exists between the old grey mother and the "Sons of the Blood" "Wards of the Outer March, Lords of the Lower Seas." "Flesh of the flesh that I bred, bone of the bone that I bare; Stark as your sons shall be-stern as your fathers were, Deeper than speech our love, stronger than life our tether, But we do not fall on the neck nor kiss when we come together." Nevertheless while dispensing with kissing, England makes promise So long as The Blood endures, I shall know that your good is mine: ye shall feel that my strength is yours; In the day of Armageddon, at the last great fight of all, That our House shall stand together and the pillars do not fall. Each of the English realms beyond the sea shall be self-governing: The Law that ye make shall be law, and I do not press my will. Because ye are Sons of The Blood and call me Mother still. They must talk together, brother to brother's face, for the good of their peoples and the Pride of the Race, speaking After the use of the English, in straight flung words and few. The concluding stanza, with the exception of the last line, which is thoroughly Kiplingesque, is hardly up to the level of the rest of the poem: Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your ways, Baulking the end half won for an instant dole of praise. Stand to your work and be wise-certain of sword and pen, Who are neither children nor Gods, but men in a world of men! The last line is Kipling all over. It both suggests his limitation and betrays his secret. His world is a world of men and men only. God and Woman are equally outside. I postpone to the next section his sea-pieces, and turn to the powerful and pathetic "Song of the Dead," the unknown multitude of pioneers of the Empire, emigrants and others, to whom in "the man-stifled town" "Came the Whisper, came the Vision" which drove them over sea in the faith of little children : Then the wood failed-then the food failed-then the last water dried In the faith of little children we lay down and died. To this wholly unauthorised horde, the Gentlemen Rovers abroad who preach in advance of the Army and skirmish ahead of the Church, Rudyard Kipling acts as choir boy : There's a Legion that never was listed, That carries no colours or crest, But, split in a thousand detachments, Is breaking the road for the rest. Of these pioneers of Empire he says:— The ends o' the earth were our portion, The ocean at large was our share. There was never a skirmish to windward But the Leaderless Legion was there. The note in the "Lost Legion" recalls the Barrack Room Ballads of the "Gentlemen Rankers," one of those songs in which Rudyard Kipl ng touches depths of tragic horror rendered all the more horrible by the gruesome chorus. The ballad is dedicated To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned, To my brethren in their sorrow overseas. Lost they are indeed, as their poet describes them, with no future, drinking themselves into temporary oblivion of their past:-- We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth. God help us, for we knew the worst too young! How hideous, horrible as the laughter of fiends in hell, comes this refrain: We're little black sheep who've gone astray, Baa-aa-aa! Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, God ha' mercy on such as we, 'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead? She 'as ships on the foam-she 'as millions at 'ome, Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor, For 'alf o' Creation she owns ; We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword an' the flame, An' we've salted it down with our bones. (Poor beggars!-it's blue with our bones!) So the ballad goes on with its odd, grotesque description of the Empire and its Sovereign, for whom Kings must come down and Emperors frown "when the Widow at Windsor says 'Stop!" For 'er sentries we stand by the sea an' the land The next four lines as a variant upon the morning drumbeat are inimitable : Take 'old o' the Wings o' the Mornin', But you won't get away from the tune that they play There is a condensed force about that quatrain which contrasts markedly with the more ambitious poem "The English Flag." This is almost too well-known to need quotation; but as it is the more distinctively Imperial of all his poems I give a stanza or two. It opens thus: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 with vapour and fume and brag, They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag! Thus inspired, the Four Winds which sweep the Seven Seas reply, the North leading off. Then the South Wind sighs: Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone, But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag was flown. The East Wind roars in similar strain: Never the lotos closes, never the wild fowl wake, But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for England's sake Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maidBecause on the bones of the English the English Flag is stayed. The West Wind closes the series of responses to the poet's inquiry, "What is the Flag of England?":The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it-the frozen dews have kissed The naked stars have seen it, a fellow star in the mist. What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare, Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there! There is a fine thrilling note in this, but I am disposed to regard the "Song of the Banjo" as much more distinctive of Rudyard Kipling's conception of the Empire. There is something very characteristic of the poet's genius that he should make the banjo The war-drum of the White Man round the world! The banjo, no doubt, is a handier musical instrument than a Broadwood grand or an organ; but no one except Kipling could have glorified the banjo with its "Pillywilly-winky-winky-popp" in this fashion : Let the organ moan her sorrow to the roof- I have told the naked stars the Grief of Man! When I stand to jeer the fatted Soul of Things; They change their skies above them, But the mothers pass with their tales of wrong and dearth. Our fathers held by purchase, But we by the right of birth; Our heart's where they rocked our cradle, Our love where we spent our toil, And our faith and our hope and our honour Enough to vindicate the right of Rudyard Kipling to be Laureate of the Empire. II.