“But he is vulgar, he stirs the puddle of life,” object the fluttering, chirping gentlemen, the Tomlinsonian men.  Well, and isn’t life vulgar?  Can you divorce the facts of life?  Much of good is there, and much of ill; but who may draw aside his garment and say, “I am none of them”?  Can you say that the part is greater than the whole? that the whole is more or less than the sum of the parts?  As for the puddle of life, the stench is offensive to you?  Well, and what then?  Do you not live in it?  Why do you not make it clean?  Do you clamour for a filter to make clean only your own particular portion?  And, made clean, are you wroth because Kipling has stirred it muddy again?  At least he has stirred it healthily, with steady vigour and good-will.  He has not brought to the surface merely its dregs, but its most significant values.  He has told the centuries to come of our lyings and our lusts, but he has also told the centuries to come of the seriousness which is underneath our lyings and our lusts.  And he has told us, too, and always has he told us, to be clean and strong and to walk upright and manlike.

“But he has no sympathy,” the fluttering gentlemen chirp.  “We admire his art and intellectual brilliancy, we all admire his art and intellectual brilliancy, his dazzling technique and rare rhythmical sense; but . . . he is totally devoid of sympathy.”  Dear!  Dear!  What is to be understood by this?  Should he sprinkle his pages with sympathetic adjectives, so many to the paragraph, as the country compositor sprinkles commas?  Surely not.  The little gentlemen are not quite so infinitesimal as that.  There have been many tellers of jokes, and the greater of them, it is recorded, never smiled at their own, not even in the crucial moment when the audience wavered between laughter and tears.

And so with Kipling.  Take The Vampire, for instance.  It has been complained that there is no touch of pity in it for the man and his ruin, no sermon on the lesson of it, no compassion for the human weakness, no indignation at the heartlessness.  But are we kindergarten children that the tale be told to us in words of one syllable?  Or are we men and women, able to read between the lines what Kipling intended we should read between the lines?  “For some of him lived, but the most of him died.”  Is there not here all the excitation in the world for our sorrow, our pity, our indignation?  And what more is the function of art than to excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed?  The colour of tragedy is red.  Must the artist also paint in the watery tears and wan-faced grief?  “For some of him lived, but the most of him died”—­ can the heartache of the situation be conveyed more achingly?  Or were it better that the young man, some of him alive but most of him dead, should come out before the curtain and deliver a homily to the weeping audience?