structural cohesion. With the exception of _Badalia Herodsfoot_ and
_The Light that Failed_, which deal with phases of London life, their
contents might be thrown together without much loss of relation. The
general mass so formed could then be redivided into several coherent
sections. It may be remarked that Mr. Kipling's short stories, of
which, as I have said, we hold nearly a hundred, mainly deal with three
or four distinct classes of Indian life. We may roughly distinguish
these as the British soldier in India, the Anglo-Indian, the Native,
and the British child in India. In the following pages, I shall
endeavour to characterise his treatment of these four classes. I retain
the personal impression that it is pre-eminently as a poet that we
shall eventually come to regard him. For the present his short stories
fill the popular mind in connection with his name.
II
There can be no question that the side upon which Mr. Kipling's talent
has most delicately tickled British curiosity, and British patriotism
too, is his revelation of the soldier in India. A great body of our
countrymen are constantly being drafted out to the East on Indian
service. They serve their time, are recalled, and merge in the mass
of our population; their strange temporary isolation between the
civilian and the native, and their practical inability to find public
expression for their feelings, make these men--to whom, though we so
often forget it, we owe the maintenance of our Empire in the East--an
absolutely silent section of the community. Of their officers we may
know something, although _A Conference of the Powers_ may perhaps have
awakened us to the fact that we know very little. Still, people like
Tick Boileau and Captain Mafflin of the Duke of Derry's Pink Hussars
are of ourselves; we meet them before they go out and when they come
back; they marry our sisters and our daughters; and they lay down the
law about India after dinner. Of the private soldier, on the other
hand, of his loves and hates, sorrows and pleasures, of the way in
which the vast, hot, wearisome country and its mysterious inhabitants
strike him, of his attitude towards India, and of the way in which
India treats him, we know, or knew until Mr. Kipling enlightened us,
absolutely nothing. It is not surprising, then, if the novelty of this
portion of his writings has struck ordinary English readers more than
that of any other.
This section of Mr. Kipling's work occupies the seven tales called
_Soldiers Three_, and a variety of stories scattered through his other
books. In order to make his point of view that of the men themselves,
not spoiled by the presence of superior officers, or by social
restraint of any sort, the author takes upon himself the character of
an almost silent young civilian who has gained the warm friendship of
three soldiers, whose intimate companion and chum he becomes. Most of
the military stories, though not all, are told by one of these three,
or else recount their adventures or caprices.
Before opening the book called _Soldiers Three_, however, the reader
will do well to make himself familiar with the opening pages of a
comparatively late story, _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, in
which the characteristics of the famous three are more clearly defined
than elsewhere. Mulvaney, the Irish giant, who has been the "grizzled,
tender, and very wise Ulysses" to successive generations of young and
foolish recruits, is a great creation. He is the father of the craft
of arms to his associates; he has served with various regiments from
Bermuda to Halifax; he is "old in war, scarred, reckless, resourceful,
and in his pious hours an unequalled soldier." Learoyd, the second of
these friends, is "six and a half feet of slow-moving, heavy-footed
Yorkshireman, born on the wolds, bred in the dales, and educated
chiefly among the carriers' carts at the back of York railway-station."
The third is Ortheris, a little man as sharp as a needle, "a
fox-terrier of a cockney," an inveterate poacher and dog-stealer.
Of these three strongly contrasted types the first and the third live
in Mr. Kipling's pages with absolute reality. I must confess that
Learoyd is to me a little shadowy, and even in a late story, _On
Greenhow Hill_, which has apparently been written in order to emphasise
the outline of the Yorkshireman, I find myself chiefly interested in
the incidental part, the sharp-shooting of Ortheris. It seems as though
Mr. Kipling required, for the artistic balance of his cycle of stories,
a third figure, and had evolved Learoyd while he observed and created
Mulvaney and Ortheris, nor am I sure that places could not be pointed
out where Learoyd, save for the dialect, melts undistinguishably into
an incarnation of Mulvaney. The others are studied from the life,
and by an observer who goes deep below the surface of conduct. How
penetrating the study is, and how clear the diagnosis, may be seen
in one or two stories which lie somewhat outside the popular group.
