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self speaking behind the mask of the talking banjo :

"I have known Defeat, and mocked it as we ran ?

This is the sort of faith to which anything less than success appears inconceivable.

But valiant and uncompromising as it is, this creed lacks the one thing essential to completeness. In making duty, not love, the motive power to action, especially when that action is viewed in the light of service to others, Mr. Kipling ignores the highest sanction for the day's work. In this he is the antithesis of Robert Browning and of St. John, and the very brother-in-blood of Mr. Thomas Carlyle. Like the sage of Chelsea, he has failed to say the last word on his theme.

For love even the love that is mixed with earth- Mr. Kipling finds little place in his gospel. Thomas Atkins says of the London "'ousemaids" that "they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?" Few of Kipling's characters understand much, though many lovers are included in his repertory. Love, in our author's thought, is a very delightful incident of the day's work, but the building of bridges and engines and empires ministers, after all, rather more to the growth of character and of civilization. Not many midday hours must be devoted to wooing, though it is an admirable amusement for evenings when one cannot

labor out o' doors. One of Kipling's characters "held peculiar notions as to the wooing of girls. He said that the best work of a man's career should be laid reverently at their feet." Kipling adds, "Ruskin writes something like this somewhere, I think; but in ordinary life a few kisses are better and save time." Love, in Kipling's thought, is not a passion to abandon one's self to. Only little Hindu widows or very callow subalterns make this blunder, and they always pay for it. I cannot but feel that Kipling always has a slight tone of patronage toward women. The women whom he really likes are those who have most of the masculine grafted into their natures. They are either clever in argument, like Mrs. Hauksbee, or able to "rule eight servants and "William the Conqueror."

two horses," like Love, it is true,

forms the basis of very many of Kipling's stories. But it will be noted that his interest is not in the sentiment or the passion itself, but in the complications growing therefrom.

If Mr. Kipling finds small place for passionate love he finds almost none for spiritual love. I have already intimated that the tenderness of the All Father means less to him than the power of the All Ruler. "The Lord is a just and terrible God, Bess," Dick Heldar explains. That seems to be the view of Mulholland, of McAndrew, of all the militant saints of these ballads and stories. Marked as

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" ?

15.

III

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

But the

ORIGINALITY. Mr. Kipling seems never to have imitated anybody. He has been compared to Bret Harte, to Pierre Loti, to Dickens. 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.

of theme.

His originality is shown first of all in his choice 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,

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

"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 description of the ocean cable ever penned :

"The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires" p2

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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.

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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. 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

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