Similarly let us take another of Mr Kipling’s themes—­his delight in the world’s work.  Think first of The Bridge-Builders and of William the Conqueror and then turn to The Bell Buoy (Five Nations) or The White Man’s Burden (Five Nations).  In each case—­and we repeat the result every time the experiment is made—­we find that the author’s motive, which lives in his prose, tends in his verse to expire.  In The White Man’s Burden it expires outright, so that reading it, it is difficult to realise that William the Conqueror has had the power so deeply to move us.

This is true even where Mr Kipling’s subject, which in prose has not taken him to the top of his achievement, has in verse taken him as high as in verse he is able to go.  Mr Kipling’s best verse is contained in Barrack Room Ballads; but even these do not compare in merit with Soldiers Three. Barrack Room Ballads are the best of Mr Kipling’s poetry, because in these poems rhyme and beat are essential to their inspiration.  They are the exception which prove the rule that normally Mr Kipling has no right to his metre. Barrack Room Ballads are robust and vivid songs of the camp, choruses which require no music to enable them to serve the purpose of any gathering where the first idea is that there should be a cheerful noise.  Complete success in this kind only required Mr Kipling to fill in the skeleton of a metre which brings the right words at the right moment to the tip of the galloping tongue, and this he has admirably done.

Where in Barrack Room Ballads Mr Kipling has attempted to do more than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose.  We have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier’s point of view.  In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional.  In Barrack Room Ballads it is more pronounced.

We may take three stanzas of Snarleyow as evidence that Mr Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass of his verse, really had to be metrical; also as evidence that, in so far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney.  The Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field: 

  “’E ’adn’t ‘ardly spoke the word, before a droppin’ shell
  A little right the battery an’ between the sections fell;
  An’ when the smoke ’ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
  There lay the Driver’s Brother with ’is ’ead between ’is ’eels.

  “Then sez the Driver’s Brother, an’ ’is words was very plain,
  ‘For Gawd’s own sake get over me, an’ put me out o’ pain.’ 
  They saw ‘is wounds was mortial, an’ they judged that it was best,
  So they took an’ drove the limber straight across ‘is back an’ chest.