“Our calling is only sneered at because it is not well paid. The world has no other criterion for respectability. In Heaven’s name, what made the people talk of setting up a statue to Sir William Follet? What had he done? He had made thirty thousand pounds!... Directly the men of letters get rich they will come in for their share of honour too; and a future writer in this miscellany (Fraser’s) may be getting his guineas where we get one, and dining at Buckingham Palace while you and your humble servant, dear Padre Francisco, are glad to smoke our pipes over the sanded floor of the little D——.”
Sir Walter Scott’s opinion of writing under peaceful and under troublous circumstances was also shown in the following entry, under the same date as the above. It runs as follows:
“Poor T. S. called again yesterday. Through his incoherent miserable tale I could see that he had exhausted each access to credit, and yet fondly imagines that, bereft of all his accustomed indulgences, he can work with a literary zeal unknown to his happier days. I hope he may labour enough to gain the mere support of his family.”
Poverty is not, however, always fatal to the highest efforts of genius, even if it be not essential as an incentive to work; and there is often found in “the labour we delight in” that which “physics pain” (as Shakespeare said), even the pains of impecuniosity. Goldoni, speaking of his dramatic writings and consequent poverty, says, “Though in any other situation I might have been in easier circumstances, I should never have been so happy;” and who can doubt the happiness of the illustrious Linnæus when he was wandering a-foot with his stylus, magnifying-glass and baskets of plants, sharing the peasants’ rustic meals and homely shelter, when he gave his own name to the little Lapland flower now called the Linnæus Borealis, because it reminded him of his own position, being “a little northern plant, flowering early, depressed, abject, and long overlooked”?
Rousseau, writing of his works and life, says:
“It was in a small garret in the new street of St. Etienne du Mont, where I resided four years in the midst of physical suffering and domestic trouble, that I enjoyed the most exquisite pleasure of my life, that of writing and publishing my ‘Studies of Nature.’”
The Quarterly Review (vol. viii.), comparing the writer who goes to his work in a spirit of love for it, and pride in it, with him who labours at it merely for the money it produces, says: “The one is like a thirsty hart that comes joyously to refresh itself at the water-brooks, and the other to the same beast panting and jaded with the dogs of hunger and necessity behind.”
When Olivet presented his elaborate edition of Cicero to the public, he said the glory and pleasure he had received in producing it were all he required by way of remuneration; money he refused. Pieresc, one of the most liberal and generous of men, although his fortune was a small one, loved learning only for its own sweet sake, and was never so happy as he was when shut up in his study amongst his books and MSS. “A literary man’s true wealth,” said he, “consists in works of art, the treasures of a library, and the affections of his fellow-students.” Lord Wodehouse, when re-writing his ‘Lectures on History,’ said: “The task rewarded him with that peculiar delight which has often been observed in the latter years of literary men, the delight of returning again to the studies of their youth and of feeling under the snows of age the cheerful memories of their spring.” Petrarch, writing of himself to a friend, said, “I read, I write, I think; such is my life and my pleasures as they were in my youth.”
Beranger, when he was living on the fifth story in the Boulevard St. Martin, “without money and with no certain prospect for the future,” as he himself said, had installed himself in his garret “with inexpressible satisfaction” because, as he wrote, “To live alone and to compose verses at my leisure appeared to me the very summit of felicity.” Speaking in the spirit of his “sky parlour,” he said: “What a beautiful prospect I enjoyed from its window! What delight I had to sit there in the evening hovering as it were over the immense city, from which a loud, hoarse murmur incessantly ascended, especially when there blended with it the noise and tumult of some great storm.” But there were two sides to this life, and time revealed both. With peace and time, bread and cheese and dreams of glory, the poet was content and happy, even when thin and pale; he grew every day so weak that his father used to say frequently, “I shall soon bury you.” But he was not dismayed, but starved and wrote on placidly enough until the fear of the conscription fell upon him. But even then, as he tells us, Providence befriended him and out of evil brought good. He says: “I was bald at twenty-three in consequence, as I suppose, of continuous headaches. When the gendarmes came in search for conscripts I removed my hat. They looked at my bald head and were satisfied. They went away without me.”
Again he writes in his fragmentary autobiography: