mpostors just the same." The work, Dick says, comes from outside of him -- all he can do is prepare himself to receive it. And I admit that the creation of art does sometimes feel this way. But the consequence of believing this literally is that it is no credit on the artist when the art is great, and no shame when it is poor (so long as he has prepared well.) This is a terrible belief -- triumph and disaster are not the same. Triumph is good. Disaster is bad. And while it's true that we don't want to let disaster overwhelm us, part of that means that we should not let the risk of pain numb us to the possibility of joy; deep, fundamental, pervasive joy. In the end, Kipling seems to suggest that this is indeed the case: Dick's last painting of Melancholia is "the likeness of a woman who had known all the sorrow in the world and was laughing at it." But Dick himself fails to find this laughter in the face of his own failing sight, which can be read as a metaphor for the loss of artistic vision. He can't stay young forever, he can't continue to open himself to the beauty and horrors of the world and at the same time live a quiet domestic life with Massie. He cannot have both Love and Sight, and in the end has neither. This is a bleak and bitter book, for all that some of the playful back and forth between Dick and his masculine friends is full of humour, and Dick's descriptions of the world through his artist's eyes show Kipling the poet at his lyrical best. Dick's life is almost completely untempered by tenderness, despite the kindness of Torpenhow's final attempts to help him. Kipling's apparent answer to the question of how an artist is to live is: Live for your work alone, and don't give a tithe to what others want of you, especially women. But it's clear he recognizes the impossibility of maintaining this stance for long. In a world that offers only an impossible choice between the sanctity of work and the tenderness of love, life is ...
