Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/23

Rh Rossetti that he "loved the very feel of language." This is equally true of himself. And in him, together with the sensuous delight, there was a quite dry clear understanding of the smallest component parts of what he had to deal with—such knowledge as engineers have of engines.

The gift for writing well is a casual gift. As often as not, men of powerful intellect, and of deep feeling, have no gift for playing the fiddle. Just as often have they no gift for writing. Many good fiddlers are fools, and there are many fools who (strange though it may seem) can through written words express their folly with ease, lucidity, and grace. The people most sensitive to music, and most learned in it, have often no executive talent at all; nor does it follow that because he loves and understands good literature a man is not liable to be a duffer so soon as he takes pen in hand. Luckily Nature did not withhold from Dixon Scott the specific gift for writing. She endowed him with it in all abundance. When I began to read the proof-sheets of this book, I noted for quotation passages that seemed to me specially brilliant in their verbal felicity; but they were soon so numerous that I had to close my list. At whatever page you open this book you will find some of those felicities.

Multitudinous though they are, they have something of the preciousness of rarity; for there will be no more of them. The greater your pleasure in these pages, the greater, necessarily, is your sense of what is lost, and the more sadly will you ponder over what, had he come safely through the war, Dixon Scott would have done with his genius. Would he, for all his humility, have been content to go on writing about other people? Would he, who was so creative in his criticism, not have been impelled from within to use his imagination and insight, his humour and wisdom,