Sometimes I wonder, as others have, whether we are reaching the end of the literary culture that begins at the renaissance. If we are, one reason is obvious: people write far less than they once did. This was brought home to me when I began reading around in the 18th century. At the moment I am knee-deep in James Boswell, so he is my case in point.
Those who know him only through the Life of Johnson may not appreciate that Boswell’s collected writings will run to maybe forty volumes when the mighty Yale edition is completed. True, Boswell was exceptional and would be exceptional in any period. I cite him because of the role writing played in his life.
It wasn’t what he did for a living and it wasn’t what he did for fun. For most of his adult life he alternated between playing the laird at his estate (a role he took seriously), practising law in Edinburgh and going on sprees to London. There he put in his time drinking, socialising and whoring. Yet he found time to fill those forty volumes.
No doubt he was gifted. No doubt it helps not to have to make your own bed. Do the sums, however, and you realise that he must have written that unfailingly lucid prose just as fast as his pen could splutter across the paper. He could do this because he practised.
In Boswell in Holland, the second in Yale’s thirteen volumes of the private papers (the ‘trade’ edition) we find him in Utrecht studying law. He writes every day: his journal, a memorandum book, lengthy letters, dialogues recalled verbatim from the previous night, five French couplets ( to improve his French) and a short essay in Dutch (to improve his Dutch). The lectures he attends, by the way are in Latin and when necessary he speaks that language. Much of this multi-lingual activity involved translation, a superb discipline for someone learning to write.
Alexander Pope did not arrive at the perfection of his couplets by accident, or overnight. Couplets were almost the only verse-form he used, and the world was material to be turned into them.
From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If conversation offered anything that could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an expression more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion and some little fragments have been found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at some other time.
He was one of those few whose labour is their pleasure: he was never elevated to negligence, nor wearied to impatience; he never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair. He laboured his works, first to gain reputation, and afterwards to keep it.
_ Johnson, Life of Pope.
Athletes of the pen.