Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/74

 THE MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING

I

reputation is often a premature ghost that soars up between him and his audience, bothering and blurring their vision; and in Mr. Kipling's case this exasperating doppel-ganger has proved specially pobby and impervious and full of energy. The autobiography it rattles off, convincingly enough, generally runs like this:—

"I came out of the East, a youngster of twenty, but wiser than your very oldest men. Life had shown me her last secrets, her unmentionable sins. I was as cool about them as a connoisseur towards curios, and I tossed you tales of twisted deaths and intricate adulteries with an air of indulgent half-contempt. I could do anything I liked with words, I had the nonchalant neatness of a conjuror; and in my splendid insolence (I was only twenty, mind you), I made Poetry learn slang, common sanguinary slang, and set her serving in canteens. 'Born blasé!' muttered one of your own writers, maddened—himself reckoned something of a prodigy. 'Too clever to live,' wrote another one, Stevenson. I was the cleverest young man of my day.

"And then I came West to your dingy, cosy 48