Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/216

204 product good enough, strong enough, verifiable enough to last?' No single ballad has had such a furore of success as 'Fuzzy- Wuzzy.' A snatch, a line here and there, seems already to have passed into our daily speech, but has it passed permanently? Is not the hour close at hand in which we shall all be hopelessly sick of

or of

Doggerel, clever doggerel, attractive doggerel, but doggerel so much above the best of the music-hall as to win it a time-honoured place—inspired doggerel, in a word? Ah, that is less certain! The more often one reads these Ballads, the thinner and thinner appear the worst of them, the more and more dubious all but one or two of the very best; and as for the 'other verses,' the twenty poems that follow them up, there are some of them so appallingly bad that they paralyse all efforts at consideration. When you have taken out three or four, the others are simply non-existent. The drop in Mr. Kipling is always straight from the stars into the puddles. He has no middle