Rudyard Kipling Part 2

But _Kim_ is something of a paradox. It is the best of all Indian tales by virtue of qualities which have little to do with India. It is an Indian book only upon its least important side. It is true that Kim himself is upon one side the most cunning of Mr Kipling's studies of the meeting of East and West; but that, for us, is not his final merit.

It is the final merit of Kim to be first cousin of Mowgli, the child of the Jungle. His first claim to our delight in him is that he is the quickest of young creatures, his senses sharp and clean, of a conscience untroubled, of a spirit that rejoices in nimble work, of a will in which loyalty and courage and the peace of self-confidence are firmly rooted. In a word, he is Mowgli among men.

Here, however, we approach _Kim_ merely as a tale of India--as a link artfully used by Mr Kipling to connect and pa.s.s in review the whole pageant of Imperial India as it is revealed to Western eyes--priests, peasants, soldiers, civilians, people of the plains and hills, women of the latticed palanquin and the bazaar, Hindu and Mohammedan, Afghan and Bengali. The picture of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim is an almost unsurpa.s.sed piece of descriptive writing. The diversity of the picture dazzles and bewilders us at first. Then out of all this diversity there gradually comes a conviction that fundamentally India is unimaginably simple at heart in spite of her medley of religions and conquests and races; that it is precisely this simplicity which baffles the intruder. There is the simplicity of Bahadur Khan, whose child was bewitched: _therefore_ he killed Imray Sahib and hid his body behind the ceiling cloth. There is the simplicity of the hunter of Daoud Shah, whose house was dishonoured: _therefore_ he killed his wife and went upon the trail of her seducer. There is the simplicity of men who starve and are burnt with the sun: _therefore_ they deprecate the wrath of devils and put food in the beggar's bowl. There is, above all, the simplicity of clean hunger, thirst, adventure, piety, friendliness and love that threads the whole story of the Lama and his _Chela_.

_Kim_ is one of the few really beautiful stories in modern literature.

The brain and fancy of thousands of readers to-day are richer and sweeter by that tale of the Master and his Friend of All the World. We would not leave him and his Wheel of Things, the River he sought in simple faith, the trust he had in the charity of men, the message that bade him seek release in Nirvana from the importunity of life quaintly warring with instinctive gestures of delight and sympathy with all that made life precious--we would not leave this exquisite story so soon, were it not that it brings forward the imperishable side of Mr Kipling's work to which we shall have shortly to return. _Kim_ bridges the gap between the Indian stories and The _Jungle Book_, which means that _Kim_ is all but the top of Mr Kipling's achievement.

V

SOLDIERS THREE

Mr Kipling's three soldiers--Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd--are a literary tradition. They are the Horatii and the Curatii, the three Musketeers; Og, Gog and Magog; Captains Fluellin, Macmorris and Jamy; Bardolph, Pistol and Nym. That Kipling's soldiers three are a literary tradition is significant of their quality and rank as part of their author's achievement. They belong rather to the efficient literary workman who wrote the Simla tales than to the inspired author of the Jungle books. Though we have run from the House of Suddhu to the barrack-yard, we have not yet lost sight of Mr Kipling, decorator and colourman in words. We shall find him conspicuously at work upon Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd. Where, at first, he seems most closely to rub sleeves with the raw stuff of life we shall find him most aloof, most deliberately an artificer. Mr Kipling has seemed to the judicious, who have duly grieved, to be in his soldier tales throwing all crafty scruples to the winds in order that he may the more joyfully indulge a natural genius for ferocity. Mr Kipling's soldiers are regarded as an instance of his love for low company, of his readiness to sacrifice aesthetic beauty to vulgar truth.

This is quite the wrong direction from which to approach Mr Kipling's soldier tales. Mr Kipling's ferocity on paper is not to be explained as the result of a natural delight in violence and blood. On the contrary, it is distinctively a literary ferocity--the ferocity, not of a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people. It is essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in speculative politics. When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over like the rattle of fire-irons in the fender and the grunt of a pole-axed ox, or of a hot encounter between two combatants wherein one of them after feeling for his opponent's eyes finds it necessary to wipe his thumb on his trousers, or of gun wheels greasy from contact with a late gunner--when Mr Kipling writes like this, we admit that his pages are disagreeable. But let us be clear as to the reason. These things are disagreeable, not because they are horrible fact, but because they are deliberate fiction. We feel that these things have been written, not from inspired impulse, but by taking careful thought.

Here, clearly, is a writer who writes of war, not because he is by nature full of pugnacity, or necessarily loosed from h.e.l.l to speak of horrors, but because war is a good "subject" with opportunities for effective treatment.

