Rudyard Kipling’s novel The Light That Failed was published in 1890.

On reading it today it is apparent that little has changed after the passage of a

hundred years: in Kipling’s time, the General Public had immoderate interest

in the Corporate Imperialism of the day, demanding daily news of its half-baked

wars and adventures in far parts of the Empire, just as today foolish people

demand continuous news of half-baked wars and adventures started in the public

name by the Corporate Imperialists that control the government of the United

States of America.

Kipling’s novel explores the relationship between male adventurers gathering

news to feed the public appetites. Today we are as likely to find
females doing so alongside males. In The Light That Failed, the reader sees

the effect on these newshounds of the call to action; for it
sounds as true now as it did then.

It is also a story of unrequited love and women scorned, made tragic by passionate

pursuit of art. Art is what carries the story forward to its
conclusion. Love is germinated between two who share the coldness of a stark,

unloved childhood, lightening the loneliness of each other and
case-hardening their self-sufficiency -- a stubborness that contributes to their

ultimate undoing.

Kipling says much about art, using the visual arts as the medium of exposition. He

shows that fame depends on the good will of a fickle public
and that art should not be pursued for wealth and admiration, rather it should be

done for its own sake alone, the artist reporting the movement
of the Muse within. It requires hard work to develop technique that can capture

and display to advantage the emotions of the world seen through
the artist’s eyes.

Each of us is a traveller through the world. An artist is a keen observer that

should travel widely. Kipling shows us that an artist is one who must be
detached from the world and, through skillful use of technique, recreate the

essense of experience in a picture that conveys emotion into the
viewer such that the technique is invisible. Art, any art, succeeds when the

techniques employed go unnoticed. Kipling exemplifies this in that
he travelled widely as a reporter and writer of stories. He worked at his art for

its intrinsic worth, Only on his final return to England did he
discover the true extent of his fame. Art is a distillation of the artist’s

experience. The Light That Failed shows too the transitory nature
of life and our ultimate fate, famous or obscure; it shows too that art

doesn’t live much longer than us and can even have shorter life.

At end, the only thing worth doing is working to create, though the creator may

labour in obscurity. It is a lonely struggle. The Light That
Failed still speaks to us a century after it was written.