The Borderer of East and West

Rudyard Kipling's Verse. Inclusive Edition, 1885 1926. (Hodder and Stoughton. 25s.)

IT was through the richly expressive 'nineties, so much more exciting, protesting, and fertile in performance than these Chiding and jaded years,;that the young journalist from Lahore, who had suddenly flashed into a new lordship of prose and verse, kept steadily surprising his surprising contemporaries.

He spoke to the West ; but his flaming background was the East. Leaning as if idly upon the golden barriers of the Orient, with a frieze of palms, and sacred peacocks, and the incongruous figures of the army of occupation behind him, lie expressed, with marvellous aplomb and a style that at worst was vivid journalese and at best afresh magic evocation, the mirth, the insolence, the ennui, the casual kindness, the rectitude of English rule in India. With tunes reft from the psalmody of an Ironside, he chanted hymns of the Empire, glorious and militant. Yet, since he was the foster-child of the mysterious continent, sometimes he saw walking in terror and splendour the shapes of the ancient gods his father knew so well ; and once, with Kim and the old larria, he took the mystic Way in true humility, and found the perfection of peace and the beauty of holiness.

This large volume holds between its covers all that Kipling has written when he has passed from the measures of prose to the measures of verse. Varied metres, strong and often sweet, though innocent /of -insidiouil cadences_' Triumphal rattle of the kettledrums, trumpets urgent, bugles calling, wailing of pipes ! The shrilling of the defiant banjo, the ridiculous lilting of music-hall movements that conclude with a break-down dance ! The soft beat of tom-toms per- sistent, the ring and refrain of a Scots ballad, the dainty appeal of an " Envoy " ! The sound of mighty seas, the throb- bing of great engines, long labouring lines that convey the weariness of the trill ! Then, in a dewy hush, the sound of a shepherd's flute, or a lover's lament. In Kipling's verse, as in his fiction, the vibrations of his extreme vitality compel your sympathy even when your mind is dead against him.

Still, on the whole his poetry does not equal his prose. As with the so different Thomas Hardy, the sensuous and poetic qualities of colour and fragrance and imagery more intimately inhabit the less spiritual art. But Hardy has made himself a peculiar medium of colourless aspect and difficult metre, majestic enough, abstract enough, to convey the austere arraignment of Destiny. Kipling's matter is much the same in lyric and story. And you will hardly find in the verse anything so terrible as " The End of the Passage," so .tragic as " Love o'. Women," so pathetic as " The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot." " Mandalay " is not so lovely as " Without Benefit of Clergy " ; and no poem here holds anything so ineffable as the kiss brushed into the father's palm in the delicate mystery called " They." But let .us be .grateful for much. If this book, .perhaps, had been half the size, we would have been more grateful - So much of it is merely occasional, concerned withimperman= eat . and peevish matter never " accepted of sang," and unre- deemed by any casual beauty of phrase now that the argument is extinct. In the massed treasure of Kipling's.poetry there is much tarnished tinsel and some imperial purple gone shoddy ;- but there are splinters and spinels of Burmese ruby, tdrquoise-studded things from dim bazaars, and some star- sapphires, and a little heap of glimmering things like moon- stones, or crystals of English dew. Of the sacred and sump- tuous stuff of India there is more in the fiction ; in his verse and his prose it gives often an impression of loot, of ravished beauty. There are extremes of sweetness and brutality in Kijiling's literary mood ; the 'nineties liked him none the less for that.

$omewhere the poet returns thanks to Allah who gave him

"Two

Separate sides to my head."

