Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/148

 has never been a writer in his youth, can no more be a writer in his age than he can be a painter--a musician. What! not write a book! Oh, yes--as he may paint a picture or set a song. But a writer, in the emphatic sense of the word--a writer as Darrell was an orator--oh, no! And, least of all, will he be a writer if he has been an orator by impulse and habit--an orator too happily gifted to require, and too laboriously occupied to resort to, the tedious aids of written preparation--an orator as modern life forms orators--not, of course, an orator like those of the classic world, who elaborated sentences before delivery, and who, after delivery, polished each extemporaneous interlude into rhetorical exactitude and musical perfection. And how narrow the range of compositions to a man burdened already by a grave reputation! He cannot have the self-abandonment--he cannot venture the headlong charge--with which Youth flings the reins to genius, and dashes into the ranks of Fame. Few and austere his themes--fastidious and hesitating his taste. Restricted are the movements of him who walks for the first time into the Forum of Letters with the purple hem on his senatorial toga. Guy Darrell, at his age, entering among authors as a novice!--he, the great lawyer, to whom attorneys would have sent no briefs had he been suspected of coquetting with a muse,--he, the great orator who had electrified audiences in proportion to the sudden effects which distinguish oral inspiration from written eloquence--he achieve now, in an art which his whole life had neglected, any success commensurate to his contemporaneous repute;--how unlikely! But a success which should outlive that repute, win the "everlasting inheritance" which could alone have nerved him to adequate effort--how impossible! He could not himself comprehend why, never at a loss for language felicitously opposite or richly ornate when it had but to flow from his thought to his tongue, nor wanting ease, even eloquence, in epistolary correspondence confidentially familiar--he should find words fail ideas, and ideas fail words, the moment his pen became a wand that conjured up the Ghost of the dread Public! The more copious his thoughts, the more embarrassing their selection; the more exquisite his perception of excellence in others, the more timidly frigid his efforts at faultless style. It would be the same with the most skilful author, if the Ghost of