Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/252

226 226 C. E. MONTAGUE mimicked — a delight that is passed on to the reader in the form of a kindled new consciousness of the wonder of reality, of the vivid, sun-splashed reality that forms the original of the cunning wee model. The chief characters of this book are constantly going up into high places -in the Alps, in the Peak, in West Ireland, even in " the heart of the sweetness of Surrey." It is their maker's passion for the patterned map the height gives that really drives them there ; and the same passion living along all the nerves he endows them with shows us, irresistibly, in rinsed moments of time, all those bright kingdoms of the earth that are ours if we would only wake up and enter them. No book more realistic, more earthy and pagan, has been written since — but why compare ? There has never yet been a book that more honestly realized all the acts, facts, and emotions it touches. Things that have been happening every day since the beginning of life seem here to find for the first tiiae the formula that fits them — the queer pathos of little lights beginning their silent struggle again — "/ar down the mountain a spark struck itself ^ as it seemed^ struggled and blinked for a moment, then steadied itself and burned on, a pin-prick of light in the wide pit of blackness " : or the gnomish, changeling look of streets seen at dawn, " the first shadows reach- ing to all lengths about them, in unfamiliar directions." The power that " places " these things, seeing them so acutely and cutting their replica like a gem, is exactly the power, applied to other senses, which strengthens him to eschew iambs and polysyllables, suspicious of the licence their laxity gives — scorning their help even more than their hindrance, refusing to leave a single sound uncemented, vaguely cut, lest something should leak in accidentally, giving an effect undeserved, as well as undesigned. Nothing must be left to luck, and there must be no false pretences ;