Chapter 1

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RUDYARD KIPLING

by

JOHN PALMER

[Frontispiece: Rudyard Kipling]

New York Henry Holt and Company First Published in 1915

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION II. SIMLA III. THE SAHIB IV. NATIVE INDIA V. SOLDIERS THREE VI. THE DAY'S WORK VII. THE FINER GRAIN VIII. THE POEMS BIBLIOGRAPHY AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

I

INTRODUCTION

There is a tale of Mr Kipling which relates how Eustace Cleever, a celebrated novelist, came to the rooms of a young subaltern and his companions who were giving an account of themselves. Eustace Cleever was a literary man, and was greatly impressed when he learned that one of the company, who was under twenty-five and was called the Infant, had killed people somewhere in Burma. He was suddenly caught by an immense enthusiasm for the active life--the sort of enthusiasm which sedentary authors feel. Eustace Cleever ended the night riotously with youngsters who had helped to govern and extend the Empire; and he returned from their company incoherently uttering a deep contempt for art and letters.

But Eustace Cleever was being observed by the First Person Singular of Mr Kipling's tale. This receiver of confidences perceived what was happening, and he has the last word of the story:

"Whereby I understood that Eustace Cleever, decorator and colourman in words, was blaspheming his own Art and would be sorry for this in the morning."

We have here an important clue to Mr Kipling and his work. Mr Kipling writes of the heroic life. He writes of men who do visible and measurable things. His theme has usually to do with the world's work. He writes of the locomotive and the engineer; of the mill-wheel and the miller; of the bolts, bars and planks of a ship and the men who sail it. He writes, in short, of any creature which has work to do and does it well. Nevertheless we must not be misled into thinking that because Mr Kipling glorifies all that is concrete, practical, visible and active he is therefore any the less purely and utterly a literary man. Mr Kipling seems sometimes to write as an engineer, sometimes as a soldier. At times we would wager that he had spent all his life as a Captain of Marines, or as a Keeper of Woods and Forests, or as a Horse-Dealer. He gives his readers the impression that he has lived a hundred lives, mastered many crafts, and led the life, not of one, but of a dozen, active and practical men of affairs. He has created about himself so complete an illusion of adventure and enterprise that it seems almost the least important thing about him that he should also be a writer of books. His readers, indeed, are apt to forget the most important fact as to Mr Kipling--the fact that he is a man of letters. He seems to belong rather to the company of young subalterns than to the company of Eustace Cleever.

Hence it is necessary to consider closely the moral of that excellent tale. When Eustace Cleever blasphemed against his art, Mr Kipling predicted he would be sorry for it. Mr Kipling recorded that prediction because he had the best of reasons to know how Eustace Cleever would feel upon the morning after his debauch of enthusiasm for the heroic life. Let each man keep to his work, and know how good it is to do that work as well as it can be done. Eustace Cleever's work was to live the life of imagination and to handle English words--work as difficult to do and normally as useful as the job of the Infant. Though for one heady night Eustace Cleever yearned after a strange career, Mr Kipling knew that he would return without misgiving to the thing he was born to do. Mr Kipling, like Eustace Cleever, knows that though nothing is more pleasant than to talk with young subalterns, yet the born author remains always an author. He knows, too, that even the deeds he admires in the men who make history are, for him, no more than raw stuff to be taken in hand or rejected according to the author's need.

Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, before we have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful man of letters. Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out of the jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men are working and building and fighting, come really out of the study of an expert craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care. This may seem an unnecessary warning. The intelligent reader will protest that, since Mr Kipling writes books, it does not seem very necessary to deduce that he is a man of letters. It is true that no such warning would be necessary in the case of most writers of books. It would be pure loss of time, for example, to begin a study of the work of Mr Henry James by asserting that Mr Henry James was a man of letters. But Mr Kipling is in rather a different case. The majority of readers with whom one discusses Mr Kipling's works are sometimes far astray, simply because they have not realised that Mr Kipling is as utterly a man of letters as Mr Henry James, that he lives as completely the life of fancy and meditation as William Blake or Francis Thompson. Mr Kipling does not write tales out of the mere fullness of his life in many continents and his talk with all kinds of men. He is not to be understood as a man singular only in his experience, unloading anecdotes from a crowded life, excelling in emphasis and reality by virtue of things actually seen and done. On the contrary, Mr Kipling writes tales because he is a writer.

Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and been more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his literary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any the less devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that he is one of the craftiest authors who ever lived. He is more crafty than Stevenson. He often lives by the word alone--the word picked and polished. That he has successfully disguised this fact from many of his admirers is only a further proof of his literary cunning. Mr Kipling often uses words with great skill to create in his readers the impression that words matter to him hardly at all. He will work as hard as the careful sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawness and crudity; and thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is a literary man. They are content simply to listen to a man who has seen, and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to observe that, if the world with its day's work belongs to Mr Kipling, it belongs to him only by author's right--that is, by right of imagination and right of style.

It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of _The Light That Failed_, he tries to talk as though there were really no such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is pedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of literary discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula. It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than Tennyson or Walter Scott. Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's art is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he helped to send out of fashion.

A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement of his works here to be followed.

Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E. His intimacy with India was determined at birth. He was educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in 1882, as assistant editor on _The Civil and Military Gazette_ and _The Pioneer_. He remained on the staff of _The Pioneer_ for seven years, and travelled over the five continents. By this time he had learned to think of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see something of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come back to her from the ends of the earth. The whole of Mr Kipling's literary biography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a great traveller who is now inveterately at home.

Perhaps we should also note that Mr Kipling was a literary prodigy. _Plain Tales from the Hills_ appeared in 1887. Mr Kipling at twenty-two had shown his quality and had already mapped out in little his career. In _Plain Tales from the Hills_ there are hints for almost everything that their author afterwards accomplished. As the book of a young journalist whose name had not yet been whispered among the publishers and critics of London it was a miracle. If Mr Kipling had been able to improve on _Plain Tales from the Hills_ as much as Shakespeare improved on _Love's Labour's Lost_, as much as Shelley improved on _Queen Mab_, Robert Browning on _Pauline_, Byron on _Hours of Idleness_, he would to-day be without a peer. Mr Granville Barker is often cited as a classical modern example of precocity, but he was twenty-four when he wrote _The Marrying of Anne Leete_. Mr Henry James was twenty-eight before he had published a characteristic word. Mr Thomas Hardy at twenty-five had only printed a short story, and he was more than thirty when his first novel appeared. Mr Kipling came upon the public in 1886 without a preliminary stutter. Mr Kipling at twenty-two could write as craftily as Mr Kipling can write after nearly thirty years' experience. We shall not be greatly concerned in these pages to trace the progress of Mr Kipling's craft and wisdom. He was always crafty and always wise. He had done some of his best work at thirty. He recalls Hazlitt's curious saying that an improving author is never a great author. Mr Kipling is not an improving author. There has been a little moving up and down the scale of excellence; many things hinted in the early volumes from _Plain Tales from the Hills_ to _Many Inventions_ are developed more elaborately and surely in later volumes; the old craft has come to be used with an ease that has in it more of the insolence of a master than was possible in the author of 1887. But so far as literary finish is concerned, _Plain Tales from the Hills_ leaves little to be acquired. Already Mr Kipling wields his implement as deftly and firmly as many a skilled writer who was learning his lesson before Mr Kipling was born. Few authors have so surely scored their best in their earliest years. Authors are considered young to-day at thirty. Mr Kipling at that age had already written _The Jungle Book_.

This does not, of course, imply that all Mr Kipling's stories are of equal merit. On the contrary, we shall henceforth be mainly concerned with looking for the inspired author under a mass of skilful journalism. It is not a simple enterprise. Mr Kipling is so competent an author that he is usually able to persuade his readers that his heart is equally in all he writes. Moreover, Mr Kipling has fallen among many prejudices, literary and political, which have caused his least important work to be most discussed. For these reasons the actual, as distinguished from the legendary, Mr Kipling is not easily discovered. Mainly it is a work of excavation.

Mr Kipling has been writing short stories for nearly thirty years. His tales are too numerous for disparate discussion. It will be necessary to take them in groups. One or two stories in each group will be taken as typical of the rest. Thereby we shall avoid repetition and be able to show some sort of plan to the maze of Mr Kipling's diversity of subjects and manners.

II

SIMLA

Mr Kipling's Indian stories fall into three groups. There are (1) the tales of Simla, (2) the Anglo-Indian tales, and (3) the tales of native India. There is also _Kim_, which is more--much more--than a tale of India.

