12. Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day—an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics—but land! can a body do it to-day?
Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-&-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation—elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you live to get to it, you don't believe in it when it happens.
I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I, can't stand any more Mannering —I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, & not quit this great study rashly ….
My, I wish I could see you & Leigh Hunt!
Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
But a few days later he experienced a revelation. It came when he perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott—Quentin Durward. Hastily he wrote to Matthews again:
I'm still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke into Sir Walter & lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being—Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance artist's stage properties—finished it & took up Quentin Durward & finished that.
It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University.
I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?—[This letter, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, was evidently mislaid. It was found and mailed seven years later, June, 1910 message from the dead.]