Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/119

things are not his game. It is the little personal experiences and the 'begetting of pictures' from the same that he is keen for. This is what interests and absorbs him. 'If I were Job ten times over,' says one of his characters in the most unnatural manner for the character, and in the most natural manner for Mr. Rudyard Kipling, 'I should be so interested in what was going to happen next that I'd stay in and watch.' And he makes his Mrs. Hawksbee repeat the sentiment. 'Colour, light, and motion,' he says elsewhere with his own voice, 'without which no man has much pleasure in living.' He loves the demonstrative instinct of the Oriental. 'You cannot explain things to the Oriental. You must show.' He has in him, too, the Oriental love of story-telling for its own sake; and even their superstition strikes a responsive chord in him. 'I have lived long enough in this India,' he says, 'to know that it is best to know nothing'; and on the force of this he mars a little masterpiece like 'The Courting of Dinah Shadd' with a large allowance of second-rate second-sight prediction, which is all fulfilled to the letter. I cannot tell whether it is simply due to the benumbing chill of incredulity, but his deliberately supernatural tales, from 'The Phantom Rickshaw' downwards, impress me as distinct failures. On the other hand, when he deals in natural horror (take 'At the Pit's