Mr. Kipling is as strong a war realist, though for a different motive, as Tolstoy is, or Verestschagin in his pictures. He is not a mere glorifier. He has ventured once or twice, in prose and in verse, to describe, as no English poet has done before him, a shameful rout of British soldiers. There are his verses called 'That Day,' beginning

'It got beyond all orders, an' it got beyond all 'ope;

It got to shammin' wounded an' retirin' from the 'alt. 'Ole companies was lookin' for the nearest road to slope, It were just a bloomin' knock-out, an' our fault.'

Mr. Kipling's war-poetry is to that of Campbell, Scott, Byron, and Tennyson much what, in the sphere of another passion, the work of a novelist like Maupassant is to the Nouvelle Héloïse' of Rousseau, or to the Corinne' of Madame de Staël. He tears aside the veil of poetic weaving by which the beauties and glories of war are made to appear, the defects or ugliness hidden. This is something new. Mr. Kipling's is not the frank, childish pleasure in blood and carnage of old Norse, or Welsh, or Afghan bards reciting before barbarous audiences. He is the modern realistic artist consciously describing fights in which he has not taken part for the amusement of a public which has also not taken part, but which likes to have its sensations excited in a novel manner. The grateful public, one may add, rewards its favoured bard not, like the barbarous chief, with cups or chains of gold, but by the purchase of thousands of copies of cheaply printed volumes. It may be that poetry, like perhaps much else, passes-to borrow an expression from a discerning writer-through three stages, those of uncivilisation, civilisation, and decivilisation-and that the last resembles the first, with an immense moral difference. If Mr. Kipling's lower treatment, for he has a much higher one at his command, anticipates or founds the war-poetry of the future, some will look back with regret to the style of Hohenlinden' and 'The Eve of Waterloo.' Both in love and war the superior part of man's mind craves for a certain reserve and idealisation. If this be thrown away, it is a sign of corruption and decay, or of retreat from the upward struggle. We must not,' says Aristotle,

' agree with those who maintain that, being mortal, we 'should cherish the thoughts which are mortal; but, as much 'as possible, we should immortalise ourselves, and do all 'things with a view of attaining to the highest life.'

VOL. OXOVI. NO. CCCCI.

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After all, both in love and war, the abstracting writers probably see things as they really are better than do the realists, who, indeed, also abstract, but abstract the lower or smaller part of the subject, presenting that as if it were the whole. If things be seen rightly, a little that is spiritual, one may venture to believe-upon the assurance of the higher instincts of man-deserves to be represented more largely than much that is material. Tennyson may have depicted an objective fact in its true proportions when he ignored the blood and mangled bodies in the Balaclava charge the jostling, colliding, and swearing, the terrors and shrinkings. If he had used insincere language, if he had dragged in Mars or Bellona, or described a colonel as a 'god of war,' the poet would have departed from truth, but not by his selection of features. It is true that the higher emotions might be better employed, but while they are so engaged it is right that the poet or painter should ascribe to them their due proportion in the sad business.

Writers like Tolstoy depict the horrors of war in detail because they hate it, and desire that the world shall pass into a period where wars shall be no more. Tolstoy belongs to a country where multitudes who have not the slightest wish to fight or die for their country are driven into the army by force. Under such a system the soul of war may be destroyed, as it was so strikingly when Napoleon, to gratify his ambition, compelled half a million Western Europeans, with no interest in his quarrel, to perish miserably in Russia. Nothing in such a case is left but war's soulless body. There is, in England, a school of poets who continue the idealising or abstracting treatment of war, avoiding the details in which Mr. Kipling revels. There is something new about writers of this kind also. A hundred years ago poets were satisfied with the simple motive of their country's triumph. This seemed reason enough in itself why men should with an easy conscience violently deprive of the light of day and life fellow-creatures with whom they had no personal quarrel, why lands should be devastated, and the keen sword of sorrow pierce the hearts of women. The modern writers, we mean those of the finer school, desire to find a motive for this motive, a superior reason why their country should triumph. They seek a deeper justification of actions in themselves contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Christian religion, and to the better and higher instincts of human nature. They look for a religious or philosophic ground of war.

Some work upon the basis of the Darwinian gospel, and see in evolution the Will of God. They assume, like the Jews of old, that their race is the chosen people, destined to survive and rule, the instrument of Providence to make justice, freedom, and morality prevail. It is almost a new religion. In the poet's mind the soldier is the priest, battle the sacrifice, the slain are the victims. Or the modern poet may depict war as a means of perfecting the individual life, a form of renunciation and death to self. In this case the veil is skilfully drawn over the sheer love of excitement and adventure which makes mettled youths welcome the chance of war as of the finest form of sport. Their zest is ennobled and redeemed by the sentiment dulce et decorum est pro 'patriâ mori,' but is not due to it, certainly not in the professional army, where peace work is dull, and the chance of war is the chance of distinction. It is touching to witness the disappointment of young officers in an Indian station when some border quarrel is settled by diplomacy, and the hoped-for expedition is frustrated. There is self-sacrifice, but it takes the form of acquiescence in hopes not fulfilled.

