There is no manlier, more
gallant spectacle offered in the annals of literature than this
of Walter Scott, silent partner in a publishing house and ruined
by its failure after he has set up country gentleman and
gratified his expensive taste for baronial life, as he buckles
to, and for weary years strives to pay off by the product of his
pen the obligations incurred; his executors were able to clear
his estate of debt. It was an immense drudgery (with all
allowance for its moments of creative joy) accomplished with
high spirits and a kind of French gayety. Nor, though the best
quality of the work was injured towards the end of the long
task, and Scott died too soon at sixty-one, was the born
raconteur in him choked by this grim necessity of grind. There
have been in modern fiction a few masters, and but a few, who
were natural improvisatori: conspicuous among them are Dumas the
elder and Walter Scott. Such writers pour forth from a very
spring of effortless power invention after invention, born of
the impulse of a rich imagination, a mind stored with bountiful
material for such shaping, and a nature soaked with the
humanities. They are great lovers of life, great personalities,
gifted, resourceful, unstinted in their giving, ever with
something of the boy in them, the careless prodigals of
literature. Often it seems as if they toiled not to acquire the
craft of the writer, nor do they lose time over the labor of the
file.
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