There is another group of Indian tales, a group which deals with the
governance of India--with the men who are spent in the Imperial
Service. The peculiar charm and merit of these tales is best
considered as a special case of Mr Kipling's delight in the world's
work--a subject which claims a chapter to itself. But apart from this,
Mr Kipling's Anglo-Indian tales--his presentation of the work of the
Indian Empire, of the Anglo-Indian soldier and civilian--have an
unfortunate interest of their own. They are mainly responsible for a
misconception which has dogged Mr Kipling through all his career. This
misconception consists in regarding Mr Kipling as primarily an
Imperialist pamphleteer with a brief for the Services and a contempt
for the Progressive Parties. It is an error which has acted
mischievously upon all who share it--upon the reader who mechanically
regrets that Mr Kipling's work should be disfigured with fierce heresy;
upon the reader who chuckles with sectarian glee when the "much
talkers" are mocked and confounded; upon Mr Kipling himself who has
been encouraged to mistake an accident of his career as the essence of
his achievement and to regard himself as a sort of Imperial laureate.
The origin of this misconception is not obscure. Mr Kipling has
written intimate tales of the British Army: he is, therefore, a
"militarist." He has lived in India many years, and realised that men
who live in India, and administer India, and come into personal contact
with Hindus and Mohammedans, know more about India than Members of
Parliament who run through the Indian continent between sessions: he
is, therefore, a reviler of the free democratic institutions of Great
Britain. He has realised that Government departments in Whitehall are
not always thought to be very expeditious, well informed and devoted by
men who are often confronted with matters that cannot afford to wait
for a telegram: he is, therefore, a lover of the high hand and of
courses brutal and irregular. He has celebrated the toil and the
adventure of pioneers and of outposts: he is, therefore, one who
brandishes unseasonably the Imperial sword.
The grain of truth in these deductions is heavily outweighed by the
massive absurdity of regarding them as in any sense essential. Mr
Kipling brings political prejudice into his work less than almost any
living contemporary. At a time when there was hardly an English novel
or an English play of consequence which was not also a political
pamphlet it was completely false to regard Mr Kipling as a pamphleteer.
When most of our English authors were talking from the platform, Mr
Kipling--with a few, too few, others--remained apart. He is suspect,
not because his Anglo-Indian tales or his army tales are political, but
because they record much that is true of the English Services, which
fails to square with much that once was popularly believed about them.
The real reason of Mr Kipling's false fame as a politician is, not that
he is an Imperial pamphleteer, but that, writing of the Army and the
Empire, he fails to be a pamphleteer on the other side. His
detachment, not his partiality, is at fault.
Mr Kipling's detachment from the politics of his day explains virtually
everything that has offended his modern critics. Almost the first
thing to realise in discussing Mr Kipling's attitude to modern life is
that Mr Kipling has kept absolutely clear of the political and social
drift of the last thirty years. He has been conspicuously out of
everything. He has had nothing to say to any of the ideas or
influences which have formed his contemporaries. While others of his
literary generation were growing up amid intellectual movements,
democratic tendencies and advances of humanity, Mr Kipling was standing
between two civilisations in India which were hardly susceptible of
being reconciled till they had been reduced to very simple terms. The
instinct to simplify--to get down to something in nature that included
the East with the West, the First with the Twentieth century, was
naturally strong in one who was born between two nations; and it was an
instinct which drove Mr Kipling in the opposite direction from that in
which his contemporaries were moving. While Mr Kipling's generation
was learning to analyse, refine and interrogate, to become super-subtle
and incredulous, to exalt the particular and ignore the general, to
probe into the intricate and sensitive places of modern life, Mr
Kipling was looking at mankind in the mass, looking back to the
half-dozen realities which are the stuff of the poetry of every climate
and period--to love of country which is as old as the waters of
Babylon, to the faith of Achates, and the affliction of Job. While Mr
Kipling's contemporaries have been working towards minute studies of
individuals and groups, Mr Kipling has been content to catch the metal
of humanity at the flash point, to wait for the passionate moment which
reveals all mankind as of one kindred. "We be of one blood, ye and
I"--the phrase of the Jungle holds.
