Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/164

138 MR GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI stealing back at the bidding of an instinct so obstinate and stubborn that (as the dates reveal further) it could keep him doggedly grinding away at a single piece of work for two and even three years at a stretch. Very various are the ways by which a man reveals his inborn right to rank as writer; but the most con- vincing of all is perhaps a capacity for slowness. Facility, copiousness, a painless flux of words, are often evidence of an actual lack of the overpowering instinct, of a sunny innocence of the authentic knack of words. It is ability to write toilsomely that betrays the true poet : ability, not merely a stout willingness. It means that he really is cutting the letters out afresh, that he can see and use the virgin ore beneath our phrases. The happy scribbler scoops the latter up, suspecting nothing more, perhaps spending his spare energy, if he be very ambitious, on rearranging his tokens in the pretty pattern known as " style." But the genuine writer tugs and toils, poor soul, to unearth the living lode. It is something fixed and solid ; he divines it long before he sees it ; and so he can return to the same spot again and again, stick to it stubbornly year in and year out, with a stability that may easily look like inability, an immobility which means that much is being moved. And that effect of a man fighting down to something dense as metal, as enduring as a marble pavement underneath, is exactly what we get confirmed when we pass from dates and titles to the actual words this tough persistency laid bare. Let us examine a slab of them. The first page will do. The curtain rises on the opening Act of The Marrying of Ann Leete ; these are the printed stage-directions : — The first three acts of the comedy pass in the garden at Marks- wayde, Mr. Carnahy Leete's house, near Reading, during a summer day, towards the close of the eighteenth century ; the first act at four in the morning, the second shortly after