Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/81

55 MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING 55 aright, his work was one long loyal effort on the part of his newly freed faculties to loosen the bars they had built round themselves and gradually to twist an in- appropriate and stifling technique into a fitting house for their deeper desires. For certainly it is in the books that followed Kim — it is in Traffics and Discoveries, Actions and Reactions, Puck of Poole s Hill, Reivards and Fairies, and the con- current verse — that we begin to see most clearly the presence of this subterranean disharmony and heroic sense feud. If the reader will take these four books and consider them apart ; if he will let their particular characteristics form a fresh picture in his mind, an honest image of the kind of man he must have been who wrote them ; and if he will apply this graphic reagent to the books that came before Kim, he will see how extraordinarily it eats out and reveals their acci- dentals. The forced notes tumble out with a tinkle, the falsities fade, there is a linking up of scattered touches, unrelated before, and certain qualities, hitherto hardly recognized as crucial, rise glittering like veins. We get a fundamental filigree, a clear resultant mesh, which is a map of Kipling's mind. Now of this fundamental Kipling the cardinal quali- ties are three. The first (a) is an overpowering passion for definition — a spiritual horror of vagueness that almost amounts to a desperate fear — a hunger for certitude and system. The second (6) is the artistic counterpart and imaginative instrument of the first ; a prodigious mental capacity, namely, for enforcing design, for compelling coherence, for stamping insub- stantial dream-stuff into shapes as clear-cut and deci- sive as newly milled and minted metal discs. And the third (c), on the physical plane, is the manual counter-