acquaintance with zoology (vide the "Jungle Books"), with geography, including the use of the globes (vide The Flag of England" and "The Children of the Zodiac'), with archæology (vide "The Story of Ung"), and with botany (vide "The Flowers")? It is equally beyond dispute that he served a long apprenticeship on the sea; and it seems likely that he first gratified his passion for that element by taking service in a Greek galley and afterward in that of a Viking. He must then have occupied a post on the following vessels in succession-a Chinese pig-boat, a Bilbao tramp, a New England fishing-smack, a British manof-war, and an Atlantic liner. certainly in the engine-room of the last-named vessel that he learned those details about machinery which he reproduces so faithfully in "M'Andrew's Hymn."

It was

We infer that Mr. Kipling next withdrew for a few years' complete rest to the solitude of the jungle. He there added materially to his knowledge of natural history, and familiarized himself thoroughly with the manners and customs of bird, beast, and reptile. (If he did not, how on earth could he have written the "Jungle Books"?) It is also quite obvious that he has held a large number of appointments in the Indian Civil Service; and that he served for a considerable period in the ranks of the army. No sane man can doubt that he took part in several hot engagements, and fought in at least one Soudan campaign. A good many years must also have been passed by Mr. Kipling in disguise among the natives. By no other means could he have become conversant with their habits of thought and ways of life. is further beyond dispute that he must have slummed in London; that at one time he must have had a studio of his own; and that the inside of a newspaper office must have been during a certain period of his life a place of almost daily

resort.

It

Our chain of reasoning is now almost complete, and we defy any one to snap it. No man can acquire a knowledge of the terminology of soldiering, or sailoring, or tinkering, or tailoring, unless he has been a soldier, or a sailor,

or a tinker, or a tailor. But human life is too short for a man to be all four, and, a fortiori, for a man to follow fifty occupations. Argal, Kipling is but the name of an amanuensis or hack, through whose pen certain eminent soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, etc., have chosen, for some undisclosed reason, to tell their story to the world. Such, without exaggeration, is the reasoning of the dullards who have presumed to tamper with the fame of England's greatest poet.

While Mr. Kipling surveys mankind from China to Peru, he does so not from the dubious point of view of the cosmopolitan, but from the firm vantage-ground of a Briton. It is merely his due to attribute to him the chief share among men of letters in that revival of the Imperial sentiment, both in these islands and in our colonies, which has been so striking a phenomenon of recent years. To have reawakened a great people to a sense of its duties and responsibilities, to have fanned the drooping flame of an enlightened but fervent patriotism-these are achievements of which few indeed can boast. It is, we trust, unnecessary to disclaim all intention of disparaging the good work performed by great men in years when the country seemed plunged in a fatal lethargy, and men appeared to have grown indifferent or insensible to England's mission and destiny. Lord Tennyson, for example, has no stronger claim upon the reverence and affection of all generations of his countrymen than the fact that from time to time he set the trumpet to his lips and blew a strain whose echoes will never cease to encourage and to inspire. But old and neglected truths sometimes require to be presented in a new garb; and abstract principles constantly need to be driven home by concrete illustrations. It has been Mr. Kipling's enviable task to bring down patriotism from the closet to the street, and to diffuse its beneficent influence among millions who had hitherto remained untouched.

As so frequently happens, Mr. Kipling's teaching fell upon willing ears. The English nation is patient and long-suffering enough. It is also ex

traordinarily loyal in its allegiance to its chosen favorites. But the Government which mismanaged the affairs of this country from 1880 to 1885 was kind enough to supply at least two specimens of the application of Liberal principles to foreign politics which can never be forgotten. The shameful peace concluded after our defeat at Majuba Hill—a peace so pregnant with trouble and disaster-was not rendered more palatable to a people which loves honesty and plain-dealing by the sanctimonious cant characteristically employed to justify it. The projected relinquishment of a portion of Egypt might, indeed, have passed at the time without exciting the national resentment. But the cold-hearted abandonment of Gordon aroused a storm of indignation which in reality has been the motive-power of that series of laborious yet brilliant operations whose culmination was successfully attained a few weeks ago. The better-informed classes of Englishmen were at the same time aware that, in the East, Lord Ripon had embarked upon a course of policy, the ultimate result, if not the conscious design, of which must be the overthrow of British power in India. Worse, if worse were possible, remained behind. The most audacious and malignant of blows was presently struck at the integrity of the empire by hands the measure of whose evil-doing not even Majuba Hill and Khartoum had sufficed to fill up. The dismemberment of the United Kingdom was solemnly and seriously offered as the price of political support to a faction "steeped to the lips in treason.” This master-stroke was attended by at least one happy consequence. The nobler elements in the Liberal party were forever severed from the baser, and became practically fused with the Conservatives. No wonder that men's hearts were longing for an outspoken proclamation on the side of loyalty and empire! No wonder that the Jubilee celebrations of 1887 were hailed as an outward and visible sign of the reawakening of the national spirit! Yet they announced merely the inception of a great movement. It is surely no vain imagination to suppose that the Jubilee rejoicings of last year possessed a deeper significance and

