"Ah," I said.... and I crept in.
"That's three to you," I said icily. "Game."
A. A. M.
OUR READY WRITERS.
The astonishing rapidity attained by Mr. Walter Melville in the composition of his plays as revealed in the evidence given in court last week has suggested an appeal to other leading authors for information as to their rate of production. We append the results herewith:—
Mr. Max Pemberton observed that the speed of composition varied with the literary quality of the work produced. Personally he found that by far the most laborious and protracted mental effort was entailed in the writing of Revues. He had calculated that the amount of brain force he had spent on his last masterpiece was fully as large as that expended by Gibbon on his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In evidence of the strain he added the following interesting statistics. He had worn out thirteen of the costliest gold-nibbed fountain pens; seven expert typists had been so exhausted that they had to undergo a rest-cure; and finally he himself had consumed no fewer than nineteen seven-and-sixpenny bottles of Blunker's Sanguinogen.
Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bart., poohpoohed the notion that the moderns were more rapid producers than their forefathers. As the result of his investigations he had conclusively proved that Bacon was an infinitely more rapid producer than any living author. His time-table worked out as follows. Bacon wrote Chaucer in a little less than three weeks. He completed the Faerie Queene in one sitting, allowing for refreshments, of seventy-four hours. The Plays of Shakspeare occupied him from first to last not more than ten months. Montaigne was dashed off in just a fortnight, while Beaumont and Fletcher, Marlowe, Greene, Webster and Ben Jonson took him exactly 37-1/2 days. Next to Shakspeare's Plays the Divina Commedia was his most protracted effort, costing him nearly four months of unremitting labour. Sir Edwin added in pathetic proof of the degeneracy of the moderns that his own famous pamphlet had taken him twice as long to compose as Chaucer had taken Bacon.
Mr. Hall Caine strongly deprecated the tendency to put a premium on rapid composition, as though there were any special virtue in speed. His own novels, which were written with his heart's blood, represented in their ultimate form a rigorous condensation of materials ten or even fifteen times as bulky. It was in this process of condensation that the self-sacrificing side of true genius was most convincingly shown. But, great as was the strain involved in this painful process, even greater was that imposed on a successful author by the cruel importunity of the interviewer on the eve of publication. Such methods were absolutely alien to his nature, but he had to set against his own convenience the immeasurable disappointment which his refusal would cause his readers. It was one of the most pathetic tragedies of genius that the dictates of an austere reticence were so often set at nought by the impulses of a tender heart.