Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/115

Rh and fame, and fortune all at your hand, to write in this way of your work:

The depth and dream of my desire, The bitter paths wherein I stray, Thou knowest Who hast made the fire, Thou knowest Who hast made the clay.

One stone the more swings to her place In that dread Temple of Thy worth— It is enough that thro' Thy grace I saw nought common on Thy earth.

Take not that vision from my ken; Oh, whatso'er may spoil or speed, Help me to need no aid from men That I may help such men as need!'—

to write like this, and then to present to us such unspeakably mediocre and wretched stuff as 'The Lang Men o' Larut' or 'Namgay Doola'! 'Under any circumstances, remember,' says the sagacious Dickie, in his final character as the pictorial journalist in the heyday of his London vogue, 'four-fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.' Very true: but is this any reason that a man who can give us such a splendid sample of story-telling as 'The Courting of Dinah Shadd,' or touch the very spring of the lacrimœ rerum in the piteous narrative of 'The Man Who Was,' should proceed to inflict on us work which even the most sympathetic criticism can only designate as beneath contempt? Mr. Kipling asks too