Mr Kipling’s Indian stories necessarily tend to fill a disproportionate amount of space.  They are of less account than their number or the attention they have received would seem to imply.  Their discussion in this and the two following chapters will be more of a political than a literary discussion.  Mr Kipling as journalist and very efficient colourman in words has made much of India in his time.  He has perceived in India a subject susceptible of being profitably worked upon.  Here was a vast continent, the particular concern of the English, where all kinds of interesting work was being done, where stories grew too thickly for counting, and where there was, ready to the teller’s eye, a richness and diversity of setting which beggared the most eager penmanship.  Moreover, this continent was virtually untouched in the popular literature of the day.  Naturally Mr Kipling made full use of his opportunity.  He did not write of India because India was essential to his genius, but because he was shrewd enough to realise that nothing could better serve the purpose of a young author than to exploit his first-hand acquisition of an inexhaustible store of fresh and excellent material.  India was annexed by Mr Kipling at twenty-two for his own literary purposes.  He was not born to interpret India, nor does he throw his literary heart and soul into the business.  When, in the Indian stories, we meet with pages sincerely inspired we discover that their inspiration has very little to do with India and a great deal to do with Mr Kipling’s impulse to celebrate the work of the world, and even more to do with his impulse to escape the intellectual casuistry of his generation in a region where life is simple and intense.  These aspects of his work will be more clearly revealed at a later stage.  For the moment we are considering the Indian tales simply as tales of India; and from this point of view they obviously belong to the journalist rather than to the author who has helped to make the English short story respectable.  Mr Kipling simply gets out of India the maximum of literary effect as a teller of tales.  India, for example, is mysterious.  Mr Kipling exploits her mystery competently and coolly, making his points with the precision, clarity and force of one to whom the enterprise begins and ends as an affair of technical adequacy.  The point is made with equal ability that India is not without peril and difficulty ruled and administered by the sahibs; or that India has a complicated history; or that India is thickly peopled.  Mr Kipling in his Indian tales makes the most of his talent for observing things, always with a keen eye for their effective literary employment.  His Indian tales are descriptive journalism of a high quality; and, being journalism, their matter and their doctrine have hit hard the attention of their particular day.