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Updated: May 2, 2025
I was soon to be undeceived, however, for the next morning's mail brought to my home a dozen packages from my best "consumers," containing the maudlin frivolings of this this this well, there is no polite word to describe him in any known tongue. I shall have to study the Aryan language or Kipling to find an epithet strong enough to apply to this especial case.
Rudyard Kipling says, is another story. The story that I will tell now is that of my brief acquaintance with Leech, which began in 1860, and which I had not many opportunities of improving till I met him at Whitby in the autumn of 1864 a memorable autumn for me, since I used to forgather with him every day, and have long walks and talks with him and dined with him once or twice at the lodgings where he was staying with his wife and son and daughter all of whom are now dead.
'That's what Kipling says, he said, his eyes brightening, and he quoted some verse about 'Romance bringing up the 9.15'. 'Here's a true tale for you then, I cried, 'and a month from now you can make a novel out of it. Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a lovely yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the minor details.
I'm darned if I think you belong in the medical profession, either. The British army'd suit you." "The what?" "You know Kipling idea riding horseback, head of a column undress uniform colonel's wife making eyes at you leading last hopes and all that." "The British army with Kipling trimmings being out of the question, the original issue is still before us.
Before he left India he had published one book of verse and seven prose collections. Prose. As a master of the modern short story, Kipling stands unsurpassed. His journalistic work helped him to acquire a direct, concentrated style of narrative, to find interest in an astonishing variety of subjects, and to seize on the right details for vivid presentation.
Even Kipling partisans must sometimes wish that Kipling's vision were not so dimmed by the British flag and that he might forget for a time the British soldier he loves so ardently. His writings since 1899 are much more mechanical than his earlier works. He seems, at times, to resort to the orator's superficial tricks in his attempts to attract readers.
Balzac, George Eliot, and Meredith look at life in the large; they try to "see it whole" and to reproduce the chaos of its intricate relations: but Poe, de Maupassant, and Mr. Kipling aim rather to "see steadily" a limited phase of life, to focus their minds upon a single point of experience, and then to depict this point briefly and strikingly.
"Yeast is yeast, and West is West," I said, and was quite surprised at my own cleverness. I hadn't made a remark like that to Andrew in five years. "I see you are acquainted with Kipling," he said. "Oh, yes, every governess is." "Where and whom did you govern?" "I was in New York, with the family of a wealthy stockbroker. There were three children. I used to take them walking in Central Park."
"He cares not how he loiters by the way; he is always ready to beguile his reader with a Milesian story one of those quaint and witty interludes which have travelled the world over and become part, not merely of every literature, but of every life." It is to three of these chance loiterings of this Kipling of Rome in its decadence that we owe the famous stories alluded to above.
Ask Arthur Morrison straight from the East End, or FitzMaurice Kelly fresh from Spain; ask W.B. Blakie preoccupied with the modern development of the printed book, or Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask Kipling steeped in the real, or Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig ask any one of these men and a score besides what Henley's sympathy, Henley's outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth of his judgment and taste and helpfulness may be had.
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