Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 20, June, 1859 | Page 7

Milton wrote thus, through a habit made necessary by his blindness; and so Mozart, whose incessant labors trained his genius in the paths of musical learning, or brought learning to be its slave, till his first conceptions were often, beyond the reach of elaboration, and remained so clear in his own mind that he could venture to perform in public concertos to which he had written only the orchestral or accessory parts. Other artists work _seriatim_; some can work only when the pen is in their hands; and the blotted page speaks eloquently enough of the artistic processes of mind to which their most passionate passages are subjected before they come to the reader's eye. Think of the fac-simile of Byron's handwriting in "Childe Harold"! It shows a soul rapt almost beyond the power of writing. But the blots and erasures were not made by a "fine frenzy"; they speak no less eloquently for an artistic taste and skill excited and alert, and able to guide the frenzy and give it a contagious power through the forms of verse,--this taste and this skill and control being the very elements by which his expressions become an echo of the poet's soul,--pleasing, or, in the uncultivated, helping to form, a like taste in the hearer, and exciting a like imagined condition of feeling and poetic vision.
Yet if it were made a question, to be decided from internal evidence, whether the scene here analyzed was written before or after the rest of the piece, a strong argument for its being written before might be found in the peculiar impression it leaves upon the fancy. Let us suppose we follow the author while he runs it over, which he does quite rapidly, since there are no blotted lines, but only here and there a comma to be inserted. He designed to open his tragedy. He finds he has set a scene,--in his mind's eye the entrance-hall to an Athenian house, which he thinks he has presently intimated plainly enough to be Timon's house. Here he has brought forward four actors and made them speak as just meeting; they come by twos from different ways, and the first two immediately make it known that the other two are a merchant and jeweller, and almost immediately that they themselves are, one a painter, the other a poet. They have all brought gifts or goods for the lord Timon. The Athenian Senators pass over, and, as becomes their dignity, are at once received in an inner hall,--the first four remaining on the stage. All is so far clear. He has also, by the dialogue of the Painter and Poet, made in itself taking to the attention through the picture and the flighty recitation, suggested and interested us incidentally in the character of Timon, and conveyed a vague misgiving of misfortune to come to him. And there is withal a swelling pomp, three parts rhetorical and one part genuinely poetical, in the Poet's style, which gives a tone, and prepares the fancy to enter readily into the spirit of the tragedy. This effect the author wished to produce; he felt that the piece required it; he was so preoccupied with the Timon he conceived that he sets to work with a Timon-rich hue of fancy and feeling; to this note he pitches himself, and begins his measured march "bold and forth on." What he has assumed to feel he wishes spectators to feel; and he leaves his style to be colored by his feeling, because he knows that such is the way to make them feel it And we do feel it, and know also that we are made thus to feel through an art which we can perceive and admire. On the whole, this introduction opens upon the tragedy with just such a display of high-sounding phrases, such a fine appropriateness, such a vague presentiment, and such a rapid, yet artful, rising from indifference to interest, that it seems easiest to suppose the author to be writing while his conceptions of what is to follow are freshest and as yet unwrought out. We cannot ask him; even while we have overlooked him in his labor, his form has faded, and we are again in this dull every-day Present.
We have seen him take up his pen and begin a tragedy; or, to drop the fancy, we have made it real to ourselves in what manner Shakspeare's writing evidences that he wrought as an _artist_,--one who has an idea in his mind of an effect he desires to produce, and elaborates it with careful skill, not in a trance or ecstasy, but "in clear dream and solemn vision." The subtile tone of feeling to be struck is as much a matter of art as the action or argument to