Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

XXV

A MEMORY OF FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL

There are many signs that poetry is coming into its own again—even here in America, which, while actually one of the most romantic and sentimental of countries, fondly imagines itself the most prosaic.

Kipling, to name but one instance, has, by his clarion-tongued quickening of the British Empire, shown so convincingly what dynamic force still belongs to the right kind of singing, and the poet in general seems to be winning back some of that serious respect from his fellow-citizens which, under a misapprehension of his effeminacy and general uselessness, he had lost awhile. The poet is not so much a joke to the multitude as he was a few years ago, and the term "minor poet" seems to have fallen into desuetude.

Still for all this, I doubt if it is in the Anglo-Saxon blood, nowadays at all events, to make a national hero of a poet, one might say a veritable king, such as Frédéric Mistral is today in Provence. In our time, Björnson in Norway was perhaps the only parallel figure, and he held his position as actual "father of his people" for very much the same reasons. At once a commanding and lovable personality, he and his work were absolutely identified with his country and his countrymen. He was simply Norway incarnate.

So, today in Provence, it is with Frédéric Mistral. He is not only a poet of Provence. He is Provence incarnate, and, apart from the noble quality of his work, his position as the foremost representative of his compatriots is romantically unique. No other country today, pointing to its greatest man, would point out—a poet; whereas Mistral, were he not as unspoiled as he is laurelled, might, with literal truth, say:

We had hardly set foot in Provence this last spring, my wife and I, before we realized, with grateful wonder, that we had come to a country that has a poet for a king.

On arriving at Marseilles almost the first word we heard was "Mistral"—not the bitter wind of the same name, but the name of the honey-tongued "Master." Our innkeeper—O the delightful innkeepers of France!—on our consulting him as to our project of a walking trip through the Midi—as Frenchmen usually speak of Provence—said, for his first aid to the traveller: "Then, of course, you will see our great poet, Mistral." And he promptly produced a copy of Mirèio, which he begged me to use till I had bought a copy for myself.

"Ah! Mistral," he cried, with Gallic enthusiasm, using the words I have borrowed from his lips, "Mistral is the King of Provence!"

Marseilles had not always been so enthusiastic over Mistral and his fellows. And Mistral, in his memoirs, gives an amusing account of a philological battle fought over the letter "s" in a room behind one of the Marseilles bookshops between "the amateurs of trivialities, the rhymers of the white beard, the jealous, the grumblers," and the young innovators of the "félibrige."

But that was over fifty years ago, and the battle of those young enthusiasts has long since been won. What that battle was and what an extraordinary victory came of it must needs be told for the significance of Mistral in Provence to be properly understood.

The story is one of the most romantic in the history of literature. Briefly, it is this:

The Provençal language, the "langue d'oc," was, of course, once the courtly and lettered language of Europe, the language of the great troubadours, and through them the vehicle of the culture and refinement of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From it may be said to have sprung the beginnings of Italian literature.

But, owing to various historical vicissitudes, the language of Northern France, the "langue d'oil," gradually took its place, and when Mistral was born, in 1830, Provençal had long been regarded as little more than a patois.

Now it was the young Mistral's dream, as a school-boy in the old convent school of Saint Michael de Frigolet, at Avignon, to restore his native tongue to its former high estate, to make it once more a literary language, and it chanced that one of his masters, Joseph Roumanille, was secretly cherishing the same dream.

The master, looking over his pupil's shoulder one day, found that, instead of working at his prescribed task, he was busily engaged in translating the Penitential Psalms into Provençal. Instead of punishing him, the master gratefully hailed a kindred spirit, and presently confided Provençal verses of his own making. From that moment, though there was a dozen years' difference between their ages, Mistral and Roumanille began a friendship which was to last till Roumanille's death, a friendship of half a century.

Soon their dream attracted other recruits, and presently seven friends, whose names are all famous now, and most of whom have statues in Arles or in Avignon—Roumanille, Mistral, Aubanel, Mathieu, Giéra, Brunet, and Tavan—after the manner of Ronsard's "Pléiade," and Rossetti's "P.R.B."—formed themselves into a brotherhood to carry on the great work of regeneration.

