INTRODUCTION. Τ HIS little book furnishes a quotation from Kipling for each day in the year. The editor believes there is no similar compilation in the market. After completing his task he has learned, indeed, that a Kipling Birthday Book is on the catalogue of a prominent publisher, but he has not himself seen it. Its purpose must necessarily be different from the present one, for a birthday book aims to present a series of pleasant mottoes appropriate to anniversaries, while a year-book, free from any such restriction, aims at giving a series of suggestive thoughts for daily reading. Many of these bits from Kipling are far from pleasant; they are, however, stimulating, sensible, and true to experience. It should be remembered that the "laureate of the greater Britain" is as much humorist as he is philosopher and bard. His satire is never unkind, but it is often stinging. To omit everything from this collection except pretty paragraphs and verses of compliment would be to present a Rudyard Kipling very untrue to life. For Kipling, of all authors, must be represented adequately if at all; he is not only the most popular of living writers who use the English tongue, he is also the most versatile. Perhaps his principal claim to serious regard is his extraordinary range. Few authors have attained distinguished success in both poetry and prose fiction, but Mr. Kipling has done more than this. His prose fiction itself may be divided into at least ten departments, in each of which he has been notably successful: Novels; Mystery Tales (as The Phantom 'Rickshaw, etc.); Stories about Children (of which Wee Willie Winkie may stand as a type); Humorous Tales (the Mulvaney group, My Sunday at Home, etc.); Military Tales (Drums of the Fore and Aft, the Mutiny of the Mavericks, etc.); Jungle Tales (Mowgli and BeastFable group); Sea Tales (Captains Courageous, the Devil and the Deep Sea, etc.); Studies in Native Life and Character (Lispeth, etc.); Scientific and Sporting Tales (The Bridge Builders, The Ship that Found Herself, The Maltese Cat); Society Tales (the Story of the Gadsbys, Under the Deoddrs). Rudyard Kipling is still a young man. Born in Bombay, India, on December 30, 1865, his school days were passed in England. His father, Mr. John Lockwood Kipling, is an accomplished artist and clever writer. At seventeen, Rudyard returned to India and entered on a journalistic career as assistant editor of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. Several years of drudgery in a newspaper office furnished, perhaps, the best experience Kipling could have had. Mr. E. Kay Robinson, formerly editor of the Gazette, wrote regarding him in McClure's Magazine for July, 1896: 66 My experience of him as a newspaper hack suggests, however, that if you want to find a man who will cheerfully do the office work of three men, you should catch a young genius. Like a blood horse between the shafts of a coal wagon, he may go near to bursting his heart in the effort, but he'll drag that wagon along as it ought to go. The amount of stuff' that Kipling got through in the day was indeed wonderful: and though I had more or less satisfactory assistants after he left, and the staff grew with the paper's prosperity, I am sure that more solid work was done in that office when Kipling and I worked together than ever before or after." Kipung's subsequent history is known to everybody. It is mainly that of a man of letters turning out book after book in rapid succession. The young journalist had contributed many tales and poems, the latter chiefly satirical, to his own and other Indian papers. These caught the fancy of the Anglo-Indian public and were very widely quoted. In 1886, a small book of verse met with a cordial reception, and with the publication of The Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888 came fame. The history of literature presents nothing more astonishing than the writing of such a book by a youth barely come of age. The Plain Tales disputes with the Jungle Books and The Seven Seas the claim of being Kipling's masterpiece. In 1889, Kipling went to England and shortly afterward settled in the United States. He built a home in Brattleboro, Vermont, and married a sister of Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated The Naulahka. Subsequently he left America to explore every coast of the seven seas, with headquarters in Great Britain. His is the restless spirit of genius. A series of animal fables, quite unlike anything in literature, were produced in 1894 and 1895, and revealed an entirely new side of Kipling's personality. In 1897 Captains Courageous, the author's longest sustained. narrative, dealt with the lives of Gloucester fishermen. Mr. Kipling's essays in rhyme have shown a curious evolution. Jingle, verse, poetry, this is about the order of progression in his three books: Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads, and The Seven Seas. The first is catchy and musical, the second clever, the third magnificent. While, as I have said, any book of selections from Kipling should represent all sides of his genius, it need not represent all periods of the novelist's growth at once. In the present compilation I have confined myself chiefly to Kipling's early books, adding from his later writings only a few widely known poems, notably the Recessional and The Vampire. Thro' the Year with G Kipling January 1. OD of our fathers, known of old January 2. Recessional. HE fell to work, whistling softly, and was swallowed up in the clean, clear joy of creation, which does not come to man too often, lest he should consider himself the equal of his God and so refuse to die at the appointed time. The Light that Failed. YOU January 3. OU sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping. Watches of the Night. |