.
Was.h.i.+ngton Irving was of a less morbid temperament, and his genial nature could put up with obstacles and obstructions neither few nor small; but even in his Diary we meet with such entries as this at Bordeaux, in 1825: ”Hara.s.sed by noises in the house, till I had to go out in despair, and write in Mr. Guestier's library.” It was upon the Essay on American Scenery that he was then engaged.
Unlike Maturin, who used to compose with a wafer pasted on his forehead, which was the signal that if any of his family entered the sanctum they must not speak to him, Scott allowed his children (like their mute playmates, Camp and the greyhounds) free access to his study, never considered their talk as any disturbance, let them come and go as pleased their fancy, was always ready to answer their questions, and when they, unconscious how he was engaged (writes the husband of one of them), entreated him to lay down his pen and tell them a story, he would take them on his knee, repeat a ballad or a legend, kiss them, and set them down again to their marbles or ninepins, and resume his labor as if refreshed by the interruption. There was nothing in that manly, sound, robust const.i.tution akin to the morbid irritability of Philip in the poem:--
”When Philip wrote, he never seemed so well-- Was startled even if a cinder fell, And quickly worried.”
Biographers of Mistress Aphra Behn make it noteworthy of that too facile penwoman that she could write away in company and maintain the while her share in the talk. Madame Roland managed to get through her memoirs with a semblance at least of unbroken serenity, though so often interrupted in the composition of them by the cries of victims in the adjoining cells, whom the executioners were dragging thence to the guillotine.
Madame de Stael, ”even in her most inspired compositions,” according to Madame Necker de Saussure, ”had pleasure in being interrupted by those she loved.” She was not, observed Lord Lytton, of the tribe of those who labor to be inspired; who darken the room and lock the door, and entreat you not to disturb them. Rather, she came of the same stock as George Sand's Olympe, who ”se mit a ecrire sur un coin de la table, entre le bouteille de biere et le sucrier, au bruit des verres et de la conversation aussi tranquillement que si elle eut ete dans la solitude.
Cette puissance de concentration etait une de ses facultes les plus remarquables.”
That Lord Castlereagh was able to write his despatches at the common table in the common room of a country house is not unjustly among the admiring reminiscences of a Septuagenarian (Countess Brownlow): ”Once only we found the talking and laughter were too much for his power of abstraction, and then he went off into his own room, saying next morning at breakfast, 'You fairly beat me last night; I was writing what I may call the metaphysics of politics.'”
Celebrated in the ”Noctes Ambrosianae” is the Glasgow poet, Sandy Rogers, not less for his lyrics, one at least of which is p.r.o.nounced by Christopher North to be ”equal to anything of the kind in Burns,” than for the fact that his verses--some of them, too, of a serious character--were thought out amidst the bustle and turmoil of factory labor, the din of the clanking steam-engine, and the deafening rattle of machinery, while the work of committing them to paper was generally performed amidst the squalling and clamor of children around the hearth, now in the noise of fractious contention, and anon exuberant with fun and frolic.
Tannahill, too, composed while plying the shuttle,--humming over the airs to which he meant to adapt new words; and, as the words occurred to him, jotting them down at a rude desk which he had attached to his loom, and which he could use without rising from his seat. But no more noteworthy example of the pursuit of authors.h.i.+p under difficulties--the difficulties of a narrow home--_res augusta domi_--is probably on record, in its simple, homely way, than that of Jean Paul, as Doring pictures him, sitting in a corner of the room in which the household work was being carried on--he at his plain writing-desk, with few or no books about him, but merely with a drawer or two containing excerpts and ma.n.u.scripts; the jingle and clatter that arose from the simultaneous operations at stove and dresser no more seeming to disturb him than did the cooing of the pigeons which fluttered to and fro in the chamber, at their own sweet will.
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