Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/161

Rh 1892, when we still have Mr. Gladstone and the critically poverty-stricken with us, this sort of thing still takes!

Let us have samples of Mr. Caine's actual work. Here is a glimpse of the heroine of a book which, as he declares, 'is less novel than romance and less romance than poem':

The more one reads and reflects on this passage and on the hundred similar gems of description which can be found in any of his novels, the more wonderful and absolute appears his mastery over that unctuous, fatuous, idiotic, pseudo-poetic 'high-falutin' which is the despair of his rivals in popular bathetical pathos.

Now let us see how Mr. Caine's men and women live and move and have their being in the enchanted realms of his art. Almost any passage taken at random will do. Here is one: