Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues/Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Verse

by Francis William Lauderdale Adams

 

MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE

 

MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE

The actual work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a writer of verse divides itself in the most obvious way into two parts—his first book of verse and his second book of verse, Departmental Ditties and Barrack-Room Ballads. Further developments in this work are possible, and even probable, but at present it surely suffices, for the inevitably partial purposes of contemporary criticism, that these two books mark, and mark clearly, two distinct ages of effort and achievement.

 

I

'departmental ditties and other verses'

Mr. Kipling seems to have small belief in what the old-fashioned authors used to call the intelligent reader. At any rate, he would seem to consider that either an explanatory 'prelude' or 'envoi,' or occasionally both, are desirable adjuncts to every book. Sometimes his prelude will be an unmistakable finger-post, inscribed legibly for the perusal of all. Then, if he indulges in an envoi, we shall find him speaking with intense and personal passion to the esoteric alone, or else veiling himself even from them in a vague mysteriousness of allusion. He is well within his rights, of course, in all these things—as well within his rights as are his critics within theirs when they frankly accept his revelations of his own individual existence as an appreciable element in the production of his work.

In the Departmental Ditties, his self-explanations take the shape of a preliminary finger-post for public inspection, and of a final communication, airily inscribed, 'To whom it may concern,' but so discreetly worded withal that it is fair to raise against it the accusation of a somewhat unwarranted obscurity. When he published his first short volume of stories, Soldiers Three, he wrote for it an envoi that disclosed unexpected depths of feeling. It was evident that he took his work very seriously. He spoke of the obscure agony of its production, there in the town of his banishment—

 

'Where with the shifting dust I play,
And eat the bread of Discontent.'

 

He spoke of his sense of having achieved the power of creation over his dramatis personœ, these 'rude figures of a rough-hewn race.' He spoke of his certainty of the praise of 'the long 'bazar,' and lastly he spoke of his final doubt of having in reality 'done well.' This temper is admirable, but it is not always that one can indulge in it. As an introduction to these 'ditties,' wherein at least he still faces the foot-lights of his well-beloved Anglo-India, he declares:

 

'I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise—but ye are wise.
And ye know what the jest is worth.'

 

It is a feast of patter-songs, dispensed to the twang of the banjo in the bibulous atmosphere of the postprandial smoke-concert, that he presents to us here. Rarely shall we listen to chords struck in the minor key. More rarely still to the stirring vibrations of the march movement. Yet he cannot rise from his chair and retire without telling us—as it were, casually, quietly, and with shy, downward glances—that there are other instruments of the Muses besides the banjo on which he can, and will, he trusts, yet perform for us. Therefore (though not for the world would he have us derange our ease), 'to whom it may concern' be it known that he is well aware that the smoke is dying upon the altar, t,hat the flowers are decaying, and that the goddess has flown away. None the less, here, in this his town of banishment, where the amusement is rather too suggestive of man's latter end, and the diet is strictly limited, we still continue to pile up the sacrifice on the stone, whereon fresh wreaths are laid.

 

'For, it may be, if still we sing,
And tend the Shrine,
Some Deity on wandering wing
May there incline;
And, finding all in order meet,
Stay while we worship at her feet.'

 

The temper, then, in which we are called to view the Departmental Ditties is made quite clear by their author. But he goes even further, and, in a 'general summary,' gives us the very text of his jesting discourses. 'The artless songs I sing,' he remarks,

 

'Do not deal with anything
New or never said before.
As it was in the beginning,
Is to-day official sinning,
And shall be for evermore.'

 

And vers de société on Anglo-Indian 'official sinning,' in the hands of Mr. Kipling, mean for the most part, as was to be expected, more or less discreet variations on the ever-fertile subject of adultery. At the same time, in the forty-nine poems which make up the book, it is gratifying to note that this subject does not hold quite the same proportion that it did in the volume of tales wherein he 'illustrated' the 'social feature,' and gave five 'illustrations' (it may be remembered) out of six to the professional impugners of the Seventh Commandment.

