Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/243

217 THE ART OF MRS. MEYNELL 217 those two paragraphs almost flawless in their exact- ness and beauty. Coldly applying to them the brutal tests one has learned, self-protectively, in very dif- ferent fields, one finds no true requisition slighted, no false prerogatives claimed, nothing done for the sake of surface finesse. It isn't prose-poetry ; it isn't rhetoric or singsong. It is all as honest as machinery, it does its work with absolute economy, and every touch is strong as a hammer-stroke, though timed and directed so perfectly that it just skims like a caress the tremulous nerves of the eye. It is the very opposite of "fine writing," for fine writing is a way of rising from earth into an emotional vague- ness ; and the quality of this work is that it takes a vague emotion (in this case the actual ecstasy of ascent) and reduces it to a definite, delicate set of precisely traced responses and laws. It is all as exact as geometry, though it moves like a song — it is " metrical " in both senses of that word. On the horizon, moreover, closes the long perspective of the sky. There you perceive that an ordinary sky of clouds — not a thunder sky — is not a wall, but the underside of a floor. You see the clouds that repeat each other grow smaller by distance ; and you find a new unity in the sky and earth that gather alike the great lines of their designs to the same distant close. There is no longer an alien sky, tossed up in unintelligible heights. Of all the things that London has forgone, the most to be regretted is the horizon. Not the bark of the trees in its right colour ; not the spirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from the parks ; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot ; but rather the mere horizon. No doubt the sun makes a beautiful thing of the London smoke at times, and in some places of the sky ; but not there, not where the soft, sharp distance ought to shine. To be dull there is to put all relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to make the sky lawless. These are not *' pathetic fallacies." They are simply splendid facts ; and the whole essay is a circumstan-