GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
volume and its predecessor a score of counterparts almost as striking, and find their foil, it must be added, in pieces quite below Kipling's level and really harmful to his fame. As he may fairly consider himself still near the outset of his career, one may hope that the latter class will in time be banished from collective editions of his poetry, and that no literary ghoul of the future will venture to restore them.
Genius is said to be proved by its lapses, but even genius, since Tennyson, has been usually "successful" in technique. Kipling, however, with his fine reliance upon the first intention, never emasculates his verse; on the other hand, either through a lack of self-restraint, or working too often for a tempting wage, he achieves more failures than are needed to distinguish his gift from talent by the negative test. These are not wanting in the new barrack-room ballads. What is best in them is scarcely new, and what is new is not indispensable. "Back to the Army Again," "Soldier and Sailor Too," and perhaps a third or fourth, may well go with the "Tommy" and "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" of old, but one can spare a dozen others which seem but "runnin' emptyings" of the Atkins beer. It needs the British private at his best to make us tolerate the "Gawd" and "bloomin'" lingo that only heroism and our poet's magic can ennoble. Not a little of Kipling's balladry is also in a sense too esoteric. The life of this most primitive and spontaneous form of poetry is simplicity. True, there is one simplicity for the elect, and another for the multitude, but there must be something in a
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