XXV

But, O, if you find that castle,Draw back your foot from the gateway,Let not its peace invite you,Let not its offerings tempt you,For faded and decayed like a garment,Love to a dust will have fallen,And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow,And hope will have gone with pain;And of all the throbbing heart's high courageNothing will remain.

And these later poems are not only nobler in passion than the early introspective work; they are also more moving. Few of the "in memoriam" poems of the war touch the heart as does that poem,To a Bulldog, with its moving close:—

And though you run expectant as you always doTo the uniforms we meet,You will never find Willy among all the soldiersEven in the longest street.Nor in any crowd: yet, strange and bitter thought,Even now were the old words said,If I tried the old trick, and said "Where's Willy?"You would quiver and lift your head.And your brown eyes would look to ask if I was serious,And wait for the word to spring.Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again,You innocent old thing.I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa,While you lie there asleep on the floor;For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of,And he won't be coming here any more.

And though you run expectant as you always doTo the uniforms we meet,You will never find Willy among all the soldiersEven in the longest street.

Nor in any crowd: yet, strange and bitter thought,Even now were the old words said,If I tried the old trick, and said "Where's Willy?"You would quiver and lift your head.

And your brown eyes would look to ask if I was serious,And wait for the word to spring.Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again,You innocent old thing.

I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa,While you lie there asleep on the floor;For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of,And he won't be coming here any more.

Of the new poems in the book, one of the most beautiful isAugust Moon. The last verses provide an excellent example of Mr. Squire's gift both as a painter of things and a creator of atmosphere:—

A golden half-moon in the sky, and broken gold in the water.In the water, tranquilly severing, joining, gold:Three or four little plates of gold on the river:A little motion of gold between the dark imagesOf two tall posts that stand in the grey water.A woman's laugh and children going home.A whispering couple, leaning over the railings,And somewhere, a little splash as a dog goes in.I have always known all this, it has always been,There is no change anywhere, nothing will ever change.I heard a story, a crazy and tiresome myth.Listen! Behind the twilight a deep, low soundLike the constant shutting of very distant doors.Doors that are letting people over thereOut to some other place beyond the end of the sky.

A golden half-moon in the sky, and broken gold in the water.

In the water, tranquilly severing, joining, gold:Three or four little plates of gold on the river:A little motion of gold between the dark imagesOf two tall posts that stand in the grey water.A woman's laugh and children going home.A whispering couple, leaning over the railings,And somewhere, a little splash as a dog goes in.

I have always known all this, it has always been,There is no change anywhere, nothing will ever change.

I heard a story, a crazy and tiresome myth.

Listen! Behind the twilight a deep, low soundLike the constant shutting of very distant doors.

Doors that are letting people over thereOut to some other place beyond the end of the sky.

The contrast between the beauty of the stillness of the moonlit world and the insane intrusion of the war into it has not, I think, been suggested so expressively in any other poem.

Now that these poems have been collected into a single volume it is possible to measure the author's stature. His book will, I believe, come as a revelation to the majority of readers. A poet of original music, of an original mind, of an original imagination, Mr. Squire has now taken a secure place among the men of genius of to-day.Poems: First Series, is literary treasure so novel and so abundant that I can no longer regret, as I once did, that Mr. Squire has said farewell to the brilliant lighter-hearted moods ofSteps to ParnassusandTricks of the Trade.He has brought us gifts better even than those.

Mr. Joseph Conrad is one of the strangest figures in literature. He has called himself "the most unliterary of writers." He did not even begin to write till he was half-way between thirty and forty. I do not like to be more precise about the date, because there seems to be some doubt as to the year in which Mr. Conrad was born. Mr. Hugh Walpole, in his brief critical study of Mr. Conrad, gives the date as the 6th of December, 1857; theEncyclopaedia Britannicasays 1856; Mr. Conrad himself declares in his reminiscences that he was "nine years old or thereabouts" in 1868, which would bring the year of his birth nearer 1859. Of one thing, however, there is no question. He grew up without any impulse to be a writer. He apparently never even wrote bad verse in his teens. Before he began to writeAlmayer's Follyhe "had written nothing but letters and not very many of these." "I never," he declares, "made a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an anecdote in my life. The ambition of being an author had never turned up among those precious imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the stillness and immobility of a daydream."

