Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1280 page)

Above all things, perhaps, Mr. Kipling makes us realise the cruel heat of India. Surely “The City of Dreadful Night” is, literally, the hottest story ever written.

There is not a breath of air stirring from beginning to end.

One would think it a country too hot for Englishmen to love in. But, indeed, no. As befits a true impression, the all-pervading presence of woman is here too; and story after story illustrates woman as the goddess in the great machine of Anglo- Indian government. These men sweat and count up their weevils — for some woman. If they rise high in the service, be sure Mrs. Hauksbee is somewhere behind; if they go under, suspect Mrs. Reiver; and, in addition to civilised, flirtatious woman, there is always the so-called “ brown “ woman, “ fair as bar gold,” on whom Mr. Kipling seems to have lavished nearly all the tenderness he has to spare for women as a sex, and “niggers” as a race — which really means that he knows and loves essential woman, who is always best as a simple, gentle savage, with no pretence to masculine “ civilisation.”

“I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land “ —

apparently represents Mr. Kipling’s own leanings on the most important of all subjects. Generally speaking, though one mustn’t forget the delightful exception of “ William the Conqueror,” his civilised woman is represented by u The Vampire,” the vampire for whom poor Wrcssley of the Foreign Office wrote his great book, an absurd tribute of the intellect at the feet of the sensual doll.

In the ‘‘ romance of the clash of civilisations “ (to quote a phrase of Mr. Grant Allen’s, whose “ Rev. John Creedv “ was a notable pioneer of the genre) Mr. Kipling’s India is rich; that India of picturesque and terrible superstitions, busy and muttering in the darkness on either side of the Pcshawur express, the India of black magic, as “ In the House of Sudd- hoo ‘‘:

“A stone’s throw out on either hand

From that well-ordered road we tread,

And all the world is wild and strange:

Cburel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite

Shall bear us company to-night, For we have reached the Oldest Land

Wherein the Powers of Darkness range — ’’

the India of monkey gods and elephant gods, whom it is still far from safe to insult, as we may read in “ The Mark of the Beast”: the India, on one side, of Strickland (the Waring-like experimentalist in Indian life) and, on the other, of Mowgli.

Of the native himself Mr. Kipling’s view is mainly the view of his hero Tommy Atkins. God made Hindus for the British soldier to wipe his feet on, and Afridis for the British soldier to bayonet “with deep hacking coughs.” Certain noble child-like traits are recorded of them sparingly, and we have a glimpse of one District Commis sioner who, in the phrase of the land, felt reallv like “ a father and a mother” to the wild hill-people under his care. Then, too, we must not forget the gentle vision (out of” William the Conqueror “) of Scott sneezing in the dust of a hundred little feet, his “ Kindergarten “ of tinv famine-stricken Hindus, and his walking amongst them at sunset, “ a god in a halo of golden dust, walking slowlv at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran small naked Cupids.”

Like a true Englishman, Mr. Kipling loves to pretend that he has no feelings, and, like a true Englishman, there are occasions when his feelings are certainly inadequate; hut, all the same, we must be a little careful sometimes in taking his cynicism and hard-heartedness at their surface values. Sometimes, at least, they are dramatic. Yet, with his sympathies so evidently akin to those of his hero, he cannot blame us if sometimes we identify his dramatic utterances with his personal feelings.

As for his pictures of that “ very strong man,” it is for intelligent officers to speak of their accuracy. A mere civilian is, necessarily, no judge of that. One evidence in favour of their truth is that, with all Mr. Kipling’s good-will, they are usually far from flattering:

“. . . single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints.”

The particular Tommies Mr. Kipling singles out are certainly “ no thin, red ‘eroes.” When a man does an heroic action he is usually able to give a good unheroic reason for it, as in the story called “ In the Matter of a Private”; and as for the Three Musketeers de?ios jours, Mulvaney may be true to one individual life, but it has been the custom in all countries and times to promote such exceptionally charming beings from the rank and file of mortality to the bright legions of mythology. There are men of genius and charm and good heart in all callings, but they are always sui generis, and in noway typical of the callings to which they accidentally belong. Mulvaney, indeed, illustrates that idealising, somewhat sentimental, side of Mr. Kipling’s art, which alternates, rather surprisingly, with the realistic, cynical side. Should some commentator answer this remark with Mul- vaney’s real name and address, Mulvaney would no less remain a figure of romance. Besides, Mr. Kipling’s typical British soldier is Irish!

