The name of Oscar Wilde thus becomes a name "to conjure with" and a
fantastic beacon-fire to which those "oppressed and humiliated" may
repair and take new heart.
90. RUDYARD KIPLING. THE JUNGLE BOOK.
Whatever one may feel about Mr. Kipling's other work, about his
rampagious imperialism, his self-conscious swashbucklerism, his
pipe-clay and his journalism, his moralistic breeziness and his
patronage of the "white man's burden," one cannot help admitting that
the Jungle-Book is one of the immortal children's tales of the world.
In spite of the somewhat priggish introduction, even here, of what
might be called his Anglo-Saxon propaganda, the Jungle-Book carries
one further, it almost seems, and more convincingly, into the very
heart and inwards of beast-life and wood-magic, than any other work
ever written. The figures of these animals are quite Biblical in their
emphatic picturesqueness, and never has the romance of these spotted
and striped aboriginals, in their primordial struggles for food and
water, been more thrillingly conveyed. Every scene, every situation,
brands itself upon the memory as perhaps nothing else in literature
does except the stories in the Old Testament.
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