RUDYARD KIPLING
In the year 1890 people in this country were beginning to tell each
other about, and to ask each other about, a young Anglo-Indian
storyteller whose works were to be found in a series of pamphlets
published by Messrs A. H. Wheeler & Co., of Allahabad, in “The Indian
Railway Library.” On inquiry also it was discovered that this same
storyteller was the son of an Anglo-Indian official, and that he
himself was engaged in the Indian Civil Service, that he had become the
laureate of Governmental circles, and that his clever verses had been
collected in a volume called _Departmental Ditties_. The demand to know
more about this remarkable young man grew until it was found necessary
to publish his stories in England.
It was in the year 1890 that the short stories of Rudyard Kipling
became accessible to English readers through the normal channels
of publication. Thus came to us, bringing with them the scent and
heat, the colour and passion of the East in all its splendours and
seductiveness, the now world-famous series of short stories, beginning
with _Plain Tales from the Hills_, in which we were introduced to the
vitriolic Mrs Hawksbee, and _Soldiers Three_, with Privates Stanley
Ortheris, John Learoyd and the immortal Terence Mulvaney. These people
immediately entered into our consciousness, taking their place beside
the great comic figures of fiction, those characters whom we all know
so much better than many people we meet in real life. Of a sudden we
found ourselves enjoying a largess of short stories such as the English
language had not known before. The mere recital of the titles of the
little genius-laden volumes issued during that year recalls artistic
experiences little short of thrilling--_The Story of the Gadsbys_,
_In Black and White_, _Under the Deodars_, _The Phantom ’Rickshaw_,
_Wee Willie Winkie_, _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_ and _The City of
Dreadful Night_. Then came a long story, _The Light that Failed_, and
we realised that this new writer had in him the making of a novelist as
well as a great storyteller; a promise, however, not yet achieved. But
none who read the _Departmental Ditties_ could have foretold a poet,
although the appearance in the Press of occasional verses over the
name of Kipling was beginning to make us realise that very shortly it
would be necessary to consider some of the new author’s metrical work
in the light of poetry; and when, in 1892, a volume called _Barrack
Room Ballads and Other Verses_ made its appearance it was as though a
bombshell had burst among the seats of literary judgment, and, amidst
stimulating shouts of approval, academic criticism was faced with the
necessity of revising its idea of poetry, and ultimately of making room
for a new poet.
The versatility of Rudyard Kipling did not end there. He proved with
such books as _Many Inventions_ (1893), _The Jungle Book_ (1894),
_The Second Jungle Book_ (1895), _The Seven Seas_ (1896), _Captains
Courageous_ (1897), _The Day’s Work_ (1898), _Stalky & Co._ (1899), and
a novel, _The Naulahka_ (1892), written in conjunction with Wolcott
Balestier, that he could enter into the minds of sailors and schoolboys
and animals, besides giving something very like consciousness to
machines, with as much facility as he could enter into the minds of
soldiers, Hindoos, and the members of Anglo-Indian Society. Nor did his
surprising genius and versatility stop there, for with _Kim_ (1901)
he has given us a prose epic of Indian life, and with the _Just-So
Stories for Little Children_ (1902) he has entered into the wonder
spirit of childhood, just as in _Puck of Pook’s Hill_ (1906), and those
remarkable short stories “The Brushwood Boy,” “They,” and the “Finest
Story in the World,” he has proved that his genius is equally at home
in the realm of fancy and on the borderland of human experience.
[Illustration: RUDYARD KIPLING
_By William Nicholson_]
Everybody felt that a new force in a double sense had come into
literature. It was a new voice, a new accent, in many ways a new
language, and in every way forceful even to creating an atmosphere of
physical violence. Rudyard Kipling was a realist with a difference.
He had no antecedents. The critics found it impossible to locate him,
even when they admitted that he had earned a definite place in the
hierarchy of art. They felt without admitting it, and showed without
intending it, that they were, to use that language of the street
which Kipling turned into literature, up against a new game. There
was over-praise and half-praise, as well as right-down opposition;
in short, all the phenomena of the arrival of undoubted genius. Even
those in the vanguard of the new movement were lost when they came to
consider his work, for as he had no antecedents, so he belonged to no
definite movement, neither did he frequent, even when he came to live
in England, the places where literary men congregate.
