Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/234

208 208 SIR W. ROBERTSON NICOLL with no anxious thought of being various, will possess a rhythm, a comeliness, an actual technical attractive- ness, far subtler than any which the literary acrobat secures. It is an involuntary beauty; it comes with- out calculation ; it is the direct reward, indeed, of an absolute effortlessness. It is the result of the use of a vocabulary that has become actually common- place to the writer, and of a refusal to adopt deliberate forms. And it produces a kind of prolonged cadence, a continual fitness of phrase, every word in deep accord with every other. The whole thing has a high, clear symmetry and shapeliness ; it hangs un- consciously sheathed and circled by its bloom. As undetachable as it is undeliberate, it is impossible, of course, to reproduce this inclusive spell by slicing segments ; it requires every page to evoke it, for its chief, essential beauty is just the way it webs exactly all. But quotation can do something. It can illus- trate some of the characteristics of the personality behind — and since in this case, more than most, "the style is the man," the reader may get some hints of the harmony — remembering always that this concord depends, not on chiming syllables, but on a certain human candour and consistency. I there- fore give some extracts from the Letters which have seemed to me specially typical, adding a word or two as to the attributes each betrays. Ill The beginning of my love for Meredith was on this wise : My father was a subscriber to a literary journal, long dead, called The Critic. He had preserved many of the old numbers, and I found them delightful reading. Some of the most eager and generous spirits of the time were contributors, and there was much about new poets and the coming dawn, all written in the optimist spirit of the early fifties. Mr. W. M. Rossetti reviewed in The Critic Mr. Meredith's first book, the poems of 1851. He