RUDYARD KIPLING

INASMUCH as he defies classification, Mr. Rudyard Kipling has incurred the just resentment of criticism. When we know precisely what a man is trying to do, it is comparatively easy to make up our minds as to whether he has done it or not. But when he employs methods of his own to achieve "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” he upsets our preconceptions and stultifies our standards. We know not whether to praise or blame; we are fascinated and irritated in about equal measures; and, human nature being what it is, the irritation is apt to get the upper hand in our utterances. In saying this, I am partly making a personal confession, but mainly interpreting certain symbolic utterances of Mr. Kipling's own, which I take to imply that critics in general have felt themselves baffled much as I myself have been. Again and again in reading Mr. Kipling's work, whether in prose or verse, I have said to myself: "This is remarkable, this is powerful, this is even beautiful-but is it literature? Is it not journalism raised to its highest potency? Does this writer own due allegiance to the great traditions of the language? Can he claim a place in the august procession of our poets? Is he of the tribe of Chaucer, Milton, and Wordsworth? What's Tennyson to him, or he to Tennyson?"

Such questionings have now and then flitted through my mind, and have apparently been uttered by other critics, for

Mr. Kipling has made more than one rejoinder to them in his own allegoric fashion. Already in his Barrack-Room Ballads of 1892, he published this transparent apologue :

When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,

Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,

Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

Wherefore he called to his wife, and fled to fashion his work anewThe first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review; And he left his lore to the use of his sons-and that was a glorious gain

When the Devil chuckled "Is it Art?" in the ear of the branded Cain.

They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart, Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: "It's striking, but is it Art?"

The stone was dropped at the quarry-side and the idle derrick

swung,

While each man talked of the aims of Art, and each in an alien tongue.

The tale is as old as the Eden Tree-and new as the new-cut tooth

For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;

And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying

heart,

The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"

our ears

Yes, this is the question the fiend is for ever whispering in ears as we read Mr. Kipling's amazingly spirited rhythms: "It's pretty—or (more often, perhaps) it's ugly— but is it Art ? " Art of a sort it is, undoubtedly, and brilliant, masterly art. But is it good Art? Is it right Art? Is it Art in the noblest sense of the word? Again Mr.

Kipling takes up the parable, this time in The Seven Seas (1896). The poem is entitled The Neolithic Age. I quote (from the fourth edition) the first stanzas of it, which are complete in themselves, though Mr. Kipling rubs in the moral in five additional verses:

In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage

For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt;

I was a singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring

Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;

And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival, of Solutré, told the tribe my style was outré—

'Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell.

And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart

Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,

And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;

And I wiped my mouth and said, "It is well that they are dead, For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong."

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came, And he told me in a vision of the night :

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right!"

It is not quite clear how the Totem emphasised his deliverance. Is the stress on tribal? Is it only for "tribal” poetry that this Universalist doctrine holds good? Or are we to understand that criticism as a whole is a survival of savagery, and that one sort of poetry is as good as another, and probably better? To question so is to demand too great explicitness of the fabulist. Suffice it that he puts in his protest clearly against the method of criticism which