Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1277 page)

But this is by the way. There remains to speak of “ The Conundrum of the Workshops “; from a literary point of view a more piquant performance than “Tomlinson.” Mr. Kipling is fond of sneering at “ Art with a big A.” Evidently he had been, very naturally, nauseated with the cant talk about “ Art,” which, like his hero, “ Dick Heldar,” he found current in London. No doubt certain criticisms on his work provoked his bitter, witty rejoinder. All the same, Mr. Kipling knows well enough that, however you spell it, there is a form of lasting creation with pen and ink, with brushes and paint, with marble and chisel, and with musical notes, which we call “ art,” which also has its eternal laws not to be set aside for any of us, not even for Mr. Kipling; and that this art is not stultified of her foolish children, however foolish their talk.

Mr. Kipling represents the devil as the arch-critic. Whatever man has done he has always been there to cry: “ You did it, but was it Art r “ On the whole, a very proper question to ask — of the artist. Adam, and Noah, and the builders of Babel, were not artists, but strong men of action. The question was irrelevant to them. Mr. Kipling chose his examples badly for the force of his satire. Only in the last verse but one is the example to the point:

‘‘ ‘When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the Club-room’s green and gold, The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mould — They scratch with their pens in the mould of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start, For the Devil mutters behind the leaves: ‘ It’s pretty, but is it Art? ‘“

Of course. And only by steadily asking this question of contemporary reputations, as they blaze up on the horizon, can one hope to maintain a standard of serious work. Of course, if by art one means sugar-candy and stained-glass windows, it is another matter. But those who speak of art in its proper sense are not to be mocked out of their use of the only word for their purpose by satire, however telling, against those who take that word in vain.

I hope Mr. Kipling will overlook my saying it — but “ Mandalay “ is something very like Art! It’s “ human,” it’s “ striking,” it’s “ clever,” it’s “ pretty,” Mr. Kipling “ did it” — and yet, it is Art!

Yes, and as sure as “ Mandalay “ is “ art,” something like seventeen poems included in the “ Other Verses” are not. For eleven of these no one whose opinion counts could seriouslv plead. “ The Last Suttee,” “The Ballad of the King’s Mercv,” “ The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” “With Scindia to Delhi,” “The Lament of the Border Cattle Thief,” “ The Ballad of the < Clampherdown,’ “ “The Sacrifice of Er-Heb,” “The Explanation,” “ The Gift of the Sea,” “ Evarra and his Gods,” “ The Legend of Evil,” are all commonplace, dull, or bad, in their several ways. “ The Ballad of Boh Da Thone “ is cheap burlesque that might have passed in “ Departmental Ditties “ •, and “ Cleared “ and “ An Imperial Rescript” are satires wrong-headedly conceived and indifferently executed.

Three poems only remain: “ The Ballad of East and West,” “ The Rhyme of the Three Captains,” and “The English Flag.” I am aware that these poems have been highly praised. “ The English Flag “ begins well. Its first eight lines are spirited. They stir one. Were the rest of the poem equal to them, the poem had been a success. But they are not. Recondite geography — Mr. Kipling’s fatal geography — and astronomy, are called in to take the place of inspiration; and, as nothing can take its place, they fail. “ The Ballad of East and West “ is generally better, though not so good in any single passage. It tells a stirring story stirringly, but the Macaulay- ish method of its telling is outworn. We can Suffer ballads that go like this no more — the metre is worn out:

“Kamal is out with twenty men to raise the Border-side, And he has lifted the Colonel’s mare that is the Colonel’s pride: He has lifted her out of the stable-door between the dawn and the day, And turned the calkins upon her feet, and ridden her far away.”

As for “ The Rhyme of the Three Captains,” I may be at fault, for I have never been able to read it to the end; but so far as I have gone its story struck me as dull, its nautical technicalities, choking it like sea-weed, more than usually tiresome, and its metre open to the same objection as that brought against “ The Ballad of East and West.”

I have called eleven of Mr. Kipling’s poems commonplace, dull, or bad. The statement, I am aware, is sweeping; yet considerations of space prevent my supporting mv opinion with more than two or three quotations. Dulness is a pervasive quality difficult to illustrate in small samples. Yet one may fairly guess that a poem which begins as begins “ The Ballad of the King’s Jest” is going to be as dull all through. The lifeless beat of the couplet alone settles it. The most brilliant poetic idea could not keep itself awake in company with so somnolent a metre. Here are the opening lines:

“
When spring-time flushes the desert grass,

Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.

Lean are the camels but fat the frails,

Light are the purses but heavy the bales,

And the snowbound trade of the North

comes down To the market-square of Peshawur town.

In a turquoise twilight, crisp and chill,

A kafila camped at the foot of the hill.

Then blue smoke-haze of the cooking rose,

And tent-peg answered to hammer nose;

And the picketed ponies, shag and wild,

Strained at their ropes as the feed was piled. . . .”

This is what I call dull poetry, and I think it may serve as an illustration of what I mean by bad poetry, too. This also is what Mr. Kipling makes of the couplet.

Here is an example of his blank verse from “ The Sacrifice of Er-Heb “:

“This is Taman, the God of all Er-Heb,

Who was before all Gods, and made all Gods,

And presently will break the Gods he made,

And step upon the Earth to govern men

Who give him milk-dry ewes and cheat his Priests,

Or leave his shrine unlighted — as Er-Heb Left it unlighted and forgot Taman,

When all the Valley followed after Kysh And Yabosh, little Gods but very wise,

And from the sky Taman beheld their sin.”

