RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME. 
 
 W. B. YEATS 
 
 By Forrest Reid 
 
 J. M. SYNGE 
 By p. p. Howe 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 By Ford Madox Huefper 
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 By R. Ellis Roberts 
 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 By Lascelles Abercrojibie 
 
 BERNARD SHAW 
 By p. p. Howe 
 
 WALTER PATER 
 By Edward Thomas 
 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 By Basil de Selincourt 
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER 
 By Gilbert Cannan 
 
 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 By Edward Thomas 
 
 GEORGE GISSING 
 By Frank Swinnerton 
 
 R. L. STEVENSON 
 By Frank Swinnerton 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 By John Drinkwater 
 
 ROBERT BRIDGES 
 
 By F. E. Brett Young 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 By Una Taylor 
 
R«a.dya.r(l Kapi&ng. 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 CYRIL FALLS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
 
 MCMXV 
 
I V 
 
 LILLA, LADY BROOKE OF COLEBROOKE, 
 
 IN TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP AND IN 
 
 MEMORY OF GREAT KINDNESS 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
 o>i A Ay^*f 
 
NOTE 
 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling's works are published by 
 Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., and by Messrs. 
 Methuen & Co., Ltd. Acknowledgement is made 
 to these firms for their very courteous permission 
 to reprint many extracts in this volume. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION 
 
 II. BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 -^III. LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 7< IV. POETRY 
 
 V. SHORT STORIES: I 
 
 VI. SHORT STORIES: II 
 
 VII. SHORT STORIES: III 
 
 , VIII. NOVELS 
 
 / 
 
 y JX. STYLE 
 
 X. IMPERIALISM 
 
 XI. CONCLUSION 
 
 PAGE 
 11 
 
 22 
 
 43 
 
 63 
 
 86 
 
 118 
 
 135 
 
 151 
 
 171 
 
 185 
 
 204 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 GThere are certain writers whose place in the 
 history of literature is not determined merely 
 by their merit. They are men of their hour, 
 men who voice the thoughts and aspirations of 
 their contemporaries, men who help to explain 
 the writers that go before and that follow after. 
 They come at a time of crisis, and take their 
 part in shaping the destiny of letters. Byron 
 in England, Chateaubriand in France are 
 typical examples.^ They are foolish people who 
 deny Byron's claim to be a great poet, but it 
 is none the less true that Byron is a far grander 
 figure than the worth of his poetry would 
 warrant. He is in our eyes the great herald 
 of revolt, the man who dared scoff at the Duke 
 of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo. 
 He voices the nostalgia of Romanticism, he is 
 the mouthpiece of fin de siecle pessimism. This 
 is even truer of Chateaubriand, who was a poor 
 poet in the main, whose Genie du Christian- 
 isme is talked of but never read, who is known 
 to the modern world through his Memoires 
 
 11 
 
TltJDYARt) KIPLING 
 
 d'Outre Tombe alone. In England we have a 
 steady succession of such men, because we 
 have alternating periods of national self-satis- 
 faction and despondency. It is not too much 
 to say that the moods of the day may be traced 
 throughout the last hundred years by the suc- 
 cessive popularity of Byron, Tennyson, Wilde, 
 Kipling and Wells. 
 
 For Mr. Kipling is one of these important 
 figures, these milestones on the long and 
 crooked road of letters. He entered the literary 
 world of the last twenty years of the nineteenth 
 fcentury as forcibly and destructively as the 
 /notorious bull in a china shop. He did not 
 'attack the guardians of the china individually 
 — that was not his way. He laughed at their 
 designs and their workmanship, and put his 
 foot through the subtly-fashioned and highly 
 artistic bowls that were their chiefest delight. 
 He did, to put his power at the lowest, more 
 than any other one man to prepare the way 
 Ifor a new era. 
 *^ It was a tired world, very ready to die, that 
 Mr. Kipling demolished. It was the easier to 
 kill that its life was rather a reflection of life 
 than life itself, a beautiful mirage set in an 
 ugly desert, a fantastic pleasaunce walled in 
 from the world. To deny beauty to the mirage, 
 to speak of this world as one of mere rottenness 
 
 12 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 and decay betokens blindness or affectation. 
 This school had its philosophy, and it was not 
 a mean philosophy. It produced Wilde's de- 
 lightful play, The Importance of Being Earnest, 
 one of the finest pure comedies in modern 
 English literature ; his witty and often really 
 wise essays, his Sphinx and Salome. It pro- 
 duced a whole sheaf of charming minor poetry, 
 and at least one poet, Mr. Arthur Symons, 
 whose best work does not deserve the adjec- 
 tive. It produced, as its most typical flowers, 
 the pallid women, soaked in sin, and the fat, 
 leering rakes of Aubrey Beardsley. And its 
 fret and fume, the fever of Dowson and the 
 savagery of Crackanthorpe, were fitting enough 
 in a querulous age that was beginning to en- 
 quire whether the glories of the reign of Vic- 
 toria the Good did not mask too many things 
 that were far from being glorious. It was not 
 unjustly that Wilde boasted that he stood in 
 symbolical relations to the age in which he 
 lived. Mr. Holbrook Jackson in his brilliant 
 and stimulating book The Eighteen Nineties 
 says : " The Eighteen Nineties were electric 
 with new ideas which strove to find expression 
 in the average national life." And, a little 
 later : " Side by side with the poseur worked 
 the reformer, urged on by the revolutionist." 
 The age was an age of experiment, a stirring-up 
 
 la 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 of a society intellectually dormant. Above all, 
 it cried out for beauty and beautiful things at 
 a time when English taste generally was as 
 low as it had been for a century and a half. 
 And that taste it went very far to reform. 
 
 So much granted, it must be said that the 
 aesthetic movement was unoriginal, and that 
 it did not produce one really great man. It 
 borrowed its ideas and its ideals wholesale, 
 from the Pre-Raphaelites, from Pater, from 
 the French Symbolistes. Wilde took Salome 
 from the far finer Herodiade of Flaubert, The 
 Picture of Dorian Gray from the infinitely more 
 powerful A Rebours of Huysmans. Dowson 
 imitated Baudelaire, while some of the most 
 beautiful poems of Mr. Symons are gem-like 
 translations, no whit behind the originals, of 
 the work of Paul Verlaine. Wilde, Beardsley 
 and Dowson would have been, as Mr. Jackson 
 remarks, more at home in Paris than London. 
 The eyes of the intellectuals were turned to- 
 ward Ireland, upon the successors of Mangan, 
 Sir Samuel Ferguson and the young Mr. W. B. 
 Yeats. The whole trend of the period was 
 un-English. 
 
 It was also artificial. Again to quote 
 Mr. Jackson : "It was a characteristic of the 
 decadence not to sing of the bloom of Nature 
 but the bloom of cosmetics." The hymning of 
 
 14 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 London, of London's cafes and street lights and 
 women of pleasure ; Wilde's ingenious and 
 amusing theory of the dependence of Nature 
 upon Art were as much instances of perversion 
 as were the acts that brought him to Reading 
 Gaol. The ' red mouths ' its young men 
 yearned for were ' bought,' its flowers were 
 ever ' parched,' its heroines ' wan,' its boys 
 ' dainty.' 
 
 In the later eighties there spread bruit of a 
 man who was delighting India with very dif- ^ 
 ferent fare. " Mr. Kipling," said The Saturday 
 Review, " is a new writer, or a writer new to the 
 EngUsh as distinct from the Anglo-Indian 
 public. He is so clever, so fresh and so cynical 
 that he must be young ; like other people, he 
 will be kinder to life when he has seen more of 
 it." The other critics, The Times at their head, 
 agreed. Here was no more obsession with 
 parched flowers and delicate sins, no reflection 
 of French or Gaelic art. /As has said M. Chev- 
 rillon^/the brilliant Frenchman who has made 
 the only adequate criticism of Mr. Kipling that 
 has yet appeared, and whom I shall quote very 
 often in the course of this study : " M. Kipling 
 etait Anglais d'une fa9on simple, violente et, de 
 plus, tres nouvelle." jThat is assuredly the most 
 accurate judgment that can be, in one sentence, 
 passed upon Mr. Kipling and his early success^ 
 
 15 
 
 L 
 
 ^ 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 /_^Mr. Kipling was English to the core, and we 
 were surfeited with un-English art. He laughed 
 sometimes at the English, but he let it be 
 clearly understood that he was a privileged 
 jester and that it would be unseemly for others 
 to follow him. ? He loved the English intensely 
 and he glorified them mightily, and the sound 
 was not unpleasing to the ears of men who had 
 been told with insistence that they were brutal 
 and stupid and ugly. He struck again that 
 note which was the note of Nelson, a good 
 feeling toward the other nations, " the lesser 
 breeds without the law," but a firm and steady 
 conviction that the English were the superiors 
 of all, better fighters, better rulers, better 
 lovers, better friends. He hinted — and this I 
 shall presently discuss — that they were the 
 chosen people of the Lord. 
 
 ^Mr. Kipling was violent ; that also was 
 welcome.^ Violence had wearied Wilde and 
 his school ; if they depicted it, it was the 
 violence of the lover deceived, not of the soldier 
 in action. There had been, outside the work 
 of the Esthetes, a reign of prudery so exces- 
 sive that the word ' sire ' had been cut out of 
 a Savoy libretto as suggestive of the stud farm. 
 There was a pleasant thrill in reading the work 
 of a man who was not afraid to use language 
 such as real men used. The oaths of the smok- 
 
 16 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 ing-room, the more picturesque blasphemy of 
 Tommy Atkins on the march and in canteen 
 were vastly fascinating in print. And there 
 was satisfaction to a people, of whom every 
 year a greater proportion entered the factory 
 and workshop or sat upon the office stool, to 
 learn that there were yet men of its race in 
 whom, out on the frontiers of civilization, 
 burned the old unruly fires. 
 
 Above all, Mr. Kipling was new. He had the »^ 
 fortune to find himself in possession of mines 
 almost virgin, and he made good use of them. 
 He was not, of course, their discoverer, but he 
 was the first who knew how to extract the ore.j 
 The average Englishman, if he had no relations 
 in the Indian Civil Service, had the vaguest 
 possible knowledge of India, a knowledge based 
 on tales of the Mutiny, sentimental modern 
 novels, and casual conversations with those 
 most uncommunicative of beings, the officers 
 of His Majesty's Army. It was to him, as was v 
 Persia, Arabia, or even Egypt, a hot country 
 of palms, and black men who wore turbans. 
 Little he knew of the thousand diversities of 
 race and type and creed and caste, of climate 
 and country, of conditions of life. Scarce better 
 acquainted was he with the white men who 
 governed this bubbling cauldron of nationali- 
 ties, with their lives and the lives of their 
 B 17 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 women-folk. Mr. Kipling opened up to him 
 a vast panorama. Here he gave a glimpse of 
 the childless, pleasure-seeking, neurotic woman 
 of Simla, skilled in the discovery of every kind 
 of gratification and sated with them all ; here 
 a sight of the lonely official fighting cholera 
 and famine in the plains ; now for a moment 
 he showed the teeming, packed bazaar. Two 
 types in particular he drew as none had drawn 
 them before — the young British officer and the 
 private soldier, the long-service man of that 
 day. " To his reader in his bay-window, after 
 tea or after his eggs and pleasant breakfast 
 rolls, or on his return on Sunday from his 
 ' decent Anglican service,' " says M. Chevrillon, 
 " he taught that living in the true sense meant 
 living like the young English officers in India 
 or Burmah, who at twenty-three years of age, 
 beneath a hostile and fever-charged sun, in a 
 half-known rebellious country, cut off with a 
 handful of men in their charge, command, 
 decide and, indifferent to the daily sight of 
 corpses, shoot the rebel leader and the spy." 
 The private soldier, with his simple philosophy, 
 his language and his thirst and his lust all un- 
 ' disguised, was a yet stranger figure. 
 
 With each of these was the proper atmo- 
 sphere. [Mr. Kipling had a wonderful power of 
 suggesting and summoning to the consciousness 
 
 18 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 of his readers colours, odours, sounds. This 
 power was shown in his earhest books, though 
 it has developed considerably since, and was 
 at its height in the description of the Grand 
 Trunk Road in Kim. J 
 
 /Almost all the critics were thrown a little off 
 their balance by this youth of four-and-twenty 
 and his amazing freshness and cleverness. 
 Many exhausted early their vocabulary of 
 words expressing wonderment, and were left 
 tamely to repeat themselves as each new work 
 appeared. The Esthetes sneered a little, 
 though Wilde acknowledged the power of the 
 new-comer and contented himself with the not 
 unfair gibe that he had seen a number of 
 curious things through key-holes. Mr. Kipling 
 took full revenge later in a poem wherein he 
 laughed at Art with a capital A, representing 
 the devil as enquiring of every work of man's 
 
 hands : 
 
 It's pretty, but is it Art ? 
 
 /There was another form of attack which has 
 not ceased to this day ; rather has it grown 
 more bitter. This came from the men who 
 objected to Mr. Kipling's opinions, to his early 
 discovered Imperialism, to his contempt for 
 certain forms of humanitarianism, to just that 
 trace of brutality which helped to give him 
 his vogue. Such attacks were — and are — 
 
 19 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 sometimes masked behind objections to his 
 work on artistic grounds. Of the more able, 
 an article by the late Francis Adams in The 
 Fortnightly Review is typical."! There was in it 
 some acute and on the whole unfavourable 
 criticism of his early verse, which would have 
 been more important had it not been plain to 
 all that most of this was mere clever vers de 
 societe, owning many models, for which its 
 author would probably have been the last to 
 make high claims. \ But it was something more 
 than the odium cestheticum that made Adams 
 use such ridiculous phrases as " little-brained, 
 second-rate journalist," " sickening egotism 
 and vanities," which were dotted about his 
 review. This was merely the vicious rancour 
 of the political controversialistj/and of such 
 attacks, so far as I am aware, l\Ir. Kipling has 
 never taken the slightest notice. 
 
 At that time there was small occasion why 
 he should. All through the nineties, till it 
 reached its height at the beginning of the new 
 century, was swelling and mounting that flood 
 of Imperialism and national pride that subsided 
 so suddenly after reaching full tide, and that 
 is now perhaps creeping slowly up once more. 
 It would be foolish to suggest that Mr. Kipling 
 was responsible for its rise, but equally foolish 
 to deny that he hastened it. Upon its waves 
 
 20 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 his bark rode triumphant, ^is poems had a 
 popularity given to none since Tennyson's 
 death ; his prose was read as no prose — not 
 Stevenson's even — had been read since the 
 days of Dickens. He was the man of the hour, 
 an acknowledged leader of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race. His position was somewhat similar to 
 that of M. Maurice Barres in France, though 
 precocity and patriotism were almost the only 
 qualities shared by the two young men. 
 M. Chevrillon bestowed upon him a title which 
 the Frenchman had received from his contem- 
 poraries a few years earlier, ^e was the ' Pro- ^ 
 fessor of Energy ' of the English peoplej 
 
 
 21 
 
II 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Mr. Kipling was born on the 30th of Decem- 
 ber, 1865. It is interesting though perhaps 
 hardly profitable to enquire how far India 
 imprinted itself upon his mind in infancy ; 
 whether, had his removal from her influence at 
 the age of four been final, there would have 
 persisted in him any of that Eastern fancy, 
 that love of bright colours, that are the only 
 un-English traits in his very English character. 
 However this may be, the boy suffered the not 
 uncommon fate of the children of Anglo-Indian 
 parents. He was brought to England with his 
 younger sister in 1871, and left in the charge 
 of a relative at Southsea, while his mother 
 remained with his father, engaged in his official 
 duties in India. 
 
 In the year of Rudyard's birth John Lock- 
 wood Kipling, a skilful draughtsman, as his 
 illustrations to his book Beast and Man in 
 India testify, was appointed Professor of Archi- 
 tectural Sculpture in the Bombay School of 
 Art. He was for some years engaged in the 
 
 22 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 Central Provinces, making casts of the mytho- 
 logical sculpture of the Rock Temples. Later 
 he was appointed Curator of the Government 
 Museum at Lahore — the ' Wonder House ' of 
 Kim. Beast and Man in India, his most im- 
 portant book, discursive and formless as it is, 
 is a mine of information on all things Indian. 
 Reading it, we begin to feel that Rudyard 
 Kipling's powers of observation came to him 
 almost inevitably. It also gives us the origins 
 of many little incidents and customs that are 
 scattered through his books. One such custom 
 reappears in that horrible story. The Strange 
 Ride of Morrowbie Jukes — the catching of crows 
 for food by means of a decoy. Mr. Lockwood 
 Kipling relates how the Indian gypsies peg 
 down a tame crow on its back, its legs in the 
 air, which seizes and holds fast the other crows 
 that after the manner of their kind come to 
 attack it in its distress. Directly the decoy has 
 fastened its grip upon the wild bird, a man who 
 has been in hiding close at hand seizes the 
 latter and despatches it. Again, in Beast and 
 Man in India are discussed the native legends 
 of the dancing-places of wild elephants in the 
 forests which are the foundation of Toomai of 
 the Elephants. The story of the elephant who 
 refused to work the while his mahout was 
 absent on a drinking-bout was drawn from the 
 
 23 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 same source. The description of monkeys at 
 play is similar to that in The Jungle Book, 
 There are here and there instances of an irony 
 as mocking as that in the son's stories. It is 
 pointed out that English observers often attri- 
 bute the customs and creed of the tiny, high- 
 caste fringe of culture and philosophy to the 
 whole body of the people of India. Mr. Lock- 
 wood Kipling's comment on this is : "A 
 description of the habits and beliefs of the 
 Bench of Bishops would scarcely be accepted 
 as fully representative of the masses of Great 
 Britain." I cannot refrain from quoting one 
 delightfully cynical native proverb from all 
 this mass of wit and wisdom and keen obser- 
 vation : " The cat does not catch mice for 
 God." 
 
 But Mr. Rudyard Kipling owed to his father 
 a great deal more than mere hints. In the 
 preface to Life's Handicap it is written : "A 
 few (of the tales), but these are the very best, 
 my father gave me." But above all he owed 
 him encouragement and good advice, which is 
 something that not every literary man can say 
 of his father. In the dedication, written in 
 mock old English, of his third book In Black 
 and White, he thus acknowledges the debt : 
 
 How may I here tell of that Tender Diligence which 
 in my wauerynge and inconftante viages was in all 
 
 24 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 tyme about me to showe the Paffions and Occafions, 
 Shifts, Humours, and Sports that in due proporcion 
 combinate haue bred that Rare and Terrible Myltery 
 the which, for lacke of a more compleat Vnderftand- 
 inge, the Worlde has cauled Man ; aswel the maner 
 in which you shoulde goe about to pourtraie the same, 
 a lytel at a time in Feare and Decencie. 
 
