Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/22

xvi about; he had always gone to the root of his subject, grasped the whole range of it. It is true that in every essay he seems to be setting out breathlessly on a wild and mysterious adventure fraught with all manner of difficulties and perils which he will not disguise from you, his companion. But you need have no fear. He knows the way. He has been over all the ground. He knows just where the goal is, and will punctually set you down there.

Sometimes, perhaps, he leads you by some path not because it is a short cut, but just because it is rocky and precipitous. Belonging very much to the age he lived in, Dixon Scott had a delight in paradoxes. It may be that a hundred years hence our typical writers will all seem to have been a little mad, just as the typical writers of the eighteenth century seem all to have been a little dull. But in the best of those bygone writers one sees that the dullness is a mere mannerism: it does not affect for us the excellence of their work. Nor can I imagine that any discerning person who may read Dixon Scott's book in the twenty-first century will be much disturbed by the parodoxes—many of which, by the way, are solid truths, and all of them mere incidents in the exposition of some general truth.

I know not whether to admire more the wide "synthetic sweep" of his mind or the truly exquisite subtlety he had in analysis. Certainly, no other English critic has had such an ear as Dixon Scott had for the vibrations of "style" in literature, or has been able to analyse so minutely, with such unerring science, the technical peculiarities of this or that man's writing. In the essays on Mr. Shaw, Mr. Kipling, Mr. C. E. Montague and many others, you will find done, done perfectly, something which has hardly been even attempted by any one else, Dixon Scott said of