Mr. Kipling is an author whom one has loved and hated a good deal. One
has loved him as the eternal schoolboy revelling in smells and bad
language and dangerous living. One has loved him less, but one has at
least listened to him, as the knowing youth who could tell one all about
the ladies of Simla. One has found him rather adorable as the favourite
uncle with the funny animal stories. One has been amazed by his
magnificent make-believe as he has told one about dim forgotten peoples
that have disappeared under the ground. One has detested him, on the
other hand, as the evangelist with the umbrella--the little Anglo-Indian
Prussian who sing hymns of hate and Hempire.
Luckily, this last Kipling is allowed an entirely free voice only in
verse. If one avoids _Barrack Room Ballads_ and _The Seven Seas_, one
misses the worst of him. He visits the prose stories, too, it is true,
but he does not dominate them in the same degree. Prose is his easy
chair, in which his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand.
Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance
of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home
of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. _Recessional_
surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr.
Kipling has written. But, apart from _Recessional_, most of his
political verse is a mere quickstep of bragging and sneering.
His prose, certainly, stands a third or a fourth reading, as his verse
does not. Even in a world which Henry James and Mr. Conrad have taught
to study motives and atmospheres with an almost scientific carefulness,
Mr. Kipling's "well-hammered anecdotes," as Mr. George Moore once
described the stories, still refuse to bore us.
At the same time, they make a different appeal to us from their appeal
of twenty or twenty-five years ago. In the early days, we
half-worshipped Mr. Kipling because he told us true stories. Now we
enjoy him because he tells us amusing stories. He conquered us at first
by making us think him a realist. He was the man who knew. We listened
to him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us with
his cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in a
mysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with the
barrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives of
generals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's
trick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy hands
of Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaborate
detail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood of
belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike
life as _A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_. His characters are
inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak--dialects which
used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of
realism--are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's or
Ortheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the real
thing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling does
undoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. There are false
touches in the boys' conversation in _The Drums of the Fore and Aft_,
but the humour and energy with which the progress of the regiment to the
frontier, its disgrace and its rescue by the drunken children, are
described, make it one of the most admirable short stories of our time.
His humour, it must be admitted, is akin to the picaresque. It is
amusing to reflect as one looks round the disreputable company of Mr.
Kipling's characters, that his work has now been given a place in the
library of law and order. When _Stalky and Co._ was published, parents
and schoolmasters protested in alarm, and it seemed doubtful for a time
whether Mr. Kipling was to be reckoned among the enemies of society. If
I am not mistaken, _The Spectator_ came down on the side of Mr. Kipling,
and his reputation as a respectable author was saved.
But the parents and the schoolmasters were not nervous without cause.
Mr. Kipling is an anarchist in his preferences to a degree that no bench
of bishops could approve. He is, within limits, on the side of the
Ishmaelites--the bad boys of the school, the "rips" of the regiment. His
books are the praise of the Ishmaelitish life in a world of law and
order. They are seldom the praise of a law and order life in a world of
law and order. Mr. Kipling demands only one loyalty (beyond mutual
loyalty) from his characters. His schoolboys may break every rule in the
place, provided that somewhere deep down in their hearts they are loyal
to the "Head." His pet soldiers may steal dogs or get drunk, or behave
brutally to their heart's content, on condition that they cherish a
sentimental affection for the Colonel. Critics used to explain this
aspect of Mr. Kipling's work by saying that he likes to show the heart
of good in things evil. But that is not really a characteristic of his
work. What he is most interested in is neither good nor evil but simply
roguery. As an artist, he is a barn rebel and lover of mischief. As a
politician he is on the side of the judges and the lawyers. It was his
politics and not his art that ultimately made him the idol of the
genteel world.