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SIDE-LIGHTS ON GREAT WRITERS

To many of us it seems as if an author with an assured reputation must be one of the happiest of men; yet some of the very greatest have suffered almost intolerably.

Bobby Burns was a victim of drink largely because of his brilliant imagination and extreme sensitiveness. He was petted by society and praised as the poet of the future; all England was at his feet. Yet he gave way to his passions, took to drink, and ruined the lives of several of his dearest friends, as well as his own. In almost anyone else this would condemn him absolutely; but the truth is that his poetic powers, the gift of his genius, rendered him too sensitive to moods of the moment, and his will could not hold out under the strain.

A somewhat similar case was that of Coleridge. In his youth he showed extraordinary talent, but he fell a victim to opium and the greater part of his life was wasted in a series of unfinished efforts. No opium was necessary to stimulate his imagination, as his weird ballad of "The Ancient Mariner" plainly shows. Indeed his genius even worked during his sleep, for "Kubla Khan" is but a fragment of a poem which he dreamed and then began to write down as soon as he awoke. If he had not been interrupted by a visitor, a man of no importance, we might have had the whole instead of a scanty portion of this unique masterpiece. Even as it stands it is one of the most picturesque and brilliant compositions ever produced. It seems incredible that it should be the work of a sleeping brain. And yet this is the man who gave himself up to opium, wrecking a career that promised to surpass even that of Byron or Shelley in poetic power.

Thomas De Quincey, the author of the "Confessions of an Opium Eater," drank laudanum by the glassful. He first took to using this liquid form of opium in order to gain relief from the dyspepsia that resulted from his days of privation in the streets of London. Of course he was unable to stop the use of the drug and had to increase the doses to the alarming extent mentioned. When he was living in Edinburgh this almost caused the death of a gentleman who dined with him there; for his visitor picked up a decanter of a rich, dark red liquor, which he thought was port wine, poured out a glass, and had it at his lips, when De Quincey hurriedly seized it and saved the situation. Smoking opium was not the custom then; Coleridge drank it, as De Quincey did, and unknowingly spread the habit; for a poor man who once lived near Coleridge's house admitted that he had obtained laudanum from a boy who worked for Coleridge and smuggled it out to his friend by the bottleful.

As we all know, our great American short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe, was the prey of alcohol and also of opium, as well as a genius. The combination seems to have been more unavoidable in his case than in any other we know of. His imagination could only bring forth those extraordinarily gruesome tales of mystery and horror when stimulated by wines and brandy or opium. His whole life was spent in the shadow of despondency and irritation; and although we are indebted to him for priceless literary gems, he paid the penalty with misery which we cannot imagine.

In contrast, look at the life of Charles Lamb. He was a poor clerk at a pitiful salary, struggling to increase his income by literary work in his spare time, with a dangerous appetite for alcohol, and an insane sister to take care of. He, himself, constantly dreaded insanity. Yet he kept up a cheerful and continual resistance to his craving for drink, although he often took a drop too much. In order to care for his sister, who had killed her mother in one of her attacks, he gave up his sweetheart and settled down to the brave and heartrending task of devotion to the unhappy invalid. This lasted for thirty-three years, during which he never murmured except when her attacks forced him to place her in an asylum. One of his friends leaves the record of meeting Charles and Mary Lamb walking across the fields to the hospital with tears streaming down their faces. Yet in spite of all his troubles Lamb's essays have a delicacy and a cheerfulness that never reveal the burden he had to bear. He is one of the great heroes of English literature.

John Milton was another such hero. As a young man he won great distinction as a poet and a scholar; so much so that when he went to Italy the greatest Italian authors and critics praised his Italian and Latin poetry as the best of that day, superior to anything written during that time in Italy itself. He was received there with boundless enthusiasm and was having the time of his life, so to speak, when the news reached him of the Puritan rebellion against Charles the First. Without a moment's hesitation he abandoned his tour and came back to England. There he acted as foreign correspondent for Cromwell's Government and kept England safe from attacks by France and the rest of Europe through his able diplomacy. He worked day and night until he fell ill and eventually lost his eyesight. To make matters worse, the Puritans were deprived of their power and Milton's enemies then persecuted him so that he had to fly for his life. He spent the rest of his days in a humble cottage, while his daughters grumbled because he made them transcribe "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained." It seems as if his sacrifice for his country was utterly unrewarded, until we remember that his name to-day is almost the first in its long roll of poets.