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Meanwhile the anxiety of writers at home to find motives for war of a kind superior to those which satisfied their ancestors is perhaps one out of many signs of an increasing contradiction between the fact of war and the conscience of civilised humanity. It is not merely the increased expense of war which has so much diminished its frequency; it is also the moral feeling that the cause for war must be overwhelmingly great. There have been times when princes went to war, in Europe as well as in Asia, almost as regularly as sportsmen to the annual slaying of grouse or pheasants. In the month of June,' says William of Malmesbury, 'quando solent reges ad bella procedere.' India, of old, the war season always began in October or November, after the rains, when the air was cooler. Even so late as the eighteenth century wars were undertaken with much the same ease of conscience as that with which financiers now fight their wars for possession of the market. There were differences of opinion as to the expediency of wars; there has not, till late times, been much division of opinion as to their morality. Although this feeling is growing, there is, no doubt, at the same time an inclination among writers of the day to glorify war as a good in itself. This may be partly due to a reaction against the tame and sedentary lives which most poets lead in great cities; partly, perhaps, to a disposition of literary men, in days when

literature is not strong, to adore men of action. Truly great poets-Dante, Milton, Wordsworth-have rated their own sacred calling as it deserved.

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The deliberate glorification of war by some poets, the subtle justifications of it by others, are signs of this movement of feeling. Our ancestors felt no need either to glorify or to justify war. They took it as a normal incident of life, and described its beauties with zest. They thought it good exercise, as Shakespeare makes one of his comic characters say: Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's sprightly, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; peace makes 'men hate one another.' But Shakespeare's own feeling, as that of all wise men, is rather to be found in these deep lines:

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'O War, thou son of Hell,

Whom angry heavens do make their minister!' War is a great misfortune, a sad necessity, a visitation for the sins of men, a malady burning itself out in fever. If there be reality and truth in the conception that the course of mankind lies upward from the levels of the brute creation, war must vanish from the earth, and civilised war, already half refined away, must become a mere memory, as much as now are, among Europeans, the old barbarous wars with their full and unabated equipment of killing, destroying, ravishing, and enslaving. Modern war is only relatively better; it is evil in itself. The evil may be sometimes necessary, but one may hope that it is so only in consequence of men's crimes and follies. As a foreign writer has lately said, fatality reigns in the lower sphere of human passions, but its chain may be broken by the intervention of wisdom.

We have pointed out that modern poets have on the whole written better war-poetry when they were divided from their subject by time. One may say also that they write better when they are divided from their subject by space. Campbell, who was roaming in Germany in the year of Hohenlinden, did actually cross one field of recent fight covered with dead horses and other débris, and even saw from an adjacent monastery a slight skirmish between French and Bavarians. With this exception and that of Sir Alfred Lyall, no one of the authors of the later English war-poems which we have quoted had ever, we think, heard a shot fired or seen a sword drawn in battle. The

old clan bards who followed the fray, a little, perhaps, behind the front rank, are now represented in this respect, not by our poets, but by the paid correspondents of newspapers, often, certainly, most poetic writers of prose. These now celebrate the heroes, and award the palm. The actual vision of battle does not seem to inspire poetry. No doubt this is partly due to the great specialisation of all occupations in modern life. Perhaps also, since professional armies, with all their machinery, came into use, war has lent itself less easily to the poet's art. But the fact is also due, we think, to the growing separation between the nature of civilised man and delight in war. It is more necessary than of old for poetry that the brutalities of the business should be softened by distance. Macaulay could hardly have written so gaily of the Roman battles, or Scott of Flodden, had they seen at nightfall the field, more horrible than our modern fields of battle. Sadness and disgust would have deprived the poet of the high spirits necessary for this kind of poetry. The modern poet needs to be at a distance of space from scenes of human slaughter, and writes better still, as a rule, if he is also at a distance of time. And the men who fight do not write. The lust of battle in the soldier is followed by a reaction of disgust, though the desire to fight returns again. Nothing,' wrote the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, 'nothing except a 'battle lost is half so sad as a battle won.' After war the soldier is often inclined to talk of any other subject in preference. Often he would say, like Claudio in the play

'But now I am returned, and that war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying, I liked her ere I went to wars.

Finally, it may be pointed out that it is not, in modern times, the greatest poets who have written the best warpoetry. The author of 'The Burial of Sir John Moore' was not a professional poet at all. Campbell, Scott, Macaulay do not rank among the highest stars in the poetical firmament, although one of these was the greatest of British romance-writers, and another was one of the greatest of British historians. The distaste of poets for the subject is natural. War, notwithstanding the fine qualities and emotions which it evokes in the nobler natures, is a lower state than peace, as disease, although it, too, may