to admire--in particular, surely, _Placet_, and the delightful poem
called _Le Guignon_. Perhaps these were too lucid for the worshippers.
In return, we have certain allegories which are terribly abstruse,
and some subfusc sonnets. I have read the following, called _Le
Tombeau d'Edgard Poe_, over and over and over. I am very stupid, but
I cannot tell what it _says_. In a certain vague and vitreous way I
think I perceive what it _means_; and we are aided now by its being
punctuated, which was not the case in the original form in which I met
with it. But, "O my Brothers, ye the Workers," is it not still a little
difficult?

     _Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,_
       _Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu_
       _Son siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connu_
     _Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!_
     _Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'ange_
       _Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu_
       _Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu_
     _Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange._
     _Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!_
     _Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief_
       _Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orne_
     _Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscur_
       _Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne_
     _Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur._

Of the prose of M. Mallarmé, I can here speak but briefly. He has
not published very much of it; and it is all polished and cadenced
like his verse, with strange transposed adjectives and exotic nouns
fantastically employed. It is even more distinctly to be seen in his
prose than in his verse that he descends directly from Baudelaire, and
in the former that streak of Lamartine that marks his poems is lacking.

The book called _Pages_ can naturally be compared with the _Poèmes
en Prose_ of Baudelaire. Several of the sketches so named are
now reprinted in _Vers et Prose_, and they strike me as the most
distinguished and satisfactory of the published writings of M.
Mallarmé. They are difficult, but far more intelligible than the
enigmas which he calls his sonnets. _La Pipe_, in which the sight
of an old meerschaum brings up dreams of London and the solitary
lodgings there; _Le Nénuphar Blanc_, recording the vision of a lovely
lady, visible for one tantalising moment to a rower in his boat;
_Frisson d'Hiver_, the wholly fantastic and nebulous reverie of
archaic elegances evoked by the ticking of a clock of Dresden china;
each of these, and several more of these exquisite _Pages_, give
just that impression of mystery and allusion which the author deems
that style should give. They are exquisite--so far as they go--pure,
distinguished, ingenious; and the fantastic oddity of their vocabulary
seems in perfect accord with their general character.

Here is a fragment of _La Pénultième_, on which the reader may try his
skill in comprehending the New French:

"Mais où s'installe l'irrécusable intervention du surnaturel, et le
commencement de l'angoisse sous laquelle agonise mon esprit naguère
seigneur, c'est quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des
antiquaires instinctivement suivie, que j'étais devant la boutique d'un
luthier vendeur de vieux instruments pendus au mur, et, à terre, des
palmes jaunes et les ailes enfouies en l'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je
m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnée à porter probablement le deuil de
l'inexplicable Pénultième."

As a translator, all the world must commend M. Mallarmé. He has put
the poems of Poe into French in a way which is subtle almost without
parallel. Each version is in simple prose, but so full, so reserved,
so suavely mellifluous, that the metre and the rhymes continue to sing
in an English ear. None could enter more tenderly than he into the
strange charm of _Ulalume_, of _The Sleeper_, or of _The Raven_. It is
rarely indeed that a word suggests that the melody of one, who was a
symbolist and a weaver of enigmas like himself, has momentarily evaded
the translator.

M. Mallarmé, who understands English so perfectly, has perhaps seen the
poems of Sydney Dobell. He knows, it is possible, that thirty or forty
years ago there was an English poet who cultivated the symbol, who
deliquesced the language, as he himself does in French. Sydney Dobell
wrote lovely, unintelligible things, that broke, every now and then,
into rhapsodies of veritable beauty. But his whole system was violent.
He became an eccentric cometary nebula, whirling away from our poetic
system at a tangent. He whirled away, for all his sincere passion, into
oblivion. This is what one fears for the Symbolists: that being read
with so great an effort by their own generation, they may, by the next,
not be read at all, and what is pure and genuine in their artistic
impulses be lost. Something of M. Mallarmé will, however, always be
turned back to with respect and perhaps with enthusiasm, for he is a
true man of letters.

_1893._

TWO PASTELS

Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet

A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished
writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only
"swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was
listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century,
who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute
a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is
not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone
was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic
verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We
might, indeed, open our little volume with _The Lawyers Farewell to
his Muse_. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique
poem, _Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way_; and Oldys,
the antiquary, would spare us his _Busy, curious, thirsty Fly_. We
should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in the _Anatomy of
Melancholy_, and to Bacon for _The World's Bubble_. If I had any finger
in that anthology, Smollett's _Ode to Leven Water_ should by no means
be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's
_Gaffer Gray_, or Sydney Smith's _Receipt for a Salad_, which latter
Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be
printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's
sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.

As we come down to recent times the task of editing our anthology would
grow difficult. In our day, the prose writers have either been coy
or copious with their verses. If Professor Tyndall has never essayed
the Lydian measure it is very surprising, but we have not yet been
admitted to hear his shell; nor has Mr. Walter Besant, to the best of
my belief, published an ode to anything. Let the shades of Berkeley and
Smollett administer reproof. Until quite lately, however, we should
have been contented to close our selection with "The bed was made, the
room was fit," from _Travels with a Donkey_. But Mr. Stevenson is now
ineligible--he has published books of poems.

That this departure is not quite a new one might be surmised by any one
who has followed closely the publications of the essayist and novelist
whom a better man than I am has called "the most exquisite and original
of our day." Though Mr. Stevenson's prose volumes are more than twelve
in number, and though he had been thought of essentially as a prose
writer, the ivory shoulder of the lyre has peeped out now and then. I
do not refer to his early collections of verse, to _Not I, and other
Poems_, to _Moral Emblems_, and to _The Graver and the Pen_. (I mention
these scarce publications of the Davos press in the hope of rousing
wicked passions in the breasts of other collectors, since my own set
of them is complete.) These volumes were decidedly occult. A man might
build upon them a reputation as a sage, but hardly as a poet. Their
stern morality came well from one whose mother's milk has been the
_Shorter Catechism;_ they are books which no one can read and not be
the better for; but as mere verse, they leave something to be desired.
_Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda_, if you happen to be lucky enough
to possess them, _e passa_. Where the careful reader has perceived
that Mr. Stevenson was likely to become openly a poet has been in
snatches of verse published here and there in periodicals, and of a
quality too good to be neglected. Nevertheless, the publication of _A
Child's Garden of Verses_ (Longmans, 1885) was something of a surprise,
and perhaps the new book of grown-up poems, _Underwoods_ (Chatto and
Windus, 1887) is more surprising still. There is no doubt about it any
longer. Mr. Stevenson is a candidate for the bays.

The _Child's Garden of Verses_ has now been published long enough to
enable us to make a calm consideration of its merits. When it was
fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about a new strong thing,
between those who, in Mr. Longfellow's phrase about the little girl,
think it very, very good, and those who think it is horrid. After
reading the new book, the _Underwoods_, we come back to _A Child's
Garden_ with a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a wider
experience of his poetical outlook upon life. The later book helps us
to comprehend the former; there is the same sincerity, the same buoyant
simplicity, the same curiously candid and confidential attitude
of mind. If any one doubted that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own
childish memories into verse in the first book, all doubt must cease in
reading the second book, where the experiences, although those of an
adult, have exactly the same convincing air of candour. The first thing
which struck the reader of _A Child's Garden_ was the extraordinary
clearness and precision with which the immature fancies of eager
childhood were reproduced in it. People whose own childish memories had
become very vague, and whose recollections of their games and dreams
were hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this poet's visions
were inspired by real memory and how far by invention. The new book
sets that question at rest; the same hand that gave us--

     _My bed is like a little boat;_
       _Nurse helps me in when I embark;_
     _She girds me in my sailor's coat,_
       _And starts me in the dark;_

and the even more delicious--

     _Now, with my little gun, I crawl_
     _All in the dark along the wall,_
     _And follow round the forest-track_
     _Away behind the sofa-back,--_

now gives us pictures like the following:

     My house, _I say. But hark to the sunny doves,_
     _That make my roof the arena of their loves_,
     _That gyre about the gable all day long_
     _And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:_
     Our house, _they say; and_ mine, _the cat declares,_
     _And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;_
     _And_ mine _the dog, and rises stiff with wrath_
     _If any alien foot profane the path._
     _So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,_
     _Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;_
     _Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode_
     _And his late kingdom, only from the road._

We now perceive that it is not invention, but memory of an
extraordinarily vivid kind, patiently directed to little things, and
charged with imagination; and we turn back with increased interest
to _A Child's Garden_, assured that it gives us a unique thing, a
transcript of that child-mind which we have all possessed and enjoyed,
but of which no one, except Mr. Stevenson, seems to have carried away a
photograph. Long ago, in one of the very earliest, if I remember right,
of those essays by R. L. S. for which we used so eagerly to watch the
_Cornhill Magazine_ in Mr. Leslie Stephen's time, in the paper called
"Child Play," this retention of what is wiped off from the memories of
the rest of us was clearly displayed. Out of this rarely suggestive
essay I will quote a few lines, which might have been printed as an
introduction to _A Child's Garden_:

"In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. 'Making
believe' is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take
a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some
suitable _mise-en-scène_, and had to act a business-man in an office
before I could sit down to my book.... I remember, as though it were
yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that
came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none
to see. Children are even content to forego what we call the realities,
and prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking
intelligently together, they chatter gibberish by the hour, and are
quite happy because they are making believe to speak French."

Probably all will admit the truth of this statement of infant fancy,
when it is presented to them in this way. But how many of us, in
perfect sincerity, not relying upon legends of the nursery, not
refreshed by the study of our own children's "make-believe," can
say that we clearly recollect the method of it? We shall find that
our memories are like a breath upon the glass, like the shape of a
broken wave. Nothing is so hopelessly lost, so utterly volatile, as
the fancies of our childhood. But Mr. Stevenson, alone amongst us all,
appears to have kept daguerreotypes of the whole series of his childish
sensations. Except the late Mrs. Ewing, he seems to be without a rival
in this branch of memory as applied to literature.

The various attitudes of literary persons to the child are very
interesting. There are, for instance, poets like Victor Hugo and Mr.
Swinburne who come to admire, who stay to adore, and who do not disdain
to throw their purple over any humble article of nursery use. They are
so magnificent in their address to infancy, they say so many brilliant
and unexpected things, that the mother is almost as much dazzled as she
is gratified. We stand round, with our hats off, and admire the poet
as much as he admires the child; but we experience no regret when he
presently turns away to a discussion of grown-up things. We have an
ill-defined notion that he reconnoitres infancy from the outside, and
has not taken the pains to reach the secret mind of childhood. It is to
be noted, and this is a suspicious circumstance, that Mr. Swinburne
and Victor Hugo like the child better the younger it is.

     _What likeness may define, and stray not_
       _From truth's exactest way,_
     _A baby's beauty? Love can say not,_
       _What likeness may._

This is charming; but the address is to the mother, is to the grown-up
reflective person. To the real student of child-life the baby contains
possibilities, but is at present an uninteresting chrysalis. It cannot
carry a gun through the forest, behind the sofa-back; it is hardly so
useful as a cushion to represent a passenger in a railway-train of
inverted chairs.

