Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/18

xii work was (in form) journalism; and journalists are not encouraged by editors to write about one another. Had he been a writer of books, and had these contained but a tithe of the quality he showed in his articles, he would have won quick enough fame even in the metropolis, I fancy. I don't say that his failure to do so was, for him, regrettable. A young artist who sets the Thames on fire is very apt to singe his own fingers. Obscurity, if he has ambition of a worldly kind, is a spur, and doesn't irk him if he hasn't. I gather from report that Dixon Scott had no worldly ambition but to earn enough for bread and butter. But, though he seems to have been indifferent to fame, he was not, I happen to know, ungrateful for a little praise; and I wish he had had rather more of it from that "royal city of romance," as London appeared to him, "towering tremendously above the level of the shires."

Much of the charm of his writing—the freshness, the vigorous youngness of it—is due to his having been a provincial. He was not unconscious of an advantage in being so. "A Londoner," he wrote, in another criticism than that from which I have just quoted, "sees life at an angle, foreshortened, as from a stagebox; instead of taking to it gradually, breast on, from the primitive beach, every step an adventure, he nips into it aslant, deep water at once, from the door of his sophisticated bathing-van—a solid half of experience irrecoverably missed." And elsewhere he wrote, in like vein, that provincialism "teaches an artist proportion and perspective, teaches him humility, persuades him, above everything, to that wordless belief in something finer than he has ever experienced." Without wishing to be pedantic, I should demur that provincialism and humility are not inseparable. It all depends. I have known provincials to be very aggressive, very pragmatical and cocksure, and have been sure that