to be stretched, even by
well-meaning persons, to cover theft, lying and flat piracy.

"Are you trying to prove," demanded X, "that Mr. Kipling is a feminine
poet?"

"No, but I am about to bring you to the conclusion that in his worse mood
he is a sham-masculine one. The 'Recessional' proves that, man of genius
that he is, he rises to a conception of Universal Law. But too often he
is trying to dodge it with sham law. A woman would not appeal to law at
all: she would boldly take her stand on lawlessness. He, being an
undoubted but misguided man, has to find some other way out; so he takes a
twopenny-halfpenny code as the mood seizes him--be it the code of a
barrack or of a Johannesburg Jew--and hymns it lustily against the
universal code: and the pity and the sin of it is that now and then by
flashes--as in 'The Tale of Purun Bhagat'--he sees the truth.

"You remember the figure of the Cave which Socrates invented and explained
to Glaucon in Plato's 'Republic'? He imagined men seated in a den which
has its mouth open to the light, but their faces are turned to the wall of
the den, and they sit with necks and legs chained so that they cannot
move. Behind them, and between them and the light, runs a raised way with
a low wall along it, 'like the screen over which marionette-players show
their puppets.' Along this wall pass men carrying all sorts of vessels
and statues and figures of animals. Some are talking, others silent; and
as the procession goes by the chained prisoners see only the shadows
passing across the rock in front of them, and, hearing the voices echoed
from it, suppose that the sound comes from the shadows.

"To explain the fascination of Mr. Kipling's verse one might take this
famous picture and make one fearsome addition to it. There sits (one
might go on to say) among the prisoners a young man different from them in
voice and terribly different to look upon, because he has two pairs of
eyes, the one turned towards the light and realities, the other towards
the rock-face and the shadows. Using, now one, now the other of these two
pairs of eyes, he never knows with which at the moment he is gazing,
whether on the realities or on the shadows, but always supposes what he
sees at the moment to be the realities, and calls them 'Things as They
Are.' Further, his lips have been touched with the glory of the greater
vision, and he speaks enchantingly when he discourses of the shadows on
the rock, th