Probably Orthcris, so far as we can individualise him, is more typical of the British Tommy, and he is nothing like so attractive. Learoyd is little more than a battering-ram with a Yorkshire dialect. Yet there is one remark of his, with Mulvaney’s and Ortheris’s comments upon it, which may serve as a text for Mr. Kipling’s vindication of the British soldier, disregarded no less by a peace-loving, war-wag ing people, than is the obscure Anglo-Indian official whom he supports with his rifle:

“They talk o’ rich folk bein’ stuck up an’ genteel,” says Learoyd, telling the story of his heart, “ but for cast-iron pride o’ respectability there’s naught like poor chapel folk. It’s as cold as th’ wind o’ Greenhow Hill — ay, and colder, for ‘twill never change. And now I come to think on it, one at strangest things I know is ‘at they couldn’t abide th’ thought o’ soldiering. There’s a vast o’ fightin’ i’ th’ Bible, and there’s a deal of Methodists i’ th’ Army; but to hear chapel folk talk yo’d think that soldierin’ were next door, an’ t’other side, to hangin’. . . . And they’d tell tales in th’ Sunday-school o’ bad lads as had been thumped and brayed for bird- nesting o’ Sundays and play in’ truant o’ week-days, and how they took to wrestlin’, dog fightin’, rabbit-runnin’, and drinkin’, till at last, as if ‘twere a hepitaph on a gravestone, they damned him across th’

moors wi’, ( an then he went and ‘listed for a soldier,’ an’ they’d all fetch a deep breath, and throw up their eyes like a hen drinkin’.’

“‘ Fwhy is ut? ‘ said Mulvaney, bringing down his hand on his thigh with a crack.

‘In the name av God, fwhv is ut? I’ve seen ut, tu. They cheat an’ they swindle, an’ they lie an’ they slander, an’ fifty things fifty times worse; but the last an’ the worst by their reckonin’ is to serve the Widdy honest. It’s like the talk av childer — see- in’ things all round.’

“‘ Plucky lot of fightin’ good fights of whatsername they’d do if we didn’t see they had a quiet place to fight in. And such fightin’ as theirs is! Cats on the tiles. T’other callin’ to which to come on . . .’ said Ortheris with an oath.”

Yet, though India is the subject-matter which best suits Mr. Kipling’s hand, as another man will write best of Greece, another of ‘‘ Wessex,’’ and another of ‘‘ Thrums,’’

and though that choice of subject-matter was a fortunate accident of birth so far as Mr. Kipling’s contemporary vogue is concerned, it was, perhaps, rather in spite of, than because of his subject, that he was most enthusiastically read by those whose enthusiasm matters most in the end. So far as literature is concerned, India owes more to Mr. Kipling than he to India. In whatever environment he had hatched out, his voracity for knowledge would no less have eaten up his surroundings — to spin in the end no less brilliant a literary cocoon.

Seriously speaking, it is rather a pity for literature that he was thus born in a sensational province of the empire, as it was a pity for so great a natural gift as that of Burns to be born into the Scotch dialect, or as it is a pity that so many gifts of similarly vivid impressionism should be born into American journalism. Important to us as India is to-day, and as it will continue to remain for a few to-morrows, its importance is only a passing crisis in those strategical and commercial complications of the human race which change nothing in that human nature with which lasting writings are concerned. India has its lasting importance in literature — the importance of its sacred books. Mr. Kipling’s stories, as subject-matter, are merely the cables of a brilliant journalist describing the long-drawn looting of an ancient civilisation. The circumstances are of no original importance. “When India belongs to Russia,” said a distinguished poet to the present writer, “no one will understand Kipling.” At all events, he will certainly need a glossary. Yes, only in so far as the stories are universally human, as well as Indian, will they — and do they — really matter. How far they are that we may, perhaps, measure by considering them not as Indian stories, but just as stories. I do not propose to examine them exhaustively or on any set principles, but by recording several impressions of the stories as a whole I may, perhaps, best suggest a tentative conclusion. Yet if occasionally I should seem to hint at, or even be compelled to refer to, general principles, such references may, I hope, seem inevitable to some few readers.

