this is found in the very simple justification offered by the claims of art. Dr. Groos's Play of Animals, shortly to be published in English, is a very valuable example of the scientific attitude. That Mr. Kipling's literary treatment has been untrammeled is a cause for congratulations, unless we are to beg the question at the outset by relegating imagination to fairy tales pure and simple. Now, Mr. Kipling does not deal in fairy tales, but primarily with motives which are practical. When Shelley enshrined the skylark in literature he did not clip the wings of his song with an explanation that the skylark sometimes destroys crops in Germany. This fact would have been noted by Mr. Kipling, and in one way or another his imagination would have found a way of suggesting it in a purely literary form. This is an extreme case, but it illustrates fairly enough a mental curiosity, alertness, and keenness of perception which would have made a mark in laboratory work, let us say, if Mr. Kipling had been a student of science. The suggestion gains piquancy from the constant presence in Mr. Kipling's work of a quality diametrically opposed to this—the martial spirit, which is quite the reverse of the scientific. Mr. Kipling's earlier years of association with the British army in India have left an impress which will remain. In spite of the nobler motive of the magnificent Recessional, the ring of the sword is heard throughout the larger portion of his verse and prose, a note due to his intense vitality and personal force, as well as to the accentuated patriotism of the poet laureate of Greater Britain.
Patriotism, however, which we are assured is unscientific and merely a phase of selfishness, has nothing to do necessarily with another phase of Mr. Kipling's literary performance—his literary conquest of the new realm of applied science. From him we have learned that the locomotive engineer may be a more romantic figure than the mailed knight, and that the passing away of white sails has lessened in no degree the poetry of the sea. The central motive of our time is the application of science to industry, but it was left for Kipling to sing the song of steam in McAndrew's Hymn. One grows chary of the use of that time-honored phrase "a new note." There have been so many "new notes" which have died away into a silence never broken afterward. But if Mr. Kipling should write no more, he has already proclaimed the romance of machinery, the heroism of "earth's chosen men of strength," the significance of the deep-sea cables, "blind, white sea snakes," and he has expressed the appeal to the poet's imagination made by phases of invention, commerce, and manufacture, which have had hardly a superficial recognition heretofore. There are critics who quarrel with Mr. Kipling's liberal use of the nomenclature of marine engines and locomotives, but that is not a quarrel to be insisted upon. Possibly, like a student in the first flush of enthusiasm, he is unconsciously zealous to show that he does not "miscall technicalities," but "coupler flanges" and "spindle guides" by the score will not prevent such work from reducing the number of "damned ijjits" who whimper that "steam spoils romance at sea." Quite aside from purely literary quality, with which we are not primarily concerned in this place, Mr. Kipling's power of concentration, his application as a student, and his ability to master practical details are exhibited to a very striking degree in McAndrew's Hymn, in The Ship that Found Herself, in his long story Captains Courageous, and in his story No. 007, which appeared lately in Scribner's Magazine. We do not think that a story like the last furnishes the human interest
