musicians looked at each other and smiled, as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

* * * * *

From his “Essays.”

=_222._= The Philosophy of Composition.

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story.  Either history affords a thesis—­or one is suggested by an incident of the day—­or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative—­designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue, or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent.

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect, keeping originality always in view—­for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest.  I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul, is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid, effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone, whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—­afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by any author who would—­that is to say, who could—­detail, step by step, the process by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion.  Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say—­but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause.  Most writers, poets in especial, prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy, an ecstatic intuition, and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought—­at the true purposes seized only at the last moment—­at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view—­at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable—­at the cautious selections and rejections—­at the painful erasures and interpolations—­in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting—­the step-ladders and demon-traps—­the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constituted the properties of the literary histrio.