THE MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING
"You and Barrie and Kipling are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made...."—R. L. S. in a Letter to Henry James.
I
A writer's reputation is often a premature ghost that soars up between him and his audience, bothering and blurring their vision; and in Mr. Kipling's case this exasperating doppel-ganger has proved specially pobby and impervious and full of energy. The autobiography it rattles off, convincingly enough, generally runs like this:—
"I came out of the East, a youngster of twenty, but wiser than your very oldest men. Life had shown me her last secrets, her unmentionable sins. I was as cool about them as a connoisseur towards curios, and I tossed you tales of twisted deaths and intricate adulteries with an air of indulgent half-contempt. I could do anything I liked with words, I had the nonchalant neatness of a conjuror; and in my splendid insolence (I was only twenty, mind you), I made Poetry learn slang, common sanguinary slang, and set her serving in canteens. 'Born blasé!' muttered one of your own writers, maddened—himself reckoned something of a prodigy. 'Too clever to live,' wrote another one, Stevenson. I was the cleverest young man of my day.
"And then I came West to your dingy, cosy
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