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the less familiar into the more familiar: the abstract conception into the concrete image.

18. DESCRIPTION. If he portrays natural scenery with a few vital strokes, Mr. Kipling applies the same method to all his descriptive passages. His great achievement is that of actually making the reader see things. What a second-class writer would dredge the dictionary in describing, he packs into a curt, truncated sentence. "Give me one adjective," he seems to say, "and I will do more than you could with a portfolio of them; but you must let me choose the adjective." His selective instinct is unfaltering. He picks out from the myriad details of a scene those two or three which suggest the whole. His method is never the patient, elaborate manner of Tennyson, laying in every line and shadow with Pre-Raphaelite precision. Mr. Kipling spirits you out of doors. You are not reading about a place, you are seated square in it. It is nothing less than verbal magic. Take, for instance, this picture of his beloved North-country drawn by a homesick Afridi horse-thief: "The bloom of the peach-orchards is upon all the Valley, and here is only dust and a great stink. There is a pleasant wind among the mulberry-trees, and the streams are bright with snow-water, and the caravans go up and the caravans go down, and a hundred fires sparkle in the gut of the Pass, and tent-peg answers hammer-nose, and pack-horse squeals to

pack-horse across the drift smoke of the evening. It is good in the North now. Come back with me.

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There are few situations which Mr. Kipling is unable to describe with success, but two, at least, he pictures with a mastery which is beyond anything in modern literature. Whenever he writes of the open sea or whenever he touches upon a battlescene, he is preeminent. Nowhere, unless in Shakespeare, shall one discover sea-pictures which equal some of those in “ A Matter of Fact” and “ Captains Courageous." None of his contemporaries, unless Mr. Stephen Crane, and scarcely one of his predecessors, no, not Sir Walter himself, has approached the vividness of certain battle-pictures in "With the Main Guard," The Light that Failed, " Mutiny of the Mavericks," and "Drums of the Fore and Aft." They are painted in blood and fire.

19. CHARACTERIZATION. — If description is Mr. Kipling's strongest side, character-drawing is his weakest. Or let us say that with him characterization is another kind of description. His fiction forms a sort of verbal "biograph": though his pictures move, they remain pictures none the less. After reading his stories one is left with an impression of remarkably vigorous delineation, but not with the feeling that one has watched the natural and inevitable growth of character. Hardly anybody, indeed, develops in Kipling.

1" Dray Wara Yow Dee."

Maisie and

Dick, Tarvin and Kate- they are the same at the end of the book as at the outset. Harvey Cheyne suffers a sea-change, perhaps, but his sudden regeneration is not so much a study in the evolution of character as a study in the relation of environment to conduct. Nor is there anything save the different circumstances surrounding them that enables us to tell apart certain of the men and women who reappear in the short stories. Mrs. Hauksbee is not clearly discriminated from Mrs. Polly Mallowe or from Mrs. Harriet Herriott. Mrs. Reiver differs from her hated rival only by being plainly labelled: "wicked in a business-like way," and "not honestly mischievous like Mrs. Hauksbee." Mowgli, marvellous creature though he is, is less an individualized character than a type of the natural man highly idealized. The familiar musketeers may seem to refute the truth of our generalization. But Learoyd, closely as his dialect is caught, is on the whole rather shadowy an "'ayrick in trousies;" Ortheris, while a more clear-cut figure, is a generic cockney; and Mulvaney a typical son of Erin plus something of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. The Irishman and Londoner are actual, but they fail to live and move and have their being as Lear does, or Hamlet, or Falstaff, or Doctor Primrose, or Colonel Newcome. Verisimilitude is not verity. It must be observed that in the case of all his most striking personages Mr. Kipling has the distinct

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advantage (in this he is Dickens' own son) of choosing individuals who are marked by some external idiosyncrasy. Mulvaney is at once set apart from the rest by his Irish wit and brogue, by his height, by his appetite for strong waters. Otheris is remembered by his diminutive stature, his dogstealing propensities, and his fondness for the Adjective. Were the author to choose characters whose appearance and manner was similar, and aim to differentiate them by subtle mental differences which called for powers of insight rather than for exercise of the descriptive faculty, his inferiority to more than one contemporary-take Mr. Meredith as a single example would be apparent.

Mr. Kipling's characters seem to be infinitely various, yet they are principally limited to the folk who engage in the day's work. With spineless, indolent men who take their ideas from books, with flaccid, washed-out women who can't ride a horse or run a house, he has little sympathy. The few people of this sort who appear in his pages are introduced only to be hastily chastised and dismissed. When he approaches the narrowly evangelical type so concerned with prayers and phylacteries that it is content to leave the day's work to others, his usual tolerance deserts him and he descends into fiercest caricature. When he describes children he is apt to make them monsters of precocity. In order to in

terest him they must bring things to pass, even like their stalwart fathers and mothers whom he loves. Wee Willie Winkie, a prodigy of six years, effects a marvellous rescue of a young lady surrounded by bandits. Tods, a youth of the same age, discusses politics with Indian officials and actually influences legislation. What a spectacle is this! Men at work, women at work, children at work! hind the ranks of toiling and fighting humanity the imperturbable young poet urging them on by word and example to still greater activity!

And be

But Mr. Kipling's characterization is not only varied and strenuous, it is saturated with humor. The grim sardonic wit of the early ballads, the irony of the early stories, melt gradually into a kinder spirit but the fun is still there. It is often mingled so closely with pathos that they cannot easily be disentangled. "Comic stuff and tragic sadness" stand cheek by jowl in "Thrown Away; in "Tomlinson" we laugh and shudder at the same

moment.

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Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan I can rip your very heart-strings out with those,”

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boasts the poet's banjo. Only writers of extraordinary power can touch at the same instant the springs of merriment and of tears. Shakespeare, of course, is the master in this sort, but Mr. Kipling is an apt disciple.

I have already said, however, that character

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