They needed a name to call themselves by. They had all met together to talk things over in the old castle of Font-Ségugne, or, as Mistral more picturesquely puts it: "It was written in heaven that one blossoming Sunday, the twenty-first of May, 1854, in the full springtide of life and of the year, seven poets should come to meet together in the castle of Font-Ségugne." Several suggestions were made for a name for this brotherhood, but presently Mistral announced that in an old folk-story he had collected at his birthplace, Maillane, he believed that he had found the word they were in search of. In this folk-story the boy Christ is represented as discoursing in the temple with "the seven félibres of the Law."

"Why, that is us!" exclaimed the enthusiastic young men as Mistral finished, and there on the spot "félibre" was adopted as the password of their order, Mistral coining the word "félibrige" to represent the work they aimed to do, and also their association. The name stuck, and has now for many years been the banner-word for the vigorous school of Provençal literature and the allied arts of painting and sculpture which has responded with such eager vitality to Mistral's rallying cry.

But, excellent as are the other poets which the school has produced—and one need only glance through a recent Anthologie du Félibrige to realize what a wealth of true poetry the word "félibrige" now stands for—there can be no question that its greatest asset still remains Mistral's own work, as it was his first great poem, Mirèio, which first drew the eyes of literary Paris, more than inclined to be contemptuous, to the Provençal renaissance.

Adolphe Dumas had been sent to Provence in the year 1856 by the Minister of Public Instruction to collect the folk-songs of the people, and calling on Mistral (then twenty-six), living quietly with his widowed mother at Maillane, he had found him at work on Mirèio. Mistral read some passages to him, with the result that the generous Dumas returned to Paris excitedly to proclaim the advent of a new poet. Presently, Mistral accepted his invitation to visit Paris, was introduced to the great Lamartine—who has left some charming pages descriptive of his visit,—read some of Mirèio to him, and was hailed by him as "the Homer of Provence."

The press, however, had its little fling at the new-comer. "The Mistral it appears," said one pitiful punster, "has been incarnated in a poem. We shall soon see whether it is anything else but wind." Such has been the invariable welcome of great men in a small world.

But Mistral had no taste for Paris, either as a lion or a butt, and, after a few days' stay, we find him once more quietly at home at Maillane. Yet he had brought back with him one precious trophy—the praise of Lamartine; and when, in the course of a year or two (1859), Mirèio came to be published at Avignon, it bore, as it still bears, this heart-felt dedication to Lamartine:

"To thee I dedicate Mirèio; it is my heart and my soul; it is the flower of my years; it is a bunch of grapes from Crau with all its leaves—a rustic's offering."

With the publication of Mirèio Mistral instantly "arrived," instantly found himself on that throne which, as year has followed year, has become more securely his own. Since then he has written much noble poetry, all embodying and vitalizing the legendary lore of his native land, a land richer in momentous history, perhaps, than any other section of Europe. But in addition to his poetry he has, single-handed, carried through the tremendous scholarly task of compiling a dictionary of the Provençal language—a Thesaurus of the Félibrige, for which work the Institute awarded him a prize of ten thousand francs.

In 1904, he was awarded the Nobel prize of 100,000 francs, but such is his devotion to his fellow-countrymen that he did not keep that prize for himself, but used it to found the Musée Arlésien at Arles, a museum designed as a treasure house of anything and everything pertaining to the history and life of Provence—antiquities, furniture, costumes, paintings, and so forth.

It was in Arles in 1909, the fiftieth birthday of Mirèio, that Mistral, then seventy-nine years old, may be said to have reached the summit of his romantic fame. A great festival was held in his honour, in which the most distinguished men of France took part. A dramatized version of his Mirèio was played in the old Roman amphitheatre, and a striking statue of him was unveiled in the antique public square, the Place du Forum, with the shade of Constantine looking on, one might feel, from his mouldering palace hard by.

