His voice, while he develops an idea or conjures up a
scene, takes on a peculiar richness and unction. If he be describing
an actual scene, voice and face are adaptable to those of the actual
persons therein. But it is not in such mimicry that he excels. As a
reporter he has rivals. For the most part, he moves on a higher plane
that of mere fact: he imagines, he creates, giving you not a person,
but a type, a synthesis, and not what anywhere has been, but what
anywhere might be--what, as one feels, for all the absurdity of it,
just would be. He knows his world well, and nothing human is alien to
him, but certain skeins of life have a special hold on him, and he on
them. In his youth he wished to be a clergyman; and over the clergy of
all grades and denominations his genius hovers and swoops and ranges
with a special mastery. Lawyers he loves less; yet the legal mind
seems to lie almost as wide-open to him as the sacerdotal; and the
legal manner in all its phases he can unerringly burlesque. In the
minds of journalists, diverse journalists, he is not less thoroughly
at home, so that of the wild contingencies imagined by him there is
none about which he cannot reel off an oral `leader' or `middle' in
the likeliest style, and with as much ease as he can preach a High
Church or Low Church sermon on it.
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