Hark, hark! the lark at Heaven’s gate sings,

or

  When daffodils begin to peer,

or

  His golden locks time hath to silver turned,

shape themselves in the poet’s first thoughts, he would be a manifest fool to trouble himself further.  Genius is the recognition of the perfect line, the perfect phrase, the perfect word, when it appears, and this perfect line or phrase or word is quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of an eye as after a week of vigils.  But the point is that it does not invariably so appear.  It sometimes cost Flaubert three days’ labour to write one perfect sentence.  Greater writers have written more hurriedly.  But this does not justify lesser writers in writing hurriedly too.

Of all the authors who have exalted the part played in literature by inspiration as compared with labour, none has written more nobly or with better warrant than Shelley.  “The mind,” he wrote in the Defence of Poetry—­

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.  Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.  I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study.

He then goes on to interpret literally Milton’s reference to Paradise Lost as an “unpremeditated song” “dictated” by the Muse, and to reply scornfully to those “who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso.”  Who is there who would not agree with Shelley quickly if it were a question of having to choose between his inspirational theory of literature and the mechanical theory of the arts advocated by writers like Sir Joshua Reynolds?  Literature without inspiration is obviously even a meaner thing than literature without style.  But the idea that any man can become an artist by taking pains is merely an exaggerated protest against the idea that a man can become an artist without taking pains.  Anthony Trollope, who settled down industriously to his day’s task of literature as to bookkeeping, did not grow into an artist in any large sense; and Zola, with the motto “Nulle dies sine linea” ever facing him on his desk, made himself a prodigious author, indeed, but never more than a second-rate writer.  On the other hand, Trollope without industry would