 Mr. John Lockwood Kipling is spoken of by 
 all who knew him as a man of deep and wide 
 culture, a talker witty, cynical and entertaining, 
 and a good friend as well as a good companion. 
 His acquaintances seem to have been legion, 
 judging from the number of Anglo-Indians who 
 expressed for him their affection and respect 
 at his death a few years ago. 
 
 He married a Miss Alice Macdonald, one of 
 three beautiful sisters. The other two married 
 respectively Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir 
 Edward Poynter. Mr. Kipling's connection by 
 marriage with the former has in it an element 
 of irony, seeing how much he has done to de- 
 stroy the type of art for which Sir Edward 
 Burne-Jones stood. He dedicated Plain Tales 
 from the Hills to his mother, as " The wittiest 
 woman in England." Mr. Kipling's sister, now 
 Mrs. Fleming, is the author of two novels, The 
 Heart of a Maid and A Pinchbeck Goddess. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's early years in England were 
 not happy. They must have been very far 
 
 25 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 from happy, terrible even, if it be true that 
 they formed the basis of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep 
 and of the beginning of The Light that Failed. 
 Remorselessly in these two stories he has 
 painted the pictures of spirited, sensitive 
 children cowed till they become brutal, dis- 
 trusted till they are in fact untrustworthy, 
 made to feel themselves little black sheep. It 
 was five years ere his parents realized his un- 
 happy case and rescued him. Then, after a 
 visit to Paris with his father while the latter 
 made holiday, he was sent in the year 1878 to 
 those " twelve bleak houses by the shore " 
 that he has made famous in every corner of the 
 world, United Services College, Westward Ho ! 
 
 In this chapter I am going to discuss Stalky 
 and Co., which is obviously largely auto- 
 biographical, just as under the heading 
 ' Literary Foundations ' I shall speak of the 
 Mowgli stories, which seem to me to represent 
 Mr. Kipling's very sdf, his idealism, his im- 
 patience with civilization and love of the 
 primeval. 
 
 ' The best school story ever written ' was 
 the verdict of enthusiasts when Stalky and Co. 
 appeared. There were many who demurred, 
 but indeed the title itself is not very high praise. 
 We are weak in the literature of school life, 
 perhaps because men find it very hard to recall 
 
 26 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 in maturity the sentiments, the conventions 
 and the aspirations of youth. Tom Brown's 
 School Days, which treats of a bygone age of 
 school existence, the maudlin Eric of which 
 Mr. Kipling makes such merciless fun, the 
 commonplace Godfrey Martin, Schoolboy, the 
 clever Human Boy, and Mr. Vachell's brilliant 
 book The Hill are among the few that can be 
 selected for purposes of comparison. Mr. 
 Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street is superior 
 as a story to all but Tom Brown and The Hill, 
 ahd in subtlety and insight excels them, but 
 it is the tale of a very exceptional boy and 
 of a school which is not typical of the public 
 schools of England. 
 
 Stalky and Co. has no pretensions to being a 
 minute study like Sinister Street. It is merely 
 a short series of episodes, all taking place in 
 the last two years of the stay of Beetle, the 
 name under which Mr. Kipling chooses to pass, 
 at the school. Corkran, otherwise known as 
 ' Stalky ' by reason of his wiles, and McTurk, 
 the ' scowling Celt with a fluent tongue,' are 
 likewise real personages. Stalky became in 
 due — and rapid — course of time a colonel of 
 Sikhs, while McTurk entered the Indian Tele- 
 graph Service. The records of the escapades 
 and villainies of these confederates are cer- 
 tainly amazing. It surely needs not to ask 
 
 27 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 whether they be one and all precisely true. 
 What does matter is that we have here the 
 true spirit of the boy, undisguised by the senti- 
 mentality of middle age. There are just one 
 or two occasions, notably that where Stalky 
 propounds for the benefit of the Reverend 
 John his opinions on married house-masters 
 and morality, when we feel uneasily that the 
 Mr. Kipling of thirty is speaking through the 
 mouths of these boys of sixteen. These occa- 
 sions will certainly be forgiven by every reader 
 who is not distressed by the brutality and 
 heartlessness of Stalky, which brutality is due 
 simply to Mr. Kipling's accurate analysis of the 
 young male animal. These boys are real boys, 
 though they are exceptional boys in that they 
 dare to own to a dislike for cricket, which is 
 probably shared by at least twenty per cent 
 of their kind. McTurk's explanation of their 
 unpopularity with their house-master may 
 be devilish, but it is also absolutely true to 
 type. 
 
 " If we attended the matches an' yelled ' Well hit, 
 sir,' an' stood on one leg an' grinned every time Heffy 
 said, ' So ho, my sons. Is it thus ? ' an' said, ' Yes, 
 sir,' an' ' No, sir,' an' ' O, sir,' an' ' Please, sir,' like a 
 lot o' filthy fa-ags, Heffy 'ud think no end of us," said 
 McTurk with a sneer. 
 
 Their exploits are only such as all boys plan 
 28 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 and relish. With real boys, or let us say with 
 ordinary boys, in ordinary schools — and this 
 school was not ordinary by reason of a certain 
 roughness and looseness of discipline — such 
 exploits are carried out once in every few years 
 only, and each is talked of with bated breath 
 till the next arrives. Mr. Kiphng merely makes 
 them occur more often, and, lest we should 
 imagine that these boys were demigods or 
 demidemons, unconquerable by any of human 
 kind, he shows us in the background ' Prooshian 
 Bates,' that 'downy bird,' the Head Master in 
 other words, who was a man wiser than they 
 all, and who at the proper time meted out to 
 them the proper punishment. 
 
 Perhaps the most amusing episode is that 
 of the boys' visit to Colonel Dabney. They 
 have obtained permission from him to come at 
 any time they like to his land, which would 
 otherwise have been out of bounds. They do 
 not even hint at this permission, and are 
 followed by their house-master, Mr. Prout ; 
 their sworn foe, Mr. King ; and ' Foxy,' the 
 School Sergeant. There is a perfectly ludicrous 
 scene when their friend the keeper comes upon 
 their pursuers. He dashes past them as they 
 lie in hiding : 
 
 " Who'm be they to combe bottom for Lard's sake ? 
 Master' II be crazy," he said. 
 
 29 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 " Poachers simly," Stalky replied in the broad 
 Devon that was the boys' langue de guerre. 
 
 " I'll poach 'em to raights." He dropped into the 
 funnel-like combe, which presently began to fill with 
 noises, notably King's voice crying, "Go on. Ser- 
 geant ! Leave him alone, you, sir. He's executing 
 my orders." 
 
 " Who'm be yeou to give arders here, gingy 
 whiskers ? " 
 
 After a long-drawn struggle to explain, while 
 the keeper persists in taking them for poachers, 
 they are brought before Colonel Dabney. This 
 gentleman is even hastier than his servant. 
 He will not hear a word, but flies at once into 
 a passion, pours upon them a stream of invec- 
 tive, and finally drives them away. The boys 
 overhear every word of the interview. 
 
 In connection with this scene it may be 
 remarked that Mr. Kipling pictures himself as 
 the only human member of the trio. As they 
 listen to the discomfiture of Prout, King and 
 the Sergeant : 
 
 Beetle lay at full length on the turf behind the 
 Lodge, literally biting the earth in spasms of joy. 
 
 Stalky kicked him upright. There was nothing of 
 levity about Stalky or McTurk save a stray muscle 
 twitching on the cheek. 
 
 McTurk and Stalky are like Red Indians ; 
 on the war-path they allow no emotions to 
 
 30 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 interfere with their quest of scalps. Elsewhere 
 are given instances of this absence of ordinary 
 human feelings. Beetle enquires, as he sits 
 down in the study with some guests to a mag- 
 nificent ' brew,' as to whence this plenty came. 
 He knew that the study was almost bankrupt 
 at the time. Stalky informs him coolly that 
 the feast has been provided out of the proceeds 
 of the pawning of his, Beetle's, watch, and 
 hands him the ticket. The guests listen open- 
 mouthed, but their wonder changes to blank 
 amazement when Beetle hears of the transac- 
 tion without comment, but McTurk is filled 
 with rage and denounces Stalky for his unfair- 
 ness. Last week, he declares, they took his 
 watch and sold it. He had no ticket to show. 
 
 Stalky, McTurk and Beetle, who are all 
 literary in their way, rejoicing respectively in 
 Surtees, Ruskin and Browning, will have no 
 traffic with sentiment. The Reverend John, 
 the school chaplain, who is their only friend in 
 the Senior Common Room, asks them to pre- 
 vent the bullying of a little boy named Clewer. 
 There is a half-hearted suggestion that he should 
 be made their study-fag for his protection. 
 
 " No ! " said McTurk firmly. " He's a dirty little 
 brute, and he'd mess up everything. Besides, we 
 ain't goin' to have any beastly Erickin'. D'you want 
 to walk about with your arm round his neck ? " 
 
 31 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Thereupon they proceed, by means of an 
 outrageous ruse, to entrap the buUies, and 
 having them at their mercy, to inflict upon 
 them with tenfold ferocity the tortures they 
 have practised on Clewer. 
 
 It is hatred of sentiment, not merely on the 
 part of Stalky and Co. but on that of the whole 
 school, that brings about the calamity of The 
 Flag of their Country. The story is a very acute 
 study of boyish temperament ; it might be set 
 before every pedagogue as an object-lesson of 
 the fashion in Avhich youthful shyness and 
 reticence can be outraged by the heavy hands 
 of middle age. A school cadet-corps has just 
 been started, accepted with much doubt by 
 the boys, and a certain Mr. Raymond Martin, 
 M.P., comes down to help on the good work by 
 giving an address on ' Patriotism.' His open- 
 ing is thus described : 
 
 He plunged into his speech with a long-drawn, 
 rasping " Well, boys," that, though they were not 
 conscious of it, set every young nerve ajar. He sup- 
 posed they knew- — hey ?• — what he had come down 
 for ? It was not often that he had an opportunity to 
 talk to boys. He supposed that boys were very much 
 the same kind of persons — some people thought them 
 rather funny persons — as they had been in his 
 youth. 
 
 " This man," said McTurk with conviction, " is 
 the Gadarene Swine." 
 
 32 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 He makes a truly dreadful but quite credible 
 speech, shouting aloud the things they guard 
 in the secret places of their hearts from their 
 closest friends, preaching the glories of service 
 for the Empire to boys ninety per cent of whom 
 are the sons of soldiers. Finally, to their horror, 
 he unfurls a large, staring Union Jack, waves 
 it before them, tells them it is the symbol of 
 their country on which none may look without 
 respect, and sits down. The Head saves the 
 situation by rising swiftly and voicing their 
 thanks for a most enjoyable evening to the 
 speaker. He is greeted with great cheers, 
 cheers which Mr. Raymond Martin appro- 
 priates to himself. As the boys are leaving the 
 room a prefect picks up the flag, rolls it up, 
 and tosses it into a locker. He is greeted with 
 a volley of hand-clapping. Mr. Martin is 
 universally execrated in the dormitories that 
 night. Stalky finally summing up all the abuse 
 with the vigour and conciseness peculiar to him. 
 Mr. Raymond Martin is a ' Jelly-bellied Flag- 
 flapper.' His speech actually breaks up the 
 cadet-corps which it was intended to support. 
 
 Mr. Kipling, with that instinct he has for 
 heightening the effect of a story by some slight 
 half-relevant addition, tells us that Foxy, the 
 School Sergeant, was touched to the heart by 
 the incident of the flag ! 
 c 33 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 The three leave school, McTurk for Cooper's 
 Hill, Stalky for Sandhurst, Beetle for India 
 and his newspaper, after a merry episode 
 related in The Last Term. They are followed 
 on one of their final excursions by a young 
 and conscientious prefect, who believes they 
 are breaking bounds. After an excellent tea 
 in their favourite restaurant, they bribe the 
 daughter of the house, pretty Mary Yeo, to 
 step out and kiss the prefect as he passes. He 
 runs as for his life. Says Beetle : 
 
 " Look here. If he kissed her — which is our tack 
 ■ — he's a cynically immoral hog, and his conduct is 
 blatant indecency. ..." 
 
 " Time, 3.57 p.m. Make a note of that. What 
 d'you mean, Beetle ? " said Stalky. 
 
 " Well ! He's a truthful little beast. He may say 
 he was kissed." 
 
 " And then ? " 
 
 " Why, then ! " Beetle capered at the mere thought 
 of it. " Don't you see ? The corollary to the giddy 
 proposition is that the Sixth can't protect 'emselves 
 from outrages an' ravishin's. Want nursemaids to 
 look after 'em ! We've only got to whisper that to 
 the Coll. Jam for the Sixth ! Jam for us ! Either 
 way it's jammy ! " 
 
 || " By gum ! " said Stalky. " Our last term's endin' 
 well ! " 
 
 The last story dates from several years later, 
 and tells how Stalky carries into operation as 
 
 34 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 a soldier in India the principles on which he 
 has worked at Westward Ho ! 
 
 Mere wide circulation is no test of a book's 
 merit. There are certain novelists of to-day 
 whom no critic with the slightest courage 
 hesitates to condemn, though he knows them 
 as the authors of the ' best sellers ' of each 
 successive year. But when we find a book 
 read with delight by all classes, from the intel- 
 lectuals to that great public that knows naught 
 of reviews ; when we find that we ourselves, 
 whom our vanity puts in the first category, can 
 return to that book again and again, year after 
 year, and can laugh as heartily over An Un- 
 savoury Interlude at the fifth as at the first time 
 of reading, we shall be very slow to believe the 
 noisy minority who deny that this book is a 
 brilliant book, a true book and a book that will 
 live. 
 
 However much of Stalky and Co. be fiction, 
 I cannot but believe that the record of the 
 Head's relations with Beetle is true. That 
 interest and encouragement, that opening up of 
 a fine library to a boy very eager to read, must 
 have greatly influenced Mr. Kipling's early 
 career, as I think the simple Spartan ideals he 
 learnt from ' Prooshian Bates ' influenced the 
 man himself. Mr. Kipling did go to India, and 
 he did go to a post on a newspaper, even as it 
 
 35 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 is related in Stalky and Co. The town he went 
 to was Lahore, the newspaper, The Civil and 
 Military Gazette. 
 
 Then followed seven years of very hard work, 
 the first five on The Civil and Military Gazette, 
 the other two as Assistant-Editor of The Pioneer 
 at Allahabad. 
 
 The then Editor of The Civil and Military 
 Gazette has said of Mr. Kipling : " If you want 
 to find a man who will cheerfully do the work 
 of three men, you should catch a young genius." 
 He goes on to compare a young genius thus 
 employed to a blood horse in a wagon. He 
 may not have the strength of a draught-horse, 
 but he has more spirit. He will pull his load 
 uphill or kill himself in the attempt. 
 
 Throughout these seven years Mr. Kipling 
 was contributing poems, short stories and 
 miscellaneous articles to the newspapers with 
 which he was connected. At first he seems to 
 have been permitted to do this rather as a 
 favour, but by 1886, when he was but twenty, 
 his name was widely known in India. Depart- 
 mental Ditties, published by himself, brought 
 his first fame ; In Black and White established 
 it. In 1889 he was sent by The Pioneer on a 
 leisurely journey through India, and by way 
 of Japan, San Francisco and New York to 
 England. His contributions to The Pioneer 
 
 36 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 were published as Letters of Marque and From 
 Sea to Sea. In 1890 appeared Plain Tales from 
 the Hills and The Light that Failed. Mr. Kipling 
 was the literary lion of the moment. The 
 Times review before-mentioned had set the 
 seal on his fame. He was inundated with invi- 
 tations, courted, flattered and feted. He 
 accepted it all with philosophy, as unruffled 
 by success as he had been by early hard work, 
 and doubtless enjoyed himself vastly. In 1891 
 he set off on a great tour, visiting South Africa, 
 Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand. That 
 year Life's Handicap, one of the best of all his 
 collections of short stories, had birth. 
 
 1892 was a year of great importance. On 
 January the 18th he married Miss Caroline 
 Balestier, sister of his friend Wolcott Balestier, 
 in collaboration with whom he had written the 
 Naidahka. In April was published Barrack 
 Room Ballads. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's honeymoon was spent on a 
 world tour. When in the East he planned a 
 visit to Robert Louis Stevenson at Samoa. 
 For some reason — a biographer declares be- 
 cause of the failure of the Oriental Bank — he 
 was unable to make the voyage. He never 
 met the man whom he admired so much that 
 to a French critic he spoke of him as ' my 
 master.' 
 
 37 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Kipling now settled at Brattle- 
 boro', Vermont, living at first in a cottage on 
 the Balestier estate. He built, largely with his 
 own hands, a wooden house, christened ' The 
 Naulahka,' where he and his wife lived about 
 four years. Here he wrote Captains Courageous, 
 which had a very great success, and many 
 poems and short stories, including those in The 
 Jungle Books. The last were published in 1894 
 and 1895 respectively. Three children were 
 born of the marriage, of whom two, a boy and 
 a girl, survive. 
 
 In 1896 Mr. and Mrs. Kiphng returned to 
 England, and in 1898 went to live at Rotting- 
 dean and subsequently moved to Burwash. 
 Since then their life has been uneventful, a 
 striking contrast to that which Mr. Kipling had 
 lived so far. He seems to have grown more 
 and more in love with loneliness, and in his 
 later stories we find that the beauties of the 
 English countryside take some of the place 
 in his heart hitherto given to India and the 
 glories of the Empire. He yet makes occasional 
 excursions, and was for some time in South 
 Africa during the war. In 1899 he underwent 
 a very serious illness in New York, when the 
 public of England and America waited for 
 bulletins with an anxiety that it would scarcely 
 have shown for any other living man. The 
 
 38 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 German Emperor telegraphed to Mrs. Kipling 
 for news of the invalid's progress. 
 
 Even while he was creeping back to his 
 strength his daughter Josephine, then six 
 years old, died very suddenly from the pneu- 
 monia that had passed from him. For long 
 none dared tell him of his loss, and the blow 
 was the bitterest of his life. He has said 
 himself : " People say that that kind of 
 wound heals. It doesn't. It only skins 
 over." 
 
