April 23. The following sonnet, entitled "The Soldier," has made a deep impression wherever English is read: "If I should die, think only this of me, That there's some corner of a foreign field "A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, "And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less, Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; In hearts at peace, under an English heaven." The circumstances of Brooke's fate recall Keats, Shelley, and Sir Philip Sidney. QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. For what are Americans especially grateful to James Bryce? 2. Through what medium do children become familiar with the name of Andrew Lang? 3. Who wrote "The Daffodil Fields," "The Little Minister," "King Solomon's Mines"? 4. What is meant by the Celtic Revival? 5. What new literary vein was struck in the nineties by H. G. Wells? 6. What part has the Five Towns played in modern English literature? 7. Name three modern essayists. 8. Name two of the most famous modern playwrights. 9. What are two of the best modern books you have read in the last two years? Why did you like them? 10. Discuss with your classmates any modern movement you can perceive in English literature. Suggested Readings. In reading modern writers it is well to bear in mind that there are a great many books written every year and of them only a very few are worth reading. In this last chapter we have tried to point out those authors who are writing the best books; you must do the rest. If they could see as thou seest they would do what thou has done, “Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o' Steam!" -McAndrew's Hymn. "The Devil mutters behind the leaves: 'It's pretty, but is it Art?'" -The Conundrum of the Workshops. "And each, in his separate star, Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of things as they are." -Envoi. RUDYARD KIPLING, the greatest writer of the present time, was born 1865 in India. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and for nearly twenty years curator of a museum at Lahore. There is evidence in the son's writings that the father was a wise teacher. Rudyard's formal schooling was done at the United Services College at Westward Ho, England. Those who wish to catch the spirit of the atmosphere in which he passed his first years may perhaps read with profit the short stories, "Wee Willie Winkie," "His Majesty the King," "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep." Whether they read them with profit or not, however, matters little, for they will surely read them with pleasure. In Stalky and Co.," moreover, he has written what Richard Le Gallienne and John Palmer pronounce the best of all boy stories. The student may derive pleasure from the effort to guess which character, if any, in it is Kipling himself. In 1882 Kipling was back in India as assistant editor on "The Civil and Military Gazette " and " The Pioneer." In " The Man Who Would be King," there is some description of the life he must have led while thus employed. Verses and short stories from his pen began shortly to appear. Soon there was a demand for a collection of the former and in 1886 there was issued from "The Civil and Military Gazette " press at Lahore, in the form of a public or legal document, a collection of poems called "Departmental Ditties and Other Verses." The best of these may be described as superlatively good comic poetry, full of boyish spirits and frankly imitative. There were "Potiphar Gubbins, C.E.," the story of an elevation-in Indian ink, modelled on Lowell's "John P. Robinson"; "The Betrothed," a lovely variation on Will Carleton's" Betsy and I are Out "; " Griffen," redolent of whisky and Tennyson; and a "Tale of Two Cities," redolent not of Dickens but of Browning. There were also more original verses, familiar since the world over. Among the best of these were "The Inscription," "The General Summary," "The Story of Uriah," "The Post that Fitted," "The Man Who Could Write," "The Ballad of East and West," "The Ballad of the Bolivar," and "Tomlinson." As the work of a boy of twenty-one the volume was more astonishing than the first work of Pope or Chatterton. How the cub could have known such things is a far deeper mystery than that which the Baconians say is connected with the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The little brown baby, as Kipling called the book, speedily filled India with its fame, and shortly was reviewed by Sir William Hunter in "The London Academy." Within a fortnight thereafter, everybody in England was reading and quoting it. "The English Flag,” one of its poems, so pleased Alfred Tennyson that he wrote Kipling a letter of commendation, to which the young poet replied: "When the private in the ranks is praised by the general, he cannot presume to thank him, but he fights the better the next day." Since 1888, when the first English editions of "Departmental Ditties" and "Plain Tales from the Hills" were published, Kipling's biography is the story of a man who has travelled everywhere and is now inveterately at home. He has been for some years and is now settled at Bateman's, Burwash, Sussex, England. Among his achievements during this period, not the least was to live seven years at Brattleboro, Vermont. The literary results of his residence and travels in America include " '007," a prose idyl with an American passenger locomotive as hero; " The Walking Delegate," a story in which the atmosphere of a back pasture in Vermont is perfectly reproduced; "Captains Courageous," which is at once a good story of adventure, a noble picture of the life of a Gloucester fisherman, a satire on cigarettes and snobbery, and an eulogy of wholesome labor; and a book called " American Notes," in which he praises Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and San Francisco punch, but finds matter for unflattering comment in our after-dinner oratory, our habit of guessing, and Chicago. The book is likely to anger Americans, yet it is mostly true and friendly in spirit. "They be," he says, "the biggest, finest, and best people on the surface of the globe. . Wait till the Anglo-American-German-Jew-the Man of the Future— is properly equipped. He will sway the world." Kipling also showed his appreciation of America by marrying an American girl, Miss Caroline Starr Balestier, 1892. In "An Habitation Enforced," one of his finest stories, he tells of the emotions and experiences of an American husband and a wife of English descent who settle in a southern English county because they cannot resist its charm. If this is not a transcript of Kipling's own experiences, it ought to be. At all events, it is an exquisite story. Since Kipling first in 1888 came upon England with all the fury and suddenness of a monsoon, his literary activity has been multifarious. He has constantly been doing something that he has not done before. Like Edgar Allan Poe and unlike Conan Doyle, he does not repeat himself. First he published a series of clever and cynical stories about English official life in India. These were entitled "Plain Tales from the Hills," "The Story of the Gadsbys," "Under the Deodars," and "The Phantom Rickshaw." This was 1888. Then he took to depicting and glorifying Tommy Atkins in prose and verse. "Soldiers Three," 1888, was a series of short stories about three British soldiers in India, the same being Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd. Mulvaney is a fascinating Irish wit, Ortheris a little Welshman, and Learoyd a huge Yorkshireman-a sort of human battering ram. Though their ancestors may be found in Og, Gog, and Magog, in the three Horatii and the three Curiatii, in the Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol of Shakespeare's "Henry IV," in the Fluellen, Macmorris, and Jamy of his " Henry V," and in Dumas's "Three Musketeers," they are all especially Mulvaney-additions to literature, exceedingly human, simple-minded, lazy, irresponsible, brutal, amusing. "Barrack-Room Ballads," 1892, contained six songs that Kipling has not since surpassed. They did for the cockney dialect what Burns did for the Scotch. Without music they sing themselves more tunefully than most of those mournful ditties that are known as popular songs succeed in doing with its assistance. Their names are "Mandalay," "Fuzzy Wuzzy," "Danny Deever," "Oonts,' ""Gunga Dhin," and " Tommy Atkins." Kipling's next theme was native India. He did not seek to explain |