his admirers is only a further proof of his literary cunning. Mr
Kipling often uses words with great skill to create in his readers the
impression that words matter to him hardly at all. He will work as
hard as the careful sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawness
and crudity; and thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is a
literary man. They are content simply to listen to a man who has seen,
and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to
observe that, if the world with its day's work belongs to Mr Kipling,
it belongs to him only by author's right--that is, by right of
imagination and right of style.

It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary
formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of
_The Light That Failed_, he tries to talk as though there were really
no such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is
pedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of
literary discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the
sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula.
It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than
Tennyson or Walter Scott. Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be
misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's art
is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he
helped to send out of fashion.

A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates
which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement
of his works here to be followed.

Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E.
His intimacy with India was determined at birth. He was educated at