Revolution, and other essays

s dead, dead and buried. And a fluttering, chirping host of men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut leaves of Kim, wrapped

g their hands in amaze and wondering why they did

it was - to find, not what the people of the nineteenth century thought they thought, but what they really thought, not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really did do, then a certain man, Kipling, will be read - and read with

ts up a prophet to-day that it may stone him to-morrow; which clamours for the book everybody else is reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else is reading it. This is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and vogue, the unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the "monkey-folk," if you please, of these latter days. Now it may be reading The Eternal City. Yesterday it

this man whom so many mourned. If everybody else mourned, it were fit that they mourn too. So a vast wail went up. Each was a spur to the other's grief, and each began privately to read this man they had never read and publicly to proclaim this man they had always read. And straightaway next day they drowned their grief in a sea of

will come forth again. For be it known: That man of us is imperishable who makes his century imperishable. That man of us who seizes upon the salient facts of our

en speech, so he left us rude scratchings of beasts and things, cracked marrow-bones, and weapons of stone. It was the best expression of which he was capable. Had he scratched his own particular name with the scratchings of beasts and th

erations of men, we remember him. And so long as the name of Greece is known on the lips of men, so long will the name of Homer be known. There are many such name

acts of our existence. They must tell why we have lived, for without any reason for living, depend upon it, in the time to come, it will be as though we had never lived. Nor are the things that were true of the people a thousand years or so ago true of us to-day. The romance of Homer's Greece is the romance of Homer's Greece. That is undeniable. It is not our romance. And he who in our time sings the romance of Homer's Gre

is people Kipling has sung. Their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive of motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with what underlies all the Anglo–Saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the genius of the race. And this is the cosmic qualit

of to-day dreams the dream of Clive and Hastings. The Anglo–Saxon is strong of arm and heavy of hand, and he possesses a primitive brutality all his own. There is a discontent in his blood, an unsatisfaction that will not let him rest, but sends him adventuring over the sea and among the lands in the midst of the sea. He does not know when he is beaten, wherefore the term "bulldog"

l other centuries, he has expressed himself differently. But blood will tell, and in the name of God, the Bible, and Democracy, he has gone out ove

ry he mastered matter; his twentieth-century claim will be, in the highest probability, that he organized life - but that will be sung by the twentieth-century Kiplings or the twenty-first-century Kiplings. Rudyard Kipling of the nineteenth century has sung of "things as they are." He has seen life as it is, "taken it up squ

se practicality, his proper and necessary respect for the hard-headed, hard-fisted fact. And, above all, he has preached the gospel of work, and as potently as Carlyle ever preached. For he has preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men, to the great sweating thong of

pling's century to roll in the sun, to formulate, in other words, the reign of law. And of the artists i

w - be swift i

vil, drive the road

sure to e

reap what h

ur peoples let men k

line, whether of The Vampire or The Recessional. And no prophet out of Israel has c

the sum of the parts? As for the puddle of life, the stench is offensive to you? Well, and what then? Do you not live in it? Why do you not make it clean? Do you clamour for a filter to make clean only your own particular portion? And, made clean, are you wroth because Kipling has stirred it muddy again? At least he has stirred it healthily, with steady vigour and goo

devoid of sympathy." Dear! Dear! What is to be understood by this? Should he sprinkle his pages with sympathetic adjectives, so many to the paragraph, as the country compositor sprinkles commas? Surely not. The little gentlemen a

able to read between the lines what Kipling intended we should read between the lines? "For some of him lived, but the most of him died." Is there not here all the excitation in the world for our sorrow, our pity, our indignation? And what more is the function of art than to excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed? The colour o

ocracy - the marshalling of the races, the merciless, remorseless laissez faire of the dominant bourgeoisie, and the practical, actual working government of men within a very limited equality. The democracy of the nineteenth c

ds, and race traditions. Even into the steam-laden speech of his locomotives has he breathed our life, our spirit, our significance. As he is our mouthpiece, so are they his mouthpieces. And the romance of the nineteenth

y life? When Kipling is forgotten, will Robert Louis Stevenson be remembered for his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his Kidnapped and his David Balfour? Not so. His Treasure Island will be a classic, to go down with Robinson Crusoe, Through the Looking–Glass, and The Jungle Books. He will be remembered for his essays, for his letters, for his philosophy of life, for himself. He will be the well beloved, as he has been the wel

d, Cal

901.