One of the sorrows of literary men is lack of appreciation. Longfellow was laughed at by the Harvard students whom he taught, for his poems had no attraction for them and he was only appreciated elsewhere. Bret Harte wrote the finest stories of California life that have ever appeared, yet for years he was not recognized in this country as a writer of unusual powers, and as a matter of fact he spent the greater part of his life in London, six thousand miles from his old home; Lafcadio Hearn was so homely and eccentric that he could not be happy or comfortable in the United States or in Europe, and took refuge in Japan where his appearance would never be remarked. As he points out in his wonderful writings on Japanese life, politeness is one of the ruling habits of that race, so that he was made far more comfortable and did far better work than would have been possible in his own country.

Some writers have done their best work in prison. "The Star Spangled Banner," as we know, was written by Francis Scott Key, while he was a captive on a British battleship during the bombardment of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in the War of 1812, and as he wondered whether the flag was still flying he jotted down the lines of our National Anthem. The masterpiece of Spanish literature was written in jail; "Don Quixote" is so amusing, so pathetic, and so vivid that Spain can stake her whole reputation on that one work, written by Cervantes, an innocent man, imprisoned through envy and malice. John Bunyan, another guiltless author, wrote his immortal "Pilgrim's Progress" while he was locked up for his stubborn refusal to mold his religious belief according to the demands of authorities for whom he could have no respect. The opium of Coleridge and De Quincey and the brandy of Edgar Allan Poe never stimulated them to equal the work of these two geniuses. Innocence in prison has been proved superior to dissipation in the best of surroundings, for the opium victims, Coleridge and De Quincey, had the society of England's most brilliant men and the environment of her finest scenery.

Both Bunyan and Cervantes worked hard, but the hardest workers of all have been Frenchmen; Balzac and Dumas labored unceasingly for the greater part of their lifetimes. In twenty years Balzac wrote ninety-seven novels for a mere pittance that just kept body and soul together. The greatness of his work was recognized, but the French public, as a whole, did so little reading, that the publisher himself did not make anything like a fortune. Dumas was more popular and employed a staff of assistants to collect the material for his historical romances, but the actual writing was all his own and cost him from fourteen to eighteen hours a day in labor. His works are more numerous than those of Dickens, Thackeray, and Cooper combined. It seems incredible that one man could have turned out such a tremendous mass of fascinating stories.

The only man in English literature who is to be compared to these two Frenchmen is Sir Walter Scott. In his first success, when money flowed in on him almost in torrents, his vanity led him to build the mansion of Abbotsford and his one wish was to be regarded as the Squire or ruler of the countryside, but not long after, when his partner in the publishing business had caused the failure of the firm, he bravely went to work and wrote novel after novel, year after year, to pay off his debts. His vanity and love of show disappeared and the man's true nobility took its proper place; almost on his death-bed he continued to dictate his novels although he was agonized with pain and distress.

Similar patience was shown by Thomas Carlyle, who rewrote the whole of his great work, "The French Revolution," after the first copy had been carelessly burnt by a servant girl in the house of a friend who had borrowed the manuscript. He was a dyspeptic and a constant grumbler, but on this occasion he redeemed himself by sitting down quietly to work and hammering away at his dreary task until he had once more finished the masterpiece. Carlyle was so sensitive to noise and other disturbances that he had a sound-proof shed or room built on the roof of his house in London, where he did a great part of his writing, and even there he complained of the rumbling of the wagons in the street, which vibrated through the house.

Herbert Spencer, the great English philosopher, was also easily disturbed by noises, but he solved the problem by wearing ear muffs which were specially made under his instruction. Spencer was rather irritable, it is said; certainly on one occasion he made himself a source of amusement when he objected to being beaten at billiards by the son of a friend of his and remarked that it was not fitting that a young man should have spent so much time and money on so foolish a pastime; yet when he won, the expenditure of thought and time on the part of so great a philosopher seemed altogether wise.

Robert Browning had an amusing experience on one occasion toward the close of his life. He was walking through the residential district of London's fashionable West End to a meeting which he had been invited to attend. Mistaking the house, he walked into a literary gathering that was discussing his own poems. Presently he rose to his feet and offered a few suggestions as to the meaning of a rather difficult passage. Now Browning was not at all like a poet in appearance, but rather resembled a prosperous business man, and it happened that as he was well toward the back of the hall no one recognized him. On the contrary his suggestions were ridiculed by other critics who took the floor when he sat down and he retired unrecognized but vastly delighted. Of course some of Browning's work is intensely intricate and confused; he himself said of his early poem "Sordello" that once there were two beings who understood it, the Almighty and Robert Browning; now, he added, there was but one, for Browning had long lost the key to its problem.

