9. STYLE: Force. The word beautiful would never come to mind if one were asked to characterize the work of Mr. Kipling in a single epithet. What we first notice about him is his power. He means something and means it hard. It is impossible to ignore him; his demand is too immediate and persistent. Read where you will, his writings strike you with the weight of a six-fold blow." "His vitality and force are so extraordinary that they sweep the goddess of Criticism off her legs," said a eulogist in the Saturday Review. Let the reader once get caught in the dash and swing of The Seven Seas and he is swept along irresistibly until finis at the book's end casts him ashore again halfdrowned but happy. When a man can bring this about, only the purist, the grammarian, or the prig will question whether he is a poet. We recommend to all such Mr. Kipling's "Conundrum of the Workshops":

“They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart,

Till the devil grunted behind the bricks: It's striking, but is it art?'

Art may be crude or coarse, but it is successful if it achieve its purpose. If the artist's product "strikes you, art of some sort it certainly is. The distinguishing characteristic of wholly inartistic things is this: They do not strike one at all.

IO. STYLE: Precision. — In addition to force

style should have precision. Macaulay possesses force, but so little delicacy that he constantly understates or overstates his meaning. He chooses primary colors and has no subtlety of shading. On the other hand, Mr. Pater and Mr. James cultivate precision of phrase, one thinks, at the expense of energy. What makes Mr. Kipling's use of language so triumphantly successful is the fact that he combines strength and exactness, almost never sacrificing one to the other. The Spectator has said of him that he " is of all living writers the most careful and conscientious in the matter of form.” He knows the value of individual words as a mechanic knows the use and importance of different tools, and can turn with perfect ease from the sledgehammer to the awl or file. In his powerful and odd, though wholly serious, conception of the Hereafter, the happy artist "shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair." But the splashes are not daubs. Kipling hastens to add that the painter "shall draw the thing as he sees it, for the God of Things as They Are."1

Such a coördination of vigor and nicety is very remarkable. It is Byron and Mr. Aldrich in partnership.

1 L'envoi to The Seven Seas.

II

II. MR. KIPLING'S THREE PERIODS. Mr. Kipling's work may be divided for convenience into three periods: Satirical Treatment of Character; Sympathetic Treatment of Character; Spiritual Treatment of Character.

12. SATIRICAL TREATMENT OF CHARACTER.— In Mr. Kipling's early writings one hears the sound of scornful laughter. There is irony, wit, cleverness in plenty, but a lack of the charity which "suffereth long and is kind."

Yet

The first book which deserves consideration is Departmental Ditties, a collection of verses mainly satirical and almost wholly concerned with Indian official life. It is impossible for outside readers to appreciate, as the little Anglo-Indian world of the eighties could, all the allusions to Delilah, Boanerges Blitzen, Pagett, M.P., and Potiphar Gubbins. these queer appellations stood for the names of men and women widely known in the circles the poet frequented, and the sharp personalities struck home. The book enjoyed the same sort of success that topical songs filled with local "gags" always win at vaudeville theatres. It was in some sense a survival of the mood which led the schoolboy Kipling to lampoon his masters, but it had perhaps a more serious intent. The occasional pieces are certain to

t

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be forgotten, since their appeal is to passing, not permanent, sources of interest. The society verse is already forgotten, since this above all kinds of poetry demands perfectly polished form precisely the point where the youthful Kipling was deficient. A few of the Ditties, however, deserve to survive.

One of them is "The Story of Uriah," an AngloIndian version of the David and Bathsheba narrative. It is unpleasant, it has no smoothness or charm, but every word is like a blow of the fist.

Another poem which gives earnest of Mr. Kipling's maturer style is "The Galley Slave," an alle- -gorical description of the Indian Civil Service. preaches a robust gospel from first line to last :

It

"Was it storm? Our fathers faced it, and a wilder never blew ;

Earth that waited for the wreckage watched the galley struggle through."

Perhaps still finer is the jubilee poem, the People Said":

"What

It has just that added note of spirituality which is wanting in the rest of the book, and points prophetically to the "Recessional" of a decade later.

As a whole, the tone of these Ditties is disagreeable. Their attitude toward life is very juvenile.

Here is a sample:

Consider. Allegorical V'very durens plenty of contemporer le

"Open the old cigar-box let me consider anew

Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?"

"A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke : And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

No plea of deliberate humor excuses such brutal cynicism.

Another representative work of this early period is Plain Tales from the Hills. Here we find much the same merits and faults as in Departmental Ditties. The tales are notable for force, conciseness, unity, and wit. They have a spontaneousness about them which some of Mr. Kipling's very recent stories lack. They were not written to propitiate the critics, nor to win money, nor to satisfy his own mature and exacting canons of taste. They were dashed off to please himself. They are consequently marked by an astounding freshness and charm, and even the poorest of them has the quality of being readable. What they lack is that sympathetic insight which delves beneath surface faults of character and discovers the fountains of human suffering. Many of them are marred by cynicism, nearly all of them by cocksureness—the jaunty haton-one-side, chip-on-shoulder air of precocious youth. The best of the stories are those in which Mr. Kipling drops his air of knowingness, and is content to stand aside and let his story tell itself, as he does