Page:Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).djvu/232



Mr. Kipling knows and appreciates the English in India, and is a born story-teller and a man of humour into the bargain. It would be hard to find better reading.—The Saturday Review.

Every one knows that it is not easy to write good short stories. Mr. Kipling has changed all that. Here are forty of them averaging less than eight pages apiece; there is not a dull one in the lot. Some are tragedy, some broad comedy, some tolerably sharp satire. The time has passed to ignore or undervalue Mr. Kipling. He has won his spurs and taken his prominent place in the arena. This, as the legitimate edition, should be preferred to the pirated ones by all such as care for honesty in letters.—Churchman.

One of the first things that strikes the reader is the exceptional excellence of the tales. In so large a collection as forty stories one naturally expects to find some two or three of peculiar power dwarfing the rest. It is the fate of most collections, but here there are at least a dozen, possibly even a score, with regard to which it would be quite impossible to say that this or that is the most powerful or the most beautiful. The explanation is simple—the variety equals the intensity, the imaginative insight, the literary tact. Indeed, we are not sure whether this variety—inexhaustible it seems—is not by far and away the most striking and the most satisfactory characteristic of the volume. The man who wrote these tales has manifestly numberless others to tell. Character, situation, incident, humour, pathos, tragic force, are all in abundance; words alone are at a minimum. Of course these are “plain” tales,—lightning-flash tales. A gleam, and there the whole tragedy or comedy is before you—elaborate it for yourself afterwards,—Glasgow Herald.

Whatever may be Mr. Kipling's ability in the higher walks of fiction, his ability as a story-teller or for narrating such incidents, whether real or fictitious, as are here put together is beyond question. They are told with ease, force, and directness. The humorous stories are probably the best, but whether humorous or grave—and there are both in the volume—they throw considerable light upun certain phases of European society in India and on numerous aspects of native Indian life. There is not an uninteresting story in the volume, and one closes the book with the desire to read the “other stories" Mr. Kipling so often alludes to, and somewhat tantalizingly passes over.—Scottish Review