LETTER V.
TO A STUDENT WHO FELT HURRIED AND DRIVEN.
Some intellectual products possible only in excitement—Byron’s authority on the subject—Can inventive minds work regularly?—Sir Walter Scott’s opinion—Napoleon on the winning of victories—The prosaic business of men of genius—“Waiting for inspiration”—Rembrandt’s advice to a young painter—Culture necessary to inspiration itself—Byron, Keats, Morris—Men of genius may be regular as students.
In my last letter to you on quiet regularity of work, I did not give much consideration to another matter which, in certain kinds of work, has to be taken into account, for I preferred to make that the subject of a separate letter. There are certain intellectual products which are only possible in hours or minutes of great cerebral excitement. Byron said that when people were surprised to find poets very much like others in the ordinary intercourse of life, their surprise was due to ignorance of this. If people knew, Byron said, that poetical production came from an excitement which from its intensity could only be temporary, they would not expect poets to be very different from other people when not under the influence of this excitement. Now, we may take the word “poet,” in this connection, in the very largest sense. All men who have the gift of invention are poets. The inventive ideas come to them at unforeseen moments, and have to be seized when they come, so that the true inventor works sometimes with vertiginous rapidity, and afterwards remains for days or weeks without exercising the inventive faculty at all. The question is, can you make an inventive mind work on the principle of measured and regular advance. Is such counsel as that in my former letter applicable to inventors?
Scott said, that although he had known many men of ordinary abilities who were capable of perfect regularity in their habits, he had never known a man of genius who was so. The popular impression concerning men of genius is very strong in the same sense, but it is well not to attach too much importance to popular impressions concerning men of genius, for the obvious reason that such men come very little under popular observation. When they work it is usually in the most perfect solitude, and even people who live in the same house know very little, really, of their intellectual habits.
The truth seems to be, first, that the moments of high excitement, of noblest invention, are rare, and not to be commanded by the will; but, on the other hand, that in order to make the gift of invention produce its full effect in any department of human effort, vast labors of preparation are necessary, and these labors may be pursued as steadily as you like Napoleon I. used to say that battles were won by the sudden flashing of an idea through the brain of the commander at a certain critical instant. The capacity for generating this sudden electric spark was military genius. The spark flashed independently of the will; the General could not win that vivid illumination by labor or by prayer; it came only in the brain of genius from the intense anxiety and excitement of the actual conflict. Napoleon seems always to have counted upon it, always to have believed that when the critical instant arrived the wild confusion of the battle-field would be illuminated for him by that burst of sudden flame. But if Napoleon had been ignorant of the prosaic business of his profession, to which he attended more closely than any other commander, what would these moments of supreme clearness have availed him, or would they ever have come to him at all? If they had come to him, they would have revealed only the extent of his own negligence. Instead of showing him what to do, they would have made painfully evident what ought to have been done. But it is more probable that these clear moments would never have occurred to a mind unprepared by study. Clear military inspirations never occur to shopkeepers and farmers, as bright ideas about checkmates occur only to persons who have studied chess. The prosaic business, then, of the man of genius is to accumulate that preparatory knowledge without which his genius can never be available, and he can do work of this kind as regularly as he likes.
The one fatal mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the scarcely desirable gift of half-genius is “waiting for inspiration.” They pass week after week in a state of indolence, unprofitable alike to the mind and the purse, under pretext of waiting for intellectual flashes like those which came to Napoleon on his battle-fields. They ought to remember the advice given by one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century to a young painter of his acquaintance. “Practise assiduously what you already know, and in course of time other things will become clear to you.” The inspirations come only to the disciplined; the indolent wait for them in vain.
If you have genius, therefore, or believe you have, it is admitted that you cannot be perpetually in a state of intense excitement. If you were in that state without ceasing, you would go mad. You cannot be expected to write poetry in the plodding ox-pace manner advocated for intellectual work generally in my last letter. As for that good old comparison between the hare and the tortoise, it may be answered for you, simply, that you are not a tortoise, and that what is a most wise procedure for tortoises may be impracticable for you. The actual composition of poetry, especially poetry of a fiery kind, like—
“The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece,”
of Byron, is to be done not when the poet will, but when he can, or rather, when he must.
But if you are a wise genius you will feel how necessary is culture even for work of that kind. Byron would not have felt any enthusiasm for the isles of Greece if he had not known something of their history. The verses are an inspiration, but they could never have occurred to a quite uncultivated person, however bright his inspirations. Even more obviously was the genius of Keats dependent upon his culture. He did not read Greek, but from translations of Greek literature and from the direct study of Greek art he got the sort of material that he needed. And in our own day Morris has been evidently a very diligent student of many literatures. What I insist upon is, that we could not have had the real Keats, the real Morris, unless they had prepared themselves by culture. We see immediately that the work they have done is their work, specially, that they were specially adapted for it—inspired for it, if you will. But how evident it is that the inspiration could never have produced the work, or anything like it, without labor in the accumulation of material!
Now, although men of genius cannot be regularly progressive in actual production, cannot write so many verses a day, regularly, as you may spin yarn, they can be very regular as students, and some of the best of them have been quite remarkable for unflinching steadiness of application in that way. The great principle recommended by Mr. Galton, of not looking forward eagerly to the end of your journey, but interesting yourself chiefly in the progress of it, is as applicable to the studies of men of genius as to those of more ordinary persons.