Perhaps the quality that first struck one in reading Mr. Kipling’s stories was their exceptional reality — while you read them. That, and the extraordinary knowledge not only of the details of human life, but of its less speedily learnt moods, complications, and significances; knowledge, too, that, even in a generation so inured to marvellous boys, was made the more astonishing by its precocious acquirement. There was, indeed, a conscious and irritating air of knowingness; as, for example, here: “ Michcle was working in his office when he heard the sound that a man never forgets all his life, the ‘ ah-yah ‘ of an angry crowd. [When that sound drops about three tones, and changes to a thick, dron ing ut, the man who hears it had better go away if he is alone.]” This is, indeed, calculated to impress, and yet, in spite of these boyish airs of omniscience, it was evident that Mr. Kipling had read deeply in the book of human life. He really did know an astonishing number of things about men and women, white and brown.

It was almost uncanny to hear this Chat- terton of India talking after this fashion: “Now, a Dalesman from beyond Skipton will forgive an injury when the Strid lets a man live; but a South Devon man is as soft as a Dartmoor bog”; “ I have seen Captain Haves argue with a tough horse — I have seen a tonga-driver coerce a stubborn pony — I have seen a riotous setter broken to gun by a hard keeper . . .”; “Did vou ever know Shackles — b. w. g., 15. if — coarse, loose, mule-like ears — barrel as long as a gate-post — tough as a telegraph- wire — and the queerest brute that ever looked through a bridle? He was of no brand, being one of an ear-nicked mob taken into the Bucephalus at £4. ioj. a head to make up freight, and sold raw and out of condition at Calcutta for Rs. 275.”; “ The women sang the Song of the Pick — the terrible, slow, swinging melody with the muttered chorus that repeats the sliding of the loosened coal, and, to each cadence, Kundoo smote in the black dark”; “ Listen! I see it all — down, down even to the stays! Such stays! Six-eight a pair, Polly, with red flannel — or list, is it? — that they put into the tops of those fearful things.” The way of “ Queenstown potato-smacks in a runnin’ tide,” the danger of poking a camp-fire with a bayonet, the window decorations of Aylesbury dairies, the secret talk of women as they unhook their stays with a sigh of relief after a ball, the meaning (hidden from his readers) of “ T. Gs,” and “ E. P. tents,” the hardness of “ five- year-old tea-baulks,” and, apparently, all the heart of man and the whole heartlessness of woman: was there anything this youngster had not seen, done, or remembered?

Then he was evidently a born storyteller. To him had been given the wonderful knack of doing with the pen what so many delightful men, quite inglorious and often hardly respectable, do daily in bar-parlours and other haunts of anecdote, by fleeting fascinating word of mouth. Indeed, here was just that very method captured in literature — the vividness, the nearness, the endearing, or irritating, slang of it. The last minstrel of the bar-parlour; the fish-liar of the smoking-room; the flashlight man of American journalism; the Eng- 1; h “ public-school” man, who brilliantly “don’t you knows” his way through a story: here were all these, plus that “ something, something” of genius that makes “ not a fourth sound, but a star.”

A humourist, too, at once simple and subtle. Perhaps farce is the test of your true humourist; and, over and over again, Mr. Kipling was convicted of a delightful boyish love of farce. Serious realists have reproached him, I see, for such revelries of fun as u The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney.” As if anything in the world couldn’t happen to Mulvaney — Mulvaney drunk, with his heels kicking out of a queen’s palanquin to begin the story.

Also he had written at least one love- story (“Without Benefit of Clergy”) that broke one’s heart; and ghost-stories, and tales of so-called “supernatural” horror, which, in spite of traditional expedients (such as “It” and “The Thing,” and dogs barking at the unseen, and horses plunging, and the breaking of the photographic plates in “ At the End of the Passage “ — as obvious a begging of the mystery as that which Stevenson has pointed out in the “ impressively” reticent conclusion of “ The Pit and the Pendulum “), really got hold of one. One may pause to remark that this vein of “ supernaturalism “ is verv characteristic of Mr. Kipling; and that related to it the theory of previous incarnations seems to have considerable attraction for him. Witness “ The Brushwood Boy,” one of his best love-stories. One mav note, too, his interest in insanity and morbid states of mind.