is he has admirably done.

Where in _Barrack Room Ballads_ Mr Kipling has attempted to do more
than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds
in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. We
have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis
of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive
imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point of
view. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In
_Barrack Room Ballads_ it is more pronounced.

We may take three stanzas of _Snarleyow_ as evidence that Mr Kipling's
_Barrack Room Ballads_, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass
of his verse, _really had to be metrical_; also as evidence that, in so
far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they
are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. The
Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying
that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field:

"'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell
A little right the battery an' between the sections fell;
An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.

"Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain,
'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain.'
They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best,
So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest.

"The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt,
But 'e swung 'is 'orses 'andsome when it came to 'Action Front!'
An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head
'Twas juicier for the niggers when the case began to spread."

The brutality in this incident is forced in idea and expression beyond
anything we find in _Soldiers Three_. It is this continuous _forcing_
of idea and expression which persists in virtually all Mr Kipling's
verse except where the jingle is all that matters. We have only to
recall recitations from the platform or before the curtain of some of
Mr Kipling's popular poetry to realise, sometimes a little painfully,
that verse is for him not a threshold of the authentic Hall of Song,
but, too often, a door out of reality into the sentimental and
overwrought.

Comparing the soldier tales and the soldier songs it is often possible,
ho