were informed with a more exalted spirit than those of ten years before. The soul of the nation seemed to be more profoundly stirred. Ideas and aspirations of a loftier order seemed to have taken root in the nation's heart. And if such indeed were the case, it was to Rudyard Kipling more than to any other writer that the change was due, just as it was he who seized upon the unspoken national thought and enshrined it in imperishable verse. On one Englishman of eminence, and one alone, it is to be feared, did the writings of Mr. Kipling during the last decade fail to produce a perceptible impression. From childhood to old age the more poignant emotions of patriotism and the fine sense of national honor were, unhappily, strangers to the bosom of William Ewart Gladstone.

We make no apology for this apparent digression; for Mr. Kipling's most characteristic work is really saturated with politics-not the politics of Taper or Tadpole, or even of Mr. Rigby, but the politics of true statesmanship. No patriot assuredly can forget the signal service which he rendered to his country, at a moment when the horizon was darker than one now cares to think of, by the publication of "Cleared." It is not only one of the most trenchant pieces of rhetoric in any language (Juvenal himself might be proud to claim it for his own), but it furnishes an absolute and conclusive answer to the contemptible sophistries. by which men who had once had at least a bowing acquaintance with honesty were fain to palliate their connection and co-operation with ruffians and assassins. But the truth is, that no more formidable attack has been de

livered upon Liberalism in the present generation than Mr. Kipling's work, taken as a whole. The shameless lies by which the friends of disaffection and the devotees of so-called philanthropy have never scrupled to fortify their cause, crumble to atoms at the touch of the artist whose highest aspiration it is "to draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are." The precious, time-dishonored formulæ become meaningless when confronted with the very essence of practical experience. Mr. Kipling has taken the

pains (in "The Enlightenments of Padgett, M.P.") to set forth his opinions in direct and almost didactic shape; but a story like "The Head of the District" is more valuable than many such discourses, and illuminates the situation as with a flash. Here are facts, stubborn facts, which it is the very raison d'être of Liberalism to ignore, but the ignoring of which means the end of all government worthy of the name. It is of a piece with his sound and comprehensive view of politics that Mr. Kipling should strike the true note in comparing the relative value and im portance of the man of action and the man of letters. He is guiltless of the affectation of depreciating his own calling. But his judgment coincides with that invariably pronounced by Sir Walter Scott. A Conference of the Powers" is in many ways by much the least felicitous of the numerous productions of his pen. Nowhere else is his touch so uncertain; nowhere else does the author strike one as being so much of a poseur; nowhere else does he come so near to trespassing upon the unconsciously ridiculous. But despite its manifold imperfections, it teaches lessons which we fear that many journalists and many more pretentious writers have yet to learn.

The particular quarter of the globe in which Mr. Kipling reduces Liberal principles ad absurdum is, of course, India; and, though the universe is his by right of conquest, India is, no question, his particular domain. "I'was there his earliest triumphs

were

achieved; and with it the most instructive portion of his work is concerned. Whatever his excellences or defects, it was he and no other who first brought home to the average Englishman something like an adequate conception of what our Indian Empire means. We all knew that there was a subtle and mysterious charm about the East. Those who had read the "Arabian Nights" and "Tancred" had a faint conception of its potency. Those who were fortunate enough to have relatives in the Company's or the Queen's service were, of course, in the enjoyment of a much ampler knowledge. The Mutiny taught us something, though that something was gradually being

