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Page 9
ON WRITING ONESELF OUT.
Lord Beaconsfield once compared his opponents on the Treasury Bench to
a line of exhausted volcanoes. They had taken office when they were
full of mighty aspirations; they had poured forth measures of all
sorts with prodigal vigour; and at last they were reduced to wait,
supine and helpless, for the inevitable swing of the political
pendulum. A similar process of exhaustion goes on among literary men;
and there are certain symptoms which cause expert persons to say, "Ah,
poor Blank seems to have written himself out!" I have occasionally
alluded to this most distressing topic, but I have never discussed it
fully.
The subject of brain-exhaustion has a very peculiar interest for the
public as well as for the professional penman; half the slovenly prose
which ordinary men use in their correspondence is due to the bad
models set by written-out men, and the agonising exhibitions made by
some thousands of public speakers in this devoted and long-suffering
land are also due to the purblind weakness of the exhausted man. The
wrought-out writer is not permitted to cease from work; he goes on
droning out his fixed quantity of mortal dreariness day by day and
week by week until his mind spins along a particular groove, and he
probably repeats himself every day of his life without being aware
that he is anything but brilliantly original. I am obliged to study
many novels, and I know many most successful workers who at this
present time are turning out the same fiction under varied names with
monotonous regularity. They are not quite like an old hand whom I knew
long ago, who used to promote the characters in novelettes of his own
and turn them on to the market again and again; the effusions of this
genius were not of sufficient importance to attract attention from
folk with clear memories, and I believe that he escaped detection in a
miraculous way. His untitled country gentleman became a baronet, the
injured heroine was similarly moved up on the social scale, and the
noble effort came forth with a fresh name, while the knowing old
impostor chuckled in his garret and pouched his pittance. I believe
the funny soul has passed away; but really there are many very
pretentious persons who do little more than vary his methods
unconsciously. Poor James Grant delighted many a schoolboy, and
perhaps his best work was never quite so much appreciated as it ought
to have been. "The Black Dragoons," "The Queen's Own," and "The
Romance of War" all contained good work, and many gallant lads
delighted their hearts with them; I know that one youth at least
learned "The Black Dragoons" by heart, and amused the people in a
lonely farm-house by reciting whole chapters on winter nights, and I
have some reason to believe that the book gave the boy a taste for
literature which ended in his becoming a novelist. But, as Grant went
on with machine-like regularity, how curiously similar to each other
his books became! Narvaez Cifuentes, in "The Romance of War," is the
type of all the villains; the young dragoons were all alike; the
wooden heroines might have been chopped out by a literary carpenter
from one model; the charges, the escapes, the perils of the hero never
varied very much from volume to volume; and the fact was obvious that
the brain had ceased to develop any strikingly original ideas and only
the busy hand worked on. A very sarcastic personage once observed that
"it is better for literary men to read a little occasionally." To
outsiders the advice may seem like a piece of grotesque fun; but those
who know much of literary work are well aware that a writer may very
easily become possessed by a sick disgust of books which never leaves
him. He will look at volumes of extracts, he will skim poetry, he will
read eagerly for a few days or weeks in order to get up a subject; but
the pure delight in literature for its own sake has left him, and he
is as decidedly prosaic a tradesman as his own hosier. Such a man soon
joins the written-out division, and, unless he travels much or has a
keenly humorous eye for the things about him, he runs a very good
chance of becoming an intolerable bore. He forgets that the substance
of his brain is constantly fading, and that he needs not only to
replenish the physical substance of the organ by constant care, but to
replenish all his dwindling stores of knowledge, ideas, and even of
verbal resources. Among the older authors there were some who offered
melancholy spectacles of mental exhaustion; and the practised reader
knows how to look for particular features in their work, just as he
looks for Wouvermans' white horse and Beaumont's brown tree. These
literary spinners forget the example of Macaulay, who was quite
contented if he turned out two foolscap pages as his actual completed
task in mere writing for one day. He was never tired of laying in new
stores, and he persistently refreshed his memory by running over books
which he had read oftentimes before. The books and manuscripts which
Gibbon read in twenty years reached such an enormous number that, when
he attempted to form a catalogue of them, he was compelled to give up
the task in despair; he was constantly adding to the enormous
reservoir of knowledge which he had at command, and thus his work
never grew stale, and he was ready instantly with a hundred
illustrative lights on any point which chanced to crop up either in
conversation or in the course of his reading. The cheap and flashy
writer is inclined to disdain the men who are thorough in their
studies; but, while his work grows thin and poor, the judicious
reader's becomes marked by more and more of richness and fulness.
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