Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/261

235 LIONEL JOHNSON'S FKOSE 235 There indeed the vestments are fitting, and the thought rises level with its companions, and the serene lapse of the clauses that surround the quota- tions has a movement almost as lovely as that of the messengers they bear. It is true that it has nothing of the sudden, carbonic brilliance of essential thought set free by hard cutting. This is manifestly the beauty that is gained by delicate accretions— clause silting subtly over clause, film upon film, until the whole substance is a cloudy shimmer and the germ has grown into a gem. But then that is how pearls, true pearls, always are made. And when an artist offers you pearls it is foolish to ask for a stone. Was that sharp division between his art and his life, then, a wholly good thing for the latter — a way of working off any wilfulness externally, leaving the rest free to blossom undisturbed ? We once heard the purest artist living — an old friend of Johnson's — Yeats himself — urge that it was so. "Beauty is the spoil and the monument of such battles" was one of his high phrases. Yet it is a proposition one wants not to accept. And there is a certain paleness in this prose — and the paleness is the price of its purity. For after all there are only two ways in which a writer can make such critical work independently and indestructibly vital — and Johnson held back from both. Life in the rough, on the one hand, whose strong intrusion can cross-fertilize criticism, he coldly and relentlessly locked out. There are only two places where the lines tremble — and that is because they are scorning the tremors of others — the nerves of Marie Bashkirtseff, the noisiness of Byron. ("He did one thing well : he rid the world of a cad — by dying as a soldier.") In the essay on Izaak Walton the word *' river " never once occurs ; in that on Stevenson one- third deals with Addison ; in that on Savonarola we hear of *' thunders of thought and