Rudyard Kipling | Page 2

rejected according to the author's need.
Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, before we
have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful man of
letters. Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out of the
jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men are working
and building and fighting, come really out of the study of an expert
craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care. This may
seem an unnecessary warning. The intelligent reader will protest that,
since Mr Kipling writes books, it does not seem very necessary to
deduce that he is a man of letters. It is true that no such warning would
be necessary in the case of most writers of books. It would be pure loss
of time, for example, to begin a study of the work of Mr Henry James
by asserting that Mr Henry James was a man of letters. But Mr Kipling
is in rather a different case. The majority of readers with whom one
discusses Mr Kipling's works are sometimes far astray, simply because
they have not realised that Mr Kipling is as utterly a man of letters as
Mr Henry James, that he lives as completely the life of fancy and
meditation as William Blake or Francis Thompson. Mr Kipling does
not write tales out of the mere fullness of his life in many continents
and his talk with all kinds of men. He is not to be understood as a man
singular only in his experience, unloading anecdotes from a crowded
life, excelling in emphasis and reality by virtue of things actually seen
and done. On the contrary, Mr Kipling writes tales because he is a
writer.
Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and been
more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his

literary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any the less
devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that he is one of
the craftiest authors who ever lived. He is more crafty than Stevenson.
He often lives by the word alone--the word picked and polished. That
he has successfully disguised this fact from many of his admirers is
only a further proof of his literary cunning. Mr Kipling often uses
words with great skill to create in his readers the impression that words
matter to him hardly at all. He will work as hard as the careful
sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawness and crudity; and
thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is a literary man. They
are content simply to listen to a man who has seen, and possibly done,
wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to observe that, if the
world with its day's work belongs to Mr Kipling, it belongs to him only
by author's right--that is, by right of imagination and right of style.
It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary
formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of
The Light That Failed, he tries to talk as though there were really no
such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is pedantic
and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of literary
discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the sense that all good
work is more than a conscious adherence to formula. It is not true in the
sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than Tennyson or Walter Scott.
Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be misled by his buccaneering
contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's art is as formal as the art of
Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he helped to send out of fashion.
A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates
which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement
of his works here to be followed.
Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E.
His intimacy with India was determined at birth. He was educated at
the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in
1882, as assistant editor on The Civil and Military Gazette and _The
Pioneer. He remained on the staff of The Pioneer_ for seven years, and
travelled over the five continents. By this time he had learned to think

of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from
Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see
something of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do
who come back to her