Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/226

200 THE YELLOW PATCH Our man, in short, had invented, by a kind of accident, a verbal machine that applied all his energies creatively — using them to stamp a pattern on knowledge, to give reality design, and to mint memories into talismans that gave the rest of us courage, so bright and clear and certain was their form. But it still remained for him to apply it to the brutal boulder of the world. It had worked won- derfully in brief essays, in the romantic studies of A Tarpaulin Muster would it work when he fed into it the unselected stuff of modern life : would this snapping die-stamp sort of technique make a novel ? IV Captain Margaret ; Multitude and Solitude ; The Street of To-day: these were the successive results of this larger application. Each is better than the last; and though even the third has its weakness, it is reassuring to realize its nature. For the special weakness of the first is half -eradicated in the second ; and in the third it is its cure that makes the new one. Captain Margaret failed badly when it touched on certain themes. Whenever it dealt with action, with vigour, enterprise, eagerness, this panting prose method was superb. But when it touched anything " poetic " — women, roses, love, ideals — then the old tradition of the Celtic sigh, the hushed accent and the dreamy voice, touched the writer and persuaded him to write in gloves. He parted with his special powers. He became dreamy and the colour faded from his work. For a man must be wide-awake to see visions. This, then, was his danger — the self-consciously poetic ; old, unhappy, far-off things played the deuce with him ; and so when news came that he was at work on a novel of modern life, that Multitude and