In Arles Mistral is a well-known, beloved figure, for it is his custom, every Saturday, to come there from Maillane, to cast his eye over the progress of his museum, the pet scheme of his old age. One wonders how it must seem to pass that figure of himself, pedestaled high in the old square. To few men is it given to pass by their own statues in the street. Sang a very different poet—

But poor Villon had the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old Sylvanus and the sister nymphs—as Virgil sang; and Virgilian indeed has been the golden calm, and sunlit fortunes, as Virgilian, rather than Homeric, is the gracious art, of the poet whom his first Parisian admirer, Adolphe Dumas, called "the Homer of Provence"—as Virgilian, too, seemed the landscape through which at length, one April afternoon, we found ourselves on pilgrimage to the home of him whose name had been on the lips of every innkeeper, shopkeeper, and peasant, all the way from Marseilles to Tarascon.

Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet—here and there a farmhouse ("mas," as they call them in Provence) snugly sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage—and far aloft in the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of Mont Ventoux—the Fuji Yama of Provence.

At last the old, time-worn village came in sight—it lies about ten miles north-east of Tartarin's Tarascon—and we entered it, as was proper, with the "Master's" words on our lips: "Maillane is beautiful, well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every day. Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from the month of May.

"Who would be in Paris or in Rome? Poor conscripts! There is nothing to charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere—and one would rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris."

It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlésien caps. At first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was understood that we were seeking the house of the "Master" we inspired immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees.

We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty years—there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world. The idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying American mind.

Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden. A paved walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets told of the coming of spring. Here we were greeted by some half a dozen friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested that she was the real watch dog, on behalf of her master, standing between him and an intrusive world. As a matter of fact, as we afterward learned, that is one of her many self-imposed offices, for, having been in the Mistral household for many years, she has long since been as much a family friend as a servant, and generally looks after the Master and Mme. Mistral as if they were her children, nursing and "bossing" them by turns. "Elise"—I think her name is—is a "character" almost as well known in Provence as the Master himself.

So she looked sharply at us, while I produced a letter to M. Mistral which had been given me by a humble associate of the "félibres," a delightful chansonnier we had met at Les Baux. With this she went indoors, presently to return with a face of still cautious welcome, and invited us in to a little square hall hung with photographs of various distinguished friends of the poet and two bronze medallions of himself, one representing him with his favourite dog.

Then a door to the right opened, revealing a typical scholar's study, lined with books from ceiling to floor, books and papers on tables and chairs, and framed photographs again on the free wall space. The spring sunshine poured in through long windows, and in this characteristic setting stood a tall old man, astonishingly erect, his distinguished head, with its sparse white locks, its keen eyes, and strong yet delicate aquiline features, pointed white beard and mustache, suggesting pictures of some military grand seigneur of old time. His carriage had the same blending of soldier and nobleman, and the stately kindliness with which he bade us welcome belonged, alas! to another day.

At his side stood a tall, handsome lady, with remarkable, dark, kind eyes, evidently many years his junior. This was Mme. Mistral, in her day one of those "queens of beauty" whom the "félibres" elect every seven years at their floral fêtes. Mme. Mistral was no less gracious to us than her husband, and joined in the talk that followed with much animation and charm.

We had a little feared that M. Mistral, as he declines to write in anything but Provençal, might carry his artistic creed into his conversation too. To our relief, however, he spoke in the most polished French—for you may know French very well, but be quite unable to understand Provençal, either printed or spoken. This had sometimes made our journeying difficult, as we inquired our way of peasants along the road.

It was natural to talk first to Mistral of literature. We inquired whether he read much English. He shook his head, smiling. No! outside of one or two of the great classics, Shakespeare and Milton, for example, he had read little. Yes! he had read one American author—Fenimore Cooper. Le Feu-Follet had been a favourite book of his boyhood. This we identified as The Fire-Fly.

He seemed to wish to talk about America rather than literature, and seemed immensely interested in the fact that we were Americans, and he raised his eyes, with an expression of French wonderment, at the fact of our walking our way through the country—as also at the length of the journey from America. Evidently it seemed to him a tremendous undertaking.

"You Americans," he said, "are a wonderful people. You think nothing of going around the world."

We were surprised to find that he took the keenest interest in American politics.

"It must be a terribly difficult country to govern," he said. And then he asked us eagerly for news of our "extraordinary President." We suggested Mr. Wilson.

"Oh, no! no!" he explained. "The extraordinary man who was President before him."

"Colonel Roosevelt?"

Yes, that was the man—a most remarkable man that! So Colonel Roosevelt may be interested to hear that the poet-king of Provence is an enthusiastic Bull Mooser.

