Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/24

xviii in a purely creative form? One cannot tell. Between creative criticism and creation there is a frontier, almost imperceptible though it be; and Dixon Scott might or might not have crossed it. He wrote verses when he was very young. Some of these I have been allowed to see. They do not seem to have more than usual merit. In later years he meditated a novel, but this he did not actually write. (Zarya, a novel published some years ago, was by another writer whose name, oddly enough, is Dixon Scott.) It is likely that the strength of his critical faculty would have hampered him in creative work: watched by himself so narrowly at every step, he could hardly not have faltered. I am inclined to think that his future lay along the path he was already treading. It was hoped by his friends, and by any one who appreciated his work, that he would one day be able to shake off those fetters of journalism which, though he trod so buoyantly in them, must have galled him. One cannot read his longer and more important essays without wishing they were longer still—were indeed whole books, vessels to hold all that there so evidently was to be poured in. One wishes he had been free to write not always essays about the work of this or that man, but books about whole periods and schools. One regrets that he had to concern himself always with writers of his own time. Of his subjects in this book, Browning and Morris alone were not alive when he wrote about them. Yet how many in English literature are the men, and groups of men, about whom Dixon Scott should have discoursed to us!

It may be that he preferred, and would always have preferred, to appraise rather the living or the recently dead than those whose writings had already been sifted, and their positions fixed with more or less finality, by Time. For it is clear that the adventurous