But the gravest, and the entirely fatal fault, is the painting of the English land system.  To read this story one could never guess that the English land system is not absolutely ideal, that tenants and hereditary owners do not live always in a delightful patriarchal relation, content.  There are no shadows whatever.  The English land system is perfect, and no accusation could possibly be breathed against it.  And the worst is that for Kipling the English land system probably is perfect.  He is incapable of perceiving that it can be otherwise.  He would not desire it to be otherwise.  His sentimentalization of it is gross—­there is no other word—­and at bottom the story is as wildly untrue to life as the most arrant Sunday-school prize ever published by the Religious Tract Society.  Let it be admitted that the romantic, fine side of the English land system is rendered with distinction and effectiveness; and that the puzzled, unwilling admiration of the Americans is well done, though less well than in a somewhat similar earlier story, “An Error in the Fourth Dimension.”

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An example of another familiar aspect of Kipling is “With the Night Mail.”  This is a story of 2000 A.D., and describes the crossing of the Atlantic by the aerial mail.  It is a glittering essay in the sham-technical; and real imagination, together with a tremendous play of fancy, is shown in the invention of illustrative detail.  But the whole effort is centred on the mechanics of the affair.  Human evolution has stood stock-still save in the department of engineering.  The men are exactly the same semi-divine civil service men that sit equal with British military and naval officers on the highest throne in the kingdom of Kipling’s esteem.  Nothing interests him but the mechanics and the bureaucratic organization and the esprit de corps.  Nor does he conceive that the current psychology of ruling and managing the earth will ever be modified.  His simplicity, his naivete, his enthusiasms, his prejudices, his blindness, and his vanities are those of Stalky.  And, after all, even the effect he aims at is not got.  It is nearly got, but never quite.  There is a tireless effort, but the effort is too plain and fatigues the reader, forcing him to share it.  A thin powder of dullness lies everywhere.

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When I had read these stories, I took out “Life’s Handicap,” and tasted again the flavour of “On Greenhow Hill,” which I have always considered to be among the very best of Kipling’s stories.  It would be too much to say that I liked it as well as ever.  I did not.  Time has staled it.  The author’s constitutional sentimentality has corroded it in parts.  But it is still a very impressive and a fundamentally true thing.  It was done in the rich flush of power, long before its creator had even suspected his hidden weaknesses, long before his implacable limitations had begun to compel him to imitate himself.  It was done in the days when he could throw off exquisite jewels like this, to deck the tale: