Kipling’s stories depend for their interest on incident, not on analysis.  He embodies romantic adventure and action in masterpieces as different as the terrible tragedy of The Man Who would be King (1888), the tender love story of Without Benefit of Clergy (1890), and the mystic dream-land of The Brushwood Boy (1895).  He specially enjoyed portraying the English soldier.  Perhaps his best-known characters are the privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, whom we meet in such tales of mingled comedy and tragedy as With the Main Guard (1888), On Greenhow Hill (1891), The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney (1891), The Courting of Dinah Shadd (1981).

When Kipling traveled to new lands, he wrote stories of America, Africa, and the deep sea; but his later tales show an unfortunate increase in the use of technical terms and a lessening of his former dash and spontaneity.  There are, however, readers who prefer such a delicate, subtle, story as They (1905), to his earlier masterpieces of strenuous action.

In The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), Kipling has accomplished the greatest of feats,—­an original creation.  From the moment the little brown baby, Mowgli, crawls into Mother Wolf’s cave away from Shere Khan, the tiger, until the time for him to graduate from the jungle, we follow him under the spell of a fascination different from any that we have known before.  The animals of the jungle have real personalities, from the chattering Bandar-log to the lumbering kindly Baloo.  With all their intense individuality, they remain animals, each one true to his kind, hating or loving men, thinking mainly through their instincts, and surpassing human schoolmasters in teaching Mowgli the great laws of the jungle,—­that obedience is “the head and the hoof of the Law,” that nothing was ever yet lost by silence, that, in the jungle, life and food depend on keeping one’s temper, that no one shall kill for the pleasure of killing.

[Illustration:  MOWGLI AND HIS BROTHERS. By permission of Century Company.]

Above all stands the character of Mowgli, the wolf-adopted man-cub, human and yet brother to the animals.  With a touch of genius, Kipling revealed the kinship between Mowgli and the denizens of the jungle.  Kipling’s eyes could see both the harsh realism of animal existence and the genuine idealism of Mother Wolf and the Pack and the Jungle-law.

Just So Stories (1902), written primarily for children, but entertaining to all, is a collection of romantic stories, mostly of animals, illustrated by Kipling himself.  One of the best of these tales is The Cat that Walked by Himself, which has distinct ethical value in showing how the cat through service won his place by the fireside.