Still more remote than the dithyrambic poets are those writers about
children--and they are legion--who have ever the eye fixed upon
morality, and carry the didactic tongue thrust in the cheek of fable.
The late Charles Kingsley, who might have made so perfect a book of
his _Water-Babies_, sins notoriously in this respect. The moment a
wise child perceives the presence of allegory, or moral instruction,
all the charm of a book is gone. Parable is the very antipodes of
childish "make-believe," into which the element of ulterior motive or
secondary moral meaning never enters for an instant. The secret of the
charm of Mrs. Gatty's _Parables from Nature_, which were the fairest
food given to very young minds in my day, was that the fortunate child
never discovered that they were parables at all. I, for one, used to
read and re-read them as realistic statements of fact, the necessity of
pointing a moral merely having driven the amiable author to the making
of her story a little more fantastic, and therefore more welcome, than
it would otherwise be. It was explained to me one hapless day that the
parables were of a nature to instil nice principles into the mind; and
from that moment Mrs. Gatty became a broken idol. Lewis Carroll owed
his great and deserved success to his suppleness in bending his fancy
to the conditions of a mind that is dreaming. It has never seemed to
me that the _Adventures in Wonderland_ were specially childish; dreams
are much the same, whether a child or a man is passive under them, and
it is a fact that Lewis Carroll appeals just as keenly to adults as to
children. In Edward Lear's rhymes and ballads the love of grotesque
nonsense in the grown-up child is mainly appealed to; and these are
certainly appreciated more by parents than by children.

It would be easy, by multiplying examples, to drive home my contention
that only two out of the very numerous authors who have written
successfully on or for children have shown a clear recollection of
the mind of healthy childhood itself. Many authors have achieved
brilliant success in describing children, in verbally caressing them,
in amusing, in instructing them; but only two, Mrs. Ewing in prose,
and Mr. Stevenson in verse, have sat down with them without disturbing
their fancies, and have looked into the world of "make-believe" with
the children's own eyes. If Victor Hugo should visit the nursery,
every head of hair ought to be brushed, every pinafore be clean, and
nurse must certainly be present, as well as mamma. But Mrs. Ewing or
Mr. Stevenson might lead a long romp in the attic when nurse was out
shopping, and not a child in the house should know that a grown-up
person had been there. There are at least a dozen pieces in the
_Child's Garden_ which might be quoted to show what is meant. "The
Lamplighter" will serve our purpose as well as any other:

     _My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;_
     _It's time to take the window to see Learie going by;_
     _For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat,_
     _With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street,_

     _Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,_
     _And my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be;_
     _But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm to do,_
     _O Learie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!_

     _For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,_
     _And Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more;_
     _And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,_
     _O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night._

In publishing this autumn a second volume, this time of grown-up
verses, Mr. Stevenson has ventured on a bolder experiment. His
_Underwoods_, with its title openly borrowed from Ben Jonson, is an
easy book to appreciate and enjoy, but not to review. In many respects
it is plainly the work of the same fancy that described the Country
of Counterpane and the Land of Story-books, but it has grown a little
sadder, and a great deal older. There is the same delicate sincerity,
the same candour and simplicity, the same artless dependence on
the good faith of the public. The ordinary themes of the poets are
untouched; there is not one piece from cover to cover which deals
with the passion of love. The book is occupied with friendship, with
nature, with the honourable instincts of man's moral machinery. Above
all, it enters with great minuteness, and in a very confidential
spirit, into the theories and moods of the writer himself. It will be
to many readers a revelation of the every-day life of an author whose
impersonal writings have given them so much and so varied pleasure.
Not a dozen ordinary interviewers could have extracted so much of the
character of the man himself as he gives us in these one hundred and
twenty pages.

The question of admitting the personal element into literature is
one which is not very clearly understood. People try to make rules
about it, and say that an author may describe his study, but not his
dining-room, and his wife, but not her cousin. The fact is that no
rules can possibly be laid down in a matter which is one of individual
sympathy. The discussion whether a writer may speak of himself or no
is utterly vain until we are informed in what voice he has the habit
of speaking. It is all a question which depends on the _timbre_ of
the literary voice. As in life there are persons whose sweetness of
utterance is such that we love to have them warbling at our side, no
matter on what subject they speak, and others to whom we have scarcely
patience to listen if they want to tell us that we have inherited a
fortune, so it is in literature. Except that little class of stoic
critics who like to take their books _in vacuo_, most of us prefer to
know something about the authors we read. But whether we like them to
tell it us themselves, or no, depends entirely on the voice. Thackeray
and Fielding are never confidential enough to satisfy us; Dickens and
Smollett set our teeth on edge directly they start upon a career of
confidential expansion; and this has nothing to do with any preference
for _Tom Jones_ over _Peregrine Pickle_. There is no doubt that Mr.
Stevenson is one of those writers the sound of whose personal voices
is pleasing to the public, and there must be hundreds of his admirers
who will not miss one word of "To a Gardener" or "The Mirror Speaks,"
and who will puzzle out each of the intimate addresses to his private
friends with complete satisfaction.

The present writer is one of those who are most under the spell. For
me Mr. Stevenson may speak for ever, and chronicle at full length all
his uncles and his cousins and his nurses. But I think if it were my
privilege to serve him in the capacity of Molière's old woman, or to be
what a friend of mine would call his "foolometer," I should pluck up
courage to represent to him that this thing can be overdone. I openly
avow myself an enthusiast, yet even I shrink before the confidential
character of the prose inscription to _Underwoods_. This volume is
dedicated, if you please, to eleven physicians, and it is strange that
one so all compact of humour as Mr. Stevenson should not have noticed
how funny it is to think of an author seated affably in an armchair,
simultaneously summoning by name eleven physicians to take a few words
of praise each, and a copy of his little book.

The objective side of Mr. Stevenson's mind is very rich and full, and
he has no need to retire too obstinately upon the subjective. Yet
I know not that anything he has written in verse is more worthily
dignified than the following little personal fragment, in which he
refers, of course, to the grandfather who died a few weeks before his
birth, and to the father whom he had just conducted to the grave, both
heroic builders of lighthouses:

     _Say not of me that weakly I declined_
     _The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,_
     _The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,_
     _To play at home with paper like a child._
     _But rather say: In the afternoon of time_
     _A strenuous family dusted from its hands_
     _The sand of granite, and beholding far_
     _Along the sounding coast its pyramids_
     _And tall memorials catch the dying sun,_
     _Smiled well content, and to this childish task_
     _Around the fire addressed its evening hours._

This is a particularly happy specimen of Mr. Stevenson's blank verse,
in which metre, as a rule, he does not show to advantage. It is not
that his verses are ever lame or faulty, for in the technical portion
of the art he seldom fails, but that his rhymeless iambics remind the
ear too much now of Tennyson, now of Keats. He is, on the contrary,
exceedingly happy and very much himself in that metre of eight or seven
syllables, with couplet-rhymes, which served so well the first poets
who broke away from heroic verse, such as Swift and Lady Winchilsea,
Green and Dyer. If he must be affiliated to any school of poets it is
to these, who hold the first outworks between the old classical camp
and the invading army of romance, to whom I should ally him. Martial
is with those octo-syllabists of Queen Anne, and to Martial might well
have been assigned, had they been in old Latin, the delicately homely
lines, "To a Gardener." How felicitous is this quatrain about the
onion--

     _Let first the onion flourish there,_
     _Rose among roots, the maiden fair,_
     _Wine-scented and poetic soul_
     _Of the capacious salad-bowl._

Or this, in more irregular measure, and enfolding a loftier fancy--

     _Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,_
     _Sing truer, or no longer sing!_
     _No more the voice of melancholy Jacques_
     _To make a weeping echo in the hill;_
     _But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,_
     _From the green elm a living linnet takes,_
     _One natural verse recapture--then be still._

It would be arrogant in the extreme to decide whether or no Mr. R. L.
Stevenson's poems will be read in the future. They are, however, so
full of character, so redolent of his own fascinating temperament,
that it is not too bold to suppose that so long as his prose is
appreciated those who love that will turn to this. There have been
prose writers whose verse has not lacked accomplishment or merit, but
has been so far from interpreting their prose that it rather disturbed
its effect and weakened its influence. Cowley is an example of this,
whose ingenious and dryly intellectual poetry positively terrifies the
reader away from his eminently suave and human essays. Neither of Mr.
Stevenson's volumes of poetry will thus disturb his prose. Opinions may
be divided as to their positive value, but no one will doubt that the
same characteristics are displayed in the poems, the same suspicion
of "the abhorred pedantic sanhedrim," the same fulness of life and
tenderness of hope, the same bright felicity of epithet as in the
essays and romances. The belief, however, may be expressed without
fear of contradiction that Mr. Stevenson's fame will rest mainly upon
his verse and not upon his prose, only in that dim future when Mr.
Matthew Arnold's prophecy shall be fulfilled and Shelley's letters
shall be preferred to his lyrical poems. It is saying a great deal to
acknowledge that the author of _Kidnapped_ is scarcely less readable in
verse than he is in prose.

_1887._

II

Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Short Stories

Two years ago there was suddenly revealed to us, no one seems to
remember how, a new star out of the East. Not fewer distinguished men
of letters profess to have "discovered" Mr. Kipling than there were
cities of old in which Homer was born. Yet, in fact, the discovery was
not much more creditable to them than it would be, on a summer night,
to contrive to notice a comet flaring across the sky. Not only was this
new talent robust, brilliant, and self-asserting, but its reception
was prepared for by a unique series of circumstances. The fiction of
the Anglo-Saxon world, in its more intellectual provinces, had become
curiously feminised. Those novel-writers who cared to produce subtle
impressions upon their readers, in England and America, had become
extremely refined in taste and discreet in judgment. People who were
not content to pursue the soul of their next-door neighbour through
all the burrows of self-consciousness had no choice but to take ship
with Mr. Rider Haggard for the Mountains of the Moon. Between excess
of psychological analysis and excess of superhuman romance there was
a great void in the world of Anglo-Saxon fiction. It is this void
which Mr. Kipling, with something less than one hundred short stories,
one novel, and a few poems, has filled by his exotic realism and his
vigorous rendering of unhackneyed experience. His temperament is
eminently masculine, and yet his imagination is strictly bound by
existing laws. The Evarras of the novel had said:

                     _Thus gods are made,_
     _And whoso makes them otherwise shall die,_

when, behold, a young man comes up out of India, and makes them quite
otherwise, and lives.

The vulgar trick, however, of depreciating other writers in order to
exalt the favourite of a moment was never less worthy of practice than
it is in the case of the author of _Soldiers Three_. His relation to
his contemporaries is curiously slight. One living writer there is,
indeed, with whom it is not unnatural to compare him--Pierre Loti.
Each of these men has attracted the attention, and then the almost
exaggerated admiration, of a crowd of readers drawn from every class.
Each has become popular without ceasing to be delightful to the
fastidious. Each is independent of traditional literature, and affects
a disdain for books. Each is a wanderer, a lover of prolonged exile,
more at home among the ancient races of the East than among his own
people. Each describes what he has seen in short sentences, with highly
coloured phrases and local words, little troubled to obey the laws of
style if he can but render an exact impression of what the movement
of physical life has been to himself. Each produces on the reader a
peculiar thrill, a voluptuous and agitating sentiment of intellectual
uneasiness, with the spontaneous art of which he has the secret.
Totally unlike in detail, Rudyard Kipling and Pierre Loti have these
general qualities in common, and if we want a literary parallel to the
former, the latter is certainly the only one that we can find. Nor is
the attitude of the French novelist to his sailor friends at all unlike
that of the Anglo-Indian civilian to his soldier chums. To distinguish
we must note very carefully the difference between Mulvaney and _mon
frère Yves_; it is not altogether to the advantage of the latter.

The old rhetorical manner of criticism was not meant for the discussion
of such writers as these. The only way in which, as it seems to me, we
can possibly approach them, is by a frank confession of their personal
relation to the feelings of the critic. I will therefore admit that
I cannot pretend to be indifferent to the charm of what Mr. Kipling
writes. From the first moment of my acquaintance with it it has held
me fast. It excites, disturbs, and attracts me; I cannot throw off its
disquieting influence. I admit all that is to be said in its disfavour.
I force myself to see that its occasional cynicism is irritating and
strikes a false note. I acknowledge the broken and jagged style, the
noisy newspaper bustle of the little peremptory sentences, the cheap
irony of the satires on society. Often--but this is chiefly in the
earlier stories--I am aware that there is a good deal too much of the
rattle of the piano at some café concert. But when all this is said,
what does it amount to? What but an acknowledgment of the crudity of a
strong and rapidly developing young nature? You cannot expect a creamy
smoothness while the act of vinous fermentation is proceeding.

