else. Who does not recognize in the words he has put into the mouth of Lassalle-Lassalle is even more deserving than Heine of being considered the German Byron - the Continental contempt of the British nation as "a power extinct, a people gone to fat, who have gained their end in a hoard of gold and shut the door upon bandit ideas!" That contempt should breed exasperation is the most natural thing in the world. The remarkable patience with which, since the present war began, the British people have borne Continental insults, may yet be found to have been ominous, to have indicated a grim determination to show the world, if ever a suitable chance came, that such contempt was not justified.

But mere "bandit ideas" have never had any permanent influence in this country; the Byronic theory of life has been infinitely more fruitful in Paris than in London. There may have been in the past, and there may again be in the future, outbreaks of Berserkerism in our literature, but never of sheer brigandage or buccaneering. Action, merely for the sake of action, war simply as a means of giving vent to energy, have never been appreciated as a moral meal for the nation, although they may have tickled the appetite as a sauce. For the truly commanding force in present-day literature one inevitably and almost instinctively goes back to Carlyle because, in spite of his violence, and his frequent injustice where individuals are concerned, he sents the permanently serious side of what is at bottom a serious people. He loved Byron, but he had no sympathy with Byronism. He denounced Napoleonism-between which and Byronism there are many ties of sympathy, affinity and more—as Dick Turpinism; during the Franco-German War he denounced France as "the Cartouche of nations." But, as all the world knows

repre

knows ad nauseam-he was a hero-worshipper. And, although it is possible that, in certain respects, his influence has latterly been on the wane, the revival of the worship of Cromwell as the best type of British influence abroad, as the incarnation of what most of us would wish a "spirited foreign policy" to be, is evidence that the true gospel of Carlyle is still a power -an unconscious and indirect power, perhaps with the British mind. The germs, at all events, of the modern preaching of Action as a protest against Materialism, as an escape from the despair and scepticism which Matthew Arnold has "moulded in colossal calm," are found here.

It

The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, will not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life is with very great exactness added to the Eternities; remains forever a new divine portion of the Sum of Things. No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in man's life. Religions, I find, stand upon it. . . What, therefore, is loyalty proper, the lifebreath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship. . . I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting adamant, lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall. Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them, unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the wild ocean with its monsters, and all men and things, progenitors of our own Blakes and Nelsons. Hrolf or Rollo, Duke of Normandy, the wild Sea-King, has a share in governing England at this hour. . . . No wild Saint Dominics and Thebaid Eremites, there had been no melodious Dante; rough, practical Endeavor, Scandinavian and

other, from Odin to Walter Raleigh, from Nefela to Cranmer, enabled Shakespeare to speak. Nay, the finished Poet, I remark sometimes, is a symptom that his epoch itself has reached perfection and is finished; that before long there will be a new Epoch, new reformers needed.

The strain here is not only of a higher mood than that represented in the quotation from "The Tragic Comedians," but it comes nearer to that actual temper of the younger and more enterprising section of the nation which has found vent in Expansion, and which has been, at least, the advance-guard of Imperialism. These old heroes, “silent, with closed lips, unconscious that they were specially brave, defying the wild ocean with its monsters," have been in a measure, at all events, reproduced in the "still, strong men"the humbler, the more heroic-who have given the defences of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley a not unimportant place in British military annals.

Carlyle's greatest disciple, and most articulate-not forgetting Ruskin, Dickens and Browning-was Tennyson. We are apt to forget that the author of "The Idylls of the King" and "In Memoriam" was also the author of "Riflemen Form." Mr. Frederic Harrison has gone so far as to express regret that this side of Tennyson could not be forgotten. And yet, as Lord Lansdowne's new scheme for the defence of the Empire clearly proves, the volunteer movement, which originated in the threats of invasion uttered by Napoleon the Third's colonels, was the concrete beginning of Imperialism. Here, indeed, we have the spirit, though not the music-hall air of Kipling, the contention that domestic reforms should be postponed to the great work of setting the defences of the Empire in order.

Be not deaf to the sound that warn', Be not gall'd by a despot's plea;

Are figs of thistles, or grapes of thorns? How should a despot set men free?

