Mr Kipling's three soldiers--Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd--are a
literary tradition. They are the Horatii and the Curatii, the three
Musketeers; Og, Gog and Magog; Captains Fluellin, Macmorris and Jamy;
Bardolph, Pistol and Nym. That Kipling's soldiers three are a literary
tradition is significant of their quality and rank as part of their
author's achievement. They belong rather to the efficient literary
workman who wrote the Simla tales than to the inspired author of the
Jungle books. Though we have run from the House of Suddhu to the
barrack-yard, we have not yet lost sight of Mr Kipling, decorator and
colourman in words. We shall find him conspicuously at work upon
Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd. Where, at first, he seems most closely
to rub sleeves with the raw stuff of life we shall find him most aloof,
most deliberately an artificer. Mr Kipling has seemed to the
judicious, who have duly grieved, to be in his soldier tales throwing
all crafty scruples to the winds in order that he may the more joyfully
indulge a natural genius for ferocity. Mr Kipling's soldiers are
regarded as an instance of his love for low company, of his readiness
to sacrifice aesthetic beauty to vulgar truth.
This is quite the wrong direction from which to approach Mr Kipling's
soldier tales. Mr Kipling's ferocity on paper is not to be explained
as the result of a natural delight in violence and blood. On the
contrary, it is distinctively a literary ferocity--the ferocity, not of
a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and
conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people. It is
essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the
ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in
speculative politics. When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to
the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over
like the rattle of fire-irons in the fender and the grunt of a
pole-axed ox, or of a hot encounter between two combatants wherein one
of them after feeling for his opponent's eyes finds it necessary to
wipe his thumb on his trousers, or of gun wheels greasy from contact
with a late gunner--when Mr Kipling writes like this, we admit that his
pages are disagreeable. But let us be clear as to the reason. These
things are disagreeable, not because they are horrible fact, but
because they are deliberate fiction. We feel that these things have
been written, not from inspired impulse, but by taking careful thought.
Here, clearly, is a writer who writes of war, not because he is by
nature full of pugnacity, or necessarily loosed from hell to speak of
horrors, but because war is a good "subject" with opportunities for
effective treatment.
It is incorrect to say that Mr Kipling naturally delights in savage
war. He has been accused of a positive gusto for knives and bayonets,
for redly dripping steel and spattered flesh. The gusto must be
confessed; but it is not a gusto for the subject. It is the skilled
craftsman's gusto for doing things thoroughly and effectively. Mr
Kipling cannot conceal his delight in his competency to make war as
nasty as Zola or Tolstoi have made it. But this has nothing to do with
a delight in war. Professors have gloried in blood and iron who would
probably faint away in the nice, clean operating theatre of a London
hospital. Philosophers who cannot run upstairs have preached the
survival of the physically fittest. The politest of Roman poets has
felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior's head fell to
right and left of his vertebral column. Mr Kipling's savagery is of
this excessively cultivated kind. It is not atavism or a sinister
resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility. Mr Kipling's
warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling's
real inspiration and interest is far away from the battle-field and the
barrack. They are the kind of battle story which is usually written by
sedentary poets who live in the country and are fond of children. Only
they are the very best of their kind.
Mr Kipling's study of the professional soldier is best observed in
Private Ortheris. Mulvaney is more popular, but Mulvaney in no sense
belongs to Mr Kipling. He is the stage Irishman of the old Adelphi and
the hero of many tales by Lever and Marryat. He is as purely a
convention of the days of Mr Kipling's youth as are Mrs Hawksbee and
the Simla ladies. His chief importance lies in the opportunities he
gives Mr Kipling for indulging his joyful gift for pure farce.
_Krishna Mulvaney_ and _My Lord the Elephant_ are farce of the first
quality, whose merit liberally covers the charge that their hero is of
no human importance. Ortheris is in rather a different case. He has
just that air of being authentic which is needed for an anecdote or
narrative. He is not a profound and original document in human nature.
There is no such document in any one of Mr Kipling's books. But he
stands well erect among the professional soldiers of literature.
We will take one look at Private Ortheris at work:
"Ortheris suddenly rose to his knees, his rifle at his shoulder, and
peered across the valley in the clear afternoon light. His chin
cuddled the stock, and there was a twitching of the muscles of the
right cheek as he sighted; Private Stanley Ortheris was engaged on his
business. A speck of white crawled up the watercourse.
