Robert Edward Francillon

“ If he feels—and biography speaks vainly if he is held to be mistaken in feeling—that the work for which Nature intended him must be left undone unless he deliberately elects to ruin his health, to become an awful warning to the white sheep of the social sheepfold and a stumbling-block to would-be imitators, which is he to choose? ”

“ But all safe, wholesome, popular doctrines have an unfortunate tendency to turn men at large into a great flock of sheep—infinitely better worth owning than a herd of red deer, but proportionately less full of individual character. The history of how imaginative work is done reads very like a deliberate and apparently insane effort to keep up the action of brain-fever by artificial stimulus, as if creative genius were literally an unsound habit of mind requiring an unsound habit of body—mens insana in corpore insano. ”

“ Genius has been defined in as many different ways as there have been people who have tried to define it. But perhaps the most suggestive I have ever heard is the attempt to destroy an exceptionally strong constitution for the gratification of a mental tendency—the physique of an elephant, as I heard it roughly put, and the conduct of a slave-driver who is his own slave. There must be the exceptionally strong constitution to bear an abnormal strain and the effort by every means to do more than Nature when kindly treated will allow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The history of a plant, according to the theory of degeneration, is strikingly like the pedigree of literary and artistic genius, according to any of the hundred definitions of that indefinite word. So far as known facts combine into a probable law, a creative intellect is never generated spontaneously. Like dukes and princes, men of imaginative genius have ancestors between themselves and Adam. ”

“ THERE is a botanical theory that a flower is nothing more than a leaf in which full development has been arrested. It is more beautiful than the leaf by reason, not of its perfection, but of its imperfection. ”

“ The strange manners and customs of men of genius have often enough been defended as unfortunate weaknesses by their apologists: it seems to me they ought either to be condemned as unworthy of men of sense and will, or else boldly asserted as the necessary instruments of the work that owes its birth to them—as the artificial means of producing strength out of weakness which a man who lives for his work ought to use. ”

“ People say, "See what a woman can do"—not "See what women can do." In music, the typically imaginative art, wherein they have had a free and open career, it is legitimately dogmatic to deny them any place at all. Seeing, therefore, that the natural imagination of women is comparatively barren while the ordinary unimaginativeness of men is absolutely fertile, it is impossible to doubt that the way of work has something to do with the matter. ”

“ It is notorious that creative genius is essentially of the masculine gender. Women are the imaginative sex, but the work, which Nature seems to have distinctly allotted to them, has been done by men. This really strange phenomenon is not due to the fact that women have written comparatively little, because, if it were, the little imaginative work they have done would have been great in quality, and would surpass in quantity the other work they have done. ”

“ The hardest part of the lot of genius, I suspect, has been not the emotional troubles popularly—and with absurd exaggeration—ascribed to it, but a disgust for labor during the activity of the fancy, and the necessity for labor when it is most disgusting. And, as it is not in human nature to endure suffering willingly, the mood in which such labor is possible calls for artificial conditions by which it can be rendered endurable. ”

“ The man of talent is the ancestor of the man of genius, but the man of genius is the ancestor either of nobodies or of nobody. Descendants of great authors, painters, and musicians, who lived two or three generations ago, are hardly to be found. While the families of great soldiers and statesmen swarm, there is scarcely a man in Europe who can boast of a great poet or other artist in the direct line of his pedigree: probably there is not even one who can boast of two such forefathers. ”

“ The cacoëthes scribendi is a disease common, not to imaginative, but to imitative minds. Probably no hewer of wood or drawer of water undergoes a tithe of the toil of those whose work is reputed play, but is, in fact, a battle, every moment, between the flesh and the spirit. ”

“ They keep themselves broad awake in order to dream! They seek to do imaginative work, and take as models the lives of men who do unimaginative work—that is to say, precisely the opposite routine to that of men by whom imaginative work is done. These prove negatively what the examples of creative genius prove positively. If scholars toil late into the early hours, it is to continue their day's work, not to begin it. It is interest that chains them to the desk at midnight, not impulse that calls them there. All philosophers have not always been sober men ”

“ There spoke the man who habitually and without artificial help drew upon his imagination at the hours when instinct has told others they should be employing not their fancy but their reason. The privilege of being healthily dull before breakfast must have been an intense relief to one who compelled himself to do unhealthy or abnormal work without the congenial help of abnormal conditions. ”

“ The tone of hero-worshipers themselves is, to deplore eccentric indulgences as weaknesses of genius rather than to recognize in them the artificial atmosphere necessary for production and creation. The popular doctrine is thoroughly wholesome, because it is taught by the many for the many, and to teach otherwise, in a broad way, would risk the popular confusion of genius with its accidents. ”

“ If creative genius is really an unhealthy condition, it must require unhealthy methods to produce and sustain its action. It is not the healthy oyster that breeds the pearl. Nor is this a dangerous theory. The oyster does not deliberately produce in itself the disease of pearl-bearing, nor can any man—it need hardly be added—give himself genius by adopting and abusing the artificial means that enable genius to work when it is already there. The disease suggests its appropriate conditions: the conditions clearly cannot bring about the disease. ”

