THE PHYSIOLOGY OF AUTHORSHIP. 97 



coffee. Then lie went to the theatre, where a glass of punch was 

 brought 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, tlie 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. 

 But he who imagined " Faust " is not to be so easily let off from his share 

 in illustrating a rule. There is no need to quarrel with Mr. Lewes 

 for going out of his way to prove that Goethe was not necessarily a 

 toper because he liked wine and had a good head. Though a great 

 deal of wine was no doubt essential to his general working power, it 

 was in his case rather a tonic than an immediate stimulant, because it 

 came after instead of during work-hours. But this is significant of 

 the same result, only in a different way. Goethe differed from almost 

 every 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. I doubt very much if those long morn- 

 ings of early work were often spent in the fever of creation. He was 

 a physiologist, a botanist, a critic ; and the longer he lived he became 

 more and more of a savant^ if not less and less of a poet. His imagina- 

 tion was most fertile before he settled down into these regular ways, 

 but not before he settled down into a full appreciation of wine. Bal- 

 zac would write the draft of a whole novel at a sitting, and then de- 

 velop 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, I must consistently hold that Goethe was the philosopher before 

 dinnert-ime, and the poet in the theatre, or during those long after-din- 

 ner-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. Al- 

 fieri found or made his ideas while listening to music or galloping on 

 horseback. Instances are common in every-day life of men who can- 

 not 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 though, 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 



VOL. Til. 7 



