Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/111

Rh of wood or drawer of water undergoes a tithe of the toil of those whose work is reputed play, but is, in fact, a battle, every moment, between the flesh and the spirit. Campbell, who at the age of sixty-one could drudge at an unimaginative work for fourteen hours a day like a galley-slave, "and yet," as he says in one of his letters, "be as cheerful as a child," speaks in a much less industrious tone of the work which alone was congenial to him: "The truth is, I am not writing poetry but projecting it, and that keeps me more idle and abstracted than you can conceive. I pass hours thinking about what I am to compose. The actual time employed in composition is but a fraction of the time lost in setting about it." "At Glasgow," we read of him even when a young man, "he seldom exercised his gift except when roused into action either by the prospect of gaining a prize or by some stirring incident." Campbell, if not a great man, was a typical worker. Johnson—who, whatever may be thought of his imaginative powers, was another type—struck off his Ramblers and Idlers at a heat when the summons of the press forbade his indolence to put off his work another moment; he did not give himself even a minute to read over his papers before they went to the printers. He would not have written "Rasselas" except for the necessity of paying for his mother's funeral; and yet he was a laborious worker where the imagination was not concerned. The elder Dumas had to forbid himself, by an effort of will, to leave his desk before a certain number of pages were written, in order to get any work done at all. Victor Hugo is said to have locked up his clothes while writing "Not re-Dame," so that he might not escape from it till the last word was written. In such cases the so-called "pleasures of imagination" look singularly like the pains of stone-breaking. The hardest part of the lot of genius, I suspect, has been not the emotional troubles popularly—and with absurd exaggeration—ascribed to it, but a disgust for labor during the activity of the fancy, and the necessity for labor when it is most disgusting. And, as it is not in human nature to endure suffering willingly, the mood in which such labor is possible calls for artificial conditions by which it can be rendered endurable.

The passing mention of Blake indirectly suggests an objection. Nature has thought fit to place an insuperable bar between painters and night-work: and yet the work of the painter is as imaginative in character as that of the poet, while painters have shown no tendency, as a class, to break down under the strain. Artists in form have not often followed the example of Michael Angelo, who stuck a candle in a lump of clay, and the lump of clay on his head, and chiseled till morning. But then writing is the exercise of the imagination, including conception as well as execution; painting is the record of previous imagination, and so belongs to the daylight, even according to Balzac's rule. Skill, intelligence, the eye and the hand, which work best under natural and healthy conditions, have to bear the