Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/217

Rh place, no gradual process of descent. And yet this is not quite so, for at least half a dozen instances could be quoted of his success at spoiling good work by flaws in workmanship, or by his uncertainty of touch. But then his uncertainty of touch is perpetual. It is rarely that he is quite sure how he is working, that he entirely transfuses his material. Take his use of allegory. Could anything be more stupidly and annoyingly obscure than 'The Three Captains'? The whole matter treated of was quite ephemeral, and one may almost say quite personal. He makes an elaborate allegory of it where his letch for technical terms runs riot. Even in the 'Galley Slave,' his one success in this style, he cannot help trying to show us how well up he is in nautical phraseology, as if in an allegory any pressure of the symbolism were not the most obvious futility. Of course, when he attempts direct portrayal, he doses us with his peculiar pedantries to the top of his bent. The Bolivar doesn't drift seven days and seven nights merely: she drifts to the Start, because everybody ought to know that the Start is a bit of local colour. Her 'coal and fo'c'sle are short'; her 'bulk-heads fly'; she 'hogs' and 'sags' and 'races'; the seas pound at her 'strake'; the Lord, it is hoped, has 'his thumb on the plummer-block,' and so on. Clever, isn't it? But (as Mr. Kipling says the devil