It is no superficial idler among men who has taken down the strange
notes on military hysteria which inspire _The Madness of Ortheris_ and
_In the Matter of a Private_, while the skill with which the battered
giant Mulvaney, who has been a corporal and then has been reduced for
misconduct, who to the ordinary view and in the eyes of all but the
wisest of his officers is a dissipated blackguard, is made to display
the rapidity, wit, resource, and high moral feeling which he really
possesses, is extraordinary.
We have hitherto had in English literature no portraits of private
soldiers like these, and yet the soldier is an object of interest
and of very real, if vague and inefficient, admiration to his
fellow-citizens. Mr. Thomas Hardy has painted a few excellent soldiers,
but in a more romantic light and a far more pastoral setting.
Other studies of this kind in fiction have either been slight and
unsubstantial, or else they have been, as in the baby-writings of a
certain novelist who has enjoyed popularity for a moment, odious in
their sentimental unreality. There seems to be something essentially
volatile about the soldier's memory. His life is so monotonous, so
hedged in by routine, that he forgets the details of it as soon as the
restraint is removed, or else he looks back upon it to see it bathed
in a fictitious haze of sentiment. The absence of sentimentality in
Mr. Kipling's version of the soldier's life in India is one of its
great merits. What romance it assumes under his treatment is due to the
curious contrasts it encourages. We see the ignorant and raw English
youth transplanted, at the very moment when his instincts begin to
develop, into a country where he is divided from everything which can
remind him of his home, where by noon and night, in the bazar, in
barracks, in the glowing scrub jungle, in the ferny defiles of the
hills, everything he sees and hears and smells and feels produces on
him an unfamiliar and an unwelcome impression. How he behaves himself
under these new circumstances, what code of laws still binds his
conscience, what are his relaxations and what his observations, these
are the questions which we ask and which Mr. Kipling essays for the
first time to answer.
Among the short stories which Mr. Kipling has dedicated to the British
soldier in India there are a few which excel all the rest as works of
art. I do not think that any one will deny that of this inner selection
none exceeds in skill or originality _The Taking of Lungtungpen_. Those
who have not read this little masterpiece have yet before them the
pleasure of becoming acquainted with one of the best short stories,
not merely in English, but in any language. I do not know how to
praise adequately the technical merit of this little narrative. It
possesses to the full that masculine buoyancy, that power of sustaining
an extremely spirited narrative in a tone appropriate to the action,
which is one of Mr. Kipling's rare gifts. Its concentration, which
never descends into obscurity, its absolute novelty, its direct and
irresistible appeal to what is young and daring and absurdly splendid,
are unsurpassed. To read it, at all events to admire and enjoy it, is
to recover for a moment a little of that dare-devil quality that lurks
somewhere in the softest and the baldest of us. Only a very young man
could have written it, perhaps, but still more certainly only a young
man of genius.
A little less interesting, in a totally different way, is _The Daughter
of the Regiment_, with its extraordinarily vivid account of the
breaking-out of cholera in a troop-train. Of _The Madness of Ortheris_
I have already spoken; as a work of art this again seems to me somewhat
less remarkable, because carried out with less completeness. But it
would be hard to find a parallel, of its own class, to _The Rout of
the White Hussars_, with its study of the effects of what is believed
to be supernatural on a gathering of young fellows who are absolutely
without fear of any phenomenon of which they comprehend the nature.
In a very late story, _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_, Mr. Kipling has
shown that he is able to deal with the humours and matrimonial amours
of Indian barrack-life just as rapidly, fully, and spiritedly as with
the more serious episodes of a soldier's career. The scene between Judy
Sheehy and Dinah, as told by Mulvaney in that story, is pure comedy,
without a touch of farce.
