tropes are notable equally for a quaint unconventionality and for aptness. "The So remarkable is Mr. Kipling's use of metaphor that it deserves extensive illustration. A single figure of speech, however, may be taken as typical. Note the directness of the following similes: After a river flood, which swept all barriers before it," the piers of the Barhwi Bridge showed like broken teeth in the jaw of an old man.”1 "The grass-stems held the heat exactly as boiler-tubes do." 2 lightning spattered the sky as a thrown egg spatters a barn-door." "Little by little, very softly and pleasantly, she began taking the conceit out of Pluffles, as they take the ribs out of an umbrella before recovering it." "The Colonel's face set like the Day of Judgment framed in gray bristles.” 5 "Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman. From the beginning he told the tale, the I-II's flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller." 6 Kipling frequently introduces a sort of Homeric simile which suggests the influence of the Iliad and Odyssey so strikingly that it is difficult to believe he 1" In Flood Time." 2" Bubbling Well Road." Here is an lacks intimate acquaintance with them. example from The Naulahka: "His eyes were red with opium, and he walked as a bear walks when he is overtaken by the dawn in a poppy-field, where he has gorged his fill through the night watches." The Light that Failed yields good examples: "As swiftly as a reach of still water is crisped by the wind, the rock-strewn ridges and scrub-topped hills were troubled and alive with armed men." Again: "The mind was quickened, and the revolving thoughts ground against each other as mill-stones grind when there is no corn between." Once more: "A refrain, slow as the clacking of a capstan when the boat comes unwillingly up to the bars where the men sweat and tramp in the shingle."1 24. PROSE STYLE IN GENERAL. - Mr. Kipling's style, in a very remarkable degree, reflects his personality. His words do not conceal, they reveal him. What Whitman wrote regarding Leaves of Grass applies to the works of Kipling: The impression of really holding conversation with the author is due in part to his honesty and earnestness. It is attributable quite as much to the style itself. The construction is that of speech. Kipling never "reads like a book." He employs 1 See Athenæum, April 13, 1891. the tongue in which we buy and sell, and make love, and confess our sins. His sentences are brief and idiomatic; the order of the words is seldom inverted; there are few parenthetical clauses; the words themselves are usually short and prevailingly Saxon. An involved style is generally an obscure style. Kipling's clearness is due partly to his natural and effective arrangement of words; partly also to his unerring choice of the word that fits. His style has movement as well as clearness. It sweeps one on with great swiftness to the story's climax. There is no halting by the wayside to pluck an epigram. Mr. Kipling sees his work too much as a whole, he is too jealous for the integrity of his central impression, to distract the reader with aphorisms. Perhaps, too, he considers the epigrammatic style to savor of pedantry, as witness the following quotation from one of the Plain Tales: "No wise man has a policy,' said the Viceroy. A policy is the blackmail levied on the Fool by the Unforeseen. I am not the former, and I do not believe in the latter.' I do not quite see what this means, unless it refers to an insurance policy. Perhaps it was the Viceroy's way of saying, 'Lie low.'" 1 Regarding the force of Kipling's style, I have already spoken. Force, next to sincerity, is its prevailing note. Concentration, crispness, realism, coherence, suggestiveness, all these, too, are part of our 1 "A Germ Destroyer." |