sympathy." Dear! Dear! What is to be
understood by this? Should he sprinkle his pages with sympathetic
adjectives, so many to the paragraph, as the country compositor sprinkles
commas? Surely not. The little gentlemen are not quite so infinitesimal
as that. There have been many tellers of jokes, and the greater of them,
it is recorded, never smiled at their own, not even in the crucial moment
when the audience wavered between laughter and tears.

And so with Kipling. Take _The Vampire_, for instance. It has been
complained that there is no touch of pity in it for the man and his ruin,
no sermon on the lesson of it, no compassion for the human weakness, no
indignation at the heartlessness. But are we kindergarten children that
the tale be told to us in words of one syllable? Or are we men and
women, able to read between the lines what Kipling intended we should
read between the lines? "For some of him lived, but the most of him
died." Is there not here all the excitation in the world for our sorrow,
our pity, our indignation? And what more is the function of art than to
excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed? The
colour of tragedy is red. Must the artist also paint in the watery tears
and wan-faced grief? "For some of him lived, but the most of him
died"--can the heartache of the situation be conveyed more achingly? Or
were it better that the young man, some of him alive but most of him
dead, should come out before the curtain and deliver a homily to the
weeping audience?

The nineteenth century, so far as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned, was
remarkable for two great developments: the mastery of matter and the
expansion of the race. Three great forces operated in it: nationalism,
commercialism, democracy--the marshalling of the races, the merciless,
remorseless _laissez faire_ of the dominant bourgeoisie, and the
practical, actual working government of men within a very limited
equality. The democracy of the nineteenth century is not the democracy
of which the eighteenth century dreamed. It is not the democracy of the
Declaration, but it is what we have practised and lived that reconciles
it to the fact of the "lesser breeds without the Law."

It is of these developments and forces of the nineteenth century that
Kipling has sung. And the romance of it he has sung, that which
underlies and transcends objective endeavour, which deals with race
impulses, race deeds, and rac