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Updated: June 26, 2025
The post brought matter for a May or April morning a letter from Sir James Mackintosh, telling me that Moore and he were engaged as contributors to Longman's Encyclopædia, and asking me to do a volume at £1000, the subject to be the History of Scotland in one volume. This would be very easy work. I have the whole stuff in my head, and could write currente calamo.
The style of this letter is undoubtedly very different from that of Cicero's letters generally so as to suggest to the reader that it must have been composed expressly for publication whereas the daily correspondence is written "currente calamo," with no other than the immediate idea of amusing, instructing, or perhaps comforting the correspondent.
To write currente calamo for the mere pastime of author and readers, without aiming to inculcate some regenerative principle, or to photograph some valuable phase of protean truth, was in her estimation ignoble; for her high standard demanded that all books should be to a certain extent didactic, wandering like evangels among the people, and making some man, woman, or child happier, or wiser, or better more patient or more hopeful by their utterances.
'The Excursion' is accused of being lengthy, and so you will tell me that I convict myself of plagiarism, currente calamo. I have just finished a poem of some eight hundred lines, called 'The Vision of Poets, philosophical, allegorical anything but popular. It is in stanzas, every one an octosyllabic triplet, which you will think odd, and I have not sanguinity enough to defend.
Many cuneiform inscriptions were impressed with a piece of wood on clay, and are legible millenniums after. We have to write currente calamo, and as soon as written, the MS. is printed and stereotyped, and no revising proofs nor erasures are possible. An action, once done, escapes from us wholly. How needful, then, to have lofty principles ready at hand!
To the modern reader it is dull because he has at hand far better compendia; it is uninspired no doubt: the theme did not lend itself to enthusiastic treatment; the obscurity and awkwardness of expression and the imitative phraseology betray a young unformed style. To analyze the art, however, would be to take the poem more seriously than Vergil intended it to be when he wrote currente calamo.
Nature, it would seem, did not make Giles a dwarf out of malice prepense; she constructed a head and torso with her usual care; but just then her attention was distracted, and she left the rest to chance; the result was a human wedge, an inverted cone. He might justly have taken her to task in the terms of Horace, "Amphora coepit Institui; currente rota cur urceus exit?"
This was not Lettice's way of looking at it. The hero of her story was an urn in the hands of a divine artist, and a sterner stress was necessary for the consummate work. But he, Alan, was no hero. Horace' verse was nearer the mark with him. Amphoræ coepit Institui; currente rota cur urceus exit? As water to wine were all the uses of his life henceforth, compared with that which might have been.
Here the contrast between his theoretic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax. If, as he professed to believe, "the best poet is he who best executes his work," then he is hardly a poet at all. He is habitually rapid and slovenly; an improvisatore on the spot whore his fancy is kindled, writing currente calamo, and disdaining the "art to blot." "I can never recast anything.
He has no idea how the critics will greet this drama and these thoughts, summarily set forth, stripped of their corollaries and ramifications, put together currente calamo, and in haste to have done with them. Doubtless they will appear to "the disciples of La Harpe" most impudent and strange.
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