believe' is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take
a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some
suitable _mise-en-scène_, and had to act a business-man in an office
before I could sit down to my book.... I remember, as though it were
yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that
came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none
to see. Children are even content to forego what we call the realities,
and prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking
intelligently together, they chatter gibberish by the hour, and are
quite happy because they are making believe to speak French."
Probably all will admit the truth of this statement of infant fancy,
when it is presented to them in this way. But how many of us, in
perfect sincerity, not relying upon legends of the nursery, not
refreshed by the study of our own children's "make-believe," can
say that we clearly recollect the method of it? We shall find that
our memories are like a breath upon the glass, like the shape of a
broken wave. Nothing is so hopelessly lost, so utterly volatile, as
the fancies of our childhood. But Mr. Stevenson, alone amongst us all,
appears to have kept daguerreotypes of the whole series of his childish
sensations. Except the late Mrs. Ewing, he seems to be without a rival
in this branch of memory as applied to literature.
The various attitudes of literary persons to the child are very
interesting. There are, for instance, poets like Victor Hugo and Mr.
Swinburne who come to admire, who stay to adore, and who do not disdain
to throw their purple over any humble article of nursery use. They are
so magnificent in their address to infancy, they say so many brilliant
and unexpected things, that the mother is almost as much dazzled as she
is gratified. We stand round, with our hats off, and admire the poet
as much as he admires the child; but we experience no regret when he
presently turns away to a discussion of grown-up things. We have an
ill-defined notion that he reconnoitres infancy from the outside, and
has not taken the pains to reach the secret mind of childhood. It is to
be noted, and this is a suspicious circumstance, that Mr. Swinburne
and Victor Hugo like the child better the younger it is.
_What likeness may define, and stray not_
_From truth's exactest way,_
_A baby's beauty? Love can say not,_
_What likeness may._
This is charming; but the address is to the mother, is to the grown-up
reflective person. To the real student of child-life the baby contains
possibilities, but is at present an uninteresting chrysalis. It cannot
carry a gun through the forest, behind the sofa-back; it is hardly so
useful as a cushion to represent a passenger in a railway-train of
inverted chairs.
Still more remote than the dithyrambic poets are those writers about
children--and they are legion--who have ever the eye fixed upon
morality, and carry the didactic tongue thrust in the cheek of fable.
The late Charles Kingsley, who might have made so perfect a book of
his _Water-Babies_, sins notoriously in this respect. The moment a
wise child perceives the presence of allegory, or moral instruction,
all the charm of a book is gone. Parable is the very antipodes of
childish "make-believe," into which the element of ulterior motive or
secondary moral meaning never enters for an instant. The secret of the
charm of Mrs. Gatty's _Parables from Nature_, which were the fairest
food given to very young minds in my day, was that the fortunate child
never discovered that they were parables at all. I, for one, used to
read and re-read them as realistic statements of fact, the necessity of
pointing a moral merely having driven the amiable author to the making
of her story a little more fantastic, and therefore more welcome, than
it would otherwise be. It was explained to me one hapless day that the
parables were of a nature to instil nice principles into the mind; and
from that moment Mrs. Gatty became a broken idol. Lewis Carroll owed
his great and deserved success to his suppleness in bending his fancy
to the conditions of a mind that is dreaming. It has never seemed to
me that the _Adventures in Wonderland_ were specially childish; dreams
are much the same, whether a child or a man is passive under them, and
it is a fact that Lewis Carroll appeals just as keenly to adults as to
children. In Edward Lear's rhymes and ballads the love of grotesque
nonsense in the grown-up child is mainly appealed to; and these are
certainly appreciated more by parents than by children.
