Only the briefest epilogue is necessary concerning Mr Kipling's poetry.
We have concluded as to his prose stories that his best work is in the
pure fancy of _The Jungle Book_, and that we descend thence through his
English tales and his celebration of the work of the world to clever
stories of India and _Soldiers Three_. Upon each of these levels we
meet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once be
said that at all times, except where the rule is proved by the
exception, Mr Kipling's verse is less urgently inspired than his prose.
The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of a
quality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery the
beat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm of
sense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, at
first, to contradict it. Pope's _Essay on Man_, for example, which at
first seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, is
really not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appears
to be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there is
a rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is being
actually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-century
philosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in the
best of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifest
reason why prose would not have served the author's purpose equally
well.
Can we say this of Mr Kipling's poetry? Is Mr Kipling's poetry the
result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?
A careful reading of Mr Kipling's verse, comparing it subject for
subject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a more
direct passionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariably
more wrought and careful and elaborate. It does not suggest the poet
driven into song. It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing the
manner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet's tools, without
any urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way. He has
merely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed. Of
his technical success there is seldom any doubt at all. For a
craftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prose
successfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his least
abandoned moments, it is child's play to use the more obvious devices
of the metrician to similar effect. So far as mere formal excellence
is concerned, verse is a journeyman's matter as compared with prose;
and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetry
troubles Mr Kipling not at all. But we must look beyond the formality
of verse to find a poet. Poetry flies higher than prose only when the
poet's feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say. Mr Kipling
is a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question. The question
is, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author's
feeling with the author's expression? And the answer to that will be,
Not in the author's poems.
Take as an example the English motive:
"See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book."
Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose tale _Below the Mill
Dam_, or with the passage it paraphrases in the story to which it
stands as motto:
"The English are a bold people. His Saxons would laugh and jest with
Hugh, and Hugh with them, and--this was marvellous to me--if even the
meanest of them said such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor,
then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might be
near forsake everything else to debate the matter--I have seen them
stop the mill with the corn half ground--and if the custom or usage
were proven to be as it was said, why, that was the end of it, even
though it were flat against Hugh, his wish and command."
It may be said of the verse that, possibly, it is more carefully
considered than the prose, more deliberate and formally more excellent.
But it is certainly more remote from the passion it conveys. There is
more drive in a single fragment of_ An Habitation Enforced_ than in all
the songs of Puck.
Similarly let us take another of Mr Kipling's themes--his delight in
the world's work. Think first of _The Bridge-Builders_ and of _William
the Conqueror_ and then turn to _The Bell Buoy_ (_Five Nations_) or
_The White Man's Burden_ (_Five Nations_). In each case--and we repeat
the result every time the experiment is made--we find that the author's
motive, which lives in his prose, tends in his verse to expire. In
_The White Man's Burden_ it expires outright, so that reading it, it is
difficult to realise that _William the Conqueror_ has had the power so
deeply to move us.
This is true even where Mr Kipling's subject, which in prose has not
taken him to the top of his achievement, has in verse taken him as high
as in verse he is able to go. Mr Kipling's best verse is contained in
_Barrack Room Ballads_; but even these do not compare in merit with
_Soldiers Three_. _Barrack Room Ballads_ are the best of Mr Kipling's
poetry, because in these poems rhyme and beat are essential to their
inspiration. They are the exception which prove the rule that normally
Mr Kipling has no right to his metre. _Barrack Room Ballads_ are
robust and vivid songs of the camp, choruses which require no music to
enable them to serve the purpose of any gathering where the first idea
is that there should be a cheerful noise. Complete success in this
kind only required Mr Kipling to fill in the skeleton of a metre which
brings the right words at the right moment to the tip of the galloping
tongue, and this he has admirably done.
Where in _Barrack Room Ballads_ Mr Kipling has attempted to do more
than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds
in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. We
have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis
of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive
imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point of
view. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In
_Barrack Room Ballads_ it is more pronounced.
We may take three stanzas of _Snarleyow_ as evidence that Mr Kipling's
_Barrack Room Ballads_, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass
of his verse, _really had to be metrical_; also as evidence that, in so
far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they
are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. The
Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying
that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field:
"'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell
A little right the battery an' between the sections fell;
An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.
"Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain,
'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain.'
They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best,
So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest.
"The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt,
But 'e swung 'is 'orses 'andsome when it came to 'Action Front!'
An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head
'Twas juicier for the niggers when the case began to spread."
The brutality in this incident is forced in idea and expression beyond
anything we find in _Soldiers Three_. It is this continuous _forcing_
of idea and expression which persists in virtually all Mr Kipling's
verse except where the jingle is all that matters. We have only to
recall recitations from the platform or before the curtain of some of
Mr Kipling's popular poetry to realise, sometimes a little painfully,
that verse is for him not a threshold of the authentic Hall of Song,
but, too often, a door out of reality into the sentimental and
overwrought.
Comparing the soldier tales and the soldier songs it is often possible,
however, to miss the author's flagging, because, as we have seen, the
soldier songs are the best songs, whereas the soldier tales are not the
best tales. The full extent of the inferiority of Mr Kipling's verse
to Mr Kipling's prose cannot, however, be missed if we compare the
finer grain of Mr Kipling's prose with the poems that deal with similar
themes. Read first _The Story of Ung_ (_The Seven Seas_) and
afterwards the tale of the Flint Man found upon the Downs by Dan and
Una (_Rewards and Fairies_). Or, to take an even more telling
instance, recall the most perfect of all Mr Kipling's tales _The
Miracle of Purun Bhagat_, and afterwards read the poem that is proudly
set at the head of it:
"The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.
"And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!
"Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!"
--_Dirge of the Langurs._
The poem is excellent cold craft, but leaves us precisely in the state
of mind in which it found us. The story which follows it is rooted in
the same idea; but, where the one is a literary exercise, the other is
a supreme feat of imagination.
Here, with _The Miracle of Purun Bhagat_, the story itself and not the
dirge of the Langurs, we may conveniently leave the reputation of our
author. Critics of a future generation may need to apologise for
including within the limits of a brief monograph a specific chapter
upon Mr Kipling's verse. They will not need to apologise for its
brevity.