It has been Mr Kipling's habit all through his career to peg out
literary claims for himself as evidence of his intention later on to
work them at a profit. Thus, writing _Plain Tales from the Hills_, he
includes one or two stories, such as _The Taking of Lungtungpen_ and
_The Three Musketeers_, which clearly look forward to _Soldiers Three_
and all the later stories in that kind. Or, again, he looks forward in
_Tods' Amendment_ and _Wee Willie Winkie_ to the time when he will
write many stories, and, in a sense, whole books concerning children.
_Tods' Amendment_ promises _Baa Baa Black Sheep_, and _Just So
Stories_; it even promises _Stalky & Co._, which is simply the best
collection of boisterous boy farces ever written. Then, again, there
is _In the Rukh_, out of _Many Inventions_, which looks forward to the
_Jungle Book_. Finally, there is, in _The Day's Work_, clear evidence
of Mr Kipling's intention ultimately to abandon the hills and plains of
India and to take literary seisin of the country and chronicles of
England.
The first undoubted evidence that Mr Kipling, who started with skilful
tales of India, was bound in the end to turn homewards for a deeper
inspiration is contained in a story from _The Day's Work_. _My Sunday
at Home_ is ostensibly broad farce, of the _Brugglesmith_
variety--farce which might well call for a chapter to itself were it
not that broad farce is much the same whoever the writer may be. But
_My Sunday at Home_ is really less important as farce than as evidence
of Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for the stillness and ancientry of the
English wayside. The pages of this story distil and drip with peace.
Moreover, the story is neighboured with two others, all beckoning Mr
Kipling home to Burwash in Sussex. There is the Brushwood Boy, who
after work comes home and finds it good--good after his work is done.
There is also _An Error in the Fourth Dimension_ wherein Mr Kipling is
found playing affectionately with the idea that England is quite unlike
any other country. There is in England a fourth dimension which is
beyond the perception, say, of an American railway king, who after much
amazement and wrath concludes that the English are not a modern people
and thereafter returns to his own more reasonable land.
Of the miscellaneous stories in which Mr Kipling surrenders utterly to
this later theme perhaps the most memorable is _An Habitation Enforced_
from _Actions and Reactions_. Here we are in quite another plane of
authorship from that in which we have moved in the tales of India.
There is a wide difference between _The Return of Imray_--to take one
of the most skilful tales of India--and _An Habitation Enforced_. _The
Return of Imray_ betrays the conscious resolution of a clever man of
letters to make the most effective use of good material. But _An
Habitation Enforced_ is the spontaneous gesture of pure feeling. The
Indian stories are ingenious and well managed. Their point is made.
Their workmanship is excellent. Atmospheres and impressions are
cunningly arranged. But they very rarely succeed in carrying the
reader as the reader is carried upon this later tide.
The feeling of _An Habitation Enforced_, as of all the English tales,
is that of the traveller returned. The value of Mr Kipling's traffics
and discoveries over the seven seas is less in the record he has made
of these adventures than in their having enabled him to return to
England with eyes sharpened by exile, with his senses alert for that
fourth dimension which does not exist for the stranger. _An Habitation
Enforced_ is inspired by the nostalgia of inveterate banishment. Some
part of its perfection--it is one of the few perfect short stories in
the English tongue--is due to the perfect agreement of its form with
the passion that informs its writing. It is the story of a homing
Englishwoman, and of her restoration to the absolute earth of her
forbears. In writing of this woman Mr Kipling has only had to recall
his own joyful adventure in picking up the threads of a life at once
familiar and mysterious, in meeting again the homely miracle of things
that never change. Finally England claims her utterly--her and her
children and her American husband. It was an American who bade Cloke,
man of the soil and acquired retainer of the family, bring down
larch-poles for a light bridge over the brook; but it was an Englishman
reclaimed who needs consented to Cloke's amendment:
"'But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have
them down here ready.'
"'We'll get 'em down _if_ you, say so,' Cloke answered, with a thrust
of the underlip they both knew.
"'But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug
here for? We aren't building a railway bridge. Why, in America,
half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.'
"'I don't know nothin' about that,' said Cloke. 'An' I've nothin' to
say against larch--_if_ you want to make a temp'ry job of it. I ain't
'ere to tell you what isn't so, sir; an' you can't say I ever come
creepin' up on you, or tryin' to lead you farther in than you set
out----'
"A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a
little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.
"'All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp'ry job of it;
and by the time the young master's married it'll have to be done again.
Now, I've brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers as
we've ever drawed. You put 'em in an' it's off your mind for good an'
all. T'other way--I don't say it ain't right, I'm only just sayin'
what I think--but t'other way, he'll no sooner be married than we'll
'ave it _all_ to do again. You've no call to regard my words, but you
can't get out of _that_.'
"'No,' said George, after a pause; 'I've been realising that for some
time. Make it oak then; we can't get out of it.'"
This story is the real beginning of Puck--to whom Mr Kipling's latest
volumes are addressed. In _Puck of Pook's Hill_ Mr Kipling takes
seisin of England in all times--more particularly of that trodden nook
of England about Pevensey. This book is less a book of children and
fairies than an English chronicle. Dan and Una are the least living of
Mr Kipling's children--they are as shadowy as the little ghost who
dropped a kiss upon the palm of the visitor in the mansion of _They_.
The men, too, who come and go, are shadows. It is the land which
abides and is real. We hum continually a variation of Shakespeare's
song:
"This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England."
