seen,
and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to
observe that, if the world with its day's work belongs to Mr Kipling,
it belongs to him only by author's right--that is, by right of
imagination and right of style.

It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary
formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of
_The Light That Failed_, he tries to talk as though there were really
no such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is
pedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of
literary discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the
sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula.
It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than
Tennyson or Walter Scott. Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be
misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's art
is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he
helped to send out of fashion.

A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates
which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement
of his works here to be followed.

Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E.
His intimacy with India was determined at birth. He was educated at
the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in
1882, as assistant editor on _The Civil and Military Gazette_ and _The
Pioneer_. He remained on the staff of _The Pioneer_ for seven years,
and travelled over the five continents. By this time he had learned to
think of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from
Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see something
of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come back
to her from the ends of the earth. The whole of Mr Kipling's literary
biography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a great
traveller who is now inveterately at home.

Perhaps we should also note that Mr Kipling was a literary prodigy.
_Plain Tales from the Hills_ appeared in 1887. Mr Kipling at
twenty-two had shown his quality and had already mapped out in little
his career. In _Plain Tales from the Hills_ there are hints for almost
everything that their author afterwards accomplished. As the book of a
young journalist whose name had not yet been whispered among the
publishers and critics of Lon