Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/124

112 'Nothing save the spikes of the rain without and the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.' Verbal magic of this sort is of the poet: it is thrown out whole, so to say, not constructed. Or take this: 'There was nothing but grass everywhere, and it was impossible to see two yards in any direction. The grass-stems held the heat exactly as boiler-tubes do.' No more: not another word. Veritably in Art the part is ever greater than the whole. But it follows that when he deliberately sets himself down to exploit this supreme gift of his, he succeeds but moderately. 'The City of Dreadful Night' may be taken as a good example. It is excellent better-class journalism, and all the third-rate 'word-painters' are in raptures over it; but (alas!) it is not the third-rate, nor the second-rate, nor even the first-rate 'word-painters' who precisely know what they are talking about, let alone what people twenty years hence will talk about. Yet (alas! once more) for how much do they and their wrong-headed praise and undiscriminating enthusiasm count in the creation of vogues! Must a man ever owe three-fourths of his temporary success to his defects and limitations? Smartness and superficiality. Jingoism and aggressive cocksureness, rococo fictional types and overloaded pseudoprose, how much too much have these helped to make the name of our young Anglo-Indian