 In 1907 the Swedish Academy awarded him 
 the Nobel Prize of Literature. There was, 
 inevitably, an outcry in the same quarters 
 whence had come the semi-political criticism 
 of his work that I have already mentioned. 
 Letters poured into the Press, full of enumera- 
 tions of his faults, real and imaginary ; full 
 also of suggestions, not in the best of taste, 
 that certain other writers had better deserved 
 the honour. The mass of reading Englishmen, 
 however, were well content to leave politics 
 out of the question, and accepted the award 
 with satisfaction. Abroad it was equally well 
 received. His reputation in Europe was by 
 this time far greater even than in his own 
 country ; it is now almost as wide as that of 
 Richardson, Sterne or Byron. There is scarce 
 a European language into which some of his 
 
 39 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 works have not been translated. The paper 
 of M. Chevrillon had appeared in his excellent 
 book Etudes Anglaises in 1901, and had marked 
 the commencement of his vogue in France. A 
 Swedish Professor, Dr. Leeb-Lundberg, has 
 written a painstaking little study called Word- 
 Formation in Kipling, and the Fatherland, 
 amazingly scientific as ever, has given us Herr 
 Loewe's Beitrage zur Metrik Rudyard Kipling's, 
 which appeared in the series Marburger Studien 
 zur englischen Philologie. There have been 
 other studies in languages with which I am. 
 unacquainted, while the critics of the United 
 States have naturally had a good deal to say 
 on the work of the man who lived for four years 
 among them and who has depicted their 
 countrymen so often. No book great in bulk 
 has yet been written about Mr. Kipling, and 
 we shall probably have long to wait ere it will 
 be possible definitely to assign to him his place 
 in literature. 
 
 Since the beginning of the century Mr, 
 Kipling's muses, both Euterpe and Thalia, 
 have been less prolific. There are who declare 
 that they are barren, that Mr. Kipling is 
 ' written out.' Such a statement it is im- 
 possible to deny or to affirm. It may be that 
 the old days when subjects came so easily that 
 it was necessary to check his own exuberance 
 
 40 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 are gone for ever. In these days we were always 
 coming upon the famous : " But that is 
 another story," or some phrase such as : 
 " Later on, I will tell you of a case something 
 like this, but with all the jest left out, and 
 nothing in it but real trouble . " I shall presently 
 strive to show cause for my belief that in the 
 quality of Mr. Kipling's latest work there has 
 been little or no decline, but the fact remains 
 that we have had from him no book since 
 Rewards and Fairies, and that for some years, 
 save for an occasional poem in The Morning 
 Post, he has been silent altogether. It may be 
 that he is enjoying a period of complete laziness 
 to which none can be better entitled than he, 
 and that after he has let lie fallow his mind for 
 a few years there will be a renewal of produc- 
 tive energy. It is not too much to hope, for 
 Mr. Kipling is not yet fifty. 
 
 Of late years he has taken some part in 
 politics, speaking for the National Service 
 League, writing poems for the cause of the 
 Union. He recently made a much discussed 
 and somewhat violent attack upon the Liberal 
 Government then in power. He also delivered 
 not long ago to the Royal Geographical Society 
 a most brilliant address, wherein his descrip- 
 tion of the smells that the explorer and traveller 
 associates with his different routes and dif- 
 
 41 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 ferent goals was equal to anything in his 
 stories. He is, it may be, less talked of than a 
 few years ago, but the constant reissue of his 
 books in various forms shows that his popu- 
 larity stands as high as ever. 
 
 42 
 
Ill 
 
 LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 The soul of Mr. Kipling, no less than his body, 
 was born in India. India with her glaring 
 colours, her quivering heats, her thirsts, her 
 cruelties, stamped herself deep upon his spirit. 
 The personal pronoun that is given to countries 
 is warranted here, for to him India was indeed 
 one monstrous sentient being, restless and be- 
 wildering, never completely to be understood. 
 
 He saw her all 
 
 smoke and flame 
 From Simla to the haze below. 
 
 The white man who ruled her could do no more 
 than work, and pray that his work would serve ; 
 never could he have any certainty that it 
 would. The warning given to Lord Lansdowne 
 by Lord Dufferin in One Viceroy Resigns was 
 for every official in India as well as the head of 
 them all. 
 
 Accept on trust and work in darkness, strike 
 At venture, stumble forward, make your mark, 
 (It's chalk on granite) then thank God no flame 
 Leaps from the rock to shrivel mark and man. 
 43 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 He was fascinated by the ' terror by night ' 
 that slept never, howso peaceful might seem 
 the land. There was a curious delight in pry- 
 ing into horrors that it is not well for the eyes 
 of man to see. 
 
 There is a famous French author whose 
 vision has likewise been turned to the East, to 
 whom the same sights and smells have been an 
 inspiration. It is interesting to compare Mr. 
 Kipling with M. Pierre Loti, particularly as the 
 latter has in Mon Frere Yves attempted a study 
 of the life and emotions of the bluejacket in 
 the French navy. But, just as Yves is quite 
 another person than Mulvaney, so their creators 
 are very far apart. M. Loti lets the sensuous 
 side of the East permeate him. Its languors 
 and its luxuries twine themselves about him 
 and twist his style to their own softness. Mr. 
 Kipling looks upon these things and feels their 
 influence and writes of them. But he writes as 
 a European, as an Englishman. He can under- 
 stand the native, but he rarely speaks of him 
 as if his point of view were best — never unless 
 that native be of one of the warrior peoples of 
 the North. He can admire the fatalistic philos- 
 ophy that declares that all will happen as it 
 has been decreed, but he does not order his 
 affairs, and waxes exceeding wroth when he 
 thinks that his country is ordering her affairs, 
 on any such principle. 
 
 44 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 For the cause of this we must look to his 
 most strongly marked characteristic. It is his 
 energy. Energy clothes him like a garment ; ! 
 in M. Chevrillon's words " it nourishes and 
 directs all his art." He glorifies the man of '-^ 
 action above all men. His own craft he seems 
 to despise, and I am perfectly certain that had 
 he been given the choice of assisting in the 
 taking of Lungtungpen or describing it, as he 
 has, in one of the best short stories ever written, 
 he would have desired the former. The late 
 Professor Dowden recorded in a recently pub- 
 lished letter that at the last Home Rule crisis 
 he wrote to him, with Swinburne and Mr. 
 William Watson, asking for songs for Unionists 
 in Ireland. Mr. Kipling replied that if one 
 came to him he would send it, but that in his 
 opinion Irish Unionists " needed drilling a 
 damned sight more than doggerel." That is 
 a sentiment most typical of the man. When 
 Irish Unionists took his advice and drilled, he 
 was inspired by them to write poems in their 
 honour. What he loves in England and her 
 history is her restless energy. He delights in 
 her violent aggression of early times. He 
 would not dream of denying that the exploits 
 of Hawkins and Drake were the merest piracy, 
 but the record of them warms his blood not 
 the less for that. In her soberer days he ad- 
 
 45 >.^- 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 mires the cool, steady arrogance wherewith 
 she supports her claims. 
 
 ^*>j What it is plain to see he dreads for England 
 is that her ever-swelling cities with their smoke 
 and foul air should breed — as no observer can 
 doubt they are breeding — a race less steady 
 even if more intelligent, less purposeful, less 
 patriotic, given to v ain cries speedily forgotten, 
 calling only, when its toil is over, for corn 
 and circuses. It is when he imagines he sees 
 traces of such things that his love is changed 
 to anger against his country, that she seems 
 " built of putty, brass and paint," that he 
 attacks her with the scathing reproof of The 
 Islanders. 
 
 ^ It is this energy that accounts for the small 
 part that women play in his work. Like his 
 favourite hero, the ' Brushwood Boy,' he 
 wants to play his game without " petticoats 
 in the court." I say this despite my belief 
 that much nonsense has been talked as to his 
 attitude to women, but that I shall discuss 
 later on. One point in this connection may, 
 however, now be noticed. In their book on 
 him Messrs. G. F. Monkswood and George 
 Gamble say : " I have never met a woman that 
 was a Kiplingite, and I should not have be- 
 lieved it if I had. The writings of Rudyard 
 Kipling do not appeal to women, perhaps be- 
 
 46 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 cause they are not intended so to do." My 
 own experience has been precisely the contrary. 
 The two warmest admirers of his work, one of 
 his short stories, the other of his poetry, that I 
 have met were women, and I have known 
 others almost equally enthusiastic. I believe 
 that it is his very energy and violence that 
 appeals to them. Certainly I remember that 
 the poetry-lover, an actress, who at the slightest 
 provocation would stand on the hearth-rug and 
 recite for an hour on end, had a partiality for 
 The Ballad of Fisher''s Boar ding-House and 
 The Truce of the Bear, 
 
 It is, I am convinced, energy also that makes 
 him suspicious of and impatient with civiliza- 
 tion. He sees clearly the savage in every man, 
 the savage beneath every system, and he asks 
 if this civilization, admittedly a veneer, be 
 worth while. I do not mean by this that he 
 suggests, or ever would suggest, seriously that 
 we should abandon it, even if we could. But 
 I believe he experiences vague longings for 
 primeval things, vague desires to be rid of 
 complications, to be in a world altogether lower 
 in intelligence but simpler and more natural. 
 And I believe that it is these feelings that were 
 the seed from which sprung the stories of 
 Mowgli. 
 
 These tales of a new Romulus suckled in a 
 47 
 
 i^ 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 she-wolf's litter, of a creature at once man- 
 wolf and god-man, are unique in literature. 
 The nearest approach to an ancestor was Paul 
 et Virginie. The bloom of their charm, at 
 least, whatever be the fate of Mr. Kipling and 
 his works, will never fade. It has been given 
 to their author, as to not more than a few 
 dozen men in all the long roll of literature, to 
 invent a new form of expression, to employ a 
 new convention. Mowgli, the " wise little 
 frog," as the beasts call him, who makes him- 
 self king of the jungle, is not only a most beau- 
 tiful character but a type that has stamped 
 itself upon the minds of men, that has taken a 
 definite and permanent place in English letters. 
 And the marvellous knowledge, the deftness 
 in imparting it, the boldness of imagination in 
 these stories, cause new wonder with every 
 new hour of study. When we read of the lives 
 of the animals, of their customs, their laws, 
 their speech, we say to ourselves not that such 
 they may possibly be, but, in the heat of our 
 enthusiasm, that so they inevitably are. They 
 have a third quality. They are not only the 
 outpouring of their author's most intimate 
 spirit, the results of his search for an ideal 
 man, not only the most daring picture of the 
 life of animals ever drawn, but they are, as 
 The Spectator said of them, "written by a 
 
 48 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 master in allegory of a much higher kind than 
 any which i3Esop ever produced." 
 
 Take as an instance of Mr. Kipling's bold- 
 ness the following passage from The Jungle 
 Book. I think we are — or were till this was 
 written — inclined to credit the monkey with 
 being the most intelligent of beasts. Yet in 
 the jungle he is, we are told, despised utterly. 
 And the reasons given are, when we regard 
 them, very sound indeed. Monkeys are per- 
 haps too highly developed ; they play at being 
 men, but they cannot keep to any purpose. 
 They have no system of life like the other in- 
 habitants of the jungle. Baloo, the old bear, 
 who is the boy Mowgli's tutor, reproving him 
 for playing with the monkeys, gives the 
 reason why the jungle scorns them. 
 
 " Listen, man-cub," said the Bear, and his voice 
 rumbled like thunder on a hot night. " I have taught 
 thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of 
 the jungle — except the Monkey-Folk who live in the 
 trees. They have no law. They are outcaste. They 
 have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words 
 which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and 
 wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our 
 way. They are without leaders. They have no re- 
 membrance. They boast and chatter and pretend 
 that they are a great people about to do great affairs 
 in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds 
 to laughter, and all is forgotten. We of the jungle 
 have no dealings with them." 
 D 49 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 In a passage which seems to have carried 
 conviction to the heart of an Edinburgh 
 reviewer, he suggests that danger may be as 
 thriUing to animals as it sometimes is to man. 
 
 To move down so cunningly that never a leaf 
 stirred ; to wade knee-deep in the roaring shallows 
 that drown all noise from behind ; to drink, looking 
 backward over one's shoulder, every muscle ready 
 for the first desperate bound of keen terror ; to roll 
 on the sandy margin and return, wet-muzzled and 
 well plumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing 
 that all glossy-horned young bucks took a delight in, 
 precisely because they knew that at any moment 
 Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap upon them and 
 bear them down. 
 
 The first story of Mowgli is not in either of 
 the original Jungle Books, but appeared in 
 Many Inventions. It is called In the Rukh, and 
 introduces Mowgli, a man full-grown, after he 
 has been cast forth from the jungle. But 
 somehow Mowgli, his face " that of an angel 
 strayed among the woods," has not the same 
 glamour in contact with white men as with his 
 wolf-brethren and Bagheera the black panther. 
 His world is the ideal world of fantasy, not a 
 world that holds officials of the Indian Woods 
 and Forests Department or Mohammedan but- 
 lers and their beautiful daughters. And this, 
 even though the tale of a human infant suckled 
 by wild beasts is, if we can believe the peasants 
 
 50 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 of jungle villages, less improbable than it may 
 sound. 
 
 It is curious that while I was engaged upon 
 this chapter there should have appeared in The 
 Irish Times of July the 27th, 1914, a leading 
 article on this very subject, under the heading 
 ' A Jungle Story.' It may be of interest, 
 though I do not consider that it matters very 
 greatly whether or not there could possibly 
 have existed such a creature as Mowgli. This 
 newspaper, which is by no means " flighty," 
 says : 
 
 " A story comes from India, apparently on ^^ 
 good authority, which shows that the tale of 
 Mowgli is not entirely fantastic. A wild 
 creature, found in the jungle, has turned out 
 to be a human child — a girl. She is almost 
 unrecognisable as such, since hair has grown 
 on both sides of her face and her spine, but 
 vaccination marks have been found on her 
 arms, so that there can be no doubt of her 
 humanity. She has lost most of her human 
 characteristics, except that of walking upright. 
 Her other postures and actions are those of a 
 monkey, and, of course, she cannot speak. 
 \Yhen taken into captivity she was frightened, 
 and declined to eat anything except grass and 
 raw potatoes. It is believed that the child 
 was abandoned in her infancy, and adopted 
 
 51 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 and brought up by monkeys, although the 
 natives hold that her foster-parents were bears. 
 At any rate, we seem to have here a case where 
 a human being, beginning in extreme youth, 
 has lived like a beast with beasts, and on friendly 
 terms with them, and has become to all out- 
 ward appearances a beast herself. The incident 
 suggests many interesting problems. . . ." 
 
 The best of all the stories is Red Dog. It 
 tells of how the dhole, the red dog of the 
 Dekkan, which runs in great packs of two or 
 three himdred and before which all things flee, 
 comes north. Mowgli has by this cut himself 
 off from the wolf pack, but he volunteers to 
 aid it now. The wolf pack ranges itself on 
 the shores of the River Waingunga, which the 
 dhole will have to cross to meet it. The pack 
 numbers but forty wolves, but the mother- 
 wolves come from their lairs to swell its num- 
 bers. Meanwhile Mowgli sets out to meet the 
 dhole pack, and having done so climbs a tree, 
 seizes the leader as he springs up at him and 
 cuts off his tail with the knife he always carries. 
 This makes it certain that the dholes will never 
 leave his trail. He reaches the ground and 
 manages to slip away unscathed, while they 
 follow with the slow, tireless lope that is their 
 only pace. Mowgli dashes through the rocks 
 where hive in countless millions the fierce wild 
 
 52 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 bees, the Little People whom the folk of the 
 jungle know to be its most powerful inmates, 
 and plunges into the river as the roar of their 
 angry rising sounds in his ears. Half the pack 
 is destroyed by the bees ; the rest takes to the 
 water and meets the wolves on the opposite 
 bank. The description of the fight ensuing is 
 one of Mr. Kipling's most graphic passages. 
 Here I will give what of it space permits : 
 
 Then the long fight began, heaving and straining 
 and splitting and scattering and narrowing and broad- 
 ening along the red wet sands . . . for even now the 
 dholes were two to one. But they met wolves fighting 
 for all that made the pack, and not only the short, 
 deep-chested white-tusked hunters of the pack, but 
 the wild-eyed lahinis — the she-wolves of the lair, as 
 the saying is — fighting for their litters, with here and 
 there a yearling wolf, his first coat still half woolly, 
 tugging and grappling by their sides. A wolf, you 
 must know, flies at the throat or snaps at the flank, 
 while a dhole by preference bites low, so when the 
 dholes were struggling out of the water and had to 
 raise their heads the odds were with the wolves ; on 
 dry land the wolves suffered, but in the water or on 
 land Mowgli's knife came and went the same. . . . 
 Here would be a heaving mound, like a water-blister 
 in a whirlpool, which would break like a water-blister, 
 and throw up four or five mangled dogs, each striving 
 to get back to the centre ; here would be a single wolf 
 borne down by two or three dholes, dragging them 
 forward, and sinking the while ; here a yearling cub 
 would be held up by the pressure around him, though 
 
 53 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 he had been killed early in the fight, while his mother, 
 crazed with dumb grief, rolled over snapping and 
 passing on ; and in the middle of the thickest fight, 
 perhaps, one wolf and one dhole, forgetting every- 
 thing else, would be manoeuvring for first hold till 
 they were swept away by a rush of yelling fighters. 
 Once Mowgli passed Akela, a dhole on either flank, 
 and his all but toothless jaws closed over the loins of 
 a third ; and once he saw Phaon, his teeth set in the 
 throat of a dhole, tugging the unwilling beast forward 
 till the yearlings could finish him. But the bulk of 
 the fight was blind flurry and smother in the dark ; 
 hit, trip and tumble, yelp, groan and worry-worry- 
 worry round him and behind him and above him. 
 
 There is something all Homeric in this 
 description, with its sense of vague, stark fury 
 and slaughter blended with precise incidents 
 like that of the leader of the pack dragging 
 forward a dhole for the yearlings, who would 
 be outside the thickest of the flight, to despatch. 
 
 I remember that when as a boy I read The 
 Jungle Books, I felt a passionate protest rise 
 in me when Mowgli quitted the beasts he loved 
 and returned to men. When his friends, 
 Bagheera the black panther, who bought his 
 life with the price of a bull when an infant, 
 Baloo who taught him, Kaa the forty-foot rock 
 pjrthon who had so often befriended him. Grey 
 Brother the eldest of the litter wherein he was 
 suckled, bid him farewell, the pathos equals 
 
 54 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 the force of that passage I have just quoted. 
 Cries the panther : 
 
 *' Good hunting on a new trail, Master of the 
 Jungle ! Remember Bagheera loved thee." 
 
