EASE IN WORK.
To thoughts and expressions of peculiar force and beauty we give the epithets "happy" and "felicitous," as if we esteemed them a product rather of the writer's fortune than of his toil. Thus, Dryden says of Shakspeare, "All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew from them, not laboriously, but luckily." And, indeed, when one contemplates a noble creation in art or literature, one seems to receive from the work itself a certain testimony that it was never wrought out with wrestling struggle, but was genially and joyfully produced, as the sun sends forth his beams and the earth her herbage. This appearance of play and ease is sometimes so notable as to cause a curious misapprehension. For example, De Quincey permits himself, if my memory serve me, to say that Plato probably wrote his works not in any seriousness of spirit, but only as a pastime! A pastime for the immortals that were.
The reason of this ease may be that perfect performance is ever more the effluence of a man's nature than the conscious labor of his hands. That the hands are faithfully busy therein, that every faculty contributes its purest industry, no one could for a moment doubt; since there could not be a total action of one's nature without this loyalty of his special powers. Nevertheless, there are times when the presiding intelligence descends into expression by a law and necessity of its own, as clouds descend into rain; and perhaps it is only then that consummate work is done. He who by his particular powers and gifts serves as a conduit for this flowing significance may indeed toil as no drudge ever did or can, yet with such geniality and success, that he shall feel of his toil only the joy, and that we shall see of it only the prosperity. A swan labors in swimming, a pigeon in his flight; yet as no part of this industry is defeated, as it issues momentarily in perfect achievement, it makes upon us the impression, not of the limitation of labor, but of the freedom and liberation of an animal genius.
"Long deliberations," says Goethe, "commonly indicate that we have not the point to be determined clearly in view." So an extreme sense of striving effort, or, in other words, an extreme sense of inward hindrance, in the performance of a high task, usually denotes the presence in us of an element irrelevant to our work, and perhaps unfriendly to it. If a stream flow roughly, you infer obstructions in the channel. Often the explanation may be that one is attempting to-day a task proper to some future time,—to another year, or another century. It is the green fruit that clings tenaciously to the bough; the ripe falls of itself.
But as blighted and worm-eaten apples likewise fall of themselves, so in this ease of execution the falsest work may agree with the best. That the similarity is purely specious needs not be urged; yet in practically distinguishing between the two there are not a few that fail. The most precious work is performed with a noble, though not idle ease, because it is the sincere, seasonable, and, as it were, inevitable flowering into expression of one's inward life; and work utterly, glibly insincere and imitative is often done with ease, because it is so successfully separated from the inward life as not even to recognize its claim. Accordingly, pure art and pure artifice, sincere creation and sheer fabrication, flow; from the mixture of these, or from any mixture of natural and necessary with factitious expression, comes embarrassment. In the mastery of life, or of death, there is peace; the intermediate state, that of sickness, is full of pain and struggle. In Homer and in Tupper, in Cicero and the leaders of the London "Times," in Jeremy Taylor and the latest Reverend Mr. Orotund, you find a liberal and privileged utterance; but honest John Foster, made of powerful, but ill-composed elements, and replete with an intelligence now gleaming and now murky, could wring statements from his mind only as testimony in cruel ages was obtained from unwilling witnesses, namely, by putting himself to the torture.
But it is of prime importance to observe that the aforementioned mature fruit, which so falls at the tenderest touch into the hand, is no sudden, no idle product. It comes, on the contrary, of a depth of operation more profound, and testifies to a genius and sincerity in Nature more subtile and religious, than we can understand or imagine. This apple that in fancy we now pluck, and hardly need to pluck, from the burdened bough,—think what a pedigree it has, what aeons of world-making and world-maturing must elapse, all the genius of God divinely assiduous, ere this could hang in ruddy and golden ripeness here! Think, too, what a concurrence and consent of elements, of sun and soil, of ocean-vapors and laden winds, of misty heats in the torrid zone and condensing blasts from the North, were required before a single apple could grow, before a single blossom could put forth its promise, tender and beautiful amidst the gladness of spring!—and besides these consenting ministries of Nature, how the special genius of the tree must have wrought, making sacrifice of woody growth, and, by marvellous and ineffable alchemies, co-working with the earth beneath, and the heaven above! Ah, not from any indifference, not from any haste or indolence, in Nature, come the fruits of her seasons and her centuries!
