Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/107

coffee. Then he went to the theatre, where a glass of punch was brought him at six, or else he received friends at home. By ten o'clock he was in bed, where he slept soundly. "Like Thorwaldsen, he had a talent for sleeping." No man of business or dictionary-maker could make a more healthy arrangement of his hours. The five or six hours of regular morning work, which left the rest of the day open for society and recreation, the early habits, the full allowance of sleep, and the rational use of food, are in glaring contrast to Balzac's short and broken slumbers, his night-work, and his bodily starvation. But he who imagined "Faust" is not to be so easily let off from his share in illustrating a rule. There is no need to quarrel with Mr. Lewes for going out of his way to prove that Goethe was not necessarily a toper because he liked wine and had a good head. Though a great deal of wine was no doubt essential to his general working power, it was in his case rather a tonic than an immediate stimulant, because it came after instead of during work-hours. But this is significant of the same result, only in a different way. Goethe differed from almost every great poet in not doing his greatest work at a white heat; and not only so, but he differed also in constantly balancing his reasoning against his creative faculties. I doubt very much if those long mornings of early work were often spent in the fever of creation. He was a physiologist, a botanist, a critic; and the longer he lived he became more and more of a savant if not less and less of a poet. His imagination was most fertile before he settled down into these regular ways, but not before he settled down into a full appreciation of wine. Balzac would write the draft of a whole novel at a sitting, and then develop it on the margins of proofs, revises, and re-revises. Goethe acted as if, while art is long, life were long also. Till the contrary is proved, I must consistently hold that Goethe was the philosopher before dinnertime, and the poet in the theatre, or during those long after-dinner-hours, over his two or three bottles of wine. That these later hours were often spent socially proves nothing one way or the other. Some men need such active influences as their form of mental stimulus. Alfieri found or made his ideas while listening to music or galloping on horseback. Instances are common in every-day life of men who cannot think to good purpose when shut up in a room with a pen, and who find their best inspiration in wandering about the streets and hearing what they want in the rattle of cabs and the seething of life around them, like the scholar of Padua, whose conditions of work are given by Montaigne as a curiosity. "I lately found one of the most learned men in France... studying in the corner of a room, cut off by a screen, surrounded by a lot of riotous servants. He told me—and Seneca says much the same himself—that he worked all the better for this uproar, as though, overpowered by noise, he was obliged to withdraw all the more closely into himself for contemplation, while the storm of voices drove his thoughts inward. When at Padua he