Over a third of these poems are good of their kind, light, bright, and readable, but there are only too many which fall to the lugubrious level of the popular 'funny' verse of the hour—stuff like nine out of ten of the Bab Ballads and 'comic annuals,'—the source, doubtless, of much innocent pleasure to the domesticated commercial clerk, and the suburban young ladies who have lived and loved; but not alarmingly interesting to any one else. No original note is struck. Indeed, it would be a marvel if there were—as great a marvel as if a new form of barrel-organ suddenly discoursed a new form of music to us in the jaded fever of the London streets. No form of writing—no, not the Three-Volume Novel itself—has been more exploited than the Occasional Verse. It is hackneyed beyond redemption. Not even continuous efforts after local colour and the obstinate use of technical terms can get Mr. Kipling out of the vicious circle. A paraphrase of Poe ('The Raven' for choice) is inevitable under such circumstances, and here we have it at full length. So is a paraphrase of Browning's blank verse, when Mr. Kipling wants to try his hand at what he takes to be poetical characterisation; and Tennyson, and models even more hapless, will be requisitioned for efforts at the narrative idyllic. The obligations to Poe are not only obvious but conscious, but there is no sign in the other cases of anything more than the former quality. They seem rather to be samples of that dreadful and slovenly receptivity which is the curse of the clever journalist in every department of his work. Thus does Lord Dufferin address Lord Lansdowne:

 

'So here's your Empire. No more mine then? Good.
We'll clear the Aides and khitmatgars away.
(You'll know that fat old fellow with the knife—
He keeps the Name Book, talks in English, too,
And almost thinks himself the Government.)
O Truth, Truth, Truth! Forgive me, you're so young.'

 

And so on. Then a turn of Tennyson:

 

'Imprimis he was "broke." Thereafter left
His reg-i-ment and, later, took to drink;
Then, having lost the bal-ance of his friends,
"Went Fantee"—joined the people of the land,
Turned three parts Mus-salman and one Hindu,
And lived among the Gauri vill-a-gers.'

 

And so on again. Trying, however, as is a second-rate literary mannerism at second-hand, done in one's salad days, it is as nothing compared to the solemn repetition of the same offence in a worse form in the hour of one's golden prime. There may be nothing more tiresome in any of Browning's galvanised monologues, and nothing more vapid in any of Lord Tennyson's pseudo-idyls, than these two detestable paraphrases; but then Departmental Ditties is a small matter even to their author, and it would indeed be a waste of shot to demolish them in detail even to this extent. But the remarkable thing is that in the Barrack-Room Ballads we shall meet paraphrases, if possible, even more detestable still. There Mr. Kipling actually goes back on himself to produce verse of this sort in a piece called 'Evarra and his Gods':

 

'Because the city gave him of her gold,
Because the caravans brought turquoises,
Because his life was sheltered by the King,
So that no man should maim him, none should steal,
Or break his rest with babble in the streets
When he was weary after toil, he made
An image of God in gold and pearl,'

 

and so on. It is, I know, a harsh and severe thing to say, but none the less it is certainly true that not even Sir Edwin Arnold ever wrote viler blank verse than that. Nor does this singular example of critical incapacity on the part of our balladist stand alone. Here is the opening of another piece, 'The Sacrifice of Er-Heb,' also one of Mr. Kipling's latest efforts:

 

'Er-Heb beyond the Hills of Ao-Safai
Bears witness to the truth, and Ao-Safai
Hath told the men of Gorukh. Thence the tale
Comes westward o'er the peaks of In-di-a.'

 

We shall find no conscious and critical development in this man. He begins as a journalist of genius, and as a journalist of genius he seems fated to end. 'Culture' stands to the author of Life's Handicap as it did to the author of Soldiers Three, merely as 'culchaw.' In Barrack-Room Ballads we shall learn that 'art' is a mere barren device of the sardonic Satan, which is, at any rate, some change on Departmental Ditties, where we shall not find it at all. And as a practical comment on this, we have a regular tiara of gems like

 

'Thence the tale
Comes westward o'er the peaks of In-di-a'!

