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.