Being an original, Mr. Dennis Bradley cannot be fitted into any of our little pigeon-holes; he is not easily labelled; but as I have already spoken of his essays, we will keep the term and call him an essayist. His work, however, has had, and still has, so many phases that we shall do well to discriminate a little. There has been, for example, a change in his manner; and it has shown us, on the whole, a steady development, that advance towards the perfection of the instrument which marks the true artist. In his early work there was an irregularity, a wildness, a careless profusion, which promised much but hinted that the artist was not yet fully grown. He tried, if I remember rightly, to push his prose as near to poetry as it would go; and it was only later, when the thought became more weighty, that he turned to the quieter yet more impressive manner, the chiselled form and the pregnant phrase. During this early period, one of his favourite themes was Youth and Age; no new thing, it is true, but one to which he gave new significance by his characteristic treatment. When he exalted Youth and covered Age with ridicule, was he not interpreting the spirit of the times? One can discover, in that alone, the born man of letters. The times, disillusioned, were all for Youth, and he, divining it, stepped forth as our spokesman. Just because he happened to be also a tailor, just because young men happen to spend more on clothes than old men do, is no reason why Mr. Bradley should be robbed of his praise as a writer sensitive to our subtle changes of feeling.
Although there are some persons, not unpretending in criticism, who would have us believe that they prefer the earlier, wilder note, happily they are few, and most of us, I imagine, pass with pleasure to the later, more chastened form. Here we can remark his versatility, his admirable method of appealing to one type of mind after another. Now, he will give us a bright little philosophical treatise, and, sweeping away the accumulation of trivialities, he will dig in a brisk sentence or two to the roots of life, as in his essay on ‘The Three Essentials.’ Now, he will frankly appeal to the hard-headed man of affairs, and will annihilate half-a-dozen economic heresies in one paragraph. Sometimes it is the social rather than the purely economic problem that engages him. But his large sweep does not make for easy classification, and I, for one, cannot attempt to discriminate between such things, say, as ‘A Prophet on Profits,’ ‘Comparisons,’ and ‘Economy and Rubbish.’ Now and again, it is true, he seems to lay himself open to the charge of sacrificing everything to the topical appeal; but, after all, these are critical times, when men are looking for light; and, at the worst, the manner, unique in our letters, will remain to beguile us. Moreover, there also will remain the personal note, for like all your true essayists he does not hesitate to reveal his personality, to make the reader his confidant.