made full use of his opportunity. He did not write of India because
India was essential to his genius, but because he was shrewd enough to
realise that nothing could better serve the purpose of a young author
than to exploit his first-hand acquisition of an inexhaustible store of
fresh and excellent material. India was annexed by Mr Kipling at
twenty-two for his own literary purposes. He was not born to interpret
India, nor does he throw his literary heart and soul into the business.
When, in the Indian stories, we meet with pages sincerely inspired we
discover that their inspiration has very little to do with India and a
great deal to do with Mr Kipling's impulse to celebrate the work of the
world, and even more to do with his impulse to escape the intellectual
casuistry of his generation in a region where life is simple and
intense. These aspects of his work will be more clearly revealed at a
later stage. For the moment we are considering the Indian tales simply
as tales of India; and from this point of view they obviously belong to
the journalist rather than to the author who has helped to make the
English short story respectable. Mr Kipling simply gets out of India
the maximum of literary effect as a teller of tales. India, for
example, is mysterious. Mr Kipling exploits her mystery competently
and coolly, making his points with the precision, clarity and force of
one to whom the enterprise begins and ends as an affair of technical
adequacy. The point is made with equal ability that India is not
without peril and difficulty ruled and administered by the sahibs; or
that India has a complicated history; or that India is thickly peopled.
Mr Kipling in his Indian tales makes the most of his talent for
observing things, always with a keen eye for their effective literary
employment. His Indian tales are descriptive journalism of a high
quality; and, being journalism, their matter and their doctrine have
hit hard the attention of their particular day.