                               _Wit will shine_
     _Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line;_
     _A noble error, and but seldom made,_
     _When poets are by too much force betray'd;_
     _Thy generous fruits, though gather'd ere their prime,_
     _Still show a quickness, and maturing time_
     _But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rime._

In the following pages I shall try to explain why the sense of these
shortcomings is altogether buried for me in delighted sympathy
and breathless curiosity. Mr. Kipling does not provoke a critical
suspension of judgment. He is vehement, and sweeps us away with him;
he plays upon a strange and seductive pipe, and we follow him like
children. As I write these sentences, I feel how futile is this attempt
to analyse his gifts, and how greatly I should prefer to throw this
paper to the winds and listen to the magician himself. I want more
and more, like Oliver Twist. I want all those "other stories"; I wish
to wander down all those bypaths that we have seen disappear in the
brushwood. If one lay very still and low by the watch-fire, in the
hollow of Ortheris's greatcoat, one might learn more and more of the
inextinguishable sorrows of Mulvaney. One might be told more of what
happened, out of the moonlight, in the blackness of Amir Nath's Gully.
I want to know how the palanquin came into Dearsley's possession, and
what became of Kheni Singh, and whether the seal-cutter did really
die in the House of Suddhoo. I want to know who it is who dances the
_Hálli Hukk_, and how, and why, and where. I want to know what happened
at Jagadhri, when the Death Bull was painted. I want to know all the
things that Mr. Kipling does not like to tell--to see the devils of the
East "rioting as the stallions riot in spring." It is the strength of
this new story-teller that he reawakens in us the primitive emotions
of curiosity, mystery, and romance in action. He is the master of a
new kind of terrible and enchanting peepshow, and we crowd around him
begging for "just one more look." When a writer excites and tantalises
us in this way, it seems a little idle to discuss his style. Let
pedants, then, if they will, say that Mr. Kipling has no style; yet, if
so, how shall we designate such passages as this, frequent enough among
his more exotic stories?

"Come back with me to the north and be among men once more. Come back
when this matter is accomplished and I call for thee. The bloom of the
peach-orchards is upon all the valley, and _here_ is only dust and a
great stink. There is a pleasant wind among the mulberry-trees, and
the streams are bright with snow-water, and the caravans go up and the
caravans go down, and a hundred fires sparkle in the gut of the pass,
and tent-peg answers hammer-nose, and pony squeals to pony across the
drift-smoke of the evening. It is good in the north now. Come back with
me. Let us return to our own people. Come!"

The private life of Mr. Rudyard Kipling is not a matter of public
interest, and I should be very unwilling to exploit it, even if I had
the means of doing so. The youngest of living writers should really be
protected for a few years longer against those who chirp and gabble
about the unessential. All that needs to be known, in order to give him
his due chronological place, is that he was born in Bombay in Christmas
week, 1865. The careful student of what he has published will collect
from it the impression that Mr. Kipling was resident in India at an age
when few European children remain there; that he returned to England
for a brief period; that he began a career on his own account in India
at an unusually early age; that he has led a life of extraordinary
vicissitude, as a journalist, as a war correspondent, as a civilian
in the wake of the army; that an insatiable curiosity has led him to
shrink from no experience that might help to solve the strange riddles
of Oriental existence; and that he is distinguished from other active,
adventurous, and inquisitive persons in that his capacious memory
retains every impression that it captures.

Beyond this, all that must here be said about the man is that his
stories began to be published--I think about eight years ago--in local
newspapers of India, that his first book of verse, _Departmental
Ditties_, appeared in 1886, while his prose stories were not collected
from a Lahore journal, of which he was the sub-editor, until 1888, when
a volume of _Plain Tales from the Hills_ appeared in Calcutta. In the
same year six successive pamphlets or thin books appeared in an _Indian
Railway Library_, published at Allahabad, under the titles of _Soldiers
Three_, _The Gadsbys_, _In Black and White_, _Under the Deodars_, _The
Phantom 'Rickshaw_, and _Wee Willie Winkle_. These formed the literary
baggage of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, when, in 1889, he came home to find
himself suddenly famous at the age of twenty-three.

Since his arrival in England Mr. Kipling has not been idle. In 1890
he brought out a Christmas annual called _The Record of Badalia
Herodsfoot_, and a short novel, _The Light that Failed_. Already in
1891 he has published a fresh collection of tales called (in America)
_Mine Own People_, and a second miscellany of verses. This is by no
means a complete record of his activity, but it includes the names
of all his important writings. At an age when few future novelists
have yet produced anything at all, Mr. Kipling is already voluminous.
It would be absurd not to acknowledge that a danger lies in this
precocious fecundity. It would probably be an excellent thing for every
one concerned if this brilliant youth could be deprived of pens and
ink for a few years and be buried again somewhere in the far East.
There should be a "close time" for authors no less than for seals, and
the extraordinary fulness and richness of Mr. Kipling's work does not
completely reassure us.

The publications which I have named above have not, as a rule, any
structural cohesion. With the exception of _Badalia Herodsfoot_ and
_The Light that Failed_, which deal with phases of London life, their
contents might be thrown together without much loss of relation. The
general mass so formed could then be redivided into several coherent
sections. It may be remarked that Mr. Kipling's short stories, of
which, as I have said, we hold nearly a hundred, mainly deal with three
or four distinct classes of Indian life. We may roughly distinguish
these as the British soldier in India, the Anglo-Indian, the Native,
and the British child in India. In the following pages, I shall
endeavour to characterise his treatment of these four classes. I retain
the personal impression that it is pre-eminently as a poet that we
shall eventually come to regard him. For the present his short stories
fill the popular mind in connection with his name.

II

There can be no question that the side upon which Mr. Kipling's talent
has most delicately tickled British curiosity, and British patriotism
too, is his revelation of the soldier in India. A great body of our
countrymen are constantly being drafted out to the East on Indian
service. They serve their time, are recalled, and merge in the mass
of our population; their strange temporary isolation between the
civilian and the native, and their practical inability to find public
expression for their feelings, make these men--to whom, though we so
often forget it, we owe the maintenance of our Empire in the East--an
absolutely silent section of the community. Of their officers we may
know something, although _A Conference of the Powers_ may perhaps have
awakened us to the fact that we know very little. Still, people like
Tick Boileau and Captain Mafflin of the Duke of Derry's Pink Hussars
are of ourselves; we meet them before they go out and when they come
back; they marry our sisters and our daughters; and they lay down the
law about India after dinner. Of the private soldier, on the other
hand, of his loves and hates, sorrows and pleasures, of the way in
which the vast, hot, wearisome country and its mysterious inhabitants
strike him, of his attitude towards India, and of the way in which
India treats him, we know, or knew until Mr. Kipling enlightened us,
absolutely nothing. It is not surprising, then, if the novelty of this
portion of his writings has struck ordinary English readers more than
that of any other.

This section of Mr. Kipling's work occupies the seven tales called
_Soldiers Three_, and a variety of stories scattered through his other
books. In order to make his point of view that of the men themselves,
not spoiled by the presence of superior officers, or by social
restraint of any sort, the author takes upon himself the character of
an almost silent young civilian who has gained the warm friendship of
three soldiers, whose intimate companion and chum he becomes. Most of
the military stories, though not all, are told by one of these three,
or else recount their adventures or caprices.

Before opening the book called _Soldiers Three_, however, the reader
will do well to make himself familiar with the opening pages of a
comparatively late story, _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, in
which the characteristics of the famous three are more clearly defined
than elsewhere. Mulvaney, the Irish giant, who has been the "grizzled,
tender, and very wise Ulysses" to successive generations of young and
foolish recruits, is a great creation. He is the father of the craft
of arms to his associates; he has served with various regiments from
Bermuda to Halifax; he is "old in war, scarred, reckless, resourceful,
and in his pious hours an unequalled soldier." Learoyd, the second of
these friends, is "six and a half feet of slow-moving, heavy-footed
Yorkshireman, born on the wolds, bred in the dales, and educated
chiefly among the carriers' carts at the back of York railway-station."
The third is Ortheris, a little man as sharp as a needle, "a
fox-terrier of a cockney," an inveterate poacher and dog-stealer.

Of these three strongly contrasted types the first and the third live
in Mr. Kipling's pages with absolute reality. I must confess that
Learoyd is to me a little shadowy, and even in a late story, _On
Greenhow Hill_, which has apparently been written in order to emphasise
the outline of the Yorkshireman, I find myself chiefly interested in
the incidental part, the sharp-shooting of Ortheris. It seems as though
Mr. Kipling required, for the artistic balance of his cycle of stories,
a third figure, and had evolved Learoyd while he observed and created
Mulvaney and Ortheris, nor am I sure that places could not be pointed
out where Learoyd, save for the dialect, melts undistinguishably into
an incarnation of Mulvaney. The others are studied from the life,
and by an observer who goes deep below the surface of conduct. How
penetrating the study is, and how clear the diagnosis, may be seen
in one or two stories which lie somewhat outside the popular group.
It is no superficial idler among men who has taken down the strange
notes on military hysteria which inspire _The Madness of Ortheris_ and
_In the Matter of a Private_, while the skill with which the battered
giant Mulvaney, who has been a corporal and then has been reduced for
misconduct, who to the ordinary view and in the eyes of all but the
wisest of his officers is a dissipated blackguard, is made to display
the rapidity, wit, resource, and high moral feeling which he really
possesses, is extraordinary.

We have hitherto had in English literature no portraits of private
soldiers like these, and yet the soldier is an object of interest
and of very real, if vague and inefficient, admiration to his
fellow-citizens. Mr. Thomas Hardy has painted a few excellent soldiers,
but in a more romantic light and a far more pastoral setting.
Other studies of this kind in fiction have either been slight and
unsubstantial, or else they have been, as in the baby-writings of a
certain novelist who has enjoyed popularity for a moment, odious in
their sentimental unreality. There seems to be something essentially
volatile about the soldier's memory. His life is so monotonous, so
hedged in by routine, that he forgets the details of it as soon as the
restraint is removed, or else he looks back upon it to see it bathed
in a fictitious haze of sentiment. The absence of sentimentality in
Mr. Kipling's version of the soldier's life in India is one of its
great merits. What romance it assumes under his treatment is due to the
curious contrasts it encourages. We see the ignorant and raw English
youth transplanted, at the very moment when his instincts begin to
develop, into a country where he is divided from everything which can
remind him of his home, where by noon and night, in the bazar, in
barracks, in the glowing scrub jungle, in the ferny defiles of the
hills, everything he sees and hears and smells and feels produces on
him an unfamiliar and an unwelcome impression. How he behaves himself
under these new circumstances, what code of laws still binds his
conscience, what are his relaxations and what his observations, these
are the questions which we ask and which Mr. Kipling essays for the
first time to answer.

Among the short stories which Mr. Kipling has dedicated to the British
soldier in India there are a few which excel all the rest as works of
art. I do not think that any one will deny that of this inner selection
none exceeds in skill or originality _The Taking of Lungtungpen_. Those
who have not read this little masterpiece have yet before them the
pleasure of becoming acquainted with one of the best short stories,
not merely in English, but in any language. I do not know how to
praise adequately the technical merit of this little narrative. It
possesses to the full that masculine buoyancy, that power of sustaining
an extremely spirited narrative in a tone appropriate to the action,
which is one of Mr. Kipling's rare gifts. Its concentration, which
never descends into obscurity, its absolute novelty, its direct and
irresistible appeal to what is young and daring and absurdly splendid,
are unsurpassed. To read it, at all events to admire and enjoy it, is
to recover for a moment a little of that dare-devil quality that lurks
somewhere in the softest and the baldest of us. Only a very young man
could have written it, perhaps, but still more certainly only a young
man of genius.

