Chapter 4

"What follows is worth consideration. The forward engine had no more work to do. Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely, with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the cylinder-cover. It came down again, the full weight of the steam behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right and struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column of the forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches above the base, and wedging the upper portion outwards three inches towards the ship's side. There the connecting-rod jammed. Meantime, the after engine, being as yet unembarrassed, went on with its work, and in so doing brought round at its next revolution the crank of the forward engine, which smote the already jammed connecting-rod, bending it and therewith the piston-rod cross-head--the big cross-piece that slides up and down so smoothly."

This is the method of Homer as applied to the shield of Achilles, the method of Milton in enumerating the superior fiends, the method of Walter Scott confronted with a mountain pass, the method of the sonneteer to his mistress' eyebrow. Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for these broken engines would be intolerable if it were not obviously genuine. Unless we shut our ears and admit no songs that sing of things as yet unfamiliar to the poets of blue sky and violets dim as Cytherea's eyes, we cannot possibly mistake the lyrical ecstasy of the above passage. When Mr Kipling tells how a released piston-rod drove up fiercely and started the nuts of the cylinder-cover, it is an incantation. His machines are more alive than his men and women. It is more important to know about the cast-iron supporting-column of Mr Kipling's forward engine than to know that Maisie had long hair and grey eyes, or to know what happened to any of the people whom it concerned. _.007_, which is the story of a shining and ambitious young locomotive, is ten times more vital--it calls for ten times more fellow-feeling--than the heart affairs of Private Learoyd or the distresses of the Copleigh girls at Simla. The pain that shoots through .007 when he first becomes acquainted with a hot-box is a more human and recognisable bit of consciousness than anything to be shared with the Head of the District or the Man Who Was. The psychology of the Mill Wheel in _Below the Mill Dam_ is quite obviously accurate. That Mill Wheel, unlike scores of Mr Kipling's men and women, is a creature we have met, who refuses to be forgotten. When he is dealing with men Mr Kipling celebrates not so much mankind as the skill and competency of mankind as severely applied to a given and necessary task. It follows that Mr Kipling's men at their best are most excellent machines. It follows, again, that when Mr Kipling drops the pretence that he is deeply concerned with man as man, and begins to celebrate with all his might the machine as the machine, we realise that his machine is the better man of the two.

The inspiration which Mr Kipling first indulged to its full bent in _The Day's Work_ lives on through all the ensuing books. It reaches a climax in _With the Night Mail_, a post-dated vision of the air. It is one of the most remarkable stories he has written--a story produced at full pressure of the imagination which, but for its fatal prophesying, would keep his memory green for generations. The detail with which the theme is worked out is extravagant; but it is the extravagance of an inspired lover. To quarrel with its technical exuberance on the ground that Mr Kipling should have made it less like the vision of an engineer is simply to miss almost the main impulse of Mr Kipling's progress. It is true that unless we share Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for The Night Mail as a beautiful machine, for the men who governed it as skilled mechanicians, and for all the minutiae of the control and distribution of traffic by air, we are not likely to be greatly held by the story. But this is simply to say that unless we catch the passion of an author we may as well shut the author's book.

This does not imply that we must love machinery in order to love Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for machinery. We have to share the author's passion; but not necessarily to dote upon its object. It is not essential to an admiration of Shakespeare's sonnets that the admirer should have been a suitor of the Dark Lady. It matters hardly at all what is the inspiration of an imaginative author. So long as he succeeds in getting into a highly fervent condition, which prompts him to write, with entire forgetfulness of himself and the reader, of things whose beauty he was born to see, it is of little moment how he happens to be kindled. We do not need to be suffering the pangs of adolescent love, or even to know the story of Fanny Brawne, to hear the immortal longing of John Keats sounding between all the lines of the great Odes:

"Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."

We do not need to be the enemy of the Arminians to resolve the music of Milton; and we may live all our lives in a city and yet know Wordsworth for a great poet. Shelley does not suffer because philosophic anarchy has gone out of fashion; and the poetry of the Hebrews lives for ever, though its readers have never lived in the shadow of Sinai. These mighty instances are here intended not to establish a comparison but to establish a principle. The exact source of Mr Kipling's inspiration matters not a straw. We simply know that his machinery is alive and lovely in his eyes. He communicates his passion to his reader though his readers are unable to distinguish between a piston-rod and a cylinder-cover.

