Rudyard Kipling Page 6

  VI

  THE DAY'S WORK

  When we come to _The Day's Work_ we are getting very near to Mr Kiplingat his best. We should notice at this point that in all the stories wehave so far surveyed the men have mattered less than the work they do.The great majority of Mr Kipling's tales are a song in praise of goodwork. Almost it seems as if, in the year 1897, their author hadhimself realised the significance of this; for it was in that year hepublished the volume entitled _The Day's Work_; and it was the bestvolume, taking it from cover to cover, that had as yet appeared.

  The first and best story in _The Day's Work_ at once introduces thetheme which threads all the best work of Mr Kipling. _TheBridge-Builders_ is the story of a Bridge and incidentally of the menwho built it. The crown has yet to be set upon a long agony of toiland disappointment. The master builder of the Bridge has put the primeof his energy and will into its building. Now it stands all butcomplete, with the Ganges gathering in her upper reaches for a mightyeffort to throw off her strange fetters. The Bridge before the nightof the flood has passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle betweenthe most ancient gods and the young will of man. Mr Kipling has putthe Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it thereally sentient figure of the tale. Here definitely he writes thefirst chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be awareof an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofswhich preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as wellas almost anybody else. In _The Day's Work_ he passes into a provincewhich he was insistently urged to occupy by right of inspiration.

  _The Day's Work_ brings us directly into touch with one of the mostdistinctive features of Mr Kipling's method. He has never been able toresist the lure of things technical. If he writes of a horse he mustwrite as though he had bred and sold horses all his life. If he writesof a steam-engine he must write as though he had spent his life amongpistons and cylinders. He writes of ships and the sea, of fox-hunting,of the punishing of Pathans, of drilling by companies and ofagriculture; and he writes as one from whom no craft could hide itsmysteries. This fascination of mere craft, this delight in thetechnicalities and dialect of the world's work, is not a mannerism. Itis not a parade of omniscience or the madness of a note-book worm. Itis fundamental in Mr Kipling. It is wrong to think of _Between theDevil and the Deep Sea_ or of _.007_ as the unfortunate rioting of anamateur machinist. To those who object that Mr Kipling has spoiledthese stories with an absurd enthusiasm for bolts and bars it has atonce to be answered that but for this very enthusiasm for bolts andbars, which the undiscerning have found so tedious, the great majorityof Mr Kipling's stories would never have been written at all. Apowerful turbine excites in Mr Kipling precisely the same quality ofemotion which a comely landscape excited in Wordsworth; and thisemotion is stamped upon all that he has written in this kind. There isa passage in _Between the Devil and the Deep Sea_ which runs:

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

  This is the method of Homer as applied to the shield of Achilles, themethod of Milton in enumerating the superior fiends, the method ofWalter Scott confronted with a mountain pass, the method of thesonneteer to his mistress' eyebrow. Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for thesebroken engines would be intolerable if it were not obviously genuine.Unless we shut our ears and admit no songs that sing of things as yetunfamiliar 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 andstarted the nuts of the cylinder-cover, it is an incantation. Hismachines are more alive than his men and women. It is more importantto know about the cast-iron supporting-column of Mr Kipling's forwardengine than to know that Maisie had long hair and grey eyes, or to knowwhat happened to any of the people whom it concerned. _.007_, which isthe story of a shining and ambitious young locomotive, is ten timesmore vital--it calls for ten times more fellow-feeling--than the heartaffairs of Private Learoyd or the distresses of the Copleigh girls atSimla. The pain that shoots through .007 when he first becomesacquainted with a hot-box is a more human and recognisable bit ofconsciousness than anything to be shared with the Head of the Districtor the Man Who Was. The psychology of the Mill Wheel in _Below theMill Dam_ is quite obviously accurate. That Mill Wheel, unlike scoresof Mr Kipling's men and women, is a creature we have met, who refusesto be forgotten. When he is dealing with men Mr Kipling celebrates notso much mankind as the skill and competency of mankind as severelyapplied to a given and necessary task. It follows that Mr Kipling'smen at their best are most excellent machines. It follows, again, thatwhen Mr Kipling drops the pretence that he is deeply concerned with manas man, and begins to celebrate with all his might the machine as themachine, 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 aclimax in _With the Night Mail_, a post-dated vision of the air. It isone of the most remarkable stories he has written--a story produced atfull pressure of the imagination which, but for its fatal prophesying,would keep his memory green for generations. The detail with which thetheme is worked out is extravagant; but it is the extravagance of aninspired lover. To quarrel with its technical exuberance on the groundthat Mr Kipling should have made it less like the vision of an engineeris simply to miss almost the main impulse of Mr Kipling's progress. Itis true that unless we share Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for The Night Mailas a beautiful machine, for the men who governed it as skilledmechanicians, and for all the minutiae of the control and distributionof 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 authorwe may as well shut the author's book.

