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Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Walt Whitman, John Masefield, Vachel Lindsay are primary men. I have often wondered who would write a poem worthy of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Vachel Lindsay is the only living American who could do it, and I hope he will accept this challenge.
Perhaps it is an unexplained consciousness of being nearer God, or being nearer the devil of approaching truth or approaching unreality a silent something felt in the truth-of-nature in Turner against the truth-of-art in Botticelli, or in the fine thinking of Ruskin against the fine soundings of Kipling, or in the wide expanse of Titian against the narrow-expanse of Carpaccio, or in some such distinction that Pope sees between what he calls Homer's "invention" and Virgil's "judgment" apparently an inspired imagination against an artistic care, a sense of the difference, perhaps, between Dr.
The great English poets were represented there in serviceable bindings showing signs of use, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Keats, and with them in various editions, Burns. Beside the poets Robert Louis had a place, and Sir Walter, as well as Kipling and Meredith and other moderns.
Kipling's short stories sum the situation up. So far as skeleton or plot is concerned, they are built up out of a bit of nothing put with an infinity of Kipling; so far as meat is concerned, they are the Liebig Beef Extract of fiction. A single jar of Kipling contains a whole herd of old-time novels lowing on a hundred hills.
Previously I had been impressed by the dignity of labour, and, without having read Carlyle or Kipling, I had formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you. I was as faithful a wage-slave as ever a capitalist exploited.
We stopped for luncheon on the sandy shore of a pretty little lake expansion, and ate the whole morning's catch, fried in caribou tallow, with unsweetened coffee to wash it down. Then on we pushed towards the Kipling Mountains.
In the words of Rudyard Kipling: "Take up the White Man's burden Ye dare not stoop to less Nor call too loud on freedom To cloke your weariness. By all ye will or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your God and you." Of this past epoch of our national life there remains but one well-known representative. That one is my brother.
The ancient city of Chitor lies crumbling and desolate on the back of a long, level-topped hill, which rises solitary to the height of some five hundred feet above the far-stretching plain. Kipling likens it to a great ship, up the sides of which the steep road slopes like a gangway. At the foot lies the modern village, squalid but picturesque.
"I am sending with this for your acceptance," wrote Kipling to Bok, "as some little memory of my father to whom you were so kind, the original of one of the plaques that he used to make for me. I thought it being the swastika would be appropriate for your swastika. May it bring you even more good fortune."
"That," replied he, "is, as Kipling says, another story, and a long one too. I don't know that I myself could follow every step of it. But you will find McPhearson can. So seriously has he taken his profession that he is not to be floored by anything in time-keeping history. Ask him to tell you what you wish to know."
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