This is the method of Homer as applied to the shield of Achilles, the 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.

The inspiration which Mr Kipling first indulged to its full bent in The Day’s Work lives on through all the ensuing books.  It reaches a climax in With the Night Mail, a post-dated vision of the air.  It is one of the most remarkable stories he has written—­a story produced at full pressure of the imagination which, but for its fatal prophesying, would keep his memory green for generations.  The detail with which the theme is worked out is extravagant; but it is the extravagance of an inspired lover.  To quarrel with its technical exuberance on the ground that Mr Kipling should have made it less like the vision of an engineer is simply to miss almost the main impulse of Mr Kipling’s progress.  It is true that unless we share Mr Kipling’s enthusiasm for The Night Mail as a beautiful machine, for the men who governed it as skilled mechanicians, and for all the minutiae of the control and distribution of traffic by air, we are not likely to be greatly held by the story.  But this is simply to say that unless we catch the passion of an author we may as well shut the author’s book.