violence and blood. On the
contrary, it is distinctively a literary ferocity--the ferocity, not of
a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and
conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people. It is
essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the
ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in
speculative politics. When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to
the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over
like the rattle of fire-irons in the fender and the grunt of a
pole-axed ox, or of a hot encounter between two combatants wherein one
of them after feeling for his opponent's eyes finds it necessary to
wipe his thumb on his trousers, or of gun wheels greasy from contact
with a late gunner--when Mr Kipling writes like this, we admit that his
pages are disagreeable. But let us be clear as to the reason. These
things are disagreeable, not because they are horrible fact, but
because they are deliberate fiction. We feel that these things have
been written, not from inspired impulse, but by taking careful thought.
Here, clearly, is a writer who writes of war, not because he is by
nature full of pugnacity, or necessarily loosed from hell to speak of
horrors, but because war is a good "subject" with opportunities for
effective treatment.

It is incorrect to say that Mr Kipling naturally delights in savage
war. He has been accused of a positive gusto for knives and bayonets,
for redly dripping steel and spattered flesh. The gusto must be
confessed; but it is not a gusto for the subject. It is the skilled
craftsman's gusto for doing things thoroughly and effectively. Mr
Kipling cannot conceal his delight in his competency to make war as
nasty as Zola or Tolstoi have made it. But this has nothing to do with
a delight in war. Professors have gloried in blood and iron who would
probably faint away in the nice, clean operating theatre of a London
hospital. Philosophers who cannot run upstairs have preached the
survival of the physically fittest. The politest of Roman poets has
felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior's head fell to
right and left of his vertebral column. Mr Kipling's savagery is of
this excessively cultivated kind. It is not atavism or a sinister
resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility. Mr Kipling's
warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling's
real insp