 " Thou hast heard," said Baloo. " There is no 
 more. Go now ; but first come to me. O wise little 
 Frog, come to me ! " 
 
 " It is hard to cast the skin," said Kaa, as Mowgli 
 sobbed and sobbed with his head on the blind bear's 
 side and his arms round his neck, while Baloo tried 
 feebly to lick his feet. 
 
 " The stars are thin," said Grey Brother, snuffing 
 at the dawn wind. " Where shall we lair to-day ? 
 For, from now we follow new trails." 
 
 Mr. Kipling's study of animals and wild life 
 generally is a part only of the store upon which 
 he can draw. He is, in fact, interested in and 
 informed upon an amazing number of subjects 
 — excellently " documented," as the French 
 critics say. It is mainly for this that he has 
 been compared to Flaubert and his disciple 
 Maupassant. But if he has given to no one 
 subject a tenth of the study of Flaubert, he has 
 attacked ten times as many subjects and drawn 
 ten times as many types. It has been declared 
 of him that he writes of " the Hoogli like a 
 Calcutta pilot, of elephants like a mahout, of 
 the boar and the nilghai like a native hunter, 
 of the poor like the president of a charitable 
 society, like a detective of the criminal, like an 
 
 55 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 intelligent drunkard of beer and gin " (Chev- 
 rillon). To this catalogue it might be added 
 that he describes the horses in the stables of 
 the Maharajah of Jodhpur as if he were a stud 
 groom, that he talks of machines — and how 
 often has he been reproached therewith ! — like 
 a Scotch engineer. The scenes of his stories are 
 laid in India, South Africa, the Grand Banks, 
 the United States of America, the South Sea 
 Islands, Devonshire, Sussex, the East End of 
 London. He has knowledge — or at least the 
 appearance of knowledge, for Europeans must 
 take his word on some of these subjects — of the 
 nature of Indian priests and fakirs, of Simla 
 drawing-rooms, of opium -dens, mosques, ze- 
 nanas, as well as Kensington studios, Sussex 
 country-houses. 
 
 Like Flaubert, he has gained all this know- 
 ledge by very careful observation. There are 
 times when we can say with absolute certainty 
 that he is recording something that he has 
 actually seen or heard. When Private Stanley 
 Ortheris, supping with Mulvaney and Learoyd 
 on the roof of a carriage during a regimental 
 ball, calls their stolen champagne "the Colonel's 
 pet noosance," that is not audacity or skill, but 
 simply reporting. Such phrases are not invented 
 by anybody but a Cockney. But it is seldom 
 that he leaves us with such a certainty. Even 
 
 56 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 in cases like these, where we feel that he is 
 giving us " life itself," as admirers of our boring 
 present-day realists call it, he does not make 
 the realism aggressive. He understands too 
 well that mere slices of life, untinged with the 
 imagination of the retailer, are wearisome. He 
 knows — and would that the knowledge were 
 more widely diffused ! — that the average man 
 and woman in their average surroundings are 
 not interesting. Taken at a climax, set in un- 
 wonted surroundings, subjected to unusual in- 
 fluences, they may play their part worthily in 
 any tale of " human interest." In their ordinary 
 moods and avocations we see enough of them 
 as it is. 
 
 On the other hand, he does not always report 
 with complete accuracy ; he allows his likings 
 and dislikings to come between his eyes and 
 what they look upon. For example, he dis- 
 likes — certainly at one time disliked — Russians. 
 He has possibly met and assuredly heard of 
 Russian officers travelling in India, ostensibly 
 for sport, but glad to pick up any information 
 to be had. Yet he draws in Kim — and it is the 
 only false character in the book^— a Russian 
 spy who is precisely the type of man that would 
 last be chosen for such delicate work, since he 
 is bad-tempered, thoughtless, and full of stupid 
 arrogance. [On the other hand, he likes children, 
 
 57 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 and loves to bring them triumphant out of 
 every difficulty. Therefore he makes Wee 
 Willie Winkie — who is, nevertheless, a most 
 delightful person — frankly incredible. This 
 child of six, we are to believe, delivers a lady 
 from armed rebels with a courage and a cool 
 audacity that a brigadier of twenty campaigns 
 might envy. But probably every reporter has 
 his prejudicesTl 
 
 Mr. F. L. Knowles in A Kipling Primer, 
 followed by Dr. Leeb-Lundberg in Word- 
 formation in Kipling, states that his work may 
 be divided into three periods, during which 
 three characteristics were predominant. These 
 are (1) the Satirical Treatment of Character, 
 
 (2) the Sympathetic Treatment of Character, 
 
 (3) the Spiritual Treatment. Such hard-cut 
 lines of division are of little service, but it is 
 true to say that Mr. Kipling was very cynical 
 in youth, that later he broadened, and presently 
 also deepened. The Spiritual Period, accord- 
 ing to Dr. Leeb-Lundberg, " the great spectacle 
 of man's eternal struggle to assert himself 
 against the many-armed powers of fate," comes 
 with The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. 
 
 However this may be,[it is the case that the 
 very earliest Mr. Kipling can be sympathetic, 
 and even tender, and that the later can be 
 exceedingly brutal. The Drums of the Fore and 
 
 58 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 Aft, for example, is an intimate study of the 
 ' nerves ' that may affect the raw young 
 soldier, not over-ably ledj All his emotions 
 when under fire for the first time, when he sees 
 his neighbour " turn over with the rattle of 
 fire-irons falling into the fender, and the grunt 
 of a poll-axed ox," are analysed with skill and 
 sympathy. The author lets us know that the 
 soldiers of other regiments despise these men, 
 tells how a dying Highlander refuses to take 
 a drink of water from the flask of one of them', 
 but he does not himself condemn, and he pities 
 — because he understands. He shows the same 
 kindly comprehension of the boy in Thrown 
 Away, who shoots himself after a course of 
 wild extravagance and dissipation when a 
 strong hand might have guided him through 
 certain early quicksands in his path and set 
 him upon firm ground beyond that his feet 
 would never have left. On the other hand, he 
 has sometimes a passage in which he seems to 
 paint himself, as apart from his puppets, 
 brutal. The Solid Muldoon begins thus : 
 
 There had been a royal dog-fight in the ravine at i- 
 the back of the rifle-butts, between Learoyd's Jock 
 and Ortheris's Blue Rot — both mongrel Rampan 
 hounds, chiefly ribs and teeth. It lasted for twenty 
 happy, howling minutes, and then Blue Rot collapsed 
 and Ortheris paid Learoyd tliree rupees, and we were 
 all very thirsty. 
 
 59 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Now doubtless such a scene would be a " royal " 
 one to such men as Learoyd and Ortheris, but 
 a real, serious dog-fight is to the gentleman of 
 to-day — though it was not to his grandfather, 
 be it remarked — an unpleasant affair. When 
 it is carried on till one of the combatants 
 " collapses," most of us find it rather sickening. 
 
 The last characteristic of Mr. Kipling that I 
 will here notice is his humour. J His literary 
 parentage has been the subjeciB of some not 
 very conclusive discussion. Stevenson has 
 been suggested as having influenced him in his 
 choice of matter, the language of the Bible im- 
 doubtedly put its mark upon his style, and 
 Henley may have helped to shape his patriotic 
 verse. I have often thought that his grimness, 
 his irony, his conciseness and precision of style 
 place him in some proximity to Prosper 
 Merim^e. 
 
 |It is at least certain that so far as his humour 
 is concerned, he is the child of the Americans, 
 above all of Mark Twain. VHe can be when it 
 pleases him sardonically humorous and cleverly 
 — sometimes a thought cheaply — witty.' But 
 for the most part his humour is that of Mark 
 Twain and the author of The Luck of Roaring 
 Camp, bubbling, kindly, coarse, it may be, but 
 real and true. It does not gradually steal over 
 us ; it strikes us suddenly and violently like a 
 
 60 
 
LITERARY FOUNDATIONS 
 
 slap on the back. I believe that few normally 
 constituted persons could read, for example, 
 Mulvaney's exchanges with his friend Hogan, 
 while the latter played Hamlet at Silver's 
 Theatre, Dublin, without mirth : 
 
 " Hamlut," sez I, " there's a hole in your heel. 
 Pull up your shtoekin's, Hamlut," sez I. " Hamlut, 
 Hamlut, for the love av decincy dhrop that skull an' 
 pull up your shtoekin's."' The whole house begun 
 to tell him that. He stopped his soliloquishms mid- 
 between. " My shtoekin's may be comin' dowTi or 
 they may not," sez he, screwin' his eye into the gallery, 
 for well he knew who I was. " But afther this per- 
 formince is over me an' the Ghost'll trample the tripes 
 out av you, Terence, wid your ass's bray ! " 
 
 But all these various characteristics will 
 most clearly appear when Mr. Kipling's novels, 
 short stories and poems are discussed and 
 analysed. I have but one remark more to 
 make ere I turn to the last. There has been 
 some criticism of his early stories of the social 
 life ii. 'India on moral grounds. But it must 
 be remembered that he has never tried to 
 besugar adultery, to make it attractive. It is, 
 in fact, not with the first raptures that he has 
 concerned himself, but with the weary, sordid 
 days of satiety and disgust and struggle to be 
 free. And if in reply it be urged that the same 
 argument could be used in defence of Zola, the 
 
 61 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 last defendant for whom I should desire to hold 
 a brief, but who cannot be accused of making 
 vice pleasant, I can only answer that Zola's 
 chief crimes are, first that he is needlessly dis- 
 gusting, which Mr. Kipling is but seldom, and 
 second that he is long-winded and monstrously 
 dull, which Mr. Kipling is never. In any case, 
 he has left Mrs. Herriott and Captain Gadsby, 
 Mrs. Boulte and Captain Kurrell far behind. 
 
 62 
 
IV 
 
 POETRY 
 
 /It may be said to begin with that Mr. KipHng's ^ 
 poetry suffers in comparison with his prose, 
 forasmuch as a greater proportion of it is 
 didactic. The lessons he would teach he has 
 striven "to teach by means of his verses rather 
 than his stories.^ I do not desire to enter now 
 upon the weary old controversy concerning 
 subjective and objective standards of beauty 
 or merit, merely to assert my conviction that 
 — ceteris paribus, as the professors say — what 
 is created by the imagination, what is born 
 inevitably, must be better and purer art than 
 what is manufactured with half an eye to its 
 own perfection and half upon somethin^ex- 
 terior which it is designed to influence. /Now 
 Mr. Kipling has written a great deal of his 
 poetry — perhaps the greater part of it — with 
 the object of warning, of exhorting, of criticiz- 
 ing his country menj? and, but for one not very 
 important allegory* in a late book, no prose 
 that can be said to have such a direct end. 
 
 63 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 To that extent his poetry is handicapped in 
 competition with his prose. 
 
 It was Departmental Ditties, as I have already 
 remarked, that brought Mr. Kiphng his earhest 
 fame. Looking back twenty years, with the 
 bulk of his subsequent poetry as our criterion, 
 we shall be disposed to consider that their 
 importance was exaggerated. We shall admit, 
 however, that they were clever, witty, and 
 novel. 
 
 They were novel, but by no means original. 
 Swinburne was parodied in this fashion : 
 
 Before the beginning of years 
 There came to the rule of the State 
 Men with a pair of shears, 
 Men with an Estimate — 
 Strachey with Muir for leaven, 
 Lytton with locks that fell, 
 Rippon fooling with Heaven, 
 And Temple riding like H — 11 ! 
 
 which is scarcely worth while. And a parody 
 dealing with the currency such as The Rupaiyat 
 of Omar KaVvin cannot possess, and cannot 
 have been intended to possess, more than a 
 very transient interest. There were, however, 
 better things than this, light, graceful vers de 
 societe, worthy of any of the masters of this 
 somewhat difficult art. One of the best and 
 merriest is An Old Song, that goes with a 
 delightful swing. The last verse is as follows : 
 
 64 
 
POETRY 
 
 By Docket, Billetdoux, and File, 
 
 By Mountain, Cliff, and Fir, 
 By Fan and Sword and Office-box, 
 
 By Corset, Plume, and Spur, 
 By Riot, Revel, Waltz and War, 
 
 By Women, Work and Bills, 
 By all the life that fizzes in 
 
 The everlasting Hills, 
 
 If you love me as I love you 
 What pair so happy as we two ? 
 
 The Mare's Nest and Pink Dominoes are of the 
 same type — light fare but spicy. 
 
 There were also exercises in that sort of satire 
 and cynicism that abounds in Plain Tales from 
 the Hills. The most famous of these is the 
 Study of an Elevation, in Indian Ink. Potiphar 
 Gubbins, c.e., its hero, is become a household 
 word. He is an eternal type, that flourishes 
 under every bureaucracy. Again I quote only 
 the last verse, which gives the key-note of the 
 poem. 
 
 Lovely Mehitabel Lee 
 
 Let me enquire of thee, 
 
 Should I have riz to what Potiphar is 
 
 Hadst thou been mated to Me ? 
 
 But far better than this is The Story of Uriah, 
 with its deep and bitter indignation, concealed 
 at first under a light tone, but bursting out 
 unrestrained in the last verse. Mr. Kipling is 
 not laughing, he is lashing somebody with a 
 cutting-whip in this tale of how 
 E Q5 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Jack Barrett went to Quetta 
 And there gave up the ghost ; 
 
 Attempting two men's duty 
 In that very healthy post ; 
 
 And Mrs. Barrett mourned for him 
 Five lively months at most. 
 
 Jack Barrett's bones at Quetta 
 
 Enjoy profound repose ; 
 But I shouldn't be astonished 
 
 If now his spirit knows 
 The reason of his transfer 
 
 From the Himalayan snows. 
 
 And when the Last Great Bugle Call 
 
 Adown the Hurnai throbs, 
 When the last grim joke is entered 
 
 In the big black Book of Jobs, 
 And Quetta gi-aveyards give again 
 
 Their victims to the air, 
 I shouldn't like to be the man, 
 
 Who sent Jack Barrett there. 
 
 The rhetorical Ballad of Fisher's Boarding- 
 House, Hke the later Ballad of East and West, 
 and certain other poems would be dearer to us 
 did we not instinctively associate it with an 
 earnest rhapsodist, reciting amidst the blue 
 haze of a smoking concert. Not even this train 
 of ideas can rob us of our pleasure in the splen- 
 did, swinging Galley-Slave, probably an alle- 
 gory of the Indian Civil Service. 
 
 UEnvoi, addressed To whom it may concern, 
 is entirely different from anything else in the 
 book, and is a forerunner of those simple and 
 
 66 
 
POETRY 
 
 beautiful poems, generally in praise of the 
 English countryside, that he was to put forth 
 in after years. It has a charm that recalls 
 some of the songs of Davenant and Sterling — 
 to put it no higher. 
 
 The smoke upon your Altar dies, 
 
 The flowers decay, 
 The Goddess of your sacrifice 
 t Has flown away. 
 
 What profit then to sing or slay 
 The sacrifice from day to day ? 
 
 I remember showing Departmental Ditties to a 
 foreigner, an acute if rather narrow critic, who 
 knew the British language and literature far 
 better than I do myself. He looked through it 
 for half an hour, then came to me with the 
 page open from which this verse is quoted. 
 
 " All this may be clever stuff, but it's not 
 poetry," was his comment. " This here is the 
 only poem in the book." 
 
 Most emphatically I disagreed ; yet I felt 
 that I could understand. 
 
 JBarrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses marky^ 
 a long step forward. Grip, precision, control 
 over metre, have increased infinitely. The 
 slang, of the canteen is used with amazing 
 skillTj These poems bear the same relation to 
 Soldiers Three as Departmental Ditties to Plain 
 Tales. But it was probably a greater achieve- 
 
 67 
 
 
\ 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 ment to put the thoughts of the private soldier 
 into verse than to write stories of his doings. 
 Since these songs were written there has been 
 a great change in the attitude of the general 
 public to the army. Something of this change 
 is doubtless due to an improvement in the 
 class of man who enlists and in his behaviour 
 thereafter ; something to the fact that we are 
 as a people more thoughtful than we were 
 twenty years ago. But perhaps even more is 
 owing to society's greater knowledge of the 
 soldier's life, in imparting which knowledge 
 Mr. Kipling has been almost alone. He voiced 
 the unhappiness of being misunderstood, the 
 impatience of never-ending criticism, the desire 
 for sympathy in the plea : 
 
 We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards 
 
 too, 
 But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you. 
 
 The soldier knew his service : 
 
 Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor 
 
 For 'alf o' creation she owns ; 
 We 'ave bought 'er the same withthe sword an' the flame, 
 
 An' we've salted it down with our bones. 
 
 He knew also how to respect a worthy foe, and 
 none more than " Fuzzy- Wuzz," the howling 
 Dervish of the Soudan, who is not only hard to 
 kill but " generally shammin' when 'e's dead." 
 He tells us candidly that : 
 
 68 
 
POETRY 
 
 An 'appy day with Fuzzy on the rush 
 Will last an 'ealthy Tommy for a year. 
 
 His less regenerate moments are suggested in 
 the sardonic philosophy of The Ladies and 
 Loot. The latter shows the advance of his 
 power since An Old Song. Mr. Le Gallienne 
 has called him " master of the singing ballad, 
 with swinging jingle chorus," and this poem is 
 one of the best examples of that class of verse. 
 It begins : 
 
 If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg be'ind the keeper's 
 
 back, / 
 
 If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line, j 
 
 If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 
 'aversack. 
 You will understand this little song o' mine. «' 
 
 Mr. Le Gallienne proceeds to say — and evidently \ 
 he intends it as in some sort a stricture — that \ 
 Mr. Kipling's favourite instrument is the banjo. \ 
 If this be true, it will at least be conceded that 
 he is a master-minstrel. [In Barrack-Room j 
 
 Ballads is a " banjo song " that is not merely 
 his best, but one of the best ever written, even 
 if we hark back to Beranger for a comparison. 
 No poem in English written in the last five-and- 
 twenty years is known so widely, has so taken 
 hold upon the imaginations of English-speak- 
 ing people as MandalayJ Here is a puff of the 
 very wind of Romance, spice-laden, hot from 
 
 69 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 ^^' the burnished East. The battered soldier is 
 looking back to a heaven that distance has 
 made '^all-glorious. 
 
