Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/197

 reached their excellence had they not dared to be poor till middle age. Had they accepted Trollope's maxim, we should have had masses of newspaper articles and keepsake rhyming instead of Sartor Resartus and In Memoriam.

The temptation of the present system to sacrifice quality to quantity, and to work exhausted brains instead of accumulating thought, is too obvious to be insisted upon. When we look at Trollope's turnout, we are tempted to take him for an example of the consequences. George Eliot, as Mr. Harrison tells us—and we can well believe it—was horror-struck when she heard of Trollope's methods. When he began a new book, he allowed a fixed time for its completion, and day by day entered in a diary the number of pages written. A page meant two hundred and fifty words. He had every word counted, and never failed to deliver his tale of words at the time prefixed. 'Such appliances,' people told him, 'were beneath the notice of a man of genius.' He never fancied himself, he replied, to be a man of genius, but 'had I been so, I think I might well have subjected myself to these trammels.' He could hardly 'repress his scorn' when he was told that an imaginative writer should wait for 'inspiration.'