Yet, as we can see now, he was a bigger figure in the vital modernist
movement of the Nineties than many who were fonder of using labels to
define their position. His was a definite expression of the modern
movement towards the revaluation of ideas and life; and, although his
temperament was essentially conservative, his interpretation of what
finally is a traditional view of life was so fresh and personal that
it created the illusion of a revolution. He reasserted the claims of
virility and actuality, and, if you like, of vulgarity--that underlying
grossness of life which is Nature’s safeguard. In that respect Kipling
might well be considered a realist. But his realism never, as in the
case of the French realists, looked upon mere frankness as an end in
itself. He was never a realist for realism’s sake: he faced facts only
because he recognised in them the essentials of romance. When he told
a story it was not the outcome of any notion about being an artist, it
was the outcome of the oldest of literary traditions, the desire of
one man to tell another what he has seen, heard or experienced, and to
tell it in the most effective way. His stories, therefore, read like
the verbatim reports of the achievements of a gifted raconteur in club
or smoking-room, or any other place where men swap yarns; and these
stories are equally masculine. They bring the modern clubroom into
literature.
His poems sing the song of ordinary healthy manhood in much the same
way as folk-songs sang the life of the folk, or, better, as soldier
songs, student songs or sailor chanties tell the desires, whims and
gossip of men who are thrown together by common circumstances. You
feel all the while that the love of the masculine life which is the
keynote of _The Light That Failed_ is the underlying and impelling
influence of Kipling’s attitude. Whilst Bernard Shaw was using Ibsen
to decry the fixed ideals of “the manly man” and “the womanly woman,”
Rudyard Kipling was interpreting a new vision of the manly man in some
of the most masculine poems that have ever been written, wherein every
reference to woman bears the stamp of the oldest attitude of manliness
towards womanliness. And in this respect Kipling was nearer the most
modern philosophy of the time, that of Nietzsche, than Bernard Shaw.
He was no believer in the equality of the sexes; on the contrary, the
pugnacious philosophy of Kipling, with its insistence upon clean health
and a courageous and dangerous life would make men more like men and
women more like women.
Rudyard Kipling was undeniably a protest also against the artistic
intellectualism of the time, with its tendency to enclose life in the
conservatory of culture; and he was all the more effective as he used
his protagonists’ favourite weapons. He knew what he thought and said
what he thought in his own way, with as little apology to precedent or
convention as the most ultra-realist or impressionist. Everything he
did was impressionist, and like all the great figures of his period
he did not scruple, when occasion served, to use art as a means of
teaching or preaching. He used his art to preach a new imperialistic
patriotism as deliberately as Bernard Shaw used art to preach
socialism, or John Davidson that gospel of philosophic science to which
he devoted his last energies.
As an artist, then, Kipling won his spurs at the outset by writing a
cycle of short stories unsurpassed in our literature, and finding
their only parallel for bulk of output and high achievement in
the stories of Guy de Maupassant. But he differs from the French
storyteller in that sex plays only a secondary part in his work. In a
period whose artists were over-engaged with the aspects and problems
of sex, it was a virtue to show that life had other interests than the
way of a man with a maid; and it was no small achievement at such a
time to be able to write stories on other subjects which should prove
both stimulating and interesting. It was not as though Rudyard Kipling
were not conscious of the problem of sex; he knew all about it, but
he did not treat it as a problem, he recognised it as a mystery: an
inspiration--and a warning. And into the poem called “The Vampire” he
put his idea of the tragedy of sexual abandonment:
“A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair--
(Even as you and I!)”
And one cannot help feeling that Rudyard Kipling has finally stated,
through the medium of one of his own soldiers, the average, and perhaps
eternal, view of the sex problem, with all its cheerful fatalism, in
“The Ladies”:
“I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it,
An’ now I must pay for my fun,
For the more you ’ave known o’ the others
The less you will settle to one;
An’ the end of it’s settin’ and thinkin’
An’ dreamin’ Hell-fires to see;
So be warned by my lot (which I know you will not)
An’ learn about women from me.”
With the concluding dictum that--
“... the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady
Are sisters under their skins!”