Perhaps this might serve as an example of dulness, too.

“The Ballad of the ‘ Clampherdown ‘ “ and “ The Lament of the Border Cattle Thief” are examples of what Mr. Kipling can do with the more conventional forms of ballad metre. Here is a verse from the first:

“It was our war-ship ‘ Clampherdown ‘

Would sweep the Channel clean,

Wherefore she kept her hatches close

When the merry Channel chops arose,

To save the bleached marine.”

And here a verse from the second:

“O woe is me for the merry life

I led beyond the Bar,

And a treble woe for my winsome wife

That weeps at Shalimar.”

It is largely the fault of Mr. Kipling’s own achievement if such verse seems tame after “ The ‘ Bolivar.’ “ But the simple truth is that Burns was not more de-poetized, cramped, and conscious, when he left his native Scotch to write Thomsonian English, than Mr. Kipling when he forsakes his inspiring Cockney — or at all events, some form of dialect. And this we shall find no less true of his second volume, “The Seven Seas,” which we have now to consider.

3. “ The Seven Seas.”

Still, the general average of “The Seven Seas “ is higher than the general average of “Barrack-Room Ballads”; or, perhaps one should say, that the proportion of good second-class poems is larger. In fact, there is hardly a poem in the volume that has not some redeeming merit, of feeling or phrase. And if there is no “ Mandalay,” there is at least one poem supreme beyond the others, the pitiful ballad, “ Mary, Pity Women.” Here once more Mr. Kipling takes the very mud and orange-peel of the gutter, with an honest disregard of squeamish stomachs, and makes a symbol of tragedy and pity, which I shall leave “the Master of All Good Workmen,” whom he invokes in his envoi, to praise.

“Mary, Pity Women,” obviously belongs to the barrack-room section of the volume, and with the poems in that section we may as well deal before turning to the sea-poems. They well keep up the average of the first volume. In fact, rank and file, I think they are better. But there’s no “ Fuzzy-Wuzzy “ or “Danny Deever.” As near as we approach the latter is in “ Cholera Camp,” with its almost unbearably mournful refrain:

“Oh, strike your camp an’ go, the bugle’s callin’

The Rains are fallin —

The dead are hushed an stoned to keep ‘em safe below;

The Band’s a-doin all she knows to cheer us;

The chaplains gone and prayed to Gazud to ‘ear us —

To ‘ear us — O Lord, for if s a killin of us so!”

But the strength of this second instalment is in their humour, in the delightful devil-

may-care fun of “The Shut-Eye Sentry” and “ The Jacket “:

“
So it was ‘ Rounds! What rounds? ‘ at two of a frosty night,

‘E’s ‘ old in on by the sergeant’s sash, but, sentry) shut your eye.

An it zvas ‘ Pass!  All’s well! ‘ Oh, ain’t Je drippin’ tight!

‘E’ ll need an affidavit pretty badly by-an by”-

in the Mulvaney spirit of “The Men that Fought at Minden,” a ballad of the break- ing-in of poor young “ recruities “ j in the delightful frankness of “The Ladies,” “An’ I learned about women from ‘er “; and in the quaint phrases of “ Soldier an’ Sailor Too” — ” ‘E’s a kind of a giddy harum-frodite — soldier an’ sailor too! “ But, perhaps, better than any of the ballads (except, of course, “ Mary, Pity Women “) 4 is Mr. Kipling’s charming prologue in regard to his “art “:

“When ‘ Outer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre,

He’d ‘eard men sing by land an sea;

An what be thought ‘ e might require,

‘E ivent an’ took — the same as me!”

Turning to ccThe Seven Seas “ section, one remarks that Mr. Kipling is growing more ambitious, also that his songs of the sea do not seem to come so natural to him as his soldier songs. There is more evidence of the determined note-book. Soldiers he learnt in the receptive, comparatively unconscious, period of boyhood; sailors he has had to cram. The same applies to his sea-stories, as I shall have further occasion to note later on.

Two ambitions firmly define themselves in “ The Seven Seas “: to sing the song of the Empire, and to sing the song of steam;

to unite our scattered colonies in a song, and, like Whitman, “ in the labours of engines and the fields, to show the developments and the eternal meanings.” From a literary point of view Mr. Kipling has succeeded best with steam, though in both cases he brings evidences of energetic intention rather than achievement. Still a persistent sentiment goes a long way, makes up for a good deal, in poetry, and when one’s theme is so popular as the British Empire, the Empire itself is likely to help us out with the chorus.

Only as the work of the author of “ Barrack-Room Ballads,” and the story-teller of Anglo-India, could that mild cantata, “ A Song of the English,” have any significance; though in its opening number, “ Fair is our lot, O goodly is our heritage,” it sounds the first note of Mr. Kipling’s later Alethodistical-jingoistic manner. Never, throughout all its metrical devices, does it once catch fire; and the idea of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and a dozen other cities and colonies, singing four lines apiece, like the lifeless personifications of the old masques, was one which no poet could carry out successfully. In the “ Hymn before Action “ we approach still nearer to the “ Recessional “ spirit:

“The earth is full of anger,

The seas are dark with wrath,

The Nations in their harness

Go up against our path:

Ere yet we loose the legions —

Ere yet we draw the blade,

Jehovah of the Thunders,

Lord God of Battles, aid!”