Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/218

206 keeps inquiring), 'Is it art?' To tell the simple truth, it reads rather more like juvenile vanity. Or, again, there is the equal uncertainty of touch which afflicts him when he attempts to write with an assured poetical diction. The 'Ballad of East and West' is such an attempt, and it is the least like a failure of them all. ('The English Flag' is a remarkable instance of how he can fail when he really makes up his mind to show us that he is a master of style quâ style.) It is, indeed, curious to note how he can write, even in work that has stirred him, galvanised conventionalism side by side with the most vivid and actual realism. Yet he does it again and again. The magnanimous Afghan of this Ballad, for instance, 'whistles his only son,' who, like unto the good young only sons of all the robber chiefs in our more or less pseudo-literature, and also unto our old, old poetic friend the eagle or the hawk or the falcon, or any other member of the genus raptor, 'drops from the mountain crest.' Then Mr. Kipling suddenly looks at him as he is, and describes him in one admirable line like this:

Fancy that being the line that follows and rhymes with the venerable crest-dropping business! It is