A little less interesting, in a totally different way, is _The Daughter
of the Regiment_, with its extraordinarily vivid account of the
breaking-out of cholera in a troop-train. Of _The Madness of Ortheris_
I have already spoken; as a work of art this again seems to me somewhat
less remarkable, because carried out with less completeness. But it
would be hard to find a parallel, of its own class, to _The Rout of
the White Hussars_, with its study of the effects of what is believed
to be supernatural on a gathering of young fellows who are absolutely
without fear of any phenomenon of which they comprehend the nature.
In a very late story, _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_, Mr. Kipling has
shown that he is able to deal with the humours and matrimonial amours
of Indian barrack-life just as rapidly, fully, and spiritedly as with
the more serious episodes of a soldier's career. The scene between Judy
Sheehy and Dinah, as told by Mulvaney in that story, is pure comedy,
without a touch of farce.

On the whole, however, the impression left by Mr. Kipling's military
stories is one of melancholy. Tommy Atkins, whom the author knows so
well and sympathises with so truly, is a solitary being in India. In
all these tales I am conscious of the barracks as of an island in a
desolate ocean of sand. All around is the infinite waste of India,
obscure, monotonous, immense, inhabited by black men and pariah dogs,
Pathans and green parrots, kites and crocodiles, and long solitudes
of high grass. The island in this sea is a little collection of young
men, sent out from the remoteness of England to serve "the Widder,"
and to help to preserve for her the rich and barbarous empire of the
East. This microcosm of the barracks has its own laws, its own morals,
its own range of emotional sentiment. What these are the new writer
has not told us (for that would be a long story), but shown us that he
himself has divined. He has held the door open for a moment, and has
revealed to us a set of very human creations. One thing, at least, the
biographer of Mulvaney and Ortheris has no difficulty in persuading
us--namely, that "God in his wisdom has made the heart of the British
soldier, who is very often an unlicked ruffian, as soft as the heart of
a little child, in order that he may believe in and follow his officers
into tight and nasty places."

The Anglo-Indians with whom Mr. Kipling deals are of two kinds. I
must confess that there is no section of his work which appears to
me so insignificant as that which deals with Indian "society." The
eight tales which are bound together as _The Story of the Gadsbys_
are doubtless very early productions. I have been told, but I know
not whether on good authority, that they were published in serial
form before the author was twenty-one. Judged as the observation of
Anglo-Indian life by so young a boy, they are, it is needless to say,
astonishingly clever. Some pages in them can never, I suppose, come
to seem unworthy of his later fame. The conversation in _The Tents of
Kedar_, where Captain Gadsby breaks to Mrs. Herriott that he is engaged
to be married, and absolutely darkens her world to her during "a Naini
Tal dinner for thirty-five," is of consummate adroitness. What a "Naini
Tal dinner" is I have not the slightest conception, but it is evidently
something very sumptuous and public, and if any practised hand of the
old social school could have contrived the thrust and parry under the
fire of seventy critical eyes better than young Mr. Kipling has done,
I know not who that writer is. In quite another way the pathos of the
little bride's delirium in _The Valley of the Shadow_ is of a very
high, almost of the highest, order.

But, as a rule, Mr. Kipling's "society" Anglo-Indians are not drawn
better than those which other Indian novelists have created for our
diversion. There is a sameness in the type of devouring female, and
though Mr. Kipling devises several names for it, and would fain
persuade us that Mrs. Herriott, and Mrs. Reiver, and Mrs. Hauksbee
possess subtle differences which distinguish them, yet I confess I am
not persuaded. They all--and the Venus Annodomini as well--appear to
me to be the same high-coloured, rather ill-bred, not wholly spoiled
professional coquette. Mr. Kipling seems to be too impatient of what
he calls "the shiny toy-scum stuff people call civilisation" to paint
these ladies very carefully. _The Phantom 'Rickshaw_, in which a
hideously selfish man is made to tell the story of his own cruelty
and of his mechanical remorse, is indeed highly original, but here it
is the man, not the woman, in whom we are interested. The proposal of
marriage in the dust-storm in _False Dawn_, a theatrical, lurid scene,
though scarcely natural, is highly effective. The archery contest in
_Cupid's Arrows_ needs only to be compared with a similar scene in
_Daniel Deronda_ to show how much more closely Mr. Kipling keeps his
eye on detail than George Eliot did. But these things are rare in this
class of his stories, and too often the Anglo-Indian social episodes
are choppy, unconvincing, and not very refined.

All is changed when the central figure is a man. Mr. Kipling's
officials and civilians are admirably vivid and of an amazing variety.
If any one wishes to know why this new author has been received
with joy and thankfulness by the Anglo-Saxon world, it is really not
necessary for him to go further for a reason than to the moral tale of
_The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin_. Let the author of that tract
speak for himself:

"Every man is entitled to his own religious opinions; but no man--least
of all a junior--has a right to thrust these down other men's throats.
The Government sends out weird civilians now and again; but McGoggin
was the queerest exported for a long time. He was clever--brilliantly
clever--but his cleverness worked the wrong way. Instead of keeping
to the study of the vernaculars, he had read some books written by a
man called Comte, I think, and a man called Spencer, and a Professor
Clifford. [You will find these books in the Library.] They deal with
people's insides from the point of view of men who have no stomachs.
There was no order against his reading them, but his mamma should have
smacked him.... I do not say a word against this creed. It was made
up in town, where there is nothing but machinery and asphalte and
building--all shut in by the fog.... But in this country [India], where
you really see humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing
between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled
earth underfoot, the notion somehow dies away, and most folk come back
to simpler theories."

Those who will not come back to simpler theories are prigs, for whom
the machine-made notion is higher than experience. Now Mr. Kipling, in
his warm way, hates many things, but he hates the prig for preference.
Aurelian McGoggin, better known as the Blastoderm, is a prig of the
over-educated type, and upon him falls the awful calamity of sudden
and complete nerve-collapse. Lieutenant Golightly, in the story which
bears his name, is a prig who values himself for spotless attire and
clockwork precision of manner; he therefore is mauled and muddied up
to his eyes, and then arrested under painfully derogatory conditions.
In _Lispeth_ we get the missionary prig, who thinks that the Indian
instincts can be effaced by a veneer of Christianity. Mr. Kipling hates
"the sheltered life." The men he likes are those who have been thrown
out of their depth at an early age, and taught to swim off a boat. The
very remarkable story of _Thrown Away_ shows the effect of preparing
for India by a life "unspotted from the world" in England; it is as
hopelessly tragic as any in Mr. Kipling's somewhat grim repertory.

Against the _régime_ of the prig Mr. Kipling sets the _régime_ of
Strickland. Over and over again he introduces this mysterious figure,
always with a phrase of extreme approval. Strickland is in the police,
and his power consists in his determination to know the East as the
natives know it. He can pass through the whole of Upper India, dressed
as a fakir, without attracting the least attention. Sometimes, as in
_Beyond the Pale_, he may know too much. But this is an exception,
and personal to himself. Mr. Kipling's conviction is that this is
the sort of man to pervade India for us, and that one Strickland is
worth a thousand self-conceited civilians. But even below the Indian
prig, because he has at least known India, is the final object of Mr.
Kipling's loathing, "Pagett, M.P.," the radical English politician who
comes out for four months to set everybody right. His chastisement
is always severe and often comic. But in one very valuable paper,
which Mr. Kipling must not be permitted to leave unreprinted, _The
Enlightenment of Pagett, M.P._, he has dealt elaborately and quite
seriously with this noxious creature. Whether Mr. Kipling is right or
wrong, far be it from me in my ignorance to pretend to know. But his
way of putting these things is persuasive.

Since Mr. Kipling has come back from India he has written about society
"of sorts" in England. Is there not perhaps in him something of Pagett,
M.P., turned inside out? As a delineator of English life, at all
events, he is not yet thoroughly master of his craft. Everything he
writes has vigour and picturesqueness. But _The Lamentable Comedy of
Willow Wood_ is the sort of thing that any extremely brilliant Burman,
whose English, if slightly odd, was nevertheless unimpeachable, might
write of English ladies and gentlemen, having never been in England.
_The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot_ was in every way better, more truly
observed, more credible, more artistic, but yet a little too cynical
and brutal to come straight from life. And last of all there is the
novel of _The Light that Failed_, with its much-discussed two endings,
its oases of admirable detail in a desert of the undesirable, with its
extremely disagreeable woman, and its far more brutal and detestable
man, presented to us, the precious pair of them, as typical specimens
of English society. I confess that it is _The Light that Failed_ that
has wakened me to the fact that there are limits to this dazzling new
talent, the _éclat_ of which had almost lifted us off our critical feet.

IV

The conception of Strickland would be very tantalising and incomplete
if we were not permitted to profit from his wisdom and experience. But,
happily, Mr. Kipling is perfectly willing to take us below the surface,
and to show us glimpses of the secret life of India. In so doing he
puts forth his powers to their fullest extent, and I think it cannot be
doubted that the tales which deal with native manners are not merely
the most curious and interesting which Mr. Kipling has written, but
are also the most fortunately constructed. Every one who has thought
over this writer's mode of execution will have been struck with the
skill with which his best work is restrained within certain limits.
When inspiration flags with him, indeed, his stories may grow too long,
or fail, as if from languor, before they reach their culmination. But
his best short stories--and among his best we include the majority of
his native Indian tales--are cast at once, as if in a mould; nothing
can be detached from them without injury. In this consists his great
technical advantage over almost all his English rivals; we must look to
France or to America for stories fashioned in this way. In several of
his tales of Indian manners this skill reaches its highest because most
complicated expression. It may be comparatively easy to hold within
artistic bonds a gentle episode of European amorosity. To deal, in
the same form, but with infinitely greater audacity, with the muffled
passions and mysterious instincts of India, to slur over nothing, to
emphasise nothing, to give in some twenty pages the very spicy odour of
the East, this is marvellous.

Not less than this Mr. Kipling has done in a little group of stories
which I cannot but hold to be the culminating point of his genius so
far. If the remainder of his writings were swept away, posterity would
be able to reconstruct its Rudyard Kipling from _Without Benefit of
Clergy_, _The Man who Would be King_, _The Strange Ride of Morrowbie
Jukes_, and _Beyond the Pale_. More than that, if all other record of
Indian habits had been destroyed, much might be conjectured from these
of the pathos, the splendour, the cruelty, and the mystery of India.
From _The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows_ more is to be gleaned of the
real action of opium-smoking, and the causes of that indulgence, than
from many sapient debates in the British House of Commons. We come very
close to the confines of the moonlight-coloured world of magic in _The
Bisara of Pooree_. For pure horror and for the hopeless impenetrability
of the native conscience there is _The Recrudescence of Imray_. In a
revel of colour and shadow, at the close of the audacious and Lucianic
story of _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, we peep for a moment
into the mystery of "a big queen's praying at Benares."

Admirable, too, are the stories which deal with the results of attempts
made to melt the Asiatic and the European into one. The red-headed
Irish-Thibetan who makes the king's life a burden to him in the
fantastic story of _Namgay Doola_ represents one extremity of this
chain of grotesque Eurasians; Michele D'Cruze, the wretched little
black police inspector, with a drop of white blood in his body, who
wakes up to energetic action at one supreme moment of his life, is at
the other. The relapse of the converted Indian is a favourite theme
with this cynical observer of human nature. It is depicted in _The
Judgment of Dungara_, with a rattling humour worthy of Lever, where the
whole mission, clad in white garments woven of the scorpion nettle, go
mad with fire and plunge into the river, while the trumpet of the god
bellows triumphantly from the hills. In _Lispeth_ we have a study--much
less skilfully worked out, however--of the Indian woman carefully
Christianised from childhood reverting at once to heathenism when her
passions reach maturity.

