It would be difficult to answer the general question whether the books
of the world grow, as they multiply, as much better as one might suppose
they ought, with such a lesson of wasteful experiment spread perpetually
behind them. There is no doubt, however, that in one direction we profit
largely by this education: whether or not we have become wiser to
fashion, we have certainly become keener to enjoy. We have acquired the
sense of a particular quality which is precious beyond all others--so
precious as to make us wonder where, at such a rate, our posterity will
look for it, and how they will pay for it. After tasting many essences
we find freshness the sweetest of all. We yearn for it, we watch for it
and lie in wait for it, and when we catch it on the wing (it flits by so
fast) we celebrate our capture with extravagance. We feel that after so
much has come and gone it is more and more of a feat and a _tour de
force_ to be fresh. The tormenting part of the phenomenon is that, in
any particular key, it can happen but once--by a sad failure of the law
that inculcates the repetition of goodness. It is terribly a matter of
accident; emulation and imitation have a fatal effect upon it. It is
easy to see, therefore, what importance the epicure may attach to the
brief moment of its bloom. While that lasts we all are epicures.
This helps to explain, I think, the unmistakeable intensity of the
general relish for Mr. Rudyard Kipling. His bloom lasts, from month to
month, almost surprisingly--by which I mean that he has not worn out
even by active exercise the particular property that made us all, more
than a year ago, so precipitately drop everything else to attend to him.
He has many others which he will doubtless always keep; but a part of
the potency attaching to his freshness, what makes it as exciting as a
drawing of lots, is our instinctive conviction that he cannot, in the
nature of things, keep that; so that our enjoyment of him, so long as
the miracle is still wrought, has both the charm of confidence and the
charm of suspense. And then there is the further charm, with Mr.
Kipling, that this same freshness is such a very strange affair of its
kind--so mixed and various and cynical, and, in certain lights, so
contradictory of itself. The extreme recentness of his inspiration is as
enviable as the tale is startling that his productions tell of his being
at home, domesticated and initiated, in this wicked and weary world. At
times he strikes us as shockingly precocious, at others as serenely
wise. On the whole, he presents himself as a strangely clever youth who
has stolen the formidable mask of maturity and rushes about, making
people jump with the deep sounds, and sportive exaggerations of tone,
that issue from its painted lips. He has this mark of a real vocation,
that different spectators may like him--must like him, I should almost
say--for different things; and this refinement of attraction, that to
those who reflect even upon their pleasures he has as much to say as to
those who never reflect upon anything. Indeed there is a certain amount
of room for surprise in the fact that, being so much the sort of figure
that the hardened critic likes to meet, he should also be the sort of
figure that inspires the multitude with confidence--for a complicated
air is, in general, the last thing that does this.
By the critic who likes to meet such a bristling adventurer as Mr.
Kipling I mean, of course, the critic for whom the happy accident of
character, whatever form it may take, is more of a bribe to interest
than the promise of some character cherished in theory--the appearance
of justifying some foregone conclusion as to what a writer or a book
"ought," in the Ruskinian sense, to be; the critic, in a word, who has,
_a priori_, no rule for a literary production but that it shall have
genuine life. Such a critic (he gets much more out of his opportunities,
I think, than the other sort) likes a writer exactly in proportion as he
is a challenge, an appeal to interpretation, intelligence, ingenuity,
to what is elastic in the critical mind--in proportion indeed as he may
be a negation of things familiar and taken for granted. He feels in this
case how much more play and sensation there is for himself.
Mr. Kipling, then, has the character that furnishes plenty of play and
of vicarious experience--that makes any perceptive reader foresee a rare
luxury. He has the great merit of being a compact and convenient
illustration of the surest source of interest in any painter of
life--that of having an identity as marked as a window-frame. He is one
of the illustrations, taken near at hand, that help to clear up the
vexed question in the novel or the tale, of kinds, camps, schools,
distinctions, the right way and the wrong way; so very positively does
he contribute to the showing that there are just as many kinds, as many
ways, as many forms and degrees of the "right," as there are personal
points in view. It is the blessing of the art he practises that it is
made up of experience conditioned, infinitely, in this personal way--the
sum of the feeling of life as reproduced by innumerable natures; natures
that feel through all their differences, testify through their
diversities. These differences, which make the identity, are of the
individual; they form the channel by which life flows through him, and
how much he is able to give us of life--in other words, how much he
appeals to us--depends on whether they form it solidly.