_The Day's Work_ throws back a clear and searching light upon some of the tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed in review. As we look back upon these stories of men and women we realise, in the light of _The Day's Work_, that machinery--the machinery of Army and Empire--enters repeatedly as a leading motive. Far from regarding Mr Kipling's passion for technical engineering as something which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling human tales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human tales are no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion that helplessly spins them. As literature _William the Conqueror_ and _The Head of the District_ have less to do with the politics of India than with the nuts and bolts of _The Ship That Found Herself_. The same truth applies equally to a book which has been discussed beyond all proportion to its rank among the stories of Mr Kipling. _The Light That Failed_ is often read as the high and tragical love story of Dick Heldar; but it is really nothing of the kind. It really belongs to _The Day's Work_. As the love story of Dick Heldar it is of small account. Mr Kipling thinks very little of it from that point of view. He has even allowed it, upon that side, to be deprived of all its significance in order to meet the needs of a popular actor. Mr Kipling is not the man to sell his conscience. Therefore his admirers may infer from the fact that he has sold Dick and Maisie to British and American playgoers that Dick and Maisie are not regarded by their author as of the first importance. We cannot think of Mr Kipling as allowing one screw of the ship that found herself to be misplaced. But he has cheerfully allowed his story of Dick and Maisie to be turned with a few strokes of the pen into an effective curtain for a negligible play.

This does not mean that _The Light That Failed_ is not a characteristic and a fine achievement. It means that its character and fineness have nothing to do with Dick and Maisie or with any of that stuff of the story which contrives to exist behind the footlights of Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson's theatre. _The Light That Failed_ must not be read as the love story of a painter who goes blind. It must be read, with _.007_ and _The Maltese Cat_, as an enthusiastic account of the day's work of a newspaper correspondent. The really vital passages of the story have all to do with Mr Kipling's chosen text of work for work's sake. Dick's work and not Dick himself is the hero of the play. The only incident which really affects us is the scraping out of his last picture. We do not bother in the least as to whether Maisie returns to him or stays away; because we do not believe in the reality of Maisie and we cannot imagine anything she may or may not do as affecting anyone very seriously. Dick's wrestle with his picture is another matter. He and his friends may talk a great deal of nonsense about their work (nonsense which would strictly require us to condemn every good page which Mr Kipling has written), but there is no doubt whatever that the enthusiasm of men for men's work is the vital and moving principle of _The Light That Failed_. The motive of the whole story is the motive of _The Bridge-Builders_. The rest is merely accessory.

_The Light That Failed_ is full of instruction for the close critic of Mr Kipling. We discover in it three out of the many levels of excellence in which he moves. First there is a cunning artificer pretending to a knowledge and admiration which he does not really possess--an artificer who tries to impose Maisie and the Red-Haired Girl upon us in the same deceiving way as the way in which he tried to impose upon us Mrs Hawksbee and the Copleigh girls. Second, there is a clever writer of soldier stories, showing us some nasty fighting at close range, with a far too elaborate pretence that he can take it all for granted as a professional combatant. Finally there is an inspired author celebrating the world's work--an author we have agreed to put in a higher rank than those other literary experts who have quite unjustifiably stolen his greener laurels.

VII

THE FINER GRAIN

It has been Mr Kipling's habit all through his career to peg out literary claims for himself as evidence of his intention later on to work them at a profit. Thus, writing _Plain Tales from the Hills_, he includes one or two stories, such as _The Taking of Lungtungpen_ and _The Three Musketeers_, which clearly look forward to _Soldiers Three_ and all the later stories in that kind. Or, again, he looks forward in _Tods' Amendment_ and _Wee Willie Winkie_ to the time when he will write many stories, and, in a sense, whole books concerning children. _Tods' Amendment_ promises _Baa Baa Black Sheep_, and _Just So Stories_; it even promises _Stalky & Co._, which is simply the best collection of boisterous boy farces ever written. Then, again, there is _In the Rukh_, out of _Many Inventions_, which looks forward to the _Jungle Book_. Finally, there is, in _The Day's Work_, clear evidence of Mr Kipling's intention ultimately to abandon the hills and plains of India and to take literary seisin of the country and chronicles of England.

The first undoubted evidence that Mr Kipling, who started with skilful tales of India, was bound in the end to turn homewards for a deeper inspiration is contained in a story from _The Day's Work_. _My Sunday at Home_ is ostensibly broad farce, of the _Brugglesmith_ variety--farce which might well call for a chapter to itself were it not that broad farce is much the same whoever the writer may be. But _My Sunday at Home_ is really less important as farce than as evidence of Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for the stillness and ancientry of the English wayside. The pages of this story distil and drip with peace. Moreover, the story is neighboured with two others, all beckoning Mr Kipling home to Burwash in Sussex. There is the Brushwood Boy, who after work comes home and finds it good--good after his work is done. There is also _An Error in the Fourth Dimension_ wherein Mr Kipling is found playing affectionately with the idea that England is quite unlike any other country. There is in England a fourth dimension which is beyond the perception, say, of an American railway king, who after much amazement and wrath concludes that the English are not a modern people and thereafter returns to his own more reasonable land.

