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_.
I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means common in
which an author is at all in condition to retrace the steps by which his
conclusions have been attained.
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