Part 3

Turning inland we see deploying upon a glittering plain an army with banners, preceded by a mitered host chanting in deep Gregorian. _Entre per me!_ shouts a charging knight galloping forward with a great clatter of arms and armor. We recognize one of Maurice Hewlett’s many inventions. Hewlett manages an archaic manner admirably; a trifle over-elaborate maybe, but there is muscle beneath the embroidery. Afar off steams the battleship Rudyard Kipling, and we know the young Admiral for a man of high courage, at home on land or sea, in the air above or in the waters under the earth. And if we may pause for one word, we may say that the tremendous importance, the hardly calculable influence of the English Bible on English style has nowhere in our generation been better evidenced than in the writings of Kipling. Not merely that he so often quotes from the Bible; not so much that biblical phrases abound in his pages; but that the directness, the simplicity, the rugged power of Hebrew narrative imparts a singular distinction and force to all he writes. Young writers, intent upon the best possibilities of our mother English, do well to leave all that the great Greeks, the great Latins, the great Italians and French have written until they have wrought,--into the very alphabet of memory,--the innumerable lessons and high examples of that imperishable text book of English style.

Ah, if it were a mere pagan chronicle; if it were the least spiritual book in the world, still we who love English literature must go to it, as one who thirsteth, to a familiar and well-loved spring, longing for it verily as “David longed, and said, oh, that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, that is by the gate!”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.