This does not imply that we must love machinery in order to love Mr Kipling’s enthusiasm for machinery.  We have to share the author’s passion; but not necessarily to dote upon its object.  It is not essential to an admiration of Shakespeare’s sonnets that the admirer should have been a suitor of the Dark Lady.  It matters hardly at all what is the inspiration of an imaginative author.  So long as he succeeds in getting into a highly fervent condition, which prompts him to write, with entire forgetfulness of himself and the reader, of things whose beauty he was born to see, it is of little moment how he happens to be kindled.  We do not need to be suffering the pangs of adolescent love, or even to know the story of Fanny Brawne, to hear the immortal longing of John Keats sounding between all the lines of the great Odes: 

  “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
  Though winning near the goal—­yet do not grieve;
  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
  For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.”

We do not need to be the enemy of the Arminians to resolve the music of Milton; and we may live all our lives in a city and yet know Wordsworth for a great poet.  Shelley does not suffer because philosophic anarchy has gone out of fashion; and the poetry of the Hebrews lives for ever, though its readers have never lived in the shadow of Sinai.  These mighty instances are here intended not to establish a comparison but to establish a principle.  The exact source of Mr Kipling’s inspiration matters not a straw.  We simply know that his machinery is alive and lovely in his eyes.  He communicates his passion to his reader though his readers are unable to distinguish between a piston-rod and a cylinder-cover.

The Day’s Work throws back a clear and searching light upon some of the tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed in review.  As we look back upon these stories of men and women we realise, in the light of The Day’s Work, that machinery—­the machinery of Army and Empire—­enters repeatedly as a leading motive.  Far from regarding Mr Kipling’s passion for technical engineering as something which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling human tales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human tales are no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion that helplessly spins them.  As literature William the Conqueror and The Head of the District have less to do with the politics of India than with the nuts and bolts of The Ship That Found Herself.  The same truth applies equally to a book which has been discussed beyond all proportion to its rank among the stories of Mr Kipling. The Light That Failed is often read as the high and tragical love story of Dick Heldar; but it is really nothing of the kind.  It really belongs to The Day’s Work.  As the love story of Dick Heldar it is of small account.