University of Virginia Library

TIME AS A RESERVE FORCE

"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 labors 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 he 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 Vergil is most instructive for an age of "get-rich-quick " litterateurs. 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 endeavoring 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.