_Puck of Pook's Hill_ is a final answer to those who think of the
Imperial idea as loose and vast, without roots in any dear, particular
soil. _Puck of Pool's Hill_ suggests in every page that England could
never for its lovers be too small. We would know intimately each place
where the Roman trod, where Weland came and went, where Saxon and
Norman lost themselves in a common league.
From this England, fluttered with memories and the most ancient magic,
it is a natural step into the regions of pure fancy where Mr Kipling is
happiest of all. _The Children of the Zodiac_ and _The Brushwood Boy_
are the earliest proofs that Mr Kipling flies most surely when he is
least impeded by a human or material document. We have here to make a
last protest against a too popular fallacy concerning the tales of Mr
Kipling. Mr Kipling's passion for the concrete, which is a passion of
all truly imaginative men, together with his keen delight in the work
of the world, has caused him to be falsely regarded as a note-book
realist of the modern type. He is assumed to be happiest when writing
from direct experience without refinement or transmutation. We cannot
trace this error to its source and expose the many fallacies it
contains without going deeper into aesthetics than is here necessary or
desirable. The simple fact that Mr Kipling's best stories are those in
which his fancy is most free is answer enough to those who put him
among the reporters of things as they are. It sufficiently excuses us
from the long and difficult inquiry as to whether Mr Kipling's account
of the people who live next door is accurate and minute, and allows us
to assume, without starting a controversy which only a heavy volume
could determine, that, if Mr Kipling had ever set out to describe the
people who live next door, he would have simplified them out of all
recognition. Mr Kipling has pretended, often with some success, that
his people are really to be met with in the Royal Navy or in the Indian
Civil Service. But let the reader consider for a moment whom they
remember best. Is it Mowgli or is it someone who is a C.I.E.? Is it
the Elephant Child, or is it Mr Grish Chunder Dé? When does Mr Kipling
more successfully convey to us the impression that his people are alive
and real? Is it when he is supposed to be drawing men from the life,
or is it when he has set free his imagination to call up the People of
the Hills or the folk in the Jungle?
The grain of Mr Kipling's work is the finer, his vision is more
confident and clear, the further he gets from the world immediately
about him. Already we have seen how happily in India he left behind
his impression of the alert tourist, his experience of the mess-room
and bazaar, to enshrine in his fairy tale of _Kim_ the faith and
simplicity of two of the children of the world--each, the old and the
young, a child after his own fashion. _Kim_ is Mr Kipling's escape
from the India which is traversed by the railway and served by the
"Pioneer." It is the escape of Dan and Una into the Kingdom of Puck,
and the escape of Mowgli into the Jungle. It is the escape, finally,
of Mr Kipling's genius into the region where it most freely breathes.
We have noted that Kim is one of the Indian doors by which we enter;
but there is a more open door in the first story of _The Second Jungle
Book_. It is the best of all Mr Kipling's stories, just as the _Jungle
Books_ are the best of all his books. It concerns the Indian, Purun
Bhagat.
He was learned, supple, and deeply intimate in the affairs of the
world. He had shared the counsels of princes; he had been received
with honour in the clubs and societies of Europe. He was, to all
appearances, a polite blend of all the talents of East and West. Then
suddenly Purun Bhagat disappeared. All India understood; but of all
Western people only Mr Kipling was able to follow where he walked as a
holy man and a beggar into the hills. There he became St Francis of
the Hills, living in a little shrine with the friendly creatures of the
woods, venerated and cared for by a village on the hillside.
All Mr Kipling's readers know how that story ends--how on a night of
disaster there came together as of one blood the saint and his people
and the wild creatures who had housed with him. It is quoted here as
showing how the old piety of India beckoned Mr Kipling into the jungle
as inevitably as the old loyalty of England beckoned him into a region
where on a summer day we can meet without surprise a Flint Man or a
Centurion of Rome.
Always the bent of Mr Kipling, in his best work, is found to be away
from the world. To appreciate his finer quality we must pass with him
into the Rukh, or into the country beyond Policeman Day, into the
mansion of lost children, or into a region where it is but a step from
the Zodiac to fields under the plough. The tales of Mr Kipling which
will longest survive him are not the tales where he is competently
brutal and omniscient, but the tales where he instinctively flies from
the necessity of giving to his vision the likeness of the modern world.
We may now realise more clearly the peril which lies in the popular
fallacy concerning Mr Kipling described in the first few pages of this
book. So far is Mr Kipling from being an author inspired and driven to
claim a share in the active life of the present, an author who unloads
upon us a store of memories and experience, that he is only able to do
his finest work as an unchecked and fantastic dreamer. The stories in
which he imposes upon his readers the illusion that he would never have
written books if he had stayed at home, that his stories are the
carelessly flung reminiscences of a full life--these stories are
themselves instances of the skill whereby a cunning author has been
able to conceal from his generation the deep difference between
artifice and inspiration. A crafty author will often employ his best
phrases to describe the thing he has never really seen with the eye of
genius. His manner will be most assured where his matter is the least
authentic. His points will be most effectively made where there is the
least necessity to make them. Mr Kipling, writing as a soldier, is
more a soldier than any soldier who ever lived. Thereby the discerning
reader will infer that Mr Kipling was not born to write as a soldier.
He will know that Mr Kipling is not profoundly and instinctively an
atavistic prophet, because his atavism is more atavistic than the
atavism of the first man who ever was born. He will also realise that
Mr Kipling writes so effectively about India because he ought to be
writing about England and Fairyland and the Jungle. He will realise,
in short, that Mr Kipling is an imaginative man of letters who has
wonderful visions when he stays at home, and who needs all his craft as
an expert literary artificer to persuade his readers that these visions
are not seriously impaired when he ventures abroad.