Rudyard Kipling Read online

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  by

  JOHN PALMER

  [Frontispiece: Rudyard Kipling]

  New YorkHenry Holt and CompanyFirst 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, acelebrated novelist, came to the rooms of a young subaltern and hiscompanions who were giving an account of themselves. Eustace Cleeverwas a literary man, and was greatly impressed when he learned that oneof the company, who was under twenty-five and was called the Infant,had killed people somewhere in Burma. He was suddenly caught by animmense enthusiasm for the active life--the sort of enthusiasm whichsedentary authors feel. Eustace Cleever ended the night riotously withyoungsters who had helped to govern and extend the Empire; and hereturned from their company incoherently uttering a deep contempt forart and letters.

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

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

  We have here an important clue to Mr Kipling and his work. Mr Kiplingwrites of the heroic life. He writes of men who do visible andmeasurable 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 themiller; of the bolts, bars and planks of a ship and the men who sailit. He writes, in short, of any creature which has work to do and doesit well. Nevertheless we must not be misled into thinking that becauseMr Kipling glorifies all that is concrete, practical, visible andactive he is therefore any the less purely and utterly a literary man.Mr Kipling seems sometimes to write as an engineer, sometimes as asoldier. At times we would wager that he had spent all his life as aCaptain of Marines, or as a Keeper of Woods and Forests, or as aHorse-Dealer. He gives his readers the impression that he has lived ahundred lives, mastered many crafts, and led the life, not of one, butof a dozen, active and practical men of affairs. He has created abouthimself so complete an illusion of adventure and enterprise that itseems almost the least important thing about him that he should also bea writer of books. His readers, indeed, are apt to forget the mostimportant 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 tothe company of Eustace Cleever.

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

  Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, beforewe have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful manof letters. Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out ofthe jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men areworking and building and fighting, come really out of the study of anexpert craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care.This may seem an unnecessary warning. The intelligent reader willprotest that, since Mr Kipling writes books, it does not seem verynecessary to deduce that he is a man of letters. It is true that nosuch 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 thework of Mr Henry James by asserting that Mr Henry James was a man ofletters. But Mr Kipling is in rather a different case. The majorityof readers with whom one discusses Mr Kipling's works are sometimes farastray, simply because they have not realised that Mr Kipling is asutterly a man of letters as Mr Henry James, that he lives as completelythe 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 inmany continents and his talk with all kinds of men. He is not to beunderstood as a man singular only in his experience, unloadinganecdotes from a crowded life, excelling in emphasis and reality byvirtue of things actually seen and done. On the contrary, Mr Kiplingwrites tales because he is a writer.

  Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and beenmore keenly interested in the work of the world than some of hisliterary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any theless devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that heis one of the craftiest authors who ever lived. He is more crafty thanStevenson. He often lives by the word alone--the word picked andpolished. That he has successfully disguised this fact from many ofhis admirers is only a further proof of his literary cunning. MrKipling often uses words with great skill to create in his readers theimpression that words matter to him hardly at all. He will work ashard as the careful sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawnessand crudity; and thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is aliterary man. They are content simply to listen to a man who has seen,and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting toobserve 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 ofimagination and right of style.

  It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literaryformality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of_The Light That Failed_, he tries to talk as though there were reallyno such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that ispedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent ofliterary discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in thesense 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 thanTennyson or Walter Scott. Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not bemisled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's artis as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which hehelped to send out of fashion.

  A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dateswhich bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangementof 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 atthe United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in1882, as assistant editor on _The Civil and Military Gazette_ and _ThePioneer_. He remained on the staff of _The Pioneer_ for seven years,and travelled over the five continents. By this time he had learned tothink of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk fromCharing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see somethingof men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come backto her from the ends of the earth. The whole of Mr Kipling's literarybiography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a greattraveller 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 attwenty-two had shown his quality and had already mapped out in littlehis career. In _Plain Tales from the Hills_ there are hints for almosteverything that their author afterwards accomplished. As the book of ayoung journalist whose name had not yet been whispered among thepublishers and critics of London it was a miracle. If Mr Kipling hadbeen able to improve on _Plain Tales from the Hills_ as much asShakespeare improved on _Love's Labour's Lost_, as much as Shelleyimproved on _Queen Mab_, Robert Browning on _Pauline_, Byron on _Hoursof Idleness_, he would to-day be without a peer. Mr Granville Barkeris often cited as a classical modern example of precocity, but he wastwenty-four when he wrote _The Marrying of Anne Leete_. Mr Henry Jameswas twenty-eight before he had published a characteristic word. MrThomas Hardy at twenty-five had only printed a short story, and he wasmore than thirty when his first novel appeared. Mr Kipling came uponthe public in 1886 without a preliminary stutter. Mr Kipling attwenty-two could write as craftily as Mr Kipling can write after nearlythirty years' experience. We shall not be greatly concerned in thesepages to trace the progress of Mr Kipling's craft and wisdom. He wasalways crafty and always wise. He had done some of his best work atthirty. He recalls Hazlitt's curious saying that an improving authoris never a great author. Mr Kipling is not an improving author. Therehas been a little moving up and down the scale of excellence; manythings hinted in the early volumes from _Plain Tales from the Hills_ to_Many Inventions_ are developed more elaborately and surely in latervolumes; the old craft has come to be used with an ease that has in itmore of the insolence of a master than was possible in the author of1887. But so far as literary finish is concerned, _Plain Tales fromthe Hills_ leaves little to be acquired. Already Mr Kipling wields hisimplement as deftly and firmly as many a skilled writer who waslearning his lesson before Mr Kipling was born. Few authors have sosurely scored their best in their earliest years. Authors areconsidered young to-day at thirty. Mr Kipling at that age had alreadywritten _The Jungle Book_.

  This does not, of course, imply that all Mr Kipling's stories are ofequal merit. On the contrary, we shall henceforth be mainly concernedwith looking for the inspired author under a mass of skilfuljournalism. It is not a simple enterprise. Mr Kipling is so competentan author that he is usually able to persuade his readers that hisheart is equally in all he writes. Moreover, Mr Kipling has fallenamong many prejudices, literary and political, which have caused hisleast important work to be most discussed. For these reasons theactual, as distinguished from the legendary, Mr Kipling is not easilydiscovered. Mainly it is a work of excavation.

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