At the same time, Mr. Conrad's is not a genius without parentage or pedigree. His father was not only a revolutionary, but in some degree a man of letters. Mr. Conrad tells us that his own acquaintance with English literature began at the age of eight withThe Two Gentlemen of Verona, which his father had translated into Polish. He has given us a picture of the child he then was (dressed in a black blouse with a white border in mourning for his mother) as he knelt in his father's study chair, "with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over the pile of loose pages." While he was still a boy he read Hugo andDon Quixoteand Dickens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and travel. He had also been fascinated by the map. It may be said of him even in his childhood, as Sir Thomas Browne has said in general of every human being, that Africa and all her prodigies were within him. No passage in his autobiography suggests the first prophecy of his career so markedly as that in which he writes: "It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 'When I grow up I shall gothere.'" Mr. Conrad's genius, his consciousness of his destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What but the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder and monstrous fear? Many people regardHeart of Darknessas his greatest story.Heart of Darknesssurely began to be written on the day on which the boy of nine "or thereabouts" put his finger on the blank space of the map of Africa and prophesied.

He was in no hurry, however, to accomplish his destiny. Mr. Conrad has never been in a hurry, even in telling a story. He has waited on fate rather than run to meet it. "I was never," he declares, "one of those wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a washtub for the sake of the fun." On the other hand, he seems always to have followed in his own determined fashion certain sudden intuitions, much as great generals and saints do. Alexander or Napoleon could not have seized the future with a more splendid defiance of reason than did Mr. Conrad, when, though he did not yet know six words of English, he came to the resolve: "If a seaman, then an English seaman." He has always been obedient to a star. He likes to picture himself as a lazy creature, but he is really one of the most dogged day-labourers who have ever served literature. InTyphoonandYouthhe has written of the triumph of the spirit of man over tempest and fire. We may see in these stories not only the record of Mr. Conrad's twenty years' toil as a seaman, but the image of his desperate doggedness as an author writing in a foreign tongue. "Line by line," he writes, "rather than page by page, was the growth ofAlmayer's Folly." He has earned his fame in the sweat of his brow. He speaks of the terrible bodily fatigue that is the lot of the imaginative writer even more than of the manual labourer. "I have," he adds, "carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know." He declares, indeed, that the strain of creative effort necessary in imaginative writing is "something for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn." This is to make the profession of literature a branch of the heroic life. And that, for all his smiling disparagement of himself as a Sybarite, is what Mr. Conrad has done.

It is all the more curious that he should ever have been regarded as one who had added to the literature of despair. He is a tragic writer, it is true; he is the only novelist now writing in English with the grand tragic sense. He is nearer Webster than Shakespeare, perhaps, in the mood of his tragedy; he lifts the curtain upon a world in which the noble and the beautiful go down before an almost meaningless malice. InThe End of the Tether, inFreya of the Seven Isles, inVictory, it is as though a very Nero of malice who took a special delight in the ruin of great spirits governed events. On the other hand, as inSamson Agonistes, so in the stories of Mr. Conrad we are confronted with the curious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids us utterly to despair. Mr. Hardy has written the tragedy of man's weakness; Mr. Conrad has written the tragedy of man's strength "with courage never to submit or yield." Though Mr. Conrad possesses the tragic sense in a degree that puts him among the great poets, and above any of his living rivals, however, the mass of his work cannot be called tragic.Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow Line—are not all these fables of conquest and redemption? Man in Mr. Conrad's stories is always a defier of the devils, and the devils are usually put to flight.

Though he is eager to disclaim being a moralist or even having any liking for moralists, it is clear that he is an exceedingly passionate moralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties of man and Burke than with the rights of man and Shelley. Had it not been so, he might have been a political visionary and stayed at home. As it is, this son of a Polish rebel broke away from the wavering aspirations and public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvation as an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea.

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one but an inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passion of discovery. The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of our everyday earth. Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into a new and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of the Renaissance. He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light. That, I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meant to Mr. Conrad. But some such image seems to me to be necessary to express that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of a man who has lived much underground. He is a dark man who carries the shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us in his stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure—treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not until he publishedChancethat the world in general began to recognize how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve was partly to blame for this. He tells us that all the "characters" he ever got on his discharge from a ship contained the words "strictly sober," and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety—"asceticism of sentiment," he calls it—in his literary work as at sea. He has been compared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite of Dostoevsky—an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently. At the same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevsky did for strange demons and goblins—that population of grotesque characters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale. His tales are tales of wonder. He is not only a philosopher of the bold heart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature. That is why one reads the volume calledYouthfor the third and fourth time with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first.

Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure. Every novelist of genius is that, of course, to some extent. But Mr. Conrad is more than most. He has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure. There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man who breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows, every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light—a little light in an immense darkness. Or perhaps it is more subtle than that. With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people and things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kipling communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conrad communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of the presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certain as of some noise that we have heard at night. It is like the "mana" which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects. It is unlike "mana," however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, but of romance. It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabited every tree and every stream, every ship and every human being. His function in literature is the announcement of this ghost. In all his work there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into a kind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read. His ships and men are, in an old sense of the word, possessed.

One might compare Mr. Conrad in this respect with his master—his master, at least, in the art of the long novel—Henry James. I do not mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely original. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's stories than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner of discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the school of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from Henry James than from any other writer. As one reads a story likeChance, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is something of an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor. Mr. Conrad never gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and the microscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does. He seems rather to be one of the splendid guessers. Not that Henry James is timid in speculations. He can sally out into the borderland and come back with his bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity. Even when he tells a ghost story, however—andThe Turn of the Screwis one of the great ghost stories of literature—he remains supremely master of his materials. He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with the vaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad. Where Mr. Conrad will drift into discovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chart and compass.

One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness in the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad'sUnder Western Eyes, for instance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of Henry James's novels. Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive. To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. But while Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens, Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets—often from the depths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river inHeart of Darknessis symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next bend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the unseen things that are waiting round the corner. Even when he is portraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel—the daughter of the defalcating financier and wife of the ship's captain, who is the heroine ofChance—he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get of persons hurrying round a corner. He gives us a picture of disappearing heels as the portrait of a personality. He suggests the soul of wonder in a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as by suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a shadowy island seen at twilight. One result of this is that his human beings are seldom as rotund as life. They are emanations of personality rather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels. They are, if you like, ghostly. That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and my Uncle Toby and Sam Weller. But how wonderful they are in their environment of the unusual! How wonderful as seen in the light of the strange eyes of their creator! "Having grown extremely sensitive (an effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair"—so the narrator ofChancebegins one of his sentences; and it is not in the invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such a sensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conrad wins his laurels as a writer of novels. He would be sensitive, I do not doubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyons tea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toasted scone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however, when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny—when, bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, or is beaten back by it into a savage of the first days.

Some of his best work is contained in the two storiesTyphoonandThe Secret Sharer, the latter of which appeared in the volume called'Twixt Land and Sea. And each of these is a fable of man's mysterious quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad irony, and the Conrad zest for courage. These stories are so great that while we read them we almost forget the word "psychology." We are swept off our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories, complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, is radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with the giants or of the defence of the round-house inKidnapped. In each of them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, it risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness.Typhoonwas, I fancy, not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the soul and the Prince of the power of the air. But it is because it is eternally true as such a dramatization that it is—let us not shrink from praise—one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. They are an affair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on, watching the agonies of the steamer.

Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship. She had given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.

It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowning terrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolic of Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life.

He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice—the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice is done—again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far: "All right."

He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."

And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice—the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice is done—again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far: "All right."

Mr. Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature of confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perils of the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in the night, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like a cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene inThe Secret Sharerin which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under the looming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer a chance of escaping unnoticed to the land. This is a story in which the "tonalities of the affair" are much more subtle than inTyphoon. It is a study in eccentric human relations—the relations between the captain and the manslayer who comes naked out of the seas as if from nowhere one tropical night, and is huddled away with his secrets in the captain's cabin. It is for the most part a comedy of the abnormal—an ironic fable of splendid purposeless fears and risks. Towards the end, however, we lose our concern with nerves and relationships and such things, and our hearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his ship in order to save the interloper's life. That is a moment with all romance in it. As the ship swerves round into safety just in the nick of time, we have a story transfigured into the music of the triumphant soul. Mr. Conrad, as we see inFreya of the Seven Islesand elsewhere, is not blind to the commonness of tragic ruin—tragic ruin against which no high-heartedness seems to avail. He is, indeed, inclined rather than otherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, often maleficent, hard to run away from. But he loves the fantastic comedy of the high heart which persists in the heroic game against the spider till the bitter end. HisYouthis just such a comedy of the peacockry of adventure amid the traps and disasters of fate.

