Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/85

59 MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING 59 Perceive, then, the maddening position ! The very qualities that made the first tales tell, that seemed to prove his supreme capacity for fiction, are exactly the qualities that cut him off from the ability to write novels. The novelist is essentially the explorer, the questioner, the opener of doors ; and the only law of human nature he knows is that the exception is the rule. But Mr. Kipling's first word is obedience ; he is all for rules and rivets ; for regularity and a four- square plan. Born under the sign of the Balance, his emblem is the compass and the square — and it is not with tools like these that men's motives can be measured. His vision of the world, like his Lama's, is a well-made Wheel of Life with a neat niche for the individual ; and even his famous militarism, his worship of the apparatus of war, is nothing more, in essence, than a longing for quiet comeliness and order. It is the mind, if you like, of a martinet — incapable therefore of complete imaginative sympathy. Any lapse from efficiency fills his craftsman's nature with disgust, and the only characters he can handle with perfect satisfaction are the Stricklands, the Mowglis, the Kims, as unconquerably capable as machines. His voice, indeed, is never so tolerant and human as when he is dealing with heroes and heroines that are not human at all — with beasts and ships and polo-ponies, or those odd little half-animals called children. His Jungle Books are among his best, because here a psychology as elementary as ^sop's serves to convey the effect of an unusual understanding. A like reason gives its race and richness to his dialogue the moment it takes refuge in a dialect. For dialect, in spite of all its air of ragged lawlessness, is wholly impersonal, typical, fixed, the code of a caste, not the voice of an individual. It is when the novelist sets his characters talking King's English that he really puts his capacity for reproducing the unconventional and capricious on