Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/86

60 60 MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING its trial. Mr. Kipling's plain conversations are markedly unreal. But honest craftsmanship and an ear for strong rhythms have provided him with many suits of dialects. And with these he dresses the talk till it seems to surge with character. And so, in this way and in that, the actual words which he wrote joined in the conspiracy to keep him toiling on hopefully after that ignis fatuus of fiction. Until at length he made his supreme efilj^rt, fitted all the lore he had gathered — the sharp-set N/jenes, the well-cut dialects, the crisp impressions of life — into a single ingenious zoetrope — set it whirling on one of the spindles of the Indian machine, the secret spindle called the Great Game — and so created that spirited illusion of a novel which we know as Kim. VI Thenceforward his work in prose has been a wonderful attempt to make his qualities cure their natural defects — to make sharpness and bright neatness produce their natural opposites — depth and shimmer and bloom. And by dint of an incomparable dexterity he has succeeded. There is no space left me now to trace the process with completeness — but, roughly, it may be described as an attempt to superimpose, as when you furl a fan, all the elements which in Kim had been laid side by side. The best example is perhaps Rewards and Fairies. If the reader will turn back to those wise fairy-tales he will see that each is really four-fold : a composite tissue made up of a layer of sunlit story (Dan's and Una's plane), on a layer of moonlit magic (plane of Puck), on a layer of history-story stuff (Rene's plane and Gloriana's), on a last foundation of delicately bedimmed but never doubtful allegory. And he will note, too, the exquisite precision of the correspondences, a kind of practical punning, so that the self-same object