life is simple and
intense. These aspects of his work will be more clearly revealed at a
later stage. For the moment we are considering the Indian tales simply
as tales of India; and from this point of view they obviously belong to
the journalist rather than to the author who has helped to make the
English short story respectable. Mr Kipling simply gets out of India
the maximum of literary effect as a teller of tales. India, for
example, is mysterious. Mr Kipling exploits her mystery competently
and coolly, making his points with the precision, clarity and force of
one to whom the enterprise begins and ends as an affair of technical
adequacy. The point is made with equal ability that India is not
without peril and difficulty ruled and administered by the sahibs; or
that India has a complicated history; or that India is thickly peopled.
Mr Kipling in his Indian tales makes the most of his talent for
observing things, always with a keen eye for their effective literary
employment. His Indian tales are descriptive journalism of a high
quality; and, being journalism, their matter and their doctrine have
hit hard the attention of their particular day.

This reduces us to the necessity of considering not so much their form
and quality as the ideas and doctrines they contain--a barren task but
necessary in order to clear away many misconceptions with regard to Mr
Kipling's work. Regarded as literature, Mr Kipling's Indian tales are
mainly of note as preparing in him that enthusiasm for the work of the
world which, later, was to inspire his greatest pages; as finally
leading him in _Kim_ to a door whereby he was able to pass into the
region of pure fancy where alone he is supremely happy, and as
prompting in him the instinct to simplify which urged him into the
jungle and into the minds of children. But all this has very little to
do with India. So long as we are dealing with Mr Kipling's Indian
stories as in themselves finished and intrinsic studies of India, we
remain only in the suburbs of Mr Kipling's merit as an author. The
Simla tales are not more than a skilful employment of a literary
convention which Mr Kipling did not inherit. The Anglo-Indian and
native tales are the not less skilful work of a young newspaper man
breaking into a storehouse of new material. We are interested firstly
in Mr Kipling's craft as a technician, as one who makes the most of his
theme deliberately and self-consciously; and secondl