ualizes the poetry of Service, and legitimizes his claim to be considered as one of the literary figures of the war.

Further instances might be cited, but enough has been said to show the distinctly different treatment which the individual has received at the hands of Kipling and those of Service.

The completeness of Service's mastery of soldier and Cockney slang is shown in such poems as "The Volunteer'" and "The Odessey of 'Erbert 'Iggins." These dialects marked a new departure for Service; up to the time of the composition of his war-verse, his dialect-work had been confined to the argot of the mines and the lumber-camps. There is little Kipling influence to be noted in the dialect itself; like the dialect of his former poems, it was absorbed at first hand, and is not imitated from Kipling, as will be evident upon the comparison of the two poems just cited with any specimen of the latter's dialect work. The dialect of Service is the soldier-slang of A. D. 1916, and not the Cockney of "Mandalay" or "Soldier an' Sailor Too." The ease and fluency with which Service was able to employ this medium upon such short experience is another proof of his capacity to assimilate and adapt himself to a new atmosphere, of which his Northern poems had already given evidence.

There is a final group of poems among the Rhymes of a Red Cross Man which show no appreciable Kipling influence. These are purely personal reactions of the poet himself to the war, and the influences to be traced between their lines are anything but Kiplingesque. If anything, they are more reminiscent of the work of Rupert Brooke than of that of any other recent poet. Of these, "Tricolour" and "The Lark" are perhaps the best, although "The Fool" is almost equally good. "The Lark" is worth quoting from as an example of this class of Service's work:

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

A fusillade of melody,

That sprays us from yon trench of sky;
A new amazing enemy

We cannot silence though we try;

A battery of radiant wings,

That from yon gap of golden fleece
Hurls at us hopes of such strange things
As joy and home and love and peace.

Pure heart of song! do you not know
That we are making earth a hell?
Or is it that you try to show
Life still is joy and all is well?
Brave little wings! Ah, not in vain
You beat into that bit of blue:
Lo! We who pant in war's red rain
Lift shining eyes, see heaven too.

The sentiment and the idea are as old as the literature of strife. The contrast between the war-mad destructiveness of man and the tranquil beauties of nature is coeval with language and thought itself-but the poem shows such an absolute divorcement from the Kipling attitude that it is worth citing as an example of its class."

Thus Service, while he may be the inferior of Kipling in original gift of poetic genius and in versatility, is at least not justly condemned as an imitator and nothing more. That he is indebted to Kipling in no small degree, no one can deny; but it is equally undeniable that his work possesses

'Service has recently published a new volume of verse (Ballads of a Bohemian) which is composed of poems dealing with Paris life immediately before and during the course of the War, and with the various elements of life at the Front. The verse of this last collection shows no departure from the tendencies noted in this article; it is essentially a second treatment of the same themes which formed the motif of the Rhymes of a Red Cross Man. The Kipling influence is still manifest, especially in certain of the poems which deal with the Bohemian and Apache elements of the life of Paris, while the new tendencies of Service discussed above are equally present, though they show no remarkable degree of development.

merit of its own, which is not attributable to any exterior influence, and is only to be credited to the possession of native poetic genius.

A LITERARY INVASION

BY STANLEY T. WILLIAMS

Almost weekly the fireside of our little club shelters a younger Georgian novelist, a dramatist, or an American poet, all bearing in hand their most recent offerings to the Muse. The club's living room is small, but tobacco and Elizabethan pipes soothe the spirit, and the fire burns brightly; it is a room of memories. Like Walter Savage Landor, we "dine late, but the room is well-lighted, and the guests are few."

Here they come into our white-pannelled chamber, no longer vague Englishmen, authors of something or other, but likable chaps, ready to tell us much-even what their poetry means. And sometimes they toss a delectable bit of gossip about their contemporaries. We like them all, with, perhaps, some mental reservations; doubtless their mental processes are not dissimilar.

Tchekov in The Cherry Orchard makes a character kiss the bookcase of a beloved room. Book-mad souls should salute the walls of this club which have held in intimacy so many of the great or pseudo-great. Here I have seen Tagore, oriental seer, lost in a cloud of witnesses. The musical monotone went on, not unlike Coleridge's at Highgate, amid the worship of undergraduate Buddhists. Forbes Robertson's quiet voice has been heard here, as potential actors and dramatists drank deep of Comedy and Tragedy. Here, in other mood, Percy Grainger rattled on about Robert Service, and a few days later Tolstoi dared tell us that in Soviet Russia butter is one hundred and forty dollars a pound. Altogether it has been a surprising company. We have had a riot of literary close-ups.

Our first visitor last year was William Butler Yeats. St. John Ervine remarks in Changing Winds that Mr. Yeats looks like the Angel Gabriel about to make the Annunciation. True,

possibly, but he announces only the delightful. I reached his formal university lecture just as he was saying seditiously: "If I should read this poem in London now, I should be jailed." That poem, smuggled out of Ireland in a mattress, became the pièce de résistance of the evening at the club. After this we wandered into the swamp of Irish politics. A discussion of Irish politics among a group of Americans is rather like a study of Greek mythology by schoolboys; one is apt to be very vague on interrelations, and to fancy that Sir Horace Plunkett, like Jove in Greek genealogy, is the father of them all. Mr. Yeats begged to be regarded as a Tory, though pleading the difficulty in poor, old, confused Ireland of knowing exactly what he was. It was suggestive that Mr. Yeats, when asked to say something of Ireland's greatest writers, requested the simpler task of describing her greatest talkers. Best of all, Mr. Yeats read to us, from the poetry of Stephens, and from his own, in his beautifully modulated voice.

But a week later another voice was booming in the white chamber, in a way to threaten the rafters. Whose was it? Outside I heard an undergraduate venture that the college orchestra was perhaps rehearsing in that "damned literary outfit." As I penetrated the vestibule the uproar became infernal. There was the thunder as of a thousand combers on the Maine coast, and, at intervals, a soft whirring noise. like the slosh of countless smaller waves. I glanced into the room and was no longer puzzled. Of course, none other than he Vachel Lindsay, poet of Illinois !

Curiously enough our first introduction to Mr. Lindsay's poetry had been through two Englishmen, Robert Nichols and Siegfried Sassoon, who had manifested towards him the same attitude that an earlier generation of Englishmen had shown towards Walt Whitman. Mr. Lindsay had been declared "typically American." Englishmen have precise ideas concerning what is "typically American," and there is a great tickling of vanities when theories are exemplified. Under