RUDYARD KIPLING AS JOURNALIST.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 11217, 6 May 1899, Page 5

RUDYARD KIPLING AS JOURNALIST.

Mr E. Kay Eobinson writes in Literatureiot if arch 18 :— lt wss In the winte/ pf 1884 85 thst 1 firat struok Kipling's ' trail.', I bad gore to India as assistant „ editor of the . Pioneer of Allahabad, while he had been installed for come years in the same capacity on the Civil .. anil' • Military Gazette, .ol Lahore. Shortly after arrival I wrote some Limerick verses in dog Latin for my paper, .signing them 'K,K.,' and re-ceived..-a letter a few days later from one Budyard Kipling, saying that aB he was in the' habit of writing verses signed ' B X.' he was, owing to the • : similarity of signatures, reoelving congratulations upon 'breaking out in Latin spots;' which belonged to me. This led to my Jooking out for ' E.K ' verses,, and when I had seen them I said to all and.sqndry ; ' This is genius.' bot it was not the fashion then to admit that Kipling had genius. To those who had official cognisance of his work— and , everything iv India is ofiJoial— he was ' a clever young pnp,' "or ' » smart youth.' That was all. I w«>te to Kipling soon after, telling bim that * man who oould write as he oould shoaii go home to England, to London, whew »»me oould be won ; but, he replied, in A .characteristic letter which may bo published some day :— 'You ought to know better ftt yonr time <f life than to knock a youngster off fall legs in this way. How do sop oxpect anybody will be able to hold me after your letter? . . . Would you be astonished if I told yon that I look forward to nothing bot an Indian -journalist*, career? Why should I! My home's out here ; my people ara out here ; all the friends I know are out here ; and all the intereßtß I bave are out here. Why should Igo borne? Any fool can put up rhymes, and the jaarket is full of bojs who could undersell me as soon as I put foot ia**-' ... i Suoh ls the effect of judicious depreciation upon juvenile modesty. « Let us,' he wrote further, ' depart our several ways in amity- Ton to Fleet Street (where I shall come when I •die If I'm good) and I to my own plaoe

where _ find heat and smells of oil and spices, and ruffs of temple incense, and sweat, and darkness, and dirt and luit, and cruelty, and — above all — things wonderful and fasoinatlng innumerable. Give me time, give me sßven years and three added to them and abide the punishment of "Mother Maturin."'

* Mother Maturin ' Is the great work by which for many yearß Kipling pro--posed to make his name. Io 1886 he had 350 foolscap pages of its manuscript—which means much in his neat writing, though it was Dot so small in those days as it is now — lying at the bottom of a " bruised tin teabox.' It was, he said, ' the novel which is always being written and yet gets no furrader.'

My first sight of Kipling was at an uninteresting stage, when he was a short, square, dark youth, who unfortunately wore speotacles instead* of eyeglasses and had an. unlucky eye for colour in the selection of his clothes. He had a weaknecs apparently for brown cloth with just that suggestion of ruddiness or purple in it which makes some browns bo curiously conspicious. Tbe charm of his manner, however, made you forget what he looked like in half a minute. \ From his father Rudyard Kipling haß inherited the artlatic tendency which leadß him to fill any odd scrap of paper Hear his hand with some grotesque sketch of the incident or idea uppermost in his mind. Quaint and uncanny faces almost always adorned the ■edges of his writing-blocks in the news paper office at Lahore, and many hundreds of drawings wbioh the autograph hunter would now value have gone the way .of the waste-paper basket. He illustrated, top, the connection betweon musio and poetry in tbe fiot that before composing verses he hummed a tune to fit tbem to, and in reading his finished verses he delivers tbem, sometimes at any rate, in recitative. The thought may be worth following np hosv far the oosjunotions of eketchiog with prose and -singing with poetry- suggest the natural relations of those arts to literature.

...,, Among Kipling's early journalistic experiences was, his involuntary assumption, 'for this occasion only,' of the role of fighting editor. He was essentially a man of peace, tnd would always prefer making an anery man laugh to fighting with him. But one day there called at the office a vary furious photographer. What the paper may have said about him or his photographs has been forgotten; but never will those who witnessed it forget the rough-and-tumble all over the floor in whioh Kipling and be indulged. The libel, or whatever it was, which had infuriated the photographer,, was not Kipling's work, but tbe quarrel was forced upon him ; and although he waß handicapped by bis speoteolee and smaller stature he made a very fine draw of it, and the photographer — who, It may be remarked, was very drank, was ejected, and Kipling wiped hiß glasses and buttoned his collar. That trick of wiping his spectacles is one in which Eipling indulges more frequently than any man I have eyer met, for the simple reason that he iB clways laughing ; and when you laugh till you nearly cry your glaoses get misty. Kipling, shaking aU over with lapghter aod wiping his spectaoles at the Bame time with his handkerchief,' ls the picture which el nays comes to mind as most characteristic of him in the old days when even our hardest work on ' The Rag' — for fate soon took me to Lahore to be his editor — was as full of jokes as a pomegr.ante of pips. Tbe ' high collar ' days, when there were no telegrams, and editorial matter had to be forthcoming to fill the space right up to the columns ; the. ' patent seamless ' leader of emergency ; the ' stringing ' of selected extracts ; the fitting of ' whip lashes ' to notss ; and the manufaoture of 'scraps' all gave a mixed bag of sport ,' but thfl jfipstasy of literary composi'ion was reaohed in the -joint composition of reparl.*?? to the attaoks of our dear contemporaries.