Part 3 (1/2)

Dr. Johnson delved at his dictionary in a poor lodging-house in London, with a cat purring near, and orange peel and tea at hand.

Moliere tested the comic power of his plays by reading them to an old servant.

Dr. William E. Channing used to perambulate the room while composing; his printers report that he made many revisions of the proof of his writings, so that before the words met the eyes of the public on the printed page the sentences were finished with the most elaborate minuteness.

Bloomfield, the poet, relates of himself that nearly one-half of his poem, ”The Farmer's Boy,” was composed without writing a word of it, while he was at work, with other shoemakers, in a garret.

Sharon Turner, author of the valuable ”History of the Anglo-Saxons,” who received a pension of $1,500 from the British government for his services to literature, wrote the third volume of ”The Sacred History of the World” upon paper that did not cost him a farthing. The copy consisted of torn and angular fragments of letters and notes, of covers of periodicals and shreds of curling papers, unctuous with pomatum and bear's grease.

Mrs. Lizzie W. Champney writes absolutely without method. Her stories, she admits, have been penned in her nursery, with her baby in her lap, and a st.u.r.dy little boy standing on the rails of her chair and strangling her with his loving little arms. She works whenever and wherever she can find the opportunity; but the children are always put first.

George Ticknor, the Bostonian, found William Hazlitt living in the very house in which Milton dictated ”Paradise Lost,” and occupying the room where the poet kept the organ on which he loved to play. It was an enormous room, but furnished only with a table, three chairs, and an old picture. The most interesting thing that the visitor from Boston saw, except the occupant himself, was the white-washed walls. Hazlitt had used them as a commonplace book, writing on them in pencil sc.r.a.ps of brilliant thoughts, half-lines of poetry, and references. Hazlitt usually wrote with the breakfast things on the table, and there they remained until he went out, at four or five o'clock, to dinner. His pen was more to him than a mechanical instrument; it was also the intellectual wand by which he called up thoughts and opinions, and clothed them in appropriate language.

It was in a bookseller's back-shop, M. Nisard tells us, on a desk to which was fastened a great Newfoundland dog (who, by-the-bye, one day banged through the window of an upper room, desk and all, to join his master in the street below), that Armand Carrel, one moment absorbed in English memoirs and papers, another moment in caressing his four-footed friend, conceived and wrote his ”History of the Counter Revolution in England.” Mr. Walker, in this as in other respects ”The Original,”

adopted a mode of composition which, says he, ”I apprehend to be very different from what could be supposed, and from the usual mode. I write in a bedroom at a hotel, sitting upon a cane chair, in the same dress I go out in, and with no books to refer to but the New Testament, Shakespeare, and a pocket dictionary.” Now and then, when much pressed for time, and without premeditation, and with his eye on the clock, he wrote some of his shorter essays at the Athenaeum Club, at the same table where other members were writing notes and letters.

VI.

Aids to Inspiration.

Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's literary work was generally performed before noon. He said the happiest hours of his life were those pa.s.sed in the composition of his different books. He wrote most of ”The Stout Gentleman” while mounted on a stile, or seated on a stone, in his excursions with Leslie, the painter, 'round about Stratford-on-Avon,--the latter making sketches in the mean time. The artist says that his companion wrote with the greatest rapidity, often laughing to himself, and from time to time reading the ma.n.u.script aloud.

Dr. Darwin wrote most of his works on sc.r.a.ps of paper with a pencil as he travelled. But how did he travel? In a worn and battered ”sulky,”

which had a skylight at the top, with an awning to be drawn over it at pleasure; the front of the carriage being occupied by a receptacle for writing-paper and pencils, a knife, fork, and spoon; while on one side was a pile of books reaching from the floor nearly to the front window of the carriage; on the other, by Mrs. Schimmel-penninck's account, a hamper containing fruit and sweetmeats, cream and sugar,--to which the big, burly, keen-eyed, stammering doctor paid attentions as devoted as he ever bestowed on the pile of books.

Alexander Kisfaludy, foremost Hungarian poet of his time, wrote most of his ”Himfy” on horseback or in solitary walks; a poem, or collection of poems, that made an unprecedented sensation in Hungary, where, by the same token, Sandor Kisfaludy of that ilk became at once the Great Unknown.

