Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/83

Rh strung across their faces." And these are no mere decorations. The tales are gemmed—but as watches are jewelled; it is round these tense details that the action revolves. What is the emotional axis of The Finest Story in the World? It is that "silver wire laid along the bulwarks which I thought was never going to break." Are we to know that a man was struck dumb? Then "''just as the lightning shot two tongues that cut the sky into three pieces. . . something wiped his lips of speech as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child." The motive of all his tales, as of At the End of the Passage, is a picture seen in a lens. Even the shadowy outer influences that brood over Kim's life, the inscrutable Powers that move in its background, come to us first in designs as vivid and dense as the devices of heraldry—as a Red Bull on a Green Field, as a House of Many Pillars; and before the close are resolved into the two most definite, clean-cut, and systematic of all earthly organizations : the military mechanism of India and the precise apparatus of Freemasonry. Kipling must have pattern and precision—and he has the power as well as the will. He can crush the sea into a shape as sharp as a crystal, can compress the Himalayas into a little lacquer-like design, has even, in The Night Mail''—that clean, contenting piece of craftsmanship—printed a pattern on the empty air. He is primarily a pattern-maker; and the little pieces thus obtained he builds into a larger picture still. As the sentence into the paragraph—as the paragraph into the page—so do these sharp-edged items click together to form the geometrical pattern called the plot.

"The pattern called the plot." It is here that we come very close to the irony that has ruled and wrenched his career. Switch this imperatively map-making, pattern-making method upon the third element in fiction, the element of human nature, and what is the inevitable result? Inevitably, there is the same