74 FRESH FIELDS 



He was impatient of poetry and art; they savored 

 too much of play and levity. His own work* was 

 not done lightly and easily, but with labor throes 

 and pains, as of planting his piers in a weltering 

 flood and chaos. The spirit of struggling and 

 wrestling which he had inherited was always upper- 

 most. It seems as if the travail and yearning of his 

 mother had passed upon him as a birthmark. The 

 universe was madly rushing about him, seeking to 

 engulf him. Things assumed threatening and spec- 

 tral shapes. There was little joy or serenity for 

 him. Every task he proposed to himself was a 

 struggle with chaos and darkness, real or imaginary. 

 He speaks of "Frederick" as a nightmare; the 

 " Cromwell business " as toiling amid mountains of 

 dust. I know of no other man in literature with 

 whom the sense of labor is so tangible and terrible. 

 That vast, grim, struggling, silent, inarticulate 

 array of ancestral force that lay in him, when the 

 burden of written speech was laid upon it, half 

 rebelled, and would not cease to struggle and be 

 inarticulate. There was a plethora of power: a 

 channel, as through rocks, had to be made for it, 

 and there was an incipient cataclysm whenever a 

 book was to be written. What brings joy and 

 buoyancy to other men, namely, a genial task, 

 brought despair and convulsions to him. It is not 

 the effort of composition, — he was a rapid and 

 copious writer and speaker, — but the pressure of 

 purpose, the friction of power and velocity, the 

 sense of overcoming the demons and mud-gods and 