Cujas, the object of Chateaubriand's special admiration, used to write lying flat on his breast, with his books spread about him.

Sir Henry Wotton is our authority for recording of Father Paul Sarpi that, when engaged in writing, his manner was to sit fenced with a castle of paper about his chair, and overhead; ”for he was of our Lord of St. Albans' opinion, that 'all air is predatory' and especially hurtful when the spirits are most employed.”

Rousseau tells us that he never could compose pen in hand, seated at a table, and duly supplied with paper and ink; it was in his promenades,--the _promenades d'un solitaire_,--amid rocks and woods, and at night, in bed, when he was lying awake, that he wrote in his brain; to use his own phrase, ”_J'ecris dans mon cerveau_.” Some of his periods he turned and re-turned half a dozen nights in bed before he deemed them fit to be put down on paper. On moving to the Hermitage of Montmorency, he adopted the same plan as in Paris,--devoting, as always, his mornings to the pen-work _de la copie_, and his afternoons to _la promenade_, blank paper, book, and pencil in hand; for, says he, ”having never been able to write and think at my ease except in the open air, _sule dio_, I was not tempted to change my method, and I reckoned not a little on the forest of Montmorency becoming--for it was close to my door--my _cabinet de travail_.” In another place he affirms his sheer incapacity for meditation by day, except in the act of walking; the moment he stopped walking, he stopped thinking, too, for his head worked with, and only with, his feet. ”_De jour je ne puis mediter qu'en marchant; sitot que je m'arrete je ne pense plus, et ma tete ne va qu'avec mes pieds._” _Salvitur ambulando_, whatever intellectual problem is solved by Jean Jacques. His strength was not to sit still. His Reveries, by the way, were written on sc.r.a.ps of paper of all sorts and sizes, on covers of old letters, and on playing cards--all covered with a small, neat handwriting. He was as economical of material as was ”Paper-sparing Pope” himself.

In some points Chateaubriand was intellectually, or, rather, sentimentally, related to Rousseau, but not in his way of using ink and paper.

Chateaubriand sat at a table well supplied with methodically arranged heaps of paper cut in sizes; and as soon as a page was blotted over in the biggest of his big handwriting,--according to M. de Marcullus, with almost as many drops of ink as words,--he tossed it aside, without using pounce or blotting-paper, to blot and be blotted by its acc.u.mulating fellows. Now and then he got up from this work, to look out of the window, or to pace the room, as if in quest of new ideas. The chapter finished, he collected all the scattered leaves, and revised them in due form--more frequently adding to than curtailing their fair proportions, and paying very special attention to the punctuation of his sentences.

Lessing's inherent n.o.bility of intellect is said to have been typified in his manner of study. When in the act of composition he walked up and down till his eye was caught by the t.i.tle of some book. He would open it, his brother tells us, and, if struck by some sentence which pleased him, he would copy it out; in so doing, a train of thought would be suggested, and this would be immediately followed up--provided his mood was just right.

The early morning would lure Jean Paul Richter to take out his ink-flask and write as he walked in the fragrant air. Such compositions as his ”Dream of a Madman” he would set about by first seating himself at the harpsichord, and ”fantasying” for a while on it, till the ideas, or ”imaginings,” came--which presently they would do with a rush.

Tradition, as we get it through the historian of the Clapham Sect, informs us that Wilberforce wrote his ”Practical View” under the roof of two of his best friends, in so fragmentary and irregular a manner, that one of them, when at length the volume lay complete on the table, professed, on the strength of this experience, to have become a convert to the opinion that a fortuitous concourse of atoms might, by some felicitous chance, combine themselves into the most perfect of forms--a moss-rose or a bird of paradise.

Coleridge told Hazlitt that he liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood.

Sheridan composed at night, with a profusion of lights around him, and a bottle of wine by his side. He used to say: ”If a thought is slow to come, a gla.s.s of good wine encourages it; and when it does come, a gla.s.s of good wine rewards it.”

Lamartine, in the days of his prosperity, composed in a studio with tropical plants, birds, and every luxury around him to cheer the senses.

Berkeley composed his ”Minute Philosopher” under the shade of a rock on Newport Beach.