On the whole, however, the impression left by Mr. Kipling's military
stories is one of melancholy. Tommy Atkins, whom the author knows so
well and sympathises with so truly, is a solitary being in India. In
all these tales I am conscious of the barracks as of an island in a
desolate ocean of sand. All around is the infinite waste of India,
obscure, monotonous, immense, inhabited by black men and pariah dogs,
Pathans and green parrots, kites and crocodiles, and long solitudes
of high grass. The island in this sea is a little collection of young
men, sent out from the remoteness of England to serve "the Widder,"
and to help to preserve for her the rich and barbarous empire of the
East. This microcosm of the barracks has its own laws, its own morals,
its own range of emotional sentiment. What these are the new writer
has not told us (for that would be a long story), but shown us that he
himself has divined. He has held the door open for a moment, and has
revealed to us a set of very human creations. One thing, at least, the
biographer of Mulvaney and Ortheris has no difficulty in persuading
us--namely, that "God in his wisdom has made the heart of the British
soldier, who is very often an unlicked ruffian, as soft as the heart of
a little child, in order that he may believe in and follow his officers
into tight and nasty places."
III
The Anglo-Indians with whom Mr. Kipling deals are of two kinds. I
must confess that there is no section of his work which appears to
me so insignificant as that which deals with Indian "society." The
eight tales which are bound together as _The Story of the Gadsbys_
are doubtless very early productions. I have been told, but I know
not whether on good authority, that they were published in serial
form before the author was twenty-one. Judged as the observation of
Anglo-Indian life by so young a boy, they are, it is needless to say,
astonishingly clever. Some pages in them can never, I suppose, come
to seem unworthy of his later fame. The conversation in _The Tents of
Kedar_, where Captain Gadsby breaks to Mrs. Herriott that he is engaged
to be married, and absolutely darkens her world to her during "a Naini
Tal dinner for thirty-five," is of consummate adroitness. What a "Naini
Tal dinner" is I have not the slightest conception, but it is evidently
something very sumptuous and public, and if any practised hand of the
old social school could have contrived the thrust and parry under the
fire of seventy critical eyes better than young Mr. Kipling has done,
I know not who that writer is. In quite another way the pathos of the
little bride's delirium in _The Valley of the Shadow_ is of a very
high, almost of the highest, order.
But, as a rule, Mr. Kipling's "society" Anglo-Indians are not drawn
better than those which other Indian novelists have created for our
diversion. There is a sameness in the type of devouring female, and
though Mr. Kipling devises several names for it, and would fain
persuade us that Mrs. Herriott, and Mrs. Reiver, and Mrs. Hauksbee
possess subtle differences which distinguish them, yet I confess I am
not persuaded. They all--and the Venus Annodomini as well--appear to
me to be the same high-coloured, rather ill-bred, not wholly spoiled
professional coquette. Mr. Kipling seems to be too impatient of what
he calls "the shiny toy-scum stuff people call civilisation" to paint
these ladies very carefully. _The Phantom 'Rickshaw_, in which a
hideously selfish man is made to tell the story of his own cruelty
and of his mechanical remorse, is indeed highly original, but here it
is the man, not the woman, in whom we are interested. The proposal of
marriage in the dust-storm in _False Dawn_, a theatrical, lurid scene,
though scarcely natural, is highly effective. The archery contest in
_Cupid's Arrows_ needs only to be compared with a similar scene in
_Daniel Deronda_ to show how much more closely Mr. Kipling keeps his
eye on detail than George Eliot did. But these things are rare in this
class of his stories, and too often the Anglo-Indian social episodes
are choppy, unconvincing, and not very refined.
All is changed when the central figure is a man. Mr. Kipling's
officials and civilians are admirably vivid and of an amazing variety.
If any one wishes to know why this new author has been received
with joy and thankfulness by the Anglo-Saxon world, it is really not
necessary for him to go further for a reason than to the moral tale of
_The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin_. Let the author of that tract
speak for himself:
"Every man is entitled to his own religious opinions; but no man--least
of all a junior--has a right to thrust these down other men's throats.
