The truth is Mr. Dawson is an emotionalist, not an intellectualist. So far as I can judge from his autobiography he never did any constructive work to fit himself for a writer. Early in life, he began to externalise emotional states in writing and he has continued to do so ever since. Emotional states, unless they are panoplied such as those of Shelley, Rimbaud, Poe, Dostoievsky and countless others, interest only the possessor and those who love him or are beholden to him.

It is passing strange to hear a young Methodist minister of robust health say: “I can not imagine how I could have endured life had I not found early a means of self-expression in my pen. Life would be unendurable for most of us without some means of escape from ourselves. Some find it in golf, others in collecting stamps, others in netting butterflies.” Others find it in cheerful labour in the Lord’s vineyard and that is where it is becoming for all clergymen to find it. If their quest is unsuccessful then they should find other employment. Tedium vitæ is the most unbecoming disease for a priest, and if he has it he should not talk about it.

Mr. Dawson’s father, hard-shelled, self-sacrificing, saturated with a spirit of service, was able, largely through the resourcefulness of an industrious, pious, tireless wife to put aside every year a few shillings. When the legacy came to his son, then pastor of a Church in London, it was quite a tidy sum. He promptly gambled with it and lost. “It was a very pious man of most gracious manners who first persuaded me that it was a foolish thing to buy shares and stocks for honest investment when I could buy a hundred times as many shares on margin. So I bought shares in a gold mine in Africa and a coal mine in Australia.” There is a naïveté about this that is equalled only by his account of his exaltation on the discovery of the word ineluctable and the pleasure he had in using it.

Mr. Dawson had the conventional Christian attitude toward avarice, holding that it is the root of all evil; but he also realised that without money there was no flowering of the softer and more delicate amenities of life. How much mental misery might have been spared the poetic pastor had he, in one of his trips to Italy, “whither I went on all possible occasion,” come upon the story of one Francis Bernardone. One day while Francis was still a boy he had an emotional crisis which in its genesis was not unlike that which Mr. Dawson had when he became conscious that something mysterious was happening to himself. “I—the essential Ego, the thinking Self—was passing out of my body.” Some of Francis’ constant joyousness might have crept into his soul, and the enthusiastic love of poverty which was the keynote of the character of the Poverello of Assisi might have heartened him in many hours of apprehension. But though he had long loved Francis and year by year sought his shrine, and even lectured in his own monastery he would never have succeeded in assimilating his spirit.

When Mr. Dawson approached his fiftieth year, he had an emotional experience of a kind that has often been described; some call it conversion, others seeing a light. He who had an insatiable appetite for pleasure now learned that there was a great difference between pleasure and happiness. For the first time in his life he was completely happy: he had discovered the poor and the sinful and he was moved to deliver them, to succour them, and to purge them. For the first time, he found himself invaded with a spirit of service. He coveted martyrdom for the uplifting of the South London poor. He would devote his strength and the remainder of his days to put in the way of recovery those who had been bruised and battered out of human shape by a terrible misfortune or more terrible vices, and those past cure, he would absolve from their sins and bury. It was all a wonder and a wild delight—while it lasted. But like all emotional states it was transitory.

Perhaps nothing conveys Mr. Dawson’s subjugation to the emotional states like his experience with Roosevelt. The latter talked to him of the virtues of one of his books, The Quest of the Simple Life, which apparently impressed the President as did Pastor Wagner’s classic. The author was forced to the humiliating confession that he had totally forgotten it. The phase of thought and feeling which had produced the book was past. The late Marcel Proust and Mr. W. J. Dawson would not have been congenial! The twelve years that he spent as pastor of the Congregational Church in South London added to his reputation as a pulpit orator and he says that they were marked by great intellectual growth. We have to take his word; there is no display of it in his autobiography.

At the end of this period he came to the United States to lecture. He looked upon Newark and saw that it was a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariot. New Jersey’s metropolis said, “Rise up, come away,” and he came. Whether he found it the rose of Sharon or the lily of the valley we shall not know until his next book is published, but it is safe to assume that he liked it better than South London. We trust he found there “that rare kind of friendship which is rooted in intellectual intimacy,” and that he encountered people interested in the kind of thoughts most vital to him, so that he was not forced, as he was in London, “to relatively low levels of conversation.” Had Mr. Dawson called his book Recollections of Emotional States it would have been far more fitting than The Autobiography of a Mind. The reader who can divine the writer’s mind from this book has perspicacity and penetration that I do not possess.

From the photograph of the frontispiece, and from the lines of the book, I gather that Mr. Dawson was leonine externally and feline internally; that he had great sensitiveness to verbal intoxication and that always logorrhœa threatened to exhaust him; that there was within him a big hedonist and a little puritan, that the latter sat in adverse judgment of the former at all times, and tried to trip him when Mr. Dawson was not watching his step; that he was sensitive as a child and self-conscious as a man; that his ear was not attuned to the reproofs of life and that his eye constantly mistook the comb for the honey.

IX
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS

My Musical Life, by Walter Damrosch. Irving Berlin, by Alexander Woollcott. Sunlight and Song, by Maria Jeritza. With Pencil, Brush and Chisel, by Emil Fuchs.