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Johnson, his Friends and Critics; Essays, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Macaulay, Birrell, etc. Boswell. Whitfield's Some Eighteenth Century Men of Letters. Burke. Texts: Works, 12 vols. For various speeches, see Selections for Reading, above. Criticism: Essay, by Birrell, in Obiter Dicta. See also Dowden's French Revolution and English Literature, and Woodrow Wilson's Mere Literature.
"The information which you now disclose, Mr. Sammet," he said, after Leon had made known his predicament, "is all obiter dicta." Leon blushed. He imagined this to be somewhat harsh criticism of the innocent statement that he thought Potash & Perlmutter could be bluffed into releasing Louis Grossman. "Imprimis," Mr. Feldman went on, "I have not been consulted by Mr.
Aristotle's dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle's opinions on violent and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe as there certainly were in the days of the immortal "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum" who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti's professed reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its palpable and notorious facts.
Nothing is lost of the sharp wrangle of the counsel on points of law, the measured decision's of the bench; the duels between the attorneys and the witnesses. The crowd sways with the rise and fall of the shifting, testimony, in sympathetic interest, and hangs upon the dicta of the judge in breathless silence.
Their duty was to listen to us, and act by our judgment; and when we have told them now for ages that our place is at their feet, the hem of their garments for our lips, their smiles brighter than the sunshine of heaven, should we feel surprise at their acquiescing in our dicta, and assuming the enormous social influence which we yield to them, beg them upon our knees to take?
These suddenly appeared in the House one morning, with favourable recommendations, and, mirabile dicta, the end of the day saw them through the Senate and signed by the governor. At last Mr. Crewe by his Excellency had stamped the mark of his genius on the statute books, and the Honourable Jacob Botcher, holding out an olive branch, took the liberty of congratulating him.
If a blind obedience were yielded to the dicta of the Confession, a lasting bound would be set to the spirit of inquiry; if, on the other hand, they dissented from the formulae agreed upon, the point of union would be lost. Unfortunately both incidents occurred, and the evil results of both were quickly felt.
Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta; ... Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis. Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter.
His dicta are the dicta, not of a judge, but of an advocate: often of an advocate in an unsound cause. Yet, in the very act of misrepresenting the laws of composition, he shows how well he understands them. But he was perpetually acting against his better knowledge. His sins were sins against light. He trusted that what was bad would be pardoned for the sake of what was good.
But the truth of the matter is, that an artist teaches far more by his mere background and properties, his landscape, his costume, his idiom and technique all the part of his work, in short, of which he is probably entirely unconscious, than by the elaborate and pompous moral dicta which he fondly imagines to be his opinions.
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