by virtue of their being utterly preposterous. Take, for example, the
pretence that Mrs Hawksbee is a charming woman. Mrs Hawksbee is really
nothing of the kind. She is an anthology of witty phrases. She is the
abstract perfection of what a clever head and a good heart is expected
to be in a fashionable comedy. But Mr Kipling desires her to be
accepted as a charming woman. His procedure, on a high and delicate
plane, is precisely the procedure to which we are accustomed on a low
and obvious plane in the majority of popular novels where the hero has
to be accepted for a man of brilliant genius. We have to take the
author's word for it. The author who tells us that his hero is a
genius usually requires us to believe it without further proof. He
does not show us a page of the hero's music or the hero's poetry, but
we must believe that it is very fine, even though the hero loves Pietro
Mascagni and worships Martin Tupper. Similarly Mr Kipling, presenting
us with Mrs Hawksbee, nowhere affords us direct evidence that she is a
charming woman. He assumes it, gets everyone else in the story to
assume it, and expects his readers to assume it--his cunning as a
writer being of so remarkable a quality that there are very few of the
Simla tales in which the reader is not prepared to assume it for the
sake of the story.

Mrs Hawksbee is typical of the majority of Mr Kipling's studies in
social comedy. His success in this kind is remarkable, but it is
barren. Mr Kipling realised this himself quite early, for he quite
soon abandoned Simla. There are some sixteen stories in _Plain Tales
from the Hills_ into which the Simla motive is threaded. In the books
immediately following, published in 1888 and 1889, Simla is not wholly
abandoned, but the proportion of Simla stories is less. _The Phantom
Rickshaw_ (1889) is the last story which can fairly be brought within
the list, and this story can only be included by straining its point to