of the Mill Wheel in _Below the
Mill Dam_ is quite obviously accurate. That Mill Wheel, unlike scores
of Mr Kipling's men and women, is a creature we have met, who refuses
to be forgotten. When he is dealing with men Mr Kipling celebrates not
so much mankind as the skill and competency of mankind as severely
applied to a given and necessary task. It follows that Mr Kipling's
men at their best are most excellent machines. It follows, again, that
when Mr Kipling drops the pretence that he is deeply concerned with man
as man, and begins to celebrate with all his might the machine as the
machine, we realise that his machine is the better man of the two.

The inspiration which Mr Kipling first indulged to its full bent in
_The Day's Work_ lives on through all the ensuing books. It reaches a
climax in _With the Night Mail_, a post-dated vision of the air. It is
one of the most remarkable stories he has written--a story produced at
full pressure of the imagination which, but for its fatal prophesying,
would keep his memory green for generations. The detail with which the
theme is worked out is extravagant; but it is the extravagance of an
inspired lover. To quarrel with its technical exuberance on the ground
that Mr Kipling should have made it less like the vision of an engineer
is simply to miss almost the main impulse of Mr Kipling's progress. It
is true that unless we share Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for The Night Mail
as a beautiful machine, for the men who governed it as skilled
mechanicians, and for all the minutiae of the control and distribution
of traffic by air, we are not likely to be greatly held by the story.
But this is simply to say that unless we catch the passion of an author
we may as well shut the author's book.

This does not imply that we must love machinery in order to love Mr
Kipling's enthusiasm for machinery. We have to share the author's
passion; but not necessarily to dote upon its object. It is not
essential to an admiration of Shakespeare's sonnets that the admirer
should have been a suitor of the Dark Lady. It matters hardly at all
what is the inspiration of an imaginative author. So long as he
succeeds in getting into a highly fervent condition, which prompts him
to write, with entire forgetfulness of himself and the reader, of
things whose beauty he was born to see, it is of little moment how he
happens to be kindled. We do not need to be suffering the pangs of
adolescent love, or e