"'See that beggar? . . . Got 'im.'
"Seven hundred yards away, and a full two hundred down the hillside,
the deserter of the Aurangabadis pitched forward, rolled down a red
rock, and lay very still, with his face in a clump of blue gentians,
while a big raven flapped out of the pine wood to make investigation.
"'That's a clean shot, little man,' said Mulvaney.
"Learoyd thoughtfully watched the smoke clear away. 'Happen there was
a lass tewed up wi' him, too,' said he.
"Ortheris did not reply. He was staring across the valley, with the
smile of the artist who looks on the completed work."
This passage has been quoted against Mr Kipling as evidence of his
inhuman delight in the hunting of man. If we look at it closely we
shall find (1) an obvious delight in Ortheris as a professional expert
who knows his business, the same delight which we find in Mr
Hinchcliffe the engineer or in Dick Heldar the painter, and (2) the
extremely self-conscious and cold-blooded effort of a competent author
to write like a professional soldier, and (3) the intrusion of a born
sentimentalist in Learoyd's little touch of feeling at the close.
The War Office book of infantry training contains some very curt and
calm directions for getting a "good point" in bayonet exercise. The
bayonet has to be correctly driven in, left in the enemy for a
reasonable time, and extracted with a minimum of effort to the
practitioner and a maximum of damage to the subject. Disabling the
enemy in war is a professional and technical matter, and Mr Kipling is
always able to be enthusiastic when things are beginning to be
technical. Whether it be sighting a deserter at seven hundred yards,
painting a charge of horse, writing what Dr Johnson would describe as
the "most poetical paragraph in the English language," or building a
bridge over the Ganges, Mr Kipling is ready to be interested so long as
the workman is competent, and the work of a highly skilled and special
nature. Naturally, therefore, Mr Kipling has succeeded in getting very
near to the professional view of soldiering. All Mr Kipling's soldiers
take their soldiering as men of business. This was what so terribly
astonished and interested Cleever when he met the Infant and heard that
after he had killed a man he had felt thirsty and "wanted a smoke too";
and Cleever has been followed in his astonishment by many of Mr
Kipling's literary critics.
The greatest study in literature of the professional soldier--though he
is infinitely more than that--is Shakespeare's Falstaff. It will be
remembered that Falstaff, after having led his men where they were
finely peppered, also suffered from thirst; and, being an old
campaigner, he was not unprovided. The fate of Falstaff upon the
British stage for many centuries--where he has actually been played,
not as a professional soldier, but as an incompetent poltroon!--seems
to indicate that no figure is more liable to be misunderstood than the
man whose business or duty it is to fight between meals. Even Mr
Kipling, in his anxiety to emphasise that a regular soldier, apart from
any personal and heroic qualities he may happen to possess, is to be
regarded as just a skilled practitioner whose work asks for courage and
resource, fails to take soldiering with the magnificent nonchalance of
Shakespeare's soldiers. Shakespeare takes the professional view for
granted. But Mr Kipling does not quite do that. There is a
continuously implicit protest in all Mr Kipling's soldier tales that a
soldier's killing is like an editor's leader-writing or a painter's
sketching from the nude--a protest which by its frequent over-emphasis
shows that Mr Kipling, not having Shakespeare's gift of intuition into
every kind of man, has not quite succeeded in identifying himself with
the soldier's point of view. It is always present in his mind as
something novel and surprising, needing insistence and emphasis.
This is equally true of all Mr Kipling's essays in brutality. His
ferocity is as forced as his tenderness is natural. Violence and war
are clearly foreign to his unprompted imagination. Only it happens
that Mr Kipling has talked with soldiers; and, like Eustace Cleever, he
is prompted occasionally to spend a perversely riotous evening in their
company. The literary result is far from being contemptible; but it is
far from being as precious as the result of his unprompted intrusion
into the country of the Brushwood Boy, into Cold Lairs and the Council
Rock.
The soldier tales rank not very far above the tales from Simla. Their
interest is mainly the interest of watching a skilled writer
consciously using all his skill to give an air of authenticity to
things not vitally realised. Mulvaney is pure convention, and
Ortheris, though he more individually belongs to Mr Kipling, is rather
an effort than a success. We have not yet got at the heart of Mr
Kipling's work. It yet remains to cross the barrier which divides some
of the best journalism of our time from literature which will outlive
its author.