-AS LAUREATE OF THE SEVEN SEAS. The sovereignty of the sea, which is Britain's most precious heritage, has never had a poet so strenuous and sympathetic as Rudyard Kipling. The English are the masters of the Seven Seas, and he devotes many poems to their overlordship. But not in swaggering Jingo vein. Nothing is more striking in all his poems of the sea than his constant association of the sea with death:We have fed our sea for a thousand years, And she calls us, still unfed, Though there's never a wave of all her waves We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest, Lord God, we ha' paid in full! So it goes on until in the last stanza the line, "If blood be the price of admiralty," is repeated three times. The same thought finds expression in the fine ballad, "The Sea Wife": There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate, She breeds a breed o' rovin' men And casts them over sea. She wills her sons to the wet ploughing, That makes the white ash spin; And some return by failing light, And some in waking dream, For she hears the heels of the dripping ghosts "The Merchantmen," "The Liner she's a Lady," and "The First" and "the Last Chanteys" are songs of the sea without the sad undertone. M'Andrews' Hymn" is an ambitious attempt to sing the Song of Steam, and to compel such engineering terms as cranks, tailrods, eccentrics, etc., to accommodate themselves to the uses of the poet. M'Andrews is a Calvinist-a Scotch Calvinist and he sees in his engines illustrations of predestination and the Divine decrees. He hears them Singin' like the Mornin' Stars for joy that they are made, While, out o' touch o' vanity, the sweatin' thrust block says: "Not unto us the praise, or man-not unto us the praise!" Now, a' together, hear them lift their lesson-theirs an' mine: Law, Orrder, Duty an' Restraint, Obedience, Discipline! Mill, forge an' try-pit taught them that when roarin' they arose, An' whiles I wonder if a soul was gied them wi' the blows. "Mulholland's Contract" is the lay of one Mulholland, a cattle-boat man, who, in an hour of imminent peril, made a contract with God which he loyally observed. He recovered and went to preach the gospel on the boats which "are more like Hell than anything else I know." He did not want to "preach Religion, handsome an' out of the wet," so he preached it faithfully with results: I have been smit an' bruised, as warned would be the case, An' turned my cheek to the smiter, exactly as Scripture says; But following that, I knocked him down an' led him up to Grace. An' we have preaching on Sundays whenever the sea is calm, An' I use no knife or pistol, an' I never take no harm, For the Lord abideth back of me to guide my fighting arm. The most typical of all his sea pieces is that in which he sings how seven men took the Bolivar, a coffin screwsteamer laden with a shifting cargo of rails, from Sunderland to Bilbao. It has the genuine ring in it, the grim, soulless ring natural and proper to a ballad that sings of heroic exertions inspired by no heroic faith, but merely prompted by the instinct of the bull-dog. These Seven men from all the world, back to town again, are characteristic heroes of Kipling, and he tells with gusto how Leaking like a lobster-pot, steering like a drayOut we took the "Bolivar," out across the Bay! It was an achievement worthy the muse of the Laureate of the Sea : Just a pack o' rotten plates puttied up with tar, In we came, an' time enough, 'cross Bilbao Bar. Overloaded, undermanned, meant to founder, we Euchred God Almighty's storm, bluffed the Eternal Sea! Everything in the sea or below the sea or at the side of the sea has charms for him. His eye pierces the ocean depths to the Great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-blurred cables creep. Down in the dark, in the utter dark, where the blind white sea snakes are, he listens and he hears. Down in the womb of the world Words and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat. The Coastwise Lights are saluted by him in splendid verse: Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees; Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas. From reef and rock and skerry-over headland, ness, and voe The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of Englan go. And all that float upon its waters are known to him and sung by him, whether they be the white wallsidel warship, the crawling cargo tanks, the Southern clippers, or the "gipsies of the Horn": Swift shuttles of an Empire's loom that weave us, main to main, The Coastwise Lights of England give you welcome back again! Of the Seven Seas themselves he says but little. They are referred to in two of his poems, but are not named in any. In the Neolithic Age, we read:: Still the world is wondrous large,-seven seas from marge to marge, And it holds a vast of various kinds of man; And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandu, And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban. In "The Flowers" the last verse: Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas; Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these! Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land, Master of the Seven Seas, oh, love and understand. His verse is wooden sometimes and limping, but his phrases are superb. It would be difficult to match in its own style this rollicking line: In a ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking-screws. But whether it is in telling the tragic story of the fight of the sealers in the fog, or chanting an anchor song, or whatever it may be, so long as he is among the waves listening to the wind, Rudyard Kipling is at home. It is right fitting that the Laureate of the Empire should also be the Laureate of the Seven Seas. III. THE TYRTÆUS OF THE BARRACK ROOM Rudyard Kipling's "Barrack Room Ballads" are an honest and a singularly successful attempt to explain, as he tells Tommy Atkins, "both your pleasure and your pain." In the new volume there are some more ballads, but none which come up to or excel "Tommy," and "FuzzyWuzzy." These have often been quoted, but no attempt to describe Rudyard Kipling's verse would be complete without at least a sample from each of these famous ditties. "Tommy" is devoted to contrasting the way in which the wearer of Her Majesty's uniform is often discriminated against by publicans, theatre managers. etc., to the compliments showered upon Mr. Atkins when the drums begin to roll. Tommy's protest in the following verses is as just as it is emphatic: We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you; And it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind; O it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind. For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot; An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool-you bet that Tommy sees! Even better than "Tommy" is Tommy's tribute to the Soudanese Fuzzy-Wuzzy who broke a British square: 'E rushes at the smoke when we let drive, An', before we know, 'e's 'ackin' at our 'ead; 'E's all 'ot sand an' ginger when alive, An' 'e's generally shammin' when 'e's dead. 