RUDYARD KIPLING

(1865-)

UDYARD KIPLING, still a young man in the early thirties, is a dominant figure and force in current English literature. He has passed successfully through the preliminary stages of uncritical popularity to receive the most careful critical consideration as story-teller and poet. He has brought a new and striking personality into the literature of the day: with a splendid vigor, breadth, and directness he has given literary expression to entirely fresh and interesting phases of the life in wide regions of the English-speaking peoples; and he has with a noble realism proved in his work the possibility, to genius, of using the practical rushing late nineteenth century with its machinery, science-worship, and struggle for place. as rich material for imaginative treatment in literature. In a fairly epic way he has constituted himself, in song and story, the chronicler and minstrel of the far-scattered colonial English.

Kipling's birth, education, and early experience were such as to qualify him for his elected work in the world. He was born in Christmas week, 1865, in Bombay, a city he has celebrated in verse:

"A thousand mills roar through me where I glean

All races from all lands.»

His father, Mr. Lockwood Kipling, is a cultured writer, art teacher, and illustrator, who has used his talent in making pictures and decorations for the "In Black and White" standard edition of his son's works, published by the Scribners in New York in 1897. Rudyard's school-life was passed in England, giving him the opportunity to see the Britisher in his native island. Then, when he was but seventeen, came the return to India for rough-and-ready journalistic work, as sub-editor of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette,- with all its necessity of close observation and inevitable assimilation of that life. Kipling took the shortest cut to the writer's trade; namely, he wrote daily and under pressure. Some of his best tales-notably The Man Who Would Be King'-vividly present this newspaper experience, which was indubitably a good thing for a man like Kipling. Meanwhile, in the intervals of supplying mere prosaic "copy," for which there was a loud call in the com, sing-room, he was doing

what many another hard-worked newspaper man has done before him. turning out stories and verses-which were quickly caught up by the press and circulated through East India. Then Kipling, in 1886, having attained to man's estate in years, had bound up in rough fashion in his office a small volume of his verse: "a lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a D. O. government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper and secured with red tape." And this bard's bantling had a good sale thereabouts; and as he himself puts it, "at last the book came to London with a gilt top and a stiff back." Its subsequent history is not private: few first volumes have had so cordial a reception. The Indian stories too, 'Plain Tales from the Hills' (1888), were collected in book shape, eagerly read by the writer's local clientèle, and found a continually widening public. Kipling's verse and prose were of honestest birth: sprung from local experience, his writings appealed primarily to a local audience; but possessing the essential qualities and interests, the work proved acceptable to anybody on earth capable of being moved by the earnest, truthful, forcible portrayal of life in words. When 'Plain Tales from the Hills' appeared as a book, it was seen to be the manifesto of a new talent. The vitality, distinction, newness of theme, the pathos, drama, and humor of the work, set it clean aside from anything else contemporaneous in fiction of the shortstory kind. The defects in the earlier books were an occasional abuse of the technical in word or allusion, and a young-man cynicism, appearing especially in the Gadsby series,—a mood soon sloughed off by the maturer Kipling. But the merits were of the overpowering sort, and the dynamic force of the tales was beyond question. That a man but little more than twenty should have written them made the performance spectacular. In the use of plain Biblical language and the selection of realistic themes there was something of the audacity and immediateness of journalism; but the result almost always justified the method.

The tales found in the volumes-about a dozen in numberpublished between 1886 and 1895, are of several kinds. Some treat pathetic, realistic, or weirdly sombre situations, either of native or soldier life: a class containing some masterpieces, of which 'The Man Who Would Be King,' 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,' 'The Mark of the Beast,' 'Without Benefit of Clergy,' 'The Phantom Rickshaw,' and 'Beyond the Pale' are illustrations. Another division, of which Wee Willie Winkie' is the type, grouped in the book 'Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories (1888), deals with children, and exhibits a very winning aspect of the author. Still another contains the humorous cycle personified in the inimitable triad Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, brought into an artistic unity by their common