the status quo, is the anarchist. Most of us are not anarchists; and while most of us are willing to have things improved, if necessary, at our own expense, we want some assurance that they will be improved. And if we must make blind experiments-as the reformers all want us to let us at least know the object of the experiment. These writers do not seem to know what they would like to achieve if they could.

What they chiefly breed in one is hopelessness. If this is the best that England can do for us in the way of fiction, we must either encourage our native product, or eschew fiction and take to "serious" reading. These men are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I believe, for a few big picaresque novels: something in the mode of the Satyricon, and Gil Blas, and Huckleberry Finn. For I do not think that people will put up forever with being bored-especially as they are not boring us in the interests of virtue.

To be sure-though it is some time since I began this essay-I have still not read D. H. Lawrence.

THE REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS

OF RUDYARD KIPLING

T looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a

F

world of concrete things were to be gathered into the titular abstraction; or as if Kipling's rightness were presently to be proved remarkable in that it is all wrong.

And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Chesterton-where is he, by the way?-I mean precisely what I have set down: Rudyard Kipling's remarkable rightness. Right, because time has sustained him against scoffers; remarkable, because no one originally expected that particular kind of rightness from him.

This is not to be a discursive or an exhaustive discussion of Kipling's utterances on planetary or even racial questions. I have not annotated his complete works with his "rightness" in mind. Indeed, to treat him exhaustively would be a very difficult task; for the sum of his wisdom is made up, not of a few big "works," but of an infinite number of significant brevities. My only excuse for dealing with him at all is that I have lived a long time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and that my knowledge of him has reached what Henry James called the point of saturation. I

will not pretend that I have read every word he has ever printed in the Allahabad Pioneer or even in the London Times; but I know him very well. I belong to the generation that took its Kipling hard. My friends who are five years older or five years younger never took him quite so hard as that. They knew other gods.

Rudyard Kipling, in his later life, has suffered under two great disadvantages: his insistence on a political point of view which was unpopular, and the gradual diminishing of his flow of masterpieces. The dullest people will tell you smartly that he is "written out"; the cleverest will tell you that he was precocious, but always cheap, if not vulgar. Perhaps someone will fling "The Female of the Species" at you. This paper is not to be a catalogue of Kipling's virtues, nor yet of his achievements. But I should like you to consider with me for a few moments that little volume of verse, The Five Nations. I take The Five Nations purposely, for it is the Kipling of The Five Nations that I mean. Not the better known Kipling of the Barrack-Room Ballads or The Seven Seas. But supremely the Kipling I refer

to.

Two things changed the Kipling we first knew: renewed residence in England, and the Boer War. Of course, he was always an imperialist; he always loved Lord Roberts-as

long ago as the Plain Tales, when Kipling was at once younger and cleverer than anyone else. But he saw these things, then, from the angle of India; he was an imperialist only in embryo. He cared more for the British army -in red-than for the British navy; and Anzacs were not within his vision.

Then by devious paths-he returned to England; and England held him as it held the man and the woman in "An Habitation Enforced." The Boer War came; and The Five Nations tells how he reacted. He has gone on very consistently from that day, developing, but never swerving from the path of his conviction. England did not listen to him: the Liberals of the first decade of the twentieth century did not propose to listen to anyone who wrote short stories for the sake of the plot, and verse for the sake of a Tory idea. They were much too serious in Great Britain, in those days, to hearken to Rudyard Kipling. And, so far as I know, neither Lord Roberts nor Kipling ever said, "I told you so."

Yet listen to "The Lesson":

It was our fault, and our very great fault-and now we must turn it to use;

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!

How one has heard that rough-and-ready poem reviled-in the early nineteen-hundreds! Even now one recalls abusive editorials in

American newspapers about the poem which mentioned

... the flannelled fools at the wicket. the muddied oafs at the goals.

"Oblige me by referring to the files." I remember those taunting comments very well. Not an editor but was so sane that he could make his little mock of Kipling as an extremist. But if you will get out The Five Nations and read "The Islanders" through soberly, you will curse those editors for fools. "Preparedness" is so familiar to us all now, not only as a word but even as an idea, that we can hardly believe intelligent people were calling a man names fifteen years ago for stating axioms. We are always thinking the days of Galileo are over. But they are not; they never will be; the human race instinctively and always has it in for Galileo. Kipling could get an audience for tales and ballads and jungle-books; but the moment he tried to speak nationally, he could not get an audience. Even now, they would rather read H. G. Wells.

Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?

For the low red glare to southward when the raided coast towns burn?

(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)"

"Yes, thanks," came the sarcastic answer from all the wise British millions; "we jolly