A JAPANESE CRITIC.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXX, Issue 3862, 4 October 1899, Page 3

A JAPANESE CRITIC.

A slashing piece of work is the “Japanese View of Kipling,” wjiich appears in the current) number of the “Arena.” Mr Adachi Kinnosuke provides us with oho of the most amusing criticisms of Sir Kipling that • have appeared : —'“Stevenson, Barrie, Watsou ; then came Kipling, arid the public surveyed him between its half-closed eyes, like the Viceroy watching Mollish with the fumigutor, and said, ‘evidently tins is the wrong tiger ; but it is an original animal.’ ” This is a sufficiently promising- opening, and it does not belie the Vest of the article. Mr Kinnosuke does justice tp much of Mr Kipling’s art. Ho says that when ho-first made his acquaintance in ‘Plain Tales from the Hills, “ho gasped, - smiled, soliloquised and said, among other things, ‘This man may write how a hen picked a grain, am, I would pronounce his account artistic.’ Kipling is on e of those who pick one up, knock all his old notions about literary excellence with a whack or two right between his eyes, take him to the mountain top. show him the beauty of simplicity in style and diction, and say, ‘Now, here, when I can speak my thoughts into life in the words of a peasant, what’s the use of murder-f ing them under the weight of a. thousand adjectives and polite phrases?’” It is when the critic comes to analyse the author’s characteristics that ho becomes caustic. For example:-—“Mr» Kipling’s wit is as and as calm and •as so.emn as a mule putting a boy through the most extraordinary acrobatic feat, of jumping between its long ears and over its head. And wnen his victims (I mean his readers) striae the ground head foremost, which is too often the case he seems as unhumorous ab a mule itself.” He is severe on Mr Kipling’s , female characters. He says that the author ' seems to have stumbled over wretched privates arid suoalterns in Lor Majesty’s service, to have grasped them with his fertile imagination, put dresses over their coats and trousers, and given them female names: and thus the majority of his female characters have been born. Much can be forgiven by Kipling’s admirers to Mr Kinnosuke for his comment on that precious possession Mulvaney : -“A higher Kipling had never drawn. . . . When folly, vice, extravagance kiss the heroic iii questionable twilight, then men say many things and become ecstatic. Mulvaney is that twilight.”' ' -■■ ■