Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/79

MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING 53 this fellow really likes the music-hall ! " And to him, " Oh, yes ; these little tales are very clever, very neat, you know — De Maupassant and Poe and all that. But before we can take you seriously you must produce a full-length novel. This is striking — but, is it Art ? " IV And all the time the real Kipling had been as little moved, one avers, by a desire to pander to the great public as by a wish to epater it. Essentially a dreamer, born in exile, he was absolutely innocent of all the coolly cockahoop motives and traits men ascribed to him — he pretended to have them, in fact, just because he was so shy. It was an accident of environment, and a streak of naughty pride, and a sort of simple homely emulation, that really determined his first choice of tone and topic — the hot-blooded topics and the sang-froid tone of those complicated Plain Tales from the Hills. He hadn't the faintest notion of reverencing the common soldier. But he badly wanted the soldier to reverence the pen. What egged him on was the kind of humiliating half-resentment from which so many writers necessarily suffer most. Like Mr. Shaw's affectation of ferocity, like Mr. Maurice Hewlett's early hectics, most of his first work was just the artist's human retort to that intolerable tolerance with which the workers, the doers, fighters, men of action, regard his anaemic indoor trade. It was Beetle's way of enforcing respect at Westward Ho ! It was young Kipling's way of adjusting things at Simla. He would prove that ink can be thicker than blood and the pen even more daring than the sword; and that a certain small spectacled sub-editor fond of poetry was not quite the innocent lamb that he looked. And so he picked up tales in the bazaars and the barracks, and nebulously Bret Hartened them