'Like Tuning-Down the Glare of a Volcano'

My favorite story writer after Chekhov is Kipling. He’s the one writer I’ve read without interruption since I was first able to read. For intelligent selections from so prolific an author I recommend The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling (1961), edited by Randall Jarrell, and Collected Stories (1994), the Everyman’s edition edited by Robert Gottlieb. In between other things I’ve been reading his stories again (last night, “The Bridge-Builders”), so I was pleased to see Mike Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti has posted selections from “The Uses of Reading,” a 1912 lecture collected in A Book of Words (1928). Kipling’s conclusion is admirable:

“. . . [O]ver and above all the help we can get from our ordinary training, association with our betters, and our very limited experience, we can pick up from Literature a few general and fundament ideas as to how the great game of life has been played by the best players.”

Normally I avoid sports metaphors (and sports) but here Kipling confirms my understanding of literature. It ought to humble us. We know so little compared to Horace, Swift and Proust, the best players. In another lecture, “Fiction,” delivered by Kipling to the Royal Literary Society in 1926, he sounds like Chesterton in his paradoxical mode: “Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till someone had told a story.” And Kipling honors a forebear:

“A man of overwhelming intellect and power goes scourged through life between the dread of insanity and the wrath of his own soul warring with a brutal age. He exhausts mind, heart, and brain in that battle: he consumes himself, and perishes in utter desolation. Out of all his agony remains one little book, his dreadful testament against his fellow-kind, which to-day serves as a pleasant tale for the young under the title of Gulliver’s Travels. That, and a faint recollection of some baby-talk in some love-letters [A Journal to Stella], is as much as the world has chosen to retain of Jonathan Swift, Master of Irony. Think of it! It is like tuning-down the glare of a volcano to light a child to bed!”