It is incorrect to say that Mr Kipling naturally delights in savage war. He has been accused of a positive gusto for knives and bayonets, for redly dripping steel and spattered flesh. The gusto must be confessed; but it is not a gusto for the subject. It is the skilled craftsman's gusto for doing things thoroughly and effectively. Mr Kipling cannot conceal his delight in his competency to make war as nasty as Zola or Tolstoi have made it. But this has nothing to do with a delight in war. Professors have gloried in blood and iron who would probably faint away in the nice, clean operating theatre of a London hospital. Philosophers who cannot run upstairs have preached the survival of the physically fittest. The politest of Roman poets has felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior's head fell to right and left of his vertebral column. Mr Kipling's savagery is of this excessively cultivated kind. It is not atavism or a sinister resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility. Mr Kipling's warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling's real inspiration and interest is far away from the battle-field and the barrack. They are the kind of battle story which is usually written by sedentary poets who live in the country and are fond of children. Only they are the very best of their kind.

Mr Kipling's study of the professional soldier is best observed in Private Ortheris. Mulvaney is more popular, but Mulvaney in no sense belongs to Mr Kipling. He is the stage Irishman of the old Adelphi and the hero of many tales by Lever and Marryat. He is as purely a convention of the days of Mr Kipling's youth as are Mrs Hawksbee and the Simla ladies. His chief importance lies in the opportunities he gives Mr Kipling for indulging his joyful gift for pure farce.

_Krishna Mulvaney_ and _My Lord the Elephant_ are farce of the first quality, whose merit liberally covers the charge that their hero is of no human importance. Ortheris is in rather a different case. He has just that air of being authentic which is needed for an anecdote or narrative. He is not a profound and original doc.u.ment in human nature.

There is no such doc.u.ment in any one of Mr Kipling's books. But he stands well erect among the professional soldiers of literature.

We will take one look at Private Ortheris at work:

"Ortheris suddenly rose to his knees, his rifle at his shoulder, and peered across the valley in the clear afternoon light. His chin cuddled the stock, and there was a twitching of the muscles of the right cheek as he sighted; Private Stanley Ortheris was engaged on his business. A speck of white crawled up the watercourse.

"'See that beggar? . . . Got 'im.'

"Seven hundred yards away, and a full two hundred down the hillside, the deserter of the Aurangabadis pitched forward, rolled down a red rock, and lay very still, with his face in a clump of blue gentians, while a big raven flapped out of the pine wood to make investigation.

"'That's a clean shot, little man,' said Mulvaney.

"Learoyd thoughtfully watched the smoke clear away. 'Happen there was a la.s.s tewed up wi' him, too,' said he.

"Ortheris did not reply. He was staring across the valley, with the smile of the artist who looks on the completed work."

This pa.s.sage has been quoted against Mr Kipling as evidence of his inhuman delight in the hunting of man. If we look at it closely we shall find (1) an obvious delight in Ortheris as a professional expert who knows his business, the same delight which we find in Mr Hinchcliffe the engineer or in d.i.c.k Heldar the painter, and (2) the extremely self-conscious and cold-blooded effort of a competent author to write like a professional soldier, and (3) the intrusion of a born sentimentalist in Learoyd's little touch of feeling at the close.

The War Office book of infantry training contains some very curt and calm directions for getting a "good point" in bayonet exercise. The bayonet has to be correctly driven in, left in the enemy for a reasonable time, and extracted with a minimum of effort to the pract.i.tioner and a maximum of damage to the subject. Disabling the enemy in war is a professional and technical matter, and Mr Kipling is always able to be enthusiastic when things are beginning to be technical. Whether it be sighting a deserter at seven hundred yards, painting a charge of horse, writing what Dr Johnson would describe as the "most poetical paragraph in the English language," or building a bridge over the Ganges, Mr Kipling is ready to be interested so long as the workman is competent, and the work of a highly skilled and special nature. Naturally, therefore, Mr Kipling has succeeded in getting very near to the professional view of soldiering. All Mr Kipling's soldiers take their soldiering as men of business. This was what so terribly astonished and interested Cleever when he met the Infant and heard that after he had killed a man he had felt thirsty and "wanted a smoke too"; and Cleever has been followed in his astonishment by many of Mr Kipling's literary critics.

The greatest study in literature of the professional soldier--though he is infinitely more than that--is Shakespeare's Falstaff. It will be remembered that Falstaff, after having led his men where they were finely peppered, also suffered from thirst; and, being an old campaigner, he was not unprovided. The fate of Falstaff upon the British stage for many centuries--where he has actually been played, not as a professional soldier, but as an incompetent poltroon!--seems to indicate that no figure is more liable to be misunderstood than the man whose business or duty it is to fight between meals. Even Mr Kipling, in his anxiety to emphasise that a regular soldier, apart from any personal and heroic qualities he may happen to possess, is to be regarded as just a skilled pract.i.tioner whose work asks for courage and resource, fails to take soldiering with the magnificent nonchalance of Shakespeare's soldiers. Shakespeare takes the professional view for granted. But Mr Kipling does not quite do that. There is a continuously implicit protest in all Mr Kipling's soldier tales that a soldier's killing is like an editor's leader-writing or a painter's sketching from the nude--a protest which by its frequent over-emphasis shows that Mr Kipling, not having Shakespeare's gift of intuition into every kind of man, has not quite succeeded in identifying himself with the soldier's point of view. It is always present in his mind as something novel and surprising, needing insistence and emphasis.

