Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/21

Rh of these articles were written for daily newspapers. An article in a daily newspaper has this in common with a "turn" in a music-hall: to make any effect at all, to "carry," it must be done with a certain sharpness of "attack." Dixon Scott knew this well, as you may see by what he says of the journalist's need to transform "the quiet essay into the alert, immediate article"; and you may be sure that had he lived he would have restored these articles to the form in which he (literary by nature, journalistic by circumstances) first conceived them in his mind. The articles that he had actually revised were the longer ones, the elaborate ones, which had appeared mostly in The Bookman. Collating the final text with the original, I find it was precisely this process of restoration that he aimed at—and achieved. For the rest, his boisterousness is never of that kind—that Futuristic kind—which doesn't strike one as having a corresponding vitality to back it up. There is always behind it a strong-rushing current of thought and feeling.

One often wonders which of these two things, the power to feel strongly and the power to think strongly, plays the greater part in the making of fine criticism. Feeling, of course, comes first in point of time. First the surrender to a work of art, the sensitive delight in it and passionate absorption of it. There are critics who never get beyond that stage—and very good critics too, many of them; but incomplete. We are grateful to them for having rapture and for passing it on to us; but we want to know why they and we are in such ecstasies. In other words, a critic ought to be able to use his brain as well as his heart. Dixon Scott kept a powerful and subtle brain working at high pressure for us. You will find nothing tentative in these pages, and nothing left to chance. Before be put pen to paper, he always knew what he was