kindness, create an impossible tension between them. As an adult, Massie is more atomic than ever, simply failing to feel anything for Dick, which aggravates him no end because as an artist she is capable of appreciating his work. Her failure to love Dick when she can see his success is unaccountable to him, and yet at the centre of her attraction. Her distance seems to suggest a degree of independence that will allow him to love her as something like an equal. Yet even then, in his descriptions of their proposed future together he envisions her as weak and incapable -- he tells her that they'll see the world but he "won't let you see anything horrid." But as an artist he knows the horror of walking through a field of dead men, bloated and blackening beneath the North African sun -- he knows that you cannot "do anything until you have seen everything." Kipling saw a good deal of horror in his life, both as a reporter in India and later as a war correspondent and finally as a parent whose child was killed in the first world war and whose body was never found. His response to these horrors drove a good deal of his mature art, as it drives Dick Heldar's. For Dick, his work is his justification for living, and he wants to succeed based on some absolute standard of work, not in terms of material rewards; he holds the wilful pursuit of social or material success as inimical to artistic success, though he doesn't shun good fortune when it comes his way. His advice to Massie is: All we can do is to learn how to do our work, to be the masters of our materials, instead of servants,and never to be afraid of anything.The cost of the ability to do good work is everything you have, and nothing more: "Success isn't got by sacrificing other people... you must sacrifice yourself." This is Kipling's creed, and it's a harsh and unrewarding one indeed. The telling lines in his poem "If" say: "If you can meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two i...