Charles Dickens was one of the most impressionable writers who ever lived. His characters were absolutely real to him and when he was writing he would impersonate the various characters he was describing, talking, making faces, jumping up and looking in the mirror, and then dashing back to his desk to set down each inspiration. But his impressionable nature prevented complete happiness; he was either intensely happy or down in the dumps and miserable. This made him very hard to get along with, so that it is no wonder that his wife found it almost impossible to live with him.

Gladstone, the 'Grand Old Man' of English politics in the last century, was a scholar and a linguist as well as a statesman. On one occasion he was seated in the House of Commons while his bitter opponent, the clever Disraeli, was delivering a venomous and brilliant attack upon him. During the speech Gladstone was observed to be writing on a scrap of paper, apparently taking notes for his reply. At the conclusion of his enemy's speech Gladstone rose and delivered a most masterly refutation of the attack, answering and breaking down each point of Disraeli's invective with the utmost skill. A member sitting near by noticed that the scrap of paper was lying on Gladstone's seat and picked it up to see what the notes were like; to his surprise they consisted of a careful translation of "Rock of Ages" into smooth Greek verse, which the orator had made half-consciously while waiting for the occasion to reply to his opponent.

Macaulay, too, had wonderful scholastic talent and a fine memory. Even in his youth he showed great ability and read with amazing speed; most remarkable is the fact that he never seemed to forget a line he had read, but could repeat pages of an author many years after he had once perused his work. He read many works again and again, it is true, but for the pleasure of enjoying the fine points of style rather than for the sake of attaining greater familiarity with the book. His essays are regarded as among the most brilliant in the language, and seem to have been written posthaste, at full swing. In reality, however, he was well pleased if he produced five foolscap pages of longhand manuscript a day. It was his custom to spend the morning writing as fast as he could, the afternoon, in revising and pruning the morning's work and thus producing finished copy. He knew only too well that, as Sheridan said, "easy writing makes cursed hard reading," and that labor alone could produce a forceful and pleasant style.

Goethe, the greatest of the German immortals, is mainly remembered as a poet. Yet his fame would be great even if it depended only upon his scientific exploits. It was he who did much toward establishing the modern theory of evolution. Goethe also showed his insight into human progress by prophesying the construction of the Suez and the Panama Canals as long ago as 1827; this illustrates the marvelous imagination of the genius who was, as he himself said, a citizen of the world.

Shakespeare is certainly the supreme master of English literature, yet there was a time when he was regarded as a nuisance and a good-for-nothing. He was a poacher, a thieving vagabond arrested for stealing or killing deer in the park of the neighboring aristocrat, Sir Thomas Lucy. It was not long afterward that the future playwright went to London and gained his first acquaintance with the theater by holding horses for gentlefolk at the entrance of the principal playhouse of the city. Some authors would also call him a pirate and a thief, as Sir Thomas Lucy did, for he took plots and ideas wherever he found them and worked them over into the revised versions that now rank among the finest achievements of mankind. Yet all the while his one desire was to be a well-to-do business man of his native town of Stratford, and as soon as he had made a comfortable fortune he retired and spent his last years in quiet, building a new house and writing one or two last plays in the commonplace seclusion of a country town. There is still one place left in London where his plays were performed under his direction, although the old theaters have long since perished. This is the Temple Hall, in the grounds that belonged to the old Knights Templar of Crusading fame. Here he put on "The Winter's Tale" with great success. If you are ever in London you can visit the hall and on entering you can turn the very door-handle, so tradition says, which the poet himself used.

MoliÈre was the greatest French dramatist. At the height of his career, legend relates, he was such a favorite with the grand monarch, Louis XIV, that this proud king made him come and dine in private with him, so as to convince his servants and courtiers that the genius whom they thought of as a vulgar, impossible boor, a mere actor, was worthy of the greatest consideration. Yet when MoliÈre was dead the king ungratefully refused to see that he was properly buried and the great man was carried to his last resting-place with little ceremony.

At the present day one of France's most prominent writers is Rostand, the author of "Cyrano de Bergerac," a play which brought him into instant popularity through its brilliance, although a few weeks before scarcely anyone had heard his name. On the first night of the production, in 1897, the audience cheered and shouted until it seemed as if the performance would break up in the confusion created by its success, yet thanks to Rostand's coolness the actors and even the spectators were kept calm enough to carry the play through to its masterly conclusion. At the close, when the curtain had fallen on the last act, Rostand was sought for everywhere to make his bow to the enthusiastic audience, but he had quietly driven away to his country home, with his wife, and there he stayed for a week or more before the public had a chance to welcome him.