He has an 'equally divided heart. From one point of view he is the laureate of England's greatness and the rhapsodist of her Empire. " The Man with his Back to the East " gazed at:his native land at the climax of her power and prosperity, and with all the Orientalism, drawn from his foster-country he sang her into a kind of apotheosis. For England and her Culonies he made a mythology that certainly imposed itself on manyminds, and had a quite creditable aesthetic effect. The Empire became self-conscious with Kipling. He was the singer for that particular hour. But the Law, the Blood, the Breed, the Chosen People are pre-war fashions. His imperial- istic verse is sincere, nevertheless ; and " Recessional " closed the pomp of the Diamond Jubilee with a noble rhythm. The great verse by which the rather monstrous implication about God-given "dominion over palm and pine " is dissolved away is really borrowed from the Indian mystics in whose gaze the coloured world of things passes like a little smoke from the burning-ghat at sunset.

Kipling, as the poet of Empire, belongs to social history. What of his individual and permanent poetic values ? " It's human, but is it Art ? " his own Devil might say, contem- plating this throbbing mass of song and ballad. It is the very intensity of its humanity that carries it into art, one might reply. With all candid- human beings of East or West the writer has a passionate, sympathy. He may hate a type, not often a real person. But of all the people he considers, most he loves the Cockney soldier. In Barrack-Room Ballads he raised the Cockney patois into a literary dialect, and immortalized a fantastic folk whose wild gaiety marches with a careless courage. " Danny Deever," that ghastly dialogue heard in thin air, with the recurrent stab of the chorus, can twist the very heart. The giddy and desperate tune of " Fuzzy Wuzzy " carries off a chivalrous recognition, and so does the ironic, gallant and complete understanding of Is Gunga Din ! " " Mandalay " is a melody of magical reminiscence with only one flaw. " Kabul River" seems to me_the greatestnithem._ .Theoreloctant metre with the hurry- ing line, lilte the irregular beat of a stricken heart, the vision

of the dark shining water, and the cry of the bereaved comrade, fierce as the agony. of Achilles, make it a singular lyric of tragic experience.

But the range of Kipling's verse is too wide for brief appreci- ation. Everybody knows the monologues, as searching as

Browning's, though much more vehement, things like " McAndrew's Hymn," with its black ecstasy of Calvinism and its modern machine-worship, and the triumphant Sir Antony Gloster," .a modern spoiler who must go out in his ship at his death like a Viking of old. " The Song of Mithras " is perhaps the most moving of the purely historical ditties.

In the Jungle-books, at least, the songs are equal to the stories, full of warning, divination, and soft lullaby. Some of the

epitaphs on those killed by-the War have a classic grace. - All the little verses set here and there about his chapters, very

much in the manner of Scott, are most piercing and most concentrated. Among these are snatches of sensitive love- song, not met elsewhere in his work. " Blue Roses " is wistful and muted with all regret. " The Ripple Song " and " The Nursing Sister " seem to be sighed from some deep compassion.

It is necessary to end. Having two sides to his head and heart, the poet has been afflicted with a double nostalgia. The Empire has had his rhetoric. Intimate India and intimate England have taken his heart. The sweet spell of Sussex has stilled the trumpets. Among the " close-bit thyme " he thinks no more how

" The great white oxen with onyx eyes Watch the souls of the dead arise."

Among his later verses are some songs of rare quietude, that express a patriotism none can gainsay. They make an evensong, mild and grave and soothing. In sound and fury Kipling harks back to the Elizabethans sometimes, in grace and tenderness he recalls their fragrant lyrics :—

' Take of English Earth as much As either hand may rightly clutch. In the taking of it breathe Prayer for all who lie beneath, Not the great or well bespoken, But the mere uncounted folk Of whose life and death is none Report or lamentation.

Lay that earth upon thy heart And thy sickness shall depart."

Softly breathed words for the celebrant of Empire ! He is a romantic poet of high degree ; he is akin to the makers of Norse Sagas, Scots Ballads, Chansons de testes, and even of the songs that wandered about before "'Omer struck- 'is bloomin' lyre." The very magnanimity and largesse of his singer's bounty is against his adequate recognition as a pnet ; among so much that is good, his lyric best is obscured by, his exuberance—a generous fault which is not conspicuous in contemporary poets I RACHEL ANNAND TAYLOR.