This is equally true of all Mr Kipling's essays in brutality. His ferocity is as forced as his tenderness is natural. Violence and war are clearly foreign to his unprompted imagination. Only it happens that Mr Kipling has talked with soldiers; and, like Eustace Cleever, he is prompted occasionally to spend a perversely riotous evening in their company. The literary result is far from being contemptible; but it is far from being as precious as the result of his unprompted intrusion into the country of the Brushwood Boy, into Cold Lairs and the Council Rock.

The soldier tales rank not very far above the tales from Simla. Their interest is mainly the interest of watching a skilled writer consciously using all his skill to give an air of authenticity to things not vitally realised. Mulvaney is pure convention, and Ortheris, though he more individually belongs to Mr Kipling, is rather an effort than a success. We have not yet got at the heart of Mr Kipling's work. It yet remains to cross the barrier which divides some of the best journalism of our time from literature which will outlive its author.

VI

THE DAY'S WORK

When we come to _The Day's Work_ we are getting very near to Mr Kipling at his best. We should notice at this point that in all the stories we have 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 good work. Almost it seems as if, in the year 1897, their author had himself realised the significance of this; for it was in that year he published the volume ent.i.tled _The Day's Work_; and it was the best volume, taking it from cover to cover, that had as yet appeared.

The first and best story in _The Day's Work_ at once introduces the theme which threads all the best work of Mr Kipling. _The Bridge-Builders_ is the story of a Bridge and incidentally of the men who built it. The crown has yet to be set upon a long agony of toil and disappointment. The master builder of the Bridge has put the prime of his energy and will into its building. Now it stands all but complete, with the Ganges gathering in her upper reaches for a mighty effort to throw off her strange fetters. The Bridge before the night of the flood has pa.s.sed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between the most ancient G.o.ds and the young will of man. Mr Kipling has put the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the really sentient figure of the tale. Here definitely he writes the first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs which preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as well as almost anybody else. In _The Day's Work_ he pa.s.ses into a province which he was insistently urged to occupy by right of inspiration.

_The Day's Work_ brings us directly into touch with one of the most distinctive features of Mr Kipling's method. He has never been able to resist the lure of things technical. If he writes of a horse he must write as though he had bred and sold horses all his life. If he writes of a steam-engine he must write as though he had spent his life among pistons and cylinders. He writes of s.h.i.+ps and the sea, of fox-hunting, of the punis.h.i.+ng of Pathans, of drilling by companies and of agriculture; and he writes as one from whom no craft could hide its mysteries. This fascination of mere craft, this delight in the technicalities and dialect of the world's work, is not a mannerism. It is not a parade of omniscience or the madness of a note-book worm. It is fundamental in Mr Kipling. It is wrong to think of _Between the Devil and the Deep Sea_ or of _.007_ as the unfortunate rioting of an amateur machinist. To those who object that Mr Kipling has spoiled these stories with an absurd enthusiasm for bolts and bars it has at once to be answered that but for this very enthusiasm for bolts and bars, which the undiscerning have found so tedious, the great majority of Mr Kipling's stories would never have been written at all. A powerful turbine excites in Mr Kipling precisely the same quality of emotion which a comely landscape excited in Wordsworth; and this emotion is stamped upon all that he has written in this kind. There is a pa.s.sage in _Between the Devil and the Deep Sea_ which runs:

"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 s.h.i.+p's side. There the connecting-rod jammed. Meantime, the after engine, being as yet unembarra.s.sed, 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 s.h.i.+eld of Achilles, the method of Milton in enumerating the superior fiends, the method of Walter Scott confronted with a mountain pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sage.

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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion; 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 f.a.n.n.y 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. Sh.e.l.ley does not suffer because philosophic anarchy has gone out of fas.h.i.+on; 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.h.i.+p 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 d.i.c.k Heldar; but it is really nothing of the kind. It really belongs to _The Day's Work_. As the love story of d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k and Maisie to British and American playgoers that d.i.c.k 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 s.h.i.+p that found herself to be misplaced. But he has cheerfully allowed his story of d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sages of the story have all to do with Mr Kipling's chosen text of work for work's sake. d.i.c.k's work and not d.i.c.k himself is the hero of the play. The only incident which really affects us is the sc.r.a.ping 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. d.i.c.k'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.