Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1296 page)

Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested — his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, “In such and such circumstances, what would you do?”, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and “the gods of the copybook headings,” as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not “daring,” has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the “enlightened” utterances of the same period, such as Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of
Man and Superman.

MR. KIPLING’S STORIES by Andrew Lang

This chapter was taken from novelist Lang’s critical work
Essays in Little
.

Andrew Lang, Scots poet and author

MR KIPLING’S STORIES

The wind bloweth where it listeth.  But the wind of literary inspiration has rarely shaken the bungalows of India, as, in the tales of the old Jesuit missionaries, the magical air shook the frail “medicine tents,” where Huron conjurors practised their mysteries.  With a world of romance and of character at their doors, Englishmen in India have seen as if they saw it not.  They have been busy in governing, in making war, making peace, building bridges, laying down roads, and writing official reports.  Our literature from that continent of our conquest has been sparse indeed, except in the way of biographies, of histories, and of rather local and unintelligible
facetiæ
.  Except the novels by the author of “Tara,” and Sir Henry Cunningham’s brilliant sketches, such as “Dustypore,” and Sir Alfred Lyall’s poems, we might almost say that India has contributed nothing to our finer literature.  That old haunt of history, the wealth of character brought out in that confusion of races, of religions, and the old and new, has been wealth untouched, a treasure-house sealed: those pagoda trees have never been shaken.  At last there comes an Englishman with eyes, with a pen extraordinarily deft, an observation marvellously rapid and keen; and, by good luck, this Englishman has no official duties: he is neither a soldier, nor a judge; he is merely a man of letters.  He has leisure to look around him, he has the power of making us see what he sees; and, when we have lost India, when some new power is ruling where we ruled, when our empire has followed that of the Moguls, future generations will learn from Mr. Kipling’s works what India was under English sway.

It is one of the surprises of literature that these tiny masterpieces in prose and verse were poured, “as rich men give that care not for their gifts,” into the columns of Anglo-Indian journals.  There they were thought clever and ephemeral — part of the chatter of the week.  The subjects, no doubt, seemed so familiar, that the strength of the handling, the brilliance of the colour, were scarcely recognised.  But Mr. Kipling’s volumes no sooner reached England than the people into whose hands they fell were certain that here were the beginnings of a new literary force.  The books had the strangeness, the colour, the variety, the perfume of the East.  Thus it is no wonder that Mr. Kipling’s repute grew up as rapidly as the mysterious mango tree of the conjurors.  There were critics, of course, ready to say that the thing was merely a trick, and had nothing of the supernatural.  That opinion is not likely to hold its ground.  Perhaps the most severe of the critics has been a young Scotch gentleman, writing French, and writing it wonderfully well, in a Parisian review.  He chose to regard Mr. Kipling as little but an imitator of Bret Harte, deriving his popularity mainly from the novel and exotic character of his subjects.  No doubt, if Mr. Kipling has a literary progenitor, it is Mr. Bret Harte.  Among his earlier verses a few are what an imitator of the American might have written in India.  But it is a wild judgment which traces Mr. Kipling’s success to his use, for example, of Anglo-Indian phrases and scraps of native dialects.  The presence of these elements is among the causes which have made Englishmen think Anglo-Indian literature tediously provincial, and India a bore.  Mr. Kipling, on the other hand, makes us regard the continent which was a bore an enchanted land, full of marvels and magic which are real.  There has, indeed, arisen a taste for exotic literature: people have become alive to the strangeness and fascination of the world beyond the bounds of Europe and the United States.  But that is only because men of imagination and literary skill have been the new conquerors — the Corteses and Balboas of India, Africa, Australia, Japan, and the isles of the southern seas.  All such conquerors, whether they write with the polish of M. Pierre Loti, or with the carelessness of Mr. Boldrewood, have, at least, seen new worlds for themselves; have gone out of the streets of the over-populated lands into the open air; have sailed and ridden, walked and hunted; have escaped from the fog and smoke of towns.  New strength has come from fresher air into their brains and blood; hence the novelty and buoyancy of the stories which they tell.  Hence, too, they are rather to be counted among romanticists than realists, however real is the essential truth of their books.  They have found so much to see and to record, that they are not tempted to use the microscope, and pore for ever on the minute in character.  A great deal of realism, especially in France, attracts because it is novel, because M. Zola and others have also found new worlds to conquer.  But certain provinces in those worlds were not unknown to, but were voluntarily neglected by, earlier explorers.  They were the “Bad Lands” of life and character: surely it is wiser to seek quite new realms than to build mud huts and dunghills on the “Bad Lands.”