Byron is almost the only man in English letters to come so suddenly before the people. He woke up one morning to find himself famous, through the publication of "Childe Harold." Byron was another of the unhappy geniuses. He was hot-headed and married an equally irritable wife, so naturally they separated, with anger and yet with sorrow. His little daughter, who he said was the one friend he had in the world, died at an early age. He dreaded being fat and therefore starved himself, a process which did not make him happier. But his death was in itself enough to redeem him in spite of his irresponsible and rather selfish career, for he gave himself up to the cause of the freedom and independence of the Greeks, and died of fever contracted while preparing for the great campaign against the Turks.

Poor Dean Swift, the author of "Gulliver's Travels," the bitterest book ever written about human beings, suffered even more than Byron. He was keenly sensitive, and his political labors were poorly paid because he was none too courteous in his manner to the political leaders for whom he worked so hard. Boot-licking would have brought him the position he desired, but Swift was not a toady, so he was driven to accept the second-rate place offered him, and there vented his anger in the most savage attacks on human nature that can be imagined. All this while he had been fearing that his mind would give way; "I am like that tree," he said to a friend one day when they were out walking, "I shall die at the top first." He was right, for not long afterward his brain gave way.

"The Old Oaken Bucket" still has a touch of beauty for us, if we do not hear it too often. It was written under rather interesting circumstances. Samuel Woodworth, the author, was born and brought up on a little farm in Scituate, not far from Plymouth, Massachusetts. In his youth he went to New York and got a job as a reporter. One day he was in a bar, taking a glass of brandy and declaring that it was the finest drink on earth, when a friend with him said, "You're wrong; think of the delicious water you used to draw from the old well at home." Woodworth jumped up and hurried over to his rooms, where he sat down and dashed off the outline of the song that at once won a widespread vogue.

Perhaps the bravest fight against ill health was put up by Robert Louis Stevenson, the gentle, lovable poet and novelist. As a young man he found that consumption threatened to carry him off. With the cheerfulness characteristic of the victims of the White Plague he set off on a series of outdoor trips afoot and afloat. Two of these are preserved for us in his "Inland Voyage" and the more fascinating "Travels with a Donkey." This latter is almost unequaled as a picture of travel. He finally started for America to see if the climate there would not be better for him than the moist weather of Scotland, his home. Eventually he reached Samoa, in the South Seas of the Pacific, where he lived for several years, cheerful and brave in spite of his increasing weakness. His character, although mild and kindly, was so forceful that the chiefs among the natives held him in veneration, and at the time of his death no one lamented him more than the simple Samoans, some of whom bore him to the grave on the hill-top near his home.

Thoreau, one of New England's philosophers of the great and glorious Emerson days, was as eccentric as any one that can be found. For the sake of peace and independence he went off into the woods and lived as a hermit near Walden Pond, outside Concord. To earn what little money he needed he made lead pencils; like many country folks of those days he was amazingly dexterous with his knife and his pencils were a delight to use. In his leisure he made an exhaustive study of the Pond; but in two years' time he left this little cabin and never returned. He said that he had had enough of that sort of life and now he was going to try something else. His was the same spirit of adventure that stirred the old explorers and yet he was so fond of New England that he rarely set foot outside her boundaries. He could find enough to keep him busy thinking and writing within his own dooryard. But he showed that it was possible for a man in good health to live on less than $100 a year and have more than two thirds of his time to himself. On the other hand, as he died of consumption at the age of forty-four, he also proved that outdoor life is not in itself a preventive of that scourge.

Whittier, the gentle Quaker poet, was one of the sturdiest heroes of the antislavery movement. In those days he was a fighter, stoned and mobbed by the partisans of slavery in Philadelphia and Concord, New Hampshire. His genius was discovered by William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, while he was editing a paper at Newburyport. Whittier's sister had sent some verses of her young brother's to the paper and Garrison not only printed them but hunted up the author to enlist him in his good work. In his latter years Whittier clung to the rural obscurity of Amesbury, where he enjoyed the rippling life of the little town, talking local politics with the 'natives' in the country store, chatting with his friends on the doorstep of the Friends' meeting-house which he had helped to build, or planting trees about it, like Holmes, who used to boast that at one time or another he had set out more than seven hundred saplings. Whittier, more than any other American, has left us glowing pictures of New England life and geniality. With his reverent sense of the need for emphasizing morals and duty there was a love of home, of the memory of youth's work and play that makes "Snow-Bound" immortal. Emerson was the Yankee philosopher; Hawthorne, the novelist of New England's moods; Thoreau, the nature-worshiper; Holmes, the Bostonian; Longfellow, the cosmopolitan poet; but Whittier was the poet of New England's heart.

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