Lands" of life and character: surely it is wiser to seek quite new
realms than to build mud huts and dunghills on the "Bad Lands."

Mr. Kipling's work, like all good work, is both real and romantic.
It is real because he sees and feels very swiftly and keenly; it is
romantic, again, because he has a sharp eye for the reality of
romance, for the attraction and possibility of adventure, and
because he is young. If a reader wants to see petty characters
displayed in all their meannesses, if this be realism, surely
certain of Mr. Kipling's painted and frisky matrons are realistic
enough. The seamy side of Anglo-Indian life: the intrigues,
amorous or semi-political--the slang of people who describe dining
as "mangling garbage" the "games of tennis with the seventh
commandment"--he has not neglected any of these. Probably the
sketches are true enough, and pity 'tis true: for example, the
sketches in "Under the Deodars" and in "The Gadsbys." That worthy
pair, with their friends, are to myself as unsympathetic, almost, as
the characters in "La Conquete de Plassans." But Mr. Kipling is too
much a true realist to make their selfishness and pettiness
unbroken, unceasing. We know that "Gaddy" is a brave, modest, and
hard-working soldier; and, when his little silly bride (who prefers
being kissed by a man with waxed moustaches) lies near to death,
certainly I am nearer to tears than when I am obliged to attend the
bed of Little Dombey or of Little Nell. Probably there is a great
deal of slangy and unrefined Anglo-Indian society; and, no doubt, to
sketch it in its true colours is not beyond the province of art. At
worst it is redeemed, in part, by its constancy in the presence of
various perils--from disease, and from "the bullet flying down the
pass." Mr. Kipling may not be, and very probably is not, a reader
of "Gyp"; but "The Gadsbys," especially, reads like the work of an