 

It was the same with his fiction. 'Krishna Mulvaney' heads the list of his last volume, and the 'Lang Men o' Larut' turns up naked and unashamed among its wedding guests. On this occasion the matter is one chiefly of technique. But technique, we know, is something more, far more, than a trick of hand, and in other cases we can be sure that we shall find the crying want of it manifesting itself in a writer's essential qualities of spirit and intellect.

Over a third of these ditties are good of their kind, light, bright, and readable, the verse which in the hours of our teased weariness of work it is pleasant and sometimes not altogether unprofitable to have at hand. One sample will suffice—a sample of the better sort—the 'Legend of the Foreign Office,' which explains why Rustum Beg, the Rajah of Kolazai, loves 'simpkin' (Anglicè, champagne) and brandy, squanders his revenues, and vexes a Government which is tender and kind, and 'also—but this is a detail—blind.'

 

'Rustum Beg of Kolazai—slightly backward native state—
Lusted for a C.S.I.—so began to sanitate.
Built a Gaol and Hospital—nearly built a city drain—
Till his faithful subjects all thought their ruler was insane.

'Strange departures made he then—yea, Departments stranger still,
Half a dozen Englishmen helped the Rajah with a will,
Talked of noble aims and high, hinted of a future fine
For the State of Kolazai, on a strictly Western line.

'Rajah Rustum held his peace; lowered octroi dues a half;
Organised a State Police; purified the Civil Staff:
Settled cess and tax afresh in a very liberal way;
Cut temptations of the flesh—also cut the Bukhshi's pay;

'Roused his Secretariat to a fine Mahratta fury,
By a Hookum hinting at supervision of dasturi;
Turned the State of Kolazai very nearly upside down;
When the end of May was nigh waited his achievements' crown.

'Then the Birthday Honours came. Sad to state and sad to see.
Stood against the Rajah's name nothing more than C.I.E.!

·

·

·

·

·

·

·

Things were lively for a week in the State of Kolazai.
Even now the people speak of that time regretfully.

'How he disendowed the Gaol—stopped at once the city drain;

Turned to beauty fair and frail—got his senses back again;

Doubled taxes, cesses, all; cleared away each new-built thana;

Turned the two-lakh Hospital into a superb zenana;

 

'Heaped upon the Bukhshi Sahib wealth and honours manifold;

Clad himself in Eastern garb—squeezed his people as of old:

Happy, happy Kolazai! never more will Rustum Beg

Play to catch the Viceroy's eye. He prefers the "simpkin" peg.'

 

A few samples of the wisdom, which either is or is not the product of more or less extensive experience of Anglo-India, may be given as completing the picture. They come to us under the guise of 'certain maxims of Hafiz.'

Thus does the Mohammedan poet and sage remark with a kindly charity on the ways of infidel officials, civil or military:

 

'Yea, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannum

If he borrowed in life from a native at sixty per cent, per annum.'

 

Hafiz has his own opinions as to the true nature of the foreign râj:

 

'Who are the rulers of Ind—to whom shall we bow the knee?

Make your peace with the women, and men will make you L.G.'

Yet let us beware of one of the methods in vogue for achieving this purpose:

'As the thriftless gold of the babul,^[1] so is the gold that we spend
On a Derby sweep, or our neighbour's wife, or the horse we buy from a friend.'

 

The equine business on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges is even worse, it would appear, than that which concerns the female of our species:

 

'The ways of a man with a maid be strange, yet simple and tame
To the ways of a man with a horse, when selling or racing that same.'

 

All of which tends to produce in us a certain large and philosophic tolerance. Thus:

 

'If he play, being young and unskilful, for shekels of silver and gold,
Take his money, my son, praising Allah. The kid was ordained to be sold.'

