Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/110

100 view of evening and candle-light," to quote his commentator, De Quincey, once more, "as involved in the full delight of literature," may seem no more than a pleasant extravaganza, and no doubt it is in the nature of such gayeties to travel a little into exaggeration; but substantially it is certain that Lamb's sincere feelings pointed habitually in the direction here indicated. His literary studies, whether taking the color of tasks or diversions, courted the aid of evening, which by means of physical weariness produces a more luxurious state of repose than belongs to the labor-hours of day; they courted the aid of lamplight, which, as Lord Bacon remarked, gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures such as would be vainly sought from the homeliness of daylight." Those words "physical weariness," if they do not contain the whole philosophy of the matter, are very near it, and are at all events more to the point than the quotation from Lord Bacon. They almost exactly define that non-natural condition of the body which, on other grounds, appears to be proper to the non-natural exercise of the mind. It will be remembered that Balzac recommended the night for the artist's work, the day for the author's drudgery. Southey, who knew how to work and how to get the best and the most out of himself as well as anybody who ever put pen to paper, and who pursued the same daily routine throughout his whole literary life, performed his tasks in the following order: From breakfast till dinner, history, transcription for the press, and, in general, all the work that Scott calls "walking on all fours." From dinner till tea, reading, letter-writing, the newspapers, and frequently a siesta—he, also, was an heroic sleeper, and slept whenever he had the chance. After tea, poetry, or whatever else his fancy chose—whatever work called upon the creative power. It is true that he went to bed regularly at half-past ten, so that his actual consumption of midnight oil was not extravagant. But such of it as he did consume was taken as a stimulant for the purely imaginative part of his work, when the labor that required no stimulant was over and done. Blake was a painter by day and a poet by night; he often got out of bed at midnight and wrote for hours, following by instinct the deliberate practice of less impulsive workers. Now, bodily weariness is simply bodily indolence induced artificially; its production by hard walking, hard riding, hard living, or hard study, looks like an instinctive effort on the part of energetic men to put themselves for the time and for a purpose into the chronically unhealthy condition of naturally indolent men. Indolence, that is to say chronic fatigue, appears to be the natural habit of imaginative brains. It is a commonplace to note that men of fertile fancy, as a class, have been notorious for their horror of the work of formulating their ideas even by the toil of thought, much more by passing them through the crucible of the ink-bottle. In many cases they have needed the very active stimulant of hunger. The cacoëthes scribendi is a disease common, not to imaginative, but to imitative minds. Probably no hewer