The Literary Regimen - Page 2

get no literature out of it. "We
learn in suffering what we teach in song." This is why men who live at
home with their mothers, or have their elder sisters to see after them,
never, by any chance, however great their literary ambition may be,
write anything but minor poetry. They get their meals at regular hours,
and done to a turn, and that plays the very devil--if you will pardon
the phrase--with one's imagination.

A careful study of the records of literary men in the past, and a
considerable knowledge of living authors, suggests two chief ways of
losing one's digestion and engendering literary capacity. You go and
live in humble lodgings,--we could name dozens of prominent men who have
fed a great ambition in this way,--or you marry a nice girl who does not
understand housekeeping. The former is the more efficacious method,
because, as a rule, the nice girl wants to come and sit on your knee all
day, and that is a great impediment to literary composition. Belonging
to a club--even a literary club--where you can dine is absolute ruin to
the literary beginner. Many a bright young fellow, who has pushed his
way, or has been pushed by indiscreet friends, into the society of
successful literary men, has been spoilt by this fatal error, and he has
saved his stomach to lose his reputation.

Having got rid of your digestion, then, the common condition of all good
literature, the next thing is to arrange your dietary for the particular
literary effect you desire. And here we may point out the secrecy
observed in such matters by literary men. Stevenson fled to Samoa to
hide his extremely elaborate methods, and to keep his kitchen servants
out of the reach of bribery. Even Sir Walter Besant, though he is fairly
communicative to the young aspirant, has dropped no hints of the plain,
pure, and wholesome menu he follows. Sala professed to eat everything,
but that was probably his badinage. Possibly he had one staple, and took
the rest as condiment. Then what did Shakespeare live on? Bacon? And Mr.
Barrie, though he has written a delightful book about his pipe and
tobacco, full of suggestion to the young humorist, lets out nothing or
next to nothing of his meat and drink. His hints about pipes are very
extensively followed, and nowadays every ambitious young pressman smokes
in public at least one well-burnt briar with an eccentric stem--even at
some personal inconvenience. But this jealous reticence on the part of
successful men--you notice they never let even the interviewer see their
kitchens or the débris of a meal--necessarily throws one back upon
rumour and hypothesis in this matter. Mr. Andrew Lang, for instance, is
popularly associated with salmon, but that is probably a wilful
delusion.