and to seize on the right details for vivid
presentation. He was fortunate in discovering in India a new literary
field, in which his genius appears at its best. Some of his early
tales of Indian life are marred by crudeness and by lack of feeling;
but these faults decreased as he matured.

Kipling's stories depend for their interest on incident, not on
analysis. He embodies romantic adventure and action in masterpieces as
different as the terrible tragedy of _The Man Who would be King_
(1888), the tender love story of _Without Benefit of Clergy_ (1890),
and the mystic dream-land of _The Brushwood Boy_ (1895). He specially
enjoyed portraying the English soldier. Perhaps his best-known
characters are the privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, whom we
meet in such tales of mingled comedy and tragedy as _With the Main
Guard_ (1888), _On Greenhow Hill_ (1891), _The Incarnation of Krishna
Mulvaney_ (1891), _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_ (1981).

When Kipling traveled to new lands, he wrote stories of America,
Africa, and the deep sea; but his later tales show an unfortunate
increase in the use of technical terms and a lessening of his former
dash and spontaneity. There are, however, readers who prefer such a
delicate, subtle, story as _They_ (1905), to his earlier masterpieces
of strenuous action.

In _The Jungle Book_ (1894) and _The Second Jungle Book_ (1895),
Kipling has accomplished the greatest of feats,--an original creation.
From the moment the little brown baby, Mowgli, crawls into Mother
Wolf's cave away from Shere Khan, the tiger, until the time for him to
graduate from the jungle, we follow him under the spell of a
fascination different from any that we have known before. The animals
of the jungle have real personalities, from the chattering Bandar-log
to the lumbering kindly Baloo. With all their intense individuality,
they remain animals, each one true to his kind, hating or loving men,
thinking mainly through their instincts, and surpassing human
schoolmasters in teaching Mowgli the great laws of the jungle,--that
obedience is "the head and the hoof of the Law," that nothing was ever
yet lost by silence, that, in the jungle, life and food depend on
keeping one's temper, that no one shall kill for the pleasure of
killing.

[Illustration: MOWGLI AND HIS BROTHERS. _By permission of Century
Company._]

Above all stands the character of Mowgli, the wolf-adopted man-cub,
human and yet brother to the animals.