Of the miscellaneous stories in which Mr Kipling surrenders utterly to this later theme perhaps the most memorable is _An Habitation Enforced_ from _Actions and Reactions_. Here we are in quite another plane of authorship from that in which we have moved in the tales of India. There is a wide difference between _The Return of Imray_--to take one of the most skilful tales of India--and _An Habitation Enforced_. _The Return of Imray_ betrays the conscious resolution of a clever man of letters to make the most effective use of good material. But _An Habitation Enforced_ is the spontaneous gesture of pure feeling. The Indian stories are ingenious and well managed. Their point is made. Their workmanship is excellent. Atmospheres and impressions are cunningly arranged. But they very rarely succeed in carrying the reader as the reader is carried upon this later tide.

The feeling of _An Habitation Enforced_, as of all the English tales, is that of the traveller returned. The value of Mr Kipling's traffics and discoveries over the seven seas is less in the record he has made of these adventures than in their having enabled him to return to England with eyes sharpened by exile, with his senses alert for that fourth dimension which does not exist for the stranger. _An Habitation Enforced_ is inspired by the nostalgia of inveterate banishment. Some part of its perfection--it is one of the few perfect short stories in the English tongue--is due to the perfect agreement of its form with the passion that informs its writing. It is the story of a homing Englishwoman, and of her restoration to the absolute earth of her forbears. In writing of this woman Mr Kipling has only had to recall his own joyful adventure in picking up the threads of a life at once familiar and mysterious, in meeting again the homely miracle of things that never change. Finally England claims her utterly--her and her children and her American husband. It was an American who bade Cloke, man of the soil and acquired retainer of the family, bring down larch-poles for a light bridge over the brook; but it was an Englishman reclaimed who needs consented to Cloke's amendment:

"'But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have them down here ready.'

"'We'll get 'em down _if_ you, say so,' Cloke answered, with a thrust of the underlip they both knew.

"'But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here for? We aren't building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.'

"'I don't know nothin' about that,' said Cloke. 'An' I've nothin' to say against larch--_if_ you want to make a temp'ry job of it. I ain't 'ere to tell you what isn't so, sir; an' you can't say I ever come creepin' up on you, or tryin' to lead you farther in than you set out----'

"A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.

"'All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp'ry job of it; and by the time the young master's married it'll have to be done again. Now, I've brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers as we've ever drawed. You put 'em in an' it's off your mind for good an' all. T'other way--I don't say it ain't right, I'm only just sayin' what I think--but t'other way, he'll no sooner be married than we'll 'ave it _all_ to do again. You've no call to regard my words, but you can't get out of _that_.'

"'No,' said George, after a pause; 'I've been realising that for some time. Make it oak then; we can't get out of it.'"

This story is the real beginning of Puck--to whom Mr Kipling's latest volumes are addressed. In _Puck of Pook's Hill_ Mr Kipling takes seisin of England in all times--more particularly of that trodden nook of England about Pevensey. This book is less a book of children and fairies than an English chronicle. Dan and Una are the least living of Mr Kipling's children--they are as shadowy as the little ghost who dropped a kiss upon the palm of the visitor in the mansion of _They_. The men, too, who come and go, are shadows. It is the land which abides and is real. We hum continually a variation of Shakespeare's song:

"This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

_Puck of Pook's Hill_ is a final answer to those who think of the Imperial idea as loose and vast, without roots in any dear, particular soil. _Puck of Pool's Hill_ suggests in every page that England could never for its lovers be too small. We would know intimately each place where the Roman trod, where Weland came and went, where Saxon and Norman lost themselves in a common league.

