Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1279 page)

“The depth and dream of my desire,

The bitter paths wherein I stray,

Thou knowest Who hast made the Fire,

Thou knowest Who hast made the Clay.

One stone the more swings to her place

In that dread Temple of Thy Worth —

It is enough that through

Thy grace I saw naught common on Thy earth.

Take not that vision from my ken;

Oh whatsoe’er may spoil or speed,

Help me to need no aid from men

That I may help such men as need.”

But these notwithstanding, I venture, without great consciousness of daring, to state that in the high calm zones of poetry, where a word lasts for a thousand years; where a thought needs no renewal of temporary slang to give it piquant edge; where the mystery of things is deep and simple as at the beginning; where the poet’s voice is so strong and clear that it needs no modern devices to make it carry; where the languages of Babylon and Persia and Egypt and Rome and Greece and Italy and England are but as dialects of one eternal speech; in zones where you put the earth in .one line, the sea in another, and sun, moon, and stars in a third; in the zones where Homer sings immortally of war, though it was never given to his poor blind eyes to dote on a gun-cotton gun or a submarine boat; where Shakespeare knows all about the world, though three-fourths of it is yet to be discovered; where Keats knows all beauty, though he is quite ignorant of Greek: into these zones, I am sure, Mr. Kipling — with that absence of arrogance which characterises one who is decidedly the most famous of our younger men of letters — will be only too glad to be admitted as an Academy student.

CHAPTER II

THE STORIES

1.” Plain Tales from the Hills.”

2. “ Soldiers Three,” “ The Story of the Gadsbys,” “ In Black and White.”

3. “ Wee Willie Winkie,” “Under the Deodars,” “ The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Stories.”

4.” The Light that Failed.”

5. “ Life’s Handicap, being Stories of Mine Own People.”

6.” Many Inventions.”

7.” The Jungle Book.”

8.” The Second Jungle Book.”

9. “Captains Courageous: a Story of the Grand Banks.”

10. “ The Day’s Work.”

Six volumes of short stories, including stories told in dialogue; one novel; two fairy-tale books, and one boy’s book. Such is the material for our consideration of Mr. Kipling as a story-teller, counting by the English editions, and disregarding “ The Naulahka “ and “ Stalky $z Co.,” perhaps the best school story ever written, and concerning which it is sufficient against objectors to quote Mr. Kipling’s own criticism: “ It’s not brutality . . . It’s boy; only boy.”

I

The short stories number one hundred and thirty-one. Of these no less than forty are included in “ Plain Tales,” which, having been contributed originally (at least twenty-eight of them) to The Civil and Military Gazette, are all, no doubt for that reason, much shorter than Mr. Kipling’s other stories. Evidently, journalistic conditions kept them down to an average of some two thousand words apiece; and that insistence on a comprehensive brevity is always something to the credit of journalism as a literary training. “ In every poem, train the leading shoot, break off the suckers,” runs a dictum of Landor’s. There is nothing like journalism for breaking off the suckers, and as Mr. Kipling’s style is essentially a journalistic one, journalism at its highest power, the journalism of a man of genius, journalism vitalised by an imagination which usually reserves itself for higher forms of prose, this reference to The Civil and Military Gazette — as an earlier reference to .Mr. Kipling’s newspaper office experiences — is not without its significance.

Of these one hundred and thirty-one stories, one hundred and twelve, from one point of view or another, are stories of life in India. Of the remaining nineteen, five are sea-stories; four, yams of life trading and botanising in South America; two are allegories (“ The Finest Story in the World” and “Children of the Zodiac”); two are what may be called “ fairy-tales of science “;

one is a story of a South American republic; two are stories of Americans in England; one is a story of Americans in America; one is a Whitechapel story, and one I can only describe as “ Brugglesmith.”

Two main determinations run through these stories, as through the whole of Mr. Kipling’s work: to celebrate the romance of the English Government of India; and to celebrate the romance of commerce throughout the world — generally speaking, the heroism of modern life. In this, of course, Mr. Kipling is not a pioneer; but, perhaps, his work provides the most concrete embodiment yet given us of an ideal common to many poets and essayists and novelists of the last twenty years, and voiced most aggressively by Walt Whitman. But while the others say: “Modern life is as heroic as any,” Mr. Kipling is most ready with convincing examples. Young as he still is, and vigourous as he is likely to remain for many coming years, it is not unlikely that, section by section, he may make a complete picture of British and American rule, and thus become the snap-shot Balzac of Anglo-Saxon colonisation — his gifts for getting up a country and its people are so exceptional. Yet it seems unlikely, judging by his essays in new fields, that he will ever do, say, America or Australia as he has done India. Evident as is his notebook sometimes in his Indian sketches, it is less that than his sub-conscious experience and memory of the country that counts. There are, too, his father’s affectionately acknowledged stores of Indian lore and anecdote to be remembered. One cannot be a boy in two countries at once, and there is little doubt that Mr. Kipling’s best work will always be Indian in subject, however heroically he may strive to span the octave of the globe.

