is the growth of religious insight in Mr. Kipling's recent writings, the years have still much to teach him. He has sung of obedience and work, none more nobly; may we not hope that he will yet rise to the Apostolic conception: "The greatest of these is Love"?

III

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

15. ORIGINALITY.

Mr. Kipling seems never to have imitated anybody. He has been compared to Bret Harte, to Pierre Loti, to Dickens. But the truth is, he owes practically nothing to other writers. He formed himself on no classic models, but relied for inspiration solely upon " that Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." He is as truly a successful original as Carlyle or Browning or Walt Whitman.

His originality is shown first of all in his choice of theme. Politicians and compilers of statistics wrote about India for centuries, but the novelists passed it by. A young man, picking up the discarded material, taught the world more about the Orient than all histories and blue-books, and

brought India nearer to England than the Suez Canal has done." He has made us see India, and feel it, and smell it.

He has dared also to write of the common soldier,

L

who, for the most part, had been overlooked by the novelists and poets, and has made us understand that Tommy is most remarkable like [us]." He has crept into the native mind, and given the reader not clever guesses as to the Oriental's point of view, but actual bits of his psychology. He has made the outside world know Anglo-Indian society. More recently he has given us some marvellous studies of the Jungle-folk. None of these things had ever

been done before.

To some observers Mr. Kipling's treatment of machinery constitutes the most original feature of his work. It is true that no writer has with such persistence and brilliancy sung the "Song o' Steam." Yet it must not be forgotten that Walt Whitman celebrated modern mechanical inventions with great imaginative power. How far the younger writer is indebted to Whitman may be disputed, but absolute originality in this field can hardly be conceded to the author of "McAndrew's Hymn." Did not Whitman, addressing the locomotive, speak of

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Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel, Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides " ? 1

Was it not Whitman who wrote the finest de

scription of the ocean cable ever penned :

“The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires”? 2

The two poets are alike in their idealization of machinery. They differ chiefly in this: the younger man knows machinery not only as a poet, but also as an inventor; the older man looked at it with the eyes of a poet only.

But Mr. Kipling is original in manner as well as in theme. In the Jungle Books he has created a distinctly new form of literature as different from Æsop as from his other closest prototype in this kind, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris. He has invented for his short stories a prose style so bare of all conventional and pedantic devices that puzzled critics have denied to him the possession of style at all. He seems to write not in words but in pictures. Still more original, if anything, is his verse. "Kiplingesque manner " has come to stand for a wellknown type. Its features are virility, a fondness for specific words, the frequent union of the beautiful with the grotesque, and a swift and splendid metrical movement as inimitable as it is indefinable.

After all it may be doubted whether Mr. Kipling has ever done a more original thing than in making the cockney jargon of the Barrack Room Ballads poetic. That the dialect of Burns is suited to purposes of poetry is very plain. It is archaic, not ignorant. The Atkins vernacular, on the other hand, is not properly dialect at all. We should say on general principles that this corrupt patois, this very refuse of human speech, is totally unsuited for the

poet's use, and should incline to doubt whether any living poet could do more than to make it into witty verse. Yet whoever does not call “Mandalay " and "Danny Deever" poetry is ignorant of poetry when he sees it. "To make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is a test of genius,' said Mr. Lowell. . No writer of our century has met this test more unmistakably than Rudyard Kipling.

16. IMPERIALISM. Mr. Kipling is the Cecil Rhodes of literature. No one has done more to give Englishmen an imaginative conception of their colonial possessions, or to cultivate in them a lofty patriotic pride. "Mr. Kipling's most characteristic work is really saturated with politics," says Blackwood's," the politics of true statesmanship." It is difficult to decide whether his influence is greater in literature or in public affairs. His voice is for the closer union of English-speaking peoples, and bitterly against a false liberalism that would extend the privileges of self-government in advance of the preparation of subject races to receive it, equally against, also, the insular complacency of the "Little Englander" who is indifferent to the welfare of colonial dependencies or who selfishly ignores it. "What should they know of England," Kipling asks in "The English Flag," "who only England know?" In his great chant of imperialism, “The Native-Born," he pledges faith

"To the last and the largest Empire,

To the map that is half unrolled."

There have been laureates of England in plenty, but never before a laureate of the British Empire. Born in India, educated in England, a traveller in South Africa and almost every colony that owes allegiance to Victoria, for several years an American resident, Mr. Kipling has indeed followed “the war-drum of the white man round the world."1

For his intense allegiance to Britain Mr. Kipling has not escaped criticism. A recent writer has complained of his devotion to the idea of " the supremacy of the British Empire over all the globe for the sake of materialism and by means of militarism.

The ue which Kipling lays stress upon is the milita virtue of obedience for militant ends." 2 This is a partial misconception. Mr. Kipling is nɔne the less human or representative; on the contrary, he is more so, because so national. A flower shares the general life of nature only by feeding on the soil around its root. No one can become a citizen of the world until h country, till he

"I stand in

e truly a citizen of his own ʼn able to say with Whitman:

place with my own day here."

Thus much for he implied charge of provincialism. As for Kipling's materialism, it is plain that the

"Song of the Banjo."

2 Charlotte Porter in Poet-Lore.