When we come to _The Day's Work_ we are getting very near to Mr Kipling
at his best. We should notice at this point that in all the stories we
have so far surveyed the men have mattered less than the work they do.
The great majority of Mr Kipling's tales are a song in praise of good
work. Almost it seems as if, in the year 1897, their author had
himself realised the significance of this; for it was in that year he
published the volume entitled _The Day's Work_; and it was the best
volume, taking it from cover to cover, that had as yet appeared.
The first and best story in _The Day's Work_ at once introduces the
theme which threads all the best work of Mr Kipling. _The
Bridge-Builders_ is the story of a Bridge and incidentally of the men
who built it. The crown has yet to be set upon a long agony of toil
and disappointment. The master builder of the Bridge has put the prime
of his energy and will into its building. Now it stands all but
complete, with the Ganges gathering in her upper reaches for a mighty
effort to throw off her strange fetters. The Bridge before the night
of the flood has passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between
the most ancient gods and the young will of man. Mr Kipling has put
the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the
really sentient figure of the tale. Here definitely he writes the
first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware
of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs
which preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as well
as almost anybody else. In _The Day's Work_ he passes into a province
which he was insistently urged to occupy by right of inspiration.
_The Day's Work_ brings us directly into touch with one of the most
distinctive features of Mr Kipling's method. He has never been able to
resist the lure of things technical. If he writes of a horse he must
write as though he had bred and sold horses all his life. If he writes
of a steam-engine he must write as though he had spent his life among
pistons and cylinders. He writes of ships and the sea, of fox-hunting,
of the punishing of Pathans, of drilling by companies and of
agriculture; and he writes as one from whom no craft could hide its
mysteries. This fascination of mere craft, this delight in the
technicalities and dialect of the world's work, is not a mannerism. It
is not a parade of omniscience or the madness of a note-book worm. It
is fundamental in Mr Kipling. It is wrong to think of _Between the
Devil and the Deep Sea_ or of _.007_ as the unfortunate rioting of an
amateur machinist. To those who object that Mr Kipling has spoiled
these stories with an absurd enthusiasm for bolts and bars it has at
once to be answered that but for this very enthusiasm for bolts and
bars, which the undiscerning have found so tedious, the great majority
of Mr Kipling's stories would never have been written at all. A
powerful turbine excites in Mr Kipling precisely the same quality of
emotion which a comely landscape excited in Wordsworth; and this
emotion is stamped upon all that he has written in this kind. There is
a passage in _Between the Devil and the Deep Sea_ which runs:
"What follows is worth consideration. The forward engine had no more
work to do. Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely,
with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the
cylinder-cover. It came down again, the full weight of the steam
behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as
the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right and
struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column of the
forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches above the
base, and wedging the upper portion outwards three inches towards the
ship's side. There the connecting-rod jammed. Meantime, the after
engine, being as yet unembarrassed, went on with its work, and in so
doing brought round at its next revolution the crank of the forward
engine, which smote the already jammed connecting-rod, bending it and
therewith the piston-rod cross-head--the big cross-piece that slides up
and down so smoothly."
This is the method of Homer as applied to the shield of Achilles, the
method of Milton in enumerating the superior fiends, the method of
Walter Scott confronted with a mountain pass, the method of the
sonneteer to his mistress' eyebrow. Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for these
broken engines would be intolerable if it were not obviously genuine.
Unless we shut our ears and admit no songs that sing of things as yet
unfamiliar to the poets of blue sky and violets dim as Cytherea's eyes,
we cannot possibly mistake the lyrical ecstasy of the above passage.
When Mr Kipling tells how a released piston-rod drove up fiercely and
started the nuts of the cylinder-cover, it is an incantation. His
machines are more alive than his men and women. It is more important
to know about the cast-iron supporting-column of Mr Kipling's forward
engine than to know that Maisie had long hair and grey eyes, or to know
what happened to any of the people whom it concerned. _.007_, which is
the story of a shining and ambitious young locomotive, is ten times
more vital--it calls for ten times more fellow-feeling--than the heart
affairs of Private Learoyd or the distresses of the Copleigh girls at
Simla. The pain that shoots through .007 when he first becomes
acquainted with a hot-box is a more human and recognisable bit of
consciousness than anything to be shared with the Head of the District
or the Man Who Was. The psychology of the Mill Wheel in _Below the
Mill Dam_ is quite obviously accurate. That Mill Wheel, unlike scores
of Mr Kipling's men and women, is a creature we have met, who refuses
to be forgotten. When he is dealing with men Mr Kipling celebrates not
so much mankind as the skill and competency of mankind as severely
applied to a given and necessary task. It follows that Mr Kipling's
men at their best are most excellent machines. It follows, again, that
when Mr Kipling drops the pretence that he is deeply concerned with man
as man, and begins to celebrate with all his might the machine as the
machine, we realise that his machine is the better man of the two.