To find here evidence of a bias merely political, of an attitude
reactionary and hostile to the progress o the world, is to deny sense
and meaning to the greatest literature of the world. Mr Kipling's
instinctive simplifying of life he shares with the immortals. It is,
as we shall see, the immortal part of him. To write of Mr Kipling as
though he celebrates the ape and the tiger; extols the Philistine and
the brute; calls always for more chops--"bloody ones with gristle";
delights in the savagery of war, and ferociously despises all that
separates the Englishman of to-day from his painted ancestor--this is
the mistake of critics who cannot distinguish the cant of progress from
its reality.
We shall be driven more particularly to consider Mr Kipling's atavism
in discussing his tales of the British Army. For the present we are
dealing only with India and the "Imperialism" which some of Mr
Kipling's critics have taken for an offensive proof of his political
prejudice. Mr Kipling's treatment of the Anglo-Indian, and of the
dealing of the Anglo-Indian with the Indian Empire, has nothing to do
with the Yellows and the Blues. The real motive of Mr Kipling's
attitude towards the men on the frontier, in places where deadly things
are encountered and there is work to be done, is no more a matter of
politics, "progressive" or "reactionary," than is his celebration of
the Maltese Cat or of .007. "The White Man's Burden" is the burden of
every creature in whom there lives the pride of unrewarded labour, of
endurance and courage. In India this pride has to be wholesomely
tempered with humility; for India is old and vast and incomprehensible,
to be handled with care, to be approached as a country which, though it
shows an inscrutably smiling face to the modern world, has the power
suddenly to baffle its modern rulers by opening to them glimpses of an
intricate and unassailable life which cannot be ruffled by Orders in
Council or disturbed by the weak ploughing of teachers from the West.
The task of the Anglo-Indian administrator is, indeed, the finest
opportunity for that heroic life to the celebration of which Mr Kipling
has devoted so many of his tales. This hero has a task which taxes all
his ability, which promises little riches and little fame, and is known
to be tolerably hopeless. It offers to him a supreme test of his
virtue--a test in which the hero is accountable only to his personal
will; whose best work is its own reward and comfort.
"Gentlemen come from England," writes Mr Kipling in one of his Indian
tales, "spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great sphinx of the
Plains, and write books upon its ways and its work, denouncing or
praising it as their ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world
knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no one, not even
the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of
the Empire. Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first
fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service.
These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or
broken in health and hope, in order that the land may be protected from
death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable
of standing alone. It will never stand alone; but the idea is a pretty
one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing
and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes
forward. If an advance be made, all credit is given to the native,
while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure
occurs, the Englishmen step forward and accept the blame."
This passage declares the heroic spirit of Mr Kipling's Anglo-Indian
tales; and many readers will fail to understand how exactly this spirit
has been found vainglorious.
There is a passage in Shakespeare where a king's envoy comes to claim
of a high-mettled and sweating warrior the fruits of victory. The
warrior grudges less surrendering the fruits of victory to the king
than he grudges surrendering his anger at being easily and prettily
addressed on the field of battle by a polite and dainty fellow who has
no idea how dearly the fruits of victory are purchased. Mr Kipling's
heroes are frail enough to feel some of this very natural indignation
when unbreathed politicians lecture them in the heat of their Indian
day. They come into touch with things simple and bitter. India has
searched out the value of many a Western shibboleth, destroyed many
doctrines, principles, ideas and theories. Phrases which look well in
a peroration look foolish when there is immediate work to be done, and
expediency begins to rule. The first lesson which the Indian civilian
learns, a lesson which is rarely omitted from any of Mr Kipling's
Indian stories, is that practical men are better for being ready to
take the world as they find it. The men who worship the Great God
Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, most terrible, One-eyed,
Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk--men who are set on saving their own
particular business--have no time for saving faces and phrases. They
have small respect for a principle. They have seen too many principles
break down under the particular instance. Hence there is in all Mr
Kipling's work a disrespect of things which are printed and made much
of in the contemporary British press; and this, again, has encouraged
the idea that he is "reactionary," contemptuous of the humanities, and
enemy of all the best poets and philosophers.
