Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/109

Rh the comfort afforded 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 privilege 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 temperance. . . . Surely if he had been a drunkard or an opium-eater, he might have contrived to weather the point of sixty years." This is putting things pretty strongly, but it is said of a man of great imaginative 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 exceptionally 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 exception 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 exceptionally strong constitution for the gratification of a mental tendency—the physique of an elephant, as I heard it roughly put, and the conduct of a slave-driver who is his own slave. There must be the exceptionally strong constitution to bear an abnormal strain and the effort 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 followed 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