lacked the last tale—perhaps not the last—for In the Rukh appeared in Many Inventions, published by D. Appleton and Company in 1893. For the first time, therefore, we now have a properly classified exhibition of the wealth which Mr. Kipling has added to imaginative literature. The titles of the volumes under the present systematic arrangement are Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three and Military Tales (two volumes), In Black and White, The Phantom Rickshaw, Under the Deodars and Other Stories, The Jungle Books, The Light that Failed, and The Naulakha. The illustrations have been photographed from reliefs modeled in clay by Mr. Kipling's father. The light paper, handsome type, with its firm, clear impression, the generous margins, and dignified binding are reasons for congratulations to publisher and reader alike.
If this were the place for purely literary comment upon Mr. Kipling's splendid gifts much might be written of the tremendous power of his best expression, the resonance of his song, his quick insight into motives, and his control of a gamut which might be deemed to run from Hood to Poe, since his imagination, power of sympathy, and his quick humor thrill us, or move us to laughter, at his will. But all this the reading world has recognized. Very little, however, has been said of Mr. Kipling's application, possibly more or less unconscious, of scientific principles in his work. It is quite unnecessary to explain that Mr. Kipling is not an ethnologist because he differentiates the Hindu, Sikh, or Afghan so consistently, or because in all his work he expresses more forcibly than any other writer the characteristics which have made England a great imperial power. He is not an alienist because of The Madness of Private Ortheris, or The Man who Was, or In the Matter of a Private, or The Phantom Rickshaw, or The Disturber of Traffic, or At the End of the Passage, and yet a professional alienist might well accept his diagnosis of certain phases of mental aberration, his description of the effects of certain hallucinations and illusions, and his description of severe mental shock and aphasia in The Man who would be King, and elsewhere. He is not a physiologist, but his exactness in indicating the physiological effects of strong emotions—witness Mulvaney in battle—is another indication of the quality of his analytic observation. To cite a very different instance, in a preface to Wee Willie Winkle Mr. Kipling has illustrated his attitude toward children in saying: "If a mere man keeps very quiet and humbles himself properly, and refrains from talking clown to his superiors, the children will sometimes be good to him, and let him see what they think about the world." This, as Mr. Gosse has said, suggests the collector of exact data, the naturalist lying quietly in the grass and noting the habits of birds and animals.
The wonderful Jungle Stories have added a new character to fiction in Mowgli, yet if we judge the other characters by our special standard Mr. Kipling's power of getting at the roots of things—of reasoning to causes—is perhaps less apparent in these stories for a reason not far to seek. Certain familiar motives shown in mating and in jealousy, in the father's place as provider and in the mother's care for her young, in instincts of self-defense and revenge, and in quasi-tribal organization and leadership would naturally lend themselves to a writer's purposes. But while certain truthful characteristics are retained, the developed personification of Mr. Kipling's animal heroes takes them almost as much out of the field of exact observation as the animals of our own Indian mythology. The reason of
