chafe and go down with typhoid and cholera they are in the iron grip of the machine, and they must wait the turn of its wheels. Dervishes wait and wonder, passing from apprehension to security. The Turks are not coming; the Turks are afraid. Then suddenly at daybreak one morning they see the Sirdar advancing upon them from all sides together, and by noon they are dead. Patient and swift, certain and relentless, the Soudan machine rolls conquering southward.

In the meantime, during all the years of preparation and achievement, the man has disappeared. The man Herbert Kitchener owns the affection of private friends in England and of old comrades of fifteen years' standing; for the rest of the world there is no man Herbert Kitchener, but only the Sirdar, neither asking affection nor giving it. His officers and men are wheels in the machine; he feeds them enough to make them efficient, and works them as mercilessly as he works himself. He will have no married officers in his army-marriage interferes with work. Any officer who breaks down from the climate goes on sick leave once; next time he goes, and the Egyptian army bears him on its strength no more. Asked once why he did not let his officers come down to Cairo during the season, he replied: "If it were to go home, where they would get fit and I could get more work out of them, I would. But why should I let them down to Cairo?" It is unamiable, but it is war, and it has a severe magnificence. And if you suppose, therefore, that the Sirdar is unpopular, he is not. No general is unpopular who always beats the enemy. When the columns move out of camp in the evening to march all night through the dark, they know not whither, and fight at dawn with an enemy they have never seen, every man goes forth with a tranquil mind. He may personally come back and he may

not; but about the general result there is not a doubt. You bet your boots the Sirdar knows; he wouldn't fight if he weren't going to win. Other generals have been better loved; none was ever better trusted.

For of one human weakness the Sirdar is believed not to have purged himself— ambition. He is on his promotion, a man who cannot afford to make a mistake. Homilies against ambition may be left to those who have failed in their own: the Sirdar's, if apparently purely personal, is legitimate and even lofty. He has attained eminent distinction at an exceptionally early age: he has commanded victorious armies at an age when most men are hoping to command regiments. Even now a junior Major-General, he has been intrusted with an army of six brigades, a command such as few of his seniors have ever led in the field. Finally, he has been charged with a mission such as almost every one of them would have greedily accepted-the crowning triumph of half a generation's war. Naturally he has awakened jealousies, and he has bought permission to take each step on the way only by brilliant success in the last. If in this case he be not so stiffly unbending to the high as he is to the low, who shall blame him? He has climbed too high not to take every precaution against a fall.

rate.

But he will not fall, just yet at any So far as Egypt is concerned he is the man of destiny-the man who has been preparing himself sixteen years for one great purpose. For Anglo-Egypt he is the Mahdi, the expected; the man who has sifted experience and corrected error; who has worked at small things and waited for great; marble to sit still and fire to smite; steadfast, cold, and inflexible; the man who has cut out his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.

saw that he and we are truly living in an age of romance. He set to work to reveal the age to itself. With his own McAndrew, he cried out:

I'm sick of all their quirks and turns-the loves and doves they dream—” Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song of Steam!

He is himself the best answer to his own prayer.

With this for his creed, Kipling must be the most modern of writers. In order

to write about it, he must see and know the world as it really is. He is as up-todate as a newspaper. He is off to South Africa to see a new empire making; he sails with the Channel Squadron to know the battle-ship at first hand. The Queen's Jubilee produces the "Recessional;" the Czar's peace manifesto calls out the legend of "The Truce of the Bear." By knowing what things really are, he gains the admiration and respect of the men whose business it is to know them. This is a man's world that he looks upon-and, therefore, it is not free from what is cruel and wicked and incomplete. What he clearly sees must all go into the picturepleasant and unpleasant together.

For to admire an' for to see,

For to behold this world so wide-
It never done no good to me,

But I can't drop it if I tried!

It had become the fashion to associate "realism" with what was depressing and often disgusting. Kipling has given a new meaning to the term. He has looked upon the world not only with a keen eye but with a healthy mind. He sees things sanely. His characters are not types but individuals. He has arrived at a true idea of the balance of right and wrong, the pleasant and the unpleasant, success and failure, by his wide acquaintance with all kinds of men. Nothing is so false to nature as the type; it is as characterless as a composite photograph. The novelist who thinks he is reproducing reality when he gathers into one character the various manifestations of a certain trait or disease or sin which he has carefully studied from a hundred subjects is not only false to art but false to truth. Nature does not manage things in that synthetic way. She gives one man his share of a sin and its punishment; and to another, who exhibits

a different phase of it, is allotted a different reward.

Kipling stands for the individual, and for his chance to do something with himself if he will. He has found among all kinds of men the capacity for getting enjoyment out of life by doing one thing well. Mulvaney got the thrill of it at the taking of Lungtungpen. It was a barbarous slaughter, but for Mulvaney it made life worth while. But for the man who can't do something "off his own bat"--who is without industry or originality even in his sins-Kipling has no mercy. Like Tomlinson, there is no place

for him in heaven or hell.

Having a fixed belief in the supreme importance of the thing done, it is natural that Kipling should show admiration for

those men who take a short cut to achievement.

This brushes aside many conventions. A man with his mind concentrated on a certain deed can't stop to consider all the feelings of all his friends, or split hairs over philosophical distinctions in morality. Kipling's admiration of Cecil

Rhodes is in line with this belief. When

recently asked whether Rhodes was a religious man, he swept the inquiry aside and answered, "Man, he is building an empire!" His impatience was evidently not with religion, but with the implication that certain conventions are an essential part of religion. Kipling's own reverent attitude toward all honest work is clearly expressed in one of his poems:

If there be good in that I wrought,

Thy hand compelled it, Master, Thine; Where I have failed to meet Thy thought, I know, through Thee, the blame is mine. One stone the more swings to her place

In that dread Temple of Thy WorthIt is enough that through Thy grace

I saw naught common on Thy Earth. This respect for "the day's work as the significant part of any character that he draws gives full force to his own literary methods. He holds himself up to the same rigid standard of accomplishment as that by which he judges other men. The marvelous fertility of his brain has never given him an excuse for slighting the execution of his work. A German critic, Dr. Kellner, who recently talked with him, says: "Kipling lays the greatest stress upon form. The artistic object of all details was declared by Mr. Kipling to be so