Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/215

Rh und Dichtung—the truth and the poetry—of Tommy, and to have added this to a like achievement concerning Anglo-India, and a certain portion of India, is a record of which any man under thirty might well be proud. The Barrack-Room Ballads have caught on, as the Americans say, even more decisively than the Anglo-Indian stories, and they have already had an ample, perhaps too ample a measure of justice done to them. In one way they are Mr. Kipling's most genuine personal expression. He threw away the scabbard when he wrote them, and came to the test with those of us who had complained that his earlier work was as good as his latest, and that the bolt seemed shot. Certainly the result proves that, whether or not the bolt was shot in his prose, it was not in his verse, and it is freely to be admitted that he has not only turned back upon himself and put his ancient speech to fresh rhyme and rhythm, but has also struck out notes entirely new. There is only one word for the Ballads, viewed from the calmer point of view of criticism, and that is 'taking.' They are wonderfully and tremendously taking. The very cockney canaillerie of the dialect in which Tommy is made to express himself has the true contagion of the best music-hall patter song of the hour. The question that arises, of course, is: 'But is this