sand miles away.

From east and west, north and south, wherever the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes may float, they flock into the vast auditorium to listen spellbound to a single voice, which reaches clear and distinct to the most distant tier, where the white faces look and listen while the story is told." And in this audience are gathered all classes, the college don and the day-labourer, scholarly and illiterate, young and old, for the voice of the story-teller is the voice of the people. No less wide and varied is his range of subjects.

"For to admire and for to see,

For to behold this world so wide,"

this is and has been his constant attitude.

But while this cosmopolitan spirit is at home from sea to sea, it is in India that we feel ourselves taken into the very heart of things, that his magic pen dips deep into the tears and laughter of that land of romance and mystery. And what is the secret of the magician's power in this land? The sahib and Tommy Atkins, the coolie and the people of the hill country, is it not because he has lived with these that the strong voice is tremulous with unspoken sympathy? Is it not because, as he writes to this people,

"I have eaten your bread and salt,

I have drunk your water and wine, The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives that ye led were mine.

"Was there aught that I did not share In vigil or toil or ease;

One joy or woe that I did not know, Dear hearts across the seas?"

And this strain of sympathy and brotherhood we find promise of in a little story of the child Kipling.*

"Celebrities," says an English writer, runs in the Kipling family, and the poet owes much to his early associations. Both his grandfathers were Wesleyan ministers, and one of them had three remarkable

At the age of five, the little fellow, trudging over the ploughed fields near Bombay, his tiny hand in the giant clasp of a native husbandman, called back to his mother, "Goodbye, this is my brother." This is the key-note, sweet and strong, to the deep sympathy which permeates his portrayal of Hindu life.

And if his world is sometimes a rough world, and if not only matter, but method too, seems at times undignified and abrupt, all that Mr. Kipling asks of us is

66

Through the broken words and mean, May ye see the truth between." As the singer knew and touched it in the ends of all the earth, and truth, even in ugliness, is beauty. He does not dress out flimsy ladies and dapper knights to flaunt their little parts behind the footlights of an unreal stage, but in the light of day, under the hard pressure of no imaginary conditions, we have "neither children nor gods, but men in a world of men." Men as in "Soldiers Three," degraded, blasphemous and drunken, " rude figures of a rough-hewn race," but behind all their vices are the real men meeting their fate, living their life, doing their work. Underneath all is the spark of the Divine.

And of the jungle books, what shall we say? Other men have made animals talk, but never did they appeal to us as do "Bagheera,"

daughters, who became, in turn, Lady BurneJones, Lady Poynter, wife of the President of the Royal Academy, and the mother of Mr. Kipling.

"Mr. Kipling owes much to the Wesleyan ex-President. While staying in Burslem with his sister, Mr. Macdonald introduced her to a young artist named Lockwood Kipling, and one day at a little place called Rudyard, in the Potteries, the two became engaged. In due time they were married, and the son was born whose name-the name of the little village which figured in his parents' love story-is now known to the world. The boy Kipling thus came under the happiest home influences, coming in frequent contact with such men as Sir Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris."

"Akela," "Baloo," and "The Langurs." We forget, as we read, that we belong to a world of men. Our life is the jungle life, our friends are Mowgli's friends. We listen eagerly to their conversation, their jests, their disputes. In lines of swinging strength are set forth their laws, embodying the greatest wisdom of nations, for they are wiser than humankind in that they know the laws of the life of which they are a part.

"Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, As old and as true as the sky,

And the wolf that shall keep them shall prosper,

And the wolf that shall break them
shall die.

As the creeper that girdles the palm-tree,
The law runneth forward and back,
For the strength of the pack is the
strength of the wolf,

And the strength of the wolf is the
pack."

In the realm of poetry there is the same diversity of opinion with regard to Mr. Kipling's genius as in the domain of prose. Some declare him unhesitatingly the "unchallenged Laureate of Greater Britain," and without any sense of incongruity can use the phrase from Chaucer to Rudyard Kipling," while others refuse to assign him even the obscurest corner in the Temple of Fame. To these last we can only answer in Mr. Kipling's trenchant words:

Own

"There are nine and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right."

