And Even Now
voice, while he develops an idea or conjures up a scene, takes on a
peculiar richness and unction. If he be describing an actual scene,
voice and face are adaptable to those of the actual persons therein. But
it is not in such mimicry that he excels. As a reporter he has rivals.
For the most part, he moves on a higher plane that of mere fact: he
imagines, he creates, giving you not a person, but a type, a synthesis,
and not what anywhere has been, but what anywhere might be--what, as one
feels, for all the absurdity of it, just would be. He knows his world
well, and nothing human is alien to him, but certain skeins of life have
a special hold on him, and he on them. In his youth he wished to be
a clergyman; and over the clergy of all grades and denominations his
genius hovers and swoops and ranges with a special mastery. Lawyers he
loves less; yet the legal mind seems to lie almost as wide-open to
him as the sacerdotal; and the legal manner in all its phases he can
unerringly burlesque. In the minds of journalists, diverse journalists,
he is not less thoroughly at home, so that of the wild contingencies
imagined by him there is none about which he cannot reel off an oral
‘leader’ or ‘middle’ in the likeliest style, and with as much ease as
he can preach a High Church or Low Church sermon on it. Nor are his
improvisations limited by prose. If a theme call for nobler treatment,
he becomes an unflagging fountain of ludicrously adequate blank-verse.
Or again, he may deliver himself in rhyme. There is no form of utterance
that comes amiss to him for interpreting the human comedy, or for
broadening the farce into which that comedy is turned by him. Nothing
can stop him when once he is in the vein. No appeals move him. He goes
from strength to strength while his audience is more and more piteously
debilitated.
What a gift to have been endowed with! What a power to wield! And how
often I have envied Comus! But this envy of him has never taken root
in me. His mind laughs, doubtless, at his own conceptions; but not
his body. And if you tell him something that you have been sure will
convulse him you are likely to be rewarded with no more than a smile
betokening that he sees the point. Incomparable laughter-giver, he is
not much a laugher. He is vintner, not toper. I would therefore not
change places with him. I am well content to have been his beneficiary
during thirty years, and to be so for as many more as may be given us.