This hardness of the conduit, cemented with a rare assurance, is perhaps
the most striking idiosyncrasy of Mr. Kipling; and what makes it more
remarkable is that incident of his extreme youth which, if we talk about
him at all, we cannot affect to ignore. I cannot pretend to give a
biography or a chronology of the author of "Soldiers Three," but I
cannot overlook the general, the importunate fact that, confidently as
he has caught the trick and habit of this sophisticated world, he has
not been long of it. His extreme youth is indeed what I may call his
window-bar--the support on which he somewhat rowdily leans while he
looks down at the human scene with his pipe in his teeth; just as his
other conditions (to mention only some of them), are his prodigious
facility, which is only less remarkable than his stiff selection; his
unabashed temperament, his flexible talent, his smoking-room manner, his
familiar friendship with India--established so rapidly, and so
completely under his control; his delight in battle, his "cheek" about
women--and indeed about men and about everything; his determination not
to be duped, his "imperial" fibre, his love of the inside view, the
private soldier and the primitive man. I must add further to this list
of attractions the remarkable way in which he makes us aware that he
has been put up to the whole thing directly by life (miraculously, in
his teens), and not by the communications of others. These elements, and
many more, constitute a singularly robust little literary character (our
use of the diminutive is altogether a note of endearment and enjoyment)
which, if it has the rattle of high spirits and is in no degree
apologetic or shrinking, yet offers a very liberal pledge in the way of
good faith and immediate performance. Mr. Kipling's performance comes
off before the more circumspect have time to decide whether they like
him or not, and if you have seen it once you will be sure to return to
the show. He makes us prick up our ears to the good news that in the
smoking-room too there may be artists; and indeed to an intimation still
more refined--that the latest development of the modern also may be,
most successfully, for the canny artist to put his victim off his guard
by imitating the amateur (superficially, of course) to the life.
These, then, are some of the reasons why Mr. Kipling may be dear to the
analyst as well as, M. Renan says, to the simple. The simple may like
him because he is wonderful about India, and India has not been "done";
while there is plenty left for the morbid reader in the surprises of his
skill and the _fioriture_ of his form, which are so oddly independent of
any distinctively literary note in him, any bookish association. It is
as one of the morbid that the writer of these remarks (which doubtless
only too shamefully betray his character) exposes himself as most
consentingly under the spell. The freshness arising from a subject
that--by a good fortune I do not mean to underestimate--has never been
"done," is after all less of an affair to build upon than the freshness
residing in the temper of the artist. Happy indeed is Mr. Kipling, who
can command so much of both kinds. It is still as one of the morbid, no
doubt--that is, as one of those who are capable of sitting up all night
for a new impression of talent, of scouring the trodden field for one
little spot of green--that I find our young author quite most curious in
his air, and not only in his air, but in his evidently very real sense,
of knowing his way about life. Curious in the highest degree and well
worth attention is such an idiosyncrasy as this in a young Anglo-Saxon.
We meet it with familiar frequency in the budding talents of France, and
it startles and haunts us for an hour. After an hour, however, the
mystery is apt to fade, for we find that the wondrous initiation is not
in the least general, is only exceedingly special, and is, even with
this limitation, very often rather conventional. In a word, it is with
the ladies that the young Frenchman takes his ease, and more
particularly with the ladies selected expressly to make this attitude
convincing. When they have let him off, the dimnesses too often
encompass him. But for Mr. Kipling there are no dimnesses anywhere, and
if the ladies are indeed violently distinct they are not only strong
notes in a universal loudness. This loudness fills the ears of Mr.
Kipling's admirers (it lacks sweetness, no doubt, for those who are not
of the number), and there is really only one strain that is absent from
it--the voice, as it were, of the civilised man; in whom I of course
also include the civilised woman. But this is an element that for the
present one does not miss--every other note is so articulate and direct.
It is a part of the satisfaction the author gives us that he can make us
speculate as to whether he will be able to complete his picture
altogether (this is as far as we presume to go in meddling with the
question of his future) without bringing in the complicated soul. On the
day he does so, if he handles it with anything like the cleverness he
has already shown, the expectation of his friends will take a great
bound. Meanwhile, at any rate, we have Mulvaney, and Mulvaney is after
all tolerably complicated. He is only a six-foot saturated Irish
private, but he is a considerable pledge of more to come. Hasn't he, for
that matter, the tongue of a hoarse siren, and hasn't he also mysteries
and infinitudes almost Carlylese? Since I am speaking of him I may as
well say that, as an evocation, he has probably led captive those of
Mr. Kipling's readers who have most given up resistance. He is a piece
of portraiture of the largest, vividest kind, growing and growing on the
painter's hands without ever outgrowing them. I can't help regarding
him, in a certain sense, as Mr. Kipling's tutelary deity--a landmark in
the direction in which it is open to him to look furthest. If the author
will only go as far in this direction as Mulvaney is capable of taking
him (and the inimitable Irishman is like Voltaire's Habakkuk, _capable
de tout_) he may still discover a treasure and find a reward for the
services he has rendered the winner of Dinah Shadd. I hasten to add that
the truly appreciative reader should surely have no quarrel with the
primitive element in Mr. Kipling's subject-matter, or with what, for
want of a better name, I may call his love of low life. What is that but
essentially a part of his freshness? And for what part of his freshness
are we exactly more thankful than for just this smart jostle that he
gives the old stupid superstition that the amiability of a story-teller
is the amiability of the people he represents--that their vulgarity, or
depravity, or gentility, or fatuity are tantamount to the same qualities
in the painter itself? A blow from which, apparently, it will not easily
recover is dealt this infantine philosophy by Mr. Howells when, with the
most distinguished dexterity and all the detachment of a master, he
handles some of the clumsiest, crudest, most human things in
life--answering surely thereby the play-goers in the sixpenny gallery
who howl at the representative of the villain when he comes before the
curtain.