Mr. Kipling has done much to broaden literary taste and to bring poetry into every-day life. Others may seek their material in tropical gardens or star-lit heavens, but from the rough life of the barrack-room comes his prayer :

"It is enough that through Thy Grace I saw naught common on Thy earth."

He has appreciation and praise for

66

the poor benighted heathen," Fuzzy-Wuzzy, and the loyal-hearted Gunga Din; it is his voice that pleads indignantly for the redcoat's place in society, and with his clearsighted vision he sings with conviction of honour among thieves, and the incident of the border thief and the colonel's son in that most musical "Ballad of East and West" is used to flash forth his doctrine of the essential brotherhood of man :

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till earth and sky stand presently at
God's great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Bor-
der, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face,

tho' they come from the ends of the earth."

The aim of all these ballads seems to be underneath the degraded exterior to show the touch of human nature, which makes the semi-savage "most remarkable like you."

An undertone of deep seriousness is felt throughout all his portrayal of Hindu life, as he explains to them :

"I have written the tale of our life For a sheltered people's mirth,

In jesting guise-but ye are wise,

And ye know what the jest is worth." This jesting guise is discarded in his later poems, so aptly designated "The Seven Seas." It is this book that has so deservedly won for him the title of "Poet of the Sea," and the book seems a vast sea-symphony, with orchestral harmonies of wind and wave. Where could we find a more majestic sea-dirge than the 66 Song of the Dead"?

"We have fed our seas for a thousand years

And she calls us, still unfed,

Though there's never a wave of all her

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But Mr. Kipling is a master of melody in all its variations. From the slow, measured drum-beat of Soldier, soldier, come from the war"; from the light, imitative harmony in the "Song of the Banjo," he can turn with unerring touch to the deep organ-anthem of "Recessional." From the gay lilt of the ballad, he passes to the stately measure of "The English Flag" with its two so perfectly imitative lines: "Where the sea-egg flames on the coral and the long-backed breakers croon Their endless ocean legends to the lazy, locked lagoon."

Another music sounds in the machinery-clanging chorus of "McAndrew's Hymn," in which the poet of an age of invention and materialism sings the song of steam. The poem has magnificent force and resonance, and the metre ringing out the clanging beats and throbs proves Mr. Kipling a master of versification.

In this poem we see Mr. Kipling as the poet of a materialistic age, but in another aspect we find him even more conspicuously the interpreter of his age. He is the poet of Imperialism, not the imperialism of little England-" a poor, little street-bred people," but the imperialism of Greater Britain, of the colonies, including our own Canada, which he so picturesquely pledges in "The Native-born":

"To the far-flung, fenceless prairie,

Where the quick cloud shadows trail, To our neighbour's barn in the offing And the line of the new-cut rail.

"To the plough in her league-long furrow,
With the grey lake-gulls behind-
To the weight of a half-year's winter
And the warm, wet western wind."

Of Mr. Kipling's imperialism, glorified with the glory of unselfishness, if we may again quote Sir Walter Besant, he says: 66 He has brought home to the most parochial of Little Englanders the sense and

knowledge of what the British Empire means. What Seeley has taught scholars, Mr. Kipling has taught the multitude. He is the Poet of the Empire, not the Jingo Rhymer, but the poet with the deepest reverence for those who have built up the Empire, the deepest respect for the Empire, the most profound sense of responsibility.

"Keep ye the Law-be swift in all obedi

ence

Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.

Make ye sure to each his own

That he reap where he hath sown ; By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"

And this same poet it was when the people were shouting themselves hoarse in vainglory, "drunk with sight of power," whose voice is heard. in the prayer which must live as one of the greatest moulding forces of British character:

"Lord God of Hosts! be with us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget."