Rudyard Kipling is without doubt the greatest of living short-story writers, though in interest his later fiction does not equal his productions of the early nineties. His journalistic work drilled him in compression; his precocious intuitions and personal experience of life in India opened up a fresh and fascinating field; his genius taught him how to tell his stories with unfailing variety, a robust humor, and an understanding of the human heart quite uncanny in one so young. In style, he is a master of the unexpected; in narration, he is by turns deliberate and swift; in atmospheric painting, he transports us to real places, wherein real folk do real things.
Tell them first of those things that thou hast seen and they have seen together. Thus their knowledge will piece out thy imperfections. Tell them of what thou alone hast seen, then what thou hast heard, and since they be children tell them of battles and kings, horses, devils, elephants, and angels, but omit not to tell them of love and such like. All the earth is full of tales to him who listens and does not drive away the poor from his door. The poor are the best of tale-tellers; for they must lay their ear to the ground every night.—Rudyard Kipling, Preface to Life’s Handicap.
The tremulous passion of Ameera, her hopes, her fears, and her agonies of disappointment, combine to form by far the most tender page which Mr. Kipling has written.—Edmund Gosse, Questions at Issue.
... The truly appreciative reader should surely have no quarrel with the primitive element in Mr. Kipling’s subject-matter, or with what, for want of a better name, I may call his love of low life. What is that but essentially a part of his freshness? And for what part of his freshness are we exactly more thankful than for just this smart jostle that he gives the old stupid superstition that the amiability of a story-teller is the amiability of the people he represents—that their vulgarity, or depravity, or gentility, or fatuity are tantamount to the same qualities in the painter himself?—Henry James, Introduction to Works.
It was not until “Without Benefit of Clergy” that he came to his full strength in pathetic prose. The history of Ameera is one of the triumphs of the short story. Its characterization is vivid; its progress direct and poignant. I do not wish even for an instant to seem to cheapen one of the most touching and beautiful stories in the world when I call it journalism. But the voice of the desolate mother breaking into the nursery rime of the wicked crow,
“And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a pound,
Only a penny a pound, baba—only—,”
and every pathetic moment, is chosen by an inspired sense for what would most feelingly grasp the interest of the reader. This is high art, with intense feeling behind it—otherwise it would not be so excellent. But it is also good journalism.—Henry Seidel Canby, The Short-Story in English.
For Mr. Kipling to write a story without some firm human touch, however slight, would be impossible.... In his effects Mr. Kipling is usually photographic (“cinematographic” is better), but his methods are almost invariably, for want of a better word, “artistic.” I mean that whereas the principle of selection, which is a vital principle of art, can operate but little in photography, it is seen to be remarkably active in all Mr. Kipling’s best work. His stories, so to speak, represent the epigram of action, the epigram of a given situation.... It is from the lives of such Englishmen ... that Mr. Kipling has gathered so many of his vivid anecdotes. A great number of them ... are the lesser lights and darks contributing to such more serious elements of the general picture as “At the End of the Passage,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” “In Flood Time,” “The Man Who Was,” behind which looms vast in the background the image of that old Sphinx of the Plains complete in mystery as no other writer has ever been able to suggest her.... Also he had written at least one love-story (“Without Benefit of Clergy”) that broke one’s heart.... For all the humour and buoyancy of his writings, Mr. Kipling is at heart a pessimist, and, perhaps, his sincerest expression of opinion in regard to the government of the universe is contained in the fierce Omarian exclamation of Holden in “Without Benefit of Clergy,” addressed to no one in particular, but evidently meant to reach far up into the skies: “O you brute! You utter brute!” So Omar bade Allah “man’s forgiveness give and take.”—Richard Le Gallienne, Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON KIPLING