From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

"You remember the figure of the Cave which Socrates invented and explained to Glaucon in Plato's 'Republic'? He imagined men seated in a den which has its mouth open to the light, but their faces are turned to the wall of the den, and they sit with necks and legs chained so that they cannot move. Behind them, and between them and the light, runs a raised way with a low wall along it, 'like the screen over which marionette-players show their puppets.' Along this wall pass men carrying all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals. Some are talking, others silent; and as the procession goes by the chained prisoners see only the shadows passing across the rock in front of them, and, hearing the voices echoed from it, suppose that the sound comes from the shadows.

"To explain the fascination of Mr. Kipling's verse one might take this famous picture and make one fearsome addition to it. There sits (one might go on to say) among the prisoners a young man different from them in voice and terribly different to look upon, because he has two pairs of eyes, the one turned towards the light and realities, the other towards the rock-face and the shadows. Using, now one, now the other of these two pairs of eyes, he never knows with which at the moment he is gazing, whether on the realities or on the shadows, but always supposes what he sees at the moment to be the realities, and calls them 'Things as They Are.' Further, his lips have been touched with the glory of the greater vision, and he speaks enchantingly when he discourses of the shadows on the rock, thereby deepening the delusion of the other prisoners whom his genius has played the crimp to, enticing them into the den and hocussing and chaining them there. For, seeing the shadows pass to the interpretation of such a voice, they are satisfied that they indeed behold Things as They Are, and that these are the only things worth knowing.

"The tragedy of it lies in this, that Mr. Kipling in his greater moments cannot help but see that he, with every inspired singer, is by right the prophet of a law and order compared with which all the majestic law and order of the British Empire are but rags and trumpery:—"

"'I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' God,
I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three;
I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' Hell,
And—ye—would—make—a Knight o' me!'"

"Not long ago an interviewer called on Mr. Meredith, and brought away this for his pains:—

"'I suppose I should regard myself as getting old—I am seventy-four. But I do not feel to be growing old either in heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man's eye. I have always hoped I should not grow old as some do—with a palsied intellect, living backwards, regarding other people as anachronisms because they themselves have lived on into other times, and left their sympathies behind them with their years.'

"He never will. He will always preserve the strength of manhood in his work because hope, the salt of manhood, is the savour of all his philosophy. When I think of his work as a whole—his novels and poems together—this confession of his appears to me, not indeed to summarise it—for it is far too multifarious and complex—but to say the first and the last word upon it. In poem and in novel he puts a solemnity of his own into the warning, ne tu pueri contempseris annos. He has never grown old, because his hopes are set on the young; and his dearest wish, for those who can read beneath his printed word, is to leave the world not worse, but so much the better as a man may, for the generations to come after him. To him this is 'the cry of the conscience of life':—"

"'Keep the young generations in hail,
And bequeath them no tumbled house.'