that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within
its own sphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others.
It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge
of it.--_The Critic as Artist_.




WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND


He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new
background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings.
The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As
one turns over the pages of his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feels
as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of
vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The
jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their
surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd
journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of
literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the
point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than
any one has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr.
Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness. He is our first authority
on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and
his backgrounds are real works of art. As for the second condition, we
have had Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to
be done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that
fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has
never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the