POETS AND POETRY.
AN INCLUSIVE EDITION OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLINC'S VERSE.* THE new inclusive edition of the verse published by Mr. Kipling between 1885 and 1918 gives the modern reader materials with which to make an estimate of Mr. Kipling's work which he has not possessed before. Here are displayed his variety of subject and his monotony of treatment, his intelligent use of picturesque circumstances and his often thoughtlessly mechanical rhythms. There are a great many striking and picturesque poems in the book and an abundance of good ballads, while the irresistible emotional appeal of a great many of the poems will probably prove rather exasperating to the critic who is by no means determined that he likes Mr. Kipling's verse enough to pay him the tribute of a lump in the throat. That there are a great many execrably bad poems in the book only a partisan would deny, and only an enemy would count against Mr. Kipling. There is quite as much bad verse, but of a different kind, in a collected edition of Wordsworth or Shelley ; there is a huge body of bad scenes and bad lines in Shakespeare. Just as a dog has, by English law, a right to his first bite, so a poet has a right to a certain proportion of bad poems. That Mr. Kipling's bad poems are rather more annoying than most people's is only a proof of his vitality. Granted that a poem is to be bad, it might just as well be rampageously and provocatively bad and chiefly written in italics as mildly, quietly, sluggishly bad. In neither case has the critic any right to judge a poet by his failures.
" Eddi's Service," a ballad about the Saxon priest who holds the midnight mass which is attended only by a bullock and an old marsh donkey is delightful, and, though sentimental, nothing like as sentimental as Mr. Chesterton's donkey poem. Then how excellent are two lines from " The Legend of Mirth " about Raphael, Gabriel, Michael and Azrael :- " Who, when the Charges were allotted, burst Tumultuous-winged from out the assembly first . . ."
Again, there is fine vigour about the " Song of Mithras." In a more distinguished vein is " The Song of Travel," that begins :- " Where's the lamp that Hero lit Once to call Leander home ?
Equal time bath shovelled it
-'Neath the wraok of Greece and Rome.
Neither wait we any more, That worn sail which Argo bore . . ."
So is also his little poem " The Explanation ; or, Love and Death." But, like many writers whose natural medium is prose and fiction, it is in quite short poems, chapter headings, for instance, that Mr. Kipling often shows at his best. For example, the famous one with which " Lispeth " opens :- "Look, you have east out Love I What Cods are these You bid me please ? The Three in One, the One in Three ? Not so ! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities."
Or, again, such a writer very often finds himself in a lighter vein. For example, " Rimini," " Poor Honest Men," " Five and Twenty Ponies," " Jobson's Amen," or the eternally fresh and charming "When 'Omer Smote . . ." But even in the poems that I have instanced, all poems that from old acquaintance or immediate reconsideration have seemed to me to be typical of what is aesthetically best in Mr. Kipling's work, we shall be very blind if-we dry not see a common and not -strictly aesthetic quality. In the less aesthetically successful -poems• this quality is still more apparent. -It is a power of sympathetic insight into other men's minds. The world has never yet determined to its satisfaction what is the aim and function of the arts. I am inclined to think that it is concerned with some very subtle form of communication and expression, but whether or not we arc willing 'to consider that this is in any sense a final end of the arts, we shall all of us agree That expression and communi.aition are unquestionably two of the functions which the arts fulfil. Milton set out consoiously " to justify the ways of God to men," but every poet in sa fer as he displays the weaknesses, the splendours and the subtleties of the human soul, does to some extent justify the ways of men to men. Men would not torment each other so if they did not constantly misunderstand each other, for Comprehension is the mother of 'Sympathy,-and" Sympathy of Kindness,and Kindness
• .Rudvard Eipling's Verse,
rl5m n^.:.11885-1018. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
of Love, which, as the Christian religion never ceases to reiterate, is the only all-embracing and all-sufficient virtue. Now, if it is the function of the arts, especially in their more mystical aspects (take the oases of Blake, Shelley and Wordsworth), to make the human soul comprehensible in its subtlest aspects, we shall begin to feel on turning over Mr. Kipling's poems again that so well does he fulfil this function of explaining men to their fellows, not perhaps in their subtlest aspects, but in their most urgent everyday affairs, that he ought almost to be exempt from purely aesthetic criticism. His insight and sympathy for all sorts and kinds of men are really amazing, and by some good luck it is just the most inarticulate people that he seems to understand best—the soldier in all his aspects, noble and ignoble ; the man of action, often so exasperating to the man of reflection ; Hobden and all those whom he has himself called " The Sons of Martha." His Barkack Room Balled statement about the soldier :-
" We aren't no thin red 'erocs, nor wo aren't no blackguards,
too, But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you," was a saying whose immense clarity should make us more than ready to forgive any lack of subtlety that we may detect in it. It helped to cure a real evil, it sent a ray of that light which grows from a reference of particular cases to general principles into the outer darkness of the sons of Martha," besides its more obvious effect upon the more priggish of " the sons of Mary." And that is typical of the truths that Mr; Kipling has always seen and has always struggled to express—the fact that " the sons of Martha " and " the sons of Maly" are complementary to one another, not only from the point of view that " it takes all sorts to make a world," but from the aspect that the sons of Mary " and "the sons of Martha" have each a little of their first cousins' characteristics and aro much improved by the cultivation of that little.
Let us, for the moment, set aside Mr. Kipling's genuine and indisputably first-rate aesthetic work in the domain of . the short story and judge him only in his secondary character as poet. I still maintain that, though perhaps not in what we might call a. legitimate manner, he has yet in his own way helped forward the work of civilization and enlightenment through comprehension, which is one of the greatest functions performed by the arts. An eccentric workman might construct a box and fasten it with screws, which he knocked in with a hammer, or with nails, which lie knocked in with a screwdriver. His box might have been a better one if his technical methods had been legitimate. Mr. Kipling might have expounded men still better to one another if his poems had been more perfect vehicles. But the box did serve ita purpose of conveying food to a man in a German prison camp, and Mr. Kipling's poems successfully conveyed their messages to a great body of readers.
A. Wllaaaus-Emas.
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