row over a writer whose omniscience used to make the
timorous believe that arrogance, if lively enough, had some advantage
over reason.

Yet there is in a few of the letters enough to show what we missed
because they were not addressed to himself, or to anybody but a Composite
Portrait of The Breed. There are passages in the chapter called "Half a
Dozen Pictures" which clear all irritation from the mind (for many of the
author's insults are studied and gratuitous) and leave nothing but
respect for the artist. These come when the artist sees only a riot of
Oriental deck passengers, bears, and macaws, in the tropics; or a steamer
coming round, exposed by a clarity like crystal in the trough of immense
seas somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Auckland Islands at dayfall.
We get such impressions when Kipling has, for the moment, forgotten the
need to make a genuflection towards the Absolute and Everlasting
Chutney, and is a man and brother delighting in his craft.

The rest of the book has, one must admit, a value, but it is an
undesigned value; indeed, its value is that it was designed to prove, at
the time it was written, something quite different. From this book, with
its recurring contempt for England, you may see what value we need have
attached to much that the assured and the violent ever had to tell us
about our Empire. If this publication is, indeed, an act of contrition
for words unwisely written, then it should be read as a warning by all
who write. Materialists naturally attach to transient circumstances a
value which the less patriotic of us might think not really material. "We
discussed, first of all, under the lee of a wet deck-house in
mid-Atlantic; man after man cutting in and out of the talk as he sucked
at his damp tobacco." There is no doubt Kipling supposes that the wet
deck-house adds a value to the words spoken under its lee-side. Yet the
words he reports are what one may hear, with grief, any day in any tavern
in the hurry and excitement of ten minutes before closing time. But
Kipling always thought an opinion gained in value if expressed elsewhere
than in England. His ideal government would be a polo-player from Simla
leading the crew of the _Bolivar_.

Every horror in the world, the author of these letters tells us, has its
fitting ritual. How easily, too, one realizes it, when feeling again the
fanatic heat and force of this maker of old magic with the tom-tom; the
vicious mockery, certain of