Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/84

58 MEEKNESS OF MR. RUDYARD KIPLING sudden stiffening and formulation. The characters spring to attention like soldiers on parade ; they re- spond briskly to a certain description ; they wear a fixed suit of idiosyncrasies like a uniform. A mind like this must use types and set counters ; it feels dissatisfied, ineffective, unsafe, unless it can reduce the fluid waverings of character, its flitting caprices and twilit desires, to some tangible system. The characters of such a man will not only be definite ; they will be definitions. His heroes will be courage incarnate ; his weak men will be unwaveringly weak ; and those who are mixed will be mixed mathematically, with all their traits clearly related to and explained by some neat blend of blood and race and caste behind. Is not all this true of Kipling's characters? They are marked by a strange immobility. They strike certain attitudes — and retain them. Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd live long but never alter ; Kim never grows up. And indeed it is this very fixity that makes the short stories so effective. Their maker took these frozen gestures, rigid faces, and tense attitudes, and fitted them together to form his effect; and, whilst the in- flexibility was exactly what he needed for his mosaic- work, for making the sudden star called the story, the very tension of the details (" life seen by lightning- flashes" some one called them) seemed to prove the piercing realism of the writer. It was only when he tried to construct a long novel with them that the stiffness of these details turned to obstinacy, and their numbness became a kind of death. A short tale can be told in tableau — but a novel is not a long short tale. The pattern of The Light that Failed is every bit as neat as the most successful of the contes, but it is the static symmetry of decoration and stained glass. It is applied art — that is to say, misapplied art. Its logic is not that of life. The characters are stowed into the interstices of a pre-arranged design that relies upon them remaining fixed quantities.