eed.

Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, before
we have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful man
of letters. Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out of
the jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men are
working and building and fighting, come really out of the study of an
expert craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care.
This may seem an unnecessary warning. The intelligent reader will
protest that, since Mr Kipling writes books, it does not seem very
necessary to deduce that he is a man of letters. It is true that no
such warning would be necessary in the case of most writers of books.
It would be pure loss of time, for example, to begin a study of the
work of Mr Henry James by asserting that Mr Henry James was a man of
letters. But Mr Kipling is in rather a different case. The majority
of readers with whom one discusses Mr Kipling's works are sometimes far
astray, simply because they have not realised that Mr Kipling is as
utterly a man of letters as Mr Henry James, that he lives as completely
the life of fancy and meditation as William Blake or Francis Thompson.
Mr Kipling does not write tales out of the mere fullness of his life in
many continents and his talk with all kinds of men. He is not to be
understood as a man singular only in his experience, unloading
anecdotes from a crowded life, excelling in emphasis and reality by
virtue of things actually seen and done. On the contrary, Mr Kipling
writes tales because he is a writer.

Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and been
more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his
literary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any the
less devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that he
is one of the craftiest authors who ever lived. He is more crafty than
Stevenson. He often lives by the word alone--the word picked and
polished. That he has successfully disguised this fact from many of
his admirers is only a further proof of his literary cunning. Mr
Kipling often uses words with great skill to create in his readers the
impression that words matter to him hardly at all. He will work as
hard as the careful sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawness
and crudity; and thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is a
literary man. They are content simply to listen to a man who has