o ago true of us to-day. The romance of Homer's
Greece is the romance of Homer's Greece. That is undeniable. It is not
our romance. And he who in our time sings the romance of Homer's Greece
cannot expect to sing it so well as Homer did, nor will he be singing
about us or our romance at all. A machine age is something quite
different from an heroic age. What is true of rapid-fire guns,
stock-exchanges, and electric motors, cannot possibly be true of
hand-flung javelins and whirring chariot wheels. Kipling knows this. He
has been telling it to us all his life, living it all his life in the
work he has done.

What the Anglo-Saxon has done, he has memorialized. And by Anglo-Saxon
is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the edge of
the Western Ocean. Anglo-Saxon stands for the English-speaking people of
all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions, are more
peculiarly and definitely English than anything else. This people
Kipling has sung. Their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives
of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive
of motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with
what underlies all the Anglo-Saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the
genius of the race. And this is the cosmic quality. Both that which is
true of the race for all time, and that which is true of the race for all
time applied to this particular time, he has caught up and pressed into
his art-forms. He has caught the dominant note of the Anglo-Saxon and
pressed it into wonderful rhythms which cannot be sung out in a day and
which will not be sung out in a day.

The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber. Underneath
his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan's time, in
Drake's time, in William's time, in Alfred's time. The blood and the
tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins. In battle he is subject
to the blood-lusts of the Berserkers of old. Plunder and booty fascinate
him immeasurably. The schoolboy of to-day dreams the dream of Clive and
Hastings. The Anglo-Saxon is strong of arm and heavy of hand, and he
possesses a primitive brutality all his own. There is a discontent in
his blood, an unsatisfaction that will not let him rest, but sends him
adventuring over the sea and among the lands in the midst of the sea. He
does not know when he is beaten, wherefore the term "bulldog" is attached
to