Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/106

96 was a night-worker and a coffee-drinker, and used to work on champagne. Not only so, but he used an artificial stimulus altogether peculiar to himself: he found it impossible, according to the well-known anecdote, to work except in a room filled with the scent of rotten apples, which he kept in a drawer of his writing-table, in order to keep up his necessary mental atmosphere. Shelley's practice of continually munching bread while composing is not a mere piece of trivial gossip when taken in connection with more striking and intelligible attempts to ruin the digestion by way of exciting the brain, and when it is remembered that his delicate and almost feminine organization might require far less to throw it off the balance than naturally stronger frames. At all events, it seems to point to the same instinctive craving for abnormal aids to work when the imagination is called upon—as if it were not intended that the creative power should be a function of the natural man. Of course there is no need to suppose that the stimulus is always or even often adopted with the deliberation of the actor, who used to sup on underdone pork-chops to inspire himself with the mood proper to tragedy. Nor need the stimulus be of a kind to produce intoxication, in the vulgar sense of the word. So long as it puts the body into a non-natural condition, in the way pointed out by individual instinct, it seems that the physical conditions of imaginative work are fulfilled.

Unfortunately for any complete treatment of the question, a sufficient body of data is not easily gathered. Great artists, in all fields of work, are notoriously shy of publishing their processes, even when they themselves know what their processes are. It is, however, always legitimate to argue from the known to the probable; and if it can be gathered that all great imaginative work, whenever the process is known, has been accompanied with some abnormal habit, however slight, it is fair enough to assume that the relation of cause and effect has something to do with the matter, and that some such habit may be suspected where processes are not known. There are, however, two great imaginative authors of the very first rank whom believers in the pleasant doctrine that the highest and freest work can be done under the healthiest conditions of fresh air, early hours, daylight, and temperance—which does not mean abstinence—have always claimed for their own. One of these is Goethe. He and Balzac are at precisely opposite poles in their way of working. Here is the account of Goethe's days at Weimar, according to Mr. G. H. Lewes: He rose at seven. Till eleven he worked without interruption. A cup of chocolate was then brought, and he worked on again till one. At two he dined. "His appetite was immense. Even on the days when he complained of not being hungry he ate much more than most men. . . . He sat a long while over his wine, chatting gayly, for he never dined alone. . . . He was fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles." There was no dessert—Balzac's principal—meal nor