Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/140

128 reviewers remained the sole piece of fun that is to be found in his writings, one would suppose that his protests of spiritual super-sanity in his last attacks on Matthew Arnold were not serious. And yet he really does perceive the beauty and strength of scholarship, and in some of these essays we find an effort after their perfection which is strenuous and almost successful. The essays on Byron, Coleridge, and Ford are the only criticisms of his that give the impression of anything like harmonious wholes. Those on Rossetti and Arnold are, in some ways, a step forward, but a step that is less sure. When we get to the review of L'Année Terrible we have reached the connecting link between the second part of his work and the last. The self-abandonment has begun. 'These divers waifs of tentative criticism,' he says, with an oblique look at lost harmonious wholes. 'The one object,' he says again, 'which gives to this book whatever it may have of unity, is the study of art in its imaginative aspects.' Yet the book is a noteworthy one. It is full of scraps of really valuable criticism. And more. The intuition which as early as '67 saw that Arnold 'if justly judged must be judged by his verse and not by his prose' was a fine one. The remark is somewhat excessive. Arnold, for good or for evil, is to be judged by both; but, in