 

Yet the deeper note is not altogether absent—the deeper note which tells us of that India with which Mr. Kipling has done more than any one else to make us familiar:

 

'Hard her service, poor her payment,—
She in ancient tattered raiment—
India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind.'

 

Indeed, it is with the one strong enunciation of this note in the whole book that he sees fit to close. 'The Galley Slave,' the last of the ditties, comes very near being a splendid poem. It has eight or nine verses, which can be quoted as the most powerful expression of the heart and soul of the true Anglo-India which has yet been sung or said for the instruction of 'a sheltered people.'

 

'Oh, gallant was our galley, from her carven steering-wheel
To her figure-head of silver and her beak of hammered steel;
The leg-bar chafed the ankle and we gasped for cooler air,
But no galley in the water with our galley could compare.

'Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold—
We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold;
The white foam spun behind us, and the black shark swam below,
As we gripped the kicking sweep-head and we made that galley go.

'It was merry in the galley; for we revelled now and then—
If they wore us down like cattle, faith, we fought and loved like men!
As we snatched her thro' the water, so we snatched a minute's bliss.
And the mutter of the dying never spoiled the lover's kiss. ...

'Bear witness, once my comrades, what a hard-bit gang were we—
The servants of the sweep-head, but the masters of the sea!
By the hands that drove her forward as she plunged and yawed and sheered,
Woman, man, or God, or devil, was there anything we feared?

'Was it storm? Our fathers faced it, and a wilder never blew;
Earth that waited for the wreckage watched the galley struggle through.
Burning noon or choking midnight, sickness, sorrow, parting, death?
Nay, our very babes would mock you had they time for idle breath. ...

'Yet they talk of times and seasons and of woe the years bring forth,
Of our galley swamped and shattered in the rollers of the North.
When the niggers break the hatches and the decks are gay with gore,
And a craven-hearted pilot crams her crashing on the shore.

'She will need no half-mast signal, minute-gun, or rocket-flare;
When the cry for help goes seaward, she will find her servants there.
Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled drafts of years gone by,
To the bench that broke their manhood they shall lash themselves and die.

'Hale and crippled, young and aged, paid, deserted, shipped away—
Palace, cot, and lazaretto shall make up the tale that day,
When the skies are black above them and the decks ablaze beneath,
And the top-men clear the raffle with their clasp-knives in their teeth.'

 

The two finest lines here, the first couplet of the fifth verse, are followed by two that are feeble beyond expression, and make one doubt of everything; yet not unreasonably might a man who could write the whole piece as it stands tell us that he felt he was yet destined to perform on other instruments of the Muses beside the banjo—not unreasonably might he still sing and tend the deserted Shrine, in the hope that

 

'Some deity on wandering wing
Might there incline.
And, finding all in order meet,
Stay while he worshipped at her feet.'

 

II

'barrack-room ballads and other verses'

