Rudyard Kipling as Journalist

Abstract

From his father Rudyard Kipling has inherited the artistic tendency which leads him to fill any odd scrap of paper near his hand with some grotesque sketch of the incident or idea uppermost in his mind. Quaint and uncanny faces almost always adorned the edges of his writing-blocks in the newspaper-office at Lahore, and many hundreds of drawings which the autograph-hunter would now value have gone the way of the waste-paper basket. He illustrated, too, the connection between music and poetry in the fact that before composing verses he hummed a tune to fit them to, and in reading his finished verses he delivers them, sometimes at any rate, in recitative. The thought may be worth following up how far the conjunctions of sketching with prose and singing with poetry suggest the natural relations of those arts to literature….

Literature, iv (18 Mar 1899) 285–6.