RUDYARD KIPLING.

Evening Star, Issue 11676, 7 February 1902, Page 3

RUDYARD KIPLING.

The Rev. A. M. Robb lectured on Rudyard Kipling at the First Church Hall last evening. The hall was well filled, and the lecture was listened to with close attention. The lecturer referred to Kipling as the Laureate of the Empire, remarking that it was to the bard of the barrack room, not to Mr Henley, and certainly not to Mr Watson, that they must look for tho continuation of the line of the Empire’s national poets. Kipling had come upon the scene at the nick of time—at the exact psychological moment —when a masculine poet was wanted as a contrast to the effeminacy of the poetic age. Mr Kipling was not on the summit yet, and fame had overtaken him on the steeps. The critics condemned him, and declared him vulgar and coarse and illiterate, but the people recognised in him a poet and writer who wrote as he felt and thought—as one who had the rare faculty of feeling and thinking with those of whom he owrote. There was no timidity about Kipling. In short and incisive sentences, in a broken and jagged style, he satirised and condemned, and while one could not help wishing that some less vulgar adjectives had been specially invented for him—that in his earlier work he had not taken a more exalted view of what he strove to accomplish—the past could be forgiven in the promise of the future. The indication of his later and higher ideals showed that as Kipling progressed in years and experience be took a more exalted view of humanity. Let Kipling’s readers compare his latest references to the objects of life with his earlier apologetic condonements of sin; And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame, And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame. But each for tho joy of working,. and each in liis separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as they Are. 13m lecture throughout waai a studied Ufa-

rary criticism of Kipling, which, while not sparing or shielding the crudities of his verse and prose, recognised the genius of the poet and incisivencss of one of the foremost literary men of the age. At the close of the lecture a cordial vote of thanks was accorded to Mr Robb for the literary treaty given to his audience. ''