On the Departmental Ditties followed much in the life of their author which counted for an extraordinary stimulus and expansion, and which must be taken into account in any estimate of his later work. It is given to the experience of few writers to awake and find themselves famous. Those who achieve fame achieve it for the most part slowly and with effort, and are too sick of the thing to care much for it when they have got it. Mr. Kipling, after the sojourn of a few years in his town of banishment, was suddenly called upon to shake off the shifting dust wherewith he played, and cast away the bread of discontent wherewith he balked his hunger, for a residence in metropolitan haunts of ease, with all the fun of the fair and the fat morsels thereof thrown in with liberal hand. His vogue was the most universal one of our time. His popular limitations were plentiful enough, his cheap effects were glaring enough, to win him the applause of the intellectual groundlings, the noisy, imperious 'pit' of our contemporary theatre of art. Yet his achievement was so real and striking, his contribution to literature was so undeniable, that no one possessed of candour and intelligence could refuse to take him seriously. He had revealed to us, if partially and askew, still with singular power and vividness, what Anglo-India meant—what the life of the Anglo-Indian civil servant and soldier meant; and he had lifted the short story, as an expression of thought and emotion, a whole plane higher than he had found it. In return for this, not only did he receive the golden wages of an enthusiastic appreciation, but the passionate and general instinct repaid his revelation to us of broader and more animating horizons by the revelation of himself to himself. The cry was, 'Tell us of India—tell us of our redcoats! You can—will—must!' A year ago, in reviewing his tales, I was complaining of the injustice of the dedication of Soldiers Three to 'that very strong man, T. Atkins,' whereas there was little or nothing of T. Atkins in the book, but merely the old long-service man, concerning whom it is written: 'Ichabod, or, the glory is departed.' And I pleaded for the disappearance of Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, the d'Artagnan, Aramis, and Porthos of a later day, who had provided good sport for us all at times, but were now visibly fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. I cannot flatter myself that my humble protest and plea could have any effect upon a self-sufficiency so magnificent as that of Mr. Kipling, especially in the face of the chorus of reckless and indiscriminate praise lavished upon him all round; but there can happily be no mistake on this occasion as to the justice of his second dedication to 'T. A.' For the first time our 'sheltered people' has heard something approaching an adequate statement of the point of view of the 'poor beggars in red' who have bought us 'half of creation with the sword and the flame, and have salted it down with their bones.' That is the significance of the Barrack-Room Ballads as regards the general public. They are a statement of Tommy's case as powerful and convincing as it is passionate and sincere. This may not be the real Tommy in his totality. Mr. Kipling, with commendable modesty, leaves that to the decision of Tommy himself, who alone can tell him if what he has written is 'true.' But there can be no mistake about the fact that this is at least the Wahrheit und Dichtung—the truth and the poetry—of Tommy, and to have added this to a like achievement concerning Anglo-India, and a certain portion of India, is a record of which any man under thirty might well be proud. The Barrack-Room Ballads have caught on, as the Americans say, even more decisively than the Anglo-Indian stories, and they have already had an ample, perhaps too ample a measure of justice done to them. In one way they are Mr. Kipling's most genuine personal expression. He threw away the scabbard when he wrote them, and came to the test with those of us who had complained that his earlier work was as good as his latest, and that the bolt seemed shot. Certainly the result proves that, whether or not the bolt was shot in his prose, it was not in his verse, and it is freely to be admitted that he has not only turned back upon himself and put his ancient speech to fresh rhyme and rhythm, but has also struck out notes entirely new. There is only one word for the Ballads, viewed from the calmer point of view of criticism, and that is 'taking.' They are wonderfully and tremendously taking. The very cockney canaillerie of the dialect in which Tommy is made to express himself has the true contagion of the best music-hall patter song of the hour. The question that arises, of course, is: 'But is this product good enough, strong enough, verifiable enough to last?' No single ballad has had such a furore of success as 'Fuzzy- Wuzzy.' A snatch, a line here and there, seems already to have passed into our daily speech, but has it passed permanently? Is not the hour close at hand in which we shall all be hopelessly sick of

 

"E 's a daisy, 'e 's a ducky, 'e 's a lamb!
'E 's a injia-rubber idiot on the spree'?

 

or of

 

'We never got a ha'porth's change of 'im:
'E squatted in the scrub an' 'ocked our 'orses,
'E cut our sentries up at Suakim,
An' 'e played the cat an' banjo with our forces'?

