“Who,” asked Hawthorne gloomily, “would risk publishing a book from me, the most unpopular writer in America?”

“I would,” was Field’s rejoinder, and after some further sparring, Hawthorne owned up.

“As you have found me out,” said he, “take what I have written and tell me if it is good for anything”; and Fields went away with the manuscript of what is, without any question, America’s greatest novel.

Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have been endeavouring to support.  It must reluctantly be confessed that one of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of romance—­even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for him by his “disciples.”

George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer.  Here is a description of her method: 

To write novels was to her only a process of nature.  She seated herself before her table at ten o’clock, with scarcely a plot and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five in the evening, while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself.  Next day, and the next, it was the same.  By and by the novel had written itself in full and another was unfolding.

Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so confidently left her novels—­to write themselves.  Different, indeed, was the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of The Human Comedy, sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never less than twelve, and that “in the midst of protested bills, business annoyances, the most cruel financial straits, in utter solitude and lack of all consolation.”  But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, “by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold.”

To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily expenditure of “three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for firing.”  But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the Four Hundred.