"
"Oh, of course I don't deny," said Herries, "that volume and
vitality are what matters most. Scott's imagination was at once
prodigious and profound. He seems to me to have said to his
creations, 'Let the young men now arise and play before us.' But I
don't think his art was the better for his carelessness. Great and
noble as the result was, I think it would have been greater if he
had taken more pains. Of course one regards men of genius like
Scott and Shakespeare with a kind of terror--one can forgive them
anything; but it is because they do by a sort of prodigal instinct
what most people have to do by painful effort. If one's imagination
has the poignant rightness of Scott's or Shakespeare's, one's
hurried work is better than most people's finished work. But people
of lesser force and power, if they get their stitches wrong, have
to unpick them and do it all over again. Sometimes I have an uneasy
sense, when I am writing, that my characters are feeling as if
their clothes do not fit. Then they have to be undressed, so to
speak, that one may see where the garments gall them.
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