All this being so, it may be thought that I have underestimated the flesh-and-blood qualities in Mr. Conrad's work. I certainly do not want to give the impression that his men are less than men. They are as manly men as ever breathed. But Mr. Conrad seldom attempts to give us the complete synthesis of a man. He deals rather in aspects of personality. His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmastering characters in them. In reading such a book asUnder Western Eyeswe feel as though we had here a precious alphabet of analysis, but that it has not been used to spell a magnificent man.

Worse than this, Mr. Conrad's long stories at times come out as awkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. He pauses frequently to impress upon us not only the romance of the fact he is stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebody discovered it. InChanceandLord Jimhe is not content to tell us a straightforward story: he must show us at length the processes by which it was pieced together. This method has its advantages. It gives us the feeling, as I have said, that we are voyaging into strange seas and harbours in search of mysterious clues. But the fatigue of reconstruction is apt to tell on us before the end. One gets tired of the thing just as one does of interviewing a host of strangers. That is why some people fail to get through Mr. Conrad's long novels. They are books of a thousand fascinations, but the best imagination in them is by the way. Besides this, they have little of the economy of dramatic writing, but are profusely descriptive, and most people are timid of an epic of description.

Mr. Conrad's best work, then, is to be found, I agree with most people in believing, in three of his volumes of short stories—inTyphoon, Youth, and'Twixt Land and Sea. His fame will, I imagine, rest chiefly on these, just as the fame of Wordsworth and Keats rests on their shorter poems. Here is the pure gold of his romance—written in terms largely of the life of the old sailing-ship. Here he has written little epics of man's destiny, tragic, ironic, and heroic, which are unique in modern (and, it is safe to say, in all) literature.

Mr. Kipling is an author whom one has loved and hated a good deal. One has loved him as the eternal schoolboy revelling in smells and bad language and dangerous living. One has loved him less, but one has at least listened to him, as the knowing youth who could tell one all about the ladies of Simla. One has found him rather adorable as the favourite uncle with the funny animal stories. One has been amazed by his magnificent make-believe as he has told one about dim forgotten peoples that have disappeared under the ground. One has detested him, on the other hand, as the evangelist with the umbrella—the little Anglo-Indian Prussian who sing hymns of hate and Hempire.

Luckily, this last Kipling is allowed an entirely free voice only in verse. If one avoidsBarrack Room BalladsandThe Seven Seas, one misses the worst of him. He visits the prose stories, too, it is true, but he does not dominate them in the same degree. Prose is his easy chair, in which his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand. Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus.Recessionalsurprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr. Kipling has written. But, apart fromRecessional, most of his political verse is a mere quickstep of bragging and sneering.

His prose, certainly, stands a third or a fourth reading, as his verse does not. Even in a world which Henry James and Mr. Conrad have taught to study motives and atmospheres with an almost scientific carefulness, Mr. Kipling's "well-hammered anecdotes," as Mr. George Moore once described the stories, still refuse to bore us.

At the same time, they make a different appeal to us from their appeal of twenty or twenty-five years ago. In the early days, we half-worshipped Mr. Kipling because he told us true stories. Now we enjoy him because he tells us amusing stories. He conquered us at first by making us think him a realist. He was the man who knew. We listened to him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us with his cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in a mysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with the barrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives of generals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's trick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy hands of Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaborate detail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood of belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike life asA Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. His characters are inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak—dialects which used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of realism—are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's or Ortheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the real thing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling does undoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. There are false touches in the boys' conversation inThe Drums of the Fore and Aft, but the humour and energy with which the progress of the regiment to the frontier, its disgrace and its rescue by the drunken children, are described, make it one of the most admirable short stories of our time.

His humour, it must be admitted, is akin to the picaresque. It is amusing to reflect as one looks round the disreputable company of Mr. Kipling's characters, that his work has now been given a place in the library of law and order. WhenStalky and Co.was published, parents and schoolmasters protested in alarm, and it seemed doubtful for a time whether Mr. Kipling was to be reckoned among the enemies of society. If I am not mistaken,The Spectatorcame down on the side of Mr. Kipling, and his reputation as a respectable author was saved.

