Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/105

Rh might write to her for the cold-blooded reason that letter-writing improves the style. Not only did Balzac preach this austere doctrine, but he practised it as nearly as he could without ceasing altogether to be a man and a Frenchman. Léon Gozlan's account of the daily life of the author of the "Comédie 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 nothing but water. At seven o'clock he wished his friends goodnight and went to bed. At midnight he rose and worked—till dinner-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 avoidance 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 utterly 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 effect of a stimulus that instinctive experience 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, illustration 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