Mr. Kipling’s work, like all good work, is both real and romantic.  It is real because he sees and feels very swiftly and keenly; it is romantic, again, because he has a sharp eye for the reality of romance, for the attraction and possibility of adventure, and because he is young.  If a reader wants to see petty characters displayed in all their meannesses, if this be realism, surely certain of Mr. Kipling’s painted and frisky matrons are realistic enough.  The seamy side of Anglo-Indian life: the intrigues, amorous or semi-political — the slang of people who describe dining as “mangling garbage” the “games of tennis with the seventh commandment” — he has not neglected any of these.  Probably the sketches are true enough, and pity ‘tis true: for example, the sketches in “Under the Deodars” and in “The Gadsbys.”  That worthy pair, with their friends, are to myself as unsympathetic, almost, as the characters in “La Conquête de Plassans.”  But Mr. Kipling is too much a true realist to make their selfishness and pettiness unbroken, unceasing.  We know that “Gaddy” is a brave, modest, and hard-working soldier; and, when his little silly bride (who prefers being kissed by a man with waxed moustaches) lies near to death, certainly I am nearer to tears than when I am obliged to attend the bed of Little Dombey or of Little Nell.  Probably there is a great deal of slangy and unrefined Anglo-Indian society; and, no doubt, to sketch it in its true colours is not beyond the province of art.  At worst it is redeemed, in part, by its constancy in the presence of various perils — from disease, and from “the bullet flying down the pass.”  Mr. Kipling may not be, and very probably is not, a reader of “Gyp”; but “The Gadsbys,” especially, reads like the work of an Anglo-Indian disciple, trammelled by certain English conventions.  The more Pharisaic realists — those of the strictest sect — would probably welcome Mr. Kipling as a younger brother, so far as “Under the Deodars” and “The Gadsbys” are concerned, if he were not occasionally witty and even flippant, as well as realistic.  But, very fortunately, he has not confined his observation to the leisures and pleasures of Simla; he has looked out also on war and on sport, on the life of all native tribes and castes; and has even glanced across the borders of “The Undiscovered Country.”

Among Mr. Kipling’s discoveries of new kinds of characters, probably the most popular is his invention of the British soldier in India.  He avers that he “loves that very strong man, Thomas Atkins”; but his affection has not blinded him to the faults of the beloved.  Mr. Atkins drinks too much, is too careless a gallant in love, has been educated either too much or too little, and has other faults, partly due, apparently, to recent military organisation, partly to the feverish and unsettled state of the civilised world.  But he is still brave, when he is well led; still loyal, above all, to his “trusty chum.”  Every Englishman must hope that, if Terence Mulvaney did not take the city of Lungtung Pen as described, yet he is ready, and willing so to take it.  Mr. Mulvaney is as humorous as Micky Free, but more melancholy and more truculent.  He has, perhaps, “won his way to the mythical” already, and is not so much a soldier, as an incarnation, not of Krishna, but of many soldierly qualities.  On the other hand, Private Ortheris, especially in his frenzy, seems to shew all the truth, and much more than the life of, a photograph.  Such, we presume, is the soldier, and such are his experiences and temptations and repentance.  But nobody ever dreamed of telling us all this, till Mr. Kipling came.  As for the soldier in action, the “Taking of Lungtung Pen,” and the “Drums of the Fore and Aft,” and that other tale of the battle with the Pathans in the gorge, are among the good fights of fiction.  They stir the spirit, and they should be distributed (in addition, of course, to the “Soldier’s Pocket Book”) in the ranks of the British army.  Mr. Kipling is as well informed about the soldier’s women-kind as about the soldier: about Dinah Shadd as about Terence Mulvaney.  Lever never instructed us on these matters: Micky Free, if he loves, rides away; but Terence Mulvaney is true to his old woman.  Gallant, loyal, reckless, vain, swaggering, and tender-hearted, Terence Mulvaney, if there were enough of him, “would take St. Petersburg in his drawers.”  Can we be too grateful to an author who has extended, as Mr. Kipling in his military sketches has extended, the frontiers of our knowledge and sympathy?