The Government sends out weird civilians now and again; but McGoggin
was the queerest exported for a long time. He was clever--brilliantly
clever--but his cleverness worked the wrong way. Instead of keeping
to the study of the vernaculars, he had read some books written by a
man called Comte, I think, and a man called Spencer, and a Professor
Clifford. [You will find these books in the Library.] They deal with
people's insides from the point of view of men who have no stomachs.
There was no order against his reading them, but his mamma should have
smacked him.... I do not say a word against this creed. It was made
up in town, where there is nothing but machinery and asphalte and
building--all shut in by the fog.... But in this country [India], where
you really see humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing
between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled
earth underfoot, the notion somehow dies away, and most folk come back
to simpler theories."
Those who will not come back to simpler theories are prigs, for whom
the machine-made notion is higher than experience. Now Mr. Kipling, in
his warm way, hates many things, but he hates the prig for preference.
Aurelian McGoggin, better known as the Blastoderm, is a prig of the
over-educated type, and upon him falls the awful calamity of sudden
and complete nerve-collapse. Lieutenant Golightly, in the story which
bears his name, is a prig who values himself for spotless attire and
clockwork precision of manner; he therefore is mauled and muddied up
to his eyes, and then arrested under painfully derogatory conditions.
In _Lispeth_ we get the missionary prig, who thinks that the Indian
instincts can be effaced by a veneer of Christianity. Mr. Kipling hates
"the sheltered life." The men he likes are those who have been thrown
out of their depth at an early age, and taught to swim off a boat. The
very remarkable story of _Thrown Away_ shows the effect of preparing
for India by a life "unspotted from the world" in England; it is as
hopelessly tragic as any in Mr. Kipling's somewhat grim repertory.
Against the _régime_ of the prig Mr. Kipling sets the _régime_ of
Strickland. Over and over again he introduces this mysterious figure,
always with a phrase of extreme approval. Strickland is in the police,
and his power consists in his determination to know the East as the
natives know it. He can pass through the whole of Upper India, dressed
as a fakir, without attracting the least attention. Sometimes, as in
_Beyond the Pale_, he may know too much. But this is an exception,
and personal to himself. Mr. Kipling's conviction is that this is
the sort of man to pervade India for us, and that one Strickland is
worth a thousand self-conceited civilians. But even below the Indian
prig, because he has at least known India, is the final object of Mr.
Kipling's loathing, "Pagett, M.P.," the radical English politician who
comes out for four months to set everybody right. His chastisement
is always severe and often comic. But in one very valuable paper,
which Mr. Kipling must not be permitted to leave unreprinted, _The
Enlightenment of Pagett, M.P._, he has dealt elaborately and quite
seriously with this noxious creature. Whether Mr. Kipling is right or
wrong, far be it from me in my ignorance to pretend to know. But his
way of putting these things is persuasive.
Since Mr. Kipling has come back from India he has written about society
"of sorts" in England. Is there not perhaps in him something of Pagett,
M.P., turned inside out? As a delineator of English life, at all
events, he is not yet thoroughly master of his craft. Everything he
writes has vigour and picturesqueness. But _The Lamentable Comedy of
Willow Wood_ is the sort of thing that any extremely brilliant Burman,
whose English, if slightly odd, was nevertheless unimpeachable, might
write of English ladies and gentlemen, having never been in England.
_The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot_ was in every way better, more truly
observed, more credible, more artistic, but yet a little too cynical
and brutal to come straight from life. And last of all there is the
novel of _The Light that Failed_, with its much-discussed two endings,
its oases of admirable detail in a desert of the undesirable, with its
extremely disagreeable woman, and its far more brutal and detestable
man, presented to us, the precious pair of them, as typical specimens
of English society. I confess that it is _The Light that Failed_ that
has wakened me to the fact that there are limits to this dazzling new
talent, the _éclat_ of which had almost lifted us off our critical feet.
