for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It 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 life-breath 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 Endeavour, 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 conten

tion 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 warns,

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 battle-cry,

God's just wrath shall be wreck'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 now-a-days 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
be'ind,"

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,

O, it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.'

'You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all;
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational ;
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face,
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.

Or

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute !

But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot;

An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;

An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool-you bet that Tommy sees!'

'What was the end of all the show,

Johnnie, Johnnie ?

Ask my colonel, for I don't know,

Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!

We broke a King, and we built a road

A court-house stands where the reg'ment goed,
And the river's clean where the raw blood flowed
When the Widow gave the party.'

L

6

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.

And yet

'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 there—where is he not?
Variety's his envied lot,

He eats, drinks, sleeps, and pays no shot,
And follows the loud tattoo.'

'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.'

6

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.

He

Henley is the candid prophet of latter-day Byronism. maintains that the singer of Lara' is the greatest master in English poetry since Shakespeare. He is a believer in and preacher of the vigour 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:—

'We have renewed our old pride in the Flag, our old delight in the thought of a good thing done by a good man of his hands, our old faith in the ambitions and traditions of the race. I doubt for instance, if outside politics (and perhaps the Stock Exchange), there be a single Englishman who does not rejoice in the triumph of Mr. Rhodes; even, as I believe, there is none inside or out of politics, who does 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 men 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 dishonour 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 wages-the 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 half-a-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—