It was one of Kipling’s chief distinctions to have been able to see
and feel romance without the aid of antiquity. He had no patience
with antiquarian romanticism, and he satirised those who upheld the
old against the new in “The King,” giving the laments of Cave-men and
Lake-folk at the changes which were killing romance in their times, of
the soldier who saw the death of romance in the substitution of the gun
for the sword, and of the sailor who saw romance again disappearing
when steam took the place of sails; and he brings us down to our
own times with the modern season ticket-holder repining for the old
romantic days of the stage coach, when--
“... all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.
His hand was on the lever laid,
His oil-can soothed the worrying cranks,
His whistle waked the snowbound grade,
His foghorn cut the reeking banks;
By dock and deep and mine and mill
The Boy-god reckless laboured still!”
And this idea of romance he wove into all his finest work. He took
things as he found them, the men who worked at manly crafts like
soldiering and sailoring and engine-driving and, later, aviation, and
showed us how fearful and wonderful were their days, turning what had
hitherto been considered a humdrum modern world into an Arabian Night’s
Entertainment. In many a tale he has made machinery speak as eloquently
as Tommy Atkins or Mowgli, or Toomai of the Elephants. He has taken
us out on to the banks of Newfoundland and shown us the hardness and
joyousness of the cod fisheries and the way they have in the making of
a man. And in the Jungle Books he has taken us into the wild, and woven
a spell of romance more fascinating than the romantic life of men, and
more natural than natural history. When he goes among the machines one
feels that he loves them as his own “Stiff-necked, Glasgow beggar,” the
engineer M’Andrews, loved them, and that the reply of the engineer to
the passenger who had asked him, “Don’t you think steam spoils romance
at sea?” would be Kipling’s own reply in the same circumstances, to
those who failed to see the romance of the modern world:
“Darned ijit! I’d been doon that morn’ to see what ailed the
throws,
Manholin’, on my back--the cranks three inches off my nose.
Romance! Those first-class passengers they like it very well,
Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell?
I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns--the loves an’ doves they
dream.
Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o’ Steam!”
Rudyard Kipling did not wait, as we have seen, for someone else to
fulfil this demand of his own creating. He stepped into the breach
himself, and if not exactly as a new Burns singing the song of steam,
as one who had vision enough to express that vision in a language
strong to compel the attention of his fellow-men.
Kipling was far from inclined to rest after discovering nought common
on the earth. He wanted to share this discovery with his fellow-men;
and he wanted his compatriots to realise their obligations to an
Empire which embraced so much of the good earth. Before him our poets
were insular; they had no consciousness of Empire, or when they had
they associated the Empire with England. Kipling took the opposite
attitude--he associated England with the Empire. “What do they know
of England who only England know?” he asked. And his question came at
a moment when circumstances had made a hitherto indifferent people
acutely conscious of the world-circling colonies their race had
founded. At the Jubilee of 1887 they had been told that Queen Victoria
reigned over an Empire upon which the sun never set. The image had
filled the popular imagination. Gladstone’s failure to settle the
Soudan, and his more recent attempt to give Ireland Home Rule, thus
creating an illusion of Imperial dismemberment, had each contributed
to the larger patriotism of Empire. So when Kitchener “avenged” the
death of Gordon, and obliterated the failures of Wolseley in Egypt,
by defeating the Mahdi at Omdurman, and retaking Khartoum, slumbering
Imperialism awoke with a strange and arrogant light in its eyes.
