The subjects, no doubt, seemed so familiar,
that the strength of the handling, the brilliance of the colour,
were scarcely recognised. But Mr. Kipling's volumes no sooner
reached England than the people into whose hands they fell were
certain that here were the beginnings of a new literary force. The
books had the strangeness, the colour, the variety, the perfume of
the East. Thus it is no wonder that Mr. Kipling's repute grew up as
rapidly as the mysterious mango tree of the conjurors. There were
critics, of course, ready to say that the thing was merely a trick,
and had nothing of the supernatural. That opinion is not likely to
hold its ground. Perhaps the most severe of the critics has been a
young Scotch gentleman, writing French, and writing it wonderfully
well, in a Parisian review. He chose to regard Mr. Kipling as
little but an imitator of Bret Harte, deriving his popularity mainly
from the novel and exotic character of his subjects. No doubt, if
Mr. Kipling has a literary progenitor, it is Mr. Bret Harte. Among
his earlier verses a few are what an imitator of the American might
have written in India. But it is a wild judgment which traces Mr.
Kipling's success to his use, for example, of Anglo-Indian phrases
and scraps of native dialects. The presence of these elements is
among the causes which have made Englishmen think Anglo-Indian
literature tediously provincial, and India a bore.
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