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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. Rhodes of literature.

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Mr. Kipling is the Cecil

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

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"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 virtue which Kipling lays stress upon is the military virtue of obedience for militant ends." 2 This is a partial misconception. Mr. Kipling is none 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 he has been truly a citizen of his own country, till he has been able to say with Whitman:

"I stand in my place with my own day here.”

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

2 Charlotte Porter in Poet-Lore.

objector has failed to read between his lines. Mr. Kipling is not at bottom a materialist, but a psychologist, I had almost said moralist. The material product resulting from human energy interests him as the tangible expression of character. As to the "militant ends," the notion is so patently absurd that it hardly calls for refutation. That the end he has in view is material and vulgar prosperity this is a gratuitous assumption denied by every line of his writings. He seeks the permanent well-being of the world, an end to be achieved only, as he reasons, by securing the well-being of that race or of those races best fitted to dominate the world, to shape its ideals, and to control its destiny. In Mr. Kipling's prose and verse the goal toward which the Saxon struggle for supremacy is directed is

"An hundred times made plain, To seek another's profit

And work another's gain."

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One cannot deny, however, that the immediate means by which Mr. Kipling looks for the advance of civilization is militarism. It is not the God of Things as They Should Be that he worships. there be any defect in his philosophy of human progress it lies in his danger of relatively undervaluing the effectiveness of quiet spiritual forces as opposed to the forces more spectacular and demonstrative. We would respectfully recall to his memory a

"The White Man's Burden."

passage from a very old-fashioned book: "And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks. before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice."

17. TREATMENT OF NATURE. In traversing his imperial domain with Mr. Kipling we are impressed not only with the sense of tramping armies, rolling ships, and flying flags, we are struck by the out-of-door feeling of it all, by the great stretches of plain and ocean and coast-line, and the sound of the wind about our ears.

Yet nature, in the thought of Mr. Kipling, is simply the background for humanity. He has little of the contemplative spirit. He has nothing of that half-indolent, brooding receptiveness of effects from every source whereby Tennyson permitted a scene to mirror itself in quiet harmony on his mind's retina. He is too impatient, too alert for this. You would hardly expect to find him writing a song to the daisy or a sonnet on a daffodil, or celebrating the joys of solitary communion with the landscape. Nor has he any " philosophy of nature.” He conceives of nature neither, as Wordsworth and Shelley do, as if she possessed a distinctly personal life, nor as Keats does, as though she were peopled with

mythical beings apart both from human life and her own. He constantly personifies natural phenomena, but never forgets that he is talking in metaphor. Note several instances of his interpretation of natural scenery or force in terms of human activity :

"The wind that tramps the world."

“The deaf, gray-bearded seas.”’

"The hours struck clear in the cabin ; the nosing bows slapped and scuffled with the seas.'

"All night the red flame stabbed the sky

With wavering, wind-tossed spears."'

"Hot moist orchids that make mouths at you."

“The winter moon was walking the untroubled sea.” “Driving a whispering wall of water to right and left.” "The Peace Rock lay across the shallows like a long snake, and the little tired ripples hissed as they dried on its hot side."

Personification is common in all imaginative writing, but its use in Kipling deserves special note. His interest is so exclusively centred in the activities of men and women that he has to transfer their various forms of effort to his landscape before entering into its spirit with much sympathy. Thus we hear of the seawater's "choking and chuckling," of the winds "herding the purple-blue cloud-shadows," of "the kiss of rain," of the earth" breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals," of "the thunder chattering overhead,” of “the trees thrashing each other." The advantage of this descriptive method lies in its vividness; it translates

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