'E's a daisy, 'e's a ducky, 'e's a lamb! 'E's a injia-rubber idiot on the spree, 'E's the only thing that doesn't give a damn So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan; The 'orse 'e knows above a bit, the bullock's but a fool, O the oont, O the oont, O the Gawd-forsaken oont! An' when we get him up again-the beggar goes an' dies! There is a famous lilt in some of these ballads. For example, take the line And I'm here in the clink for a thundering drink and blacking the corporal's eye, or the chorus of "Belts" whom he tended concludes the ballad about his deliverer by the consoling reflection that he will meet him in hell: 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 An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din! You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! Though I've belted you and flayed you, By the livin' Gawd that made you, You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din! Snarleyow" is one that sounds the deepest note of the horror of war in all Kipling's verse, for the conventional talk about the misery of the battle-field is, as might be expected, signally absent from his verse. Snarleyow" was a horse in a battery, which on moving into action was struck by a roundshot and "almost tore in two." The driver's brother cries out for the battery to pull up, for Snarleyow had fouled the limber, and was lying with his head between his heels. "There ain't no 'Stop Conductor!' when a battery's changin ground," replied the driver; "I couldn't pull up not for youyour 'ead between your 'eels." Hardly had he spoken before a shell dropped to the right of the battery, and when the smoke cleared away there lay the driver's brother "with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels":— Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain, 'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain! They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best, So they took and drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest. The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt, An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head 'Twas juicier for the niggers when the case begun to spread. That little touch about the juicy wheel, juicy with the driver's brother's blood, is grim indeed. The moril of this story, it is plainly to be seen: You 'aven't got no families when servin' of the Queen- There is a more pathetic note, the lament over a comrade, in the "Ford o' Kabul River." There is a vigorous, plain, practical realism in the ballad addressed to the young British soldier: When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, In the new series, the " Birds of Prey March" does not strike me as a very exhilarating performance. For soldiers embarking on a trooper to sing the chorus must be the reverse of inspiriting : Cheer! For we'll never live to see no bloomin' victory! The jackal an' the kite 'Ave an 'ealthy appetite, An' you'll never see your soldiers any more! Much better is the ballad about the Marines entitled "Soldier an' Sailor too." Here is Kipling's reference to the story of the heroism of the Marines at the wreck of the Birkenhead : To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about, Is nothin' so bad when you've cover to ’and an' leave auʼ likin’ to shout; But to stand an' be still to the Birken'ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew, An' they done it, the Jollies-'Er Majesty's Jollies-soldier an' sailor too; Their work was done when it 'adn't begun; they was younger nor me an' you; Their choice it was plain between drownin' in 'eaps an' bein' mopped by the screw, So they stood an' was still in the Birken'ead drill, soldier an' sailor too.. The ballad about the sappers is not bad, but the best of the new ballads is that entitled "The 'Eathen," which in reality is not about the heathen at all, but describes the evolution of the non-commissioned officer from the raw recruit. The description of soldiers waiting under fire is not heroic, but it is very realistic: 'E feels 'is innards 'eavin', 'is bowels givin' way; 'E sees the blue-white faces all trying' 'ard to grin, An' 'e stands an' waits an' suffers till it's time to cap 'em in. 'E's just as sick as they are, 'is 'eart is like to split, But 'e works 'em, works 'em, works 'em till he feels 'em take the bit; The rest is 'oldin' steady till the watchful bugles play, An' 'e lifts 'em, lifts 'em, lifts 'em through the charge that wins the day. The moral of it is that "the more you 'ave known the others the less will you settle to one. An' the end of it's sittin' and thinkin', an' dreamin' Hell fires to see." In "Mary, Pity Women!" there is an attempt to express something of the misery felt by the soldier's abandoned mistress, but even the pity is grudged; what's the good, what's the use, etc. When a man is tired there is naught will bind 'im; There is genuine pathos in the woman's wail:— I want the name-no more- Ah, Gawd, I love you so! But the response is, it is but as it was, is, and ever shall be-women must suffer and men go free. What's the good o' pleadin' when the mother that bore yo2, (Mary, pity women !) knew it all before you. Rudyard Kipling might have shivered with the lightnings of his song this darkness of our age-selfishness, which leads to this complaisant dooming of the weaker to the wall, but that would have been inconsistent with bis worship of the God of Things as They Are. The airiest and most sentimental of his ballads, "Mandalay," contains Tommy's longing for freedom from all moral restraints: 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. Rudyard Kipling and Tommy Atkins do not seem to be much embarrassed by the Decalogue, even when they are west of Suez. |