Mr Kipling's Indian stories necessarily tend to fill a disproportionate amount of space. They are of less account than their number or the attention they have received would seem to imply. Their discussion in this and the two following chapters will be more of a political than a literary discussion. Mr Kipling as journalist and very efficient colourman in words has made much of India in his time. He has perceived in India a subject susceptible of being profitably worked upon. Here was a vast continent, the particular concern of the English, where all kinds of interesting work was being done, where stories grew too thickly for counting, and where there was, ready to the teller's eye, a richness and diversity of setting which beggared the most eager penmanship. Moreover, this continent was virtually untouched in the popular literature of the day. Naturally Mr Kipling made full use of his opportunity. He did not write of India because India was essential to his genius, but because he was shrewd enough to realise that nothing could better serve the purpose of a young author than to exploit his first-hand acquisition of an inexhaustible store of fresh and excellent material. India was annexed by Mr Kipling at twenty-two for his own literary purposes. He was not born to interpret India, nor does he throw his literary heart and soul into the business. When, in the Indian stories, we meet with pages sincerely inspired we discover that their inspiration has very little to do with India and a great deal to do with Mr Kipling's impulse to celebrate the work of the world, and even more to do with his impulse to escape the intellectual casuistry of his generation in a region where life is simple and intense. These aspects of his work will be more clearly revealed at a later stage. For the moment we are considering the Indian tales simply as tales of India; and from this point of view they obviously belong to the journalist rather than to the author who has helped to make the English short story respectable. Mr Kipling simply gets out of India the maximum of literary effect as a teller of tales. India, for example, is mysterious. Mr Kipling exploits her mystery competently and coolly, making his points with the precision, clarity and force of one to whom the enterprise begins and ends as an affair of technical adequacy. The point is made with equal ability that India is not without peril and difficulty ruled and administered by the sahibs; or that India has a complicated history; or that India is thickly peopled. Mr Kipling in his Indian tales makes the most of his talent for observing things, always with a keen eye for their effective literary employment. His Indian tales are descriptive journalism of a high quality; and, being journalism, their matter and their doctrine have hit hard the attention of their particular day.

This reduces us to the necessity of considering not so much their form and quality as the ideas and doctrines they contain--a barren task but necessary in order to clear away many misconceptions with regard to Mr Kipling's work. Regarded as literature, Mr Kipling's Indian tales are mainly of note as preparing in him that enthusiasm for the work of the world which, later, was to inspire his greatest pages; as finally leading him in _Kim_ to a door whereby he was able to pass into the region of pure fancy where alone he is supremely happy, and as prompting in him the instinct to simplify which urged him into the jungle and into the minds of children. But all this has very little to do with India. So long as we are dealing with Mr Kipling's Indian stories as in themselves finished and intrinsic studies of India, we remain only in the suburbs of Mr Kipling's merit as an author. The Simla tales are not more than a skilful employment of a literary convention which Mr Kipling did not inherit. The Anglo-Indian and native tales are the not less skilful work of a young newspaper man breaking into a storehouse of new material. We are interested firstly in Mr Kipling's craft as a technician, as one who makes the most of his theme deliberately and self-consciously; and secondly in Mr Kipling's point of view, in the impressions and ideas he has collected concerning the country of which he writes. Until we arrive at _The Day's Work_ we shall be mainly occupied in clearing the ground of impertinent prejudices concerning Mr Kipling's temperament and politics. For though the Indian and soldier tales are as literature not impregnable to criticism, they can at any rate be rescued from those who have annexed or repudiated them from motives which have little to do with their literary value.

We will begin with the Simla tales.

