Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, before we have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful man of letters. Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out of the jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men are working and building and fighting, come really out of the study of an expert craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care. This may seem an unnecessary warning. The intelligent reader will protest that, since Mr Kipling writes books, it does not seem very necessary to deduce that he is a man of letters. It is true that no such warning would be necessary in the case of most writers of books. It would be pure loss of time, for example, to begin a study of the work of Mr Henry James by asserting that Mr Henry James was a man of letters. But Mr Kipling is in rather a different case. The majority of readers with whom one discusses Mr Kipling's works are sometimes far astray, simply because they have not realised that Mr Kipling is as utterly a man of letters as Mr Henry James, that he lives as completely the life of fancy and meditation as William Blake or Francis Thompson. Mr Kipling does not write tales out of the mere fullness of his life in many continents and his talk with all kinds of men. He is not to be understood as a man singular only in his experience, unloading anecdotes from a crowded life, excelling in emphasis and reality by virtue of things actually seen and done. On the contrary, Mr Kipling writes tales because he is a writer.
Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and been more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his literary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any the less devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that he is one of the craftiest authors who ever lived. He is more crafty than Stevenson. He often lives by the word alone—the word picked and polished. That he has successfully disguised this fact from many of his admirers is only a further proof of his literary cunning. Mr Kipling often uses words with great skill to create in his readers the impression that words matter to him hardly at all. He will work as hard as the careful sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawness and crudity; and thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is a literary man. They are content simply to listen to a man who has seen, and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to observe that, if the world with its day's work belongs to Mr Kipling, it belongs to him only by author's right—that is, by right of imagination and right of style.
It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of The Light That Failed, he tries to talk as though there were really no such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is pedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of literary discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula. It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than Tennyson or Walter Scott. Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's art is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he helped to send out of fashion.
A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement of his works here to be followed.
Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E. His intimacy with India was determined at birth. He was educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in 1882, as assistant editor on The Civil and Military Gazette and The Pioneer. He remained on the staff of The Pioneer for seven years, and travelled over the five continents. By this time he had learned to think of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see something of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come back to her from the ends of the earth. The whole of Mr Kipling's literary biography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a great traveller who is now inveterately at home.
Perhaps we should also note that Mr Kipling was a literary prodigy. Plain Tales from the Hills appeared in 1887. Mr Kipling at twenty-two had shown his quality and had already mapped out in little his career. In Plain Tales from the Hills there are hints for almost everything that their author afterwards accomplished. As the book of a young journalist whose name had not yet been whispered among the publishers and critics of London it was a miracle. If Mr Kipling had been able to improve on Plain Tales from the Hills as much as Shakespeare improved on Love's Labour's Lost, as much as Shelley improved on Queen Mab, Robert Browning on Pauline, Byron on Hours of Idleness, he would to-day be without a peer. Mr Granville Barker is often cited as a classical modern example of precocity, but he was twenty-four when he wrote The Marrying of Anne Leete. Mr Henry James was twenty-eight before he had published a characteristic word. Mr Thomas Hardy at twenty-five had only printed a short story, and he was more than thirty when his first novel appeared. Mr Kipling came upon the public in 1886 without a preliminary stutter. Mr Kipling at twenty-two could write as craftily as Mr Kipling can write after nearly thirty years' experience. We shall not be greatly concerned in these pages to trace the progress of Mr Kipling's craft and wisdom. He was always crafty and always wise. He had done some of his best work at thirty. He recalls Hazlitt's curious saying that an improving author is never a great author. Mr Kipling is not an improving author. There has been a little moving up and down the scale of excellence; many things hinted in the early volumes from Plain Tales from the Hills to Many Inventions are developed more elaborately and surely in later volumes; the old craft has come to be used with an ease that has in it more of the insolence of a master than was possible in the author of 1887. But so far as literary finish is concerned, Plain Tales from the Hills leaves little to be acquired. Already Mr Kipling wields his implement as deftly and firmly as many a skilled writer who was learning his lesson before Mr Kipling was born. Few authors have so surely scored their best in their earliest years. Authors are considered young to-day at thirty. Mr Kipling at that age had already written The Jungle Book.
This does not, of course, imply that all Mr Kipling's stories are of equal merit. On the contrary, we shall henceforth be mainly concerned with looking for the inspired author under a mass of skilful journalism. It is not a simple enterprise. Mr Kipling is so competent an author that he is usually able to persuade his readers that his heart is equally in all he writes. Moreover, Mr Kipling has fallen among many prejudices, literary and political, which have caused his least important work to be most discussed. For these reasons the actual, as distinguished from the legendary, Mr Kipling is not easily discovered. Mainly it is a work of excavation.
Mr Kipling has been writing short stories for nearly thirty years. His tales are too numerous for disparate discussion. It will be necessary to take them in groups. One or two stories in each group will be taken as typical of the rest. Thereby we shall avoid repetition and be able to show some sort of plan to the maze of Mr Kipling's diversity of subjects and manners.