Mr Kipling thinks very little of it from that point of view.  He has even allowed it, upon that side, to be deprived of all its significance in order to meet the needs of a popular actor.  Mr Kipling is not the man to sell his conscience.  Therefore his admirers may infer from the fact that he has sold Dick and Maisie to British and American playgoers that Dick and Maisie are not regarded by their author as of the first importance.  We cannot think of Mr Kipling as allowing one screw of the ship that found herself to be misplaced.  But he has cheerfully allowed his story of Dick and Maisie to be turned with a few strokes of the pen into an effective curtain for a negligible play.

This does not mean that The Light That Failed is not a characteristic and a fine achievement.  It means that its character and fineness have nothing to do with Dick and Maisie or with any of that stuff of the story which contrives to exist behind the footlights of Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson’s theatre. The Light That Failed must not be read as the love story of a painter who goes blind.  It must be read, with _.007_ and The Maltese Cat, as an enthusiastic account of the day’s work of a newspaper correspondent.  The really vital passages of the story have all to do with Mr Kipling’s chosen text of work for work’s sake.  Dick’s work and not Dick himself is the hero of the play.  The only incident which really affects us is the scraping out of his last picture.  We do not bother in the least as to whether Maisie returns to him or stays away; because we do not believe in the reality of Maisie and we cannot imagine anything she may or may not do as affecting anyone very seriously.  Dick’s wrestle with his picture is another matter.  He and his friends may talk a great deal of nonsense about their work (nonsense which would strictly require us to condemn every good page which Mr Kipling has written), but there is no doubt whatever that the enthusiasm of men for men’s work is the vital and moving principle of The Light That Failed.  The motive of the whole story is the motive of The Bridge-Builders.  The rest is merely accessory.

The Light That Failed is full of instruction for the close critic of Mr Kipling.  We discover in it three out of the many levels of excellence in which he moves.  First there is a cunning artificer pretending to a knowledge and admiration which he does not really possess—­an artificer who tries to impose Maisie and the Red-Haired Girl upon us in the same deceiving way as the way in which he tried to impose upon us Mrs Hawksbee and the Copleigh girls.  Second, there is a clever writer of soldier stories, showing us some nasty fighting at close range, with a far too elaborate pretence that he can take it all for granted as a professional combatant.  Finally there is an inspired author celebrating the world’s work—­an author we have agreed to put in a higher rank than those other literary experts who have quite unjustifiably stolen his greener laurels.