IV
The conception of Strickland would be very tantalising and incomplete
if we were not permitted to profit from his wisdom and experience. But,
happily, Mr. Kipling is perfectly willing to take us below the surface,
and to show us glimpses of the secret life of India. In so doing he
puts forth his powers to their fullest extent, and I think it cannot be
doubted that the tales which deal with native manners are not merely
the most curious and interesting which Mr. Kipling has written, but
are also the most fortunately constructed. Every one who has thought
over this writer's mode of execution will have been struck with the
skill with which his best work is restrained within certain limits.
When inspiration flags with him, indeed, his stories may grow too long,
or fail, as if from languor, before they reach their culmination. But
his best short stories--and among his best we include the majority of
his native Indian tales--are cast at once, as if in a mould; nothing
can be detached from them without injury. In this consists his great
technical advantage over almost all his English rivals; we must look to
France or to America for stories fashioned in this way. In several of
his tales of Indian manners this skill reaches its highest because most
complicated expression. It may be comparatively easy to hold within
artistic bonds a gentle episode of European amorosity. To deal, in
the same form, but with infinitely greater audacity, with the muffled
passions and mysterious instincts of India, to slur over nothing, to
emphasise nothing, to give in some twenty pages the very spicy odour of
the East, this is marvellous.
Not less than this Mr. Kipling has done in a little group of stories
which I cannot but hold to be the culminating point of his genius so
far. If the remainder of his writings were swept away, posterity would
be able to reconstruct its Rudyard Kipling from _Without Benefit of
Clergy_, _The Man who Would be King_, _The Strange Ride of Morrowbie
Jukes_, and _Beyond the Pale_. More than that, if all other record of
Indian habits had been destroyed, much might be conjectured from these
of the pathos, the splendour, the cruelty, and the mystery of India.
From _The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows_ more is to be gleaned of the
real action of opium-smoking, and the causes of that indulgence, than
from many sapient debates in the British House of Commons. We come very
close to the confines of the moonlight-coloured world of magic in _The
Bisara of Pooree_. For pure horror and for the hopeless impenetrability
of the native conscience there is _The Recrudescence of Imray_. In a
revel of colour and shadow, at the close of the audacious and Lucianic
story of _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, we peep for a moment
into the mystery of "a big queen's praying at Benares."
Admirable, too, are the stories which deal with the results of attempts
made to melt the Asiatic and the European into one. The red-headed
Irish-Thibetan who makes the king's life a burden to him in the
fantastic story of _Namgay Doola_ represents one extremity of this
chain of grotesque Eurasians; Michele D'Cruze, the wretched little
black police inspector, with a drop of white blood in his body, who
wakes up to energetic action at one supreme moment of his life, is at
the other. The relapse of the converted Indian is a favourite theme
with this cynical observer of human nature. It is depicted in _The
Judgment of Dungara_, with a rattling humour worthy of Lever, where the
whole mission, clad in white garments woven of the scorpion nettle, go
mad with fire and plunge into the river, while the trumpet of the god
bellows triumphantly from the hills. In _Lispeth_ we have a study--much
less skilfully worked out, however--of the Indian woman carefully
Christianised from childhood reverting at once to heathenism when her
passions reach maturity.
The lover of good literature, however, is likely to come back to
the four stories which we named first in this section. They are the
very flower of Mr. Kipling's work up to the present moment, and on
these we base our highest expectations for his future. _Without
Benefit of Clergy_ is a study of the Indian woman as wife and mother,
uncovenanted wife of the English civilian and mother of his son. The
tremulous passion of Ameera, her hopes, her fears, and her agonies of
disappointment, combine to form by far the most tender page which Mr.
Kipling has written. For pure beauty the scene where Holden, Ameera,
and the baby count the stars on the housetop for Tota's horoscope is
so characteristic that, although it is too long to quote in full, its
opening paragraph must here be given as a specimen of Mr. Kipling's
style in this class of work: