is to do that work as well as it can be done.  Eustace Cleever’s work was to live the life of imagination and to handle English words—­work as difficult to do and normally as useful as the job of the Infant.  Though for one heady night Eustace Cleever yearned after a strange career, Mr Kipling knew that he would return without misgiving to the thing he was born to do.  Mr Kipling, like Eustace Cleever, knows that though nothing is more pleasant than to talk with young subalterns, yet the born author remains always an author.  He knows, too, that even the deeds he admires in the men who make history are, for him, no more than raw stuff to be taken in hand or rejected according to the author’s need.

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