proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures.

    My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out
    afresh.

In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and everything ready, so that when “Lyovotchka” came down he could send the proof-sheets out by post.

    My father would carry them off to his study to have “just one last
    look,” and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing
    had been rewritten and messed up once more.

“Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I’ve spoilt all your work again; I promise I won’t do it any more,” he would say, showing her the passages with a guilty air.  “We’ll send them off to-morrow without fail.”  But his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks or months together.

“There’s just one bit I want to look through again,” my father would say; but he would get carried away and rewrite the whole thing afresh.  There were even occasions when, after posting the Proofs, my father would remember some particular words next day and correct them by telegraph.

There, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what the artistic conscience is.  In a world in which authors, like solicitors, must live, it is, of course, seldom possible to take pains in this measure.  Dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty left him no time or chance to write his best as Tolstoy and Turgenev could write theirs.  But he at least laboured all that he could.  Novel-writing has since his time become as painless as dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that, while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except as merchandise.

XXII.—­THE THEORY OF POETRY

Matthew Arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was good poetry not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn by heart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets, and to apply these as touchstones.  Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl’s Theory of Poetry in England, which aims at giving us a representative selection of the theoretical things which were said in England about poetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one wonder at the barrenness of men’s thoughts about so fruitful a world as that of the poets.  Mr. Cowl’s book is not intended to be read as an anthology of fine things.  Its value is not that of a book of golden thoughts.  It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for their beauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of English poetic theory.  It is a work, not of literature,