Unhappily, Murger was, in one important respect, particularly ill-adapted for the kind of life into which he was thus driven. A man who trusts to his pen for daily bread should at least be a facile and ready writer, able to turn off indefinite quantities of copy in a given time, and willing to undertake the writing up of any subject upon which public interest may be temporarily aroused, and an article required. When literature becomes a business, the higher ambition to produce only good work must almost inevitably be subordinated to the lower and more practical aim of making the thing pay. Now, the difficulty with Murger was, that although literature was his livelihood, his regular trade and calling, he persistently refused to regard it mainly in that light—refused to sacrifice artistic excellence to temporary advantage, and to debase a sacred mission into mere routine work, the immediate, if not indeed the sole, object of which was to turn so much intellectual labor into so much food and clothing. He himself has remarked concerning one of his characters that, after the fashion of genius—a generalization which may or may not be partially true,—he had a tendency to be lazy. Murger was not exactly lazy; but he was whimsical and uncertain; his energies were not always under command; and he did not, with Anthony Trollope, put firmer faith in a piece of beeswax on the seat of his chair than in all the promptings of the divine afflatus. Like Goldsmith, he recognized that the conditions of his life rendered it impossible for him to pay court to the “draggle-tail Muses”; they would simply have left him to starve outright. So he turned to prose; but with prose things were nearly as bad. There were times when he could not and would not write—when the spirit was not upon him; and when he could not work as an artist, he would not work as a day-laborer or publisher’s drudge. And even when he was in full swing, his delicate taste, his almost morbid care in composition, his constant desire to do his best, prevented him from ever producing with the rapidity necessary to make the results really remunerative. Never, even under the greatest stress of circumstances, would he consent to write hastily, or allow his manuscript to leave his hands without what he conceived to be its proper share of thought and revision. Money to him was always the secondary consideration; even hunger had to wait, that the artistic sense might be satisfied. Rather than prove traitor to his lofty ideals, he would live for weeks on dry bread.