 

Doggerel, clever doggerel, attractive doggerel, but doggerel so much above the best of the music-hall as to win it a time-honoured place—inspired doggerel, in a word? Ah, that is less certain! The more often one reads these Ballads, the thinner and thinner appear the worst of them, the more and more dubious all but one or two of the very best; and as for the 'other verses,' the twenty poems that follow them up, there are some of them so appallingly bad that they paralyse all efforts at consideration. When you have taken out three or four, the others are simply non-existent. The drop in Mr. Kipling is always straight from the stars into the puddles. He has no middle place, no gradual process of descent. And yet this is not quite so, for at least half a dozen instances could be quoted of his success at spoiling good work by flaws in workmanship, or by his uncertainty of touch. But then his uncertainty of touch is perpetual. It is rarely that he is quite sure how he is working, that he entirely transfuses his material. Take his use of allegory. Could anything be more stupidly and annoyingly obscure than 'The Three Captains'? The whole matter treated of was quite ephemeral, and one may almost say quite personal. He makes an elaborate allegory of it where his letch for technical terms runs riot. Even in the 'Galley Slave,' his one success in this style, he cannot help trying to show us how well up he is in nautical phraseology, as if in an allegory any pressure of the symbolism were not the most obvious futility. Of course, when he attempts direct portrayal, he doses us with his peculiar pedantries to the top of his bent. The Bolivar doesn't drift seven days and seven nights merely: she drifts to the Start, because everybody ought to know that the Start is a bit of local colour. Her 'coal and fo'c'sle are short'; her 'bulk-heads fly'; she 'hogs' and 'sags' and 'races'; the seas pound at her 'strake'; the Lord, it is hoped, has 'his thumb on the plummer-block,' and so on. Clever, isn't it? But (as Mr. Kipling says the devil keeps inquiring), 'Is it art?' To tell the simple truth, it reads rather more like juvenile vanity. Or, again, there is the equal uncertainty of touch which afflicts him when he attempts to write with an assured poetical diction. The 'Ballad of East and West' is such an attempt, and it is the least like a failure of them all. ('The English Flag' is a remarkable instance of how he can fail when he really makes up his mind to show us that he is a master of style quâ style.) It is, indeed, curious to note how he can write, even in work that has stirred him, galvanised conventionalism side by side with the most vivid and actual realism. Yet he does it again and again. The magnanimous Afghan of this Ballad, for instance, 'whistles his only son,' who, like unto the good young only sons of all the robber chiefs in our more or less pseudo-literature, and also unto our old, old poetic friend the eagle or the hawk or the falcon, or any other member of the genus raptor, 'drops from the mountain crest.' Then Mr. Kipling suddenly looks at him as he is, and describes him in one admirable line like this:

 

'He trod the ling like a buck in spring, and he looked like a lance at rest.'

 

Fancy that being the line that follows and rhymes with the venerable crest-dropping business! It is almost as bad as the terrible second couplet in the fifth stanza of the 'Galley Slave.'

So much, then, for the outer shape taken by his limitations. The shape they take in the essential qualities of his spirit and intellect is far more disconcerting, because in his happier moments, with thought and emotion at the white-heat, he again and again transcends his tricks of inferior workmanship; but it is, indeed, rarely that he ever quite transcends his tricks of clap-trap sentiment. 'Gunga Din' is one of the very finest of the Ballads; it is not too much to say of it that it comes very near being a little masterpiece of its kind. He gives the picture of the 'regimental bhisti,' the devoted 'limpin' lump of brick-dust,' who 'didn't seem to know the use of fear' in his thankless duty of water-carrier to the men, fighting or wounded, on the march, or in camp, or under fire. The particular Tommy who tells the story relates how, when he dropped behind the fight, 'with a bullet where his belt-plate should 'a' been,' it was the inevitable Gunga Din who spied him first, lifted up his head, plugged his wound, gave him a drink, and finally carried him away to a dooli. At this point a bullet comes and drills Gunga Din clean; but, none the less, he puts Tommy safe inside, and, just before rendering up the ghost,

 

'"I'ope you liked your drink,' sez Gunga Din'!

 

Could a falser note have been struck? Of course, Gunga Din never said anything of the kind. It was Mr. Rudyard Kipling who said it, because it was one of those superficially smart things which he and his friends, the groundlings, cannot resist. Again and again he does it. The fat Babu Harendra sends the head of a Burman dacoit chief in a packet to an English officer who had, in a moment of baffled impotence, promised 'a hundred' for it; and this is the way the Babu Harendra Mukerji opens his

letter:

 

'Dear Sir,—I have honour to send, as you said,
For final approval (see under) Boh's Head.'

