The point was the question of literary finish, and the degree to which 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 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