Chapter 15

His faults are so conspicuous, so much on the surface, that they hardly need to be named. They are curiously visible to some readers who are blind to his merits. There is a false air of hardness (quite in contradiction to the sentiment in his tales of childish life); there is a knowing air; there are mannerisms, such as "But that is another story"; there is a display of slang; there is the too obtrusive knocking of the nail on the head. Everybody can mark these errors; a few cannot overcome their antipathy, and so lose a great deal of pleasure.

It is impossible to guess how Mr. Kipling will fare if he ventures on one of the usual novels, of the orthodox length. Few men have succeeded both in the _conte_ and the novel. Mr. Bret Harte is limited to the _conte_; M. Guy de Maupassant is probably at his best in it. Scott wrote but three or four short tales, and only one of these is a masterpiece. Poe never attempted a novel. Hawthorne is almost alone in his command of both kinds. We can live only in the hope that Mr. Kipling, so skilled in so many species of the _conte_, so vigorous in so many kinds of verse, will also be triumphant in the novel: though it seems unlikely that its scene can be in England, and though it is certain that a writer who so cuts to the quick will not be happy with the novel's almost inevitable "padding." Mr. Kipling's longest effort, "The Light which Failed," can, perhaps, hardly be considered a test or touchstone of his powers as a novelist. The central interest is not powerful enough; the characters are not so sympathetic, as are the interest and the characters of his short pieces. Many of these persons we have met so often that they are not mere passing acquaintances, but already find in us the loyalty due to old friends.

FOOTNOTES:

{70} The subject has been much more gravely treated in Mr. Robert Bridges's "Achilles in Scyros."

{91} Conjecture may cease, as Mr. Morris has translated the Odyssey.

{109} For Helen Pendennis, see the "Letters," p. 97.

{128} Mr. Henley has lately, as a loyal Dickensite, been defending the plots of Dickens, and his tragedy. _Pro captu lectoris_; if the reader likes them, then they are good for the reader: "good absolute, not for me though," perhaps. The plot of "Martin Chuzzlewit" may be good, but the conduct of old Martin would strike me as improbable if I met it in the "Arabian Nights." That the creator of Pecksniff should have taken his misdeeds seriously, as if Mr. Pecksniff had been a Tartuffe, not a delight, seems curious.