Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/87

61 MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING 61 plays a different part in every plane. One instance will suffice. Puck kicks a bunch of scarlet toadstools idly. Why ? Simply so that the red colour may stain back through all the textures till it matches, in the third, with the name of Rufus. This is not the mere swagger of virtuosity. These superimpositions produce a very beautiful imposture. They give the tales an opalescence that had hitherto seemed foreign to his work. They give them the milkiness of a magic crystal and make them by far the completest symbols of life he has yet produced. These fairy-tales for children are far more realistic than the Plain Tales from the Hills. For half of life is moonlit, and the image that would copy it exactly must be vague. Nor is this all. If there be any logic in the lines of effort we have traced it is not here they find their consummation : they leap forward through this magic haze, emerge beyond it strangely clarified ; they make it impossible not to believe that this woven obscurity, this new delicate dimness, is indeed but a curtain — a mist — not of dusk, but of dawn — that will dissolve to reveal Kipling carving his true masterwork. Released at last from the conventions thrust upon it by pride and accident and the impertinences of criticism, his system-seeking genius can now openly take up its true task, the task it has hitherto attempted only inter- mittently, and begin the sustained practice of that colossal kind of craftsmanship for which it is so singularly suited. It will beat out for itself a new form of imaginative prose, as unclogged by charac- erization as his verse. The devices of drama it will use no doubt, and some of the tricks of narration ; but its true medium will be massed impersonal things — tangles of human effort — the thickets of phenomena — the slow movements of industry, so muffled to the average eye — the general surge and litter of sensation. What his genius can do with material of this kind we