Life.—­Rudyard Kipling, the youngest of the great Victorians, was born in Bombay, India, in 1865.  His parents were people of culture and artistic training, the father, John Lockwood Kipling, being a recognized authority on Indian art.  Like most English children born in India, Kipling, when very small, was sent to England to escape the fatal Indian heat.  Afterwards in the story Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, Kipling told the tragic experience of two Anglo-Indian children when separated from their parents.  If it is true that this story is largely autobiographical, the separation must have been a trying ordeal in Kipling’s childhood.  Later he spent several years at Westward Ho, Devonshire, in a school conducted mainly for the sons of Indian officials. Stalky and Co., a broadly humorous book of schoolboy life, gives the Kipling of this period, in the character of the “egregious Beetle.”

When only seventeen, he returned to India and immediately began journalistic work.  For seven years, first at Lahore and later at Allahabad, he was busy with the usual hackwork of a small newspaper.  During these impressionable years, from seventeen to twenty-four, he gained his intimate knowledge of the strangely-colored, many-sided Indian life.  His first stories and poems, often written in hot haste, to fill the urgent need of more copy, appeared as waifs and strays in the papers for which he wrote.  A collection of verse, Departmental Ditties, published at Lahore in 1886, was well received; and it was quickly followed by several volumes of short stories.  His ability thus gained early recognition in India.

At the age of twenty-four, he left India for London.  Here his books found a publisher almost at once, and he was hailed as a new literary genius.  His work became so popular that he was able to devote his whole time to writing.  It is doubtful whether any writer since Dickens has received such quick and enthusiastic recognition from all classes of the English-speaking race.  Even the street-car conductors were heard quoting him.

In 1892 he married Miss Caroline Balestier, an American, and afterwards lived for four years at Brattleboro, Vermont.  Later he settled in Sussex, England, whence he has made long journeys to South Africa, Canada, and Egypt, amassing more knowledge of the English “around the Seven Seas.”

Probably the most remarkable feature of Kipling’s career is the early age at which his genius developed.  Before he left India he had published one book of verse and seven prose collections.  By the time he was thirty, he had written The Jungle Books, most of his best short stories, and some of his finest verse.

Prose.—­As a master of the modern short story, Kipling stands unsurpassed.  His journalistic work helped him to acquire a direct, concentrated style of narrative, to find interest in an astonishing variety of subjects, and to seize on the right details for vivid presentation.  He was fortunate in discovering in India a new literary field, in which his genius appears at its best.  Some of his early tales of Indian life are marred by crudeness and by lack of feeling; but these faults decreased as he matured.