But the parents and the schoolmasters were not nervous without cause. Mr. Kipling is an anarchist in his preferences to a degree that no bench of bishops could approve. He is, within limits, on the side of the Ishmaelites—the bad boys of the school, the "rips" of the regiment. His books are the praise of the Ishmaelitish life in a world of law and order. They are seldom the praise of a law and order life in a world of law and order. Mr. Kipling demands only one loyalty (beyond mutual loyalty) from his characters. His schoolboys may break every rule in the place, provided that somewhere deep down in their hearts they are loyal to the "Head." His pet soldiers may steal dogs or get drunk, or behave brutally to their heart's content, on condition that they cherish a sentimental affection for the Colonel. Critics used to explain this aspect of Mr. Kipling's work by saying that he likes to show the heart of good in things evil. But that is not really a characteristic of his work. What he is most interested in is neither good nor evil but simply roguery. As an artist, he is a barn rebel and lover of mischief. As a politician he is on the side of the judges and the lawyers. It was his politics and not his art that ultimately made him the idol of the genteel world.

Everybody who is older than a schoolboy remembers how Mr. Rudyard Kipling was once a modern. He might, indeed, have been described at the time as a Post-Imperialist. Raucous and young, he had left behind him the ornate Imperialism of Disraeli, on the one hand, and the cultured Imperialism of Tennyson, on the other. He sang of Imperialism as it was, or was about to be—vulgar and canting and bloody—and a world that was preparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting and bloody bade him welcome. In one breath he would give you an invocation to Jehovah. In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be getting round the roguish side of you with the assurance that:—

If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg behind the keeper's back,If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line,If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack,You will understand this little song o' mine.

This jumble—which seems so curious nowadays—of delight in piety and delight in twopence-coloured mischiefs came as a glorious novelty and respite to the oppressed race of Victorians. Hitherto they had been building up an Empire decently and in order; no doubt, many reprehensible things were being done, but they were being done quietly: outwardly, so far as was possible, a respectable front was preserved. It was Mr. Kipling's distinction to tear off the mask of Imperialism as a needless and irritating encumbrance; he had too much sense of reality—too much humour, indeed—to want to portray Empire-builders as a company of plaster saints. Like anenfant terrible, he was ready to proclaim aloud a host of things which had, until then, been kept as decorously in the dark as the skeleton in the family cupboard. The thousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty and brutality and drunkenness—all of those things to which builders of Empire, like many other human beings, are at times prone—he never dreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed, to be regretted. He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day's work; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness with which he referred to them. Simple old clergymen, with a sentimental vision of an Imperialism that meant a chain of mission-stations (painted red) encircling the earth, suddenly found themselves called upon to sing a new psalm:—

Ow, the loot!Bloomin' loot!That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!It's the same with dogs an' men,If you'd make 'em come again.Clap 'em forward with a Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot!Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Loot! Loot!

Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain. It might have frightened the clergymen away. Unfortunately, no sooner had the old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp, and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty. "Take up," he would sing—

Take up the White Man's burden,Send forth the best ye breed,Go, bind your sons to exile,To serve your captives' need;To wait in heavy harnessOn fluttered folk and wild—Your new-caught, sullen peoples,Half-devil and half-child.

Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of self-sacrifice. No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to the new music—music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its revivalistic purpose.

At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men. They loved him for his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a leading article in verse. His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talk of the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once more real and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual of their homes. He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath he loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in literature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one inThe Ballad of "The Bolivar," which runs—

Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell—rig the winches aft!

Not that anybody knew, or cared, what "rigging the winches aft" meant. It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to give literature a new: horizon. Similarly, it was the eternal flames in the background that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, the water-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys. With what delight they would quote the verse:—

So I'll meet 'im later on,At the place where 'e is gone—Where it's always double drill and no canteen;'E'll be squattin' on the coals,Givin' drink to poor damned souls.An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!

Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the place whither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and the courteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight in hell and damnation. Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste.

Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree,Damned from here to eternity,

began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination. Those "seven men from out of Hell" who went

Rolling down the Ratcliff Road,Drunk, and raising Cain,

were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands. One even wrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to picture oneself as

Cursed with the curse of Reuben,Seared with the brand of Cain,

though so far one's most desperate adventure into reality had been the consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a back-street public-house. Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence and wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion against conventions and orthodoxies.

It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was exceptionally greedy for both. He, more than any other writer of his time, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would not stay at home—the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least a thousand miles away from the home of his fathers. He excited the imagination of youth with deft questions such as—

Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade—Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?