The lover of good literature, however, is likely to come back to
the four stories which we named first in this section. They are the
very flower of Mr. Kipling's work up to the present moment, and on
these we base our highest expectations for his future. _Without
Benefit of Clergy_ is a study of the Indian woman as wife and mother,
uncovenanted wife of the English civilian and mother of his son. 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. For pure beauty the scene where Holden, Ameera,
and the baby count the stars on the housetop for Tota's horoscope is
so characteristic that, although it is too long to quote in full, its
opening paragraph must here be given as a specimen of Mr. Kipling's
style in this class of work:

"Ameera climbed the narrow staircase that led to the flat roof. The
child, placid and unwinking, lay in the hollow of her right arm,
gorgeous in silver-fringed muslin, with a small skull-cap on his head.
Ameera wore all that she valued most. The diamond nose-stud that takes
the place of the Western patch in drawing attention to the curve of
the nostril, the gold ornament in the centre of the forehead studded
with tallow-drop emeralds and flawed rubies, the heavy circlet of
beaten gold that was fastened round her neck by the softness of the
pure metal, and the clinking curb-patterned silver anklets hanging low
over the rosy ankle-bone. She was dressed in jade-green muslin, as
befitted a daughter of the Faith, and from shoulder to elbow and elbow
to wrist ran bracelets of silver tied with floss silk; frail glass
bangles slipped over the wrist in proof of the slenderness of the hand,
and certain heavy gold bracelets that had no part in her country's
ornaments, but, since they were Holden's gift, and fastened with a
cunning European snap, delighted her immensely.

"They sat down by the low white parapet of the roof, overlooking the
city and its lights."

What tragedy was in store for the gentle astrologer, or in what
darkness of waters the story ends, it is needless to repeat here.

In _The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes_ a civil engineer stumbles by
chance on a ghastly city of the dead who do not die, trapped into it,
down walls of shifting sand, on the same principle as the ant-lion
secures its prey, the parallel being so close that one half suspects
Mr. Kipling of having invented a human analogy to the myrmeleon. The
abominable settlement of living dead men is so vividly described,
and the wonders of it are so calmly, and, as it were, so temperately
discussed, that no one who possesses the happy gift of believing can
fail to be persuaded of the truth of the tale. The character of Gunga
Dass, a Deccanee Brahmin whom Jukes finds in this reeking village,
and who, reduced to the bare elements of life, preserves a little,
though exceedingly little, of his old traditional obsequiousness, is an
admirable study. But all such considerations are lost, as we read the
story first, in the overwhelming and Poe-like horror of the situation
and the extreme novelty of the conception.

A still higher place, however, I am inclined to claim for the daring
invention of _The Man who would be King_. This is a longer story than
is usual with Mr. Kipling, and it depends for its effect, not upon
any epigrammatic surprise or extravagant dénouement of the intrigue,
but on an imaginative effort brilliantly sustained through a detailed
succession of events. Two ignorant and disreputable Englishmen, exiles
from social life, determine to have done with the sordid struggle, and
to close with a try for nothing less than empire. They are seen by
the journalist who narrates the story to disappear northward from the
Kumharsan Serai disguised as a mad priest and his servant starting to
sell whirligigs to the Ameer of Kabul. Two years later there stumbles
into the newspaper office a human creature bent into a circle, and
moving his feet one over the other like a bear. This is the surviving
adventurer, who, half dead and half dazed, is roused by doses of raw
whisky into a condition which permits him to unravel the squalid and
splendid chronicle of adventures beyond the utmost rim of mountains,
adventures on the veritable throne of Kafiristan. The tale is recounted
with great skill as from the lips of a dying king. At first, to give
the needful impression of his faint, bewildered state, he mixes up
his narrative, whimpers, forgets, and repeats his phrases; but by
the time the curiosity of the reader is fully arrested, the tale has
become limpid and straightforward enough. When it has to be drawn to
a close, the symptoms of aphasia and brain-lesion are repeated. This
story is conceived and conducted in the finest spirit of an artist.
It is strange to the verge of being incredible, but it never outrages
possibility, and the severe moderation of the author preserves our
credence throughout.

It is in these Indian stories that Mr. Kipling displays more than
anywhere else the accuracy of his eye and the retentiveness of his
memory. No detail escapes him, and, without seeming to emphasise the
fact, he is always giving an exact feature where those who are in
possession of fewer facts or who see less vividly are satisfied with a
shrewd generality.

V

In Mr. Kipling's first volume there was one story which struck
quite a different note from all the others, and gave promise of a
new delineator of children. _Tods' Amendment_, which is a curiously
constructed piece of work, is in itself a political allegory. It is to
be noticed that when he warms to his theme the author puts aside the
trifling fact that Tods is an infant of six summers, and makes him give
a clear statement of collated native opinion worthy of a barrister in
ample practice. What led to the story, one sees without difficulty,
was the wish to emphasise the fact that unless the Indian Government
humbles itself, and becomes like Tods, it can never legislate with
efficiency, because it never can tell what all the _jhampanis_ and
_saises_ in the bazar really wish for. If this were all, Mr. Kipling in
creating Tods would have shown no more real acquaintance with children
than other political allegorists have shown with sylphs or Chinese
philosophers. But Mr. Kipling is always an artist, and in order to
make a setting for his child-professor of jurisprudence, he invented
a really convincing and delightful world of conquering infancy. Tods,
who lives up at Simla with Tods' mamma, and knows everybody, is "an
utterly fearless young pagan," who pursues his favourite kid even into
the sacred presence of the Supreme Legislative Council, and is on terms
of equally well-bred familiarity with the Viceroy and with Futteh Khan,
the villainous loafer _khit_ from Mussoorie.

To prove that _Tods' Amendment_ was not an accident, and also,
perhaps, to show that he could write about children purely and simply,
without any after-thought of allegory, he brought out, as the sixth
instalment of the _Indian Railway Library_, a little volume entirely
devoted to child-life. Of the four stories contained in this book one
is among the finest productions of its author, while two others are
very good indeed. There are also, of course, the children in _The Light
that Failed_, although they are too closely copied from the author's
previous creations in _Baa, Baa, Black Sheep_; and in other writings of
his, children take a position sufficiently prominent to justify us in
considering this as one of the main divisions of his work.

In his preface to _Wee Willie Winkie_, Mr. Kipling has sketched for us
the attitude which he adopts towards babies. "Only women," he says, but
we may doubt if he means it, "understand children thoroughly; but if a
mere man keeps very quiet, and humbles himself properly, and refrains
from talking down to his superiors, the children will sometimes be
good to him, and let him see what they think about the world." This is
a curious form of expression, and suggests the naturalist more than
the lover of children. So might we conceive a successful zoologist
affirming that the way to note the habits of wild animals and birds
is by keeping very quiet, and lying low in the grass, and refraining
from making sudden noises. This is, indeed, the note by which we may
distinguish Mr. Kipling from such true lovers of childhood as Mrs.
Ewing. He has no very strong emotion in the matter, but he patiently
and carefully collects data, partly out of his own faithful and
capacious personal memory, partly out of what he still observes.

The Tods type he would probably insist that he has observed. A finer
and more highly developed specimen of it is given in _Wee Willie
Winkie_, the hero of which is a noble infant of overpowering vitality,
who has to be put under military discipline to keep him in any sort of
domestic order, and who, while suffering under two days' confinement to
barracks (the house and verandah), saves the life of a headstrong girl.
The way in which Wee Willie Winkie--who is of Mr. Kipling's favourite
age, six--does this is at once wholly delightful and a terrible strain
to credence. The baby sees Miss Allardyce cross the river, which he has
always been forbidden to do, because the river is the frontier, and
beyond it are bad men, goblins, Afghans, and the like. He feels that
she is in danger, he breaks mutinously out of barracks on his pony and
follows her, and when she has an accident, and is surrounded by twenty
hill-men, he saves her by his spirit and by his complicated display of
resource. To criticise this story, which is told with infinite zest
and picturesqueness, seems merely priggish. Yet it is contrary to Mr.
Kipling's whole intellectual attitude to suppose him capable of writing
what he knows to be supernatural romance. We have therefore to suppose
that in India infants "of the dominant race" are so highly developed at
six, physically and intellectually, as to be able to ride hard, alone,
across a difficult river, and up pathless hilly country, to contrive
a plan for succouring a hapless lady, and to hold a little regiment
of savages at bay by mere force of eye. If Wee Willie Winkie had been
twelve instead of six, the feat would have been just possible. But
then the romantic contrast between the baby and his virile deeds would
not have been nearly so piquant. In all this Mr. Kipling, led away by
sentiment and a false ideal, is not quite the honest craftsman that he
should be.

But when, instead of romancing and creating, he is content to observe
children, he is excellent in this as in other branches of careful
natural history. But the children he observes, are, or we much misjudge
him, himself. _Baa, Baa, Black Sheep_ is a strange compound of work at
first and at second hand. Aunty Rosa (delightfully known, without a
suspicion of supposed relationship, as "Antirosa"), the Mrs. Squeers
of the Rocklington lodgings, is a sub-Dickensian creature, tricked out
with a few touches of reality, but mainly a survival of early literary
hatreds. The boy Harry and the soft little sister of Punch are rather
shadowy. But Punch lives with an intense vitality, and here, without
any indiscretion, we may be sure that Mr. Kipling has looked inside
his own heart and drawn from memory. Nothing in the autobiographies
of their childhood by Tolstoi and Pierre Loti, nothing in Mr. R. L.
Stevenson's _Child's Garden of Verses_, is more valuable as a record of
the development of childhood than the account of how Punch learned to
read, moved by curiosity to know what the "falchion" was with which the
German man split the Griffin open. Very nice, also, is the reference to
the mysterious rune, called "Sonny, my Soul," with which mamma used to
sing Punch to sleep.

By far the most powerful and ingenious story, however, which Mr.
Kipling has yet dedicated to a study of childhood is _The Drums of the
Fore and Aft_. "The Fore and Aft" is a nickname given in derision to a
crack regiment, whose real title is "The Fore and Fit," in memory of a
sudden calamity which befell them on a certain day in an Afghan pass,
when, if it had not been for two little blackguard drummer-boys, they
would have been wofully and contemptibly cut to pieces, as they were
routed by a dashing troop of Ghazis. The two little heroes, who only
conquer to die, are called Jakin and Lew, stunted children of fourteen,
"gutter-birds" who drink and smoke and "do everything but lie," and are
the disgrace of the regiment. In their little souls, however, there
burns what Mr. Pater would call a "hard, gem-like flame" of patriotism,
and they are willing to undergo any privation, if only they may wipe
away the stigma of being "bloomin' non-combatants."

In the intervals of showing us how that stain was completely removed,
Mr. Kipling gives us not merely one of the most thrilling and effective
battles in fiction, but a singularly delicate portrait of two grubby
little souls turned white and splendid by an element of native
greatness. It would be difficult to point to a page of modern English
more poignant than that which describes how "the only acting-drummers
who were took along," and--left behind, moved forward across the pass
alone to the enemy's front, and sounded on drum and fife the return of
the regiment to duty. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of the
whole story is that a record of shocking British retreat and failure is
so treated as to flatter in its tenderest susceptibilities the pride of
British patriotism.

_1891._

AN ELECTION AT THE ENGLISH ACADEMY

An Election at the English Academy

ATHENÆUM CLUB, PALL MALL, S.W.

