Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/120

108 Mouth' as a sample, or 'The Other Man') I often find him admirable.

But do not let me seem to strike with too great insistence the note of depreciation and disappointment. That would be to be unjust as well as ungracious. The best Mr. Kipling has to give he gives, and the best of that best is veritably good, and what more should we ask of him? Nowhere in his more elaborate efforts to delineate child-life (and some of them are something rather like successes) does he give us so perfect a piece of work as the little child-idyl called 'The Story of Muhammad Din': nowhere does his gift of natural horror find more artistically harrowing expression than in 'The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,' or in 'Bubbling Well Road': nowhere does he paint the 'ewig Weibliche' with a more liquid depth of simple love than in 'Lispeth' or 'Beyond the Pale.' And all of these are stories that illustrate the 'native' feature.

There is one obvious quality in all literary work without which the name or fame of a writer has no possible chance of survival, and that is the literary quality. Its manifestations are many, far more diverse, indeed, than jejune critics like Matthew Arnold will admit. Arnold loved to quote a line of Sophokles above a line of Homer, a line of Dante below a line of Shakespeare, and to assure us that these were all