THE WORK OF RUDYARD KIPLING.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 5, 30 January 1892, Page 104

THE WORK OF RUDYARD KIPLING.

Mr Francis Adams, in the Fortnightly lievieic, says :— * It was inevitable that sooner or later someone should make a systematic effort, in the interests (say) of literature and art, to exploit India and the Anglo-Indian life. England has awakened at last to the astonishing fact of her worldwide Empire, and has now an ever-growing curiosity concerning her great possessions outre mer. The writer who can ‘explain,’in a vivid and plausible manner, the social conditions of India, Australia, Canada, and South Africa—who can show, even approximately, how people there live, move, and have their being, is assured of at least, a remarkable vogue. Several vogues of this sort have already been won on more or less inadequate grounds ; have been won and lost, and the cry is still, They come ! From among them all, so far, one writer alone, led on to fortune on this Hood-tide in the affairs of men, has consciously and deliberately aimed high ; taken his work seriously, and attempted to add something to the vast store of our English literature. The spectacle of a writer of fiction who is also a man of letters, and not merely a helpless caterer for the circulating libraries and the railway bookstalls, is unfortunately as rate among us as it is frequent among our French friends. Literature and Art are organised in France, and have prestige and power. In England they are impotent and utterly at the mercy of Philistine and imperfectly educated newspaper men, who, professed caterers for the ignorant and stupid cravings of the average English person, male and female (and especially female), foist upon us painters, poets, novelists, and musicians of the most hopeless mediocrity. In France this sort of thing is impossible. Such efforts would only provoke a smile. People would say to you when you were taking seriously a poet (for instance) like Mr Lewis Morris, or Sir Edwin Arnold, ora novelist like Mr Besant or Mr Haggard, “ Why, you must be joking'. These gentlemen are not writers—are not artists at all. Surely you know that what they concern themselves with is the nourishment of the babes and sucklings who have to be provided with pap somehow ; but serious workers, contributors to critical and creative thought— allez!" It seems something to be at last able to go to our French friends and say, “ Well, here at any rate we have a young Englishman who has won a remarkable vogue, and for all that i-s a serious worker, ix a contributor to critical and creative thought, is an artist, is a writer to be able to go and say this, and to advance reasons for our belief in it of sufficient cogency to extort, perhaps, from our friends a genuine assent. If for this alone, we ought to be grateful to Mr Rudyard Kipling, our Anglo-Indian storyteller.’