Of course, we talked too of the "félibrige," and it was beautiful to see how M. Mistral's face softened at the mention of his friend Joseph Roumanille, and with what generosity he attributed the origin of the great movement to his dead friend.

"But you must by all means call on Mme. Roumanille," said he, "when you go to Avignon, and say that I sent you"—for Roumanille's widow still lives, one of the most honoured muses of the "félibrige."

When it was time for us to go on our way, nothing would satisfy M. and Mme. Mistral but that we drink a glass of a cordial which is made by "Elise" from Mistral's own recipe; and as we raised the tiny glasses of the innocent liqueur in our hands, Mistral drank "A l'Amérique!"

Then, taking a great slouch hat from a rack in the hall, and looking as though it was his statue from Aries accompanying us, the stately old man led us out into the road, and pointed us the way to Avignon.

On the 30th of this coming September that great old man—the memory of whose noble presence and beautiful courtesy will remain with us forever—will be eighty-three.

February, 1913.

XXVI

IMPERISHABLE FICTION

The longevity of trees is said to be in proportion to the slowness of their growth. It has to do no little as well with the depth and area of their roots and the richness of the soil in which they find themselves. When the sower went forth to sow, it will be remembered, that which soon sprang up as soon withered away. It was the seed that was content to "bring forth fruit with patience" that finally won out and survived the others.

These humble, old-fashioned illustrations occur to me as I apply myself to the consideration of the question provoked by the lightning over-production of modern fiction and modern literature generally: the question of the flourishing longevity of the fiction of the past as compared with the swift oblivion which seems almost invariably to over-take the much-advertised "masterpieces" of the present.

I read somewhere a ballade asking—where are the "best sellers" of yesteryear? The ballad-maker might well ask, and one might re-echo with Villon: "Mother of God, ah! where are they?" During the last twenty years they have been as the sands on the seashore for multitude, yet I think one would be hard set to name a dozen of them whose titles even are still on the lips of men—whereas several quieter books published during that same period, unheralded by trumpet or fire-balloon, are seen serenely to be ascending to a sure place in the literary firmament.

What can be the reason? Can the decay of these forgotten phenomena of modern fiction, so lavishly crowned with laurels manufactured in the offices of their own publishers, have anything to do with the hectic rapidity of their growth, and may there be some truth in the supposition that the novels, and books generally, that live longest are those that took the longest to write, or, at all events underwent the longest periods of gestation?

Some fifteen years or so ago one of the most successful manufacturers of best sellers was Guy Boothby, whose Dr. Nikola is perhaps still remembered. Unhappily he did not live long to enjoy the fruits of his industrious dexterity. I bring his case to mind as typical of the modern machine-made methods.

I had read in a newspaper that he did his "writing" by phonograph, and chancing to meet him somewhere, asked him about it. His response was to invite me to come down to his charming country house on the Thames and see how he did it. Boothby was a fine, manly fellow, utterly without "side" or any illusions as to the quality of his work. He loved good literature too well—Walter Pater, incongruously enough, was one of his idols—to dream that he could make it. Nor was the making of literature by any means his first preoccupation, as he made clear, with winning frankness, within a few moments of my arriving at his home.

Taking me out into his grounds, he brought me to some extensive kennels, where he showed me with pride some fifty or so prize dogs; then he took me to his stables, his face shining with pleasure in his thoroughbreds; and again he led the way to a vast hennery, populated with innumerable prize fowls.

"These are the things I care about," he said, "and I write the stuff for which it appears I have a certain knack only because it enables me to buy them!"

Would that all writers of best sellers were as engagingly honest. No few of them, however, write no better and affect the airs of genius into the bargain.

Then Boothby took me into his "study," the entire literary apparatus of which consisted of three phonographs; and he explained that, when he had dictated a certain amount of a novel into one of them, he handed it over to his secretary in another room, who set it going and transcribed what he had spoken into the machine; he, meanwhile, proceeding to fill up another record. And he concluded airily by saying with a laugh that he had a novel of 60,000 words to deliver in ten days, and was just on the point of beginning it!

