drawing is not Mr. Kipling's forte.

He finds it dif

ficult to keep his own personality out of that of his creation, and is always in danger of introducing false touches into his very best work. In "With the Main Guard," after Ortheris has produced his bottles of gingerade, Mulvaney inquires, "Where did ye get ut, ye Machiavel?" Again, take this: “Ortheris had considered the question in all its bearings. He spoke, chewing his pipe-stem meditatively the while :

"""Go forth, return in glory,

To Clusium's royal 'ome :

An' round these bloomin' temples 'ang

The bloomin' shields o' Rome.'

Once more (Mulvaney is speaking): "Spit it out, Jock, an' bellow melojus to the moon. It takes an earthquake or a bullet graze to fetch aught out av you. Discourse, Don Juan! The a-moors av Lotharius Learoyd !" 2

Bessie, illiterate and immoral, thus solicits Torpenhow in The Light that Failed: "Oh, please, 'tisn't as if I was asking you to marry me. I wouldn't think of it. But cou- couldn't you take and live with me till Miss Right comes along? I'm only Miss Wrong, I know, but I'd work my hands to the bare bone for you." Another singularly infelicitous touch is that where our author makes the

1 "The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney."
2" On Greenhow Hill."

"Brushwood girl," most sensitive and highly-bred
of women, exclaim in a moment of strong feeling,
My God!" One unfortunate line in "Gunga
Din" mars a masterpiece. Even Mr. Kipling fails
to convince us that a water-carrier who is dying of
a mortal wound, model of unselfishness though he
be, would gasp with his last death-rattle: "I 'ope
you liked
your drink."
would not have said.

It is precisely what he shit)

Mr.

20. MASTERY OF THE SHORT STORY. Kipling has inexhaustible inventiveness. To have written more than one hundred and fifty stories, hardly one of which gives the reader the impression of being some familiar set of incidents turned up again, is to have revealed very unusual talents, but to have handled these plots with such sure artistic sense is to have accomplished far more.

Possibly the most wonderful feat that Kipling has performed is the mastery of the short story as a literary form. In accomplishing this he has succeeded where nearly every English writer who preceded him has failed. Englishmen have been able to write a good three-volume novel ever since Richardson, but, with perhaps half a dozen exceptions, they have not produced a single short story that can take its place beside the little perfections of France and America. Yet Mr. Kipling has written more than a score, to be very conservative, that are masterly in form and brilliant in content. They are not pages

torn from some unfinished novel, they " are cast at once, as if in a mold.”

Even in the Plain Tales this unique power is apparent. These early stories were marred by mannerisms which the author has since discarded. Yet note that these very mannerisms were always employed in the interest of conciseness. He abbreviates almost to the point of obscurity; he ends a broken sentence with a dash; he omits his finite verbs; he overwhelms the lay reader with a flood of military initials, since you see it saves space to write C. O. rather than commanding officer. Even his trick of saying, " But that is another story

shows his conscious, if not ostentatious, effort to keep himself within bounds. The result is a sort of tale condensed almost to anecdote. Introductions and preliminary explanations are suggested by a phrase or cut out; conclusions exist in your stimulated imagination, you will not find them on the page; not a word anywhere could be spared or added. The power of the tales is in their suddenness. They are not paintings, growing, stroke by stroke, under the artist's brush. They are stereopticon pictures projected instantly upon the

screen.

In some of his recent fiction Mr. Kipling, while showing gain in analysis and maturity of thought, gives evidence of having lost this early power. He

has seldom been at his best in the elaborate method.

Maisie, in The Light that Failed, who is described at length, is less real to our imagination that the redhaired girl, revealed in three or four lightning glimpses. It is the misfortune of Mr. Kipling's later style that he is explicit where he was once suggestive. In such tales as "The Devil and the Deep Sea" and "The Ship that Found Herself" he shows that he has forgotten the force of the epigram: "The secret of being dull is to tell all you know."

It may be said in passing that the swift conciseness which seems to have departed from his prose style has been, oddly enough, transferred to his poetry. His recent ballads are so tightly packed with meaning that their rapid allusiveness often approaches the verge of obscurity.

21. MASTERY OF METRE. Yet it must be said that, on the whole, Mr. Kipling's mastery of form in poetical composition is no less remarkable than his mastery of form in story-writing. His metres are as various as his themes. Though his favorite metrical scheme is simple, his inventiveness, when he leaves his swinging ballad measures, and sets out in quest of variety, is almost unrivalled. No matter how intricate the problem he sets himself, he is certain to solve it. "The Song of the Banjo" is an instance in point. It presents technical difficulties that would have baffled any other living writer, yet the poet overrides them with ingenuity and apparent ease.

It may be questioned, however, whether the music inherent in Mr. Kipling's lines has much subtlety, or in any sense equals his force, metrical facility, or precision of phrase. So many of his poems are heel-and-toe choruses that one doubts whether the poet will ever wholly emancipate himself from this regimental mood. "White Horses " and a few other lyrics begin to give us hope, but it must be said in general that he marches in strict time to the band. What he gains in speed, he loses in repose; what he gains in ornament of phrase, he loses in simplicity. Mr. Kipling's verse is rhetorical and declamatory. Very little of it can be classed with that highest order of poetry, devoid of every suspicion of "style," which Nature seems to have penned herself. Representative examples in this kind are Wordsworth's Lucy lyrics and the best songs of Burns and of Blake. Brilliant is not the word one applies to these. the authors as composing them. They are inevitable. Mr. Kipling's poetry, on the other hand, is more like that of Byron, of Campbell, of Dryden, of Macaulay, though far surpassing in one respect or another the work of each of them. It is excessively clever, it is eloquent and sonorous to a degree, but it falls short of that "nobly plain manner” admired by Matthew Arnold, which is really the crowning triumph of expression. The one immortal exception is the "Recessional," which is as unadorned as

One never thinks of