Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/75

Rh Babylon, tasted fame and flesh-pots and found them very good. And the brightness died out of my colours and the snap from my tunes. Your snug horizons hemmed me in, I lost my gift of shining vision. I relied contentedly on tricks I'd learned before. I wrote a bad novel, it became a worse drama. I made pots of money, I made party speeches, I spoiled my paints by mixing them with politics. And now here I am, sir, the popular favourite.—Vide Max.—Seen the Post? 'Save the King!"

Well, I want, in this essay, to pronounce all that pure perjury—to force aside the phantom and give you instead a glimpse of the real man behind. I want to suggest that, instead of depreciating, the quality of his work has continuously improved, that his literary technique has never been so amazing as now, nor his artistic integrity more Lutheran; and that, instead of being immensely precocious and worldly-wise—"born blasé," as Barrie (it was Barrie) once said—Kipling has always been, as much as Barrie himself, one of those blessed born innocents who never grow up, who are never quite at home in the world, but who wander through it, like Hawthorne or Poe, a little alien and elf-like, a little envious of "the happy folk in housen," and that this quality of envy of the practical grown-ups and genuine worldlings is, indeed, the essential characteristic of the man and the key to and core of his work.

II

Now, to get the first glimmer of the ghost, to follow this Jekyll-and-Hyding from the outset, it is necessary to go back to the days of the Departmental Ditties—so swiftly did the severance begin. Many readers, not yet aged, will no doubt still remember