Atlantic Monthly | Page 7

coheres, the
artistic purpose is more or less evident in every part; and the order in
which each was put upon paper is of as little consequence as the place
or time or date or the state of the weather. Wordsworth has been
particular enough to let it be known, where he composed the last verse
of a poem first. With some artists the writing is a mere copying from
memory of what is completely elaborated in the whole or in long
passages: 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