Boothby's method was, I believe, somewhat unusual in those days. Since then it has become something like the rule. Not so much as regards the phonograph, perhaps, but with respect to the breathless speed of production.

I am informed by an editor, associated with magazines that use no less than a million and a half words of fiction a month, that he has among his contributors more than one writer on whom he can rely to turn off a novel of 60,000 words in six days, and that he can put his finger on twenty novelists who think nothing of writing a novel of a hundred thousand words in anywhere from sixty to ninety days. He recalled to me, too, the case of a well-known novelist who has recently contracted to supply a publisher with four novels in one year, each novel to run to not less than a hundred thousand words. One thinks of the Scotsman with his "Where's your Willie Shakespeare now?"

Even Balzac's titanic industry must hide its diminished head before such appalling fecundity; and what would Horace have to say to such frog-like verbal spawning, with his famous "labour of the file" and his counsel to writers "to take a subject equal to your powers, and consider long what your shoulders refuse, what they are able to bear." It is to be feared that "the monument more enduring than brass" is not erected with such rapidity. The only brass associated with the modern best seller is to be found in the advertisements; and, indeed, all that both purveyor and consumer seem to care about may well be summed up in the publisher's recommendation quoted by Professor Phelps: "This book goes with a rush and ends with a smash." Such, one might add, is the beginning and ending of all literary rockets.

Now let us recall some fiction that has been in the world anywhere from, say, three hundred years to fifty years and is yet vigorously alive, and, in many instances, to be classed still with the best sellers.

Don Quixote, for example, was published in 1605, but is still actively selling. Why? May it perhaps be that it was some six years in the writing, and that a great man, who was soldier as well as writer, charged it with the vitality of all his blood and tears and laughter, all the hard-won humanity of years of manful living, those five years as a slave in Algiers (actually beginning it in prison once more at La Mancha), and all the stern struggle of a storm-tossed life faced with heroic steadfastness and gaiety of heart?

Take another book which, if it is not read as much as it used to be, and still deserves to be, is certainly far from being forgotten—Gil Blas. Published in 1715—that is, its first two parts—it has now two centuries of popularity to its credit, and is still as racy with humanity as ever; but, though Le Sage was a rapid and voluminous writer, over this one book which alone the world remembers it is significant to note that he expended unusual time and pains. He was forty-seven years old when the first two parts were published. The third part was not published till 1724, and eleven years more were to elapse before the issue of the fourth and final part in 1735.

A still older book that is still one of the world's best sellers, The Pilgrim's Progress, can hardly be conceived as being dashed off in sixty or ninety days, and would hardly have endured so long had not Bunyan put into it those twelve years of soul torment in Bedford gaol. Robinson Crusoe still sells its annual thousands, whereas others of its author's books no less skilfully written are practically forgotten, doubtless because Defoe, fifty-eight years old at its publication, had concentrated in it the ripe experience of a lifetime. Though a boy's book to us, he clearly intended it for an allegory of his own arduous, solitary life.

"I, Robinson Crusoe," we read, "do affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical, and that it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortune, and of a variety not to be met with in this world."

The Vicar of Wakefield, as we know, was no hurried piece of work. Indeed, Goldsmith went about it in so leisurely a fashion as to leave it neglected in a drawer of his desk, till Johnson rescued it, according to the proverbial anecdote; and even then its publisher, Newbery, was in no hurry, for he kept it by him another two years before giving it to the printer and to immortality. It was certainly one of those fruits "brought forth with patience" all round.

Tom Jones is another such slow-growing masterpiece. Written in the sad years immediately following the death of his dearly loved wife, Fielding, dedicating it to Lord Lyttelton, says: "I here present you with the labours of some years of my life"; and it need scarcely be added that the book, as in the case of all real masterpieces, represented not merely the time expended on it, but all the accumulated experience of Fielding's very human history.

Yes! Whistler's famous answer to Ruskin's counsel holds good of all imperishable literature. Had he the assurance to ask two hundred guineas for a picture that only took a day to paint? No, replied Whistler, he asked it for "the training of a lifetime"; and it is this training of a lifetime, in addition to the actual time expended on composition, that constitutes the reserve force of all great works of fiction, and is entirely lacking in most modern novels, however superficially brilliant be their workmanship.

