t, an author who unloads
upon us a store of memories and experience, that he is only able to do
his finest work as an unchecked and fantastic dreamer. The stories in
which he imposes upon his readers the illusion that he would never have
written books if he had stayed at home, that his stories are the
carelessly flung reminiscences of a full life--these stories are
themselves instances of the skill whereby a cunning author has been
able to conceal from his generation the deep difference between
artifice and inspiration. A crafty author will often employ his best
phrases to describe the thing he has never really seen with the eye of
genius. His manner will be most assured where his matter is the least
authentic. His points will be most effectively made where there is the
least necessity to make them. Mr Kipling, writing as a soldier, is
more a soldier than any soldier who ever lived. Thereby the discerning
reader will infer that Mr Kipling was not born to write as a soldier.
He will know that Mr Kipling is not profoundly and instinctively an
atavistic prophet, because his atavism is more atavistic than the
atavism of the first man who ever was born. He will also realise that
Mr Kipling writes so effectively about India because he ought to be
writing about England and Fairyland and the Jungle. He will realise,
in short, that Mr Kipling is an imaginative man of letters who has
wonderful visions when he stays at home, and who needs all his craft as
an expert literary artificer to persuade his readers that these visions
are not seriously impaired when he ventures abroad.

VIII

THE POEMS

Only the briefest epilogue is necessary concerning Mr Kipling's poetry.
We have concluded as to his prose stories that his best work is in the
pure fancy of _The Jungle Book_, and that we descend thence through his
English tales and his celebration of the work of the world to clever
stories of India and _Soldiers Three_. Upon each of these levels we
meet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once be
said that at all times, except where the rule is proved by the
exception, Mr Kipling's verse is less urgently inspired than his prose.
The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of a
quality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery the
beat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm of
sense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, at
f