It will perhaps be well to look a little closely at one or two of Mr
Kipling's Indian series. They will help us to realise how the charges
we are discussing have arisen and exactly how unreasonable they are.
The first of two excellent examples is the story of _Tods' Amendment_.
_Tods' Amendment_ is the story of a Bill brought in by the Supreme
Legislative Council of India. Tods was an English baby of six, and he
mixed on friendly terms with Indians in the bazaar and with members of
the Supreme Legislative Council. The Council was at this time devising
a new scheme of land tenure which aimed at "safeguarding the interests"
of a few hundred thousand cultivators of the Punjab. The Bill was
beautiful on paper; and the Legal Member, who knew Tods, was settling
the "minor details." The weak part of the business was that European
legislators, dealing with natives, are often puzzled to know which
details are the major and which the minor. Also the Native Member was
from Calcutta, and knew nothing about the Punjab. Nevertheless, the
Bill was known to be a beautiful Bill till Tods happened one evening to
be sitting on the knee of the Legal Member, and to hear him mention
_The Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment_. Tods had heard the
bazaar talking of a new plan for the Ryotwari, as bazaars talk when
there is no white man to overhear. Tods began to prattle, and the
Legal Member began to listen, till he soon realised that there was only
one drawback to the beautiful Bill. The beautiful Bill, in short, was
altogether wrong, more especially in the Council's pet clause which so
clearly "safeguarded the interests of the tenant." It therefore came
about that the rough draft of the Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised
Enactment was put away in the Legal Member's private paper-box--"and,
opposite the twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed
by the Legal Member, are the words, 'Tods' Amendment.'"
The moral of the tale is not obscure. A baby who runs in the bazaar is
better able to legislate for India than a Supreme Legislative Council.
India, in short, is a vast and uncertain land, whose ways are not
always learned in a lifetime by the men whose business it is. The
argument _a fortiori_--namely, that amiable and humane political
philosophers, well bred in the latest European theories of government,
are even less likely to be infallible--need not be pursued.
Our second story is the story of Aurelian McGoggin. Aurelian McGoggin
had read too many books, and he had too many theories. He also had a
creed: "It was not much of a creed. It only proved that men had no
souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry
along somehow for the good of humanity." McGoggin had found it an
excellent creed for a Government office, and he brought it to India and
tried to teach it to all his friends. His friends had found that life
in India is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one
particular at the head of affairs, and they objected. They also warned
McGoggin not to be too good for his work, and not to insist on doing it
better than it needed to be done, because people in India wanted all
their energy for bare life. But McGoggin would not be warned, and one
day, when he had steadily overworked and overtalked through the hot
season, he was suddenly interrupted at the club, in the middle of an
oration. The doctor called it _aphasia_; but McGoggin only knew that
he was struck sensationally dumb: "Something had wiped his lips of
speech as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child, and he was
afraid. For a moment he had lost his mind and memory--which was
preposterous and something for which his philosophy did not allow.
Henceforth he did not appear to know so much as he used to about things
Divine."
McGoggin, in fact, was converted; for, as Mr Kipling explains, his
story is really a tract--a tract whose purpose is to convey that India
is able to cure the most resolute positivist of his positivism. Mr
Kipling's India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic
philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips. You do not
talk of Humanity in India, because in India "you really see
humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing between it and the
blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot." Mr
Kipling's Indian administrators are practical and simple men, who obey
orders and accept the incredible because their position requires them
to administer India as though they were never at fault, whereas their
experience tells them that, if they are never to be at fault in India,
it is wise to be not too original and fatal to be too rigid.
_Tods' Amendment_ and _The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin_ are printed
among _Plain Tales from the Hills_. They look forward to a whole
series of Anglo-Indian tales which present Mr Kipling's idea of the
English in India. Out of his later books we can illustrate a hundred
times his conviction that in India the simplest wisdom is the best.
