Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's
Burden."

It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that
period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively
mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently
exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down.
But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little
figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement
gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective
force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very
odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton
waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic
dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us
wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he
stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the
very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his
"Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.

What did he give me exactly?

He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he
provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion
and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express,
that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to
express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore
something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it
back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and
the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and
inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:--