Kipling The Light That Faded

3 Pages 785 Words

Rudyard Kipling is remembered today mostly as a children's author. Kipling's poetry and adult fiction are both worth serious examination; “The Light That Failed” is probably the most important of his adult novels, in which he apparently makes the clearest statements of his beliefs about art and the purpose of life.
Dick Heldar is an orphan, a young savage who is not civilized by the beatings he gets from Mrs. Jennet, his foster-mother, nor by the contempt he receives from his school-fellows for his cheap and shoddy clothing. Coming out of his childhood, he goes off to wander the world, learns to paint, and finds he can see things that others can't, and capture them on canvas. His childhood companion, Massie, who is aptly described as "an atom" -- indivisible and impenetrable -- also learns to draw, but with considerably less success than Dick as she fails to give her whole life and soul to the work.
Dick's career is given its first great boost by a chance meeting with Torpenhow, a Special Correspondent for a news syndicate sent to the Sudan to cover the ultimately unsuccessful expedition to relieve Gordon. Torpenhow sees Dick's talents and immediately signs him up to supply drawings for his syndicate at a pittance. In this world of manly men, it's assumed that the strong will struggle forward on the thinnest of chances, and the weak will be swept away. Dick and Torpenhow become close friends in the course of the campaign, but in the midst of a battle Dick is wounded on the head and has a moment's flashback to the world of his childhood and Massie, whom he fell in love with shortly before they last parted.
The bulk of the story is taken up by the life Dick and Torpenhow share in London, living pleasantly in each other's company, arguing about the value of their work, and helping each other fail romantically. Women are implicitly a great threat to their work, to their whole way of being, and yet they provide something that can't...