Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/166

140 nobody can miss it; but when we proceed to say- that the reason is simply that it is the work of a born man of letters, we must discriminate, or there will be some confusion. For by " man of letters " I don't at all mean a man delighting in grace-notes, eager to speak of trees stirring "as if in their sleep," careful to say "near to sunset" instead of "towards evening." Rather I mean a man possessing a certain ruthless, Röntgen faculty which is actually the enemy of literary diapering—a keen cathodic sense that bites and pierces through mere textures till it reaches a bony anatomy beneath—and that only knows it has reached it (this is the uncanny thing) because it suddenly sees its vague perceptions contracting into a shrunken, stringent formula of words. Does that sound too theoretical? Honestly, I believe it to be the way the literary nerve usually does its eerie work in actual practice. A mind equipped with it is restless, uneasy, insecure, until the shapes about it are reduced to this strict structure—and the consequence is that the more passionately and implacably it peers at life the nearer does it get to something verbal. What is an artifice to most of us is for them essential nature : reality and the written word are one. Their work is not a "copy" but a capture; they do not so much describe as disclose. There is no melting down experience to re-cast in printers' type, no wasteful translation of living into language; life to them is a cloudy body with a skeleton of sentences—they have but to strip it clean to find their phrase. Vita longa, ars brevis—that is how they see it. At the centre of all things is the Word.

And it is of such words that this Ann Leete overture is composed. That is why its brusqueness is identical with beauty, and why, although apparently all boiled down to the grittiest residuum of fact, there has been no loss of literary grace. And that