TO ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, R.E.A., Samoa

DEAR MR. STEVENSON,--Last night I think that even you must
have regretted being a beachcomber. Even the society of your friend
Ori-a-Ori and the delights of kava and bread-fruit can hardly make up
to you for what you lost in Piccadilly. It was the first occasion, as
you are aware, upon which we have been called upon to fill up a vacancy
in the Forty. You know, long before this letter reaches you, that we
have already lost one of our original members. Poor Kinglake! I thought
at the time that it was a barren honour, but it was one which his fame
imperatively demanded. I can't say I knew him: a single introduction,
a few gracious words in a low voice, a grave and sad presence--that
is all I retain of him personally. I shall know more when our new
Academician has to deliver the eulogium on his predecessor. What an
intellectual treat it will be!

We had a splendid gathering. Do you recollect that when the papers
discussed us, before our foundation, one thing they said was that
there never would be a decent attendance? I must confess our
business meetings have been rather sparsely filled up. Besant is
invariably there, Lecky generally, a few others. There has always
been a quorum--not much more. But between you and me and those other
palms--the feathery palms of your cabin--there has not been much
business to transact; not much more than might have been left to
assiduous Mr. Robinson, our paid secretary. But last night the clan was
all but complete. There were thirty-seven of us, nobody missing but Mr.
Ruskin and yourself. Ruskin, by the way, wrote a letter to be read at
the meeting, and then sent on to the _Pall Mall Gazette_--so diverting!
I must cut it out and enclose it. But his style, if this is to be taken
as an example, is not quite what it was.[2]

Well, I am still so excited that I hardly know where to begin. To
me, a real country bumpkin, the whole thing was such an occasion!
Such a _social_ occasion! I must begin from the beginning. I came
all the way up from Luxilian, my green uniform, with the golden
palm-shoots embroidered on it, safely packed in my portmanteau under my
dress-clothes. To my great annoyance the children had been wearing it
in Christmas charades. My dear wife, ay me, has so little firmness of
character. By-the-by, I hope you wear yours on official occasions in
Samoa? The whole costume, I should fancy, must be quite in a Polynesian
taste. I was more "up" in the candidates and their characteristics
than you would expect. Ah! I know you think me rather a Philistine--but
can an Academician be a Philistine? That is a question that might be
started when next the big gooseberry season begins. I was "up" in the
candidates because, as good luck would have it, Sala had been spending
a week with me in the country. Delightful companion, but scarcely
fitted for rural pleasures. He mentioned such a great number of eminent
literary persons whom I had never heard of--mostly rather occasional
writers, I gathered. He has an extraordinarily wide circle, I find:
it makes me feel quite the Country Mouse. He did not seem to know
much about Gardiner, it is true, but then he could tell me all that
Hardy had written--or pretty nearly all; and, of course, as you know,
Gardiner is my own hobby.

The moment I got to Paddington I foolishly began looking hither and
thither for fellow-"immortals." Rather absurd, but not so absurd as
you might suppose, for there, daintily stepping out of a first-class
carriage, whom should I see but Max Müller. I scarcely know him, and
should not have ventured to address him, but he called out: "Ah! my
dear friend, we come, I suspect, on the same interesting, the same
patriotic errand!" I had felt a few qualms of conscience about my own
excitement in the election; we are so quiet at Luxilian that we can
scarcely measure the relative importance of events. But Max Müller
completely reassured me. It was delightful to me to see how seriously
he regarded the event. "Europe," he said, "is not inattentive to such
a voice as the unanimity of the English Academy may--may wield." I
could not help smiling at the last word, and reflecting how carelessly
the most careful of us professional writers expresses himself in
conversation. But his enthusiasm was very beautiful, and I found myself
more elevated than ever. "It is permitted to us," he went on, "to
whisper among ourselves what the world must not hear--the unthinking
world--that the social status of English Academician adds not a
little dignity to literature. One hopes that, whoever may be added
to our number to-night, the social----eh?" I had formulated just the
same feeling myself. "Only in so far," he went on, "as is strictly
consistent with the interests of literature and scholarship--of course?
Good-bye!" and he left me with an impression that he wanted to vote for
both candidates.

There was a little shopping I had to do in Regent Street, after I
had left my costume at the Academy, and I called in at Mudie's for a
moment on my way to the British Museum. To give you an idea of the
mental disturbance I was suffering from, I asked the very polite
young man at the counter for my own _Mayors of Woodshire_--you know,
my seventeenth-century book--instead of _The Mayor of Casterbridge_,
which my wife wanted to read. I did not realise my mistake till I saw
the imprint of the Clarendon Press. At last I got to the manuscript
room, made my references, and found that our early dinner hour was
approaching. I walked westward down Oxford Street, enjoying the
animation and colour of the lovely evening, and then, suddenly,
realising what the hour was, turned and took a hansom to the Athenæum.

Who should meet me in the vestibule but Seeley? Less and less often
do I find my way to Cambridge, and I hesitated about addressing him,
although I used to know him so well. He was buried in a reverie,
and slowly moving to the steps. I suppose I involuntarily slackened
my speed also, and he looked up. He was most cordial, and almost
immediately began to talk to me about those notes on the commercial
relations of the Woodshire ports with Poland which I printed in the
_English Historical_ two (or perhaps three) years ago. I daresay you
never heard of them. I promised to send him some transcripts I have
since made of the harbour laws of Luxilian itself--most important.
I longed to ask Seeley whether we might be sure of his support for
Gardiner, but I hardly liked to do so, he seemed so much more absorbed
in the past. I took for granted it was all right, and when we parted,
as he left the Club, he said, "We meet later on this evening, I
suppose?" and that was his only reference to the election.

I am hardly at home yet at the Athenæum, and I was therefore delighted
to put myself under Lecky's wing. I soon saw that quite a muster of
Academicians was preparing to dine, for when we entered the Coffee Room
we found Mr. Walter Besant already seated, and before we could join him
Mr. Black and Mr. Herbert Spencer came in together and approached us.
We had two small tables placed together, and just as we were sitting
down, Lord Lytton, who was so extremely kind to me in Paris last autumn
when I left my umbrella in the Eiffel Tower, made his appearance. We
all seemed studiously to make no reference, at first, to the great
event of the day, while Mr. Spencer diverted us with several anecdotes
which he had just brought from a family in the country--not at all, of
course, of a puerile description, but throwing a singular light upon
the development of infant mind. After this the conversation flagged a
little. I suppose we were all thinking of the same thing. I was quite
relieved when a remark of Lecky's introduced the general topic.

Our discussion began by Lord Lytton's giving us some very interesting
particulars of the election of Pierre Loti (M. Viaud) into the French
Academy last week, and of the social impression produced by these
contests. I had no idea of the pushing, the intriguing, the unworthy
anxiety which are shown by some people in Paris who wish to be of the
Forty. Lord Lytton says that there is a story by M. Daudet which,
although it is petulant and exaggerated, gives a very graphic picture
of the seamy side of the French Academy. I must read this novel, for I
feel that we, as a new body destined to wield a vast influence in this
country, ought to be forewarned. I ventured to say that I did not think
that English people, with our honest and wholesome traditions, and the
blessings of a Protestant religion, would be in any danger of falling
into these excesses. Nobody responded to this; I am afraid the London
writers are dreadfully cynical, and Black remarked that we six, at all
events, were poachers turned inside out. They laughed at this, and I
was quite glad when the subject was changed.

Lord Lytton asked Mr. Besant whether he was still as eager as ever
about his Club of Authors, or whether he considered that the English
Academy covered the ground. He replied that he had wholly relinquished
that project for the present. His only wish had been to advocate union
among authors, on a basis of mutual esteem and encouragement, and
he thought that the Academy would be quite enough to do that, if it
secured for itself the building which is now being talked about, as
a central point for consultation on all matters connected with the
literary life and profession. But this notion did not seem to command
itself to Mr. Spencer, who said that it seemed to him that the Forty
were precisely those whom success or the indulgence of the public had
raised above the need or the desire of consultation. "I am very glad
to have the pleasure of playing a game of billiards with you, Mr.
Besant, but why should I consult you about my writings? I conceive that
the duty of our Academy is solely to insist on a public recognition of
the dignity of literature, and that if we go a step beyond that aim, we
prepare nothing but snares for our feet."

"Whom, then, do you propose," continued Lecky to Besant, "to summon to
your consultations?"

"Surely," was the reply, "any respectable authors."

"Outsiders, then," said Mr. Spencer, "a few possible and a multitude of
impossible candidates?"

"Female writers as well as male?" asked Black; "are we to have the
literary Daphne at our conversaziones--

     _With legs toss'd high on her sophee she sits,_
       _Vouchsafing audience to contending wits?_

How do you like that prospect, Lecky?"

"But poorly, I must confess. We have tiresome institutions enough
in London without adding to them a sort of Ptolemaic Mouseion, for
us to strut about on the steps of, in our palm-costume, attended by
dialectical ladies and troops of intriguing pupils. Though that,
I am sure," he added courteously, "is the last thing our friend
Besant desires, yet I conceive it would tend to be the result of such
consultation."

"What then," said the novelist, "is to be the practical service of the
English Academy to life and literature?"

At this we all put on a grave and yet animated expression, for
certainly, to each of us, this was a very important consideration.

"Putting on one side," began Mr. Spencer, "the social advantage, the
unquestionable dignity and importance given to individual literary
accomplishment at a time when the purer parts of writing--I mean no
disrespect to you novelists--are greatly neglected in the general
hurly-burly; putting on one side this function of the English Academy,
there remains, of course----"

But, at this precise moment, when I was literally hanging on the lips
of our eminent philosopher, the door opened with a considerable noise
of gaiety, and Mr. Arthur Balfour entered, in company with a gentleman,
who was introduced to me presently as Mr. Andrew Lang.

"Two more Academicians, and this time neither novelists nor
philosophers," said Black.

They sat down close to us, so that the conversation was still general.

"We were discussing the Academy," said Lord Lytton. "And we," replied
Mr. Balfour, "were comparing notes about rackets. Lang tells me he has
found a complete description of the game in one of the Icelandic sagas."

"Played with a shuttlecock," said Mr. Lang, throwing himself back
with a gesture of intense fatigue. "By the way, when we get to B in
our Academy dictionary, I will write the article _battledore_. It is
Provençal, I believe; but one must look up Skeat."

"We shall be very old, I am afraid, before we reach letter B," I
remarked, "shall we not?"

"Oh! no," said Mr. Lang, "we shall fire away like fun. All we have to
do is to crib our definitions out of Murray."

"I hardly think that," said Mr. Besant; "we seem to have precious
little to occupy ourselves with, but our dictionary at least you must
leave us."

We talked this over a little, and the general opinion seemed to be that
it would turn out to be more an alphabetical series of monographs on
the history of our language than a dictionary in the ordinary sense.
And who was to have the courage to start it, no one seemed able to
guess.

A general conversation then began, which was of not a little interest
to me. The merits of our two candidates were warmly, but temperately
discussed. Everybody seemed to feel that we ought to have them both
among us; that our company would still be incomplete if one was
elected. Black suggested that some public-spirited Academician should
perform the Happy Despatch, so as to supply the convenience of two
vacancies. Lord Lytton reminded us that we were doing, on a small
scale, what the French Academy itself did for a few years,--from the
election of Guizot to that of Labiche--namely, meeting in private to
wrangle over the merits of the candidates. We laughed, and set to with
greater zeal, I painting Gardiner in rosier colours as Besant advanced
the genius of Hardy.

While this was going on Sir Frederick Leighton joined us, listening
and leaning in one of his Olympian attitudes. "I find," he said at
last, "that I am able to surprise you. You are not aware that there is
a third candidate." "A third candidate?" we all exclaimed. "Yes," he
said; "before the hour was too far advanced yesterday, our secretary
received the due notice from his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury."
"Ah! you mean for your own Academy," some one said; "as chaplain in the
room of the poor Archbishop of York?" "No," Sir Frederick answered,
smiling, "as a candidate for _our_ Academy, the English Academy." (And,
indeed, I recollected that Leighton was one of our original members. I
cannot quite recall upon what literary grounds, but he is a charming
person, and a great social acquisition.)

