talks from the hills. It was a voice from the frontiers, and the frontiers had not been asked to speak. The voice, however, continued to speak every year with increasing force-"apparent power," they call it-and the public was not to be frightened by old gentlemen with pens. The public was revelling in the new author, "barbarity" and all; schoolboys had his tales by heart; and the critics stood down in favor of a new genius and a new world. That he should have discovered this new world and this new art in the five years or so after his return from school in England is one of the most wonderful things about Kipling. It is not only that he became in those few years a first-class journalist, a journalist of almost intolerable efficiency, with a passion for the makers and the making of things and an infallible ear for the symbol and the trade term; but he had already discovered the British Army, in the only part of the world where it was vocal and had nerves, and had adopted already that philosophy of the Group, which is either the Law of the Service or the Law of the Jungle, as you please, and, by extension, the Law of the Nation and of Empire. Death is already, to this young man of twentyone, "that pukka step miscalled 'decease'"-the last department in the Service.

A breath of wind, a Border bullet's flight,

A draught of water, or a horse's fright

The droning of the fat Sheristadar
Ceases, the punka stops, and falls

the night

For you or me. Do those who live decline

The step that offers, or their work re sign?

Trust me, To-day's Most Indispensables,

Five hundred men can take your place

or mine.

The moral of half his stories is there.

It is not a cheerful philosophy, but it is good Anglo-Indian, and it sees men through. For India, it seems,

is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriouslythe mid-day sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink. Flirtation does not matter, because every one is being transferred, and either you or she leave the station and never return. Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output, and another man takes all the credit of his best, as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do worse, and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else. Amusements do not matter, because you must repeat them as soon as you have accomplished them once, and most amusements only mean trying to win another person's money. Sickness does not matter, because it's all in the day's work, and if you die, another man takes over your place and your office in the eight hours between death and burial. Nothing matters except home-furlough and acting allowances, and these only because they are scarce. It is a slack country, where all men work with imperfect instruments; and the wisest thing is to escape as soon as ever you can to some place where amusement is amusement and a reputation worth the having.

A liverish philosophy no doubt, but it was made for liverish men; an exile's philosophy, but it is meant for exiles; and to say that the men out there have a keen sense of exile, what is it but to say that they are English and cannot afford to forget it? Phil the planter took to dropping his English correspondence, and began to look on India as his home: "Some men fall this way, and they are of no use afterwards." The mockery and irony in Kipling's Indian tales are in the spirit of this paradox, for they are the mockery and irony of a true believer.

When he mocks, it is as a colonel curses his regiment, because he is at ease in his faith. No man believes more heartily than Kipling in the game of life, but he takes an artist's pleasure in life's handicaps. He enjoys the spills. Home writers may talk till doomsday of running society and government by laws of science; Kipling recognized from the first, watching his elders going about their work in India, that society and government are run on race and character, and depend on quite irrational loyalties and prejudices on which one can count-plain as a pikestaff to members of the group, but to the intelligent outsider, a Fabian statistician, for example, madness and folly. It is odd to think that Mr. Bernard Shaw, after so long deploying those wonderful wits of his on the feverish work of reform, should have come round at last to where Kipling began, to the law of the Group and the denial of Progress.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances.

This Kipling knew at eighteen, taught by the best schoolmaster, the blood in his veins, and in the best school, the outskirts of the world, where boys become men in a single action and men come to nature without Nietzsche. He began to create at the point where Shaw lays down his pen. French critics talk of his désinvolture. His désinvolture is the club philosophy of a hard-living service, in which to be sentimental is to be unfit. In such a service the sentiments must rough it, and death, drink, debts, and adultery be reckoned up among the chances of the day. There is waste, of course, in such a life; every now and then The