 When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was 
 
 droppin' slow, 
 She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing " Kulla-lo-lp ! " 
 With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin my 
 
 cheek 
 We useter watch the steamers an' the hathis pilin' teak. 
 
 The restlessness, the impatience in the clinging 
 bonds of civilization that are Mr. Kipling's, 
 are put into the words of the private, crying 
 out for the East : 
 
 Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man 
 can raise a thirst. 
 
 The concluding line of the refrain is, I venture 
 to assert, the greatest and most inspired line in 
 contemporary poetry. 
 
 An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost 
 the Bay ! 
 
 " Banjo songs " that are inspired are far finer 
 fare than serious poetry that is not. Just as 
 lolanthe and The Gondoliers are truer art than 
 anything that Gounod or Thomas ever wrote, 
 so Mandalay stands above almost all the work 
 of the respectable poets of the later Victorian 
 era, whom it were invidious to name. 
 
 But in Barrack-Room Ballads there is em- 
 ployed occasionally another instrument than 
 
 70 
 
POETRY 
 
 the banjo — the pipes in their saddest wail. 
 Cholera Camp has running through it a note 
 of poignant distress that tears the heart. 
 
 Oh, strike your camp an' go, the bugle's callin', 
 
 The Rains are fallin' — 
 The dead are bushed an' stoned to keep 'em safe below ; 
 The Band's a-doin' all she knows to cheer us ; 
 The Chaplain's gone and prayed to Gawd to 'ear us — 
 
 To 'ear us — 
 O Lord, for it's a-killin' of us so ! 
 
 But Httle short of this in plaintive intensity is 
 Danny Deever, with its final refrain : 
 
 O, they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'. 
 
 The " Other Verses " contain many fine 
 things, but are not in the main up to the 
 standard of the poems that precede them. 
 The Ballad of the " Bolivar " is one of the best- 
 known, and rings finely with the indignation 
 that we all feel against those who send out 
 ships " meant to founder." The Ballad of 
 East and West has been much criticized, and 
 it is certainly very uneven. Francis Adams in 
 The Fortnightly article which I have mentioned 
 makes one good point in showing the contrast 
 between these two succeeding lines : 
 
 With that he whistled his only son, that dropped from a 
 
 mountain crest — 
 He trod the ling like a buck in spring, and he looked like 
 
 a lance in rest. 
 
 71 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 The first of these Hnes is rodomontade, and it 
 is not unfair to demand how it came that, when 
 after a chase lasting all night the horse of the 
 pursued fell, the only son should happen to be 
 at hand upon a mountain crest within reach of 
 a whistle. The second line is expressive and 
 splendid. The Three Captains, a tale of Paul 
 Jones, is certainly the most obscure of all Mr. 
 Kipling's poems. Cleared is an extraordinarily 
 bitter expression of political feeling, though 
 there is no doubt that it clothed in words the 
 sentiment of a great proportion of the com- 
 munity on the Parnell Commission Report. 
 
 They only took the Judas-gold from Fenians out of jail, 
 They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clan-na- 
 
 Gael. 
 If black is black or white is white, in black and white it's 
 
 down, 
 They're only traitors to the Queen and rebels to the Crown. 
 
 [But it was not till he reached The Seven 
 Seas that Mr. Kipling's destiny was accom- 
 plished. There is therein one poem at least, 
 The Sea and the Hills, that belongs to the very 
 highest order of English poetry, that would 
 deserve a place in a collection of the hundred 
 finest short poems in the language. It is * 
 written in a metre that Swinburne might have 
 used, (with a theme whereon he loved to dwell. 
 No poem that that great master of rhythm 
 
 72 
 
POETRY 
 
 ever put forth excels it. /it is, like much of 
 Swinbui-ne's verse, for the ear even more than 
 the eye, and ono matopoeia is_employed with 
 more than Swinburne's skiTirjjNone save " the 
 man that hath not music in himself " can read 
 aloud the following verse without perceiving 
 how the fifth and sixth lines suggest respec- 
 tively the rush of the wave up the beach and 
 the shorter back-suck as it retreats. 
 
 Who hath desired the Sea ? — the sight of salt water 
 unbounded — 
 
 The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the 
 comber wind-hounded ? 
 
 The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, 
 enormous and gromng — 
 
 Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurri- 
 cane blowing — 
 
 His Sea is no showing the same — his Sea and the same 
 'neath each showing — 
 
 His Sea as she slackens or thrills ? 
 
 So and no other^vise — so and no otherwise — hillmen 
 desire their Hills ! 
 
 If one must so lack grace as to criticize this 
 magnificent poem, the only possible criticism 
 is that its title and the refrain in the last line 
 of each verse are out of place. It is essentially 
 a poem of the sea, and the desire of hillmen for 
 their hills comes as a distraction to the mind 
 if not to the earr/ "^ 
 
 While this is Brst, there are other poems that 
 are fine, though with the best I am not inclined 
 
 73 
 
 / 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 to include The English Flag or the too-famous 
 Envoi beginning : 
 
 When Earth's last picture is painted. 
 
 Tomkinson has a grim and cynical power, and 
 The Lost Legion, the song of the pioneers who 
 say: 
 
 We preach in advance of the Army, 
 We skirmish ahead of the Church, 
 
 is another expression of the love of the primeval 
 to which I have frequently referred. It goes 
 with a swing as fine as that of Loot. 
 
 Then a health (we must drink it in whispers) 
 
 To our wholly unauthorized horde — 
 To the line of our dusty forelopers, 
 
 The Gentlemen Rovers abroad — 
 Yes, a health to ourselves ere we scatter. 
 
 For the steamer won't wait for the train. 
 And the legion that never was 'listed 
 
 Goes back into quarters again ! 
 
 It is curious to note how divergent are the 
 opinions of the critics as to the merits of certain 
 of Mr. Kipling's poems. For example, the 
 Edinburgh reviewer calls M^ Andrew's Hymn 
 " splatterdash writing," while M. Chevrillon 
 considers it as good as anything Browning ever 
 wrote. It has certainly the qualities that are 
 in Browning, for it is compressed and packed 
 with thought. But it does not sustain the 
 interest as Browning's poetry does. He has 
 written, however, certain poems that have little 
 
 74 
 
POETRY 
 
 merit, and one, The Files, that I do not hesitate 
 to call exceedingly bad, and that I was as- 
 tonished to find included in his recently pub- 
 lished Collected Verse. It begins thus : 
 
 FHes— 
 The Files- 
 Office Files ! 
 Oblige me by referring to the files. 
 
 IWith the exception of Mandalay and The 
 Sea and the Hills I believe that every one of 
 Mr. Kipling's finest poems have been poems of 
 patriotism or poems expressive of his love for 
 the English country-side. And it is to the latter, 
 of all his poetry, that least exception can be 
 taken. The man who holds — as there are who 
 hold — that his verse is in the main disfigured 
 by a certain garishness, a straining of the note, 
 can find no such objection to these simple, 
 beautiful lyrics. Those who know only the 
 Kipling of The English Flag, with its trace of 
 bluster, could scarcely imagine that he had 
 written also : 
 
 Buy my English posies ! 
 
 Kent and Surrey may — 
 Violets of the undercliff 
 
 Wet with Channel spray ; 
 Cowslips from a Devon combe — 
 
 Midland furze afire — 
 Buy my English posies 
 
 And I'll sell your heart's desire ; 
 
 75 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 or these beautiful lines from a poem in Puck 
 of Pook's Hill : 
 
 Trackway and Camp and City lost, 
 Salt Marsh where now is corn ; 
 
 Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease. 
 And so was England born ! 
 
 She is not any common Earth, 
 
 Water or wood or air. 
 But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye, 
 
 Where you and I will fare. 
 
 [Mr. Kipling's most famous poem Recessional 
 is one that I do not think will dieTj I think it 
 deserves to live. Those who think the con- 
 trary can console themselves with the reflec- 
 tion that [It is not always the best poems of a 
 popular poet that catch the popular sentiment) 
 Thousands of men know The Charge of the 
 Light Brigade, perhaps large portions of iL by 
 heart, who have never heard of Ulysses. JAnd 
 I believe that it will live as much for its faults 
 as its great merits. For its weakness is the 
 weakness of the English race, an almost in- 
 tolerable arrogance beneath a mask of humility. 
 The Englishman does not boast that he belongs 
 to the greatest race in the world, because he is 
 so convinced thereof that it is not worth while. 
 M. Chevrillon, in a study of English opinion on 
 ^ the Boer War which is bound with that study 
 
 76 
 
POETRY 
 
 of Mr. Kipling that I have so often quoted, 
 notices how absolutely confident we were at 
 that time that we had God on our side. The 
 Boers were, according to the general opinion, 
 a savage, fanatical, untrustworthy race whom 
 it was set upon us to overbear. We did not — 
 till long afterwards — recognize their heroism, 
 we were never allowed to realize the tremendous 
 disproportion of the forces arrayed against one 
 another in the struggle. One heard scarce a 
 generous word throughout the whole duration 
 of the war. I do not mean for an instant that 
 Mr. Kipling is to be included in this general 
 accusation. He knew the Boer farmer too well 
 to despise him. His General Joubert was a 
 noble tribute to a great man. /^ut undoubtedly 
 there is in Recessional a hint of this spirit of 
 arrogance,! a feeling that we are the Lord's 
 peculiar people, that if He fails us it will be 
 because we have deserted Him, not because 
 the cause of the " Gentiles " seems righteous 
 to Him. iMark this arrogance above all in the 
 fourth verse : \ 
 
 ^ God of our fathers, known of old, 
 Lord of our far-fiung battle-line. 
 
 Beneath whose a^vful Hand we hold 
 Dominion over palm and pine — 
 
 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 
 
 77 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 The tumult and the shouting dies ; 
 
 The captains and the kings depart ; 
 Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, 
 
 An humble and a contrite heart. 
 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet. 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 
 
 Far-called, our navies melt away ; 
 
 On dune and headland sinks the fire : 
 Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 
 
 Is one with Nineveh and Tyre ! 
 Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 
 
 If drunk with sight of power, we loose 
 Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe. 
 
 Such boastings as the Gentiles use, 
 Or lesser breeds without the Law — 
 
 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet. 
 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 
 
 For heathen heart that puts her trust 
 In reeking tube and iron shard. 
 
 All valiant dust that builds on dust 
 And guarding, calls not Thee to guard. 
 
 For frantic boast and foolish word — 
 
 Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord. 
 
 When every possible criticism has been made, 
 I still believe that Recessional remains one of 
 the greatest patriotic hymns in the language. 
 It may be — it almost certainly is — illogical on 
 entering into battle to pray to God for victory, 
 while your opponent does likewise with like 
 conviction of a righteous cause. But it will be 
 
 78 
 
POETRY 
 
 done so long as men pray to ^ personal God 
 and so long as they go to wai\^ And we must 
 not forget that in most wars both antagonists 
 have right on their side — not absolute right as 
 it would be understood in a perfect and logical 
 world, but right as it must be understood in 
 the world we live in with its conflicting ideals 
 and creeds and nationalities. And as a patriotic 
 hymn this is nearly perfect ; it has at once 
 simplicity, dignity and sonority. Its biblical 
 language gives to it a sense of awe, so that one 
 can imagine it recited in some vast cathedral 
 on the eve of war amidst an intense, shuddering 
 silence. It is not alone the work of a true poet, 
 but of a poet who understands his countrymen's 
 hearts. 
 
 Parallel with Mr. Kipling's love of the 
 primeval is a curious characteristic, an ab- ^ 
 sorbing interest in the most important ap- 
 panages of civilization, its ships, its machines, 
 its workshops. This will be of great import- 
 ance in the discussion of his stories, but it is 
 also in evidence in certain of his poems. 
 M'' Andrew's Hymn, for example, is full of the 
 throb of ships' engines. He has been careful 
 to point out that this our world is not without 
 its glamour, though he has gone to others for 
 the stories that are deepest charged with its 
 essence. He has noted how each age, up to 
 
 79 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 the present, has mourned the death of Romance 
 
 while 
 
 all unseen 
 Romance brought up the nine-fifteen. 
 
 But he has himself done much to prove that 
 Romance is yet very much alive by the skill 
 with which he has woven it into the technical 
 details of modern affairs. No poem, for 
 example, could be more purely and genuinely 
 romantic than that from which I quote the 
 following verse ; its metre is laden with its 
 hunger and yearning. Yet the first four lines 
 might be taken directly from the mouth of an 
 officer getting his ship under way : 
 
 Heh ! Walk her round. Heave, ah, heave her short again ! 
 
 Over, snatch her over, there, and hold her on the pawl. 
 Loose all sail and brace your yards aback and full — 
 
 Ready jib to pay her off and heave short all ! 
 
 Well, ah fare you well ; we can stay no more 
 
 with you, my love — 
 Down, set down your liquor and your girl from 
 off your knee ; 
 For the wind has come to say : 
 " You must take me while you may 
 If you'd go to Mother Carey ! 
 (Walk her down to Mother Carey !) 
 Oh, we're bound to Mother Carey where she feeds her 
 chicks at sea ! " 
 
 (There yet remains something to be said on 
 the subject of Mr. Kipling's metres. [ I have 
 already mentioned Herr Loewe's Beftrage zur 
 
 80 
 
POETRY 
 
 Metrik Rudyard Kipling's. It is a book that 
 should fill us with national shame — blent with 
 a certain sneaking feeling of national thankful- 
 ness — that such things are not done amongst 
 us. Its thoroughness is appalling. Herr Loewe 
 notes where such different quantities as 'chance' 
 and ' circumstance,' ' land ' and * command ' are 
 made to rime. He calls our attention to ' frock- 
 coat ' and ' beam-sea,' so accented. He is con- 
 cerned over the riming of long and short ' i,' as 
 * wise ' and ' homilies.' Along this nice path I 
 shall not follow him ; I recognize too well that 
 I write for readers infinitely less scientific than 
 his. But I am indebted to him for many sug- 
 gestions, the product of his care and industiy 
 in the study of Mr. Kipling's me,tres. 
 
 These are many and varied, [^ost poets who 
 have great skill in the management of metre, 
 such as Tennyson and Swinburne, love to 
 practise it, and Mr. Kipling's dexterity is not 
 far below that of either. Blank verse he has 
 seldom employed, and rightly, for it is not his 
 natural metre. He has made best use of it, 
 perhaps, in One Viceroy Resigns, from which I 
 have already quoted.J This poem is very closely 
 modelled upon Browning, and in its tone 
 recalls Bishop Blougram's Confession. Giffen's 
 Debt and X^e Sacrifice of Ex-Heh are heavy and 
 lifeless. [There is little swing in his blank verse, 
 F 81 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 little of that elasticity which alone can save 
 this metre from monotony. More complicated 
 as well as simpler metres he has employed with 
 great effect. Years have made him a truer and 
 a deeper poet, but they have not brought him 
 greater dexterity than he possessed when he 
 wrote Christmas in India, in Departmental 
 Ditties : 
 
 Dim dawn behind the tamarisks — the sky is saffron- 
 yellow — 
 As the women in the village grind the corn, 
 And the mynas seek the river-side, each calling to his 
 fellow 
 That the Day, the staring Eastern Day, is born. •. 
 
 iTn later times his poem The Dead King, on the 
 death of His late Majesty King Edward the 
 Seventh, is an example of most masterly 
 handling of very difficult metrej It excited 
 more admiration in Germany, where technical 
 skill is better understood than amongst us, 
 than in this country. [It begins :j 
 
 Who in the realm to-day lays down dear life for the sake 
 
 of a land more dear ? 
 And, unconcerned for his own estate, toils till the last 
 
 grudged sands have run ? 
 
 The Alexandrine he has used in The 'Eathen 
 and The Three-Decker, and with more effect jn 
 the fine Anchor Song in The Seven Seas. [He 
 has employed six-syllable trochaical verse, a 
 
 82 
 
POETRY 
 
 very rare metre in English, in The Sergeant's 
 Wedding : 
 
 'E was warned agin 'er — ^ 
 That's what made 'im look. \ 
 
 QBut great as is his skill in such forms, it is 
 equalled in his treatment of the simplest^ And 
 the skill needed for dealing with very simple 
 forms of verse is as great as that for dealing 
 with very complicated. The " common metre " 
 of the seventeenth century, four lines of alter- 
 nately eight and six feet, cross-riming, has 
 been almost handed over since that day to the 
 use of comic or nursery poets, because since 
 then none have been able to write serious poetry 
 in it. But in those days not only a great poet 
 like Donne but a poetical has bleu like " The 
 Matchless Orinda " could handle it with ease 
 and skill. It was in this metre that Herrick 
 
 wrote : 
 
 No marigolds yet closed are, 
 
 No shadows great appear ; 
 Nor doth the early shepherd's star 
 
 Shine like a spangle here. 
 
 And to show that the art of very simple yet 
 very beautiful verse-making is not dead it 
 needs only to study some of the little poems of 
 Mr. W. H. Davies, smelling of the country and 
 wild flowers and the breath of cattle. 
 (In the simplest dactylic form Mr. Kipling 
 
 83 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 has written one of the most bewitching poems 
 that I know in praise of native land. There is 
 magic in every word, yet not one word that 
 belongs to " poetic diction," scarce one that 
 might not be in the mouth of the humblest^ 
 The Recall is appended, in its author's fashion, 
 to a story in Actions and Reactions called An 
 Habitation Enforced. It relates how an Ameri- 
 can and his wife, visiting Sussex in search of 
 health, are entrapped by its allurements, and 
 how, after they have planned there to take up 
 their abode, it is discovered that the wife's 
 ancestors sprang from those parts. The story 
 I shall consider later. [With the poem I shall 
 conclude my study of this branch of Mr. 
 Kipling's art. 
 
 I am the land of their fathers, 
 
 In me the virtue stays ; 
 I will bring back my children 
 
 After certain days. 
 
 Under their feet in the grasses 
 
 My clinging magic runs. 
 They shall return as strangers, 
 
 They shall remain as sons. 
 
 Over their heads in the branches 
 Of their new-bought ancient trees, 
 
 I weave an incantation, 
 
 And draw them to my knees. 
 
 84 
 
POETRY 
 
 Scent of smoke in the evening, 
 
 Smell of rain in the night, 
 The hours, the days and the seasons, 
 
 Order their souls aright ; 
 
 Till I make plain the meaning 
 Of all my thousand years — 
 
 Till I fill their hearts with knowledge. 
 While I fill their eyes with tears. Jj 
 
 85 
 
V 
 
 SHORT STORIES: I 
 
 In Mr. Kipling's early stories cynicism was, 
 after descriptive power, the most striking 
 characteristic. For the cynic there could be 
 no sight more entertaining than the spectacle 
 of social life in India. That social life may 
 seem at first view incredible, but carefully 
 considered it proves to be such as might be 
 expected. Set beneath a semi-tropical sun a 
 large but scattered colony of English men and 
 women, belonging to the upper and upper- 
 middle classes, for the most part young or in 
 the prime of life. Remove from them the 
 influence of that lower-middle class which is 
 at home so stern a censor of morals. Let the 
 women be so cunningly served that they are 
 well-nigh freed from those household cares that 
 would otherwise engage them. Give the men 
 in their turn tasks which demand, as well as 
 courage and absolute self-confidence, fierce 
 bursts of painful energy, but allow long inter- 
 vals of leisure. The obvious result from these 
 
 86 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 conditions will be a certain contempt for 
 ordinary social obligations, a general slacken- 
 ing of the bonds of social discipline. And the 
 restraints of sexual relationship will not be the 
 last to be loosened. 
 
 It was upon these foibles that the young 
 cynic directed the raking fires of his wit. He 
 observed with his keen eyes the Mrs. Hauks- 
 bees and the Mrs. Reivers, middle-aged women 
 with a propensity for young men and the skill 
 of a condottiere in the pursuit of their quarry. 
 He draws them for us with marvellous fidelity, 
 even if he sees not very de^p into their souls. 
 When he relates the conversation of two ladies 
 of this type, as in The Education of Otis Yere, 
 the only word we can find to describe the im- 
 pression made upon us is " uncanny." Even 
 when a maid is wooed in the East, it is a 
 " brazen business," he tells us, " when half the 
 community stand back and bet on the result, 
 and the other half wonder what Mrs. So-and-So 
 will say to it." And if he is never salacious, 
 he certainly never minces his words. What 
 could be bolder in the nineties than such an 
 opening as : " Once upon a time there was a 
 Man and his Wife and a Tertium Quid " ? It 
 is also a model from the artistic point of view, 
 since it brings the whole situation into focus 
 with almost unexampled compression. 
 
 87 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 All the characteristics of these early stories 
 are to be found in The Story of the Gadshys. 
 Here the powers that he possessed in those 
 days, if far below those that he afterwards 
 attained, are at their highest. The Story of 
 the Gadshys has been condemned on the score 
 of vulgarity, I think somewhat unfairly. It is, 
 one must admit, not a pleasant tale. Most of 
 Mr. Kipling's early women were sorceresses, 
 and there is something of the sorceress even 
 about the bread-and-butter Miss Minnie Three- 
 gan, and something a little disagreeable about 
 her fashion of captivating the fine brute 
 Captain Gadsby. There is one brilliant and 
 extraordinarily cruel scene between Gadsby 
 and his whilom mistress when he tells her of 
 his engagement, that I must quote at some 
 length. The explanation between them has 
 been put off by him again and again, till at 
 last, meeting her at a banquet, he decides that 
 it can be put off no longer! 
 
 Mrs. Herriott. {After conversation has risen to 
 proper y itch.) Ali. Didn't see you in the crush in the 
 drawing-room. {Sotto voce.) Where have you been 
 all this time, Pip ? 
 
 Captain Gadsby. {Turning from regularly ordained 
 dinner -partner and settling hock-glasses.) Good even- 
 ing. {Sotto voce.) Not quite so loud another time. 
 You've no notion how your voice carries. {Aside.) 
 
 88 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 So much for shirking the written explanation. It'll 
 have to be a verbal one now. Sweet prospect. . . . 
 
 Then, after a long conversation : 
 
 Mrs. H. Oh, what is the good of squabbling and 
 pretending to misunderstand when you are only up 
 for a short time ? Pip, don't be a stupid ! 
 
 Follows a pause, during which he crosses his left leg 
 over his right and continues his dinner. 
 
 Capt. G. {In answer to the thunderstorm in her eyes.) 
 Corns — my worst. 
 
 Mrs. H. Upon my word, you are the very rudest 
 man in the world ! I'll never do it again. 
 
 Capt. G. {Aside.) No, I don't think you will ; but 
 I wonder what you will do before it's all over. {To 
 Khitmatgar.) Thorah ur Simpkin do. 
 
 Mrs. H. Well ! Haven't you the grace to apologise, 
 bad man ? 
 
 Capt. G. {Aside.) I mustn't let it drift back now. 
 Trust a woman for being as blind as a bat when she 
 won't see. 
 
 Mrs. H. I'm waiting : or would you like me to 
 dictate a form of apology ? 
 
 Capt. G. {Desperately.) By all means dictate. 
 
 Mrs. H. {Lightly.) Very well. Rehearse your 
 several Christian names after me and go on : " Pro- 
 fess my sincere repentance." 
 
 Capt. G. " Sincere repentance — - — " 
 
 Mrs. H. " For having behaved " 
 
 Capt. G. {Aside.) At last ! I wish to goodness 
 she'd look away. " For having behaved " — as I have 
 behaved, and declare that I am thoroughly and 
 heartily sick of the whole business, and take this 
 
 89 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 opportunity of making clear my intention of ending 
 it, now, henceforth, and forever. (Aside.) If anyone 
 had told me I should be such a blackguard ! 
 
 Mrs. H. (Shaking a spoonful of potato chips into 
 her plate.) That's not a pretty joke. 
 
 Capt. G. No. It's a reality. (Aside.) 1 wonder if 
 smashes of this kind are always so raw. 
 
 Mrs. H. Really, Pip, you're getting more absurd 
 every day. 
 
 Capt. G. I don't think you quite understand me. 
 Shall I repeat it ? 
 
 Mrs. H. No ! For pity's sake don't do that. It's 
 too terrible, even in fun. 
 
 Capt. G. (Aside.) I'll let her think it over for a 
 while. But I ought to be horsewhipped. 
 
 Mrs. H. I want to know what you meant by what 
 you said just now. 
 
 Capt. G. Exactly what I said. No less. 
 
 Mrs. H. But what have I done to deserve it ? 
 What have I done ? 
 
 Capt. G. (Aside.) If she only wouldn't look at me. 
 (Aloud and very slowly, his eyes on his plate.) D'you 
 remember that evening in July, before the Rains 
 broke, when you said that the end would have to 
 come sooner or later — and you wondered for which of 
 us it would come first ? 
 
 Mrs. H. Yes ! I was only joking. And you swore 
 that, as long as there was breath in your body, it 
 should never come. And I believed you. 
 
 A long pause, during which Mrs. H. bows her head 
 and rolls the bread-twist into little pellets : G. stares at 
 the Oleanders. 
 
 Mrs. H. (Throwing back her head and laughing 
 
 90 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 naturally.) They train us women well, don't they, 
 Pip ? . . . 
 
 Then the storm bursts. She demands the 
 reasons why their intimacy should come to an 
 end, divining another woman. This Gadsby 
 at first denies, but is finally driven to admit. 
 She then tries to persuade him that from no 
 other woman will he ever receive the love that 
 she has given him. She breaks out : 
 
 Don't tell me anything about her ! She won't care 
 for you, and when you come back, after having made 
 an exhibition of yourself, you'll find me occupied 
 with 
 
 Capt. G. (Insolently.) You couldn't while I'm 
 alive. (Aside.) If that doesn't bring her pride to her 
 rescue, nothing will. 
 
 Mrs. H. (Drawing herself up.) Couldn't do it ? 
 I? (Softening.) You're right. I don't believe I could 
 — though you are what you are — a coward and a liar 
 in grain. . . . 
 
 She continues in this ignominious vein, 
 finally, as she rises to go, pleading : 
 
 When it's all over, come back to me, come back to 
 me, and you'll find that you are my Pip still ! 
 
 Capt. G. (Very clearly.) False move, and you pay 
 for it. It's a girl ! 
 
 Mrs. H. (Rising.) Then it was true ! They said 
 — but I wouldn't insult you by asking. A girl ! / 
 was a girl not very long ago. Be good to her, Pip. 
 I daresay she believes in you. 
 
 91 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Goes out with an uncertain smile. He watches her 
 through the door, and settles into a chair as the men 
 redistribute themselves. 
 
 Capt. G. Now, if there is any Power who looks 
 after this world, will He kindly tell me what I have 
 done ? {Reaching out for the claret, and half aloud.) 
 What have I done ? 
 
 This is the central scene of the drama, the 
 rest of which need not concern us. I believe 
 that almost everybody who reads it will come 
 to this conclusion. It may not be great art — 
 it is not great art — but it is powerful, full of 
 energy and movement, true to a brutal side 
 of life. It deals with the proper matter of 
 tragedy, men and women at odds with fate. 
 For Captain Gadsby is not a liar and coward 
 in grain as Mrs. Herriott calls him, nor an 
 utter blackguard as he dubs himself. He is 
 merely, as I have said, a fine brute, who loves 
 Minnie Threegan with a better and less brutal 
 love than he has ever before felt, and who tells 
 his mistress of the change with blundering and 
 cruel stupidity. 
 
 "^ Of all the " sex stories," perhaps the most 
 blisteringly cynical is A Wayside Comedy. 
 There is little pleasure in the mirth of the 
 observer of this extraordinary menage a cinq. 
 The scene is a little isolated station where the 
 
 92 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 English population consists of Boulte, an 
 engineer, his wife and Captain Kurrell. 
 
 Kurrell had discovered that Mrs. Boulte was the 
 one woman in the world for him and — you cannot 
 blame them. 
 
 To these are added Major Vansuyther and 
 his beautiful wife. Fiercely jealous because 
 her lover is paying attentions to Mrs. Vansuy- 
 ther, Mrs. Boulte in a wild outburst tells her 
 husband the truth, and that she hates him. 
 She goes over later to Mrs. Vansuyther's 
 house, and enters in time to hear her husband 
 declaring his passionate love for that lady, 
 adding that he need not consider his wife, who 
 is the mistress of Captain Kurrell. Mrs. 
 Vansuyther replies that this is incredible, since 
 Captain Kurrell has already told her that he 
 cares not a rap for Mrs. Boulte, and that there 
 is nothing between them. She, poor woman, 
 whose fatal beauty has been responsible for all 
 the pother, hates the very sight of both men, 
 and cares only for her husband. There follow^s 
 a scene in which Mrs. Boulte faints, then 
 another between Boulte and Kurrell, the 
 former madly jealous, not because he has been 
 betrayed, but because Kurrell has made love 
 to Mrs. Vansuyther. Major Vansuyther dis- 
 covers nothing, so these four are left to live 
 
 93 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 out their terms of service under these extra- 
 ordinary conditions. 
 
 Mrs. Vansuyther has never told the Major, and . . . 
 she has been compelled to break her vow of not speak- 
 ing to Kurrell. This speech . . . serves admirably to 
 keep alight the flame of jealousy and dull hatred in 
 Boulte's bosom, as it awakens the same passions in 
 his wife's heart. Mrs. Boulte hates Mrs. Vansuyther 
 because she has taken Ted from her, and, in some 
 curious fashion, hates her because Mrs. Vansuyther — 
 and here the wife's eyes see far more clearly than the 
 husband's — detests Ted. And Ted — that gallant 
 captain and honourable man — knows now that it is 
 possible to hate a woman once loved, to the verge of 
 wishing to silence her for ever with blows. . . . 
 
 Boulte and he go out tiger-shooting in all friend- 
 ship. Boulte has put their relationship on a most 
 satisfactory footing. 
 
 " You're a blackguard," he says to Kurrell, " and 
 I've lost any self-respect I may ever have had ; but 
 when you're with me, I can feel certain that you're 
 not with Mrs. Vansuyther, or making Emma miser- 
 able." 
 
 Kurrell endures anything that Boulte may say to 
 him. Sometimes they are away for three days to- 
 gether, and then the Major insists upon his wife going 
 over to sit with Mrs. Boulte ; although Mrs. Van- 
 suyther has repeatedly declared that she prefers her 
 husband's company to any in the world. From the 
 way in which she clings to him, she would certainly 
 seem to be speaking the truth. 
 
 But of course, as the Major says, " in a little station 
 we must all be friendly." 
 
 94 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 The writer of this edifying Httle episode has 
 assuredly, in the cant phrase, dipped his pen 
 in gall. 
 
 Mr. Kipling treats the problems of sex in \X 
 other fashions than this, hove o' Women, for 
 example, if terrible, is free from cynicism. It 
 describes the overthrow, by that dread disease 
 locomotor ataxy, of a man who has made the 
 overthrow of women his peculiar pastime. The 
 last scene where, dying, he is taken to the arms 
 of the woman he has married, deserted, driven 
 into a house of ill-fame, has not the less force 
 that it is told in the brogue of Mulvaney, Mr. 
 Kipling's most beloved of soldiers. 
 
 There is one story. Without Benefit of Clergy, ^^"^'^^ 
 so tender and so beautiful, that it goes far to 
 absolve Mr. Kipling from the charges that have 
 been levelled against him, that he could not 
 see — could not, at least, depict — the fairest side 
 of love. And it is out of material sordid enough 
 that he has woven this sad and delicate romance, 
 the tale of a young Mohammedan girl, pur- 
 chased like a chattel from her mother by an 
 Englishman. That easily made contract has 
 been the most important act of John Holden's 
 life, for in the two years since its sealing 
 Ameera has become " all but all the world in 
 his eyes." Just as it is expected that " there 
 was going to be added to this kingdom a third 
 
 95 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 person whose arrival Holden felt inclined to 
 resent," he is ordered away on special duty. 
 His return, after a period of wild anxiety and, 
 consequently, ill-managed work, is thus de- 
 scribed : 
 
 Holden hurried through the courtyard. A light 
 burned in the upper room. His horse neighed in the 
 gateway, and he heard a shrill little wail that sent all 
 the blood into the apple of his throat. It was a new 
 voice, but it did not prove that Ameera was alive. 
 
 " Who is there ? " he called up the narrow brick 
 staircase. 
 
 There was a cry of delight from Ameera, and then 
 the voice of the mother, tremulous with old age and 
 pride — " We be two women and — the — man — ^thy — 
 son." 
 
 Thenceforward Holden, whose sole thought 
 has been till then for Ameera, is wrapped up 
 in the child as well. The days of the little boy's 
 early childhood are described as only Mr. Kip- 
 ling, who loves children more than any writer 
 of to-day, can describe them. Amecra's lullaby, 
 charged as it seems with coming tragedy, takes 
 one by the heart. 
 
 Oh crow ! Go crow ! Baby's sleeping sound, 
 
 And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a 
 
 pound. 
 Only a penny a pound, haha, only a penny a pound. 
 
 But " the delight of that life was too perfect 
 to endure." The " little lord of the house " 
 
 96 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 was carried off, almost ere his parents knew 
 that he ailed, by the seasonal autumn fever. 
 
 His mother nearly died of grief, and Holden 
 was himself only saved from the blackest of 
 despair by the necessity of comforting her, of 
 assuring her that no blame for the calamity 
 could be laid to her door, of gradually winning 
 her back again to life and reason. 
 
 This he accomplished little by Httle, while 
 his own pain he numbed by fierce attention to 
 his work. Ameera declared that it was because 
 they had loved their child so much and pro- 
 claimed their love so loudly that he had been 
 taken from them. They would make no pro- 
 testations of delight, would hide their love from 
 the jealous God. 
 
 That even was without avail. After a few 
 months came an outbreak of black cholera. 
 Ameera scornfully refused to follow the white 
 tiiem-log to the hills, and, inevitably as Holden 
 had felt, the fiend caught her. Holden went 
 to her only just in time, for the black cholera 
 moves swiftly. 
 
 The soul came back a little and the lips moved. 
 Holden bent down to listen. " Keep nothing of mine," 
 said Ameera. " Take no hair from my head. She 
 would make thee burn it later on. That flame I should 
 feel. Lower ! Stoop lov%'er ! Remember only that I 
 was thine and bore thee a son. Though thou wed a 
 
 G 97 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 white woman to-morrow, the pleasure of receiving in 
 thy arms thy first son is taken from thee for ever. 
 Remember me when thy son is born — the one that 
 shall carry thy name before all men. His misfortmies 
 be on my head. I bear witness — I bear witness " — 
 the lips were forming the words on his ear — " that 
 there is no God but — thee, beloved ! " 
 Then she died. 
 
 Here again is true tragedy. Mr. Kipling 
 does not deal with mawkishness, but he is not 
 afraid to play upon the feelings of his readers 
 in a manner not common with the writers of 
 his generation. To-day we are in some danger 
 of confusing sentiment with sentimentality, of 
 making our literature juiceless and marrowless 
 by reason of a dread of unbaring hearts too 
 freely, of giving too much space to a chronicle 
 of the emotions. 
 
 Such stories as Without Benefit of Clergy are 
 
 too rare in Mr. Kipling's collection. It must 
 
 be admitted that the tone of most of his tales 
 
 that deal with women resembles rather that of 
 
 A Wayside Comedy. Woman is to him a 
 
 \^ /^mysterious being, not to be trusted wholly 
 
 because not wholly to be understood, and not 
 
 ■ to be understood just because she is primitive, 
 
 since, as he often points out, it is easier to 
 
 \ follow the line of thought of the most complex 
 
 ! people than of the simplest. The thoughts and 
 
 98 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 actions of Man are, save at rare moments when 
 some smouldering fire below the crust bursts 
 through, such as may be expected from his ' 
 circumstances and his state of civilization. 
 Woman is a simpler machine, in which the 
 function of life-creation takes a larger part. 
 She is governed by more primitive instincts, 
 instincts more closely connected with race and 
 sex. She appears illogical, because she moves 
 in obedience to these instincts, which cannot 
 be apprehended by the processes of logic, which 
 seem like straws in the wind, but which, we 
 may believe, are the tables of the law of human 
 progress. 
 
 I do not pretend that Mr. Kipling has ever 
 put his opinions into any such words as these, 
 though he is not far from them in that poem 
 which declares : 
 
 That the female of the species is more deadly than the 
 male. 
 