Nothing is more refreshing than this active, disinterested sense of the
real; it is doubtless the quality for the want of more of which our
English and American fiction has turned so wofully stale. We are ridden
by the old conventionalities of type and small proprieties of
observance--by the foolish baby-formula (to put it sketchily) of the
picture and the subject. Mr. Kipling has all the air of being disposed
to lift the whole business off the nursery carpet, and of being perhaps
even more able than he is disposed. One must hasten of course to
parenthesise that there is not, intrinsically, a bit more luminosity in
treating of low life and of primitive man than of those whom
civilisation has kneaded to a finer paste: the only luminosity in either
case is in the intelligence with which the thing is done. But it so
happens that, among ourselves, the frank, capable outlook, when turned
upon the vulgar majority, the coarse, receding edges of the social
perspective, borrows a charm from being new; such a charm as, for
instance, repetition has already despoiled it of among the French--the
hapless French who pay the penalty as well as enjoy the glow of living
intellectually so much faster than we. It is the most inexorable part
of our fate that we grow tired of everything, and of course in due time
we may grow tired even of what explorers shall come back to tell us
about the great grimy condition, or, with unprecedented items and
details, about the gray middle state which darkens into it. But the
explorers, bless them! may have a long day before that; it is early to
trouble about reactions, so that we must give them the benefit of every
presumption. We are thankful for any boldness and any sharp curiosity,
and that is why we are thankful for Mr. Kipling's general spirit and for
most of his excursions.
Many of these, certainly, are into a region not to be designated as
superficially dim, though indeed the author always reminds us that India
is above all the land of mystery. A large part of his high spirits, and
of ours, comes doubtless from the amusement of such vivid, heterogeneous
material, from the irresistible magic of scorching suns, subject
empires, uncanny religions, uneasy garrisons and smothered-up
women--from heat and colour and danger and dust. India is a portentous
image, and we are duly awed by the familiarities it undergoes at Mr.
Kipling's hand and by the fine impunity, the sort of fortune that
favours the brave, of _his_ want of awe. An abject humility is not his
strong point, but he gives us something instead of it--vividness and
drollery, the vision and the thrill of many things, the misery and
strangeness of most, the personal sense of a hundred queer contacts and
risks. And then in the absence of respect he has plenty of knowledge,
and if knowledge should fail him he would have plenty of invention.
Moreover, if invention should ever fail him, he would still have the
lyric string and the patriotic chord, on which he plays admirably; so
that it may be said he is a man of resources. What he gives us, above
all, is the feeling of the English manner and the English blood in
conditions they have made at once so much and so little their own; with
manifestations grotesque enough in some of his satiric sketches and
deeply impressive in some of his anecdotes of individual responsibility.
His Indian impressions divide themselves into three groups, one of
which, I think, very much outshines the others. First to be mentioned
are the tales of native life, curious glimpses of custom and
superstition, dusky matters not beholden of the many, for which the
author has a remarkable _flair_. Then comes the social, the Anglo-Indian
episode, the study of administrative and military types, and of the
wonderful rattling, riding ladies who, at Simla and more desperate
stations, look out for husbands and lovers; often, it would seem, and
husbands and lovers of others. The most brilliant group is devoted
wholly to the common soldier, and of this series it appears to me that
too much good is hardly to be said. Here Mr. Kipling, with all his
off-handedness, is a master; for we are held not so much by the greater
or less oddity of the particular yarn--sometimes it is scarcely a yarn
at all, but something much less artificial--as by the robust attitude of
the narrator, who never arranges or glosses or falsifies, but makes
straight for the common and the characteristic. I have mentioned the
great esteem in which I hold Mulvaney--surely a charming man and one
qualified to adorn a higher sphere. Mulvaney is a creation to be proud
of, and his two comrades stand as firm on their legs. In spite of
Mulvaney's social possibilities, they are all three finished brutes; but
it is precisely in the finish that we delight. Whatever Mr. Kipling may
relate about them forever will encounter readers equally fascinated and
unable fully to justify their faith.