But there are two kinds of simplicity. The one kind is illustrated in
a tale from _The Day's Work_; it is the right kind of simplicity. In
no story of Mr Kipling is the devoted service and practical
resourcefulness of the good Civilian so movingly celebrated as in the
story of _William the Conqueror_. It is the story of a famine, and of
how it was met by the servants of the Indian Government. The
administration of famine relief would seem to be a simple thing when
the grain has come by rail and only waits to be distributed. But the
district served by the little group of English in _William the
Conqueror_ was a district which did not understand the food of the
North, and, if it could not get the rice which it knew, was ready to
starve within reach of bagsful of unfamiliar wheat or rye. The hero of
the tale is finally reduced to distributing the Government rations to
the goats, and keeping the starving babies alive with milk. It was a
simple idea, and the man to whom it occurred worked himself to death's
door, which was no more than another simple idea of what was due from
him to the district and to his superior officer.
The wrong kind of simplicity is illustrated in a story from _Life's
Handicap_. It is called _The Head of the District_, and it has to do
with a simple idea which occurred to the Viceroy. A Deputy
Commissioner who understood the lawless Khusru Kheyel and had put into
them the fear of English law had died and a successor had to be
appointed. The man for the post was a certain Tallentire who had
worked with the late head of the district and knew the tribe with whom
he had to deal. But the Viceroy had a Principle. He wished to educate
the natives in self-government; and here was an opportunity--a vacant
post of responsibility and a native candidate to fill it.
"There was a gentleman and a member of the Bengal Civil Service who had
won his place and a university degree to boot in fair and open
competition with the sons of the English. He was cultured, of the
world, and, if report spoke truly, had wisely and, above all,
sympathetically ruled a crowded district in South-Eastern Bengal. He
had been to England and charmed many drawing-rooms there. His name, if
the Viceroy recollected aright, was Mr Grish Chunder Dé, M.A. In
short, did anybody see any objection to the appointment, always on
principle, of a man of the people to rule the people? The district in
South-Eastern Bengal might with advantage, he apprehended, pass over to
a younger civilian of Mr G. C. Dé's nationality (who had written a
remarkably clever pamphlet on the political value of sympathy in
administration); and Mr G. C. Dé could be transferred northward. As
regarded the mere question of race, Mr Grish Chunder Dé was more
English than the English, and yet possessed of that peculiar sympathy
and insight which the best among the best Service in the world could
only win to at the end of their service."
The principle was sound; but the consequences were such as usually
follow when ideas which are simple in one continent are applied in
another. Any man on the frontier could have told what would come of
asking the Khusru Kheyel to respect and obey Mr Grish Chunder Dé. It
was not a matter of religion or ability, but of history. The Khusru
Kheyel had had relations with the countrymen of their new Head for
generations and they were not relations of respect and obedience. How
there was riot and some rapid blood-letting on the border, and how the
new Head resigned his office before he had taken it over, is told as a
warning that there is a wrong kind of simplicity in dealing with India.
It is fatal to have invented simple and embracing phrases about a
country which holds more races than all Europe; has had a long and
private history of its own; has been more often conquered than Great
Britain; and has had every sort of experience except that of being
governed according to constitutional law.
This chapter being mainly devoted to rescuing Mr Kipling from his
political admirers and censors, it may be well to conclude upon his
vision of the devoted civilian Scott, the hero of a tale already
quoted, the man who fed the Indian babies from a herd of goats fattened
on the food which the starving people of the Deccan distrusted and
refused. Scott appears in that story at sunset, delectable and humane,
sneezing in the dust of a hundred little feet, "a god in a halo of gold
dust, walking slowly at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran
small naked cupids."
Clearly there is something wrong with the popular habit of regarding Mr
Kipling as essentially concerned with the carving of men to the "nasty
noise of beef-cutting on the block." His "god in a halo of gold dust"
seriously discourages any attempt to brand him with the mark of the
reverting carnivor.