Kipling's Latest Story.

Evening Post, Volume LXX, Issue 61, 9 September 1905, Page 11

Kipling's Latest Story.

"AN HABITATION ENFORCED." The notable thing in the magazine fiction for the month of August is Rudj'ard Kipling's story, "An Habitation Enforced," in the Century Magazine. It is referred to in tho advertisement on the cover of the magazine as "a long story — complete," and it is as to, matter of fact over eleven thousand words in length. The impression the reader is likely to get, however, is one of extreme compression. It is not, propsrly speaking, a short story at all, but a condensed novel of a not unfamiliar kind. W. E. Norris Avould have given us the same thing in four hundred pages. Of plot there is very little. It is the story of an American stockbroker, the victim of nervous collapse, who goes with his wife to England on enforced vacation. While resting in an out-of-the-way corner they discover a run-down estate of eight hundred acres, and buy it for sixty-eight ; thousand dollars. They meet the neighi bours, the country people take them in, Mrs. Cliapin — who was a Lashmar of Connecticut — finds that her people came from there, and they settle down little by little to the quiet lesponsiblo life of English landed gentiy. It ends with Chapin's giving up the attempt to get a carpenter to make a foot-bridge of scantlings such ias would serve in America. "Make it oak, then," he said ; "we can't get out of j it." ■ . ; It may be hinted that in this story Mr. Kipling oxtols the English way in a very American method. The nervous haste of the tale is very American ; an English workman would have moved to a slower tune — put in heavier timbering — expanded paragraphs into chapters — taken sketches of characters and worked them up into the real thing. He has depicted the. life of leisure for those who read as they run. The story is a good example of what some have predicted the novel is coming toj — the speed accelerated, the effects indicated rather than realised, the reader given a whole book in a nutshell. There is no waste. The dialogue is crisp and uncharacterised, bits of landscape and charming English interiors are flashed upon us in a few words. Peasants, landladies, gentlefolk come on the stage and go off again. It is all there, a threevolume pastoral novel in miniature, lacking only the juvenile lovers whom Mr. Kipling has never held in high regard. In this swift glimpse at things as they pass wo seem to see Mr. Kipling whirling through the southern counties at thirty miles an hour in his motor-car. It belongs with "They," save that it lacks the mystical element and the imaginative suggestiveness of that story, which remains the best he has done in recent ygars. The student of his work can find little difficulty in tracing the effects of tho automobile. It gives us such snap-shots as this: — "It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by clumps of brambles. Gates were not, and the rab-bit-mived, cattlc-vubbed posts beaned out and in. A narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of white tails twinkled before the racing hounds, and a hawk rose whistling shrilly. . . "Here they found the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die ; there a harsh fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles ; and here a bieadth of rampart kelk, feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures growths of dead stuff caught their feet, and tho ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of tho valley a little brook had undermined its foot-bridge and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond — old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries about the walls of a ruined house." Not less charming aic tho interiors :—: — "They entered the hall, — just such a high, light hall as such a house should own. A slim upholstered staircase, wide and shallow, and once creamy white, climbed out of it, under a long oval window. On either side delicately moulded doors gave on to wool-lumbered rooms whose sea-green mantelpieces were adorned with nymphs, scrolls and cupids in low relief. . . ."The stairs never cieaked, under their feetr From the broad landing they entered a long green-painted room lighted by three full-length windows, which overlooked the forlorn wreck of a terraced garden and wooded slopes beyond. .• . "George looked at long stone walls upholding reaches of . silvery-oak weatherboarding j buttresses of mixed flints and bricks ; curves of thatch where grass sprouted ; roundlets of houseleeked tile 3, and a huge paved yard populated by two cows. He had .not thought of himself or of the telegraph office for two-and-a-half hours." Mr. Kipling may not have so much to say as he once had, but ho has unquestionably learned to say it better. He can now write, when ho chooses, prose that has real music to it, strong and yet supple and well-balanced. He has not, it is true, the jjrace and elegance of 11. L. Stevenson, nor has lie Stevenson's fastidious concern for the key. The sharp, smart, snappy. "Soldiers Three" stylo into which he relapses so easily jars in such a composition as this. Tho style is diluted, too, by the quick give and take of dialogue which has no special distinction — could not possibly be differentiated from tho work of a thousand mediocre writers :—: — "Have you realised," .she asked, "that we've been here absolutely alone for the last thirty-four days?" "Have you counted them?" he said. "Did you like them?" she replied. "I must have. I didn't think about, them." In spite of their usful functions of "lightening tho page," conversational scrips of this sort aro dangerous. They give an effect of swiftness of motion which is somewhat delusive unless the leader is Mire that the motion is taking him somewheio. Tho talk in Mr. Kipling's stories is as a rulo by no means so good as his narrative. It is conventionalised ; it is too obviously "crisp." It helps in the present case to keep a leisurely talo trotting along in an ama&cd fashion, but it cannot be said' that Mr. Kipling has the 6moothno3s« of mimnor, the harmony of tone which fils. the theme. The publishers arc to be congratulated upon reconsidering their thought of printing the story in tv o instalments ; it makes one perfect v hole. — Springfield Republican. The folk-song is disappearing in Germany as it is disappearing in France, and as it has disappeared in England. Tho spiead of literaturo (a contemporary says) has rumed memory ; . political organisation and tho development of trado have killed romance. The town worker — tho product of a practical ago — is a phlegmatic personage, and the agricultural labourer is assuming the same type.