Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell—­rig the winches aft!

Not that anybody knew, or cared, what “rigging the winches aft” meant.  It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to give literature a new:  horizon.  Similarly, it was the eternal flames in the background that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, the water-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys.  With what delight they would quote the verse:—­

     So I’ll meet ’im later on,
     At the place where ’e is gone—­
    Where it’s always double drill and no canteen;
     ‘E’ll be squattin’ on the coals,
     Givin’ drink to poor damned souls. 
    An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!

Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the place whither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and the courteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight in hell and damnation.  Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste.

    Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree,
    Damned from here to eternity,

began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination.  Those “seven men from out of Hell” who went

    Rolling down the Ratcliff Road,
    Drunk, and raising Cain,

were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands.  One even wrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to picture oneself as

    Cursed with the curse of Reuben,
    Seared with the brand of Cain,

though so far one’s most desperate adventure into reality had been the consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a back-street public-house.  Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence and wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion against conventions and orthodoxies.

It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling’s genius as a poet.  He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature.  That is quite true.  He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he talked adventure and talked “shop” to a generation that was exceptionally greedy for both.  He, more than any other writer of his time, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would not stay at home—­the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least a thousand miles away from the home of his fathers.  He excited the imagination of youth with deft questions such as—­

    Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade—­
    Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?