THE PHYSIOLOGY OF AUTHORSHIP. loi 



of wood or drawer of water undergoes a tithe of the toil of those 

 whose work is reputed play, but is, in fact, a battle, every moment, 

 between the flesh and the spirit. Campbell, who at the age of sixty- 

 one could drudge at an unimaginative work for fourteen hours a day 

 like a galley-slave, " and yet," as he says in one of his letters, "be as 

 cheerful as a child," speaks in a much less industrious tone of the work 

 which alone was congenial to him : " The truth is, I am not writing 

 poetry but projecting it, and that keeps me more idle and abstracted 

 than you can conceive. I pass hours thinking about what I am to 

 compose. The actual time employed in composition is but a fraction 

 of the time lost in setting about it." " At Glasgow," Ave read of him 

 even when a young man, " he seldom exercised his gift except when 

 roused into action either by the prospect of gaining a prize or by some 

 stirring incident." Campbell, if not a great man, was a typical 

 worker. Johnson who, whatever may be thought of his imaginative 

 powers, was another type struck oif his Ramblers and Idlers at a 

 heat when the summons of the press forbade his indolence to put ofl' 

 his work another moment ; he did not give himself even a minute to 

 read over his papers before they went to the printers. He would not 

 have written " Rasselas " except for tlie necessity of paying for his 

 mother's funeral ; and yet he was a laborious worker where the imagi- 

 nation was not concerned. The elder Dumas had to forbid himself, by 

 an effort of will, to leave his desk before a certain number of pages 

 were written, in order to get any work done at all. Victor Hugo is 

 said to have locked up his clothes while writing " Not re-Dame," so 

 that he might not escape from it till the last word was written. In 

 such cases the so-called " pleasures of imagination " look singularly 

 like the pains of stone-breaking. The hardest part of the lot of gen- 

 ius, I suspect, has been not the emotional troubles popularly and 

 with absurd exaggeration ascribed to it, but a disgust for labor dur- 

 ing the activity of the fancy, and the necessity for labor when it is 

 most disijustins:. And, as it is not in human nature to endure sufier- 

 ing willingly, the mood in which such labor is possible calls for artifi- 

 cial conditions by which it can be rendered endurable. 



The passing mention of Blake indirectly suggests an objection. 

 Nature has thought fit to place an insuperable bar between painters 

 and night-work: and yet the work of the painter is as imaginative in 

 character as that of the poet, while painters have shown no tendency, 

 as a class, to break down under the strain. Artists in form have not 

 often followed the example of Michael Angelo, who stuck a candle 

 in a lump of clay, and the lump of clay on his head, and chiseled 

 till morning. But then writing is the exercise of the imagination, 

 including conception as well as execution ; painting is the record of 

 previous imagination, and so belongs to the daylight, even according 

 to Balzac's rule. Skill, intelligence, the eye and the hand, which 

 work best under natural and healthy conditions, have to bear the 



