useful animal, but it propagates itself by division into a lot of little protoplasmic lower forms of life like itself, a colony of which make up an informal essay (peiramorphidae). The commonest procedure is to make the original chance idea central in the universe for the time being. I empty my waste-basket one day. The contents tend to catch on the side and go out slowly, giving me time to recognize them. I pick out that letter reluctant to be shaken into the janitor's receptacle and re-read part, feel I am not quite ready to throw it away, and slip it into a pocket. Out falls a bill, paid somehow or other. There follow rueful speculations on ways and means. An apple core, and conscience tells me that my wife thinks they do not belong in waste-baskets. This tempts me to airy reflections on wives, all wives, and Eve's apple no doubt. Eve's apple suggests Adam's and a lump in my throat at thought of wifely tenderness. By this time I bid good-bye to all restraint. Playfully at first, but soon half convincing myself, I begin to generalize. I say I love waste-baskets, the short-lived pasteboard ones with gay designs and bottoms that drop out with their contents, the ruffly ones with wire skeletons, especially the substantial wooden ones that lose pencil shavings between their slats. I have begun jotting all this down and now tell the readerto-be lightly that friendship would long since have perished from the earth had it not been for these temporary depositories of correspondence; I promise him that I shall hereafter judge my acquaintance mainly through surrepti tious inspections of their waste-baskets; next follows the sentiment that the so-called marriage problems turn all on a proper appreciation of waste-baskets with their legitimate accessories, apple-cores; while industrial warfare, class-consciousness and fiscal systems are likewise epitomized within this humble utensil of mine. The world, I conclude quite seriously now, is a waste-basket-God's waste-basket. In the ultimate eschatology, the garbage furnace is hell, we are being dumped thitherward, but misgivings come to the heart of relenting deity and some are rescued as they hesitate on the edge. Duly indited, this is one type of informal essay. To me, the most thoroughgoing difference between classical and modern literary standards is that the former strove after the truth at the risk of being trite, the latter strives after novelty at the risk of being false. The writer of today who tries to be so odd that no one, by the wildest coincidence, can have hit upon the same freak of writing is avoiding comparison. The agonistic spirit of the Greek led him to court it: to throw the same old discus farther or portray the same old myth better than all previous or immediate competitors was his purpose. He might not win in the one contest or the other, but at least he did not try to do so by throwing a pillow or doing Orestes in ballad metre. Again, in contrast to our self-advertisement, such a master of the informal style as Plato masked his personality behind the dramatic setting of a dialog in which he was not one of the interlocutors. Without discounting originality directed by good taste or denying the vigor and brilliance of much English of our time, it must be confessed that all this inflation of the personality of the writer is apt to be at expense of a corresponding deflation of the meaning of language and, therefore, of deflation of thought. The temptation is constant in informal composition to debauch the style of interpolating silly expressions unique in the lingo of the writer's home, or otherwise such as he would be embarrassed to use orally in public, or to mutilate the vernacular by applying ponderous or wonderful words to trivial objects. When a page is spotted with such expressions as, "I didn't feel the least bit writey that morning," or "those really transcendental waffles," the meditation of the ungentle reader may well be, "If any man shall add unto the dictionary his own foolishness, there should be added unto him the plagues which are defined in it." It is possible to use words in a fresh, but still true, sense; but extravagant, fantastic thought and diction, unregulated, end in abuse of truth through disintegration of the meanings of words and dulling of our faculties for appreciating their true distinctions. "For be assured, my Crito, false words are not only discordant in themselves but they somehow infect the soul with evil." It is a daring assertion, apart from all question of honesty, to claim to tell the truth. For how can we do that in our ignorance? If we say we tell the truth, we add to our impressive moral pretension the colossal intellectual presumption that we know the truth. And we shall know and tell the truth no better for abusing the medium of its expression. KIPLING INFLUENCE IN THE VERSE OF ROBERT W. SERVICE BY W. A. WHATLEY The work of Robert W. Service falls naturally into two divisions. The first of these consists of his entire poetic output prior to the Great War. The major theme of the verse of this period is the interpretation of the life of the Great North, with its pendulum-sweep from the heroic to the mean, and its direct contact with the primary forces of Nature; it is to this verse that Service owes his title of "the Kipling of the Northwest." The second division of Service's work is made up of poems written during the war and dealing with soldier life at first hand, being the direct result of the author's experiences in trench, camp, and hospital while in active service with the Red Cross at the Front. In the pre-war verse of Service, the influence of Kipling is unmistakably and universally manifest. The poems of this period are, in the main, poems of adventure which are modeled, either consciously or unconsciously, upon the lines of the Kipling poem of the "Rhyme of the Three Sealers" type. In the Ballads of & Chechako, the Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, and The Spell of the Yukon, the Kipling attitude toward the life of the wild and the primitive is the prevailing motif. Service, as well as Kipling, looks upon the North as the last stronghold of the hostile forces of Nature, into which man penetrates only as a rash and audacious intruder, but in which he has no legitimate place or standing. This identity of feeling and spirit which characterizes the work of Kipling and Service is evident upon the most cursory examination of representative poems; the parallel is too striking to pass unnoticed. For instance, the following is a typical Service reaction to the mystery of the North: We watched the groaning ice wrench free, crash on with a hollow din; Men of the wilderness were we, free from the taint of sin. The mighty river snatched us up and it bore us swift along; The days were bright, and the morning light was sweet with jeweled song. Through the black canyon's angry foam we hurled to dreamy bars, And round in a ring the dog-nosed peaks bayed to the mocking stars. Spring and summer and autumn went; the sky had a tallow gleam, Yet North and ever North we pressed to the land of our Golden Dream. So we came at last to a tundra vast and dark and grim and lone; And there was the little lone moose trail, and we knew it for our own. By muskeg hollow and nigger-head it wandered endlessly; Sorry of heart and sore of foot, weary men were we. The shortlived sun had a leaden glare and the darkness came too soon, And stationed there with a solemn glare was the pinched, anemic moon. Silence and silvern solitude till it made you doubly shrink, And you thought to hear with an outward ear the thoughts that you ought to think.1 The resemblance in spirit to the Kipling presentation of a Northern scene is evident: Where the grey goose goes nakedly between the weedhung shelves, And the little blue fox is bred for his skin, and the seal they breed for themselves; For when the matkas seek the shore to drop their pups aland, 'Service, Ballads of a Chechako, "The Ballad of the Northern Lights." |