Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/82

56 part of these : a cunning craftsman's gift for fitting these crisp units into complex patterns, adjusting them like the works of a watch, with an exquisite accuracy, performing miracles of minute mechanical perfection.

These are the three faculties, often bitted and strained, that form everywhere the sinews of his work. Take the so-called technical elements of his style. "There is a writer called Stevenson," he once wrote admiringly, "who makes the most delicate inlay-work in black-and-white and files out to the fraction of a hair." His own work is even freer from fluff or haze or slackness. The rhythms run with a snap from stop to stop ; every sentence is as straight as a string; each has its self-contained tune. Prise one of them out of its place and you feel it would fall with a clink, leaving a slot that would never close up as the holes do in woollier work. Replace it, and it locks back like type in a forme, fitting into the paragraph as the paragraph fits into the tale. There are no glides or grace-notes, or blown spray of sound. Most prose that loves rhythm yields its music like a mist, an emanation that forms a bloom on the page, softly blurring the partitions of the periods. Kipling's prose shrinks stiffly from this trustfulness. The rhythms must report themselves promptly, prove their validity, start afresh after the full stop. Lack of faith, if you like—but also, it must be admitted, a marvellously unremitting keenness of craftsmanship. And it is the same with the optical integers as its third. Sudden scenes stud his page like inlaid stones. "The leisurely ocean all patterned with peacocks' eyes of foam." "I swung the car to clear the turf brushed along the edge of the wood, and turned in on the broad stone path to where the fountain basin lay like one star-sapphire." "When his feettouched that still water, it changed, with a rustle of unrolling maps, to nothing less than a sixth quarter of the globe, with islands coloured yellow and blue, their lettering