Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/206

180 BEAU BEERBOHM will cover the masked carper with confusion, will pierce him with his own pencil, by triumphantly- turning Stevenson's attention away from the dis- respectful portraits and out upon the peering draughtsman himself. Zuleika is written ; and what a rare joy it is to see the words on a page of fiction no* longer trudging dully across the page like clerks going to work, but streaming like figures in a carnival, each a piece of finished colour, mannered costume, preened dandiacally, and yet all linked together by the hidden music of no tone which the movements of the dance alone betray, and all pelting each other as they dart with perfumed messages full of private meanings. Delicious, too, to find them forming frank conceits : " Her mouth was a mere replica of Cupid's bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls " ; or "the shadows crept out across the lawn, thirsty for dew." Here is a manner so light that even pathetic fallacies chuckle as they flit, and the all- dreaded descriptive passage becomes a pirouette. This of an Oxford noon : — Some clock clove with silver the stillness of the morning. Ere came the second stroke, another and nearer clock was striking. And now there were others chiming in. The air was confused with the sweet babel of its many spires, some of them booming deep, measured sequences, some tinkling impatiently and out- witting others which had begun before them. And when this anthem of jealous antiphonies and uneven rhythms had dwindled quite away and fainted in one last solitary note of silver, there started somewhere another sequence ; and this almost at its last stroke was interrupted by yet another, which went on to tell the hour of noon in its own way, quite slowly and significantly, as though none knew it. It is beauty forgetting to be solemn. Or rather it is laughter remembering all the graces : laughter holding both its sides — but as the figures do in a