 I have simply striven to describe the feelings 
 which, as it seems to me, underlie his sketches 
 of women. These opinions seem to me as 
 exaggerated and as faulty as those of the 
 extreme exponents of Feminism, who will have 
 it that Man and Woman are to all intents and 
 purposes the same mentally and morally. 
 It is, at all events, something of a relief to 
 99 
 
 y/ 
 
Xl 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 turn from Mr. Kipling's treatment of women 
 to his studies of young English officers. He 
 loves the type, and draws it with a loving hand. 
 One can easily fashion a composite picture of 
 his ideal young man from half a dozen portraits 
 of subalterns. Bobby Wick of Only a Subal- 
 tern, with his " ugly, wholesome phiz," the boy 
 who fights the cholera in his regiment by the 
 sheer force of his personality, and, when it has 
 been got under, himself succumbs to it, would 
 be one. Tommy Dodd would be another, of 
 whom in The Head of ike District the barest 
 glimpse is seen, shaking with fever and sending 
 his native troopers forth to quell a hill insur- 
 rection in this manner : 
 
 " O, men ! If you die you will go to Hell. There- 
 fore endeavour to keep alive. But if you go to Hell 
 that place cannot be hotter than this place, and we 
 are not told that we shall there suffer from fever. 
 Consequently be not afraid of dying. File out there ! " 
 They grinned, and went. 
 
 Yet another would be the gallant, simple 3''oung 
 knight Strickland, hero of A Deal in Cotton, 
 who won the heart of the great Arab slave- 
 dealer, the scourge of all Central Africa. 
 
 But there is scarce need to draw such a com- 
 posite picture, for there is one character that 
 we can feel to be his creator's unparagoned 
 hero, his conception of the perfection of 
 
 100 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 chivalry at this present time. A many people, 
 besides the married lady who kissed him as he 
 lay asleep in his cabin, have fallen in love with 
 The Brushwood Boy. In effect, everyone must 
 love him, though he is by no means everyone's 
 ideal. He is simple and modest and brave, 
 intelligent if not intellectual, as eager in his 
 play as in his work. He is courteous to women, 
 but cares not very much for their company, 
 because he is rather afraid of them. When he 
 does fall in love, with the girl who has been 
 the partner of his dreams from infancy, he 
 does so in as knightly a fashion as is consistent 
 with his reserved English character. He is, 
 above all, an English hero. There is in him 
 nothing of the heau sabreur, nothing of the 
 errant charm of Stendhal's Fabrice del Dongo. 
 The problems that rack Tolstoy's Levin and 
 Count Vronsky never present themselves to 
 him. He has never troubled about the culte 
 du moi of M. Barres. He is just the finest 
 flower that the gardens of Eton and Sandhurst, 
 as they are at present constituted, can produce. 
 Mr. KipHng loves to contrast his boy soldiers 
 with other types, always to the advantage of 
 the former. The portrait of the novelist Eustace 
 Cleever, by no means an unpleasant or gro- 
 tesque figure, is drawn beside that of a group 
 of young men on leave from India, just for this 
 
 101 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 effect. He has, after some trouble, induced 
 the young men to talk. Says the Infant to 
 Cleever : 
 
 " The dacoits were having a first-class time y'know 
 — filling women up with kerosine and setting 'em 
 alight, and burning villages, and crucifying people." 
 
 The wonder in Eustace Cleever's eyes deepened. 
 He could not quite realize that the cross still existed 
 in any form. 
 
 " Have you ever seen a crucifixion ? " said he. 
 
 It is really but another example of that 
 phase in Mr. Kipling that I have already 
 pointed out so often, this admiration of the 
 man of the sword by the man of the pen. 
 
 I remember one critic v^ho declared very 
 justly that in his praise of the brilliant young 
 soldier, swift to act in emergency, a glutton 
 for responsibility, he spoke as if the whole 
 British Army were officered by such. Whereas, 
 said the critic, we all know how many there 
 are — South Africa showed it only too clearly — 
 who in truth know their duty, but little out- 
 side it, who are sunk in routine and have their 
 vision dulled by the smoke of pipe-clay ; 
 honourable and courageous men enough, but 
 not first-class soldiers because lacking in initia- 
 tive and imagination. I think Mr. Kipling 
 had something of this feeling before the Boer 
 War, and that he was as sadly disillusioned as 
 
 102 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 any of us. In A Sahibs' War, an Indian observer 
 has some far from flattering comments to make 
 upon our methods, but in the very amusing 
 story The Captive, dehberate fun is poked at 
 the British officer in the field. 
 
 The story is told by an American adventurer 
 who has put his patent quick-firing gun at the 
 disposal of the Boers. He is serving under a 
 certain Commandant Van Zyl, the sworn 
 friend of the British general opposing him. 
 The two call each other by their Christian 
 names, and the rival forces exist in a ludicrous 
 state of communion and friendship. The 
 American describes the operations thus : 
 
 " The way we worked lodge was this way. The 
 General, he had his breakfast at 8.45 a.m. to the tick. 
 He might have been a Long Island commuter. At 
 8.42 a.m. I'd go down to the Thirty-fomth Street 
 ferry to meet him — I mean I'd see the Zigler into 
 position at two thousand (I began at three thousand, 
 but that was cold and distant) — and blow him off to 
 two full hoppers — eighteen rounds — just as they were 
 bringing in his coffee. If his crowd was busy cele- 
 brating the anniversary of Waterloo or the last royal 
 kid's birthday, they'd open on me with two guns 
 (I'll tell you about them later on), but if they were 
 disengaged they'd all stand to their horses and pile 
 on the ironmongery, and washers, and typewriters, 
 and five weeks' grub, and in half an hour they'd sail 
 out after me and the rest of Van Zyl's boys ; lying 
 down and firing till 11.45 a.m. or maybe high noon. 
 
 103 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Then we'd go from labour to refreshment, resooming 
 at 2 p.m. and batthng till tea-time. Tuesday and 
 Friday was the General's moving days. He'd trek 
 ahead ten or fifteen miles, and we'd loaf around his 
 flankers and exercise the ponies a piece." 
 
 Now this is exceedingly fine satirical writing, 
 but there is in it some of the irritation of the 
 man who has seen his gods — not cast down for 
 that they never were — but prove themselves 
 rather ordinary people, unable to subsist with- 
 out afternoon tea like mere mortal men. The 
 men who fought Commandant Van Zyl in this 
 quiet and gentlemanly fashion would never, 
 like Mulvaney's friends who took Lungtungpen 
 stripped naked, " take St. Pethersburg in their 
 dhrawers." But at least that war has shown 
 us that we wanted to be shaken up. 
 
 Something has been said, in considering 
 Barrack-Room Ballads, of Mr. Kipling's treat- 
 ment of the private soldier. It is now time to 
 discuss it with reference to his short stories. 
 A discussion of Mr. Kipling's soldiers means a 
 discussion of that famous trinity Privates 
 Mulvaney, Learoyd and Ortheris, of whom 
 the first is incomparably the greatest. 
 
 Terence Mulvaney is undoubtedly the best- 
 known of all his author's characters. I have 
 heard it claimed as a proof of Dickens' un- 
 equalled genius that we should know Mr. 
 
 104 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 [From a Drawing by B. IkviNK Hately) 
 
 The Viscomte Robert d'Humieres in his study of the English and their ways, 
 "Through Isle and Empire," gives a thumb-nt.il picture of Kipling which gives 
 one a clear idea of his personal appearance It is the best description of the 
 famous novelist that has been written : "He does not look more than thirt)'. 
 Nicholson's print makes him seem older than he is. Collier's portrait plone 
 gives the frank, open, and youthful expression of the original. His eyes in 
 particular hold the attention behind the immovable glasses, full of light, sym- 
 pathy, and gaiety, thirsting to reflect life in all its forms. The chestnut hair is 
 cut straight over the forehead. The thick-set, lather plump figure possesses a 
 singular agility with none of the somewhat wooden gestures of the average 
 Englishman." 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 Micawber and Mr. Pickwick if we were to meet 
 them in the street to-morrow. That, of course, 
 is nonsense. We should not know infinitely 
 greater creations, Anna Karenina or Squire 
 Western or P'abrice del Dongo, though we 
 might make a guess at my Uncle Toby, and I 
 hope and believe that I, at least, her most 
 devoted slave, would not pass by Mademoiselle 
 de Maupin. But the fact that Dickens, with the 
 aid of an illustrator who was also a genius, has 
 made some unusual and grotesque types 
 familiar to men as their brothers and sisters, 
 is proof of his vast skill in the depiction of 
 outward appearances and characteristics. Mr. 
 Kipling has had a like success with Mulvaney, 
 for I believe that most of us would know that 
 thirsty, war-scarred giant had we the good 
 fortune to happen upon him. 
 
 Mulvaney is the perfect type of the Irish V 
 soldier, with all his good qualities, resource, 
 humour, courage at their highest, and also all 
 his weaknesses, chief of which is of course the 
 unconquerable lure of the canteen. He has 
 been made a corporal earlj^, and has splendid 
 prospects. But he has been " rejuced afther- 
 wards " and is now the best soldier in the 
 regiment — when sober — and when drunk to be 
 passed over at parade by officer and sergeant, 
 if it be humanly possible to do so. He is loved 
 
 105 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 and laughed at, and he is not unconscious of 
 his shame. 
 
 " An' whin I'm let off in ord'ly-room through some 
 thrick of the tongue an' a ready answer an' the ould 
 man's mercy, is ut smiHn' I feel whin I fall away an' 
 go back to Dinah Shadd, thryin' to carry ut all off as 
 a joke ? Not I ! 'Tis hell to me, dumb hell through 
 ut all ; an' next time whin the fit comes I will be as 
 bad again. Good cause the reg'ment has to know me 
 for the best soldier in ut. Better cause have I to 
 know mesilf for the worst man." 
 
 He is the unquestioned head of the con- 
 federacy of three, because he is the fount of its 
 ideas, its commander-in-chief and intelligence 
 department at once. " 'Tis me," he explains, 
 " has to lie awake av nights schamin' an' 
 plottin' for the three av us." His exploits are 
 without number. He had a hand in that 
 Taking of Lungtungpen, when a lieutenant and 
 some twenty soldiers stripped themselves naked, 
 swam a river, and fell upon the village with the 
 strength of demigods. Of this story one of our 
 critics, who, if he can be as healthily enthusi- 
 astic as any, yet never loses his head, has 
 pronounced this judgment : 
 
 " Those who have not read this little master- 
 piece have yet before them the pleasure of 
 becoming acquainted with one of the best 
 short stories not merely in English, but in any 
 language." 
 
 106 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 It was he who, after he had left the army, 
 gave his unrivalled aid to the young officer 
 bringing down The Big Drunk Draf to the sea. 
 And he was the hero of that crazy, side-splitting 
 escapade told in The Incarnation of Krishna 
 Mulvaney, when he stole a palanquin, was 
 packed in it on to a train while dead drunk, 
 carried to Benares, at that moment full of 
 palanquins bearing the queens of India to a 
 festival at the temple of Prithi-Devi, watched 
 the women praying, and finally, clothing him- 
 self in the broidered lining of the palanquin, 
 appeared before them as Krishna himself. The 
 improbability of this story simply shouts at 
 one as one reads, which has led certain dull 
 people to condemn it, and Francis Adams to 
 rank it with his really poor stories such as The 
 Lang Men o' Larut. But those with a real 
 sense of humour, who have been by this mad 
 tale reduced to most painful and helpless 
 laughter, will be well content to do without 
 probability. 
 
 Private Stanley Ortheris, the little Cockney, 
 is as interesting in his way. If we love him 
 less it is because the Irishman is more sympa- 
 thetic than the Londoner. Ortheris is the 
 crack shot and the humorist of the regiment, 
 with far fewer weaknesses than his friend and 
 apparently without emotion. Yet he too has 
 
 107 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 his periods of remorse and affliction, when he 
 is not a pleasant companion. Learoyd, the 
 " six and a half feet of slow-moving, heavy- 
 footed Yorkshireman, born on the wolds, bred 
 in the dales, and educated chiefly among the 
 carriers' carts at the back of York railway 
 station," is the least satisfactory/^ of the three. 
 We are told that he had for " chief virtue an 
 unmitigated patience which helped him to win 
 fights," but he takes very small part in the 
 discussions that reveal the personality of the 
 other two. It is, however, from a story, On 
 Greenhow Hill, of which he is hero, that the 
 best glimpse of the three and their relations is 
 to be gained. 
 
 The episode began with the nightly disturb- 
 ance of the camp, on a ridge of the Himalayas, 
 by a deserter from a native regiment. Think- 
 ing that he was beside the native wing of the 
 camp he fired at intervals and shouted to his 
 old comrades to come out and fight against the 
 English. Ortheris and Mulvaney had words as 
 to the advisability of getting up and pointing 
 out his mistake, Mulvaney declaring that " 'tis 
 rainin' entrenchin' tools outside." 
 
 " Wot's the good of argifying ? Put a bullet into the 
 swine ! 'E's keepin' us awake ! " said another voice. 
 
 A subaltern shouted angrily, and a dripping sentry 
 whined from the darkness — 
 
 108 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 " 'Tain't no good, sir. I can't see 'im. 'E's 'idin' 
 somewhere down 'ill." 
 
 Ortheris tumbled out of his blanket. " Shall I try 
 to get 'im, sir ? " said he, 
 
 " No," was the answer. " Lie down. I won't have 
 the whole camp shooting all round the clock. Tell him 
 to go and pot his friends." 
 
 Ortheris considered for a moment. Then, putting 
 his head under the tent wall, he called, as a 'bus 
 conductor calls in a block, " 'Igher up, there ! 'Igher 
 up!" 
 
 The men laughed, and the laughter was carried 
 down wind to the deserter. . . . 
 
 " An' that's all right," said Ortheris, withdrawing i 
 his head. ..." S'elp me Gawd, tho', that man's \ ^ 
 not fit to live — messin' with my beauty-sleep this \ 
 way." 
 
 " Go out and shoot him in the morning, then," said I 
 the subaltern incautiously. 
 
 On the morrow Mulvaney and Ortheris went 
 to lie out for the deserter as he came up a 
 watercourse to the camp. Ortheris, the expert, 
 selected the range. 
 
 " This is something like," he said luxuriously, 
 " Wot a 'evinly clear drop for a bullet acrost. How 
 much d'you make it, Mulvaney ? " 
 
 " Seven hunder. Maybe a trifle less, bekaze the 
 air's so thin." 
 
 After a sighting shot to make sure, and 
 joined by Learoyd, they lay down to smoke 
 and wait. The stolid Yorkshireman, reminded 
 by a spur in front of them of the moors at home, 
 
 109 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 came out of his shell and told of his early 
 romance. When a boy, driving a mining 
 wagon-team, he had come by a broken arm 
 and all but a cracked skull by falling off a 
 stone wall after drinking too much ale. He 
 was carried insensible to the house of Jesse 
 Rowntree, a leading light of the Primitive 
 Methodists, and nursed by Jessie Rowntree's 
 daughter 'Liza. Under the influence of Jesse, 
 of the preacher, the Rev. Amos Barraclough, 
 still more of 'Liza, he became " converted," 
 attended regularly at chapel and took the bass 
 part in Jesse's oratorio. Yet his heart was 
 never wholly in the business ; he dreaded ever 
 the " cast-iron pride o' respectability " of these 
 folk. This led the three to discuss the atti- 
 tude of the lower -middle class to soldiers. 
 Said Learoyd : 
 
 " They'd tell tales in th' Sunday-school o' bad lads 
 as had been thumped and brayed for bird-nesting o' 
 Sundays and playin' truant o' week-days, and how 
 they took to wrestlin', dog-fightin', rabbit-runnin', 
 and drinkin', till at last, as if 'twere a hepitaph on a 
 gravestone, they damned him across th' moors wi' 
 ' an' then he went and 'listed for a soldier,' an' they'd 
 all fetch a deep breath, and throw up their eyes like 
 a hen drinkin'." 
 
 " Fwhy is ut ? " said Mulvaney, bringing down his 
 hand on his thigh with a crack. " In the name av 
 God, fwhy is ut ? I've seen ut, tu. They cheat an' 
 they swindle an' they lie an' they slander, an' fifty 
 
 110 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 things fifty times worse ; but the last an' the worst 
 by their reckonin' is to serve the Widdy honest. It's 
 hke the talk av childer — seein' things all round." 
 
 " Plucky lot of fightin' good fights of whatsername 
 they'd do if we didn't see they had a quiet place to 
 fight in. , . . I've bin turned out of a measly arf- 
 license pub down Lambeth way, full o' greasy kebmen, 
 'fore now," said Ortheris with an oath. 
 
 " Maj'be you were dhrunk," said Mulvaney sooth- 
 ingly. 
 
 " Worse nor that. The Forders were drunk. / 
 was wearin' the Queen's uniform." 
 
 Were I to write a chapter to describe the 
 indignation at their treatment that Mr. Kipling 
 puts into the mouths of his soldiers, I could not 
 do it so well as by the quotation of this passage. 
 
 Learoyd went on to tell how his friendship 
 for the preacher turned to hatred when he 
 began to fear that he would win the hand of 
 'Liza, who was ailing. One day he took him 
 down the pit with him, and suddenly, as it 
 grew dark, a fierce passion surged up within 
 him, and he seized Barraclough and held him 
 over a bottomless hole. 
 
 " Now, lad," I says, " it's to be one or t'other on 
 us — thee or me — for 'Liza Rowntree. Why, isn't thee 
 afraid for thysen ? " I says, for he were still i' my arms 
 as a sack. ' Nay ; I'm but afraid for thee, my poor 
 lad, as knows naught,' says he. . . . ' 'Liza Rown- 
 tree's for neither on us, nor for nobody o' this earth. 
 Dr. Warbottom says — and he knows her, and her 
 
 111 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 mother before her — that she is in a dechne, and she 
 cannot Hve six months longer. He's known it for 
 many a day. Steady, John ! Steady ! ' says he. 
 ' And that weak httle man pulled me further back 
 and set me again' him, and talked it all over quiet 
 and still, me turnin' a bunch o' candles in my hand, 
 and counting them ower and ower again as I listened." 
 
 The blow stunned him, and when Jesse took 
 his daughter to Bradford, the air of Greenhow 
 being too keen, he fell to moping, and gave up 
 the chapel. In the winter he threw up his job 
 and went to Bradford. 'Liza was dying, he was 
 told, and her father would not let him see her. 
 Going straight from the house he met a recruit- 
 ing-sergeant and enlisted. Next morning he 
 returned to say farewell, the ribbons in his 
 hat. Jesse bade him begone with his " devil's 
 colours fiyin'," but 'Liza, hearing his voice, 
 commanded that he should be allowed up. 
 
