Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/160

134 134 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI gets hardened — so staggering is it to discover how little he resembles the tax-paying and be-photographed simulacra who pass for him so plausibly outside. It is on these difiPerences that you fasten, marking, measuring, comparing : your sketch-book has another scalp. After that he can rejoin his imposing outside proxies when he will — they will never impose on you again. You know them now for mere doorkeepers ; you know exactly what they ward ; and the majestic way they carry off their mischievous pretence will always fill you, when you meet them, with a deep and holy glee. Brutal? Not a bit of it. They say a fox likes seeing scarlet, because it gives him, these tame times, his only opportunity for showing the world what he can really do ; and though that is just as may be, it is at least quite certain that the true writer, in his ambuscade, simply pines to be pursued and passionately hopes that you may win. To be vanquished is his victory — to escape is his defeat ; for cryptic, till you capture him, must still in part remain his work; enigmatic, all these groves without a guide. Those outcries of remonstrance that sometimes rend the air, expostulations about "unwarranted intrusions," are only raised when some poor critic, too perfectly deceived, begins tiresomely to dog the embodiments outside the gate, in the tedious manner of the illus- trated interviewer. Only be shameless enough, merciless enough, only smash your way remorselessly into his shyest haunts and recesses, and your quarry, when you compel him to throw up his hands, will really be wanting to wave them with joy. For you will have done what in his heart of hearts he hungers for us all to do — won the freedom of his kingdom by the only possible way, gained the single certain key to its design — and are now, at last, in a position to appreciate properly the points of his self-created