APPENDIX

CERTAIN SELECTED OPINIONS ON MR. KIPLING'S WORK IN GENERAL

Mr.

"Burnt into Mr. Kipling's spirit is a touch of that Puritanism which has inspired our empire-builders so largely. . Whatever the form, Mr. Kipling is always at bottom in deep and serious earnest. Though so wonderful a master of style and metre and of every form of rhetorical artifice, he never writes for the sake of wordspinning, but always because he has got a nail which he is most anxious to drive in up to the head. Kipling is, of course, a poet who has always been intensely national in sentiment, but he is also a great master of literary technique, a conscious artist in words who has laid himself out to study language as men study a science, and to wring from it all its secrets and all its latent possibilities. We know what happens in France when men do that - how the artist eats up the man, and how the inhuman maxim of art for art's sake takes him captive. agine the most modern and most artful of the younger French poets being moved to write in the mood of a Hebrew prophet. The thing is inconceivable. He might, no doubt, have produced a great patriotic ode full of fire and splendor; but could he have touched that note of

Im

seriousness which we see in Mr. Kipling's verse?" Spectator, July 24, 1897 (Editorial).

"Of the many remarkable qualities in Mr. Kipling's publications, the most remarkable of all is the extraordinary faculty of observation which they display. Nothing

he comes in contact with seems to escape his notice, and, while still a young man, he gives one the impression in his books of having lived two or three lives, and lived them pretty thoroughly. But of all Mr. Kipling's works The Jungle Book, in two series, is the most remarkable and original, and the one which, so far, offers the best promise of retaining a permanent place in our literature. It may be questioned whether compositions dealing so largely in slang and colloquialisms [i.e., as many of the stories and ballads do] can ever hope to take a permanent place in literature, however dramatically expressive they may be for the immediate purpose. Apart

from the question of slang, such sketches of the superficial manners and talk of the society of the day as are put before us in Plain Tales from the Hills, however clever and brilliant, form only amusing reading for contemporaries ; they have no lasting interest. Every now and then the author has risen above this level, and has shown that he has it in him to deal with the pathos and the humor of life in a broader spirit and from a higher point of view; but his excursions into these higher regions are few and transitory. He has to a great extent been frittering away his remarkable and exceptional powers in playing to the gallery." - Edinburgh Review, 1898.

"The nameless red-haired girl in The Light that Failed, whom for convenience' sake we shall call Anonyma, re

marks to Dick Heldar, Your things smell of tobacco and blood; can't you do anything but soldiers?' Yes, Anonyma, he can do many other things, but the scent which you dislike will hang over them all; for the fog of fighting' has got into his eyes, and he carries the battlefield wherever he wanders. Vitality at all costs is Mr. Kipling's aim to be alive and to show it. Mild clear lights are not at all to his liking. Still life is the one kind of life which he would never choose to paint. Vitality, with Mr. Kipling, keeps at a safe distance from refinement. It cannot trust itself in the society of good women or of courteous and self-respecting men. It is loud-voiced and masterful, swaggering about with its hat on one side and its hand perpetually on the hilt of its sword, challenging admiration, and talking, with a boastful air, of horses and heterodox women.' If Realism be a volcanic cinders, burning up the soil on which it falls, then threefourths of Mr. Kipling's stories are realistic. The fire in them is unmistakable; but the fountains of mud are blown into the air along with it, and harden on the ground into dead lava."Quarterly, 1892.

shower of mud and red-hot

"His whole utterance vibrates with an audible, if somewhat coarse pulse of feeling, is quickened by a bold, if somewhat bravado passion, is instinct with a buccaneer's daring, an imperialist's idealism, a man's fibre and flesh and blood. And it is resonant with corresponding lilt and rhythm. swings effects on the reader by its flashing, dashing refrains. Neither sensation nor cadence are ever sustained, and both are seldom delicate. They are earthly, but not earthy; compact of the world, but not of clay. His

men fight and win; his women love and are lost; he delights in the fiery, furious moods of humanity and nature; he rejoices like a giant to run his course; so far there is something of Byron about him; in fine, he sings (sometimes whistles) of adventure, like an adventurer. And yet he is not destitute of softer intervals, deeper insight, and sublimer flights. His whole message is informed with a scorn of the petty and sordid, the sickly and the maudlin. His enormous directness of animal vigor, his absolute sincerity and magic insight, above all, his impetuous audacity. He is truly and power

fully himself." Quarterly, 1897.

"A glowing imagination, an inexhaustible invention, a profound knowledge of the human heart- these are three of his choicest possessions. Yet how inadequately does so bald a statement sum up the rich profusion of his talents! How beggarly and feeble seem the resources of language to do justice to his great achievements!

1898.

Blackwoods,

"While Mr. Kipling surveys mankind from China to Peru, he does so not from the dubious point of view of the cosmopolitan, but from the firm vantage-ground of a Briton." Ibid.

"In the present volume (Seven Seas) the cynical reader will turn to a little group of literary allegories with peculiar pleasure. The Last Rhyme of True Thomas,' 'In the Neolithic Age,' The Story of Ung,' The Three-Decker' Age,'The

all excessively clever, and all written to instruct the reviewer what he is to say, to tell him what his attitude must be. He is to insure the creator, the manly maker of music, who

sings of all we fought and feared and felt,' against criti

cism,' by which Mr. Kipling invariably means malignant and envious attack. The public likes this defiant attitude, and the great majority of reviewers are abashed by it." Saturday Review.

"Not since Adam was driven from the Jungle has there been any one to let us in. It has remained for Mr. Kipling to prove to us, above all the warfare of life, the essential brutish brotherhood that links forever all the mouths and stomachs of the world. Basing his work upon the latent Mowgli in us all, he has created one of the most masterful illusions of literature. It almost makes a man think with his stomach to read the Jungle through." Critic, Nov. 23, 1895.

"We take Mr. Kipling very seriously, for he is the greatest creative mind that we now have; he has the devouring eye and the portraying hand."- Atlantic Monthly.

"Mr. Kipling's work is the art form of Calvinism. When Calvinism was new and fresh in the world, each man was so troubled about the salvation or damnation of his own individual soul, it would seem, that he had no heart or time to work the awful theology over into art. But now that the devil has loosed his hold a bit, and we sit up and look about us in a blinking world, something of the old Greek spirit comes creeping back; and there arises among us a poet to sing: What is to be will be, and it's all in the day's work : let no man, therefore, shirk; neither let him be afraid.' The law is his master-word

the law of the jungle, the law of the army, the law of Her Majesty's realm, and the law of gravity. Of the spirit that giveth life' he has no word to speak." J. B. P., in Critic, November, 1898.