Characteristically the author who began virtually at the end of his career--proclaiming himself a finished virtuoso at the start--entered into prose with a volume of tales, radiating from Simla, which betray qualities that are usually associated with the later rather than with the early work of an author. _Plain Tales from the Hills_ number more Simla stories to the square page than any other volume of Mr Kipling. Now Mr Kipling's Simla stories are the least important, but in some ways the most significant of all the stories he wrote. They begin and they end in sheer literary virtuosity. We feel in reading Mr Kipling's studies of the social world at Simla that he had no intuitive call to write them; that they are exercises in craft rather than genuine inspirations. Mrs Hawksbee stands for nothing in Mr Kipling's achievement save only for his power to create an illusion of reality and enthusiasm by sheer finish of style. She is not a creation. She is only the best possible example of the clever sleight-of-hand of an accomplished artificer. She is in literary fiction cousin to the witty, flirtatious ladies of the modern English theatre. Her conversation is delightful, but it belongs to nobody. It does not even belong to her author. Mrs Hawksbee talks as all well-dressed women talk in the best books. She does it with a volubility and resourcefulness which almost disguises the fact that she lives only by hanging desperately to the end of her author's pen; but she cannot deceive us always. Mr Kipling does not really believe in Mrs Hawksbee. He has no real sympathy or knowledge of the social undercrust where the tangle of three is a constant theme. The talk of Mrs Hawksbee and her circle is derived. Its conduct is fashionable light comedy in an Indian setting.

Simla really does not deserve to be known outside the Indian Empire. It is a comparatively cool place whither Indian soldier and civilians send their wives in the hot weather and whither they retire themselves under medical advice. It is not unlike any other warm and idle city of rest where there is every kind of expensive amusement provided for a migratory population. Mr Kipling has failed to make Simla interesting, because Simla is Biarritz and Monte Carlo or any place which in fiction is frequented by people who behave naughtily and enjoy themselves, and in real life is frequented by the upper middle classes mechanically passing the time. Mr Kipling's ingenious pretences regarding Simla are amusing, but they cannot long conceal from his readers that these tales, apart from literary exhibition, were really not worth the telling. Mr Kipling pretends, of course, even at twenty-four, to know of all that passes between women unlacing after a ball; but Mr Kipling's pretended omniscience is part of his literary method, and he does not quite carry it off in the Simla tales. He gives us not Simla or any place under the sun, but a sparkling stage version of Simla--all dancing and delight, a little intrigue, a touch of sentiment, patches of excellent fun, and now and then a streak of Indian mystery. But Mr Kipling's heart is not really in this business. His Simla tales will not endure, and they have been given too much prominence in the popular idea of his work. They are not plain tales, but tales very artfully coloured. They fall far short of the standard to which Mr Kipling has raised the English short story. Yet even here we may note the skill with which the author has concealed his failure. Mrs Hawksbee may be taken as a symbol of the distinction between the work of an inspired author and the work of an author playing with his tools. Mr Kipling of _The Jungle Books_ and _The Day's Work_ is an inspired author. Mr Kipling of the Simla tales, on the other hand, is simply concerned to show that he can work a conventional formula of the day as well as any man; that he can redeem the formula with individual touches beyond the reach of most; and can enliven it with impudent pretences which please by virtue of their being utterly preposterous. Take, for example, the pretence that Mrs Hawksbee is a charming woman. Mrs Hawksbee is really nothing of the kind. She is an anthology of witty phrases. She is the abstract perfection of what a clever head and a good heart is expected to be in a fashionable comedy. But Mr Kipling desires her to be accepted as a charming woman. His procedure, on a high and delicate plane, is precisely the procedure to which we are accustomed on a low and obvious plane in the majority of popular novels where the hero has to be accepted for a man of brilliant genius. We have to take the author's word for it. The author who tells us that his hero is a genius usually requires us to believe it without further proof. He does not show us a page of the hero's music or the hero's poetry, but we must believe that it is very fine, even though the hero loves Pietro Mascagni and worships Martin Tupper. Similarly Mr Kipling, presenting us with Mrs Hawksbee, nowhere affords us direct evidence that she is a charming woman. He assumes it, gets everyone else in the story to assume it, and expects his readers to assume it--his cunning as a writer being of so remarkable a quality that there are very few of the Simla tales in which the reader is not prepared to assume it for the sake of the story.

Mrs Hawksbee is typical of the majority of Mr Kipling's studies in social comedy. His success in this kind is remarkable, but it is barren. Mr Kipling realised this himself quite early, for he quite soon abandoned Simla. There are some sixteen stories in _Plain Tales from the Hills_ into which the Simla motive is threaded. In the books immediately following, published in 1888 and 1889, Simla is not wholly abandoned, but the proportion of Simla stories is less. _The Phantom Rickshaw_ (1889) is the last story which can fairly be brought within the list, and this story can only be included by straining its point to vanishing. Of all the groups of stories in _Plain Tales from the Hills_ the Simla group, though it was largest, promised least for the future.

III

THE SAHIB