Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/253

C. E. MONTAGUE 227 the reader shall see everything without fee-fo-fum- ming or fakes. And upon every detail already firm, by way of self -payment, the craftsman will leap with a gurgle of gratitude, delicately gloating, and repeat all its lucidity, deliciously concentrated, in his little percussive ivory carvings of words. It may be only a man's wrist, seen in the sun (" where the joint was a modelled steel nut among sivart, hairy straps ") ; or it may be Mont Blanc Q^ obtuse aw,id arrowy peaks like a house among poplars "). It may be the slanting edge of the south coast of England (^^ planed into shape tvith the rub, rub of shingle pressed, always one tvay, by the Atlantic's hand"); or the pattern pricked on the ear by the patter of clogs heard at a Lan- cashire daybreak (" the dots of sound, running together, becoming a line, and a thick one ") ; or the filmy course of a white owl's flight (^^ floating over their heads in a chain of linked circles that moved with them, lying outspj^ead on the air without sound or effort "). Always the avid sense seeks out the structure, and the cun- ning hand repeats it minimized, made elfin and exquisite, in a space the size of a letter in a missal, but as perfectly proportioned and as plain as a plan. Two difficulties will suggest themselves. The first : How can a tense, Pre-Raphaelite technique like this, and all the lust for lineal salience behind it, hope to tackle sympathetically and truthfully render the shadowy forces and glimmering half-ghosts of half- ghosts that lie behind the mask of behaviour ? Won't its very contempt for generalizations force it to generalize here — crushing fluid things into a bodily compactness, turning the winds of the spirit into crystals? Perhaps sometimes it does. There are characters that are uncompromising. They seem to know, not only their own part, but the theory of it. And it is this eifect of rigidity and the consequent sense of something having been arbitrarily smashed