Kipling lay very dangerously ill in New York.  For a fortnight, then, Kipling’s temperature was the most important news of the day.  I remember giving a party with a programme of music, in that fortnight, and I began the proceedings by reading aloud the programme, and at the end of the programme instead of “God Save the Queen,” I read, “God Save Kipling,” and everybody cheered.  “Stalky and Co.” cooled me, and “Kim” chilled me.  At intervals, since, Kipling’s astounding political manifestations, chiefly in verse, have shocked and angered me.  As time has elapsed it has become more and more clear that his output was sharply divided into two parts by his visit to New York, and that the second half is inferior in quantity, in quality, in everything, to the first.  It has been too plain now for years that he is against progress, that he is the shrill champion of things that are rightly doomed, that his vogue among the hordes of the respectable was due to political reasons, and that he retains his authority over the said hordes because he is the bard of their prejudices and of their clayey ideals.  A democrat of ten times Kipling’s gift and power could never have charmed and held the governing classes as Kipling has done.  Nevertheless, I for one cannot, except in anger, go back on a genuine admiration.  I cannot forget a benefit.  If in quick resentment I have ever written of Kipling with less than the respect which is eternally due to an artist who has once excited in the heart a generous and beautiful emotion, and has remained honest, I regret it.  And this is to be said:  at his worst Kipling is an honest and painstaking artist.  No work of his but has obviously been lingered over with a craftsman’s devotion!  He has never spoken when he had nothing to say—­though probably no artist was ever more seductively tempted by publishers and editors to do so.  And he has done more than shun notoriety—­Miss Marie Corelli does that—­he has succeeded in avoiding it.

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The first story, and the best, in “Actions and Reactions” is entitled “An Habitation Enforced,” and it displays the amused but genuine awe of a couple of decent rich Americans confronted by the saecular wonders of the English land system.  It depends for its sharp point on a terrific coincidence, as do many of Kipling’s tales, for instance, “The Man Who Was”—­the mere chance that these Americans should tumble upon the very ground and estate that had belonged to the English ancestors of one of them.  It is written in a curiously tortured idiom, largely borrowed from the Bible, and all the characters are continually given to verbal smartness or peculiarity of one kind or another.  The characters are not individualized.  Each is a type, smoothed out by sentimental handling into something meant to be sympathetic.  Moreover, the real difficulties of the narrative are consistently, though I believe unconsciously, shirked.  The result, if speciously pretty, is not a bit convincing.