  This does not imply that we must love machinery in order to love MrKipling's enthusiasm for machinery. We have to share the author'spassion; but not necessarily to dote upon its object. It is notessential to an admiration of Shakespeare's sonnets that the admirershould have been a suitor of the Dark Lady. It matters hardly at allwhat is the inspiration of an imaginative author. So long as hesucceeds in getting into a highly fervent condition, which prompts himto write, with entire forgetfulness of himself and the reader, ofthings whose beauty he was born to see, it is of little moment how hehappens to be kindled. We do not need to be suffering the pangs ofadolescent love, or even to know the story of Fanny Brawne, to hear theimmortal longing of John Keats sounding between all the lines of thegreat 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 ofMilton; and we may live all our lives in a city and yet know Wordsworthfor a great poet. Shelley does not suffer because philosophic anarchyhas gone out of fashion; and the poetry of the Hebrews lives for ever,though its readers have never lived in the shadow of Sinai. Thesemighty instances are here intended not to establish a comparison but toestablish a principle. The exact source of Mr Kipling's in
spirationmatters not a straw. We simply know that his machinery is alive andlovely in his eyes. He communicates his passion to his reader thoughhis readers are unable to distinguish between a piston-rod and acylinder-cover.

  _The Day's Work_ throws back a clear and searching light upon some ofthe tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed inreview. As we look back upon these stories of men and women werealise, in the light of _The Day's Work_, that machinery--themachinery of Army and Empire--enters repeatedly as a leading motive.Far from regarding Mr Kipling's passion for technical engineering assomething which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling humantales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human talesare no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion thathelplessly spins them. As literature _William the Conqueror_ and _TheHead of the District_ have less to do with the politics of India thanwith the nuts and bolts of _The Ship That Found Herself_. The sametruth applies equally to a book which has been discussed beyond allproportion to its rank among the stories of Mr Kipling. _The LightThat Failed_ is often read as the high and tragical love story of DickHeldar; 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 smallaccount. 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 itssignificance in order to meet the needs of a popular actor. Mr Kiplingis not the man to sell his conscience. Therefore his admirers mayinfer from the fact that he has sold Dick and Maisie to British andAmerican playgoers that Dick and Maisie are not regarded by theirauthor as of the first importance. We cannot think of Mr Kipling asallowing one screw of the ship that found herself to be misplaced. Buthe has cheerfully allowed his story of Dick and Maisie to be turnedwith a few strokes of the pen into an effective curtain for anegligible play.

  This does not mean that _The Light That Failed_ is not a characteristicand a fine achievement. It means that its character and fineness havenothing to do with Dick and Maisie or with any of that stuff of thestory which contrives to exist behind the footlights of Sir JohnstonForbes Robertson's theatre. _The Light That Failed_ must not be readas 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'swork of a newspaper correspondent. The really vital passages of thestory have all to do with Mr Kipling's chosen text of work for work'ssake. Dick's work and not Dick himself is the hero of the play. Theonly incident which really affects us is the scraping out of his lastpicture. We do not bother in the least as to whether Maisie returns tohim or stays away; because we do not believe in the reality of Maisieand we cannot imagine anything she may or may not do as affectinganyone very seriously. Dick's wrestle with his picture is anothermatter. He and his friends may talk a great deal of nonsense abouttheir work (nonsense which would strictly require us to condemn everygood page which Mr Kipling has written), but there is no doubt whateverthat the enthusiasm of men for men's work is the vital and movingprinciple of _The Light That Failed_. The motive of the whole story isthe motive of _The Bridge-Builders_. The rest is merely accessory.

  _The Light That Failed_ is full of instruction for the close critic ofMr Kipling. We discover in it three out of the many levels ofexcellence in which he moves. First there is a cunning artificerpretending to a knowledge and admiration which he does not reallypossess--an artificer who tries to impose Maisie and the Red-HairedGirl upon us in the same deceiving way as the way in which he tried toimpose upon us Mrs Hawksbee and the Copleigh girls. Second, there is aclever writer of soldier stories, showing us some nasty fighting atclose range, with a far too elaborate pretence that he can take it allfor granted as a professional combatant. Finally there is an inspiredauthor celebrating the world's work--an author we have agreed to put ina higher rank than those other literary experts who have quiteunjustifiably stolen his greener laurels.