Volume 1

Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1903-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biographic clinics / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    77/234 page 71
    anguish at the end. Noticeable also is the fact, how¬ ever, that after its completion and during the last six¬ teen years of his life there was practically no produc¬ tion of work. The “ ablaze ” and the “ white heat ” of his nerves, with which he had been compelled to work to develop the power to counteract the inhibition and irritation of morbid ocular function, had ended in final paralysis of brain and will. And Carlyle was actually conscious that with his great powers he had been able to do so little work. There are generally no better and more productive years than those between, say, 42 and 58. Carlyle writes at the age of 58: “ Here are now ten years, and what account can I give of them? The work done in them is very small even in comparison.” If I take the number of pages of the edition at hand, of his collected works, I find that they foot up about ten thousand. Dividing this number by the number of days of his sixty years of working life I find that he produced at the rate of less than one half a page a day. If we sup¬ pose that for every printed page he read ten pages to get his data, we find that the entire reading and writing was thus equal on the average to about five and one half printed octavo pages a day. In some men the untoward conditions of circum¬ stances, the ill-health, the mental abnormalism, etc., may have little or no effect upon the quality of their literary labors. In others this may be subtly modified,
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3