Rudyard Kipling: A Character Study: Life, Writings and Literary Landmarks

by R. Thurston Hopkins

PREFACE

WHEN a man has read once, or twice, or three times, through Rudyard Kipling's books, he will probably dip into them here and there at intervals. By so doing he gradually makes his own notebook on this author; but it may be that he will yet find a place for another man's " Kipling commonplace book," even if it has no pretension to completeness or authority. The following pages are intended to furnish a popular guide to the attitude and writings of Rudyard Kipling. My original purpose when the book was first discussed with my publisher was to have confined the pages to a brief outline of the author's works. But I had not been engaged long on the book before it dawned upon me that in speaking of any one of the author's books it is always necessary to say a good deal about the author as a man. When a man is recognized as our first story-teller and at the same time as a poet who has appealed to every kind of Englishman, from the illiterate pioneer to those who represent the finest culture of our country, he becomes a heritage of the people, and we are entitled to gather together as much information about his life and ideas as may be possible. This task has not been easy, for Rudyard Kipling has written of all he has seen during his residence or travels in five continents. He has absorbed India. Man and beast, native and white, have been touched upon with his unmatched picturesque style.

It will be long ere the final opinions on Kipling can be collected. Of late years he has started to restrict





output, but the works he has given to the public show clearly he is not a man of yesterday or to-day alone—he is also a man of the days to be. Kipling is a second-rate genius, which is putting him about as high up as possible, for the reader must remember that there never has been a first-rate genius this side of the "great divide." A first-rate genius is always a dead one. The man with the scythe is the only fellow who can grant the superior degree. Since 1886 he has been writing with an unapproachable power of intense visualisation of all he has

In exttndtd observation of the ways and works of man From the Four Mile Radius roughly to the plains ofHinduttan,

and, naturally, he cannot always write well; but if the good things he has put forth were collected in one volume it would form a book twice the size of the good writings of Charles Lamb. But there is so much envy and meanness among the living, that Kipling will not be fairly rated until he has been dead fifty years, and I do not suppose that he is at all anxious to compete for his final degree just yet. Kipling does not pretend to be a saint; he is perfectly natural, as any really sensible man must be, and his advice is :

Stand to your work and be wise — certain of sword and fen, Who are neither children nor gods hut men in a world of men !

But you and I do not have to decide whether this man is right or wrong. Time, the old gipsy man, takes that task out of our hands, and he has in the past cultivated a habit of reversing the judgment of the lower courts of contemporaneity. The author has deserved well of his country—firstly for those strong true tales which have made India a real place to dwellers in our " tight little island." This was in itself an imperial conquest. Marion ....

266 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 28, 2012

About the author

Robert Thurston Hopkins (1884-1958) was a prolific author. He wrote topographical works, ghost stories and more, including biographical works on Oscar Wilde, H G Wells and Rudyard Kipling