dge;
he is merely a man of letters. He has leisure to look around him, he has
the power of making us see what he sees; and, when we have lost India,
when some new power is ruling where we ruled, when our empire has
followed that of the Moguls, future generations will learn from Mr.
Kipling's works what India was under English sway.

It is one of the surprises of literature that these tiny masterpieces in
prose and verse were poured, "as rich men give that care not for their
gifts," into the columns of Anglo-Indian journals. There they were
thought clever and ephemeral--part of the chatter of the week. The
subjects, no doubt, seemed so familiar, that the strength of the
handling, the brilliance of the colour, were scarcely recognised. But
Mr. Kipling's volumes no sooner reached England than the people into
whose hands they fell were certain that here were the beginnings of a new
literary force. The books had the strangeness, the colour, the variety,
the perfume of the East. Thus it is no wonder that Mr. Kipling's repute
grew up as rapidly as the mysterious mango tree of the conjurors. There
were critics, of course, ready to say that the thing was merely a trick,
and had nothing of the supernatural. That opinion is not likely to hold
its ground. Perhaps the most severe of the critics has been a young
Scotch gentleman, writing French, and writing it wonderfully well, in a
Parisian review. He chose to regard Mr. Kipling as little but an
imitator of Bret Harte, deriving his popularity mainly from the novel and
exotic character of his subjects. No doubt, if Mr. Kipling has a
literary progenitor, it is Mr. Bret Harte. Among his earlier verses a
few are what an imitator of the American might have written in India. But
it is a wild judgment which traces Mr. Kipling's success to his use, for
example, of Anglo-Indian phrases and scraps of native dialects. The
presence of these elements is among the causes which have made Englishmen
think Anglo-Indian literature tediously provincial, and India a bore. Mr.
Kipling, on the other hand, makes us regard the continent which was a
bore an enchanted land, full of marvels and magic which are real. There
has, indeed, arisen a taste for exotic literature: people have become
alive to the strangeness and fascination of the world beyond the bounds
of Europe and the United States. But that is only because men of
imagination and literary skill have been the new conquerors--the Cort