Mr. Rudyard Kipling would perhaps shudder at the thought, but it is evident--is it not to his credit?--that he was essentially a democrat. He made his appeal to the average man. His ballads were written about ordinary men and ordinary things; the feelings they portrayed were the feelings of everyday life, feelings which everyone without distinction might feel in a vigorous and perhaps boisterous way. Wordsworth never really brought poetry back to the common, everyday life of simple folk. Long ago Coleridge pointed out that this was a popular superstition about Wordsworth shared by the poet himself. But to a far greater extent Mr. Kipling did make his appeal to the common stock of everyday and average emotion--the emotion of the average man. He was not interested, as the great Victorian poets had been, in the lonely way of the spirit; in the more personal emotions; or in nicety of expression. For him it was the corporate spirit that counted--the instinct, not for friendship, but for fellowship. He had sentiment in abundance, but he approached sentiment with that sort of nervous braggadocio with which the schoolboy conceals his softer feelings. A clever American critic, Mr. Bliss Perry, alludes to that "commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce declared to be inevitable among masses of men associated, as they are in America, under modern democratic government. "This commonness of mind and tone," says Mr. Perry, "is often one of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of a levelling up." The loud stridency of Mr. Kipling's voice is perhaps "one of the penalties" which has to be paid for the democratic sentiment of fellowship. That there should be some "levelling down" is sure to follow when the poet finds himself absorbed in the common emotions of common life, and speaking to the common man. But there need not necessarily be that coarseness of sentiment, that crudity of thought, that bigotry of limited sympathy, mis-called patriotism, which has debased the level of so much of Mr. Kipling's writing. I should say that Mr. G.K. Chesterton owes more than he supposes to the influence, direct or indirect, of Mr. Kipling; that though his opinions, his sympathies, his conclusions are all diametrically opposed to those of the elder writer, still there is something in common between the two which is essentially a democratic quality, the final standard being that of reference to commonness, normal feeling, the common man. Mr. Chesterton wrote a very stirring poem in his Ballad of King Alfred, a ballad which appealed to patriotism, fellowship, and those broad, profound emotions which underlie the common sense of a people. It was far nearer to the spirit of the _Barrack Room Ballads_ than he, I am sure, would be willing to admit.