Let your reforms for a moment go, Look to your butts and take good aims,

Better a rotten borough or so

Than a rotten fleet or a city in flames.

The spirit of Imperialism, so far as Tennyson is concerned, is, however, to be found at its best in "Maud":

I stood on a giant deck, and mix'd my breath

With a loyal people shouting a battlecry,

God's just wrath shall be wreak'd on a giant liar;

And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,

And noble thought be freer under the sun,

And the heart of a people beat with high desire;

For the peace that I deem'd no peace is over and done.

And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,

And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames

The blood-red blossom of war, with a heart of fire.

On this outburst M. Taine remarks:

Men said that he was imitating Byron; they cried out against these bitter declamations; they thought that they perceived the rebellious accent of the Satanic school; they blamed this uneven, obscure, excessive style; they were shocked at these crudities and incongruities; they called on the poet to return to his first well-proportioned style. He was discouraged, left the storm clouds, and returned to the azure sky!

This is, however, a vastly clever and thoroughly French way of saying both that Tennyson was considerably in

advance of his time and that he was not so much a man of war as a man of the cloister or of the cathedral close, who, having been seized with the patriotic fever, rushed out of his retirement, shook his fist in the face of the Czar, and, alarmed at the sensation caused by his unexpected militancy, "turned him to his thought again" somewhat shamefacedly.

The spirit of Imperialism was in Tennyson, however, as it was in Carlyle, and perhaps as, notwithstanding his romantic and dandiacal Jacobinism, it was in Byron. We identify the spirit nowadays with the muse of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, mainly because he sings the praises-and lays bare the weaknesses of that "Absent-Minded Beggar" who corresponds to the legionary of Rome, and whose mission, like his prototype's, is to defend that "extended frontier," which, according to Mr. Goldwin Smith, is the characteristic of an empire of the modern type. How familiar he is now

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,

But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;

An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all

your fancy paints, Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints; While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' Tommy "fall behind," But it's "Please to walk in front, sir,"

when there's trouble in the wind; There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind, Oh, it's "Please to walk in front, sir,"

when there's trouble in the wind.

But even Mr. Kipling was anticipated, not, perhaps, by Campbell, in whose best battle-pieces Great Britain figures not so much as what the late Mr. J. R. Green termed an "earthpower," as "the tight little island," fighting gallantly against overwhelming odds for its own life and for the liberty of the world, but by Dibdin. Dibdin, as emphatically the singer of the sailor, of the humble but capable master of that element which, in Byron's phrase, "washed us power," had glimpses of Empire. Here, at all events, is Tommy Atkins soberly photographed, yet distinctly alive, both in his personal weakness and in his representative strength.

This, this my lad's a soldier's life,
He marches to the sprightly fife,
And in each town to some new wife
Swears he'll be ever true;
He's here, he's here-where is he not?
Variety's his envied lot,

He eats, drinks, sleeps, and pays no shot,

And follows the loud tattoo.

And yet

Called out to face his country's foes,
The tears of fond domestic woes
He kisses off and boldly goes
To earn of fame his due;
Religion, liberty and laws,

Both are his and his country's cause, For these, through danger without pause,

He follows the loud tattoo.

Substitute "the flag" or "the Widow of Windsor" for "religion, liberty and laws," and we have the special sentiment or revived feudalism which animates the modern "Empire builder."

What the more recent and popular exponents of Imperialism have done is, without going any further, to supply a special reason for the faith that is in them to sing the praises of a "Their's not to reason why, their's but to do or die" devotion to it. The two writers of to-day who have done most to foster the spirit which is being exhibited on an Imperial scale in South Africa are Mr. W. E. Henley, mainly in virile prose, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, both in "graphic" prose and in resonant verse. Mr. Henley is the candid prophet of latter-day Byronism. He maintains that the singer of "Lara" is the greatest master in English poetry since Shakespeare. He is a believer in and preacher of the vigor of the senses; he advocates action and annexation as a cure alike for Arnoldian megrims and for flabby politics. In a passage written whilst Lord Kitchener was still engaged in the task which was triumphantly concluded at Omdurman, he lays down his views:

men

not feel the prouder for his kinship with Sir Herbert Kitchener. And the reason is on the surface. To the national conscience, drugged so long and so long bewildered and bemused, such as Rhodes and Kitchener are heroic Englishmen. The one has added some hundreds of thousands of square miles to the Empire, and is neck-deep in the work of consolidating what he has got and of taking more. The other is wiping out the great dishonor that overtook us at Khartoum at the same time that he is “reaching down from the North" to Buluwayo, and preparing the way of them that will change a place of skulls into a province of peace. Both are great, and that is much. But both are, after all, but types; and that is more. We know now, Mr. Kipling aiding, that all the world over are thousands of the like temper, the like capacity for government, the like impatience of anarchy; and that all the world over, these each one according to his vision and his strength-are doing Imperial work at Imperial wagesthe chance of a nameless death, the possibility of distinction, the certainty that the effect is worth achieving and will surely be achieved.

Here we have Byronism, but in phrases like "capacity for Government" and "impatience of anarchy" we have Carlylism also. Mr. Kipling's chief strength lies in his always intense, frequently grotesque, and occasionally repellent realism. Perhaps we have here the true Kipling—

You couldn't pack a Broadwood halfa-mile

You mustn't leave a fiddle in the

damp

You couldn't raft an organ up the Nile, And play it in an Equatorial swamp. I travel with the cooking-pots and pails

I'm sandwiched 'tween the coffee and

the pork

And when the dusty column checks and tails,

You should hear me spur the rearguard to a walk?

(Oh, it's any tune that comes into my head!)

So I keep 'em moving forward till they drop;

So I play 'em up to water and to bed. In the silence of the camp before the fight,

When it's good to make your will and say your prayer, You can hear my strumpty-tumpty overnight

Explaining ten to one was always fair.

I'm the Prophet of the Utterly Absurd, Of the Patently Impossible and Vain

And when the Thing that couldn't has occurred,

Give me time to change my leg and go again.

With my "Tumpa-tumpa-tumpa-tumpå-tump!"

In the desert where the dung-fed camp-smoke curled

There was never voice before us till I led our lonely chorus

I, the war-drum of the White Man round the world!

Or, if truth in realism means the same thing as unpleasantness, a still truer Kipling is to be found in "The Sergeant's Weddin'-"

See the chaplain thinkin'?
See the women smile?
Twig the married winkin'
As they take the aisle?
Keep your side-arms quiet,
Dressin' by the Band.
Ho! you 'oly beggars,
Cough be'ind your 'and!

Now it's done an' over,

'Ear the organ squeak, "Voice that breathed o'er Eden"Ain't she got the cheek! White and laylock ribbons, Think yourself so fine, I'd pray Gawd to take yer 'Fore I made yer mine!

Escort to the kerridge,

Wish him luck, the brute!

Chuck the slippers after

(Pity 'taint a boot!) Bowin' like a lady,

Blushin' like a lad'Oo would say to see 'em, Both is rotten bad?

And yet, thanks perhaps to the strain of Wesleyanism in his blood, which makes him the General Booth of Atkinsesque Imperialism, Mr. Kipling is a Carlylian in his love of a strong man wherever he finds him.

They have looked each other between the eyes, and there they found no fault,

They have taken the oath of the
Brother-in-Blood on leavened
bread and salt.
They have taken

the oath of the Brother-in-Blood on fire and freshcut sod,

On the hilt and the halt of the Kyber Knife, and the Wondrous Names of God.

The Colonel's son he rides the mare, and Kemal's boy the dun,

And

two have come back to Fort Bukloh where there went forth but one.

And when they drew to the quarterguard, full twenty swords flew clear

There was not a man but carried his feud with the blood of the mountaineer.

"Ha' done! ha' done!" said the Colonel's son. "Put up the steel at your sides!

Last night ye had struck at a Border thief-to-night 'tis a man of the Guides!"

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, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

There may be more of Wesleyanism than of Carlylism-a Wesleyanism