This story is the real beginning of Puck—­to whom Mr Kipling’s latest volumes are addressed.  In Puck of Pook’s Hill Mr Kipling takes seisin of England in all times—­more particularly of that trodden nook of England about Pevensey.  This book is less a book of children and fairies than an English chronicle.  Dan and Una are the least living of Mr Kipling’s children—­they are as shadowy as the little ghost who dropped a kiss upon the palm of the visitor in the mansion of They.  The men, too, who come and go, are shadows.  It is the land which abides and is real.  We hum continually a variation of Shakespeare’s song: 

  “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

Puck of Pook’s Hill is a final answer to those who think of the Imperial idea as loose and vast, without roots in any dear, particular soil. Puck of Pool’s Hill suggests in every page that England could never for its lovers be too small.  We would know intimately each place where the Roman trod, where Weland came and went, where Saxon and Norman lost themselves in a common league.

From this England, fluttered with memories and the most ancient magic, it is a natural step into the regions of pure fancy where Mr Kipling is happiest of all. The Children of the Zodiac and The Brushwood Boy are the earliest proofs that Mr Kipling flies most surely when he is least impeded by a human or material document.  We have here to make a last protest against a too popular fallacy concerning the tales of Mr Kipling.  Mr Kipling’s passion for the concrete, which is a passion of all truly imaginative men, together with his keen delight in the work of the world, has caused him to be falsely regarded as a note-book realist of the modern type.  He is assumed to be happiest when writing from direct experience without refinement or transmutation.  We cannot trace this error to its source and expose the many fallacies it contains without going deeper into aesthetics than is here necessary or desirable.  The simple fact that Mr Kipling’s best stories are those in which his fancy is most free is answer enough to those who put him among the reporters of things as they are.  It sufficiently excuses us from the long and difficult inquiry as to whether Mr Kipling’s account of the people who live next door is accurate and minute, and allows us to assume, without starting a controversy which only a heavy volume could determine, that, if Mr Kipling had ever set out to describe the people who live next door, he would have simplified them out of all recognition.  Mr Kipling has pretended, often with some success, that his people are really to be met with in the Royal Navy or in the Indian Civil Service.  But let the reader consider for a moment whom they remember best.  Is it Mowgli or is it someone who is a C.I.E.?  Is it the Elephant Child, or is it Mr Grish Chunder De?  When does Mr Kipling more successfully convey to us the impression that his people are alive and real?  Is it when he is supposed to be drawing men from the life, or is it when he has set free his imagination to call up the People of the Hills or the folk in the Jungle?