susceptible of being reconciled till they had been reduced to very simple terms.  The instinct to simplify—­to get down to something in nature that included the East with the West, the First with the Twentieth century, was naturally strong in one who was born between two nations; and it was an instinct which drove Mr Kipling in the opposite direction from that in which his contemporaries were moving.  While Mr Kipling’s generation was learning to analyse, refine and interrogate, to become super-subtle and incredulous, to exalt the particular and ignore the general, to probe into the intricate and sensitive places of modern life, Mr Kipling was looking at mankind in the mass, looking back to the half-dozen realities which are the stuff of the poetry of every climate and period—­to love of country which is as old as the waters of Babylon, to the faith of Achates, and the affliction of Job.  While Mr Kipling’s contemporaries have been working towards minute studies of individuals and groups, Mr Kipling has been content to catch the metal of humanity at the flash point, to wait for the passionate moment which reveals all mankind as of one kindred.  “We be of one blood, ye and I”—­the phrase of the Jungle holds.

To find here evidence of a bias merely political, of an attitude reactionary and hostile to the progress o the world, is to deny sense and meaning to the greatest literature of the world.  Mr Kipling’s instinctive simplifying of life he shares with the immortals.  It is, as we shall see, the immortal part of him.  To write of Mr Kipling as though he celebrates the ape and the tiger; extols the Philistine and the brute; calls always for more chops—­“bloody ones with gristle”; delights in the savagery of war, and ferociously despises all that separates the Englishman of to-day from his painted ancestor—­this is the mistake of critics who cannot distinguish the cant of progress from its reality.

We shall be driven more particularly to consider Mr Kipling’s atavism in discussing his tales of the British Army.  For the present we are dealing only with India and the “Imperialism” which some of Mr Kipling’s critics have taken for an offensive proof of his political prejudice.  Mr Kipling’s treatment of the Anglo-Indian, and of the dealing of the Anglo-Indian with the Indian Empire, has nothing to do with the Yellows and the Blues.  The real motive of Mr Kipling’s attitude towards the men on the frontier, in places where deadly things are encountered and there is work to be done, is no more a matter of politics, “progressive” or “reactionary,” than is his celebration of the Maltese Cat or of .007.  “The White Man’s Burden” is the burden of every creature in whom there lives the pride of unrewarded labour, of endurance and courage.  In India this pride has to be wholesomely tempered with humility; for India is old and vast and incomprehensible, to be handled with care, to be approached as a country which, though it shows an inscrutably smiling face to the