highest importance because based on false propositions. This may be said also of some of Carlyle's later pamphlets, of certain of Mr. Arnold's theological essays, of not a few of Mr. Swinburne's poems, and of such books as Queen Mab, and James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night. No amount of brilliant expression can compensate for radically false views of human nature and of society.

Now

Vice never tri

it may be said of Mr. Kipling's work as a whole that while the facts he selects are often novel or exceptional, they are based on truths of human nature as old as Job or Homer. umphs permanently over virtue, and it bears its what proper punishment. True, Mr. Kipling loves to show us that the sinner has something of the saint the f about him, and the saint is not all saint; but he never confuses moral values. In politics he guards against laisser-faire on the one hand, tyranny and toryism on the other. Mr. Kipling has that sober accuracy of vision that apprehends things in their relations.

7. MESSAGE: Human Interest. The value of a story-teller's work depends largely on the amount and quality of the human life he can depict. Mr. Kipling's work deserves to be taken seriously, because, in the first place, it gives us so much of life; because, in the second place, it gives us so much of the noble, invigorating side of life. While realistic in method, it is ideal in aim.

Our author's heroes

"Are neither children nor gods, but men in a world of men."

The delight in mere physical struggle, the love of home and equal love of roving adventure, the friendship of man for man, the remorse which follows wasted opportunities, jealousy, hatred, and revenge

where are these primary qualities of our nature given more powerful expression? The words Mr. Kipling once applied to Wressley apply quite as truly to himself: "His heart and soul were at the end of his pen, and they got into the ink. He was dowered with sympathy, insight, humor, and style for two hundred and thirty days and nights; and his book was a Book. He had his vast special knowledge with him, so to speak; but the spirit, the wovenin human touch, the poetry and the power of the output, were beyond all special knowledge." 2 Mr. Kipling's work is a cross-section through nineteenthcentury society from Supi-yaw-lat to the Widow of Windsor, from Gunga Din to the Viceroy. He is interested in one thing and one alone. It is not nature, theology, life even - but lives. Not humanity, but Dick, Tom, and Harry; not human nature, but your nature; not the brotherhood of man, but Gunga Din, Disco Troop, McAndrew, his brothers. The subject that cannot be related

1 "A Song of the English."

2 Wressley of the Foreign Office.

to the real experience of a real man has no charm for him.

But the human nature to which Mr. Kipling introduces us is not only vigorous and varied: it is wholesome.1 No side of human nature is without interest for him; but the most fascinating side is that which struggles for the attainment of ideal ends. We drop his books with more faith rather than less in men and women. Bobby Wicks is far removed from the saint, but he dies for a comrade and makes no fuss about it. Hummil, too, has the minor vices of his class, but he sacrifices his life for another. Jakin and Lew are children of the gutter, but they die drumming and fifing defiantly far in advance of the cowardly regiment. To say that the author's sympathies are not universal is only to say that they are healthy. He detests the prig, and hates above all the religious prig. The Pharisee, whether called by the name of Mrs. Jennett, or Antirosa, or Riley the bank accountant, or Mrs. Scriffshaw, he has no good word for. But towards the imperfect men and women who do the

A few of the early stories and ballads hardly deserve this praise. Yet the savagery of Kipling's satiric mood was wakened only by what he felt to be cant, hypocrisy, or cowardice. If he saw cant, hypocrisy, and cowardice where they do not exist, the error lay in his defective judgment and undeveloped faculty of sympathy, not in heart and will. Mr. Kipling's pessimism, moreover, was far from indicating moral apathy. Had he cared nothing for ethics, had he possessed no private standard of conduct, he would have been either indifferent to wrong or oblivious to it.

day's work with brave patience and a bold heart toward

"Such as praise our God for that they served His world,"

Mr. Kipling's interest and sympathy are undeviating.

8. MESSAGE: Variety. The value of literature depends in part on its range. A man who sees a few things or knows a single place is obviously less well-equipped for story-writing than a man who has observed very widely. This is not because one place offers less valuable material than another. It is partly because any theme, however interesting, becomes wearisome if harped on; it is also because a man needs to see a good many things before he can gauge the proper proportions of any one thing.

One of the most astonishing merits of Mr. Kipling is his range. He has laid the scenes of his tales in India, South Africa, the United States, the Newfoundland Banks, the East End of London, English country villages, mid-ocean, and the islands of the sea. He has written children's tales, mystery tales, soldier stories, beast fables, humorous and sailor yarns, studies in native Indian life, sporting tales, and society dialogues. He writes fluently in every dialect under heaven. While his stories of

India are mainly concerned with four classes, British soldiers, fashionable Anglo-Indian society, children of British officials, and natives, his later

tales include London bank-clerks, Gloucester fishermen, California millionaires, New York journalists, and Devonshire schoolboys. When he essays verse he is equally resourceful. Most poets can be classed by their little fields, as poets of heroism, of adventure, of the sea, of the army, of politics. Mr. Kipling is the poet of all this and of how much beside! In The Seven Seas he writes of the British empire, of the English soldier, of the American spirit, of the three-volume novel, of the sea fight between the sealing boats, of the cave-dwellers, of the true romance. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley writes of Kipling: "He has the greatest curiosity of any man I ever knew; everything interests him." He knows the name of every rope on the Newfoundland fishing schooner, and writes with equal mastery of a Greek galley, Chinese pig-boat, Bilbao tramp, British man-of-war, and Atlantic liner. "Mr. Kipling's accuracy is phenomenal," says a Popular Science Monthly writer in discussing The Scientific Spirit in Kipling's Work. Read the Jungle Books, and see how intimate is his knowledge of zoology, the Story of Ung and In the Neolithic Age, and observe his familiar acquaintance with archeology. In Quiquern and The White Seal he shows the same easy mastery of Arctic exploration, in The Flowers of botany, in The English Flag of geography, in The Children of the Zodiac of the constellations.