'You Will Find Some of Those Felicities'

“The more you admire a man’s writing the gladder you are that he should receive—for all good writers seem to be modest, and pleased with praise—whatever poor tribute you can offer him.”

It’s always fun to disparage lousy writers, in part because denigration presents more opportunities for humor. But praise for good work is a moral obligation. Above, Max Beerbohm is preparing to celebrate a writer whose name was unknown to me: Dixon Scott. Beerbohm supplied the introduction to Scott’s only book, Men of Letters, published posthumously in 1916. He had died in October 1915 at Gallipoli, serving as a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery. He died at age thirty-four not from wounds but from dysentery, aboard a hospital ship, as did thousands of others. Some 58,000 allied soldiers died on the Gallipoli peninsula along with 87,000 Ottoman Turkish troops. The campaign was planned by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to knock Ottoman Turkey, Germany’s ally, out of the war. It was a humiliating disaster for England and its allies.

Scott was born in Liverpool in 1881, attended that city’s university and worked as a journalist. He wrote a weekly column about books for The Liverpool Courier, reviews for The Manchester Guardian and critical essays for The Bookman. In the introduction, Beerbohm is writing more than two years before the Armistice:

“Many a bereavement in this war will have been the more bitter for the knowledge that the lost one had in him something that, in future days of peace, would have had a great outcome, surely. Not the least tragic thought that besets men in 1916 is that the toll taken is, in the strictest sense, incalculable. Among the very young lives laid down there may—we shall never know—have been a Shakespeare, a Newton, a far greater than Mr. Pitt, a far  greater than whom you will.”

Scott’s subjects are the luminaries of his day, some of whom remain our luminaries – Kipling, Henry James, Chesterton, Beerbohm. Two years before his death, here is Scott reviewing the twenty-four volumes of James’ “New York Edition,” while perhaps aping the Master’s late prose:

“If the style is the man, as people keep on saying, then Mr. James’s humility could be triumphantly proved by simply analyzing a series of his sentences. Incessantly, on the one hand, they are dowering the smaller acts, facts, or features with great spreading pinions of imagery. As often, on the other, they are expressing the subtlest apprehensions in terms domestic, idiomatic, colloquial—using a sort of celestial slang. And the result of this intermarrying is prose of a superb strength and suppleness, a prose probably unsurpassed since Shakespeare’s—and able, at its highest moments of passion, when it is aflame with a beauty greater than even that borne by the most self-avowed poetry, to maintain the serene carriage of the estate to which it belongs, and deprecate any suggestion of a ceremony.”

Beerbohm writes in the introduction: “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.”