Foreign News: Loud Kipling

One afternoon last week, Cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the New York World thumbtacked a fresh sheet of paper and set about sketching two figures. One was a tall figure, one a short. They faced each other, the small one standing with his knees slightly bent, his shoulders hunched, his left thumb insultingly applied to his buttonish nose. In his right hand was a little wooden sword. On his head appeared a crested toy helmet, bravely capped by a toy British flag. Behind his twiddling fingers, the small creature's mouth was opened in scolding anger; his scrubby mustache and beetling eyebrows bristled. His spectacles added to the effect of impotent, scrawny anger, which the tall figure, in familiar top hat and long coattails, surveyed with quizzical geniality, hands in pockets.

Cartoonist Kirby's many admirers wish that he would not label his characters. Seldom necessary, it was particularly unnecessary in this instance. The title told all. It said: "Why, Rudyard!"

Other cartoonists concurrently represented Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a testy little man pounding a big bass drum with a broken stick; as a nasty little boy making faces at the lady who has just given him a piece of pie; as a nasty little boy embarrassing his parents by vulgar remarks in front of company. One and all were reproving Mr. Kipling for an inept and unmelodious bit of prevarication included in his new book* of stories and verses, published simultaneously last week in England and the U. S.:

The Vineyard

At the eleventh hour he came. But his wages were the same As ours who all day long had trod The winepress of the Wrath of God.

When he shouldered through the lines Of our cropped and mangled vines, His unjaded eye could scan How each hour had marked its man.

(Children of the morningtide With the hosts of noon had died; And our noon contingents lay Dead with twilight's spent array.)

Since his back had felt no load, Virtue still in him abode; So he swiftly made his own Those last spoils we had not won.

We went home, delivered thence, Grudging him no recompense Till he portioned praise or blame To our works before he came.

Till he showed us for our good— Deaf to mirth and blind to scorn— How we might have best withstood Burdens that he has not borne!

Now few Britishers have a good word left for Woodrow Wilson, and the U. S. debt-collection policy is "notoriously extortionate." But, when Britons saw what Mr. Kipling had written, and learned of the wide notice taken of his lines in the U. S., particularly the phrase

. . . . swiftly made his own

Those last spoils we had not won there was a general feeling that Mr. Kipling had been guilty of stupidity and bad manners, that he should have kept his facts in mind, in the first place, and in the second place, should have appreciated the real relations of Britain and the U. S.