There was a pause at this unexpected announcement. "I am sorry," said
Mr. Balfour at last, "that the Archbishop, whom I greatly esteem and
admire, should have laid himself open to this rebuff. We cannot admit
him, and yet how extremely painful to reject him. He has scarcely more
claim to belong to this Academy than I have, and----" At this we all,
very sincerely, murmured our expostulation, and Lord Lytton, leaning
across, said: "My dear Arthur, you are our Haussonville!" "I am afraid
I am more likely," he replied, "to be your Audriffet-Pasquier. But
here I am, and it was none of my seeking. I am, at least, determined
not to use what fortieth-power I have for the election of any but the
best purely literary candidates." There was no direct reply to this,
and presently we all got up and separated to prepare for the election,
each of us manifestly disturbed by this unexpected news.

As I was going out of the Club, I met Jebb, whom I was very glad to
greet. I used to know him well, but I go so seldom to Cambridge in
these days that I can scarcely have seen him since he took his doctor's
degree in letters, which must be seven or eight years ago, when I
came up to see my own boy get his B.A. He was quite unchanged, and as
cordial as ever. The night was so clear that we decided to walk, and,
as we passed into Pall Mall, the moonlight suddenly flooded the street.

"How the nightingales must be singing at Luxilian," I cried.

"And that nest of singing-birds with whom I saw you dining," said Jebb,
"how did they entertain you?"

"The best company in the world," I replied; "and yet----! Perhaps
Academicians talk better in twos and ones than _en masse_. I thought
the dinner might have been more brilliant, and it certainly might have
been more instructive."

"They were afraid of one another, no doubt," said the Professor; "they
were afraid of you. But how could it have been more instructive?"

"I was in hopes that I should hear from all these accomplished men
something definite about the aims of the Academy, its functions in
practical life--what the use of it is to be, in fact."

"Had they no ideas to exchange on that subject? Did they not dwell on
the social advantages it gives to literature? Why, my dear friend,
between ourselves, the election of a new member to an Academy
constituted as ours is, so restricted in numbers, so carefully weeded
of all questionable elements, is in itself the highest distinction ever
yet placed within the reach of English literature. In fact, it is the
Garter."

"But," I pursued, "are we not in danger of thinking too much of the
social matter? Are we not framing a tradition which, if it had existed
for three hundred years, would have excluded Defoe, Bunyan, Keats, and
perhaps Shakespeare himself?"

"Doubtless," Jebb answered, "but we are protected against such folly
by the high standard of our candidates. Hardy, Gardiner--who could be
more unexceptionable? who could more eminently combine the qualities we
seek?"

"You are not aware, then," I said, "that a third candidate is before
us?"

"No! Who?"

"The Archbishop of Canterbury."

"Ah!" he exclaimed, and we walked on together in silence.

At the door of the Academy Jebb left me, "for a moment or two,"
he said, and proceeded up Piccadilly. I ascended the steps of our
new building, and passed into the robing-room. Whom should I meet
there, putting on his green palm-shoots, but Mr. Leslie Stephen. I
was particularly glad to have a moment's interview with him, for I
wanted to tell him of my great discovery, a fifth Nicodemus, Abbot
of Luxilian, in the twelfth century. Extraordinary thing! Of course,
I imagined that he would be delighted about it, although he has not
quite reached N yet, but I can't say that he seemed exhilarated. "Five
successive Nicodemuses," I said, "what do you think of that?" He
murmured something about "all standing naked in the open air." I fancy
he is losing his interest in the mediæval biographies. However, before
I could impress upon him what a "find" it is, Mr. Gladstone came in
with the Bishop of Oxford, and just then Sala called me out to repeat
a story to me which he had just heard at some club. I thought it good
at the time--something about "Manipur" and "many poor"--but I have
forgotten how it went.

Upstairs, in the great reception-room, the company was now rapidly
gathering. You may imagine how interesting I found it. Everywhere knots
of men were forming, less, I felt, to discuss the relative claims of
Hardy and Gardiner than to deplore the descent of the Archbishop into
the lists. The Duke of Argyll, who courteously recognised me, deigned
to refer to this topic of universal interest. "I would have done much,"
he said, "to protect him from the annoyance of this defeat. A prince of
the Anglican Church, whom we all respect and admire! I fear he will not
have more than--than--perhaps _one_ vote. Alas! alas!"

Various little incidents caught my eye. Poor Professor Freeman,
bursting very hastily into the room, bounced violently against Mr.
Froude, who happened to be standing near the door. I don't think Mr.
Freeman can have realised how roughly he struck him, for he did not
turn or stop, but rushed across the room to the Bishop of Oxford, with
whom he was soon in deep consultation about Gardiner, no doubt; I did
not disturb them. Lord Salisbury, with pendant arms, gently majestic,
stood on the hearth-rug talking to an elderly gentleman of pleasing
aspect, in spectacles. I heard some one say something about "the other
uncrowned king of Brentford," but I did not understand the allusion. I
suppose the gentleman was some supporter of the Ministry, but I did not
catch his name.

Lecky was so kind as to present me to Professors Huxley and Tyndall,
neither of whom, I believe, ought to have been out on so fresh a spring
night; neither, I hope to hear this evening, is the worse for such
imprudence. A curious incident now occurred, for as we were chatting,
Huxley suddenly said, in a low voice: "Gladstone has his eye upon you,
Tyndall." The professor flounced about at this in a great agitation,
and replied, so loudly that I feared it would be generally heard--"He
had better not attempt to address me. I should utter six withering
syllables, and then turn my back upon him. Gladstone, indeed, the old
----." But at this moment, to my horror, Mr. Gladstone glided across
the floor with his most courtly and dignified air, and held out his
hand. "Ah! Professor Tyndall, how long it seems since those beautiful
days on the Bel Alp." There was a little bridling and hesitating, and
then Tyndall took the proffered hand. "I was wandering," said the
Grand Old Man, "without a guide, and now I have found one, the best
possible. I am----" "Oh!" broke in the professor, "I thought it would
be so. I am more delighted than----" "Pardon me," interrupted Mr.
Gladstone with an exquisite deprecation, "I am mainly interested at the
moment in the Sirens. I am lost, as I said, without a guide, and I have
found one. Your experiments with the sirens on the North Foreland--

     [Greek: hieisai opa kallimon],--"

and then, arm in arm, the amicable and animated pair retired to a
corner of the room.

Impossible to describe to you all the incidents of this delightful
gathering. In one corner the veteran Dr. Martineau was seated,
conversing with Mr. Henry Irving. I was about to join them when I was
attracted by a sharp and elastic step on the stairs, and saw that
Lord Wolseley, entering the room, and glancing quickly round, walked
straight to a group at my left hand, which was formed around Mr. George
Meredith.

"For whom must I vote, Mr. Meredith?" he said. "I place myself in your
hands. Is it to be the Archbishop of Canterbury?"

"Nay," replied Mr. Meredith, smiling, "for the prelate I shake you out
a positive negative. The customary guests at our academic feast--well;
poet, historian, essayist, say novelist or journalist, all welcome
on grounds of merit royally acknowledged and distinguished. But this
portent of a crozier, nodding familiarly to us with its floriated tin
summit, a gilt commodity, definitely hostile to literature--never
in the world. How Europe will boom with cachinnation when it learns
that we have invented the Academy of English Letters for the more
excellent glorification of mere material episcopacy, a radiant excess
of iridescence thrown by poetry upon prelacy, heart's blood of books
shed merely to stain more rosily the _infulæ_ and _vittæ_ of a mitre. I
shall be tempted into some colloquial extravagance if I dwell on this
theme, however; I must chisel on Blackmore yonder for floral wit, and
so will, with permission, float out of your orbit by a bowshot."

Dr. Jowett now made his appearance, in company with Mr. Swinburne;
and they were followed by a gentleman in a rough coat and picturesque
blue shirt, who attracted my attention by this odd costume, and by his
very fine head, with flowing beard and hair. I was told it was the
poet Morris; not at all how I had pictured the author of _The Epic of
Hades_. And finally, to our infinite delight, Lord Tennyson himself
came in, leaning on Jebb's arm, and we felt that our company was
complete.

We clustered at last into our inner council-room, at the door of which
the usher makes us sign our names. What a page last night's will be
for the enjoyment of posterity! We gradually settled into our places;
Lord Tennyson in his presidential chair, Lecky in his post of permanent
secretary; our excellent paid secretary hurrying about with papers,
and explaining to us the routine. It seemed more like a club than ever
at that moment, our charming Academy, with the best of all possible
society. As I sat waiting for business to begin, my thoughts ran
more and more upon the unfortunate candidature of the Archbishop. I
reflected on what the Duke of Argyll had said, the wretchedness of the
_one_ vote. He should, at least, have two, I determined; and I asked
my neighbour, Mr. Frederic Harrison, if he knew what Dr. Benson had
published. "I have an idea," he replied, "that he is the author of a
work entitled _The Cathedral: its Necessary Place in the Life and Work
of an Academy_."

Our proceedings were interrupted for a moment by the entrance of
Cardinal Manning, who desired to be permitted, before the election
began, to add to the names of the candidates that of Mr. W. T. Stead.
At this there was a general murmur, and Mr. Lang muttered: "If it comes
to that, I propose Bridge" (or "Brydges"--I could not catch the name).
The Cardinal continued: "I know I have a seconder for him in my eminent
friend opposite." We all looked across at Archdeacon Farrar, who
objected, with considerable embarrassment: "No, no; when I said that,
I did not understand what the final list of candidates was to be. I
must really decline." The Cardinal then turned to Mr. John Morley, who
shook his head. "The Academy will have more need of Mr. Stead ten years
hence, perhaps, than it has now." And with that the incident terminated.

The moment had at last arrived, and we expected a prolonged session.
By a system of successive ballotings, we have to work on until one
candidate has a positive majority; this may take a long time, and may
even fail to be accomplished. The President rang his bell, and the
names were pronounced by the secretary:

     EDWARD WHITE BENSON, Archbishop of Canterbury,

     SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER, and

     THOMAS HARDY.

As soon as he had recorded his vote, our venerable President left us;
the remainder of the company awaited the result with eager curiosity.
The general opinion seemed to be that the votes for Gardiner and Hardy
would prove pretty equal, and I began to feel a little qualm at having
thrown mine away. But when Mr. Gladstone, taking the President's chair,
rang his bell, and announced the result of the voting, it is not too
much to say that we were stupefied. The votes were thus divided:

     The Archbishop of Canterbury    19
     Gardiner                         8
     Hardy                            7
     Blank votes                      3

There was, accordingly, no need for a second ballot, since the
Archbishop had secured a positive majority of the votes. I felt a
little uncomfortable when I reflected that my vote, if loyally given
to Gardiner, would have necessitated a reopening of the matter. Never
mind. Better as it is. The election is a very good one, from a social
point of view particularly.

The company dispersed rather hurriedly. On the stairs, where Mr. Arthur
Balfour was offering his arm to Lord Selborne, I heard the latter say,
"We may congratulate ourselves on a most excellent evening's work, may
we not?" Mr. Balfour shook his head, but I did not catch his reply; he
seemed to have lost something of his previous good spirits.

This morning the daily papers are in raptures, the Gladstonians as much
as the Unionists. A great honour, they all say, done to the profession
of literature. "Quite a social triumph," the _Morning Post_ remarks;
"a bloodless victory in the campaign of letters"--rather happy, is it
not? But one of those young men of the _National Observer_, who was
waiting for me outside the Academy last night, and kindly volunteered
to see me home to the hotel--where he was even good enough to partake
of refreshment--was rather severe. "Not a single _writer_ in the d----d
gang of you," he said. A little coarse, I thought; and not positively
final, as criticism.

