The Years Between

By RUDYARD KIPLING. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1919. 12mo, xvi + 159 pp. $1.50.

IF the Great War had found the Kipling of The Barrack-Room Ballads or The Seven Seas, what would his response have been? No one who turns to The Years Between can escape the question, for Kipling’s past achievement has made it impossible to read him now except by his own light. The old, uncanny power of making mechanism live never before met such a challenge as in the aeroplane and the submarine and the tank — war hurtling or lurking or crawling in steel through all the elements at once. Neither India, nor Egypt, nor African kopjes could match Flanders in its apotheosis of the lovable, laughable, tragic, and glorious figure of Kipling’s own creation — the British soldier of the earlier songs. The peculiar gift of striking through the senses to the very core of sense itself — what unheard-of scope was there not for that? Yet the book is relatively bare of all these things. So far as poetry is concerned, the war seems to have touched the springs of Kipling’s supremely individual imagination either remotely or not at all.

Could it, indeed, have been otherwise? It may well be that the ancient fire is too much to expect just now. Even to Kipling, perhaps, the war was too overwhelming and too near. Nothing else ever came so close; the old themes had mattered less, and so were possible to sing. The tremendous impact of the events themselves has stunned, it would seem, the creative faculty. The Years Between gives promise of years yet to come, and what we miss now may be still in store.

Yet nobody but Kipling could have written the book. The Kipling at whose hand the raw materials of a leader somehow took to themselves the lilt of the music-halls and the direct and pungent diction of the street, and swept, like ballads, the Five Nations and the Seven Seas — that Kipling, despite our quantum mutatus ab illo, is still here. There is nothing, to be sure, that has the amazing carrying power of things so unlike as ‘The Truce of the Bear’ and the ‘Recessional,’ in the long array of poems devoted to the Venezuela incident, the veterans of the Indian Mutiny, the Declaration of London, Joseph Chamberlain, Edward VII, Lord Roberts, Jutland, Mesopotamia, Munition Factories, Spiritualism, Slackers, Spies, the Dominions, Ulster, the Entry of America, and the diabolisms of the Hun.

But the familiar, magical rhythms fall on the ear once more in ‘A Song in Storm,’‘Zion,‘ ’The Holy War,’ and ‘The Irish Guards’; even as in ‘France,’ ‘The Sons of Martha,’ ‘A Pilgrim’s Way,’‘Natural Theology,’and the grimly laconic ‘Epitaphs,’ there is the old, unforgettable vividness and trenchancy of phrase.

Yet it is still other forms—‘My Boy Jack,’‘To Lyde of the Music Halls,’‘For All We Have and Are,’ ‘Gethsemane’ — that will call most readers back to read again. For the impression which persists is, after all, that of no simple poem. It is rather the spirit of England — not this time of England triumphant, but of the England which we have come to know so well, indomitable, with her back to the wall, carrying on.

J. L. L.