It would be easy, by multiplying examples, to drive home my contention
that only two out of the very numerous authors who have written
successfully on or for children have shown a clear recollection of
the mind of healthy childhood itself. Many authors have achieved
brilliant success in describing children, in verbally caressing them,
in amusing, in instructing them; but only two, Mrs. Ewing in prose,
and Mr. Stevenson in verse, have sat down with them without disturbing
their fancies, and have looked into the world of "make-believe" with
the children's own eyes. If Victor Hugo should visit the nursery,
every head of hair ought to be brushed, every pinafore be clean, and
nurse must certainly be present, as well as mamma. But Mrs. Ewing or
Mr. Stevenson might lead a long romp in the attic when nurse was out
shopping, and not a child in the house should know that a grown-up
person had been there. There are at least a dozen pieces in the
_Child's Garden_ which might be quoted to show what is meant. "The
Lamplighter" will serve our purpose as well as any other:
_My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;_
_It's time to take the window to see Learie going by;_
_For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat,_
_With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street,_
_Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,_
_And my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be;_
_But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm to do,_
_O Learie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!_
_For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,_
_And Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more;_
_And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,_
_O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night._
In publishing this autumn a second volume, this time of grown-up
verses, Mr. Stevenson has ventured on a bolder experiment. His
_Underwoods_, with its title openly borrowed from Ben Jonson, is an
easy book to appreciate and enjoy, but not to review. In many respects
it is plainly the work of the same fancy that described the Country
of Counterpane and the Land of Story-books, but it has grown a little
sadder, and a great deal older. There is the same delicate sincerity,
the same candour and simplicity, the same artless dependence on
the good faith of the public. The ordinary themes of the poets are
untouched; there is not one piece from cover to cover which deals
with the passion of love. The book is occupied with friendship, with
nature, with the honourable instincts of man's moral machinery. Above
all, it enters with great minuteness, and in a very confidential
spirit, into the theories and moods of the writer himself. It will be
to many readers a revelation of the every-day life of an author whose
impersonal writings have given them so much and so varied pleasure.
Not a dozen ordinary interviewers could have extracted so much of the
character of the man himself as he gives us in these one hundred and
twenty pages.
The question of admitting the personal element into literature is
one which is not very clearly understood. People try to make rules
about it, and say that an author may describe his study, but not his
dining-room, and his wife, but not her cousin. The fact is that no
rules can possibly be laid down in a matter which is one of individual
sympathy. The discussion whether a writer may speak of himself or no
is utterly vain until we are informed in what voice he has the habit
of speaking. It is all a question which depends on the _timbre_ of
the literary voice. As in life there are persons whose sweetness of
utterance is such that we love to have them warbling at our side, no
matter on what subject they speak, and others to whom we have scarcely
patience to listen if they want to tell us that we have inherited a
fortune, so it is in literature. Except that little class of stoic
critics who like to take their books _in vacuo_, most of us prefer to
know something about the authors we read. But whether we like them to
tell it us themselves, or no, depends entirely on the voice. Thackeray
and Fielding are never confidential enough to satisfy us; Dickens and
Smollett set our teeth on edge directly they start upon a career of
confidential expansion; and this has nothing to do with any preference
for _Tom Jones_ over _Peregrine Pickle_. There is no doubt that Mr.
Stevenson is one of those writers the sound of whose personal voices
is pleasing to the public, and there must be hundreds of his admirers
who will not miss one word of "To a Gardener" or "The Mirror Speaks,"
and who will puzzle out each of the intimate addresses to his private
friends with complete satisfaction.
The present writer is one of those who are most under the spell. For
me Mr. Stevenson may speak for ever, and chronicle at full length all
his uncles and his cousins and his nurses. But I think if it were my
privilege to serve him in the capacity of Molière's old woman, or to be
what a friend of mine would call his "foolometer," I should pluck up
courage to represent to him that this thing can be overdone. I openly
avow myself an enthusiast, yet even I shrink before the confidential
character of the prose inscription to _Underwoods_. This volume is
dedicated, if you please, to eleven physicians, and it is strange that
one so all compact of humour as Mr. Stevenson should not have noticed
how funny it is to think of an author seated affably in an armchair,
simultaneously summoning by name eleven physicians to take a few words
of praise each, and a copy of his little book.