I am,

Yours very faithfully,

---------------------

_1891._

FOOTNOTE:

[2] MY DEAR SIR,--What in the Devil's name should I do at your
assemblage of notorieties? I neither care nor wish to care whom you
elect. The only _Gardiner_ I ever heard of was Henry's Bloody Bishop.
If "Kiss me _Hardy_" came before us, it would be worth while for the
only true Tory left in England to vote for him; but he has been with
God this good half century. My £100 a year as Academician--recoverable,
they tell me, in case of lapsed payment, from Her Majesty herself--I
spend in perfecting my collection of the palates of molluscs, who keep
their inward economy as clean as the deck of a ship of the line with
stratagems beautiful and manifold exceedingly. Few of your Academicians
show an apparatus half so handsome when they open their mouths. How
unlike am I, by the way, in my retirement, from Bismarck across
the waters, who squeaks like a puppy-dog on his road to the final
parliamentary sausage-making machine of these poor times. Would it not
be well for your English Academy, instead of these election follies,
to bestir itself with a copy of _The Crown of Wild Olive_ for his
heart's betterment? But keep your Lydian modes; I hold my Dorian.--Ever
faithfully yours, JOHN RUSKIN.

APPENDICES

TENNYSON--AND AFTER?

When this essay first appeared in _The New Review_, the scepticism it
expressed with regard to the universal appreciation of the poet was
severely censured in one or two newspapers. On the other hand, the
accomplished author of _Thyrza_ and _New Grub Street_ obliged me with
a letter of very great interest, which fully confirmed my doubts. Mr.
Gissing has kindly permitted me to print his letter here. His wide
experience among the poor makes his opinion on this matter one which
cannot lightly be passed by:

     "_Nov. 20, 1892._

     "SIR,--Will you pardon me if I venture to say with what
     satisfaction I have read your remarks about Tennyson in _The New
     Review_, which has only just come into my hands?

     "The popular mind is my study, and I know that Tennyson's song
     no more reached it than it reached the young-eyed cherubim. Nor
     does _any_ song reach the populace, rich and poor, unless, as you
     suggest, it be such as appears in _The Referee_.

     "After fifteen years' observation of the poorer classes of
     English folk, chiefly in London and the south, I am pretty well
     assured that, whatever civilising agencies may be at work among
     the democracy, poetry is not one of them. Reading, of one kind
     or another, is universal; study, serious and progressive, is no
     longer confined to the ranks that enjoy a liberal education; but
     the populace, the industrial and trading masses, not merely remain
     without interest in poetry, but do not so much as understand what
     the term poetry means. In other intellectual points, the grades of
     unlettered life are numerous; as regards appreciation of verse,
     the People are one. From the work-girl, with her penny novelette,
     to the artisan who has collected a little library, the natural
     inclination of all who represent their class is to neglect verse
     as something exotic, something without appeal to their instincts.
     They either do not read it at all--the common case--or (with
     an exception to be noticed) they take it as a quaint variety
     of prose, which custom has consecrated to religion, to the
     affections, and to certain phases of facetiousness.

     "In London, through all orders of society below the liberally
     educated, it is a most exceptional thing to meet with a person who
     seeks for verse as verse; who recognises the name of any greater
     poet not hackneyed in the newspapers, or who even distantly
     apprehends the nature of the poet's art. In the north of England,
     where more native melody is found, self-taught readers of poetry
     are, I believe, not so rare; but they must still be greatly the
     exception. As to the influence of board-schools, one cannot doubt
     that the younger generation are even less inclined to a taste for
     poetry than their fathers. Some elderly people, in Sunday languor,
     take up a book of verse with which they have been familiar since
     early days (Mrs. Hemans, Eliza Cook, Montgomery, Longfellow);
     whereas their children cannot endure printed matter cut into
     rhythmic lengths, unless the oddity solicit them in the columns of
     a paper specially addressed to their intelligence.

     "At the instigation of those zealous persons who impress upon
     shopkeepers, clerks and artisans, the duty of 'self-culture
     in leisure hours,' there undoubtedly goes on some systematic
     reading of verse--the exceptional case to which I alluded. It
     is undertaken in a resolute spirit by pallid men, who study the
     poet just as they study the historian, the economist, the master
     of physical science, and their pathetic endeavour is directed by
     that species of criticism which demands--exclusively--from poetry
     its 'message for our time.' Hence, no doubt, the conviction of
     many who go down to the great democratic deep that multitudes
     are hungering for the poet's word. Here, as in other kindred
     matters, the hope of such enthusiasts arises from imperfect
     understanding. Not in lecture-hall and classroom can the mind of
     the people be discovered. Optimism has made a fancy picture of
     the representative working-man, ludicrous beyond expression to
     those who know him in his habitat; and the supremely ludicrous
     touch is that which attributes to him a capacity for enjoying pure
     literature.

     "I have in mind a typical artisan family, occupying a house
     to themselves, the younger members grown up and, in their own
     opinion, very far above those who are called 'the poor.' They
     possess perhaps a dozen volumes: a novel or two, some bound
     magazines, a few musty works of popular instruction or amusement;
     all casually acquired and held in no value. Of these people I am
     able confidently to assert (as the result of specific inquiry)
     that they have in their abode no book of verse--that they never
     read verse when they can avoid it--that among their intimates
     is no person who reads or wishes to read verse--that they never
     knew of any one buying a book of verse--and that not one of them,
     from childhood upwards, ever heard a piece of verse read aloud
     at the fireside. In this respect, as in many others, the family
     beyond doubt is typical. They stand between the brutal and the
     intelligent of working-folk. There must be an overwhelming number
     of such households through the land, representing a vast populace
     absolutely irresponsive to the word of any poet.

     "The custodian of a Free Library in a southern city informs me
     that 'hardly once in a month' does a volume of verse pass over
     his counter; that the exceptional applicant (seeking Byron or
     Longfellow) is generally 'the wife of a tradesman'; and that an
     offer of verse to man or woman who comes simply for 'a book' is
     invariably rejected; 'they won't even look at it.'

     "What else could one have anticipated? To love poetry is a boon of
     nature, most sparingly bestowed; appreciation of the poet's art is
     an outcome of studious leisure. Even an honest liking for verse,
     without discernment, depends upon complex conditions of birth,
     breeding, education. No one seeks to disparage the laborious
     masses on the ground of their incapacity for delights necessarily
     the privilege of a few. It was needless folly to pretend that,
     because one or two of Tennyson's poems became largely known
     through popular recitation, therefore Tennyson was dear to the
     heart of the people, a subject of their pride whilst he lived, of
     their mourning when he departed. My point is that _no_ poet holds
     this place in the esteem of the English lower orders.

     "Tennyson? The mere price of his works is prohibitive to people
     who think a shilling a very large outlay for printed paper. Half
     a dozen of his poems at most would obtain a hearing from the
     average uneducated person. We know very well the kind of home in
     which Tennyson is really beloved for the sake of perhaps half his
     work--and that not the better half. Between such households and
     the best discoverable in the world of which I speak, lies a chasm
     of utter severance. In default of other tests, Tennyson might be
     used as a touch-stone to distinguish the last of gentle-folk from
     the first of the unprivileged.

     "On the day of his funeral, I spoke of the dead poet to a live
     schoolmaster, a teacher of poor children, and he avowed to me,
     quite simply, that he 'couldn't stand poetry--except a few hymns;'
     that he had thoroughly disliked it ever since the day, when as a
     schoolboy, he had to learn by heart portions of _The Lady of the
     Lake_. I doubt whether this person could have named three pieces
     of Tennyson's writing. He spoke with the consciousness of being
     supported by general opinion in his own world.

     "Some days before, I was sitting in a public room, where two men,
     retired shopkeepers, exchanged an occasional word as they read
     the morning's news. 'A great deal here about Lord Tennyson,' said
     one. The 'Lord' was significant; I listened anxiously for his
     companion's reply. 'Ah--yes.' The man moved uneasily, and added
     at once: 'What do you think about this long-distance ride?' In
     that room (I frequented it on successive days with this object)
     not a syllable did I hear regarding Tennyson save the sentence
     faithfully recorded. This was in the south of England; perhaps it
     could not have happened in the north.

     "As a boy, I at one time went daily to school by train. It
     happened once that I was alone in the carriage with a commercial
     traveller; my Horace was open before me, and it elicited a remark
     from the man of samples, who spoke with the accent of that
     northern county, and certainly did not belong to the educated
     class. After a word or two, he opened his bag, and took out an
     ancient copy, battered, thumbed, pencilled, of--Horatius Flaccus.
     Without this, he told me, he never travelled. From a bare
     smattering obtained at school, he had pursued the study of Latin;
     Horace was dear to him; he indicated favourite odes----

     "Everywhere there are the many and the few. What of the multitude
     in higher spheres? Their leisure is ample; literature lies thick
     about them. It would be amusing to know how many give one hour a
     month to the greater poets....

     "Believe me, Sir, yours faithfully,

     "GEORGE GISSING.

     "To Edmund Gosse, Esq."

II

M. MALLARMÉ AND SYMBOLISM

It was with not a little hesitation that I undertook to unravel a
corner of the mystic web, woven of sunbeams and electrical threads,
in which the poet of _L'Après-Midi d'un Faune_ conceals himself from
curious apprehension. There were a dozen chances of my interpretation
being wrong, and scarcely one of its being right. My delight therefore
may be conceived when I received a most gracious letter from the mage
himself; Apollonius was not more surprised when, by a fortunate chance,
one of his prophecies came true. I quote from this charming paper of
credentials, which proceeds to add some precious details:--

"Votre étude est un miracle de divination.... Les poëtes seuls ont le
droit de parler; parce qu'avant coup, ils savent. Il y a, entre toutes,
une phrase, où vous écartez tous voiles et désignez la chose avec une
clairvoyance de diamant, le voici: 'His aim ... is to use words in
such harmonious combination as will suggest to the reader a mood or a
condition _which is not mentioned in the text_, but is nevertheless
paramount in the poet's mind at the moment of composition.'

"Tout est là. Je fais de la Musique, et appelle ainsi non celle qu'on
peut tirer du rapprochement euphonique des mots, cette première
condition va de soi; mais l'au delà magiquement produit par certaines
dispositions de la parole, où celle-ci ne reste qu'à l'êtat de moyen de
communication matérielle avec le lecteur comme les touches du piano.
Vraiment entre les lignes et au-dessus du regard cela se passe, en
toute pureté, sans l'entremise de cordes à boyaux et de pistons comme
à l'orchestre, qui est déjà industriel; mais c'est la même chose que
l'orchestre, sauf que littérairement ou silencieusement. Les poëtes
de tous les temps n'ont jamais fait autrement et il est aujourd'hui,
voilà tout, amusant d'en avoir conscience. Employez Musique dans le
sens grec, au fond signifiant Idée au rythme entre les rapports; là,
plus divine que dans son expression publique ou Symphonique. Très mal
dit, en causant, mais vous saisissez ou plutôt aviez saisi toute au
long de cette belle étude qu'il faut garder telle quelle et intacte.
Je ne vous chicane que sur l'obscurité: non, cher poëte, excepté par
maladresse ou gaucherie je ne suis pas obscur, du moment qu'on me lit
pour y chercher ce que j'énonce plus haut, ou la manifestation d'un
art qui se sert--mettons incidemment, j'en sais la cause profonde--du
langage: et le deviens, bien sûr! si l'on se trompe et croit ouvrir le
journal....--Votre

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.

_Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. _London and Edinburgh_

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

_In one volume, crown 8vo, red buckram, gilt top, 7s. 6d._

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THE SECRET OF NARCISSE,

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LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN.

Transcriber's note:

One unpaired double quotation mark could not be corrected with
confidence.