In contrast, look at the life of Charles Lamb. He was a poor clerk at a pitiful salary, struggling to increase his income by literary work in his spare time, with a dangerous appetite for alcohol, and an insane sister to take care of. He, himself, constantly dreaded insanity. Yet he kept up a cheerful and continual resistance to his craving for drink, although he often took a drop too much. In order to care for his sister, who had killed her mother in one of her attacks, he gave up his sweetheart and settled down to the brave and heartrending task of devotion to the unhappy invalid. This lasted for thirty-three years, during which he never murmured except when her attacks forced him to place her in an asylum. One of his friends leaves the record of meeting Charles and Mary Lamb walking across the fields to the hospital with tears streaming down their faces. Yet in spite of all his troubles Lamb's essays have a delicacy and a cheerfulness that never reveal the burden he had to bear. He is one of the great heroes of English literature.
John Milton was another such hero. As a young man he won great distinction as a poet and a scholar; so much so that when he went to Italy the greatest Italian authors and critics praised his Italian and Latin poetry as the best of that day, superior to anything written during that time in Italy itself. He was received there with boundless enthusiasm and was having the time of his life, so to speak, when the news reached him of the Puritan rebellion against Charles the First. Without a moment's hesitation he abandoned his tour and came back to England. There he acted as foreign correspondent for Cromwell's Government and kept England safe from attacks by France and the rest of Europe through his able diplomacy. He worked day and night until he fell ill and eventually lost his eyesight. To make matters worse, the Puritans were deprived of their power and Milton's enemies then persecuted him so that he had to fly for his life. He spent the rest of his days in a humble cottage, while his daughters grumbled because he made them transcribe "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained." It seems as if his sacrifice for his country was utterly unrewarded, until we remember that his name to-day is almost the first in its long roll of poets.
One of the sorrows of literary men is lack of appreciation. Longfellow was laughed at by the Harvard students whom he taught, for his poems had no attraction for them and he was only appreciated elsewhere. Bret Harte wrote the finest stories of California life that have ever appeared, yet for years he was not recognized in this country as a writer of unusual powers, and as a matter of fact he spent the greater part of his life in London, six thousand miles from his old home; Lafcadio Hearn was so homely and eccentric that he could not be happy or comfortable in the United States or in Europe, and took refuge in Japan where his appearance would never be remarked. As he points out in his wonderful writings on Japanese life, politeness is one of the ruling habits of that race, so that he was made far more comfortable and did far better work than would have been possible in his own country.
Some writers have done their best work in prison. "The Star Spangled Banner," as we know, was written by Francis Scott Key, while he was a captive on a British battleship during the bombardment of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in the War of 1812, and as he wondered whether the flag was still flying he jotted down the lines of our National Anthem. The masterpiece of Spanish literature was written in jail; "Don Quixote" is so amusing, so pathetic, and so vivid that Spain can stake her whole reputation on that one work, written by Cervantes, an innocent man, imprisoned through envy and malice. John Bunyan, another guiltless author, wrote his immortal "Pilgrim's Progress" while he was locked up for his stubborn refusal to mold his religious belief according to the demands of authorities for whom he could have no respect. The opium of Coleridge and De Quincey and the brandy of Edgar Allan Poe never stimulated them to equal the work of these two geniuses. Innocence in prison has been proved superior to dissipation in the best of surroundings, for the opium victims, Coleridge and De Quincey, had the society of England's most brilliant men and the environment of her finest scenery.
Both Bunyan and Cervantes worked hard, but the hardest workers of all have been Frenchmen; Balzac and Dumas labored unceasingly for the greater part of their lifetimes. In twenty years Balzac wrote ninety-seven novels for a mere pittance that just kept body and soul together. The greatness of his work was recognized, but the French public, as a whole, did so little reading, that the publisher himself did not make anything like a fortune. Dumas was more popular and employed a staff of assistants to collect the material for his historical romances, but the actual writing was all his own and cost him from fourteen to eighteen hours a day in labor. His works are more numerous than those of Dickens, Thackeray, and Cooper combined. It seems incredible that one man could have turned out such a tremendous mass of fascinating stories.
The only man in English literature who is to be compared to these two Frenchmen is Sir Walter Scott. In his first success, when money flowed in on him almost in torrents, his vanity led him to build the mansion of Abbotsford and his one wish was to be regarded as the Squire or ruler of the countryside, but not long after, when his partner in the publishing business had caused the failure of the firm, he bravely went to work and wrote novel after novel, year after year, to pay off his debts. His vanity and love of show disappeared and the man's true nobility took its proper place; almost on his death-bed he continued to dictate his novels although he was agonized with pain and distress.
Similar patience was shown by Thomas Carlyle, who rewrote the whole of his great work, "The French Revolution," after the first copy had been carelessly burnt by a servant girl in the house of a friend who had borrowed the manuscript. He was a dyspeptic and a constant grumbler, but on this occasion he redeemed himself by sitting down quietly to work and hammering away at his dreary task until he had once more finished the masterpiece. Carlyle was so sensitive to noise and other disturbances that he had a sound-proof shed or room built on the roof of his house in London, where he did a great part of his writing, and even there he complained of the rumbling of the wagons in the street, which vibrated through the house.
Herbert Spencer, the great English philosopher, was also easily disturbed by noises, but he solved the problem by wearing ear muffs which were specially made under his instruction. Spencer was rather irritable, it is said; certainly on one occasion he made himself a source of amusement when he objected to being beaten at billiards by the son of a friend of his and remarked that it was not fitting that a young man should have spent so much time and money on so foolish a pastime; yet when he won, the expenditure of thought and time on the part of so great a philosopher seemed altogether wise.
Robert Browning had an amusing experience on one occasion toward the close of his life. He was walking through the residential district of London's fashionable West End to a meeting which he had been invited to attend. Mistaking the house, he walked into a literary gathering that was discussing his own poems. Presently he rose to his feet and offered a few suggestions as to the meaning of a rather difficult passage. Now Browning was not at all like a poet in appearance, but rather resembled a prosperous business man, and it happened that as he was well toward the back of the hall no one recognized him. On the contrary his suggestions were ridiculed by other critics who took the floor when he sat down and he retired unrecognized but vastly delighted. Of course some of Browning's work is intensely intricate and confused; he himself said of his early poem "Sordello" that once there were two beings who understood it, the Almighty and Robert Browning; now, he added, there was but one, for Browning had long lost the key to its problem.
Charles Dickens was one of the most impressionable writers who ever lived. His characters were absolutely real to him and when he was writing he would impersonate the various characters he was describing, talking, making faces, jumping up and looking in the mirror, and then dashing back to his desk to set down each inspiration. But his impressionable nature prevented complete happiness; he was either intensely happy or down in the dumps and miserable. This made him very hard to get along with, so that it is no wonder that his wife found it almost impossible to live with him.