THE MYSTERY OF GREATNESS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIX, Issue XXVI, 18 December 1897, Page 823

THE MYSTERY OF GREATNESS.

Young’ writers are always anxious to know how rhe great Im Miks were written, and how the immortals felt and behaved when they were writing the same. It is often taken for granted by these young people that there is some secret prescription for eoin|X)iinding literature, ami that sufficient |>erseveranee may master this formula. Investigation hardly eontirms this view. A certain well-known author wrote resolutely every day, whether he felt like it or not. He turned out with almost unvarying exactness just about so many thousand words at a sitting. His works have been read with pleasure by hundreds of thousands. He has been proclaimed as the favourite novelist of several famous men. He will not live forever, but he achieved a success which might projierly satisfy a high ambition. Another noted man determined to pursue the same course. He had made marked successes in poetry and short-story work. Now he would write a book. Other people had shut their teeth together and sat down and ground out what was, if not real literature, a fair imitation of it. Hr would do the same. His book fell flat, and he has never attempted to write another. The author of one of the most successful books of the last twenty years declares that she re-wrote every sentence in it at least forty times. Her people, she said, would not mind. They did queer and unexpected things, and were constantly striving to baulk and elude the plot, but by’ persistent and severe discipline she regulated her mutinous army until her first work was ‘finished like a very Crichton,' and bore almost no mark of crudeness. Another of our most successful novelists never re-writes, ami hr corrects and interlines but little. One of the few Americans who has produced a novel which will live said once, in reply’ to a question : ‘Copy my work ! If I had to copy what 1 write I should never write a line.' One of the most famous of living writers reads the work of no contemporaries, for fear of colouring or corrupting his own output. Other writers, perhaps equally well-known, read promiscuously and unflaggingly. A well-known society woman, shut temporarily away from the world by affliction, deliberately resolved to write a book. She immediately consulted a distinguished professor of rhetoric and literature a.nd put herself under his tuition for some months. She saturated herself during a considerable succeeding period with the scenes and atmosphere in which her story was to lx? laid. Her friends laughed behind her back, ami quoted to each other the fable of the mountain and the mouse, but la grande dame, with all her fuss ami feathers, really produced a charming little story -worthy to live with some of those divinely-written effusions which have eminated from garrets and from pens of crust-fed genius. On the other hand, one of the most conspicuous of living writers certifies that, his most brilliant work treats of a land and a people whom he has never seen, though it is considered by the critics a masterpiece of verisimilitude. The story electrified everybody who read it, and was the sensation of the month among literary’ circles. Marcus Aurelius enunciated the noblest of sentiments, though he lived in a marble palace. Homer Ix'gged his bread. Robert Browning was Ixirn ami brought up a gentleman. Rol»ert Burns was a son of the soil. In short, there is no rule nor guide to literary, any more than to any other sort of success. A few foundation principles form a moral ami expedient start ing-|x»int. but thence each worker must carve his own way. ‘That by which a man compters in any passage is a profound secret to every other |>erson in the world.’ said the seer, lie might have added, ‘and it <•<111 never lie imparted.' The soul with convictions and with enthusiasms, hating shams and despising imitation and flattery, is going to be heard. No amount of modelstudy’ or statistic - hunting can give success to any other kind.

KATE UPSON CLARK.