dainty
equity about Stevenson's judgments, even when he was wrong, Henley
seemed to think that on the right side the wronger you were the better.
There was much that was feminine in him; and he is most understandable
when surprised in those little solitary poems which speak of emotions
mellowed, of sunset and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into the new
fashion of praising Colonial adventure at the expense both of the
Christian and the republican traditions; but the sentiment did not
spread widely until the note was struck outside England in one of the
conquered countries; and a writer of Anglo-Indian short stories showed
the stamp of the thing called genius; that indefinable, dangerous and
often temporary thing.

For it is really impossible to criticise Rudyard Kipling as part of
Victorian literature, because he is the end of such literature. He has
many other powerful elements; an Indian element, which makes him
exquisitely sympathetic with the Indian; a vague Jingo influence which
makes him sympathetic with the man that crushes the Indian; a vague
journalistic sympathy with the men that misrepresent everything that has
happened to the Indian; but of the Victorian virtues, nothing.

All that was right or wrong in Kipling was expressed in the final
convulsion that he almost in person managed to achieve. The nearest that
any honest man can come to the thing called "impartiality" is to confess
that he is partial. I therefore confess that I think this last turn of
the Victorian Age was an unfortunate turn; much on the other side can be
said, and I hope will be said. But about the facts there can be no
question. The Imperialism of Kipling was equally remote from the
Victorian caution and the Victorian idealism: and our subject does quite
seriously end here. The world was full of the trampling of totally new
forces, gold was sighted from far in a sort of cynical romanticism: the
guns opened across Africa; and the great queen died.

* * * * *

Of what will now be the future of so separate and almost secretive an
adventure of the English, the present writer will not permit himself,
even for an instant, to prophesy. The Victorian Age made one or two
mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is,
mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a
country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They
thought that commerce inside a cou