exactly what he
wanted--he got his effect--the structure was complete, and yet there
was the added pleasure of seeing how he achieved it. That is the kind of
finish I desire."

"Yes, of course," said Musgrave, "we should all agree about that; but my
feeling would be that the way to do it is for the artist to fill himself
to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all
believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit
of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me
like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some
noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind
were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a
cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an
excellent thing to take all the trouble, if you throw it away when it is
done; you will do your next piece of real work all the better; but for
a piece of work to have the best kind of vitality, it must flow, I
believe, easily and sweetly from the teeming mind. Take such a book as
Newman's Apologia, written in a few weeks, a piece of perfect art--but
then it was written in tears."

"But on the other hand," said I, "look at Ariosto's Orlando; it took ten
years to write and sixteen more to correct--and there is not a forced or
a languid line in the whole of it."

"Yes," said Musgrave, "it is true, of course, that people must do things
in their own way. But, on the whole, the best work is done in speed
and glow, and derives from that swift handling a unity, a curve,
that nothing else can give. What matters is to have a clear sense
of structure, and that, at all events, cannot be secured by poky and
fretful treatment. That is where intellectual grasp comes in. But, even
so, it all depends upon what one likes, and I confess that I like large
handling better than perfection of detail."

"I believe," I said, "that we really all agree. We all believe in
largeness and vitality as the essential qualities. But in the lesser
kinds of art there is a delicacy and a perfection which are appropriate.
An attention to minutiae which the graving of a gem or the making of a
sonnet demands is out of place in a cathedral or an epic. We none of us
would approve of hasty, slovenly, clumsy work anywhere; all that is to
be demanded is that such irregularity as can be detected should not be
inappropriate irregularity. What we disagree abo