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[203] effects unspoiled. His narrative of the Saratoga campaign is solid historical writing; but alas, hard at its heels follows the judgment that Saratoga was more important than Marathon. In description, in narrative, in its dry controversial humour, Dwight's style is a sound eighteenth-century style, very serviceable in conveying his keen judgments upon statecraft and college management; an administrator's style, clean in structure, sharp and low-toned in diction, modelled upon Johnson and Burke, but with an occasional richer rhythm. ‘The bloom of immortality, already deeply faded, now withered away.’ The apostle Eliot, when he died, ‘undoubtedly went to receive the benedictions of multitudes, who, but for him, had finally perished.’ Sometimes there are short passages of a sober eloquence not unlike Edwards's own. Of the congregation to whom Dr. Swift had been a faithful pastor Dwight observes: ‘Many of them will probably remember him with gratitude throughout eternity.’ But such pieces of Attic diction or noble rhythm may be followed in the very next sentence by a banality. As in his descriptions and narratives, so in the general body of his prose, the passages of power or beauty are not sustained. He has merely stumbled upon them. From first to last Dwight has either no aesthetic standards or only the standards of cocksure provincialism. ‘Longitude from Yale College,’ the legend upon the map prefixed to each of his volumes, might be their motto. His opinions upon Elizabethan writers, upon architecture, upon the drama, upon Greek and Roman literature, would be incredible if they did not stare us in the face from cold type. His genuine powers are rendered nugatory by his incompetence in the realms of taste and imagination. He is the complete Puritan, inhospitable to art but thoroughly efficient in dealing with things; and—to modify Arnold's formula concerning the Philistine—a maker of farms that produce, of sermons that edify, of a college that educates, and of characters that wear. His want of adequate standards leaves his book a miscellany, not so much because there are all sorts of things in it as because of their huge artistic incongruities; not so much because of the variety of its contents as because of the unplumbed gaps between their literary levels. Yet this is not to say that after some acquaintance with the Travels the reader does not perceive a dominant interest
Cambridge University. Press, 1917-1921.
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