Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/224

In a poem like 'Route Marchin" he gives us the very tramp of the negro camp-ditties—a form of poetical rhythm which has yet to have justice done to it by our writers. But when he essays the lighter note, how terrible are his mishaps! Gordon, again, had pretty much the same general view of life that the other has, but, being simply a gentleman by birth and breeding, he never ranted and raved like a frenzied parvenu concerning the superhuman virtues and glories of caste. It is when we put two such men side by side, as it is just to do and profitable to do, that we see clearly the fatal limitations and defects which relegate the one not only to the more ephemeral but to the lower place. Little, very little, of Mr. Kipling's poetry has the element of permanency in it. Rarely, very rarely, does he forge ahead and win the race with ease. Life's handicap, the handicap of temperament and surroundings, is too heavy for him. He contributes no appreciable body of work. It is mostly tour de force, excellently brilliant, delightfully clever, 'monstrously taking,' but it does not wear—it does not wear as twenty or thirty per cent, of Gordon's work wears. It has come like a meteor, to pass: not like a star, to stay. Yet not for a moment would I seem to undervalue the charm and satisfaction of the best poems—the best snatches. Once, and once only, as it seems to