forgotten. But it was not until Mr. Kipling's arrival on the scene that "the man on the knife-board" was dumped down, as it were, by the compelling force of an irresistible will among a mass of " raw, brown, naked humanity;" that he realized the existence of a vast body of fellow-subjects to whom his favorite catchwords (such as "liberty" and erty" and "progress") would have been absolutely unintelligible; and that he was enabled to apprehend, however imperfectly, the magnitude of the work which it has been the privilege of England to initiate and carry on in the East Indies through the instrumentality of a handful of her sons. One of the main secrets, we believe, of the extraordinary vividness with which Mr. Kipling represents scenes so wholly different from anything in the experience of the average Englishman is, that he never pauses to make preliminary explanations. His early writings, by a fortunate accident, were addressed to an Anglo-Indian audience upon whom. such explanations would have been thrown away. They knew Jakko and Peliti's, and Tara-Devi, and Benmore and Boileaugunge as well as a man about town knows Piccadilly or an Eastender Epping Forest. Tonga-bars and 'rikshaws, dak-bungalows and saises, pipals and walers, had no mysteries for them. A glossary would have been more of an impertinence and a superfluity for them than a glossary of the dialect of the Sporting Times would be to the ordinary middle-aged and middle class householder. Hence Mr. Kipling grew accustomed to waste no time in commentary, and the sudden plunge into a strange atmosphere and into unfamiliar "shop" and slang which he compels the English reader to take is eminently bracing and delightful, though it takes away the breath to start with. In his hands we may truly say that new things become familiar and familiar things new. Which (to borrow a form of sentence much affected by himself) is half the battle.

A vivid impression, it is true, is not necessarily a correct one, and it is quite natural that there should be more than one opinion as to the truth of Mr. Kipling's sketches of Anglo-Indian so

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ciety. Here his detractors (if he any have) will find the most promising material for animadversion. None of his stories, indeed, are wholly outside the region of possibility; while many of them doubtless had a more or less solid "foundation in fact." Some of the "Plain Tales" read like nothing so much as a reproduction of the current gossip of a day now dead and gone, with a proper alteration of names, dates, and immaterial surroundings. Human nature, after all, is not vastly different at Simla from human nature elsewhere. Why should jobbery and favoritism, which find a home in every clime, pass India by? In what country have men not been occasionally preferred to high office through the influence of pretty women? Doubtless merit swelters in the plains from time to time, while stupidity and incompetence are promoted to the honors and emoluments which they never earned. 'Tis a mere question of the thermometer. In more temperate zones, virtus laudatur et-alget." Thus most of Mr. Kipling's anecdotes are probably, in one sense, well-authenticated. Chapter and verse could be cited for every one of them; and regarded as a collection of isolated and independent details they may be said to be literally true to life. But when these details come to be considered as parts of a greater whole, when the picture invites criticism as a complete work of art, the matter assumes an entirely different complexion. The Government of India is emphatically not conducted at headquarters in obedience to the dictates of intriguing hussies and their unscrupulous hangers-on. No more is the Government of Great Britain. Yet a satirist with the necessary adroitness could present the world with a description of the social and political life of London which would be absolutely horrifying and absolutely misleading, yet of which each individual stroke should have been painfully copied from the living model. He would be able to quote facts in proof of the existence among us of failings and of vices notoriously inconsistent with social or political wellbeing. But if he inferred, for example, universal corruption from the records of the divorce-court, he

would be as wide of the mark as if, from a perusal of their light literature, he drew the conclusion that the French attach no sanctity to family life. The analogy we have suggested should put us on our guard against accepting as typical and representative personages or episodes with no claim to being anything of the kind. To hit off the exact proportion in which the component elements in the character of any community are blended is never an easy task, and its difficulty is not diminished for the story-teller by the fact that the baser ingredients lend themselves to his legitimate purposes in proportion as they are pungent and highflavored.

There are, to be quite frank, a few of Mr. Kipling's literary offspring which we would throw to the wolves without the least compunction. Mrs. Hauksbee "won't do ;" and no more will the "boys" who make love to her. What in the rest of Mr. Kipling's work is knowledge degenerates too often into knowingness, a very different quality, when he begins to depict Indian Society. We become conscious of a certain aggressiveness in his touch-of the absence of the tone of true fashion -of more than a hint of that uneasy familiarity which may be frequently observed in the very young or the hopelessly shy. The ladies are not exactly patterns of good breeding, while the men who associate with them have a cheap swagger which Ouida's guardsmen would despise. So at least some devil's advocate might argue with no little plausibility. There is unques tionably much better stuff in such slight sketches as "Bubbling Well Road" or " The Finances of the Gods" than in a thousand elaborate pieces of the type of Mrs. Hauksbee Sits Out," which leave behind the disagreeable suspicion that the author deliberately tried to scandalize. Sailing near the wind is a dangerous and undignified pastime for a writer of Mr. Kipling's calibre.

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Nothing, indeed, is more extraor dinary in this portion of Mr. Kipling's work than the intermingling of good and bad, worthy and base, essential and trifling. Cheek by jowl with smart snip-snap you find something that