Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/196

 Bolus's lying came from his greatness of soul and his comprehensiveness of mind. The truth was too small for him. Fact was too dry and commonplace for the fervor of his genius. Besides, great as was his memory,—for he even remembered the outlines of his chief lies,—his invention was still larger. He had a great contempt for history and historians. He thought them tame and timid cobblers mere tinkers on other peoples' wares; simple parrots and magpies of other men's sayings or doings; borrowers of and acknowledged debtors for others' chattels, got without skill; they had no separate estate in their ideas; they were bailees of goods which they did not pretend to hold by adverse title; buriers of talents in napkins, making no usury; barren and unprofitable nonproducers in the intellectual vineyard—nati consumere fruges.

He adopted a fact occasionally to start with, but, like a Sheffield razor and the crude ore, the workmanship, polish, and value were all his own. A Tibet shawl could as well be credited to the insensate goat that grew the wool, as the author of a fact that Bolus honored with his artistical skill could claim to be the inventor of the story. . ..

There was nothing narrow, sectarian, or sectional in Bolus's lying. It was, on the contrary, broad and catholic. It had no respect to times or places. It was as wide, illimitable, as elastic and variable, as the air he spent in giving it expression. It was a generous, gentlemanly, whole-souled faculty. It was often employed on occasions of thrift, but no more and no more zealously on these than on others of no profit to himself. He was an egotist, but a magnificent one; he was not a liar be cause an egotist, but an egotist because a liar. He usually made himself the hero of the romantic exploits and adventures he narrated; but this was not so much to exalt himself as because it was more convenient to his art. He had nothing malignant or invidious in his nature. If he exalted himself,