XI

Of authors at work; their blunders and their confidences; with some reflections about style.

THE habits of authors at their work seem to possess an interest for readers, and many chapters of literary gossip have been devoted to describing the methods and customs of the makers of books. Sometimes the details appear to be trivial, but there is a fascination in observing the human animal performing his little tasks akin to that which leads the bird - lover to study patiently the genesis of the blue-jay brood or of the robin family, and the ThompsonSetons to dwell affectionately with the sand-hill stag and the grizzly bear. Authors are usually. more communicative about themselves than the Wahbs and Kootenay rams of the Wild West, and the natural history of the race may easily be investigated in the comfortable corners of the library.

Should a writer mature his thoughts before committing them to paper? It is doubtless a question of temperament. Schopenhauer says: "There are three kinds of authors-those who write without thinking; they write from a full memory, from reminiscences; it may be straight out of other people's books. Then come those who do their thinking while they are writing; last of all, those authors who think before they begin to write. They are rare." Comte, we are told, thought everything out fully before writing, while Darwin was accustomed to dash off page after page hurriedly, even abbreviating his words, and he trusted to later revision. In poor Prescott's case, that hard piece of bread thrown by a careless Harvard undergraduate compelled him to run over the whole of an intended chapter in his mind before putting his pen, or, to be precise, his agate or ivory stylus, upon the sheets of carbonated paper which he was obliged to use. The writing, he says, "was an effort of memory rather than of composition." It does not matter so much how it is done if it is done well; but in certain fields of literary labor it is wise to formulate the expression of thought before inscribing it on paper. Whatever may be the shortcomings of Prescott as a historian, judged by the standards of to-day, he had an attractive style, and he wisely rejected the advice of Thierry to resort to dictation. It may be that the Gallic nature of the blind historian of the Norman Conquest was too impatient to endure the toil which Prescott was willing to undergo in order to achieve his results. We suffer in these days from the tempting plague of the stenographer and the typewriter. Little that is deserving of preservation is produced except by the author's own hand, which corrects the staggerings of the mind and is a foe to fatal diffuseness. When the dictator rambles along conversationally, deluging his scribe with slush, he loses the concentration which is a mark of wisdom. In the haste of modern days the innate laziness of the author naturally leads him to avail of the easy method of talking to a sort of machine, and relying upon his own judgment in the revision of the notes when they are put before him. He does not, however, correct, excise, or prune as he should, because he is indolent and is disposed to accept the first efforts of his mind as final and conclusive.

Wordsworth never wrote down as he composed, but composed walking, riding, or lying in bed, and, after he had completed his work, wrote it out with his own hand. Southey, on the contrary, true literary man as he was, sat at his desk and penned his thoughts as they shaped themselves in his mind. Every man has his own humor about such matters. A dear friend used to excite his faculties by copious libations of hot tea, preferable to more potent potations as a stimulant to the sluggish brain. Tobacco is for some an encourager of composition - "sublime tobacco, which, from east to west, cheers the tar's labor or the Turkman's rest." Carlyle's pipe is a proverb. We find it hard to forgive Cowper for saying of the stimulating plant:

Pernicious weed, whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys,
Thy worst effect is banishing for hours
The sex whose presence civilizes ours;
Thou art, indeed, the drug the gardener wants
To poison vermin that infest his plants.1

In these more enlightened days, when the cigarette is not distained by attractive damsels, and even the cigar is sometimes accepted by "the sex whose presence civilizes ours," notably in the case of a lady of my acquaintance of charming manners and cultivated literary taste, we can afford to smile at such remarks concerning that magic plant whereof Charles Lamb said:

For thy sake, tobacco, I
Would do anything but die.2

Dickens has been presented to us by his chosen biographer, John Forster, in an inadequate and unsatisfactory way. It is not prof

Cowper, Conv., 251

" Farewell to Tobacco."

itable to reflect much about the mistakes of that Life which ought to have been so precious to Dickens-lovers. I am discontented with even my extra-illustrated copy, and in the privacy of the library I sometimes shake my fist at it. It is possibly true that an intimate acquaintance with the subject is a drawback to a biographer, and that the records of a great man should be written by one who never knew him and never saw him; the friend is not always capable of occupying a proper point of view. Forster tells us that the beloved novelist carried with him his accompaniments of work in the shape of "certain quaint little bronze figures that stood upon his desk and were as much needed for the easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens," which he much affected. There was a group representing a duel between a couple of very fat toads, and the figure of a dog-fancier with a profusion of little dogs stuck under his arms and into his pockets and everywhere where little dogs could possibly be insinuated. Sometimes when he was toiling very hard over a book he would plough through snow half a foot deep for two hours, because he had a theory that he must spend the same amount of time in walking as he did in writing. He wrote usually between breakfast and luncheon. Contrary to the popular impression, he did not