Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/171

Rh not unfrequent lapses into the cheapest conventional style of the average popular novelist. What can one make of a piece of writing like this, where the most flagrant puppets for the time-being usurp the parts of what he has taught us to feel as something like human characters?

(The Durbeyfield family is discussing a recent visit of Mr. D'Urberville.)

And so on, in the same vile and detestable fashion.

But his dramatic aberrations lead him into blunders more serious still. To say nothing of the improbability of four milkmaids, all sleeping in one room, and all hopelessly in love with one blameless prig of an amateur gentleman farmer, what a shocking want