ART. II.-1. The Seven Seas. By Rudyard Kipling. London, 1896. 2. Fifty Bab Ballads. By W. S. Gilbert. date.) London. (No 3. The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges. London, 1894. 4. Poems. By William Watson. London, 1892. 5. The Tenth Muse and Other Poems. By Sir Edwin Arnold, M.A., K.C.I.E., C.S.I. London, 1895. 6. Old World Idylls and Other Verses. By Austin Dobson. London, 1883. 7. Ballades in Blue China. By Andrew Lang. London, 1888. 8. New Poems. By Francis Thompson. London, 1897. 9. New Ballads. By John Davidson. London, 1897. 10. English Poems. By Richard Le Gallienne. London, 'A.D. 1892.' 11. Poems. By Alice Meynell. London, 1893. 12. A Book of Verses. By Walter Ernest Henley. London, 1888. London, 1890. 13. Saturday Songs. By H. D. Traill. T HERE is a trite thesis of essayists-What is poetry? Poets rarely endeavour to define their art; and Goethe once said, 'People demand exactness and accuracy, and so ruin poetry.' We certainly shall hazard no comprehensive definition. But this much may be averred with confidence. Whatever expresses emotion through words rhythmically musical is poetry. From the remorse of Lamech to the indignation of Ruskin this holds good. Pure thought in its naked ruggedness or fine sound without emotional inspiration are not enough. Some of Wordsworth is not poetry, much of Dryden. Another consideration may be allowed its due preponderance. The glamour of a distant past lends a certain picturesqueness even to the commonplace. No contemporary regarded toga or peruke as in themselves attractive. In the same way many of the Elizabethan conceits would not have dazzled an Elizabethan. Some of Shakespeare's lyrics abounded in what would then have corresponded to 'slang'-although his pinnacle was immeasurably higher than our own. The perspective of time should be borne in mind when we discriminate both present and and bygone literature; and not least where the modern affects the language of the antique. We are told that the age of poetry is dead; that, despite the romance of science, the unquenched thirst for adventure, the growing enthusiasm for ideals, publicity, and machinery have extinguished the poet. We do not believe it. The channels have spread; but the current remains magnetic. And, in face of everything, it is still the poetic element that is required in painting, in music, in fiction. If Millais, if Wagner, if George Eliot had been asked what they strove to be in their several departments, each would, we imagine, have . answered unhesitatingly-a poet. The goal endures; it will be interesting to differentiate the methods of pursuit. For we have in our midst a vast number of Minor Poets'-versifiers incongruously lumped together under this rather invidious category, each, we suppose, appealing to a set of admirers, if only to each other. But above all there are Mr. W. S. Gilbert and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, both possessed of a special talent, both much more universally appreciable than the rest, each, in his way, supereminent. With these two we propose to begin; and first with the least voluminous. Is Mr. Rudyard Kipling a poet? Does he, whatever else he does, express emotion in musical rhythm? The affirmative is incontestable. His whole utterance vibrates with an audible, if somewhat coarse, pulse of feeling, is quickened by a bold, if somewhat bravado, passion, is instinct with a buccaneer's daring, an imperialist's idealism, a man's fibre and flesh and blood. And it is resonant with corresponding lilt and rhythm. It swings effects on the reader by its flashing, dashing refrains. Neither sensation nor cadence are ever sustained, and both are seldom delicate. They are earthly, but not earthy; compact of the world, but not of clay. They mirror those 'Who are neither children nor Gods, but men in a world of men!' and they are gleams and glimpses, not rounded wholes. His romance is weirdness rather than mysticism, respiration more than aspiration. His men fight and win; his women love and are lost; he delights in the fiery, furious moods of humanity and nature; he 'rejoices like a giant to run his course,' and, so far, there is something of Byron about him; in fine, he sings (sometimes whistles) of adventure, like an adventurer. And yet he is not destitute of softer intervals, deeper insight, and sublimer flights. The delineator of Hindoos and AngloIndians, he has gripped life as he has found it; and wherever he he has found heroism, or fidelity, or self-sacrifice, or duty, or a seeking after God, he has worthily repeated it. His whole message is informed with a scorn of the petty and sordid, the sickly and the maudlin; as well as with a most signal humour, liquid rather than dry, if we may coin the phrase. His defects are a lack both of conspicuous depth and subtlety, an intemperance, an impatience of 'quietness and confidence,' an occasional sub-redolence of the tap-room, a want of real culture both of soul and mind, which has goaded him to retort against his detractors in the telling It is pretty, but is it Art?' His enormous directness of animal vigour, his absolute sincerity and magic insight, above all his impetuous audacity, are qualities of these defects. He is truly and powerfully himself. Of course in his treatment of Tommy Atkins he employs the argot of his subject and the music of the soldier's music-hall; just as in his representation of the Indian civilian, he wields the slang of the station club-house. But he is able to raise these into poetry and carry them aloft with himself. For example, in 'The Story of Uriah,' what can sound more vulgarly prosaic than the opening?