Boy goes under, or the heat tells; but even Aurelian McGoggin learns not to be such an ass; and a service which makes Stricklands, Finlaysons, and Gisbornes is a great service or else the men in it are great, which is the same thing in the sight of God. There is nothing finer in the poets of nature than Gisborne in his rukh. Of course, love suffers. Kipling in these stories is hard on women, if they are white; he takes it out in comradeship, with a man or a dog. Had it been his wife who offered to sleep in the veranda in the rain, Strickland would not have minded, but "Tietjens was a dog, and therefore the better animal." We are dealing once more with the imperfect philosophy of fact. It is a fact that for such a life a married man is maimed; that "he travels the fastest who travels alone." Captain Gadsby was a devil in a charge, until he married and, becoming a father, found life so precious that he must make it perfectly safe; that is to say, he was no good for anything any longer, and sold out. It is only when the girl is dark and of the country that Kipling is tender; and indeed, in all these books of stories, his tales of the resthouses are better than his tales of the clubs. When the Three Soldiers are forgotten men will still read the fantasy "On the City Wall," and the tragedy of Bisesa with the broken hands, and Har Dyal's song:

My father's wife is old and harsh with years,

And drudge of all my father's house am I,

My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears,

Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

It was the good fortune of Kipling, when he discovered this Indian world, to have already discovered his art. The art of Kipling is the art of a journalist, and he learned it at once. When the Pioneer sent him, at twenty

still with a dog-he has advanced upon his original manner to something new. The soil of Sussex has got hold of him; after the lightnings of the nineties he has struck English ground. Ever since his "Jungle Books" his symbols have been deepening. There is more and more implication, which comes out in quite little things of expression; when Garm the dog was restored to his master, "his tail was a haze." It is a difficult style, but the increase of range is magnificent. From the England of "An Habitation Enforced," where the old men "come down like ellum-branches in still weather," to the cosmic impudence of "The Night Mail," is a stride almost beyond nature.

The stars ahead dim no more than if a film of mist had been drawn under unobserved, but the deep air-boom on our skin changes to a joyful shout. "The dawn-gust," says Tim. "It'll go on to meet the Sun. Look! Look! . . .” Then the Sun rises and through the colloid strikes out our lamps. Tim scowls in his face. "Squirrels in a cage," he mutters. "That's all we are. Squirrels in a cage! He's going twice as fast as us. Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we'll take steps that will amaze you. We'll Joshua you!"

He looks forward to the day when even on the Equator we shall hold the Sun level in his stride. It is in these later books that Kipling makes his amends to women. For children he had never felt anything but tenderness; and now writes more for them than for any one else "The little ones, than whom none are so terrible if a man misplace a word, or in a second telling vary events by so much as one small devil." There is Willie-baba, promoted by his own action Percival William Williams, and Punch-baba, saying as he shut the little brown book and put it back in the cupboard, "Now I can truly read, and now I will

never read anything in the world"pure baby wisdom, and the cry of the truly educated man to this day. And there are little Jakin and Lew of the Fore and Aft, and the children of "Pook's Hill," and the Lashmar baby, but most wonderful of all, the little children in "They," the souls of little dead English children walking in the wood, by the house where all the latches are low. No wonder that children love Kipling.

We have dwelt on Mr. Kipling's art in prose because we believe that he will be best remembered by it; but his poetry is as necessary to the interpretation of his mind as Meredith's, and is, besides, by the fortune of popularity, part of the history of the nation. It was in 1888 or so, when he was travelling in the United States, that Kipling first proposed to himself the task of Imperial laureate. "Remains only," he said, "to compose the greatest song of all-the Saga of the Anglo-Saxon all round the earth. Will any one take the contract?" He took it himself, and in poems which every one knows anthemed the nation into Imperialism and the Boer War. It was the opinion of Mr. Dooley that Mr. Kipling should have died in 1899, with his "Recessional" behind him-an extreme view, even if Mr. Kipling had been a politician. He was a man with a message, however, there was no doubt of that, and it was certain that the British public would do with his poems the only thing the British public can do with poems-make a policy of them. Kipling fell with the policy, and so completely that his reputation is only now beginning to recover from the fall. It was a bad spill; and "Stalky" made it worse, for, if India is "full of Stalkys," the boy was held to have given away the man. "The Islanders" of 1902 completed the débâcle: it was an ill-judged poem, but perhaps ex