 

Of course, that 'for final approval (see under)' was never written by the Babu. The real writer was aut Kipling aut diabolus. Now, what is the good of giving an intensely realistic picture, crammed with technical terms and concentrated characterisation, to end it up with a piece of burlesque like this?

But false characterisation in his art is, unhappily, only too well matched with inconsequence in his criticism. The same unscrupulousness which causes him to indulge in cheap wit at the expense of the sincerity of his dramatis personœ, causes him to indulge in antiquated sentimental clap-trap at the expense of his own. There was, from Mr. Kipling's point of view, a quite sufficiently scathing denunciation to be made out of the Irish M.P.'s who were 'cleared' by the Times Commission, without pandering to the 'gods' of the Orange gallery. As it is, the whole poem he devotes to the subject rings false from first line to last. Not even the most resolute anti-Home Ruler can believe that a picture of Ireland, where 'the widow's curse is on the house' of the Irish M.P., 'and the dead are at his door,' is quite a complete one. What a pretty task for an honest and intelligent man in this year of grace to glorify the Irish absentee landlord by painting the 'patriotic' brutes and hypocrites he has brought into existence considerably blacker than painted devils! Can it indeed be Mr. Kipling who writes:

 

'"The charge is old"?—as old as Cain—as fresh as yesterday;
Old as the Ten Commandments—have ye talked these laws away?'—

 

Mr. Kipling, the 'illustrator' of Anglo-Indian social life, with five out of the six 'illustrations' based on breakage of the Seventh Commandment—Mr. Kipling, the enthusiastic mouthpiece of the individual who prays:

 

'Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst'?

 

Again, every parvenu has a right to take his new social gods au grand serieux, but one does not, somehow, expect a man of genius to outdo even the most abject of them at their forms of worship. Mr. Kipling thinks the earth has produced nothing to equal a 'gentleman,' and he is within his rights in thinking so. For our old friend the gentleman is a really nice fellow, of course, as the average sensual man slightly idealised was to be expected to be; yet even the gentleman nowadays does not quite mistake himself for an archangel. But our poetical young parvenu does. He tells in sounding numbers of the earth's heroic workers:

 

'Gods, for they knew the heart of men; men, for they stooped to fame';

 

and in his ecstatic contemplation of them (unlike the Irish M.P.'s in this particular, but like Mr. Rudyard Kipling, they are adepts in 'God's law,' including presumably the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and most of the Catechism), he beholds them having a real good time in heaven, 'hanging with the reckless Seraphim on the reins of red-maned stars,' and so on. Then we have the culmination. God the Father appears:

 

'And ofttimes cometh our wise Lord God, master of every trade,
And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made;
And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid '!

There is only one word for that last line: it is stupendous. Those gentlemen archangels preclude anything but an amazed silence. Comment is impossible beyond the simple enunciation of the fact that they belong to literature—to the literature of Southey's vision of the apotheosis of George iii.

But let us turn from the painful spectacle of such aberrations on the part of a man who has done so much better than this in every way.

