ich
it can or ought to be practised. Herries is of the school of Flaubert,
and holds that there may be several ways of saying a thing, but only one
best way, and that it is alike the duty and the goal of the writer to
find that way. This he enunciated with some firmness.

"No," said Musgrave, "I think that is only a theory, and breaks down, as
all theories do, when it is put in practice: look at all the really big
writers: look at Shakespeare--to me his work gives the impression of
being both hasty and uncorrected. If he says a thing in one way, and
while he is doing it thinks of a more telling form of expression, he
doesn't erase the first statement; he merely says it over again more
effectively. He is full of lapses and inappropriate passages--and it is
that very thing which gives him such an air of reality."

"Well, there is a good deal in that," said Herries, "but I do not see
how you are going to prove that it is not deliberate. Shakespeare wrote
like that in his plays, breathlessly and eagerly, because that was the
aim he had in view; if he makes one of his people say a thing tamely,
and then more pointedly, it is because it is exactly what people do in
real life, and Shakespeare was thinking with their mind for the time
being. He is behind the person he has made, moving his arms, looking
through his eyes, breathing through his mouth; and just as life itself
is hurried and inconsequent, so the perfection of art is, not to be
hurried and inconsequent, but to give one the impression of being so. I
don't believe he left his work uncorrected out of mere impatience. Look
at the way he wrote when he was writing in a different manner--look at
the Sonnets, for instance--there is plenty of calculated art there!"

"Yes," I said, "there is art there, but I don't think it is very
deliberate art. I don't believe they were written SLOWLY. Of course
one can hardly be breathless in a sonnet. The rhymes are all stretched
across the ground, like wires, and one has to pick one's way among
them."

"Well, take another instance," said Musgrave. "Look at Scott. He speaks
himself of his 'hurried frankness of execution.' His proof-sheets are
the most extraordinary things, full of impossible sentences, lapses
of grammar, and so forth. He did not do much correcting himself, but I
believe I am right in saying that his publishers did, and spent hours in
reducing the chaos to order."

"Oh, of course I don't deny," said Herries, "that volu