— 'Jack Barrett went to Quetta Because they told him to. He left his wife at Simla On three-fourths his monthly screw. Ere the next month's pay he drew.' Continuously printed, these lines might well be extracts from a newspaper; not so, the culmination— -core. 'And when the Last Great Bugle Call Adown the Hurnai throbs, When the last grim joke is entered I shouldn't like to be the man Who sent Jack Barrett there.' A pugilist's poetry, may be, but none the less poetical to the Mr. Kipling, though often a swashbuckler, is never a charlatan; his passion is not hysterical, nor his sentiment twaddling; nor is his sarcasm levity. He reaches the climax of his peculiar method-his emotional illumination of a so-called common' man's common talk in a lilt catching the common tunes he loves to hum-in Mandalay.' Everyone will remember the wonderful manner in which these stanzas commemorate the Vol. 186.-No. 372. Ꮓ spell spell of the East over the ordinary British soldier. It is within our knowledge that a retired private of the line, who had certainly never heard of the poem, did actually so speak, and so regret, and so summon back the bewitching dream of Oriental womanhood in contrast with the matter-of-fact stolidity of his married happiness. We mention this as a proof of Mr. Kipling's talent for intuition, which, like a divining-rod, marks almost unerringly the wellspring of emotion. What a rhythm is that of the commencement. How familiar it sounds at once, like the chime of accustomed bells, or some haunting strain which we can neither quite remember nor ever wholly forget. How, by strokes at once sudden and subtle, it puts us into the heart of a strange world! 'By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea, Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay 2 On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin'-fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay. But that's all shove be'ind me-long ago an' fur away, An' there aint no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay; An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells; "If you've 'eard the East a-callin' you won't never 'eed naught else," No you wont 'eed nothin' else But them spicy garlic smells, An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells And what a rhapsody of rebellion is condensed in the thrill of the close! 'Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there are'nt no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst; For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be- Of course less remote, Milton would not thus have delivered himself. not; nor Dante, nor Eschylus; nor in days Goethe or Schiller. Objections of this kind are very futile. A waterfall A waterfall is one thing, and a snow-mountain another, but both swell the chorus of Nature. Poets modelled on the 'exemplaria Græca,' aim high and with restraint; diction is to them a marble for the sculpture of noble statues; and there are others, like Keats, who transfigure and transform existence. But Mr. Kipling is purely a lyric poet, nor does he rank among the first. A far greater lyrical poet, Heine, has so delivered himself in his magnificent outburst of 'The Two Grenadiers: ' 'Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind! Lass sie betteln gehen wenn sie hungrig sind. The note is identical-that of enthusiastic feeling poeticizing the soldier's rough words. The same note, too, has been constantly struck by Burns, whose songs are the Scotch ploughboy's, racy of the soil, recalling by their very shape the folk whose feelings they have immortalized. So too, however differently, Browning intersperses his philosophy with ejaculations of the soul, abruptly blurted, but convincingly real, and not any transcript from another age. And here we may observe a very significant contrast with Wordsworth. Wordsworth has rendered the poetry of peasant life, but scarcely in the English of the peasantry. His meditative Williams, with their patient resignation in Sunday guise, are expurgated editions, and remind one of Wilkie's rustics whose consumption of soap is incredible. Wordsworth was a farmer by temperament, and his labourers are simply himself, often becoming, if truth be told, insufferable by virtue of their very virtues. We do not for one moment compare Kipling with Wordsworth, who, more than any poet, has taught us the consolations and elevations of nature. But when we are told that Kipling is no poet, that his smart vulgarity' is that of the 'up-to-date press-man,' and the like, it is only fair to rejoin that, through the very twang of his verse, he has equally revealed to us certain classes of our fellow-creatures in their habit as they live. And, when he is dismissed, as so much else is now dismissed, because he is 'modern,' we are driven to point out that his method is not new, as nothing in art, if we will only reflect, is 'modern'-except the past. Another merit of Mr. Kipling is that he respects his limits. He rarely attempts an imitative or merely sportive vein, and when he does, he usually fails. His offences against rhyme and rhythm, against 'good taste' (which usually means our z 2 dislike |