about Dinah Shadd as about Terence Mulvaney. Lever never instructed us on these matters: Micky Free, if he loves, rides away; but Terence Mulvaney is true to his old woman. Gallant, loyal, reckless, vain, swaggering, and tender-hearted, Terence Mulvaney, if there were enough of him, "would take St. Petersburg in his drawers." Can we be too grateful to an author who has extended, as Mr. Kipling in his military sketches has extended, the frontiers of our knowledge and sympathy?
It is a mere question of individual taste; but, for my own part, had I to make a small selection from Mr. Kipling's tales, I would include more of his studies in Black than in White, and many of his excursions beyond the probable and natural. It is difficult to have one special favourite in this kind; but perhaps the story of the two English adventurers among the freemasons of unknown Kafiristan (in the "Phantom Rickshaw") would take a very high place. The gas-heated air of the Indian newspaper office is so real, and into it comes a wanderer who has seen new faces of death, and who carries with him a head that has worn a royal crown. The contrasts are of brutal force; the legend is among the best of such strange fancies.
Then there is, in the same volume, "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes," the most dreadful nightmare of the most awful Bunker in the realms of fancy. This is a very early work; if nothing else of Mr.
Kipling's existed, his memory might live by it, as does the memory of the American Irishman by the "Diamond Lens." The sham magic of "In the House of Suddhu" is as terrible as true necromancy could be, and I have a faiblesse for the "Bisara of Pooree." "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows" is a realistic version of "The English Opium Eater," and more powerful by dint of less rhetoric. As for the sketches of native life--for example, "On the City Wall"--to English readers they are no less than revelations. They testify, more even than the military stories, to the author's swift and certain vision, his certainty in his effects. In brief, Mr. Kipling has conquered worlds, of which, as it were, we knew not the existence.
His faults are so conspicuous, so much on the surface, that they hardly need to be named. They are curiously visible to some readers who are blind to his merits. There is a false air of hardness (quite in contradiction to the sentiment in his tales of childish life); there is a knowing air; there are mannerisms, such as "But that is another story"; there is a display of slang; there is the too obtrusive knocking of the nail on the head. Everybody can mark these errors; a few cannot overcome their antipathy, and so lose a great deal of pleasure.
It is impossible to guess how Mr. Kipling will fare if he ventures on one of the usual novels, of the orthodox length. Few men have succeeded both in the conte and the novel. Mr. Bret Harte is limited to the conte; M. Guy de Maupassant is probably at his best in it. Scott wrote but three or four short tales, and only one of these is a masterpiece. Poe never attempted a novel. Hawthorne is almost alone in his command of both kinds. We can live only in the hope that Mr. Kipling, so skilled in so many species of the conte, so vigorous in so many kinds of verse, will also be triumphant in the novel: though it seems unlikely that its scene can be in England, and though it is certain that a writer who so cuts to the quick will not be happy with the novel's almost inevitable "padding." Mr. Kipling's longest effort, "The Light which Failed,"can, perhaps, hardly be considered a test or touchstone of his powers as a novelist. The central interest is not powerful enough;the characters are not so sympathetic, as are the interest and the characters of his short pieces. Many of these persons we have met so often that they are not mere passing acquaintances, but already find in us the loyalty due to old friends.
Footnotes:
{1} The subject has been much more gravely treated in Mr. Robert Bridges's "Achilles in Scyros."{2} Conjecture may cease, as Mr. Morris has translated the Odyssey.
{3} For Helen Pendennis, see the "Letters," p. 97.
{4} Mr. Henley has lately, as a loyal Dickensite, been defending the plots of Dickens, and his tragedy. Pro captu lectoris; if the reader likes them, then they are good for the reader: "good absolute, not for me though," perhaps. The plot of "Martin Chuzzlewit" may be good, but the conduct of old Martin would strike me as improbable if I met it in the "Arabian Nights." That the creator of Pecksniff should have taken his misdeeds seriously, as if Mr. Pecksniff had been a Tartuffe, not a delight, seems curious.
