“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 about is only the precise amount of finish which is appropriate to the particular work.  Musgrave would hold, in the case of Flaubert, that he was, in his novels, trying to give to the cathedral the finish of the gem, and polishing a colossal statue as though it were a tiny statuette.”

“Yes,” said Herries mournfully, “I suppose that is right; though when I read of Flaubert spending hours of torture in the search for a single epithet, I do not feel that the sacrifice was made in vain if only the result was achieved.”