Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/125

Rh familiar to the readers of the English-speaking race all over the earth!

Grant to him, however, as we surely must, the possession of verbal magic, of this striking aspect of our precious and indispensable literary quality, and add to it such gifts as have been enumerated in our short review of his work, and surely the case for taking it and its creator seriously has been well made out. On the other hand, we must not for a moment lose sight of the fact with which we started in our consideration of his claims to a permanent literary position. We are dealing with things on a scale which can only be called small, and his limitations, his aberrations, are very real and very grave. The time is past when a writer of talent could win such a position, even for a generation, by the most nimble and vivid variations of a 'criticism of life' adapted to the use of the nursery or the schoolroom. Loud-tongued, fractious, and numerous though it still is, the Noble Army of Blockheads no longer exercises that perfect tyranny it did fifteen or twenty years ago. It is yet able to dispense the loaves and fishes, but its judgments, overwhelming though they be for a short time, are being perpetually upset by the small but evergrowing section of the public that begins in Art and Literature to know its right hand from its left. It will not be long before people come to tell