Are not those literary pleasures after all the most intense which are
the most perverse and whimsical, and even indefensible? There is a logic
in them somewhere, but it often lies below the plummet of criticism. The
spell may be weak in a writer who has every reasonable and regular
claim, and it may be irresistible in one who presents himself with a
style corresponding to a bad hat. A good hat is better than a bad one,
but a conjuror may wear either. Many a reader will never be able to say
what secret human force lays its hand upon him when Private Ortheris,
having sworn "quietly into the blue sky," goes mad with homesickness by
the yellow river and raves for the basest sights and sounds of London. I
can scarcely tell why I think "The Courting of Dinah Shadd" a
masterpiece (though, indeed, I can make a shrewd guess at one of the
reasons), nor would it be worth while perhaps to attempt to defend the
same pretension in regard to "On Greenhow Hill"--much less to trouble
the tolerant reader of these remarks with a statement of how many more
performances in the nature of "The End of the Passage" (quite admitting
even that they might not represent Mr. Kipling at his best) I am
conscious of a latent relish for. One might as well admit while one is
about it that one has wept profusely over "The Drums of the Fore and
Aft," the history of the "Dutch courage" of two dreadful dirty little
boys, who, in the face of Afghans scarcely more dreadful, saved the
reputation of their regiment and perished, the least mawkishly in the
world, in a squalor of battle incomparably expressed. People who know
how peaceful they are themselves and have no bloodshed to reproach
themselves with needn't scruple to mention the glamour that Mr.
Kipling's intense militarism has for them, and how astonishing and
contagious they find it, in spite of the unromantic complexion of
it--the way it bristles with all sorts of ugliness and technicalities.
Perhaps that is why I go all the way even with "The Gadsbys"--the
Gadsbys were so connected (uncomfortably, it is true) with the army.
There is fearful fighting--or a fearful danger of it--in "The Man Who
Would be King"; is that the reason we are deeply affected by this
extraordinary tale? It is one of them, doubtless, for Mr. Kipling has
many reasons, after all, on his side, though they don't equally call
aloud to be uttered.
One more of them, at any rate, I must add to these unsystematised
remarks--it is the one I spoke of a shrewd guess at in alluding to "The
Courting of Dinah Shadd." The talent that produces such a tale is a
talent eminently in harmony with the short story, and the short story
is, on our side of the Channel and of the Atlantic, a mine which will
take a great deal of working. Admirable is the clearness with which Mr.
Kipling perceives this--perceives what innumerable chances it gives,
chances of touching life in a thousand different places, taking it up in
innumerable pieces, each a specimen and an illustration. In a word, he
appreciates the episode, and there are signs to show that this
shrewdness will, in general, have long innings. It will find the
detachable, compressible "case" an admirable, flexible form; the
cultivation of which may well add to the mistrust already entertained
by Mr. Kipling, if his manner does not betray him, for what is clumsy
and tasteless in the time-honoured practice of the "plot." It will
fortify him in the conviction that the vivid picture has a greater
communicative value than the Chinese puzzle. There is little enough
"plot" in such a perfect little piece of hard representation as "The End
of the Passage," to cite again only the most salient of twenty examples.
But I am speaking of our author's future, which is the luxury that I
meant to forbid myself--precisely because the subject is so tempting.
There is nothing in the world (for the prophet) so charming as to
prophesy, and as there is nothing so inconclusive the tendency should be
repressed in proportion as the opportunity is good. There is a certain
want of courtesy to a peculiarly contemporaneous present even in
speculating, with a dozen differential precautions, on the question of
what will become in the later hours of the day of a talent that has got
up so early. Mr. Kipling's actual performance is like a tremendous walk
before breakfast, making one welcome the idea of the meal, but consider
with some alarm the hours still to be traversed. Yet if his breakfast is
all to come, the indications are that he will be more active than ever
after he has had it. Among these indications are the unflagging
character of his pace and the excellent form, as they say in athletic
circles, in which he gets over the ground. We don't detect him
stumbling; on the contrary, he steps out quite as briskly as at first,
and still more firmly. There is something zealous and craftsman-like in
him which shows that he feels both joy and responsibility. A whimsical,
wanton reader, haunted by a recollection of all the good things he has
seen spoiled; by a sense of the miserable, or, at any rate, the
inferior, in so many continuations and endings, is almost capable of
perverting poetic justice to the idea that it would be even positively
well for so surprising a producer to remain simply the fortunate,
suggestive, unconfirmed and unqualified representative of what he has
actually done. We can always refer to that.