do, then
a certain man, Kipling, will be read--and read with understanding. "They
thought they read him with understanding, those people of the nineteenth
century," the future centuries will say; "and then they thought there was
no understanding in him, and after that they did not know what they
thought."

But this is over-severe. It applies only to that class which serves a
function somewhat similar to that served by the populace of old time in
Rome. This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence,
ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again;
which puts a Democratic administration into office one election, and a
Republican the next; which discovers and lifts up a prophet to-day that
it may stone him to-morrow; which clamours for the book everybody else is
reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else is reading
it. This is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and vogue, the
unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the "monkey-folk," if
you please, of these latter days. Now it may be reading _The Eternal
City_. Yesterday it was reading _The Master Christian_, and some several
days before that it was reading Kipling. Yes, almost to his shame be it,
these folk were reading him. But it was not his fault. If he depended
upon them he well deserves to be dead and buried and never to rise again.
But to them, let us be thankful, he never lived. They thought he lived,
but he was as dead then as he is now and as he always will be.

He could not help it because he became the vogue, and it is easily
understood. When he lay ill, fighting with close grapples with death,
those who knew him were grieved. They were many, and in many voices, to
the rim of the Seven Seas, they spoke their grief. Whereupon, and with
celerity, the mob-minded mass began to inquire as to this man whom so
many mourned. If everybody else mourned, it were fit that they mourn
too. So a vast wail went up. Each was a spur to the other's grief, and
each began privately to read this man they had never read and publicly to
proclaim this man they had always read. And straightaway next day they
drowned their grief in a sea of historical romance and forgot all about
him. The reaction was inevitable. Emerging from the sea into which they
had plunged, they became aware that they had so soon forgotten him, and
would have been ashamed, had not the fluttering, chirping men said,
"Come,