5. Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their
characters as described by him?
6. Has he heroes and heroines whom the reader admires, admires, and
knows why?
7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that
are humorous?
8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to
lay the book down?
9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring
the placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being
artificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere and
in earnest?
10. Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't
want to?
11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another
one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one
when he saw it?
13. Can you read him? and keep your respect for him? Of course a person
could in his day--an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics--but
land! can a body do it today?
Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter.
I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX
of Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my
nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy;
and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres. Interest? Why, it
is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these
milk-and-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of the invention! Not
poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons
for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a
situation--elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you live
to get to it you don't believe in it when it happens.
I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering--I
do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great
study rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and
so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either
of them rank high now? And do they?--honest, now, do they? Dam'd if I
believe it.
My, I wish I could see you and Leigh Hunt!
Sincerely Yours
S. L. CLEMENS.
*****
To Brander Matthews, in New York:
RIVERDALE, May 8,'03 (Mailed June, 1910).
DEAR BRANDER,--I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dulness
since I broke into Sir Walter and lost my temper. I finished Guy
Mannering--that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows
jabbering around a single flesh-and-blood being--Dinmont; a book crazily
put together out of the very refuse of the romance-artist's stage
properties--finished it and took up Quentin Durward, and finished that.
It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living: it was like
withdrawing from the infant class in the College of journalism to sit
under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.