Upon whose shoulders as President of the Canadian Bankers' Association has fallen the burden of the negotiations with the Government regarding the revision of the Bank Act. Sir Frederick is General Manager of the Bank of Montreal. I GODS OF MODERN GRUB STREET BY A. ST. JOHN ADCOCK II.-RUDYARD KIPLING T is usual to write of the 1890's as the days of the decadents; but I never see them so labelled without being reminded of the Hans Brietmann ballad "Hans Brietmann gif a barty: For, though Wilde and Beardsley remain, the rest of their hectic group have either gone home or are going, and, from this distance, it is possible to focus that decade and realize that its prevailing influences were Henley and Stevenson, and that the true glory of the '90's is that they were the flowering time. of Shaw, Barrie, Wells and Kipling. Kipling, indeed, began his literary career in the '80's, and by the end of the '90's was the most popular, and most belauded and decried of living authors. After being sent home to Westward Ho, in Devon, to be educated at the school he has immortalized in "Stalkey & Co.", he went back to India, where he was born in 1865, and served successively on the staffs of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and The Allahabad Pioneer from 1882 to 1889. The satirical verses, sketches of native character, stories of Anglo-Indian life, with their intriguings and their shrewd understandings of the shabbier side of human nature that he contributed to those papers between the age of seventeen and twenty-five, rather justified Barrie's dictum that he was "born blasé." But when they were collected into his first eight or nine small books-"Departmental Ditties", "Plain Tales From the Hills", "In Black and White", "Soldiers Three", "Under the Deodars", and the rest-they capped an instant boon in India, with an even more roaring success in England and America. The vogue of the shilling shocker was then in its lusty infancy, and Kipling's insignificantlooking drab-covered booklets competed triumphantly with that showy ephemeral fiction on our bookstalls for the suffrage of the railway traveller. From the start, like. Dickens, he was no pet of a select. circle, but appealed to the crowd. an upper floor of a gloomy building squeezed between shops, at 19 Villiers Street, Strand, and in that somewhat squalid London thoroughfare were written some of the best stories in "Life's Handicap", and two of his comparative failures "The Record of Eadalia Herodsfoot", and his first novel, "The Light That Failed". Stevenson, in his letters, about then, deplored his "copiousness and haste", said, "He is all smart journalism and cleverness; it is all bright and shallow and limpid, like a business papera good one, s'entendu; but there's no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night. . . . I look on and admire; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature, I am wounded". But, naturally, Stevenson, conjuring fastidiously with words, like a lapidary with jewels, felt that his literary ideals were outraged by this exuberant, amazing young man, who, coming with a banjo for a lyre, took the sacred temple of the muses by violence, and disturbed it with raucous echoes of the music hall; who brought the manners and speech of the canteen into the library, made free use of slang and ugly colloquialisms with the most. brilliant effectiveness, and, in general, strode rough-shod over SO many accepted artistic conventions. It was easy to say his verse was meretriciously catchy, but its cleverness, the bite of its irony and humor were indisputable; that his Anglo-Indian stories were marred by vulgarities and crudities of characterization; that the riotous humors of Mulvaney and his soldier chums showed nothing but a boisterous, schoolboyish sense of fun; but there was no denying the originality of mind, the abounding genius that was experimentally at work in all these things. Not only had Kipling broken new ground, he had defied conventions and broken it in a new way of his own, and through the following ten years he was justified of his daring by the maturer, more masterly poems and stories in "BarrackRoom Ballads", "The Seven Seas", "Many Inventions", and two “Jungle Books", and, above all, by "Kim” -that wonderful story. He was a born story-teller, and could interest you as keenly in ships, bridges, machinery and mechanical objects as in the human comedy and tragedy. He could take his tone with an equal mastery, as occasion served, from the smokeroom, the bar, or the street, and from the golden phrasing and flashing visions of the biblical prophets. However much the critics might qualify and hesitate, the larger world of readers, men and women, cultured and uncultured, took him to their hearts without reserve. Never since Dickens died had any author won so magical a hold on the admiration and affection of our people. In those days, at the height of his fame, when he lay dangerously ill in New York, the cables could not have flung out more bulletins across the world, nor the newspapers followed his hourly progress more excitedly if it had been a ruling monarch in extremis. The Kaiser cabled enquiries; all England and America stood in suspense, as it were, at the closed door of that sick chamber, as those who loved Goldsmith lingered on his staircase when he was near the end, waiting for news of him. Yet, curiously enough, in the personality of Kipling, so far as it has revealed itself to his readers, there is little of the gentleness and lovableness of Goldsmith, nor of the genial, overflowing kindness that drew the multitude to Dickens. It was the sheer spell and brilliance of his work, I think, that drew them to Kipling, more than the lure of any personal charm. During the Boer War he developed into the poet and apostle of Imperialism; became our highpriest of Empire, Colonial expansion, commercial supremacy and material prosperity. You may see in some of his poems of that period and in his recently-published "Letters of Travel" how he has failed to advance with the times, how out of touch he is with the spirit of modern democracy. A certain arrogance and co sureness had increased upon h.m; his god was the old Hebrew god of battles, ours the chosen race, and even amid the magnificent contritions of the "Recessional" he cannot forget that we are superior to the "lesser breeds without the law". He is no idealist. and has no sympathy with the hopes of the poor and lowly; there is scornfulness in his attitude toward those who do not share his belief that the present social order cannot be improved, who do not join him in worshipping "the god of things as they are", but pay homage rather to the god of things as they ought to be. And yet, I remember the beauty, the wisdom and whimsical understanding there is in his stories for children-I remember that children's hymn in "Puck of Pook's Hill"— "Teach us the strength that cannot seek, By deed or thought, to hurt the weak; That, under Thee, we may possess Man's strength to comfort man's distress." I remember stray, poignant things. in this book and that, especially in "The Years Between", and am ready to think I misjudge him when I take his intolerant Imperialism too seriously, and that these rarer, kindlier moods, these larger-hearted emotions are at least as characteris tic of him. Some day somebody will gather into one glorious volume "The Finest Story in the World", "Without Benefit of Clergy", "At the End of the Passage", "The Man Who Would Be King", "The Brushwood Boy", "They", and a score or so of other short stories, and, with "Kim", and a book of such poems as "Sussex", "Tomlinson", "To the True Romance", "M'Andrew's Hymn", "The Last Chantey", those great ballads of "The Bolivar", and "The Mary Gloster", and half a hundred more, there will be enough, and more than enough, to give him rank with those whose work shall endure "while there's a world, a people and a year”. The next article in this series is on Herbert George Wells. |