There is a tale of Mr Kipling which relates how Eustace Cleever, a
celebrated novelist, came to the rooms of a young subaltern and his
companions who were giving an account of themselves. Eustace Cleever
was a literary man, and was greatly impressed when he learned that one
of the company, who was under twenty-five and was called the Infant,
had killed people somewhere in Burma. He was suddenly caught by an
immense enthusiasm for the active life--the sort of enthusiasm which
sedentary authors feel. Eustace Cleever ended the night riotously with
youngsters who had helped to govern and extend the Empire; and he
returned from their company incoherently uttering a deep contempt for
art and letters.
But Eustace Cleever was being observed by the First Person Singular of
Mr Kipling's tale. This receiver of confidences perceived what was
happening, and he has the last word of the story:
"Whereby I understood that Eustace Cleever, decorator and colourman in
words, was blaspheming his own Art and would be sorry for this in the
morning."
We have here an important clue to Mr Kipling and his work. Mr Kipling
writes of the heroic life. He writes of men who do visible and
measurable things. His theme has usually to do with the world's work.
He writes of the locomotive and the engineer; of the mill-wheel and the
miller; of the bolts, bars and planks of a ship and the men who sail
it. He writes, in short, of any creature which has work to do and does
it well. Nevertheless we must not be misled into thinking that because
Mr Kipling glorifies all that is concrete, practical, visible and
active he is therefore any the less purely and utterly a literary man.
Mr Kipling seems sometimes to write as an engineer, sometimes as a
soldier. At times we would wager that he had spent all his life as a
Captain of Marines, or as a Keeper of Woods and Forests, or as a
Horse-Dealer. He gives his readers the impression that he has lived a
hundred lives, mastered many crafts, and led the life, not of one, but
of a dozen, active and practical men of affairs. He has created about
himself so complete an illusion of adventure and enterprise that it
seems almost the least important thing about him that he should also be
a writer of books. His readers, indeed, are apt to forget the most
important fact as to Mr Kipling--the fact that he is a man of letters.
He seems to belong rather to the company of young subalterns than to
the company of Eustace Cleever.
Hence it is necessary to consider closely the moral of that excellent
tale. When Eustace Cleever blasphemed against his art, Mr Kipling
predicted he would be sorry for it. Mr Kipling recorded that
prediction because he had the best of reasons to know how Eustace
Cleever would feel upon the morning after his debauch of enthusiasm for
the heroic life. Let each man keep to his work, and know how good it
is to do that work as well as it can be done. Eustace Cleever's work
was to live the life of imagination and to handle English words--work
as difficult to do and normally as useful as the job of the Infant.
Though for one heady night Eustace Cleever yearned after a strange
career, Mr Kipling knew that he would return without misgiving to the
thing he was born to do. Mr Kipling, like Eustace Cleever, knows that
though nothing is more pleasant than to talk with young subalterns, yet
the born author remains always an author. He knows, too, that even the
deeds he admires in the men who make history are, for him, no more than
raw stuff to be taken in hand or rejected according to the author's
need.
Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, before
we have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful man
of letters. Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out of
the jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men are
working and building and fighting, come really out of the study of an
expert craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care.
This may seem an unnecessary warning. The intelligent reader will
protest that, since Mr Kipling writes books, it does not seem very
necessary to deduce that he is a man of letters. It is true that no
such warning would be necessary in the case of most writers of books.
It would be pure loss of time, for example, to begin a study of the
work of Mr Henry James by asserting that Mr Henry James was a man of
letters. But Mr Kipling is in rather a different case. The majority
of readers with whom one discusses Mr Kipling's works are sometimes far
astray, simply because they have not realised that Mr Kipling is as
utterly a man of letters as Mr Henry James, that he lives as completely
the life of fancy and meditation as William Blake or Francis Thompson.
Mr Kipling does not write tales out of the mere fullness of his life in
many continents and his talk with all kinds of men. He is not to be
understood as a man singular only in his experience, unloading
anecdotes from a crowded life, excelling in emphasis and reality by
virtue of things actually seen and done. On the contrary, Mr Kipling
writes tales because he is a writer.
Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and been
more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his
literary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any the
less devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that he
is one of the craftiest authors who ever lived. He is more crafty than
Stevenson. He often lives by the word alone--the word picked and
polished. That he has successfully disguised this fact from many of
his admirers is only a further proof of his literary cunning. Mr
Kipling often uses words with great skill to create in his readers the
impression that words matter to him hardly at all. He will work as
hard as the careful sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawness
and crudity; and thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is a
literary man. They are content simply to listen to a man who has seen,
and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to
observe that, if the world with its day's work belongs to Mr Kipling,
it belongs to him only by author's right--that is, by right of
imagination and right of style.
It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary
formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of
_The Light That Failed_, he tries to talk as though there were really
no such thing. But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is
pedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of
literary discipline. It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the
sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula.
It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than
Tennyson or Walter Scott. Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be
misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art. Mr Kipling's art
is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he
helped to send out of fashion.
A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates
which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement
of his works here to be followed.
Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E.
His intimacy with India was determined at birth. He was educated at
the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in
1882, as assistant editor on _The Civil and Military Gazette_ and _The
Pioneer_. He remained on the staff of _The Pioneer_ for seven years,
and travelled over the five continents. By this time he had learned to
think of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from
Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see something
of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come back
to her from the ends of the earth. The whole of Mr Kipling's literary
biography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a great
traveller who is now inveterately at home.
Perhaps we should also note that Mr Kipling was a literary prodigy.
_Plain Tales from the Hills_ appeared in 1887. Mr Kipling at
twenty-two had shown his quality and had already mapped out in little
his career. In _Plain Tales from the Hills_ there are hints for almost
everything that their author afterwards accomplished. As the book of a
young journalist whose name had not yet been whispered among the
publishers and critics of London it was a miracle. If Mr Kipling had
been able to improve on _Plain Tales from the Hills_ as much as
Shakespeare improved on _Love's Labour's Lost_, as much as Shelley
improved on _Queen Mab_, Robert Browning on _Pauline_, Byron on _Hours
of Idleness_, he would to-day be without a peer. Mr Granville Barker
is often cited as a classical modern example of precocity, but he was
twenty-four when he wrote _The Marrying of Anne Leete_. Mr Henry James
was twenty-eight before he had published a characteristic word. Mr
Thomas Hardy at twenty-five had only printed a short story, and he was
more than thirty when his first novel appeared. Mr Kipling came upon
the public in 1886 without a preliminary stutter. Mr Kipling at
twenty-two could write as craftily as Mr Kipling can write after nearly
thirty years' experience. We shall not be greatly concerned in these
pages to trace the progress of Mr Kipling's craft and wisdom. He was
always crafty and always wise. He had done some of his best work at
thirty. He recalls Hazlitt's curious saying that an improving author
is never a great author. Mr Kipling is not an improving author. There
has been a little moving up and down the scale of excellence; many
things hinted in the early volumes from _Plain Tales from the Hills_ to
_Many Inventions_ are developed more elaborately and surely in later
volumes; the old craft has come to be used with an ease that has in it
more of the insolence of a master than was possible in the author of
1887. But so far as literary finish is concerned, _Plain Tales from
the Hills_ leaves little to be acquired. Already Mr Kipling wields his
implement as deftly and firmly as many a skilled writer who was
learning his lesson before Mr Kipling was born. Few authors have so
surely scored their best in their earliest years. Authors are
considered young to-day at thirty. Mr Kipling at that age had already
written _The Jungle Book_.
This does not, of course, imply that all Mr Kipling's stories are of
equal merit. On the contrary, we shall henceforth be mainly concerned
with looking for the inspired author under a mass of skilful
journalism. It is not a simple enterprise. Mr Kipling is so competent
an author that he is usually able to persuade his readers that his
heart is equally in all he writes. Moreover, Mr Kipling has fallen
among many prejudices, literary and political, which have caused his
least important work to be most discussed. For these reasons the
actual, as distinguished from the legendary, Mr Kipling is not easily
discovered. Mainly it is a work of excavation.
Mr Kipling has been writing short stories for nearly thirty years. His
tales are too numerous for disparate discussion. It will be necessary
to take them in groups. One or two stories in each group will be taken
as typical of the rest. Thereby we shall avoid repetition and be able
to show some sort of plan to the maze of Mr Kipling's diversity of
subjects and manners.