THE PHYSIOLOGY OF AUTHORSHIP. 95 



might write to her for the cold-blooded reason that letter-writing im- 

 proves the style. Not only did Balzac preach this austere doctrine, 

 iDut he practised it as nearly as he could without ceasing altogether to 

 be a man and a Frenchman. Leon Gozlan's account of the daily life 

 of the author of the " Comedie Humaine " has often been quoted. He 

 began his day with dinner at six in the afternoon, at which, while he 

 fed his friends generously, he himself ate little besides fruit and drank 

 nothino- but water. At seven o'clock he wished his friends good- 

 night and went to bed. At midnight he rose and worked till din- 

 ner-time the next day : and so the world went round. George Sand 

 calls him, " Drunk on water, intemperate in work, and sober in all 

 other passions." Jules Janin asks, " Where has M. de Balzac gained 

 his knowledge of woman he, the anchorite?" Love and death came 

 to him hand-in-hand : so that he might be taken as an example of the 

 extreme result of imaginative work obtained by the extreme avoid- 

 ance of artificial stimulus, and therefore as a fatal exception to the 

 general theory, were it not for one little habit of his which, though a 

 trifle in itself, is enough to bring his genius within the pale of the 

 law. When he sat down to his desk, his servant, who regarded a man 

 that abstained even from tobacco as scarcely human, used to place 

 coffee within reach, and upon this he worked till his full brain would 

 drive his starved and almost sleepless body into such self-forgetfulness 

 that he often found himself at daybreak bareheaded and in dressing- 

 gown and slippers in the Place du Carrousel, not knowing how he 

 came there, and miles away from home. Now, coffee acts upon some 

 temperaments like laudanum upon others, and many of the manners 

 and customs of Balzac were those of a confirmed opium-eater. He 

 had the same strange illusions, the same extravagant ideas, the same 

 incapacity for distinguishing, with regard to outward things, between 

 the possible and the impossible, the false and the true. His midnight 

 wanderings, his facility for projecting himself into personalities utter- 

 ly unlike his own, belong to the experiences of the " English Opium- 

 Eater." On this assumption, the exaggerated abstinence of Balzac is 

 less like an attempt to free the soul from the fetters of the flesh than 

 a preparation for the fuller efiect of a stimulus that instinctive experi- 

 ence had recommended. In any case his intemperate temperance is 

 the reverse of the conditions in which wholesome unimaginative work 

 can possibly be carried on. 



Byron affords a similar, though of course less consistent, illustra- 

 tion 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, assisted by 

 smoking cigars and chewing tobacco, and by green tea in the evening 

 without milk or sugar. Like Balzac, he avoided meat and wine, and 

 so gave less natural brain-food room for more active play. Schiller 