The objective side of Mr. Stevenson's mind is very rich and full, and
he has no need to retire too obstinately upon the subjective. Yet
I know not that anything he has written in verse is more worthily
dignified than the following little personal fragment, in which he
refers, of course, to the grandfather who died a few weeks before his
birth, and to the father whom he had just conducted to the grave, both
heroic builders of lighthouses:
_Say not of me that weakly I declined_
_The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,_
_The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,_
_To play at home with paper like a child._
_But rather say: In the afternoon of time_
_A strenuous family dusted from its hands_
_The sand of granite, and beholding far_
_Along the sounding coast its pyramids_
_And tall memorials catch the dying sun,_
_Smiled well content, and to this childish task_
_Around the fire addressed its evening hours._
This is a particularly happy specimen of Mr. Stevenson's blank verse,
in which metre, as a rule, he does not show to advantage. It is not
that his verses are ever lame or faulty, for in the technical portion
of the art he seldom fails, but that his rhymeless iambics remind the
ear too much now of Tennyson, now of Keats. He is, on the contrary,
exceedingly happy and very much himself in that metre of eight or seven
syllables, with couplet-rhymes, which served so well the first poets
who broke away from heroic verse, such as Swift and Lady Winchilsea,
Green and Dyer. If he must be affiliated to any school of poets it is
to these, who hold the first outworks between the old classical camp
and the invading army of romance, to whom I should ally him. Martial
is with those octo-syllabists of Queen Anne, and to Martial might well
have been assigned, had they been in old Latin, the delicately homely
lines, "To a Gardener." How felicitous is this quatrain about the
onion--
_Let first the onion flourish there,_
_Rose among roots, the maiden fair,_
_Wine-scented and poetic soul_
_Of the capacious salad-bowl._
Or this, in more irregular measure, and enfolding a loftier fancy--
_Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,_
_Sing truer, or no longer sing!_
_No more the voice of melancholy Jacques_
_To make a weeping echo in the hill;_
_But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,_
_From the green elm a living linnet takes,_
_One natural verse recapture--then be still._
It would be arrogant in the extreme to decide whether or no Mr. R. L.
Stevenson's poems will be read in the future. They are, however, so
full of character, so redolent of his own fascinating temperament,
that it is not too bold to suppose that so long as his prose is
appreciated those who love that will turn to this. There have been
prose writers whose verse has not lacked accomplishment or merit, but
has been so far from interpreting their prose that it rather disturbed
its effect and weakened its influence. Cowley is an example of this,
whose ingenious and dryly intellectual poetry positively terrifies the
reader away from his eminently suave and human essays. Neither of Mr.
Stevenson's volumes of poetry will thus disturb his prose. Opinions may
be divided as to their positive value, but no one will doubt that the
same characteristics are displayed in the poems, the same suspicion
of "the abhorred pedantic sanhedrim," the same fulness of life and
tenderness of hope, the same bright felicity of epithet as in the
essays and romances. The belief, however, may be expressed without
fear of contradiction that Mr. Stevenson's fame will rest mainly upon
his verse and not upon his prose, only in that dim future when Mr.
Matthew Arnold's prophecy shall be fulfilled and Shelley's letters
shall be preferred to his lyrical poems. It is saying a great deal to
acknowledge that the author of _Kidnapped_ is scarcely less readable in
verse than he is in prose.
_1887._
II
Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Short Stories
Two years ago there was suddenly revealed to us, no one seems to
remember how, a new star out of the East. Not fewer distinguished men
of letters profess to have "discovered" Mr. Kipling than there were
cities of old in which Homer was born. Yet, in fact, the discovery was
not much more creditable to them than it would be, on a summer night,
to contrive to notice a comet flaring across the sky. Not only was this
new talent robust, brilliant, and self-asserting, but its reception
was prepared for by a unique series of circumstances. The fiction of
the Anglo-Saxon world, in its more intellectual provinces, had become
curiously feminised. Those novel-writers who cared to produce subtle
impressions upon their readers, in England and America, had become
extremely refined in taste and discreet in judgment. People who were
not content to pursue the soul of their next-door neighbour through
all the burrows of self-consciousness had no choice but to take ship
with Mr. Rider Haggard for the Mountains of the Moon. Between excess
of psychological analysis and excess of superhuman romance there was
a great void in the world of Anglo-Saxon fiction. It is this void
which Mr. Kipling, with something less than one hundred short stories,
one novel, and a few poems, has filled by his exotic realism and his
vigorous rendering of unhackneyed experience. His temperament is
eminently masculine, and yet his imagination is strictly bound by
existing laws. The Evarras of the novel had said:
_Thus gods are made,_
_And whoso makes them otherwise shall die,_
when, behold, a young man comes up out of India, and makes them quite
otherwise, and lives.