If you did not know all about the sago-dealers and the fish and the wet bamboo, Mr. Kipling had a way of making you feel unpardonably ignorant; and the moral of your ignorance always was that you must "go—go—go away from here." Hence an immense increase in the number of passages booked to the colonies. Mr. Kipling, in his verse, simply acted as a gorgeous poster-artist of Empire. And even those who resisted his call to adventure were hypnotized by his easy and lavish manner of talking "shop." He could talk the "shop" of the army, the sea, the engine-room, the art-school, the charwoman; he was a perfect young Bacon of omniscience. How we thrilled at the unintelligible jingle of theAnchor Song, with its cunning blend of "shop" and adventure:—

Heh! Tally on. Aft and walk away with her!Handsome to the cathead, now! O tally on the fall!Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy.Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!Well, ah, fare you well for the Channel wind's took hold of us,Choking down our voices as we snatch the gaskets free,And its blowing up for night.And she's dropping light on light,And she's snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea.

Heh! Tally on. Aft and walk away with her!Handsome to the cathead, now! O tally on the fall!Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy.Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!

Well, ah, fare you well for the Channel wind's took hold of us,Choking down our voices as we snatch the gaskets free,And its blowing up for night.And she's dropping light on light,And she's snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea.

The worst of Mr. Kipling is that, in verse like this, he is not only omniscient; he is knowing. He mistakes knowingness for knowledge. He even mistakes it for wisdom at times, as when he writes, not of ships, but of women. His knowing attitude to women makes some of his verse—not very much, to be quite fair—absolutely detestable.The Ladiesseems to me the vulgarest poem written by a man of genius in our time. As one reads it, one feels how right Oscar Wilde was when he said that Mr. Kipling had seen many strange things through keyholes. Mr. Kipling's defenders may reply that, in poems like this, he is merely dramatizing the point of view of the barrack-room. But it is unfair to saddle the barrack-room with responsibility for the view of women which appears here and elsewhere in the author's verse. One is conscious of a kind of malign cynicism in Mr. Kipling's own attitude, as one readsThe Young British Soldier, with a verse like—

If your wife should go wrong with a comrade, be lothTo shoot when you catch 'em—you'll swing, on my oath!—Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er; that's hell for them both,And you're shut o' the curse of a soldier.

That seems to me fairly to represent the level of Mr. Kipling's poetic wisdom in regard to the relations between the sexes. It is the logical result of the keyhole view of life. And, similarly, his Imperialism is a mean and miserable thing because it is the result of a keyhole view of humanity. Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands of miles and thousands of places through keyholes. In him, wide wanderings have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing as the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser's shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise the flag of his country without a shrill note of malice:—

Winds of the world, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro—And what should they know of England who only England know?The poor little street-bred people, that vapour, and fume, and brag,They are lifting their heads in the stillness, to yelp at the English flag!

Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping.

The truth is, Mr. Kipling has put the worst of his genius into his poetry. His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something of the music of travel; but they are too illiberal, too snappish, too knowing, to afford deep or permanent pleasure to the human spirit.

Mr. Thomas Hardy, in the opinion of some, is greater as a poet than as a novelist. That is one of the mild heresies in which the amateur of letters loves to indulge. It has about as much truth in it as the statement that Milton was greater as a controversialist than as a poet, or that Lamb's plays are better than his essays. Mr. Hardy has undoubtedly made an original contribution to the poetry of his time. But he has given us no verse that more than hints at the height and depth of the tragic vision which is expressed inJude the Obscure. He is not by temperament a singer. His music is a still small voice unevenly matched against his consciousness of midnight and storm. It is a flutter of wings in the rain over a tomb. His sense of beauty is frail and midge-like compared with his sense of everlasting frustration. The conceptions in his novels are infinitely more poetic than the conceptions in his verse. InTessandJudedestiny presides with something of the grandeur of the ancient gods. Except inThe Dynastsand a few of the lyrics, there is none of this brooding majesty in his verse. And even inThe Dynasts, majestic as the scheme of it is, there seems to me to be more creative imagination in the prose passages than in the poetry.

Truth to tell, Mr. Hardy is neither sufficiently articulate nor sufficiently fastidious to be a great poet. He does not express life easily in beautiful words or in images. There is scarcely a magical image in the hundred or so poems in the book of his selected verse. Thus he writes inI Found Her Out Thereof one who:—

would sigh at the taleOf sunk LyonesseAs a wind-tugged tressFlapped her cheek like a flail.

There could not be an uglier and more prosaic exaggeration than is contained in the image in the last line. And prose intrudes in the choice of words as well as in images. Take, for example, the use of the word "domiciled" in the passage in the same poem about—

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