Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/250

224 C. E. MONTAGUE to realize that the hailstones are all pearls, that every word is the perfectly right one — that the music, one means, is not orchestral, accompanying the action, but the very sound of the feet of the actors, the bare noise of the hammer-taps that drive the words home, every nail of them needed. That, indeed, is the chief strain. For that gives us the measure of the writer's self- challenge : shows him on the bare rock, deliberately unroped, no retreat possible. It makes you feel as though that violinist, playing a whole symphony pizzicato, were doing it poised on a billiard-ball balanced on a cue — and the plain fact that the whole thing simply must subside the next moment doesn't do much to induce a condition of placid dream. The sub- sidence never does come ; metre, meaning, and meta- phor, like three balls dancing in air, keep catching each other at the very moment of subsidence and restoring the impossible suspension. Sound-stress and sense- stress coincide purely : how perfectly let this passage illustrate : — The waiter awoke the bureau. . . . The faint buzz-uzz-uzz of the voice of the landlady, totting up columns of francs in her bower, had thinned down to stillness ; will failed her, the strong bee invaded by autumn, even to index the dying year's honey ; she leant back, her eyes slowly filming ; dozing, she mused on those other dozers, four of them, out on the terrace, her summer's lingering roses — the last, she half -hoped, if the hope were not sin ; were they gone, bees could sleep, and not dream of missed provender. It ticks, turns, and recovers with the perfect timing of clockwork. And, almost instantly, yet a fourth ball is added — the element of vocal characterization. Im- possible, it might be thought, to maintain this metre unbrokenly, a measure as personal as a profile or a signature (and personal precisely because it leaves no room for evasion), and yet allow the book's characters to speak with their dialects, with the rhythm of their