The consideration of his prose work then practically resolves itself into a consideration of his aim to write the romance of the English government of India. Necessarily three persons are chiefly concerned in that romance: the English official, the English soldier, and the native. Already in “ Departmental Ditties “ we have seen Mr. Kipling’s youthful satire at work upon home ignorance of the Anglo-Indian official lot. Not the ignorance merely, but the indifference of the comfortable Englishman to all that distant dog’s work and danger, seems early and late to have impressed Mr. Kipling with its injustice and stupidity. Here was an empire purchased at what cost, maintained at what expenditure of brain and blood and treasure, momentous, maybe, to the very existence of the British Empire — and yet to the peace-lulled people of England a matter of incredible indifference. Old the tale of how it was won, old already, too, the tale of how it was nearly lost, old Thackeray’s begums and colonels. Its conquest had been exciting, but its maintenance was the business — the prosaic business — of the Indian Civil Service. Even the Supreme Government itself slept upon Indian affairs, only awakening at times to impede by its ignorance the work of those who know — comparatively — in Calcutta.

“Gentlemen come from England,” writes Mr. Kipling in a passage which might serve as a text for a large section of his work, “ spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great Sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its works, denouncing or praising it as their own ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no one, not even the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of the Empire. Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service.

These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death or broken in health and hope in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone; but the idea is a pretty one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes forward. If an advance be made all credit is given to the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame.”

It is from the lives of such Englishmen — their pluck and patience, their hard-earned adulteries at Simla, and their occasional excursions “across the pale” into the mys- terv-land of native India — that A4r. Kipling has gathered so many of his vivid anecdotes. A great number of them (certainly most of the “Plain Tales “), considered singly, are “departmental” in the narrow sense. Their appeal is chiefly to those who have gone through the same mill. Taken separately thev are, so to speak, somebodv else’s shop, interesting to read once, as brightly told shop always is; but with nothing in their treatment to make us wish to read them again. If Air. Kipling did not sometimes discover India universally human, as well as gossipinglv departmental,” their value would be already exhausted.

Considered, however, not singly, but as contributing, however slightly, to that episodical epic of India which it has been Mr. Kipling’s ambition to write, they have their place. Thev are the lesser lights and darks contributing to such more serious elements of the general picture as lk At the End of the Passage,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” “In Flood Time,” “ The Alan Who Was,” behind which looms vast in the background the image of that old Sphinx of the Plains complete in mystery as no other writer has ever been able to suggest her.

A sphinx, too, of so many meanings.

In emphasising that Mr. Kipling has done a great service to Viceroys. To us at home India is long ago a conquest; to the Anglo-Indian, on the contrary, it has daily to be conquered. We say “ India,” as though India were a unity, instead of a congeries of mutually hostile kingdoms, divided broadly, to start with, on the bitter religious feud between Mohammedan and Hindu, and, after that, infinitesimally complicated in a venomous tangle of racehatreds and fierce ancestral distinctions. To keep the teeth of India from the throat of India is one of the initial difficulties of Indian administration. Not realising this, many well-meaning Viceroys make beautiful mistakes, as, for instance, when, in the story of “ The Head of the District,” the “ Very Greatest of All the Viceroys” appointed a distinguished Bengali to the government of a turbulent hill-district. Mr. Grish Chunder De, M.A., was as English as an English university could make him; his talk was of bump-suppers, cricket matches, and hunting-runs. He would say “ We must get these fellows in hand,” and in every respect he was terribly English. But that sort of thing could not deceive the Khusru Kheyl. Mr. Grish Chunder De, M.A., remained a Bengali, and being that, dirt beneath the feet of all Hindustan. “ Has the government gone mad to send a black Bengali dog to us? “ asked the righteously indignant chief of the clan. Such is the fate of sentimental government in India. “ A child of the country to the rule of the country.” What could be prettier — in theory? But then “ what looks so feasible in Calcutta, so right in Bombay, so unassailable in Madras, is misunderstood by the North, and entirely changes its complexion on the banks of the Indus.”

Few writers so well illustrate the old artistic maxim that the part is greater than the whole than Mr. Kipling in writing of India. Rich as he is in minutue, it is, after all, as invariably in potent description, the phrase that tells. “ The stern, black-bearded kings who sit about the Council-board of India”; “Look, there are the lights of the mail-train going to Peshawur!” It is in such flash-light phrases that Mr. Kipling reveals India to our imaginations. One might say that in those two sentences are contained the extremes of modern India. To say them over to one’s self is to see again many other pictures of Mr. Kipling’s Indian panorama. Between those phrases lie the India of “ the blazing sky, the dried-up over-handled earth,” the India of “At the End of the Passage “:

“The men flung themselves down, ordering the punkah-coolies by all the powers of Hell to pull. Every door and window was shut, for the outside air was that of an oven. The atmosphere within was only 104°, as the thermometer bore witness, and heavy with the foul smell of badly-trimmed kerosene lamps; and this stench, combined with that of native tobacco, baked brick, and dried earth, sends the heart of many a strong man down to his boots, for it is the smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns herself for six months into a house of torment “; the famine-stricken Indian of “ William the Conqueror,” the moon-haunted India of “ The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.”

Then what glimpses we get of the absurdities of Indian government in a flash of satire such as this: “Even the Secretariat believes that it does good when it asks an over-driven Executive Officer to take a census of wheat-weevils through a district of live thousand square miles”; and particularly in that delightful bit of farce called “ Pig.”