Adam Lindsay Gordon was a poet of an altogether larger and broader calibre than Mr. Kipling, but the parallel between them has more than one interesting and suggestive feature. Both as a workman and as a critic of life a certain instinct preserved the Anglo-Australian from the grosser faults of the Anglo-Indian. Gordon could only use rhymed rhythms, but he knew it, and shunned, by a rigid adherence to his own special domain, such horrors as Mr. Kipling has achieved in his blank verse. The want of delicacy of music, of melodious lyric, in Gordon is indisputable, but at least he does not thrust it upon us by offensive efforts. Mr. Kipling is, as a rule, most at home when he is using a stanza to which he can mark time with his heels, and the modern 'jingle' ballad has assuredly its justification. But what justification is there for verse, the time of which the hapless versifier has had to mark on his fingers? In a poem like 'Route Marchin" he gives us the very tramp of the negro camp-ditties—a form of poetical rhythm which has yet to have justice done to it by our writers. But when he essays the lighter note, how terrible are his mishaps! Gordon, again, had pretty much the same general view of life that the other has, but, being simply a gentleman by birth and breeding, he never ranted and raved like a frenzied parvenu concerning the superhuman virtues and glories of caste. It is when we put two such men side by side, as it is just to do and profitable to do, that we see clearly the fatal limitations and defects which relegate the one not only to the more ephemeral but to the lower place. Little, very little, of Mr. Kipling's poetry has the element of permanency in it. Rarely, very rarely, does he forge ahead and win the race with ease. Life's handicap, the handicap of temperament and surroundings, is too heavy for him. He contributes no appreciable body of work. It is mostly tour de force, excellently brilliant, delightfully clever, 'monstrously taking,' but it does not wear—it does not wear as twenty or thirty per cent, of Gordon's work wears. It has come like a meteor, to pass: not like a star, to stay. Yet not for a moment would I seem to undervalue the charm and satisfaction of the best poems—the best snatches. Once, and once only, as it seems to me, does he pass beyond the limits of poetic phases and fashions, and attain the goal of desire. Other poems have their obvious advantages over 'Mandalay,' but no other, unless I am much mistaken, can challenge criticism on all its points and challenge it with such success as this. I have given no sample of his powerful impressionist doggerel. 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy' and 'Screw-Guns,' 'Gunga Din' and 'Oonts,' 'Snarley-Yow' and 'The Young British Soldier,' are in everybody's mouth. Let me give part of a poem where, for once, his song is instinct with the lyral cry, with the note of 'the tears of things,' the eternal voice of human regret:

'By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

''Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green.
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat, jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:

Bloomin' idol made o' mud—
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd—
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
********'I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and—
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

'Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!'

A hundred years hence some appreciative and inquiring person may be searching in the British Museum for any other work done by the man who wrote 'Mandalay.'

Truly like unto angels' visits are the books which come to us as a sudden and sheer delight; and the reason is simple. For what in reality is rarer than freshness wedded to sincerity and strength at one with beauty? But few and far between as are such visitants from the mighty realm of the past, from the meagre realm of the present they come with an infrequency that is hateful, if indeed one might almost say they come at all. Let us not, therefore, be inveigled into forgetfulness of the fact of those first rapturous moments in any estimate we form of any writer who has been able to bestow them, seeing that, things being equal, this power has assuredly its justification for the critic's praise. And some such memento laudis is what I would fain affix here to my effort to speak, as adequately as I have been able, of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's verse, because the first perusal of the splendid score of his Barrack-Room Ballads gave me the keenest pleasure I have had in reading a book of poetry for several years. The second part of the volume, containing the 'Other Verses,' which, in his wisdom (or in the necessity of providing sufficient material for a seemly crown octavo at six shillings, or in the intention of a compromise between the two), he has seen fit to add, soon checked that pleasure, and presently chilled it to the bone. The rapturous moments of sheer and sudden delight, alas! were ended. A few days later the Departmental Ditties (also supplemented, as we have seen, by a liberal supply of 'Other Verses,' good, bad, and indifferent) arrived to remove the last effects of that chill by the creation of the sense of perspective; and now it appears to me no longer strange that the man who wrote 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy,' 'Gunga Din,' and 'Mandalay,' wrote also 'Evarra and his Gods' and 'The Sacrifice of Er-Heb' (candour urges me to confess that I have not yet been able to read this poem in its entirety) and 'The Explanation,' any more than it should be strange that the same man should have given us, with (apparently) a serious face, 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft,' 'At the Pit's Mouth,' 'The Courting of Dinah Shadd,' as well as 'The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney,' 'Namgay Doola,' and 'The Lang Men o' Larut.'

1. The babul is the jungle mimosa, and has a bright yellow blossom.