From this England, fluttered with memories and the most ancient magic, it is a natural step into the regions of pure fancy where Mr Kipling is happiest of all. _The Children of the Zodiac_ and _The Brushwood Boy_ are the earliest proofs that Mr Kipling flies most surely when he is least impeded by a human or material document. We have here to make a last protest against a too popular fallacy concerning the tales of Mr Kipling. Mr Kipling's passion for the concrete, which is a passion of all truly imaginative men, together with his keen delight in the work of the world, has caused him to be falsely regarded as a note-book realist of the modern type. He is assumed to be happiest when writing from direct experience without refinement or transmutation. We cannot trace this error to its source and expose the many fallacies it contains without going deeper into aesthetics than is here necessary or desirable. The simple fact that Mr Kipling's best stories are those in which his fancy is most free is answer enough to those who put him among the reporters of things as they are. It sufficiently excuses us from the long and difficult inquiry as to whether Mr Kipling's account of the people who live next door is accurate and minute, and allows us to assume, without starting a controversy which only a heavy volume could determine, that, if Mr Kipling had ever set out to describe the people who live next door, he would have simplified them out of all recognition. Mr Kipling has pretended, often with some success, that his people are really to be met with in the Royal Navy or in the Indian Civil Service. But let the reader consider for a moment whom they remember best. Is it Mowgli or is it someone who is a C.I.E.? Is it the Elephant Child, or is it Mr Grish Chunder Dé? When does Mr Kipling more successfully convey to us the impression that his people are alive and real? Is it when he is supposed to be drawing men from the life, or is it when he has set free his imagination to call up the People of the Hills or the folk in the Jungle?

The grain of Mr Kipling's work is the finer, his vision is more confident and clear, the further he gets from the world immediately about him. Already we have seen how happily in India he left behind his impression of the alert tourist, his experience of the mess-room and bazaar, to enshrine in his fairy tale of _Kim_ the faith and simplicity of two of the children of the world--each, the old and the young, a child after his own fashion. _Kim_ is Mr Kipling's escape from the India which is traversed by the railway and served by the "Pioneer." It is the escape of Dan and Una into the Kingdom of Puck, and the escape of Mowgli into the Jungle. It is the escape, finally, of Mr Kipling's genius into the region where it most freely breathes.

We have noted that Kim is one of the Indian doors by which we enter; but there is a more open door in the first story of _The Second Jungle Book_. It is the best of all Mr Kipling's stories, just as the _Jungle Books_ are the best of all his books. It concerns the Indian, Purun Bhagat.

He was learned, supple, and deeply intimate in the affairs of the world. He had shared the counsels of princes; he had been received with honour in the clubs and societies of Europe. He was, to all appearances, a polite blend of all the talents of East and West. Then suddenly Purun Bhagat disappeared. All India understood; but of all Western people only Mr Kipling was able to follow where he walked as a holy man and a beggar into the hills. There he became St Francis of the Hills, living in a little shrine with the friendly creatures of the woods, venerated and cared for by a village on the hillside.

All Mr Kipling's readers know how that story ends--how on a night of disaster there came together as of one blood the saint and his people and the wild creatures who had housed with him. It is quoted here as showing how the old piety of India beckoned Mr Kipling into the jungle as inevitably as the old loyalty of England beckoned him into a region where on a summer day we can meet without surprise a Flint Man or a Centurion of Rome.

Always the bent of Mr Kipling, in his best work, is found to be away from the world. To appreciate his finer quality we must pass with him into the Rukh, or into the country beyond Policeman Day, into the mansion of lost children, or into a region where it is but a step from the Zodiac to fields under the plough. The tales of Mr Kipling which will longest survive him are not the tales where he is competently brutal and omniscient, but the tales where he instinctively flies from the necessity of giving to his vision the likeness of the modern world.

We may now realise more clearly the peril which lies in the popular fallacy concerning Mr Kipling described in the first few pages of this book. So far is Mr Kipling from being an author inspired and driven to claim a share in the active life of the present, an author who unloads upon us a store of memories and experience, that he is only able to do his finest work as an unchecked and fantastic dreamer. The stories in which he imposes upon his readers the illusion that he would never have written books if he had stayed at home, that his stories are the carelessly flung reminiscences of a full life--these stories are themselves instances of the skill whereby a cunning author has been able to conceal from his generation the deep difference between artifice and inspiration. A crafty author will often employ his best phrases to describe the thing he has never really seen with the eye of genius. His manner will be most assured where his matter is the least authentic. His points will be most effectively made where there is the least necessity to make them. Mr Kipling, writing as a soldier, is more a soldier than any soldier who ever lived. Thereby the discerning reader will infer that Mr Kipling was not born to write as a soldier. He will know that Mr Kipling is not profoundly and instinctively an atavistic prophet, because his atavism is more atavistic than the atavism of the first man who ever was born. He will also realise that Mr Kipling writes so effectively about India because he ought to be writing about England and Fairyland and the Jungle. He will realise, in short, that Mr Kipling is an imaginative man of letters who has wonderful visions when he stays at home, and who needs all his craft as an expert literary artificer to persuade his readers that these visions are not seriously impaired when he ventures abroad.

VIII

THE POEMS