“Until within a short time back I have not had, since I left Ireland, a single moment’s peace of mind; constantly running backwards and forwards, and trying a thousand expedients, only to meet disappointments everywhere I turned.... I never will think or talk upon the subject again. It was such a year that I did not think it possible I could have outlived, and the very recollection of it puts me into the horrors.... When I first came to London my own self-conceit, backed by the opinion of one of the most original geniuses of the age, induced me to set about revolutionising the dramatic taste of the time by writing for the stage. Indeed, the design was formed and the first step taken (a couple of pieces written) in Ireland. I cannot with my present experience conceive anything more comical than my own views and measures at that time. A young gentleman totally unknown even to a single family in London coming into town with a few pounds in one pocket, and a brace of tragedies in the other, supposing that the one will set him up before the others are exhausted, is not a very novel, but a very laughable delusion. I would weary you, or I would carry you through a number of curious scenes into which it led me. Only imagine the model young Munsterman spouting his tragedy to a roomful of literary ladies and gentlemen; some of high consideration. The applause, however, of that circle on that night was sweeter, far sweeter, to me then than would be the bravos of a whole theatre at present, being united at the time to the confident anticipation of it.”
The result was his introduction to a manager—all the actors were eager to introduce him to their managers, and to one he went.
“He,” continues poor Griffin, “let down the pegs that made my music.... He was very polite, talked, and chatted about himself, and Shiel, and my excellent friend Banim. He kept my play four months, wrote me some nonsensical apologies about keeping it so long, and cut off to Ireland, leaving orders to have it sent to my lodgings without any opinion. I was quite surprised at this, and the more so that Banim, who is one of the most successful dramatic writers, at the same time saying, what indeed I found every person who had the least theatric knowledge join in, that I acted most unwisely in putting a play into an actor’s hands. It was then that I set about writing for those weekly publications, all of which, except the Literary Gazette, cheated me most abominably. Then finding this to be the case, I wrote for the great magazines. My articles were generally inserted, but on calling for payment, seeing that I was but a poor inexperienced devil, there was so much shuffling and shabby work, that it disgusted me, and I gave up the idea of making money that way. I now lost heart for everything, got into the cheapest lodging I could make out, and there worked on, rather to divert my mind from the horrible gloom that I felt growing on me, in spite of myself, than with any hope of being remunerated. This, and the recollection of the expense I had put William to, and the fears that every moment became conviction that I should never be able to fulfil his hopes, or my own expectations, all came pressing together upon my mind and made me miserable. A thousand and a thousand times I wished that I could lie down quietly and die at once, and be forgotten for ever. I can describe to you my state of mind at this time. It was not an indolent despondency, for I was working hard as I am now, and it is only receiving money for the labour of those dreadful hours. I used not to see a face that I knew, and after sitting writing all day, when I walked in the streets in the evening, it actually seemed to me as if I was a different species altogether from the people about me. The fact was, from pure anxiety alone, I was more than half dead, and would most certainly have given up the ghost, I believe, were it not that by the merest accident on earth the library friend (Mr. Forster), who had procured me the unfortunate introduction a year before, dropped in one evening to have a talk with me. I had not seen him, nor anybody else that I knew, for some months, and he frightened me by saying I looked like a ghost. In a few days, however, a publisher of his acquaintance had got me some things to do, works to arrange, regulate, and revise, so he asked me if I would devote a few hours in the middle of every day to the purpose for £50 a year. I did so, and among other things which I got to revise was a weekly fashionable journal.”
In this letter to his mother he said nothing of being without the commonest necessaries of life, of being ashamed to go out by daylight because his clothes were so shabby, of passing entire days without food—on one occasion no less than three.
There was in poor old Gerald Griffin no signs of that “indolence, or contemplation if you like,” which Thackeray considered “no unusual quality in the literary man.” With despair in his heart he still wrote on, simply because the labour in which he had delight physicked the pains of impecuniosity. But it was not under such conditions that even Griffin did his best work.
Mr. R. P. Gillies, in his ‘Memoirs of a Literary Veteran,’ tells how, when he was contemplating work of a higher and more ambitious character than he had then attempted, “in consequence of domestic anxieties little or nothing was accomplished.” He merely built some grand literary castles in the air (for which he was ridiculed in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ under the name of “Kempferhausen”); but he says: “There were some awkward conditions attached to the basis of my aerial structures; for example, I must have unbroken tranquillity like that of an anchoret. There must be no shadow on the mind of worldly cares and perturbation, otherwise the spells would be broken.” Bread was his incentive to work, but it was the hack work of which Scott so bitterly complained, not the great work he yearned to accomplish, and could not for want of “peace and time.”
The above allusion is to Sir Walter in the zenith of his fame when, through “long-winded” publishers’ money being in immediate demand, he contemplated abandoning original fiction for the more rapid work of compilation. He wanted that to secure not only bread, but the peace and time which in common with Ruskin he thought essential to the production of great work; and he wrote in his diary, under the date December 18th, 1825: “The general knowledge that an author must write for bread, at least for improving his pittance, degrades him and his productions in the public eye. He falls into the second rank of estimation,
“‘When the harness sore galls, and the spurs his sides goad,
And the high-mettled racer’s a hack on the road.’
It is a bitter thought, but, if tears start, let them flow.”
Thackeray, despite his self-satisfying opinion about the world’s being always “so good and gentle” to the “gentle and good,” here held Sir Walter’s opinion, for under the signature of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esq., he wrote: