Goethe was a believer in the pleasant doctrine that the highest and freest work can be done under the healthiest conditions of fresh air, early hours, daylight, and temperance--which does not mean abstinence. He and Balzac are at precisely opposite pales in their method of working. Here is the account of Goethe's days at Weimar, according to G. H. Lewes: He rose at seven. Till eleven he worked without interruption. A cup of chocolate was then brought, and he worked on again till one. At two he dined. His appetite was immense. Even on the days when he complained of not being hungry, he ate much more than most men. He sat a long while over his wine, chatting gayly; for he never dined alone. He was fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles. There was no dessert--Balzac's principal meal--nor coffee. Then he went to the theatre, where a glass of punch was brought to him at six, or else he received friends at home. By ten o'clock he was in bed, where he slept soundly. Like Thorwaldsen, he had a talent for sleeping.
No man of business or dictionary maker could make a more healthy arrangement of his hours. The five or six hours of regular morning work, which left the rest of the day open for society and recreation, the early habits, the full allowance of sleep, and the rational use of food are in glaring contrast to Balzac's short and broken slumbers, his night work, and his bodily starvation. Goethe differed from almost every other great poet in not doing his greatest work at a white heat; and not only so, but he differed also in constantly balancing his reasoning against his creative faculties. Those long mornings of early work were not always spent in the fever of creation. He was a physiologist, a botanist, a critic; and the longer he lived, the more of a savant he became, if not less of a poet. His imagination was most fertile before he settled down into these regular ways, but not before he settled down into a full appreciation of wine. Balzac would write the draft of a whole novel at a sitting, and then develop it on the margins of proofs, revises, and re-revises. Goethe acted as if while art is long, life were long also. Till the contrary is proved, we must consistently hold that Goethe was the philosopher before dinner-time, and the poet in the theatre, or during those long after-dinner hours over his two or three bottles of wine. That these later hours were often spent socially proves nothing, one way or the other. Some men need such active influences as their form of mental stimulus. Alfieri found, or made, his ideas while listening to music or galloping on horseback. Instances are common in every-day life of men who cannot think to good purpose when shut up in a room with a pen, and who find their best inspiration in wandering about the streets and hearing what they want in the rattle of cabs and the seething of life around them, like the scholar of Padua, whose conditions of work are given by Montaigne as a curiosity: "I lately found one of the most learned men in France studying in the corner of a room, cut off by a screen, surrounded by a lot of riotous servants. He told me--and Seneca says much the same himself--that he worked all the better for this uproar, as, if overpowered by noise, he was obliged to withdraw all the more closely into himself for contemplation, while the storm of voices drove his thoughts inward. When at Padua he had lodged so long over the clattering of the traffic and the tumult of the streets, that he had been trained not only to be indifferent to noise, but even to require it for the prosecution of his studies."