a Greek statue. For once feeling and expression absolutely fuse; there is no suspicion of artifice. See how it depends on nouns and verbs:

"The tumult and the shouting dies

The captains and the kings depart.”

In the first seven lines there are only two descriptive adjectives.

22. DICTION. — Mr. Kipling has the gift of the inevitable word. "It is the paradox of poetry that it permits no synonyms." Like every true poet, he is not content with an excellent epithet, he must have the absolute one. It is in this power that his success as a poet preeminently, and as a prose writer,

very largely, lies. Let him take a jog-trot metre,

such as that of "The White Man's Burden " (see what doggerel his host of imitators have made out of it), and then watch what he can accomplish. Does not his triumph consist principally in the glove-like fit of such phrases as "new-caught sullen peoples, half devil and half child"? The commonplace tramp of " McAndrew's Hymn " is saved from utter monotony by such lines as this: "By night those soft, lasceevious stars leered from those velvet skies."

In his choice of words Mr. Kipling always strikes for concreteness. His aversion to the indefinite and abstract amounts almost to horror. Circumlocutions and euphemisms he spews out of his mouth. Not only does he call a spade a spade, he refuses to

supplant honest old Saxon words, which were good enough for Bible translators and for Shakespeare, with those roundabout equivalents which a sophisticated modern taste regards more delicate. His passion for specific words has betrayed him, also, into a curious literary fallacy. A specific word presents a more lively image than a general or class term; hence, he argues, the precise word which a tradesman or mechanic employs has more vividness than an indefinite term applied by the layman. Consistent with his theory, he dumps into a few of his later stories the whole vocabulary of technical cant, forgetting that even a general term which we understand presents to the eye a clearer image than a technical term at whose meaning we can only guess. On the whole, Mr. Kipling writes the clearest and most picturesque prose of any living author. use of technical jargon is at the worst a mistaken essay in a right direction, and as yet appears to be rather a dangerous tendency than a settled fault. We would remind him, however, of the words he once wrote of Wressley: "He began his book in the land he was writing of. He must have

His

guessed that he needed the white light of local color on his palette. This is a dangerous paint for amateurs to play with." Yes, Mr. Kipling, and it is dangerous paint even for accomplished artists. A few nautical terms or names of tools and machines add reality to a description, but a solid page of this

sort of thing is apt to be a bore.

When one has

been treated to whole paragraphs reeking with information about garboard-strakes, link-heads, crankthrows, crates, and fall-ropes, one may be pardoned for exclaiming, even if one has the devil for company, "It's clever, but is it art?" To the mind of the present writer there can be only one

answer.

But Mr. Kipling seeks not only for the most concrete, but also for the most suggestive word. When he says he had "the smell of the drinking earth in [his] nostrils," he chooses an epithet that connotes the whole impression. When he says of Kaa, the huge python, that "he seemed to pour himself along the ground," and of Mulvaney, when he returned from his Incarnation, that he "disappeared to the waist in a wave of joyous dogs," he attains the same sort of magic. In his effort to cast imaginative spells, he makes use of imitative words, frequently invented by himself.

"And out of the grass on a sudden broke

A spirtle of fire, a whorl of smoke."

"Then Tomlinson he gripped the bars and yammered, 'Let me in.'

"There was a row in Silver street - an' I was in it too;

We passed the time o' day, an' then the belts went whirraru."

"There was a profusion of squabby, pluffy cushions.” “The swords whinny-whicker like angry kites."'

"Elephints a-pilin' teak

In the sludgy, squdgy creek."

"Forty-pounder guns:

Jiggery-jolty to and fro.”

"I did not want to plowter about any more in the drizzle and the dark."

"

These words are invariably apt. If there is no such noun as "bobble" nor such verb as “ plopped, one feels there ought to be, and that Mr. Kipling does right to introduce them. Equally descriptive are his words which stand for repeated sounds: "batbat-bat," "tap-tap-tapped," "sip-sip-sipping," "wopwop-wop," and any number of others. But perhaps the most daring of his inventions are the words imitating characteristic sounds made by animals, as "Aurgh" (tiger), "Hrrump" (elephant), "Kssha" and "Ngssh" (snake), “Ya-la-hi! Yalaha!" (wolf), "chitter-chatter" (leaping rat), "chug-drug" (boar sharpening his tusks on a bole). Nor does Kipling's coinage of words stop with the class where sound connotes sense. He improvises on whatever instrument he plays. Is he after humorous effect? He out-Brownings Browning with such monstrosities as scarabeousness, adjutaunter, special-correspondently and whalesome, or such compound adjectives as expensive-pictures-of-the-nude-adorned, Seidlitz-powders-colored, Government-broad-arrowshaped, and hair-trunk-thrown-in-the-trade.

He

forms one part of speech out of another, or gives an existing word a new ending, or restores obsolete forms at his pleasure: badling, thumbling, empties

(noun), grown-ups, high-grassed, hogged, horsehood, know-how (noun), long-ago (adjective), old-maidism, pine-needled, rocketed, smashment, Sahibdom, vagabonded, springily, bad-worded (verb), brassily, gentled (verb), gridironing, piglet, deerlets, rabbity, tailing (part.) brotherliwise. His compound words are innumerable. Fire-fanged, knotty-rooted, overankle, rain-channelled, sweetish-sourish, scissorlegged, twiney-tough- these are samples out of a list numbering several hundred which I have collected from his prose.

23. FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE. Mr. Kipling

shows his selective instinct no less in his choice

of figures than in that of words. He is one of the greatest masters of metaphor since Shakespeare.

It may almost be said that Mr. Kipling writes in nothing except figures. What is the whole body of his recent work but metaphor? A writer of less penetration might have inveighed against the materialism of an age like ours. Mr. Kipling idealizes it, lifts it all into the region of symbol. Every crank and piston is a letter in his alphabet of spiritual power. He is the great allegorist of modern times.

Metaphors, using the word in the rhetorical sense, are employed frequently in Kipling, yet so discriminately, and with such an insistent originality, as always to avoid the merely florid. His