most deliberately an artificer. Mr Kipling has seemed to the
judicious, who have duly grieved, to be in his soldier tales throwing
all crafty scruples to the winds in order that he may the more joyfully
indulge a natural genius for ferocity. Mr Kipling's soldiers are
regarded as an instance of his love for low company, of his readiness
to sacrifice aesthetic beauty to vulgar truth.

This is quite the wrong direction from which to approach Mr Kipling's
soldier tales. Mr Kipling's ferocity on paper is not to be explained
as the result of a natural delight in violence and blood. On the
contrary, it is distinctively a literary ferocity--the ferocity, not of
a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and
conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people. It is
essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the
ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in
speculative politics. When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to
the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over
like the rattle of fire-irons in the fender and the grunt of a
pole-axed ox, or of a hot encounter between two combatants wherein one
of them after feeling for his opponent's eyes finds it necessary to
wipe his thumb on his trousers, or of gun wheels greasy from contact
with a late gunner--when Mr Kipling writes like this, we admit that his
pages are disagreeable. But let us be clear as to the reason. These
things are disagreeable, not because they are horrible fact, but
because they are deliberate fiction. We feel that these things have
been written, not from inspired impulse, but by taking careful thought.
Here, clearly, is a writer who writes of war, not because he is by
nature full of pugnacity, or necessarily loosed from hell to speak of
horrors, but because war is a good "subject" with opportunities for
effective treatment.