The vulgar trick, however, of depreciating other writers in order to
exalt the favourite of a moment was never less worthy of practice than
it is in the case of the author of _Soldiers Three_. His relation to
his contemporaries is curiously slight. One living writer there is,
indeed, with whom it is not unnatural to compare him--Pierre Loti.
Each of these men has attracted the attention, and then the almost
exaggerated admiration, of a crowd of readers drawn from every class.
Each has become popular without ceasing to be delightful to the
fastidious. Each is independent of traditional literature, and affects
a disdain for books. Each is a wanderer, a lover of prolonged exile,
more at home among the ancient races of the East than among his own
people. Each describes what he has seen in short sentences, with highly
coloured phrases and local words, little troubled to obey the laws of
style if he can but render an exact impression of what the movement
of physical life has been to himself. Each produces on the reader a
peculiar thrill, a voluptuous and agitating sentiment of intellectual
uneasiness, with the spontaneous art of which he has the secret.
Totally unlike in detail, Rudyard Kipling and Pierre Loti have these
general qualities in common, and if we want a literary parallel to the
former, the latter is certainly the only one that we can find. Nor is
the attitude of the French novelist to his sailor friends at all unlike
that of the Anglo-Indian civilian to his soldier chums. To distinguish
we must note very carefully the difference between Mulvaney and _mon
frère Yves_; it is not altogether to the advantage of the latter.
The old rhetorical manner of criticism was not meant for the discussion
of such writers as these. The only way in which, as it seems to me, we
can possibly approach them, is by a frank confession of their personal
relation to the feelings of the critic. I will therefore admit that
I cannot pretend to be indifferent to the charm of what Mr. Kipling
writes. From the first moment of my acquaintance with it it has held
me fast. It excites, disturbs, and attracts me; I cannot throw off its
disquieting influence. I admit all that is to be said in its disfavour.
I force myself to see that its occasional cynicism is irritating and
strikes a false note. I acknowledge the broken and jagged style, the
noisy newspaper bustle of the little peremptory sentences, the cheap
irony of the satires on society. Often--but this is chiefly in the
earlier stories--I am aware that there is a good deal too much of the
rattle of the piano at some café concert. But when all this is said,
what does it amount to? What but an acknowledgment of the crudity of a
strong and rapidly developing young nature? You cannot expect a creamy
smoothness while the act of vinous fermentation is proceeding.
_Wit will shine_
_Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line;_
_A noble error, and but seldom made,_
_When poets are by too much force betray'd;_
_Thy generous fruits, though gather'd ere their prime,_
_Still show a quickness, and maturing time_
_But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rime._
In the following pages I shall try to explain why the sense of these
shortcomings is altogether buried for me in delighted sympathy
and breathless curiosity. Mr. Kipling does not provoke a critical
suspension of judgment. He is vehement, and sweeps us away with him;
he plays upon a strange and seductive pipe, and we follow him like
children. As I write these sentences, I feel how futile is this attempt
to analyse his gifts, and how greatly I should prefer to throw this
paper to the winds and listen to the magician himself. I want more
and more, like Oliver Twist. I want all those "other stories"; I wish
to wander down all those bypaths that we have seen disappear in the
brushwood. If one lay very still and low by the watch-fire, in the
hollow of Ortheris's greatcoat, one might learn more and more of the
inextinguishable sorrows of Mulvaney. One might be told more of what
happened, out of the moonlight, in the blackness of Amir Nath's Gully.
