rds, and never so much as
dreamt of giving Tommy a place in my pages. Then comes Kipling, not
knowing him one-half as well in one way, and knowing him a thousand
times better in another way, and makes a noble and beautiful and merited
reputation out of him; shows the man inside the military toggery, and
makes us laugh and cry, and exult with feeling. There was a man in New
South Wales--a shepherd--who went raving mad when he learnt that the
heavy black dust which spoilt his pasture was tin, and that he had waked
and slept for years without discovering the gigantic fortune which was
all about him. I will not go mad, if I can help it, but I do think it
rather hard lines on me that I hadn't the simple genius to see what lay
in Tommy.

A good deal has been said of the occasional coarseness of Kipling's
pages. There are readers who find it offensive, and they have every
right to the expression of their feelings. I confess to having
been startled once or twice, but never in a wholly disagreeable
fashion--never as 'Jude the Obscure' startled. Poor Captain Mayne Reid,
who is still beloved by here and there a schoolboy, wrote a preface to
one of his books--I think 'The Rifle Rangers,' but it is years on years
since I saw it--in order to put forth his defence for the introduction
of an occasional oath or impious expletive in the conversation of his
men of the prairies. He pleaded necessity. It was impossible to portray
his men without it. And he argued that an oath does not soil the mind
'like the clinging immorality of an unchaste episode.' The majority
of Englishmen will agree with the gallant Captain. Kipling is rough
at times, and daring, but he is always clean and honest. There are no
hermaphroditic cravings after sexual excitement in him. He is too much
of a man to care for that kind of thing.

What a benefactor an honest laughter-maker is! Since Dickens there has
been nobody to fill our lungs like Kipling. Is it not better that the
public should have 'My Lord the Elephant' and 'Brugglesmith' to
laugh outright at than that they should be feebly sniggering over the
jest-books begotten on English Dulness by Yankee humour, as they were
eight or nine years ago? That jugful of Cockney sky-blue, with a feeble
dash of Mark Twain in it, which was called 'Three Men in a Boat' was not
a cheerful tipple for a mental bank-holiday, but we poor moderns got no
better till the coming of Kipling. We have a right to be grateful to the
man