It is incorrect to say that Mr Kipling naturally delights in savage
war. He has been accused of a positive gusto for knives and bayonets,
for redly dripping steel and spattered flesh. The gusto must be
confessed; but it is not a gusto for the subject. It is the skilled
craftsman's gusto for doing things thoroughly and effectively. Mr
Kipling cannot conceal his delight in his competency to make war as
nasty as Zola or Tolstoi have made it. But this has nothing to do with
a delight in war. Professors have gloried in blood and iron who would
probably faint away in the nice, clean operating theatre of a London
hospital. Philosophers who cannot run upstairs have preached the
survival of the physically fittest. The politest of Roman poets has
felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior's head fell to
right and left of his vertebral column. Mr Kipling's savagery is of
this excessively cultivated kind. It is not atavism or a sinister
resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility. Mr Kipling's
warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling's
real inspiration and interest is far away from the battle-field and the
barrack. They are the kind of battle story which is usually written by
sedentary poets who live in the country and are fond of children. Only
they are the very best of their kind.

Mr Kipling's study of the professional soldier is best observed in
Private Ortheris. Mulvaney is more popular, but Mulvaney in no sense
belongs to Mr Kipling. He is the stage Irishman of the old Adelphi and
the hero of many tales by Lever and Marryat. He is as purely a
convention of the days of Mr Kipling's youth as are Mrs Hawksbee and
the Simla ladies. His chief importance lies in the opportunities he
gives Mr Kipling for indulging his joyful gift for pure farce.
_Krishna Mulvaney_ and _My Lord the Elephant_ are farce of the first