I want to know how the palanquin came into Dearsley's possession, and
what became of Kheni Singh, and whether the seal-cutter did really
die in the House of Suddhoo. I want to know who it is who dances the
_Hálli Hukk_, and how, and why, and where. I want to know what happened
at Jagadhri, when the Death Bull was painted. I want to know all the
things that Mr. Kipling does not like to tell--to see the devils of the
East "rioting as the stallions riot in spring." It is the strength of
this new story-teller that he reawakens in us the primitive emotions
of curiosity, mystery, and romance in action. He is the master of a
new kind of terrible and enchanting peepshow, and we crowd around him
begging for "just one more look." When a writer excites and tantalises
us in this way, it seems a little idle to discuss his style. Let
pedants, then, if they will, say that Mr. Kipling has no style; yet, if
so, how shall we designate such passages as this, frequent enough among
his more exotic stories?
"Come back with me to the north and be among men once more. Come back
when this matter is accomplished and I call for thee. The bloom of the
peach-orchards is upon all the valley, and _here_ is only dust and a
great stink. There is a pleasant wind among the mulberry-trees, and
the streams are bright with snow-water, and the caravans go up and the
caravans go down, and a hundred fires sparkle in the gut of the pass,
and tent-peg answers hammer-nose, and pony squeals to pony across the
drift-smoke of the evening. It is good in the north now. Come back with
me. Let us return to our own people. Come!"
I
The private life of Mr. Rudyard Kipling is not a matter of public
interest, and I should be very unwilling to exploit it, even if I had
the means of doing so. The youngest of living writers should really be
protected for a few years longer against those who chirp and gabble
about the unessential. All that needs to be known, in order to give him
his due chronological place, is that he was born in Bombay in Christmas
week, 1865. The careful student of what he has published will collect
from it the impression that Mr. Kipling was resident in India at an age
when few European children remain there; that he returned to England
for a brief period; that he began a career on his own account in India
at an unusually early age; that he has led a life of extraordinary
vicissitude, as a journalist, as a war correspondent, as a civilian
in the wake of the army; that an insatiable curiosity has led him to
shrink from no experience that might help to solve the strange riddles
of Oriental existence; and that he is distinguished from other active,
adventurous, and inquisitive persons in that his capacious memory
retains every impression that it captures.
Beyond this, all that must here be said about the man is that his
stories began to be published--I think about eight years ago--in local
newspapers of India, that his first book of verse, _Departmental
Ditties_, appeared in 1886, while his prose stories were not collected
from a Lahore journal, of which he was the sub-editor, until 1888, when
a volume of _Plain Tales from the Hills_ appeared in Calcutta. In the
same year six successive pamphlets or thin books appeared in an _Indian
Railway Library_, published at Allahabad, under the titles of _Soldiers
Three_, _The Gadsbys_, _In Black and White_, _Under the Deodars_, _The
Phantom 'Rickshaw_, and _Wee Willie Winkle_. These formed the literary
baggage of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, when, in 1889, he came home to find
himself suddenly famous at the age of twenty-three.
Since his arrival in England Mr. Kipling has not been idle. In 1890
he brought out a Christmas annual called _The Record of Badalia
Herodsfoot_, and a short novel, _The Light that Failed_. Already in
1891 he has published a fresh collection of tales called (in America)
_Mine Own People_, and a second miscellany of verses. This is by no
means a complete record of his activity, but it includes the names
of all his important writings. At an age when few future novelists
have yet produced anything at all, Mr. Kipling is already voluminous.
It would be absurd not to acknowledge that a danger lies in this
precocious fecundity. It would probably be an excellent thing for every
one concerned if this brilliant youth could be deprived of pens and
ink for a few years and be buried again somewhere in the far East.
There should be a "close time" for authors no less than for seals, and
the extraordinary fulness and richness of Mr. Kipling's work does not
completely reassure us.