The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18, 1909. MR. KIPLING DESPONDENT.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 589, 18 August 1909, Page 4

The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18, 1909. MR. KIPLING DESPONDENT.

Mr. Kipling's remarkably bad poem, "The City of Brass,"- tbe major portion of which we reprinted from the London Morning Post in our issue of last Saturday, has widely discussed in Britain, and it is most satisfactory to note that it has been very severely handled by practically all its critics. The poem, it will be remembered, was a peculiarly fierce denunciation of presentday England, which, in, Mr. Kipling's opinion; has "the heart of a beast." Englishmen, he tells us, have chosen "prophets and priests of minute understanding," under whose baleful guidance .the nation has gone stork, staring mad. In language of extreme fury the bard denounces every political act of the Government, local and imperial,' and he concludes by rather, since he does it with tho most violent assurance, by announcing—that Britain will "pass from the roll of the nations in headlong surrender." Although the Morning Post, which printed the Verses, declared that "Mr. Kipling's gloomy view of recent events is undoubtedly shared by very many amongst the most thoughtful of his countrymen," , most of the Unionist newspapers kept silence. The Liberal newspapers, of course, performed with thoroughness the easy task of showing tho absurdity and wickedness of the thing, and tho Spectator, which now stands practically alone in its extreme and irreconcilable 'opposition to tho Government; solemnly rebuked Mr. Kipling,' whose verses were "wholly out of focus,", and "as little representative of the national spirit as are the diatribes of those Radicals and Socialists who, while they differ from Mr. Kipling in everything else, are inolined to join with him in representing their country as composed chiefly of selfish money-makers or even more selfish pleasure-seekers."

. Everybody will sincerely regret the decline of Mn. Kiphnq both as a poet and as a patriot. It is a strange thing that "The City of Brass" comes from the brain which has given us "Tho Islanders,"' "Recessional," "Sussex," and "Tho English Flag," But the explanation of the phenomenon is not, after all, very hard to find when it is repiembered that "The City of Brass" is tho climax of a movement in Kipling's work that has become plain in late years. It will not bo forgotten that he. greeted the proposal to grant , a Constitution to the Transvaal with a burst of dreadful doggerel 1 in which he warned the nation that the British Government had "jugglingly devised" to hand back the Transvaal to the traitorous foe. More recently he fled'to Canada to escape, he said, the "smell" of the British Government, and thero he wrote vorses and articles that brought down upon him the indignant censure of even those on his own side of politics. Paradoxical as it may sound, Mil. Kipling has becomo a shrill and offensive party rhymer simply because he is a poet. ; In oarlior years, .the sentiments of his ringing verses, sung in so many keys, wore'the product of his own independent thinking. A littlo loud, perhaps, with Bomo swagger and brag, and perilously near to profanation of sacred things; but. still good and Bound at the core. His great success, reaching its climax in the late 'nineties, swept him into alliance with the people who are how in Opposition; and he has ever since been unable to realise that Imperialism can be anything: but a party issue. A poet, unable to weigh political issues without passion, he became plus Royaliste quevie roi, mistaking the political keenness of his,allies for bitter ; personal hatred, and fighting, in consequenco, with a Gallic or a childish violence that has no doubt startled his harder-headed friends.- .He has therefore not only taken to proclaiming foolish ideas, but taken to proclaiming them in. harsh doggerel,' for the. Muses abandon men who become the victims of a political demoniacal possession.

A poet may, of. course, be violent in writing on .national and; political questions, and still be a poet—but only when his violent thoughts are his own, when they; rise in him in his solitude, and are uttered because he must utter them for his own Bolace.~ Mr. William Watson and the late Me. .Swinburne are cases in point. Me. Watson wrote the most beautiful of all the poems of Imperialism long before Kipling.was heard of as a singer of Empire. , , But he was able to lash English policy in majestic sonnets which not only will be on the credit side of his reputation's ledger, but will remain amongst the greatest of sonnets in the :English tongue; But ■ Watson has lived and dreamed apart' from party quarrels. . If he had been drawn into the mill, he too, perhaps, might have gone poetically insane. As for Swinburne, nothing that even Kipling can write-can compare with the appalling fury and comminatory eloquence of some of his poems on public affairs. The South African War inspired Swinburne to the writing of a sonnet in which he urges Britain to slay in language which roaches the ultimate limit of ferocity. But, like Watson, Swinburne!kept his mind pure and his own. It is depressing to compare "The City of Brass" with Tennyson's elegy on the Duke of Wellington, or Henlei-'s "England," or Watson's "Inexorable Law," or a hundred other songs of England by simple poets who neglected, to be politicians.. The great and deserved fame which Mr. Kipling won in the past is in a fair way to being destroyed by his latest works, since the discredit he is making, for himself will tend to do him the injustice of rendering suspect all his early and genuine ardour. Britain, as we have recently taken some spaco to show, is, as the Spectator says, "sound in spirit and in wind and limb." Hit. Kipling" thinks she has "the heart of a beast," and is doomed. Porhape Bri- , tain may pass away, bub Mb, Kiplonq

will not help her passing to bo such as Watson dreamed of in "The Inexorable Law," , the tone and temper of which may be compared with the tone and temper of "The City of Brass": Wo too shall pass, we too shall disappear, Ev'n as the mighty nations that have waned And porished. Not more surely are ordaiued The crescenco and the cadence of the year, High-hearted June, October spent and sere Than this grey consummation. Wo have reigned August!}-; let our part bo so sustained That Time, far hence, shall hold our memory doar! ■ Let it be said: "This Mistress of the sword x\nd conquering prow, this Empiro swol'n with spoils, Yet served the human cause, yet strove for Man; . Hers was the purest greatness we record; Wo whose ingathered sheaves hor tilth foreran, . ■ '■• Whose peace comes of her tempests and her toils.-