THE PHYSIOLOGY OF AUTHORSHIP. 



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tbe comfort aiForded 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 privi- 

 lege 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 temper- 

 ance. . . . Surely if he had been a drunkard or an opium-eater, he 

 might have contrived to weather the point of sixty years." Tliis is 

 putting things pretty strongly, but it is said of a man of great imagi- 

 native 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. At the same time " the German 

 Coleridge" did not manage so very badly, seeing that he worked 

 hard till sixty, and he allowed himself as much coffee as his excep- 

 tionally delicate nervous system would stand ; so that in reality he 

 seems to conform to the general rule by example rather than by way of 

 exception. Scott is a far better type of the excejition that approves 

 the rule. Genius has been defined in as many different ways as there 

 have been people who have tried to define it. But perhaps the most 

 suggestive I have ever heard is the attempt to destroy an exception- 

 ally strong constitution for the gratification of a mental tendency the 

 physique of an elephant, as I heard it roughly jjut, and the conduct 

 of a slave-driver who is his own slave. There must be the exception- 

 ally strong constitution to bear an abnormal strain and the efibrt by 

 every means to do more than Nature when kindly treated will allow. 

 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 " till 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 beat the man who lived 

 healthily by full eight years of good work, and kept his imagination 

 in full vigor to the end. 



That night and not morning is most appropriate to imaginative 

 work is supported by a general consent among those who have fol- 

 lowed 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 the taper." "This 



