C. E. MONTAGUE 225 own idiosyncrasies and moods. Yet it is done, and without dodging ; nay, with an extra difficulty sportingly thrown in. For every speech is made to echo, not personal accents only, but the intonations of a whole clan, a whole country : one of the first duologues, for example, is the exchange of twenty words each between an Irish priest and an extremely Swiss waiter ; and though the book's measure beaiss through it all, its crisp pulse unblunted, the very flavour of race, qualified by the lips of individuality, makes each utterance as unakin as the men. The violinist, terrible fellow, is positively playing three sonatas as one ; and when undergraduates. Cockney bookies, Blackburn mill-hands, German savants, retired ambassadors, North-country editors, Wicklow house- keepers, Connaught carmen. Catholic cardinals, and West End wives of millionaire knights gradually pro- ceed to add the various vernaculars of Christ Church and the betting ring, of England's north and England's south, England's culture, England's rawness, and an equal number of subtly differentiated brogues, to the crystalline chime without damping or blurring, or distressing, or falsifying a single note of it . . . well, will the reader agree noiv that the only way to enjoy the tale properly is to stop the ears firmly and read the book before you with a single sense, the eye ? Honestly — one means all this. It is not a form of irony. And the root reason is extraordinarily inter- esting. For this constant snap and click of reiterant anapaests, this avoidance of the shadowy grottoes of rhetoric, is but a technical by-product of a rage for honest exactness, of a refusal to take refuge in haze, which finds its chief expression in a glad pursuit of the concrete, in an insistence on submitting every utterance to the test of definition, and in a delight, almost crooning, in the very " feel " of all solids, in the diminutive density of the concrete when Men of Lettert. i g
