The grain of Mr Kipling’s work is the finer, his vision is more confident and clear, the further he gets from the world immediately about him.  Already we have seen how happily in India he left behind his impression of the alert tourist, his experience of the mess-room and bazaar, to enshrine in his fairy tale of Kim the faith and simplicity of two of the children of the world—­each, the old and the young, a child after his own fashion. Kim is Mr Kipling’s escape from the India which is traversed by the railway and served by the “Pioneer.”  It is the escape of Dan and Una into the Kingdom of Puck, and the escape of Mowgli into the Jungle.  It is the escape, finally, of Mr Kipling’s genius into the region where it most freely breathes.

We have noted that Kim is one of the Indian doors by which we enter; but there is a more open door in the first story of The Second Jungle Book.  It is the best of all Mr Kipling’s stories, just as the Jungle Books are the best of all his books.  It concerns the Indian, Purun Bhagat.

He was learned, supple, and deeply intimate in the affairs of the world.  He had shared the counsels of princes; he had been received with honour in the clubs and societies of Europe.  He was, to all appearances, a polite blend of all the talents of East and West.  Then suddenly Purun Bhagat disappeared.  All India understood; but of all Western people only Mr Kipling was able to follow where he walked as a holy man and a beggar into the hills.  There he became St Francis of the Hills, living in a little shrine with the friendly creatures of the woods, venerated and cared for by a village on the hillside.

All Mr Kipling’s readers know how that story ends—­how on a night of disaster there came together as of one blood the saint and his people and the wild creatures who had housed with him.  It is quoted here as showing how the old piety of India beckoned Mr Kipling into the jungle as inevitably as the old loyalty of England beckoned him into a region where on a summer day we can meet without surprise a Flint Man or a Centurion of Rome.

Always the bent of Mr Kipling, in his best work, is found to be away from the world.  To appreciate his finer quality we must pass with him into the Rukh, or into the country beyond Policeman Day, into the mansion of lost children, or into a region where it is but a step from the Zodiac to fields under the plough.  The tales of Mr Kipling which will longest survive him are not the tales where he is competently brutal and omniscient, but the tales where he instinctively flies from the necessity of giving to his vision the likeness of the modern world.