Rudyard Kipling SAHIB SALAAM ! Mulvaney roars, with clash of can, To chime "Is 'ealth!" at Learoyd's cheer - And even Dinah welcomes beer As better than the sullen tear That stifled hope and doubled fear And many a man and boy beside Who cheer wi' Jock, drink Terence' toast; He lives and never better tale He told, nor yet shall tell, Though through the years with golden sail Should his Three Deckers swell; The song's not writ to end his list; New life, a freer breath Shall e'en from that dark valley's mist - The Phantom 'Rickshaw, death. – WALLACE RICE, in the Kipling Note-Book. Turning from the man to his work again, it will be recalled that Mr. Henry James found two good reasons for the high favor won by Mr. Kipling: first in the freshness of his stories, and then in the suspense caused by a belief that this freshness could not last. Every one admits the pricelessness of the ability to tell a new thing well or an old thing better; and Mr. James has told us, doubtless, why so young a man should attain so high an eminence. He has novelty, he has force and courage, he has insight into the human heart, he has a new stage setting for his characters, and he has something to say. Always, at all times, he is a storyteller. His individuality, energy, bravery, character, call it by any name you will, appears in all he writes. He is always interesting, he is always convincing, and we never know what he is going to tell us next. No line can be drawn between Mr. Kipling's prose and verse in these respects each aids the other in attaining the results he seeks. None of his volumes is unmixed: his prose works contain original poems taken as texts, poems woven into the narrative, and tales told in one medium as in the other; his poetical works contain much that appears in the others as prose, the mere use of rime and rhythm changing its character not at all. The shorter stories are generally in verse, the longer, in prose; but the "Departmental Ditties" are without poetic quality, while the longest poem Mr. Kipling has written, "The Children of the Zodiac," is not metrified. There are in English to-day two widely different predilections toward what is technically called poetry, and it is the extraordinary good fortune of Mr. Kip Rudyard Kipling ling to stand alone in making appeal direct to the lov ers of both varieties. One sort is found in the volumes of verse, tiny in size and as admirable as they are unassuming, which are appearing all over the huge English-speaking world at the rate of several a week. The poems in these books, of delicate workmanship, charming content, and almost perfect loveliness, still make, in the present condition of public taste, but a limited appeal. Yet slight acquaintance with them will justify the assertion that nothing so beautiful and so voluminous has been seen in the world before. The other species of verse, called popular, is to be read in the daily papers usually, in the weekly and monthly periodicals frequently, and, when set to music, forms the customary song of the variety theater and the street. Viewed in the light of literary art, this latter sort of verse, it need hardly be said, is inferior to the other in almost every conceivable respect, the most palpable difference, however, lying in the treatment, or technique. In respect of his own verse, Mr. Kipling, it is quite accurate to say, combines the matter of the better verse with the manner of the worse. As is perfectly plain, all his poems go to one tune or another—and these tunes are never of strange meter or unusual accompaniment, but always simple, straightforward, old fashioned — such melodies, in fine, as can be whistled after a single hearing, whether that be in church or out of it. It is a curious proof of the insistence of the air behind his poems that one of the greatest of them, "The Hanging of Danny Deever," has been set to music by several hands, but always to what is, after all, the same melody. The eminence of the composers forbids the thought of borrowing, so it is evident that the similarity is intrinsic—the poet having made his verses to a dead march, the musicians have been compelled to arrive at a single result. Tunes, lilts, chants, these are always dear to the heart of man. It was this fact that old Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had in mind when, though himself a lawyer, he set the ballads of a nation before its laws. If Mr. Kipling had done nothing more than set good new stories to good old tunes, his acceptance as a popular poet would be assured. His stories are new and good, as has been shown; his insistent rhythm, seldom varied and never experimented with, disappoints few of his listeners, while analysis of the meas ures he uses shows them to be identical with those which from the beginning have been either hallowed for edification or hollowed for entertainment. Indeed, hardly one of his meters has an ascertained origin, but hearkens back to the days before written history or unchanted poetry. It requires no education of the ear to detect the stress in such songs as these; savages have been found without a belief in God, but none without knowing how to chant and dance, if only to the noise of sticks knocked together; our very hearts keep such time. Universal acceptance of such work was, there fore, fairly inevitable. But there is much more than a mere story or mere sing-song in Mr. Kipling's poems, more than the tale of strange lands and strange folk: there is with these the force and out spokenness and joy in life which are his; and there is this subtle comprehension of the tastes of the people. The selection of strenuous rhythm and easy Rudyard Kipling rime shows a perfect understanding of the fact that metrical over-refinement will not be tolerated by the many, while its absence can be made up to the few. The choice of subjects for celebration in verse shows the same comprehension. All the world loves spicy scandal, all the world loves a fair fight, and most of the world loves scandal and fighting anyway, whether spicy or fair or not. The day is far distant, we fear, still in the bosom of an infinite future, when the tale of another's mental or moral weakness or the sound of trumpets and drums shall fail to interest the hearer. It is in this way that Mr. Kipling launches his poetic shallop; for the Departmental Ditties" are all rimed gossip, the 66 "Barrack-Room Ballads" all rimed fighting. And, with unerring instinct, there is in one a gibbeting of the foibles or vices of the ruling class, and in the other a reaching back of the commanders and the pageantry of war to the hearts of the soldiery and the bowels of the machinery of it. It is generally the private, seldom the subaltern, never the general: Mr. Kipling uses pawns more than pieces in his chess. From the earlier gossip of the "Ditties” Mr. Kipling broadens out into an extended exposition of the diffi culties of life. Beginning as a mere satirist and humorist, he makes his way from the particular to the general, as in "The Vampire" or "Tomlinson," until he attains a moralism not unlike Thackeray's after a similar evolution. From the bloodthirstiness of the "Bal lads" and a note hardly more than Tyrtaan, through such a song as that of "The Widow at Windsor,"he passes to the abstract thought of the "dear, dear land," the "precious stone set in a silver sea" of |