“ To pursue the analogy to its end, the full beauty and productiveness of imaginative genius correspond to the effect of decaying vitality.
Analogy, built upon an unscientific metaphor, is of course no argument: but it is a fair explanatory illustration of a theory that rests upon surer ground for its foundation. That the creative imagination or any other mental gift so far resembles disease as to require non-natural conditions for its exercise is not the popular doctrine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At all events, it seems to point to the same instinctive craving for abnormal aids to work when the imagination is called upon—as if it were not intended that the creative power should be a function of the natural man. Of course there is no need to suppose that the stimulus is always or even often adopted with the deliberation of the actor, who used to sup on underdone pork-chops to inspire himself with the mood proper to tragedy. ”

“ It is a commonplace to note that men of fertile fancy, as a class, have been notorious for their horror of the work of formulating their ideas even by the toil of thought, much more by passing them through the crucible of the ink-bottle. In many cases they have needed the very active stimulant of hunger. ”

“ The manners and customs of great artists in sound tend to support the general rule concerning all imaginative work to an infinite extent, but it would be unfair to argue from those who breathe poison for their native air to those who merely use poison in order to escape from the common air of the unimaginative world. ”

“ The mute, inglorious Milton finds a glorious tongue in his great-grandson: the great statesman is the heir of the village Hampden, The theory, though more than merely probable, is by its nature incapable of exhaustive proof: but instances are notorious enough to found thereon a reasonable assumption that family talent precedes individual genius even if the tendency has never made itself conspicuous, or, like the gout, has passed over a generation or two here and there. ”

“ If we desired to hand our names down to posterity as authors, it was indispensable that we should immure ourselves absolutely for two or three years: that we should drink nothing but water and only eat soaked beans, like Protogenes: that we should go to bed at sunset and rise at midnight, to work hard till morning: that we should spend the whole day in revising, amending, extending, pruning, perfecting, and polishing our night's work, in correcting proofs or taking notes, or in other necessary study. ”

“ And if examples tend to prove that creative genius among men instinctively works under artificial and unhealthy conditions of body, while work wherein the imagination is not tasked is for the most part carried on under the calmest and healthiest conditions, it would follow that women at large fail to produce great creative work by reason of their good working qualities—because they do not in general use artificial stimulants and irregular modes of life to help their brains to wear out their bodies. ”

“ The well-known and often-quoted couplet about the near alliance of great wit to madness is directly opposed to the far more pleasant belief in sound minds in sound bodies as the most favorable condition for the production of the best work of all kinds. ”

“ It was that of Balzac save in fulfilling all the accepted conditions of health—early rising, early lying down, moderate daily work, nightly rest, regular exercise, and a diet regulated with the care not of a lunatic but of a physician. A cup of tea and half a pipe in the morning cannot be looked upon as stimulants to a man in such perfect health as Kant always enjoyed ”

“ Probably everybody will be able to name off-hand one or two exceptions to what looks like a very dogmatic and sweeping piece of criticism—and probably everybody will name exactly the same one or two. Nobody dreams of looking for absolutely great imaginative work, in any branch of art, from a woman ”

“ No woman ever wrote a great drama; not one of the world's great poems came from a woman's hand. In their own domain of fiction women have been, and occasionally are, great realists, great portrait-painters, great masters of style, great psychologists—but not great inventors, and very seldom inventors at all. ”

“ That night and not morning is most appropriate to imaginative work is supported by a general consent among those who have followed instinct in this matter. Upon this question, which can scarcely be called vexed, Charles Lamb is the classical authority. "No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. The mild internal light, that reveals the fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. ”

“ Nor need the stimulus be of a kind to produce intoxication, in the vulgar sense of the word. So long as it puts the body into a non-natural condition, in the way pointed out by individual instinct, it seems that the physical conditions of imaginative work are fulfilled.
Unfortunately for any complete treatment of the question, a sufficient body of data is not easily gathered. Great artists, in all fields of work, are notoriously shy of publishing their processes, even when they themselves know what their processes are. It is, however, always legitimate to argue from the known to the probable ”

“ Now, bodily weariness is simply bodily indolence induced artificially; its production by hard walking, hard riding, hard living, or hard study, looks like an instinctive effort on the part of energetic men to put themselves for the time and for a purpose into the chronically unhealthy condition of naturally indolent men. Indolence, that is to say chronic fatigue, appears to be the natural habit of imaginative brains. ”

“ Shelley's practice of continually munching bread while composing is not a mere piece of trivial gossip when taken in connection with more striking and intelligible attempts to ruin the digestion by way of exciting the brain, and when it is remembered that his delicate and almost feminine organization might require far less to throw it off the balance than naturally stronger frames. ”

“ But even these trivial instances of caprice help to suggest that, when the fancy is called upon, the ordinary conditions of straightforward work must be considered at an end. Fancy dictates the terms on which she condescends to appear. ”