For this reason books like George Borrow's Lavengro and Romany Rye, failures on their publication, grow greater rather than less with the passage of time. Their writers, out of the sheer sincerity of their natures, furnished them, as by magic, with an inexhaustible provision of life-giving "ichor." To quote from Milton, "a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

Of this immortality principle in literature Milton himself, it need hardly be said, is one of the great exemplars. He was but thirty-two when he first projected Paradise Lost, and through all the intervening years of hazardous political industry he had kept the seed warm in his heart, its fruit only to be brought forth with tragic patience in those seven years of blindness and imminent peril of the scaffold which followed his fiftieth birthday.

The case of poets is not irrelevant to our theme, for the conditions of all great literature, whatever its nature, are the same. Therefore, we may recall Dante, whose Divine Comedy was with him from his thirty-fifth year till the year of his death, the bitter-sweet companion of twenty years of exile. Goethe, again, finished at eighty the Faust he had conceived at twenty.

Spenser was at work on his Faerie Queene, alongside his preoccupation with state business, for nearly twenty years. Pope was twelve years translating Homer, and I think there is little doubt that Gray's Elegy owes much of its staying power to the Horatian deliberation with which Gray polished and repolished it through eight years.

If we are to believe Poe's Philosophy of Composition, and there is, I think, more truth in it than is generally allowed, the vitality of The Raven, as that, too, of his genuinely imperishable fictions, is less due to inspiration than to the mathematical painstaking of their composition.

But, perhaps, of all poets, the story of Virgil is most instructive for an age of "get-rich-quick" littérateurs. On his Georgics alone he worked seven years, and, after working eleven years on the Aeneid, he was still so dissatisfied with it that on his death-bed he besought his friends to burn it, and on their refusal, commanded his servants to bring the manuscript that he might burn it himself. But, fortunately, Augustus had heard portions of it, and the imperial veto overpowered the poet's infanticidal desire.

But, to return to the novelists, it may at first sight seem that the great writer who, with the Waverley Novels, inaugurated the modern era of cyclonic booms and mammoth sales, was an exception to the classic formula of creation which we are endeavouring to make good. Stevenson, we have been told, used to despair as he thought of Scott's "immense fecundity of invention" and "careless, masterly ease."

"I cannot compete with that," he says—"what makes me sick is to think of Scott turning out Guy Mannering in three weeks."

Scott's speed is, indeed, one of the marvels of literary history, yet in his case, perhaps more than in that of any other novelist, it must be remembered that this speed had, in an unusual degree, that "training of a lifetime" to rely upon; as from his earliest boyhood all Scott's faculties had been consciously as well as unconsciously engaged in absorbing and, by the aid of his astonishing memory, preserving the vast materials on which he was able thus carelessly to draw.

Moreover, those who have read his manly autobiography know that this speed was by no means all "ease," as witness the almost tragic composition of The Bride of Lammermoor. If ever a writer scorned delights and lived laborious days, it was Walter Scott. At the same time the condition of his fame in the present day bears out the general truth of my contention, for there is little doubt that he would be more widely read than he is were it not for those too frequent longueurs and inert paddings which resulted from his too hurried workmanship.

Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing three of her best-known novels, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. Yet Pride and Prejudice, which practically survives the others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived."

Charlotte Brontë was a year in writing Jane Eyre, spurred on to new effort by the recent rejection of The Professor; but to write such a book in a year cannot be called over-hasty production when one considers how much of Jane Eyre was drawn from Charlotte Brontë's own life, and also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from their earliest childhood.

Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. "He considered," says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and four an excellent, day's work."

David Copperfield was about a year and nine months in the writing, having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. Bleak House took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, and completed in August, 1853. Hard Times was a hasty piece of work, written between the winter of 1853, and the summer of 1854, and it cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes.

George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, Richard Feverel, Evan Harrington, Sandra Belloni, and Rhoda Fleming being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, Modern Love, was also written during that period.

George Eliot was a much-meditating, painstaking writer, though Adam Bede cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness and melancholy." Romola, to which she devoted long and studious preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this paper, is probably a stranger.

It may turn out [she says], that I can't work freely and fully enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was something—however small—which wanted to be done in this world, and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work.

Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in Westward Ho! one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world will not willingly let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was brilliant.

Says a friend who was with him while he was writing Hypatia:

"He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was there, and which was found there at last."

The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English language, The Cloister and the Hearth, was what one might call a glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which he had found so serviceable.

To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, The Return of the Native, was on the stocks for four years, though a year seems to have sufficed for Far from the Madding Crowd.

The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of his method is worth catching again.

The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably penned it himself, with exceeding care.... If the first copy did not please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories again.

Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, spirit of the true artist to all his work, but The Scarlet Letter was written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife.

One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am turned out of office." To which she—God bless her!—cheerily replied: "Very well! now you can write your book!" and immediately set about lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his work.

The book was The Scarlet Letter, and was completed by the following February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had anything for him to publish.

"Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, "would risk publishing a book from me, the most unpopular writer in America?"

"I would," was Field's rejoinder, and after some further sparring, Hawthorne owned up.

"As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel.

Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have been endeavouring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of romance—even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for him by his "disciples."

George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a description of her method:

To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had written itself in full and another was unfolding.

Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so confidently left her novels—to write themselves. Different, indeed, was the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of The Human Comedy, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, "by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold."

To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the Four Hundred.

Victor Hugo, again, was one of the herculean artists, working, in Emerson's phrase, "in a sad sincerity," with the patience of an ant and the energy of a volcano. Of his Les Misérables—perhaps the greatest novel ever written, as it is, I suppose, easily the longest—he said, "it takes me nearly as long to publish a book as to write one"; and he was at work on Les Misérables, off and on, for nearly fifteen years. Of his writing Notre Dame (that other colossus of fiction) this quaint picture has been preserved. He had made vast historical preparations for it, but ever there seemed still more to make, till at length his publisher grew impatient, and under his pressure Hugo at last made a start—after this fashion:

He purchased a great grey woollen wrapper that covered him from head to foot, he locked up all his clothes lest he should be tempted to go out, and, carrying off his ink-bottle to his study, applied himself to his labour just as if he had been in prison. He never left the table except for food and sleep, and the sole recreation that he allowed himself was an hour's chat after dinner with M. Pierre Leroux, or any other friend who might drop in, and to whom he would occasionally read over his day's work.

Daudet, whose Tartarin bids fair to remain one of the world's types, like Don Quixote or Mr. Micawber, for all his natural Provençal gift of improvisation and, indeed, from his self-recognized necessity of keeping it in check, was another strenuous artist. He wrote each manuscript three times over, he told his biographer, and would write it as many more if he could; and his son, in writing of him, has this truth to say of his, as of all living work:

The fact is that labour does not begin at the moment when the artist takes his pen. It begins in sustained reflection and in the thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and imagination to expand and enlarge life.

Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's "infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series. Talking of rewriting, Prosper Mérimée, best known for Carmen, is said to have rewritten his Colomba no less than sixteen times; as our Anglo-Saxon Kipling, it used to be told, wrote his short stories seven times over.

But, of course, the classical example of the artist-fanatic in modern times was Gustave Flaubert. His agonies in quest of the mot propre, the one and only word, are proverbial, and are said literally to have broken down his nerves. Mr. Huneker has told of him that "he would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.... In twenty pages he sometimes saved three or four from destruction," and, in the course of twenty-six years' polishing and pruning of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, he reduced his original manuscript of 540 pages down to 136, even reducing it still further after its first publication.

On Madame Bovary he worked six years, and in writing Salâmmbo, which, took him no less time, he studied the scenery on the spot and exhausted the resources of the Imperial Library in his search for documentary evidences.

Flaubert may be said to have carried his passion for perfection to the point of mania, and it will be a question with some whether, with all his pains, he can be called a great novelist, after all. But that he was a great stylist and a master in the art of making terrible and beautiful bas-reliefs admits of no doubt.

To be a great world-novelist you need an all-embracing humanity as well, such as we find in Tolstoy's War and Peace—but that great book, need one say, came of no slipshod speed of improvisation. On the contrary, Tolstoy corrected and recorrected it so often that his wife, who acted as his amanuensis, is said to have copied the whole enormous manuscript no less than seven times!

Yes! though it be doubtless true, in Mr. Kipling's famous phrase, that