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 seen, and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to observe that, if the world with its day’s work belongs to Mr Kipling, it belongs to him only by author’s right—­that is, by right of imagination and right of style.

It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary formality; and that whenever he talks of “Art,” as in certain pages of The Light That Failed, he tries to talk as though there were really no such thing.  But Mr Kipling’s cheerful contempt of all that is pedantic and magisterial in “Art” does not imply that he is innocent of literary discipline.  It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula.  It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than Tennyson or Walter Scott.  Readers of Mr Kipling’s stories must not be misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art.  Mr Kipling’s art is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he helped to send out of fashion.

A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates which bear upon Mr Kipling’s authorship and (2) as to the arrangement of his works here to be followed.

Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E.  His intimacy with India was determined at birth.  He was educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in 1882, as assistant editor on The Civil and Military Gazette and The Pioneer.  He remained on the staff of The Pioneer for seven years, and travelled over the five continents.  By this time he had learned to think of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see something of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come back to her from the ends of the earth.  The whole of Mr Kipling’s literary biography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a great traveller who is now inveterately at home.

Perhaps we should also note that Mr Kipling was a literary prodigy. Plain Tales from the Hills appeared in 1887.  Mr Kipling at twenty-two had shown his quality and had already mapped out in little his career.  In Plain Tales from the Hills there are hints for almost everything that their author afterwards accomplished.  As the book of a young journalist whose name had not yet been whispered among the publishers and critics of London it was a miracle.  If Mr Kipling had been able to improve on Plain Tales from the Hills as much as Shakespeare improved on Love’s Labour’s Lost, as much as Shelley improved on Queen Mab, Robert Browning on Pauline, Byron on Hours of Idleness,