KINTORE, a royal and police burgh of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Pop. (1901), 789. It is situated on the Don, 13¼ m. N.W. of Aberdeen by the Great North of Scotland railway. It is a place of some antiquity, having been made a royal burgh in the reign of William the Lion (d. 1214). Kintore forms one of the Elgin group of parliamentary burghs, the others being Banff, Cullen, Elgin, Inverurie and Peterhead. One mile to the south-west are the ruins of Hallforest Castle, of which two storeys still exist, once a hunting-seat of Robert Bruce and afterwards a residence of the Keiths, earls marischal. There are several examples of sculptured stones and circles in the parish, and 2 m. to the north-west is the site of Bruce’s camp, which is also ascribed to the period of the Romans. Near it is Thainston House, the residence of Sir Andrew Mitchell (1708-1771), the British envoy to Frederick the Great. Kintore gives the title of earl in the Scottish, and of baron in the British peerage to the head of the Keith-Falconer family.
KIOTO (Kyoto), the former capital of Japan, in the province of Yamashiro, in 35° 01′ N., 135° 46′ E. Pop. (1903), 379,404. The Kamo-gawa, upon which it stands, is a mere rivulet in ordinary times, trickling through a wide bed of pebbles; but the city is traversed by several aqueducts, and was connected with Lake Biwa in 1890 by a canal 67⁄8 m. long, which carries an abundance of water for manufacturing purposes, brings the great lake and the city into navigable communication, and forms with the Kamo-gawa canal and the Kamo-gawa itself a through route to Osaka, from which Kioto is 25 m. distant by rail. Founded in the year 793, Kioto remained the capital of the empire during nearly eleven centuries. The emperor Kwammu, when he selected this remarkably picturesque spot for the residence of his court, caused the city to be laid out with mathematical accuracy, after the model of the Tang dynasty’s capital in China. Its area, 3 m. by 3½, was intersected by 18 principal thoroughfares, 9 running due north and south, and 9 due east and west, the two systems being connected at intervals by minor streets. At the middle of the northern face stood the palace, its enclosure covering three-quarters of a square mile, and from it to the centre of the south face ran an avenue 283 ft. wide and 3½ m. long. Conflagrations and subsequent reconstructions modified the regularity of this plan, but much of it still remains, and its story is perpetuated in the nomenclature of the streets. In its days of greatest prosperity Kioto contained only half a million inhabitants, thus never even approximating to the size of the Tokugawa metropolis, Yedo, or the Hojo capital Kamakura. The emperor Kwammu called it Heian-jo, or the “city of peace,” when he made it the seat of government; but the people knew it as Miyako, or Kyoto, terms both of which signify “capital,” and in modern times it is often spoken of as Saikyo, or western capital, in opposition to Tokyo, or eastern capital. Having been so long the imperial, intellectual, political and artistic metropolis of the realm, the city abounds with evidences of its unique career. Magnificent temples and shrines, grand monuments of architectural and artistic skill, beautiful gardens, gorgeous festivals, and numerous ateliers where the traditions of Japanese art are obeyed with attractive results, offer to the foreign visitor a fund of interest. Clear water ripples everywhere through the city, and to this water Kioto owes something of its importance, for nowhere else in Japan can fabrics be bleached so white or dyed in such brilliant colours. The people, like their neighbours of Osaka, are full of manufacturing energy. Not only do they preserve, amid all the progress of the age, their old-time eminence as producers of the finest porcelain, faience, embroidery, brocades, bronze, cloisonné enamel, fans, toys and metal-work of all kinds, but they have also adapted themselves to the foreign market, and weave and dye quantities of silk fabrics, for which a large and constantly growing demand is found in Europe and America. Nowhere else can be traced with equal clearness the part played in Japanese civilization by Buddhism, with its magnificent paraphernalia and imposing ceremonial spectacles; nowhere else, side by side with this luxurious factor, can be witnessed in more striking juxtaposition the austere purity and severe simplicity of the Shinto cult; and nowhere else can be more intelligently observed the fine faculty of the Japanese for utilizing, emphasizing and enhancing the beauties of nature. The citizens’ dwellings and the shops, on the other hand, are insignificant and even sombre in appearance, their exterior conveying no idea of the pretty chambers within or of the tastefully laid-out grounds upon which they open behind. Kioto is celebrated equally for its cherry and azalea blossoms in the spring, and for the colours of its autumn foliage.
KIOWAS, a tribe and stock of North American Indians. Their former range was around the Arkansas and Canadian rivers, in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Colorado and New Mexico. A fierce people, they made raids upon the settlers in western Texas until 1868, when they were placed on a reservation in Indian Territory. In 1874 they broke out again, but in the following year were finally subdued. In number about 1200, and settled in Oklahoma, they are the sole representatives of the Kiowan linguistic stock.
See J. Mooney, “Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians,” 17th Report of Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, 1898).
KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865- ), British author, was born in Bombay on the 30th of December 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), an artist of considerable ability, was from 1875 to 1893 curator of the Lahore museum in India. His mother was Miss Alice Macdonald of Birmingham, two of whose sisters were married respectively to Sir E. Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter. He was educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, North Devon, of which a somewhat lurid account is given in his story Stalky and Co. On his return to India he became at the age of seventeen the sub-editor of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. In 1886, in his twenty-first year, he published Departmental Ditties, a volume of light verse chiefly satirical, only in two or three poems giving promise of his authentic poetical note. In 1887 he published Plain Tales from the Hills, a collection mainly of the stories contributed to his own journal. During the next two years he brought out, in six slim paper-covered volumes of Wheeler’s Railway Library (Allahabad), Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Wee Willie Winkee, at a rupee apiece. These were in form and substance a continuation of the Plain Tales. This series of tales, all written before the author was twenty-four, revealed a new master of fiction. A few, but those the best, he afterwards said that his father gave him. The rest were the harvest of his own powers of observation vitalized by imagination. In method they owed something to Bret Harte; in matter and spirit they were absolutely original. They were unequal, as his books continued to be throughout; the sketches of Anglo-Indian social life being generally inferior to the rest. The style was to some extent disfigured by jerkiness and mannered tricks. But Mr Kipling possessed the supreme spell of the story-teller to entrance and transport. The freshness of the invention, the variety of character, the vigour of narrative, the raciness of dialogue, the magic of atmosphere, were alike remarkable. The soldier-stories, especially the exuberant vitality of the cycle which contains the immortal Mulvaney, established the author’s fame throughout the world. The child-stories and tales of the British official were not less masterly, while the tales of native life and of adventure “beyond the pale” disclosed an even finer and deeper vein of romance. India, which had been an old story for generations of Englishmen, was revealed in these brilliant pictures as if seen for the first time in its variety, colour and passion, vivid as mirage, enchanting as the Arabian Nights. The new author’s talent was quickly recognized in India, but it was not till the books reached England that his true rank was appreciated and proclaimed. Between 1887 and 1889 he travelled through India, China, Japan and America, finally arriving in England to find himself already famous. His travel sketches, contributed to The Civil and Military Gazette and The Pioneer, were afterwards collected (the author’s hand having been forced by unauthorized publication) in the two volumes From Sea to Sea (1899). A further set of Indian tales, equal to the best, appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine and were republished with others in Life’s Handicap (1891). In The Light that Failed (1891, after appearing with a different ending in Lippincott’s Magazine) Mr Kipling essayed his first long story (dramatized 1905), but with comparative unsuccess. In his subsequent work his delight in the display of descriptive and verbal technicalities grew on him. His polemic against “the sheltered life” and “little Englandism” became more didactic. His terseness sometimes degenerated into abruptness and obscurity. But in the meanwhile his genius became prominent in verse. Readers of the Plain Tales had been impressed by the snatches of poetry prefixed to them for motto, certain of them being subscribed “Barrack Room Ballad.” Mr Kipling now contributed to the National Observer, then edited by W. E. Henley, a series of Barrack Room Ballads. These vigorous verses in soldier slang, when published in a book in 1892, together with the fine ballad of “East and West” and other poems, won for their author a second fame, wider than he had attained as a story-teller. In this volume the Ballads of the “Bolivar” and of the “Clampherdown,” introducing Mr Kipling’s poetry of the ocean and the engine-room, and “The Flag of England,” finding a voice for the Imperial sentiment, which—largely under the influence of Mr Kipling’s own writings—had been rapidly gaining force in England, gave the key-note of much of his later verse. In 1898 Mr Kipling paid the first of several visits to South Africa and became imbued with a type of imperialism that reacted on his literature, not altogether to its advantage. Before finally settling in England Mr Kipling lived some years in America and married in 1892 Miss Caroline Starr Balestier, sister of the Wolcott Balestier to whom he dedicated Barrack Room Ballads, and with whom in collaboration he wrote the Naulahka (1891), one of his less successful books. The next collection of stories, Many Inventions (1893), contained the splendid Mulvaney extravaganza, “My Lord the Elephant”; a vividly realized tale of metempsychosis, “The Finest Story in the World”; and in that fascinating tale “In the Rukh,” the prelude to the next new exhibition of the author’s genius. This came in 1894 with The Jungle Book, followed in 1895 by The Second Jungle Book. With these inspired beast-stories Kipling conquered a new world and a new audience, and produced what many critics regard as his most flawless work. His chief subsequent publications were The Seven Seas (poems), 1896; Captains Courageous (a yarn of deep-sea fishery), 1897; The Day’s Work (collected stories), 1898; A Fleet in Being (an account of a cruise in a man-of-war), 1898; Stalky and Co. (mentioned above), 1899; From Sea to Sea (mentioned above), 1899; Kim, 1901; Just So Stories (for children), 1902; The Five Nations (poems, concluding with what proved Mr Kipling’s most universally known and popular poem, “Recessional,” originally published in The Times on the 17th of July 1897 on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s second jubilee), 1903; Traffics and Discoveries (collected stories), 1904; Puck of Pook’s Hill (stories), 1906; Actions and Reactions (stories), 1909. Of these Kim was notable as far the most successful of Mr Kipling’s longer narratives, though it is itself rather in the nature of a string of episodes. But everything he wrote, even to a farcical extravaganza inspired by his enthusiasm for the motor-car, breathed the meteoric energy that was the nature of the man. A vigorous and unconventional poet, a pioneer in the modern phase of literary Imperialism, and one of the rare masters in English prose of the art of the short story, Mr Kipling had already by the opening of the 20th century won the most conspicuous place among the creative literary forces of his day. His position in English literature was recognized in 1907 by the award to him of the Nobel prize.
See Rudyard Kipling’s chapter in My First Book (Chatto, 1894); “A Bibliography of Rudyard Kipling,” by John Lane, in Rudyard Kipling: a Criticism, by Richard de Gallienne; “Mr Kipling’s Short Stories” in Questions at Issue, by Edmund Gosse (1893); “Mr Kipling’s Stories” in Essays in Little, by Andrew Lang; “Mr Kipling’s Stories,” by J. M. Barrie in the Contemporary Review (March 1891); articles in the Quarterly Review (July 1892) and Edinburgh Review (Jan. 1898); and section on Kipling in Poets of the Younger Generation, by William Archer (1902). See also for bibliography to 1903 English Illustrated Magazine, new series, vol. xxx. pp. 298 and 429-432.
(W. P. J.)