The spark which eventually set the country ablaze with warlike
patriotism was the Outlander question in the Transvaal, following the
gold boom and the discovery of diamonds in South Africa. The great
force in Cape Colony was Cecil Rhodes; he had gone there in the early
Seventies as a young man, consolidated the diamond interests in the De
Beers Company, worked at the early organisation of the gold industry,
settled the native unrest in Matabeleland, Bechuanaland, Basutoland and
Mashonaland, brought about unity of purpose between British and Dutch
in the south, and founded the British South Africa Company, which was
granted a royal charter in 1889, and whose vast realm is now known
as Rhodesia. Rhodes was a man of action and a dreamer, a practical
visionary, and from his early days in the colony he dreamt of a United
South Africa, with railway and telegraphic communication from the
Cape to Cairo. In 1890 he became Prime Minister of Cape Colony, and
the events which followed this appointment were the final causes of
that new patriotism of which Rudyard Kipling became the bard. Rhodes
had been hampered in his schemes in the north by the national and
non-progressive policy of Paul Kruger, President of the South African
Republic, and Cape Town politics eventually centred around the question
of the enfranchisement of British settlers in the Transvaal. Rhodes
found a sympathetic supporter of his ideals in this country in Joseph
Chamberlain, who had joined the Marquess of Salisbury’s ministry as
Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs in 1895. Weary of political
negotiations, the residents of Johannesburg were becoming restive,
and they began arming themselves against Boer rule; and a climax was
reached when, acting upon this knowledge, on the 29th December in the
same year, Dr Jameson, the Administrator of Mashonaland, invaded the
Transvaal with a small body of troops. He was defeated and captured,
but the romantic side of the Jameson Raid appealed to popular sentiment
and the new romance became the new patriotism. The sequel to the Raid
was the Boer War (1899–1902), and the realisation of Cecil Rhodes’
dream of a United South Africa under the British flag.
Never before had this country been mixed up in a great issue which
combined so inextricably the most sordid and the most exalted
motives. Violent partisanship rent asunder the British people, and
the pro-Boer campaign led by Lloyd George ended in riots. Cecil
Rhodes became an ogre in the eyes of the Peace Party, whose members
also looked upon Joseph Chamberlain as the political instrument of
the ring of cosmopolitan financiers who controlled the South African
mining industry. Even now it is impossible to separate finance from
patriotism in that fierce struggle. Two things, however, seem certain:
firstly, that Cecil Rhodes was not wholly inspired by sordid motives,
and that he used his own wealth as much as he used the Rand financiers
and British politicians, as instruments towards the realisation of
an Imperial idea; and secondly, that Rudyard Kipling as prophet and
bard of Empire was high above all pettiness, and inspired by a genuine
romantic passion far removed from that jingoism which did nothing but
add the verb “to maffick” to our language.
It was easier to mistake the gospel of Kipling, and the crowd did
mistake it, because his most popular songs were set to a banjo melody.
Before him bardic prophets had been content with the lyre; but with
fine insolence he rejected that ancient instrument, and sought to
inspire the most commonplace of all musical instruments with an exalted
message. He saw in the banjo “the war-drum of the white man round the
world.” But not all those who heard and liked his tunes realised their
underlying demand upon character. They mistook his patriotism for
jingoism, and he was forced to pray,
“Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet--
Lest we forget--lest we forget!”
They waved flags when he sang of Empire--but showed more inclination
for cricket and football than for fighting or empire-building: and the
banjo snapped out its derision of “the flannelled fools at the wicket”
and “the muddied oafs at the goal”--
“Given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie,
Ye saw that the land lay fenceless, and ye let the months go by
Waiting some easy wonder: hoping some saving sign--
Idle--openly idle--in the lee of the forespent Line.
Idle--except for your boasting--and what is your boasting worth
If ye grudge a year of service to the lordliest life on earth?”
Obviously Kipling and the man-in-the-street, who began to become
a specially designated quantity at about this time, were at
cross-purposes. There was an austerity about his demand which did not
appeal to what he called “a poor little street-bred people.” Perhaps
his song was a little foreign--as the Empire was a little foreign; and
the masses were hardly prepared for his fierce Old Testament faith in
a God of Battles and of Hosts. The people had his confident faith in
their race. The Jews in Egypt were not more confident that they were
the Chosen People. But our democracy did not want to prove their title;
they were quite content to let others prove it for them or to take it
on faith. Kipling narrowed down the Imperial idea to ancient tribal
proportions plus conscription and the modern ideal of efficiency in
organisation:
“Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!”
With this love of a modern and masterful people he associated the
traditions of the race and its achievements in science and discovery
and adventure; and particularly in that restlessness which had pitted
the English against nature and barbarism in the ends of the earth:
“there’s never a wave of all her waves but marks our English dead,” he
sang. Not alone of successful enterprise of soldier or sailor does he
sing; but he is fully conscious of the pioneer who makes tracks into
the unknown without reward, favour or success; the
“... legion that never was ’listed,
That carries no colour or crest,
But split in a thousand detachments,
Is breaking the way for the rest.”
