in that masterpiece of humor "The Taking of Lungtungpen," and that masterpiece of pathos probably the finest thing in the book "The Story of Muhammad Din."

In Under the Deodars Kipling's effort is to depict the shallow fashionable society of Simla. Here his cynical temper finds chance for complete expression. It is not the fact that so many of these stories turn on the motive of adultery to which one objects. It is the fact that we are not given a clear perspective. Mr. Barrie defends Kipling for "choosing the dirty corner." He finds fault, however, with good reason, because "the blaze of light is always on the one spot we never see the rest of the room."1

By what right does the author direct the rays of his lantern on unfaithful husbands and intriguing wives without allowing us to observe the thousands of excellent British subjects in India who cultivate the old-fashioned virtues? It is true that Mr. Kipling writes of immorality in a moral way; he never makes it seductive, nor fails to show that it bears its penalty. He misplaces his accent, that is all. Conceding him a perfect right to "draw the Thing as he sees it," we still regret that "whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report" are not, in these early stories, given quite a fair chance.

The satiric spirit is hardly less prominent in the

hear

Story of the Gadsbys, a series of social studies with the cynical moral that a soldier married is a soldier marred:

"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

Gadsby himself has this to say to Captain Mafflim: "Jack, be very sure of yourself before you marry. I'm an ungrateful ruffian to say this, but marriage

even as good a marriage as mine has been hampers a man's work, it cripples his sword-arm, and oh, it plays Hell with his notions of duty!" The lack of genuine chivalry toward women has always been one of Mr. Kipling's faults, but it has never elsewhere touched the depths it reaches in these Gadsby dialogues. Much can be forgiven the author on the score of his extreme youth. But can that excuse be stretched to cover the retention of this book in the Outward Bound edition, recently revised by the author? The Story of the Gadsbys is as superficial and vulgar in tone as it is brilliant in composition, and can add nothing to the author's fame.

Another representative work of this early period is The Light that Failed, Mr. Kipling's first novel. It has powerful passages, but lacks tolerance and sanity. It is a very young book. Its air of omniscience becomes tiresome; its violence is never felt, except in the superb battle passages, to be

1L'envoi to Story of the Gadsbys.

exactly vigor. As a story it is disheartening. In reviewing it the Quarterly reminded Mr. Kipling of a forgotten truth: "The finest art is full of light and hope." It subordinates "other qualities, however brilliant, to a belief in the best things about God and man." Dick Heldar's blindness seems, in view of his character, "more like retribution than like Nemesis." Pity him as much as we may, we would have pitied him more if his spirit from the first had been less magisterial and selfish, if he had not been so resentful of an affront to his pride and so contemptuous of the common herd who would have none of art. Dick had yet to learn, like Mr. Kipling himself, that even shop-keepers and Sundayschool superintendents should possess an interest for a broadly receptive mind; that very lovable people have been known to attend dissenting chapels and to prefer religious tracts to Shakespeare's plays. When Dick Heldar gains his first sight of London after returning from the Soudan he addresses the following speech to a row of highly respectable houses: "Oh, you rabbit-hutches! Do you know what you've got to do later on? You have to supply me with men-servants and maid-servants,' -here he smacked his lips, and the peculiar treasure of kings. Meantime I'll get clothes and boots, and presently I will return and trample on you.' Surely that is not the mental temper which makes either for Christianity or for good art.

The work of Mr. Kipling's first period, then, is marked by dash, wit, and inexhaustible cleverness, but is marred by the characteristic faults of youth: lack of sympathy and undeveloped sense of propor

tion.

13. SYMPATHETic Treatment of Character. -But the author had already begun to promise better things. As interpretations of the queer workings of the Oriental mind and still queerer workings of the all but impenetrable native conscience, some of the stories in In Black and White are unparalleled. In certain tales of Soldiers Three, and in at least one of the child stories, he touched almost the highest level he has reached. The reason is obvious. He was writing of the classes of people with whom he was in complete rapport, and he was attempting to vindicate no favorite theory of art or society. Human nature was treated in a broader spirit which made its appeal less and less to the passing interest evoked by clever description of class manners and social fashions and more to the permanent interest awakened by portrayal of primitive and lasting emotions.

A very fortunate field for the exercise of his talents was offered by the ballads of 1892. Mr. Kipling no longer gave us society as he had found it, or sin as he had unearthed it, or art as he chose to preach it; he set Tommy Atkins to singing and let him relate his own story to music. The result

is perhaps the faithfullest picture of the common soldier we have in modern literature. Of the gallant officer-on-leave, of the picturesque veteran, or of a sort of sentimentalized man-in-the-ranks, conceived either as lover or as simon-pure hero, fiction gives us many examples. But the "snoring Barrack-room," cholera scourge, canteen, commissariat "camuels," battery mules, sweating carriers, "'arfmade recruities " these seem to have been reserved for Rudyard Kipling. The poet never ventriloquizes. We are not asked to believe that a young journalist masquerading in a red coat is Mr. Atkins. Never once does the singer of the Barrack-room stand off and view his soldier-man with cynical or even with merely curious while friendly interest; he sleeps under the same blanket, he smokes the same tobacco, he shares the same rations, he gets near enough to his comrade's heart to discover the rude chivalry which redeems his undisguised animalism. The common man of the British army is at last completely realized.

In the prose tales of Mr. Kipling's second period one sees not only surer mastery of form and the sloughing off of mannerisms; even more apparent is the growth in sympathy. There is not a page in the Plain Tales, unless we except "The Story of Muhammad Din," that reveals anything approaching the tenderness of the tale entitled "Without Benefit of Clergy." "Beyond the Pale" has, to be sure, a plot