The inspiration which Mr Kipling first indulged to its full bent in
_The Day's Work_ lives on through all the ensuing books. It reaches a
climax in _With the Night Mail_, a post-dated vision of the air. It is
one of the most remarkable stories he has written--a story produced at
full pressure of the imagination which, but for its fatal prophesying,
would keep his memory green for generations. The detail with which the
theme is worked out is extravagant; but it is the extravagance of an
inspired lover. To quarrel with its technical exuberance on the ground
that Mr Kipling should have made it less like the vision of an engineer
is simply to miss almost the main impulse of Mr Kipling's progress. It
is true that unless we share Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for The Night Mail
as a beautiful machine, for the men who governed it as skilled
mechanicians, and for all the minutiae of the control and distribution
of traffic by air, we are not likely to be greatly held by the story.
But this is simply to say that unless we catch the passion of an author
we may as well shut the author's book.
This does not imply that we must love machinery in order to love Mr
Kipling's enthusiasm for machinery. We have to share the author's
passion; but not necessarily to dote upon its object. It is not
essential to an admiration of Shakespeare's sonnets that the admirer
should have been a suitor of the Dark Lady. It matters hardly at all
what is the inspiration of an imaginative author. So long as he
succeeds in getting into a highly fervent condition, which prompts him
to write, with entire forgetfulness of himself and the reader, of
things whose beauty he was born to see, it is of little moment how he
happens to be kindled. We do not need to be suffering the pangs of
adolescent love, or even to know the story of Fanny Brawne, to hear the
immortal longing of John Keats sounding between all the lines of the
great Odes:
"Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."
We do not need to be the enemy of the Arminians to resolve the music of
Milton; and we may live all our lives in a city and yet know Wordsworth
for a great poet. Shelley does not suffer because philosophic anarchy
has gone out of fashion; and the poetry of the Hebrews lives for ever,
though its readers have never lived in the shadow of Sinai. These
mighty instances are here intended not to establish a comparison but to
establish a principle. The exact source of Mr Kipling's inspiration
matters not a straw. We simply know that his machinery is alive and
lovely in his eyes. He communicates his passion to his reader though
his readers are unable to distinguish between a piston-rod and a
cylinder-cover.
_The Day's Work_ throws back a clear and searching light upon some of
the tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed in
review. As we look back upon these stories of men and women we
realise, in the light of _The Day's Work_, that machinery--the
machinery of Army and Empire--enters repeatedly as a leading motive.
Far from regarding Mr Kipling's passion for technical engineering as
something which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling human
tales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human tales
are no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion that
helplessly spins them. As literature _William the Conqueror_ and _The
Head of the District_ have less to do with the politics of India than
with the nuts and bolts of _The Ship That Found Herself_. The same
truth applies equally to a book which has been discussed beyond all
proportion to its rank among the stories of Mr Kipling. _The Light
That Failed_ is often read as the high and tragical love story of Dick
Heldar; but it is really nothing of the kind. It really belongs to
_The Day's Work_. As the love story of Dick Heldar it is of small
account. Mr Kipling thinks very little of it from that point of view.
He has even allowed it, upon that side, to be deprived of all its
significance in order to meet the needs of a popular actor. Mr Kipling
is not the man to sell his conscience. Therefore his admirers may
infer from the fact that he has sold Dick and Maisie to British and
American playgoers that Dick and Maisie are not regarded by their
author as of the first importance. We cannot think of Mr Kipling as
allowing one screw of the ship that found herself to be misplaced. But
he has cheerfully allowed his story of Dick and Maisie to be turned
with a few strokes of the pen into an effective curtain for a
negligible play.
This does not mean that _The Light That Failed_ is not a characteristic
and a fine achievement. It means that its character and fineness have
nothing to do with Dick and Maisie or with any of that stuff of the
story which contrives to exist behind the footlights of Sir Johnston
Forbes Robertson's theatre. _The Light That Failed_ must not be read
as the love story of a painter who goes blind. It must be read, with
_.007_ and _The Maltese Cat_, as an enthusiastic account of the day's
work of a newspaper correspondent. The really vital passages of the
story have all to do with Mr Kipling's chosen text of work for work's
sake. Dick's work and not Dick himself is the hero of the play. The
only incident which really affects us is the scraping out of his last
picture. We do not bother in the least as to whether Maisie returns to
him or stays away; because we do not believe in the reality of Maisie
and we cannot imagine anything she may or may not do as affecting
anyone very seriously. Dick's wrestle with his picture is another
matter. He and his friends may talk a great deal of nonsense about
their work (nonsense which would strictly require us to condemn every
good page which Mr Kipling has written), but there is no doubt whatever
that the enthusiasm of men for men's work is the vital and moving
principle of _The Light That Failed_. The motive of the whole story is
the motive of _The Bridge-Builders_. The rest is merely accessory.
_The Light That Failed_ is full of instruction for the close critic of
Mr Kipling. We discover in it three out of the many levels of
excellence in which he moves. First there is a cunning artificer
pretending to a knowledge and admiration which he does not really
possess--an artificer who tries to impose Maisie and the Red-Haired
Girl upon us in the same deceiving way as the way in which he tried to
impose upon us Mrs Hawksbee and the Copleigh girls. Second, there is a
clever writer of soldier stories, showing us some nasty fighting at
close range, with a far too elaborate pretence that he can take it all
for granted as a professional combatant. Finally there is an inspired
author celebrating the world's work--an author we have agreed to put in
a higher rank than those other literary experts who have quite
unjustifiably stolen his greener laurels.