Now he who has any faculty of thinking must see that thoughts are before things in the order of existence. True it is, that here as elsewhere, as everywhere, last is first and first is last. That which is innermost, and consequently primary, is last to appear on the surface; and accordingly thoughts per se follow things in the order of manifestation. But how could the thing exist, but for a thought that preceded and begot it? And now that the thought has passed through the material symbol, has passed forward to a new and more consummate expression, first in the soul, and afterwards by the voice, we should be unwise indeed to deny or forget its antiquity. Thoughts are no parvenus or novi homines in Nature, but came in with that Duke William who first struck across the unnamed seas into this island of time and material existence which we inhabit. Accordingly, it is using extreme understatement, to say that every pure original thought has a genesis equally ancient, earnest, vital with any product in Nature,—has present relationships no less broad and cosmical, and an evolution implying the like industries, veritable and precious beyond all scope of affirmation. Even if we quite overlook its pre-personal ancestry, still the roots it has in its immediate author will be of unmeasured depth, and it will still proceed toward its consummate form by energies and assiduities that beggar the estimation of all ordinary toil. With the birth of the man himself was it first born, and to the time of its perfect growth and birth into speech the burden of it was borne by every ruddy drop of his heart's blood, by every vigor of his body,—nerve and artery, eye and ear, and all the admirable servitors of the soul, steadily bringing to that invisible matrix where it houses their costly nutriments, their sacred offices; while every part and act of experience, every gush of jubilance, every stifle of woe, all sweet pangs of love and pity, all high breathings of faith and resolve, contribute to the form and bloom it finally wears. Yet the more profound and necessary product of one's spirit it is, the more likely at last to fall softly from him,—so softly, perhaps, that he himself shall be half-unaware when the separation occurs.
And such only are men of genius as accomplish this divine utterance. The voice itself may be strong or tiny,—that of a seraph, or that of a song-sparrow; the range and power of combination may be Beethoven's, or only such as are found in the hum of bees; but in this genuineness, this depth of ancestry and purity of growth, this unmistakable issue under the patronage of Nature, there is a test of genius that cannot vary. He is not inimitable who imitates. He that speaks only what he has learned speaks what the world will not long or greatly desire to learn from him. "Shakspeare," said Dryden, not having the fear of Locke before his eyes, "was naturally learned"; but whoever is quite destitute of natural learning will never achieve winged words by dint and travail of other erudition. If his soul have not been to school before coming to his body, it is late in life for him to qualify himself for a teacher of mankind. Words that are cups to contain the last essences of a sincere life bear elixirs of life for as many lips as shall touch their brim; they refresh all generations, nor by any quaffing of generations are they to be drained.
To this ease it may be owing that poets and artists are often so ill judges of their own success. Their happiest performance is too nearly of the same color with their permanent consciousness to be seen in relief: work less sincere—that is, more related and bound to some partial state or particular mood—would stand out more to the eye of the doer. To this error he will be less exposed who learns—as most assuredly every artist should—to estimate his work, not as it seems to him striking, but as it echoes to his ear the earliest murmurs of his childhood, and reclaims for the heart its wandered memories. Perhaps it is common for one's happiest thoughts, in the moment of their apparition in words, to affect him with a gentle surprise and sense of newness; but soon afterwards they may probably come to touch him, on the contrary, with a vague sense of reminiscence, as if his mother had sung them by his cradle, or somewhere under the rosy east of life he had heard them from others. A statement of our own which seems to us very new and striking is probably partial, is in some degree foreign to our hearts; that which one, being the soul he is, could not do otherwise than say is probably what he was created for the purpose of saying, and will be found his most significant and living word. Yet just in proportion as one's speech is a pure and simple efflux of his spirit, just in proportion as its utterance lies in the order and inevitable procedure of his life, he will be liable to undervalue it. Who feels that the universe is greatly enriched by his heart-beats?—that it is much that he breathes, sleeps, walks? But the breaths of supreme genius are thoughts, and the imaginations that people its day-world are more familiar to it than the common dreams of sleepers to them, and the travel of its meditations is daily and customary; insomuch that the very thought of all others which one was born to utter he may forget to mention, as presuming it to be no news. Indeed, if a man of fertile soul be misled into the luckless search after peculiar and surprising thoughts, there are many chances that be will be betrayed into this oversight of his proper errand. As Sir Martin Frobisher, according to Fuller, brought home from America a cargo of precious stones which after examination were thrown out to mend roads with, so he leaves untouched his divine knowledges, and comes sailing into port full-freighted with conceits.
May not the above considerations go far to explain that indifference, otherwise so astonishing, with which Shakspeare cast his work from him? It was his heart that wrote; but does the heart look with wonder and admiration on the crimson of its own currents?
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