And his romanticism naturally takes under its wing the spirit of youth
in its hunger for life; he loves all who respond to the call of the
Red Gods and who dare to test their naked souls against the rough
uncivilised world:
“Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight? Who hath heard the
birch-log burning?
Who is quick to read the noises of the night?
Let him follow with the others, for the Young Men’s feet are
turning
To the camps of proved desire and known delight!”
Rudyard Kipling’s song, whatever its immediate subject, is always the
song of intrepid man. It is the revolt against book-culture and a fresh
demand for the old culture of experience. He was not always rude in
thought or form, and proved his power as a more conventional poet in
“Sussex,” “The Flowers,” and in the most orthodox of all his poems he
has come even nearer academic poetry in the expression of his own idea
of human, and his own, worthiness:
“One stone the more swings to her place
In that dread Temple of Thy Worth--
It is enough that through Thy grace
I saw nought common on Thy earth.
Take not that vision from my ken;
Oh, whatsoe’er may spoil or speed,
Help me to need no aid from men
That I may help such men as need.”
And it is only natural also that the poem in his own manner which rises
nearest to what we have come to regard as poetry is the “L’Envoi” to
the _Barrack Room Ballads_, in which he sings of the return to the
trail of “proved desire and known delight.” But there is little doubt
that Kipling’s most original and inevitable verse is to be found in
his soldier songs. These chanties of military life are unique, and in
them he has transcended the art of effective dialect verse by turning
slang into poetry. Such ballads as “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” and “Mandalay” are as
peculiar in their way, and as separate from the rest of English poetry,
as the designs of Aubrey Beardsley are separate things in English
pictorial art.
Another class of verse Kipling also made his own: those verses into
which he has put his more personal views upon questions of art and
conduct. But in these, as well as in some of his more recent patriotic
songs, although he has succeeded in achieving eloquent and vigorous
expression, with, in addition, that piquancy which is peculiar to all
his work, he has strayed furthest from the path of poetry. Sometimes he
has fallen into verses which are incredibly lacking even in the most
ordinary characteristics of poetry; and whatever one may find in such
compositions as “The Conundrum of the Workshops,” “In the Neolithic
Age,” “Cleared,” or “Tomlinson,” one only finds poetry by accident, as
one finds it in prose. Still, among these are works which are their own
reward, and in some of them their author has defended himself and his
method of contravening the customs of polite art:
“Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it where the moose
And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:--
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And--every--single--one--of--them--is--right.”
There is perhaps more in this sweeping assertion than art disputants
will be ready to admit. However, the selective processes of time would
seem to be on the side of Kipling, who has added another admission
in justification of his methods in a familiar set of quaint verses
introducing the second series of _Barrack Room Ballads_ in “The
Seven Seas”:
“When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went and took--the same as me!”
Rudyard Kipling has helped himself variedly at the tables of art
and life, and it is not surprising, therefore, that he has produced
unusual results. But strip from his output every weed, every unworthy
production, and there will remain not one masterpiece, but a dozen,
and in most branches of literature--novel, short story, ballad, lyric,
dialogue and descriptive essay. And if his teaching at times seemed
unnecessarily blatant it possessed an undercurrent of courageous wisdom
as far removed from blatant jingoism as jingoism is from the Imperial
or patriotic idea. Wonder was reborn in him; but it was not the wonder
of childhood. It was the wonder of the grown man who had known and
observed life and become illusion-proof--but wondered still and was
thankful always:
“For to admire an’ for to see,
For to be’old this world so wide--
It never done no good to me,
But I can’t drop it if I tried!”
He can forgive all faults of passion or ambition; but he has no
place in his system for the characterless nonentity who is neither
good for something nor bad for anything. He has revealed the type in
“Tomlinson,” and name and man have entered into our conception of
life. This poet and visionary, who has helped by his song to weld
a world-ring of colonies into an Empire, came into the Nineties
telling people to have done with the gods of printed books and life
by proxy--in short, to have done with anything in the nature of that
Tomlinson who was not good enough for Heaven or bad enough for Hell,
and who was finally rejected by the devil and sent back to earth with
the admonition:
“Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed--go back with an open eye,
And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die:
That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one--
And ... the God that you took from a printed book be with you,
Tomlinson!”