Like almost all Anglo-Saxon writers, Mr. Kipling is a moralist, and his gospel is Work. He believes in the strenuous life as a cure-all. He apparently does not agree with Goethe that To Be is greater than To Do. The moral of _Captains Courageous_ is the same moral contained in the ingenious bee-hive story. The unpardonable sin is Idleness. But although Work is good for humanity, it is rather limited as an ideal, and we cannot rate Mr. Kipling very high as a spiritual teacher. God is not always in the wind, or in the earthquake, or in the fire. The day-dreams of men like Stevenson and Thackeray sometimes bear more fruit than the furious energy of Mr. Kipling. But the consuming ambition of this man, and his honest desire to do his best, will, let us hope, spare him the humiliation of being beaten by his own past. After all, Genius is the rarest article in the world, and one who undoubtedly has it is far more likely to reach the top of the hill than he is to take the road to Danger, which leads into a great wood; or the road to Destruction, which leads into a wide field, full of dark mountains. XII "LORNA DOONE" The air of Devon and Somerset is full of literary germs. The best advice a London hack could give to a Gigadibs would be _Go west, young man_. The essential thing is to establish a residence south of Bristol, grow old along with Wessex, and inhale the atmosphere. Thousands of reverent pilgrims, on foot, on bicycle, and in automobile, are yearly following the tragic trails of Mr. Hardy's heroines; to a constantly increasing circle of interested observers, Mr. Eden Phillpotts is making the topography of Devon clearer than an ordnance map; if Mrs. Willcocks writes a few more novels like _The Wingless Victory_ and _A Man of Genius_, we shall soon all be talking about her--just wait and see; and in the summer season, when soft is the sun, the tops of coaches in North Devon and Somerset are packed with excited Americans, carrying Lornas instead of Baedekers. To the book-loving tourists, every inch of this territory is holy ground. Yet the author of our favourite romance was not by birth a Wessex man. Mr. Richard D. Blackmore (for, like the creator of _Robinson Crusoe_, his name is not nearly so well known as his work) first "saw the light" in Berkshire, the year being 1825. But he was exposed to the Wessex germs at the critical period of boyhood, actually going to Blundell's School at Tiverton, a small town in the heart of Devonshire, fourteen miles north of Exeter, at the union of Exe and Lowman rivers. To this same school he sent John Ridd, as we learn in the second paragraph of the novel:--