 " Her eyes were all alive wi' light, and her hair was 
 thick on the pillow round her, but her cheeks were 
 thin — thin to frighten a man that's strong. ' Nay, 
 father, yo mayn't say th' devil's colours. Them 
 ribbons is pretty.' An' she held out her hands for 
 th' hat, an' she put all straight as a woman will wi' 
 ribbons. ' Nay, but what they're pretty,' she says. 
 ' Eh, but I'd ha' liked to see thee i' thy red coat, John, 
 for thou was alius my own lad — my very own lad, 
 and none else.' 
 
 " She lifted up her arms, and they come round my 
 112 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 neck i' a gentle grip, and they slacked away, and she 
 seemed fainting. ' Now yo mun get away, lad,' says 
 Jesse, and I picked up my hat and I came downstairs." 
 
 The recruiting-sergeant, " one o' them smart, 
 bustlin' chaps," tells him that, having seen his 
 sweetheart, he must have a quart and do his 
 best to forget her. " And," says Learoyd, " I've 
 been forgettin' her ever since." 
 
 He threw away the wilted clump of white violets 
 as he spoke. 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. 
 
 I have quoted from this story at great length, 
 H 113 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 not because it stands among its creator's best, 
 but because it is perhaps the most representa- 
 tive of the soldier tales. It is an example of 
 Mr. Kipling's skill and good faith in giving us 
 all sides of a soldier's character, without false 
 reticence or idealization. Nothing could ex- 
 ceed the contrast of Learoyd's tenderness and 
 emotion as he tells of the death of his sweet- 
 heart, and the cruelty of Ortheris next instant, 
 gloating over the death of the deserter — whom, 
 be it remembered, he was under no necessity 
 to shoot — feeling an " artist who looks on the 
 completed work." 
 **S*^ f And such contrasts are true of these men. 
 ^They are, as Mr. Kipling reminds us, primitive 
 men caged in by a few very simple regulations. 
 " Their duty is to keep themselves and their 
 accoutrements specklessly clean, to refrain 
 i from getting drunk more often than is necessary, 
 I to obey their superiors and to pray for a war." 
 '] All these things they accomplished without 
 j changing their natures or becoming very 
 ! civilized. They were, says sarcastically Mr. 
 j Kipling, who loves them very well, "in no 
 ' sense refined, nor to be admitted to the outer- 
 door mats of decent folk." Those who do not 
 share his love, who so much abominate rough- 
 ness and drunkenness that they find no pallia- 
 tives even in steady courage and good faith 
 
 114 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 and esprit de corps, will yet be prepared to 
 admit that, were they in some crisis where the 
 ordinary rules of civilization were set aside, 
 there be none they had rather find at their 
 elbows than Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and 
 Learoyd. 
 
 I shall say a few words on the attitude of \y 
 these men to their discipline, because it is that 
 of every old soldier who has the reputation of 
 being a good man. It is something apart from 
 all discussion, never to be questioned. They 
 .may despise some callow youth, twenty years 
 their junior, set to command them. They may 
 know their drill and the tactics of hill-warfare 
 an hundredfold better than he, and be aware 
 of their superior knowledge. But they will 
 obey his commands cheerily, and, if it be pos- 
 sible, give to him in a difficulty aid that will 
 never be set to their score. All this is to them 
 an axiom of their service. Ortheris, when a 
 young fool strikes him, " the best soldier of 
 his inches " in the regiment, with his cane, and 
 tears his tunic, lies to a superior officer as to 
 the cause of the accident. His whole soul is 
 filled with murderous hatred of the man, but 
 he knows full well that the telling of the truth 
 would drive the officer from the regiment, and 
 that is unthinkable. How the officer, by a 
 stroke of genius, salves the wound in the only 
 
 115 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 possible way by granting the private the right 
 of personal combat — when they are miles away 
 from barracks — and wins his undying admira- 
 tion by knocking him doAvn, is told in His 
 Private Honour. 
 
 There are few soldiers who need be discussed 
 once we have made the acquaintance of these 
 three. The Mutiny of the Mavericks is the tale 
 of an Irish emissary from New York sent to 
 induce a regiment of his countrymen to revolt 
 against the English. They make a vast parade 
 of revolution, drink his beer by the firkin, and 
 finally, when a hill-war breaks out, drive him 
 to death on the Afghan knives. It is more 
 brutal and less interesting than the majority 
 of Mr. Kipling's stories, but has one amusing 
 and fertile-brained scoundrel in it, the Ulster- 
 man Dan Grady. In the South African tales 
 appear a few more, while in Their Lawful 
 Occasions is one most engaging sailor, Mr. 
 Moorshed, who makes us regret that Mr. 
 Kipling has not turned more of his attention 
 to the sister service. 
 ^ Mr. Kipling sets on the title-page of one of 
 his best books of short stories, Life's Handicap, 
 the native proverb, " I met a hundred men on 
 the road to Delhi and they were all my brothers." 
 That motto is not strictly appropriate — at 
 least, if he could make the statement of the 
 
 116 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 Delhi road, he could not of the London. For 
 there are certain types of men who are not his 
 brothers. The men who think that nationality- 
 is a snare and a check upon civilization, who 
 believe that war is a thing so terrible that 
 scarcely anything can justify it, who would 
 have all brutality and force and the fighting 
 spirit taken from the world, are not in fraternity 
 with him. He despises them, and he does not 
 understand them. If he were told that he 
 stood upon a lower plane of civilization than 
 they, he would with unholy glee rejoice in that 
 fact. But the simple men, the young officers 
 unmoved in the tightest of tight places, their 
 blasphemous subordinates who take the sword 
 with small care that they may perish by the 
 sword, the old Jndian priests who " sit and 
 meditate on the latter end of things," the 
 Indian peasant who says : 
 
 But the Vv'heat and the cattle are all my care, 
 And the rest is the will of God, 
 
 the shepherd knitting on the Wiltshire Downs, 
 and the Newfoundland fisherman rocking in 
 his dory on the Grand Banks, these are his 
 brethren, these the men whose hearts he knows, 
 and it is to hear him tell of these that we open 
 his books. 
 
 117 
 
VI 
 
 SHORT STORIES: II 
 
 To his keen delight in the things of this world, 
 Mr. Kipling joins a curious — it might be said a 
 superstitious — interest in things that are out- 
 side it. In almost every collection of stories 
 there are chronicles of the supernatural. And 
 there are no half -measures with him. When he 
 quits the earth, he spreads his wings beyond 
 the moon ; when he writes of the super- 
 natural he lets his imagination have full play. 
 He has not that air of telling the most ordinary 
 of stories which Hoffmann — for example — 
 assumes when he is about to deal with the 
 wildly improbable. Far from telling a plain 
 tale in a plain man's fashion, he is reticent, 
 nervous, as he pretends, of shocking by reveal- 
 ing all he knows or guesses. He hints at more 
 terrible mysteries and horrors than he reveals, 
 puts broken sentences of fear into the mouths 
 of his characters, that stimulate curiosity 
 without revealing. 
 
 ' In this he shows himself master of the tale 
 of fantastic horror. Tales of the super- 
 
 118 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 natural wherein precise details are given may 
 interest us — Mr. Kipling himself has written 
 several such — but they do not thrill or carry 
 us away. One can make natural things far 
 more terrible than ghostly. No tale of magic 
 of Hoffmann is so terrible as that of the noble- 
 man who finds his loved and beautiful wife 
 devouring corpses in the churchyard. But by 
 judicious restraint, by skilful hints and clever 
 suggestion of unearthly atmosphere, a milieu 
 of terror and dreadful mystery can be built 
 up. When we strip the veil from black 
 Horror — or indeed from riggish Delight — she 
 assumes straightway smaller proportions than 
 we had thought. * 
 
 The Phantom ^Rickshaw is one of the earliest 
 of such stories. Having ill-treated and in fact 
 helped to kill the woman who has been his 
 mistress, a man is haunted by her in her black 
 and yellow 'rickshaw. When he rides on the 
 Mall at Simla with his fiancee, he sees always 
 his former love in the 'rickshaw in front of him ; 
 whenever he is out of doors alone it pulls up 
 beside him and she begins to reproach him. 
 Eventually the strain drives him mad. The 
 story is " creepy," but faulty in the extreme. 
 When the poor wretch, now quite off his head, 
 blurts out the whole tale to his fiancee, she, 
 instead of trying to comfort him and taking 
 
 119 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 him into her father's house as surely any 
 human girl would have done, slashes him 
 across the face with her riding-whip and goes 
 off at a gallop. This is a grievous weakness, 
 but a type of weakness of which Mr. Kipling 
 has seldom been guilty since his hand has 
 become practised. 
 
 The Mark of the Beast makes every other 
 story of the kind that I have read seem child's 
 play. The Spectator said of it that it was 
 " matchless in horror and terror." We use 
 such words carelessly enough, but if we take 
 them in their most exact and literal meaning 
 they are more or less adequate. It is a question 
 whether any man has a right to put such 
 dreadful pictures before us. But it is, as I 
 have said, the telling rather than the tale that 
 makes the flesh creep, and a bare recital of 
 the story may not seem to those who do not 
 know it to warrant the things I have said of it. 
 
 A drunken reveller, returning with Strick- 
 land of the Police, who appears so often in 
 other stories, and the narrator, slips from 
 them as he passes the temple of Hanuman, 
 the Monkey-god, rushes in, and grinds the 
 ashes of his cigar-butt into the forehead of 
 the image. 
 
 " Shee that ? " he says. " Mark of the B— beasht I 
 I made it. Ishn't it fine ? " 
 
 120 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 Instantly there is uproar. The temple fills 
 with people, and it looks ugly for the intruders. 
 Suddenly a Silver Man, stark naked, " a leper 
 as white as snow," comes from behind the 
 image. He rushes at Fleete, where he sits in 
 maudlin content on the ground, throws his 
 arms round him, mewing the while like an 
 otter, and drops his head upon his breast. 
 Thereat the priests are silent, and the English- 
 men are allowed to go. That in itself frightens 
 Strickland. " They should have mauled us," 
 he says. 
 
 Next morning Fleete demands for breakfast 
 underdone chops, and eats three of them in 
 a revolting manner. He tells the others that 
 he has been bitten by mosquitoes in a curious 
 way, and shows them on his breast a mark 
 like the rosette on a leopard's hide. Then they 
 go to the stables to inspect the horses. 
 
 There is at once a tremendous scene. The 
 five horses " reared and screamed and nearly 
 tore up their pickets ; they sweated and 
 shivered and lathered and were distraught 
 with fear." Returning to the stable with the 
 narrator alone, Strickland proves conclusively 
 that it is Fleete they fear. Subsequently 
 Fleete's pony will not let him approach, and 
 the other two ride out, leaving him alone to 
 sleep. 
 
 121 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 They return in the dusk and their horses 
 bolt on the drive from something groveUing on 
 the ground. It is Fleete. When they force 
 him to return they find that in the hght his 
 eyes are horrible, with a green light behind 
 them. He is plastered with dirt from head to 
 foot. He goes at once to his room, where they 
 hear him moving about. Presently from the 
 room comes the howl of a wolf. 
 
 People write and talk lightly of blood running cold 
 and hair standing up and things of that kind. Both 
 sensations are too horrible to be trifled with. My 
 heart stopped as though a knife had been driven 
 through it, and Strickland turned as white as the 
 tablecloth. 
 
 The howl was repeated, and was answered by 
 another howl far across the fields. 
 
 That set the gilded roof on the horror. 
 
 They rush in, find Fleete climbing out of the 
 window, seize him and bind him with the 
 leather thongs of the punkah-rope. His snarls 
 are those of a wolf, not of a man. " Any one 
 entering the room would have believed that 
 we were curing a wolf's pelt. That was the 
 most loathsome accessory of all." 
 
 The doctor certifies that Fleete is dying 
 from the most terrible form of hydrophobia he 
 has ever seen. He leaves them, believing that 
 nothing can be done. Round and round the 
 
 122 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 house they hear a mewing Hke the mewing of 
 a she-otter. At each cry the beast that was 
 Fleet e falls into a fresh paroxysm. He foams 
 at the mouth and grows gradually weaker. 
 
 On a sudden resolution they wait outside 
 the door, and after a terrible struggle, capture 
 the Silver Man as he passes the door. They 
 drag him into the room where Fleete lies, and 
 the latter doubles backward into a bow as if 
 poisoned with strychnine. 
 
 " I think I was right," said Strickland. " Now we 
 will ask him to cure this case." 
 
 Strickland has put the barrels of an old 
 shot-gun into the fire, and, wrapping a towel 
 round his hand, he now seizes them. They 
 tie the leper to a bedstead. 
 
 " This part," says Mr. Kipling, " is not to be 
 printed." 
 
 Eventually they force the leper to take the 
 spell off, and let him go. Fleete falls into a 
 natural sleep. Next morning he wakes, tired 
 out, but himself, regretting that he has mixed 
 his drinks " last night." Of the intervening 
 day he is unconscious. 
 
 Mr. Kipling, with his usual uncanny skill, 
 " sets the gilded roof on the horror." 
 
 When Fhete was dressed he came into the dining- 
 room and sniffed. He had a quaint trick of moving 
 
 123 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 his nose when he sniffed. " Horrid doggy smell," 
 said he. " You should really keep those terriers of 
 yours in better order. Try sulphur, Strick." 
 
 Strickland promptly goes into hysterics and 
 the narrator follows suit. 
 
 I think that the effect of this story and of 
 others such as The Return of hnray, in which 
 Strickland also plays a part, is heightened by 
 the fact that it is told in the first person. 
 That is, indeed, one of the best methods of 
 telling a tale of magic, since it invests it with 
 a false air of verity. 
 
 At the End of the Passage is perhaps not a 
 story of the supernatural, for it records horrors 
 that have been fairly well authenticated. An 
 engineer, overworked and prostrated by the 
 heat of the Indian desert in summer, when 
 there is " neither sky, sun, nor horizon — 
 nothing but a brown-purple haze of heat," is 
 unable to sleep for fear of that which comes 
 upon him in his slumbers. If he can get sound 
 asleep, " deep down," he is safe, but that has 
 not now happened for days, and his dread of 
 falling lightly asleep is so intense that he keeps 
 a spur in his bed to rowel himself back to 
 wakefulness — and safety. When his friends 
 return after leaving him alone while they go 
 about their business for a fortnight, he is 
 lying dead. " In the staring eyes v/as written 
 
 124 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 terror beyond the expression of any pen." 
 His personal servant gives this verdict : 
 
 " Heaven-born, in my poor opinion, this that was 
 my master has descended into the Dark Places, and 
 there has been caught because he was not able to 
 escape with sufficient speed. We have the spur for 
 evidence that he fought with Fear. Thus have I 
 seen men of my race do with thorns when a spell was 
 laid upon them to overtake them in their sleeping 
 hours and they dared not sleep." 
 
 This is gruesome enough, but it will find 
 credence ready enough. Then, with his 
 favourite trick of " setting the gilded roof on 
 the horror," Mr. Kipling makes the doctor 
 photograph the terrible eyes of the dead, then 
 hastily tear up the films and emerge " very 
 white indeed." Says he : 
 
 " There was nothing there. It was impossible." 
 " That," said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching 
 
 the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, " is a 
 
 damned lie." 
 
 I think he succeeds in his effort. We scarce 
 pause to wonder whether there could be 
 preserved on the retinae of the human eye the 
 form of that Fear that slew Hammil. Medical 
 evidence is, I believe, against the author. 
 
 Mr. Kipling has written tales of magic in 
 which there is no horror, just as he has written 
 tales of horror in which the supernatural plays 
 
 125 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 no part. One that much impressed M. Chev- 
 rillon, but that I think scarce worthy of the 
 praise he lavishes upon it, is called The Finest 
 Story in the World, and tells of a young bank 
 clerk, who has been in previous incarnations a 
 galley-slave in Greek and Viking ships, and 
 who, in a sort of trance, remembers his ex- 
 periences. Eventually he falls in love, and 
 love at once drives from his soul the recol- 
 lections that the narrator has been drawing 
 from him painfully, little by little. So the 
 greatest story in the world is never finished. 
 
 Somewhat similar is Wireless, the story 
 taking its name from the fact that the central 
 theme is interwoven with an account of some 
 experiments in the then novel wireless 
 telegraphy. A young consumptive, a chemist's 
 assistant placed in circumstances resembling 
 those of Keats, of whom he has never heard, 
 is in some way imbued with his spirit, and, in 
 a trance, writes portions of The Eve of St. 
 Agnes and the Ode to a Nightingale. The story 
 is well told, but it is surely a weakness that 
 the man should write down his ideas in the 
 exact words of Keats. 
 
 They has shared with The Brushwood Boy 
 the greatest admiration of all its author's 
 mystery stories, and of all his stories of children 
 also. It is very beautiful, but somewhat 
 
 126 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 obscure. It is not, for example, clear why the 
 teller of the story, who has visited the blind 
 woman and her court of ghost children, and 
 discovered her secret, should find it necessary 
 to say good-bye to her for ever. The Brush- 
 wood Boy is disconnected and rambling ; it is 
 intensely interesting, but it does not maintain 
 the same level of interest all through what is a 
 very long " short story." Its theme is the 
 story of what may be called " twin dreams," 
 of a man and a woman who have each had the 
 same dream, in which both participate, over 
 and over again from childhood. So, though 
 they have not met since he was a small boy 
 and she little more than a baby, they share the 
 knowledge of a wonderful dream-country, of 
 the brushwood-pile — that gives the tale its 
 name — which is their starting-point, of the 
 Thirty-Mile-Ride along the beach, of the 
 policeman who will turn them back, of " They " 
 who threaten and pursue. Mr. Kipling 
 manages to give the effect of that curious in- 
 consequence of dreams, so complete that we 
 almost seem to discover in them a fourth 
 dimension. He suggests too the weird, form- 
 less terrors of nightmare. 
 
 They forgathered in the middle of an endless hot 
 tropic night, and crept into a huge house that stood, 
 he knew, somewhere north of the railway station 
 
 127 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 where the people ate among the roses. It was sur- 
 rounded with gardens, all moist and dripping ; and 
 in one room, reached through leagues of white-washed 
 passages, a Sick Thing lay in bed. Now the least 
 noise, Georgie knew, would unchain sonie waiting 
 horror, and his companion knew it too ; but when 
 their eyes met across the bed, Georgie was disgusted 
 to see that she was a child — a little child in strapped 
 shoes, with her black hair combed back from her 
 forehead. 
 
 " What disgraceful folly ! " he thought. " Now 
 she could do nothing if Its head came off." 
 
 Then the thing coughed, and the ceiling shattered 
 down in plaster from the mosquito netting, and 
 " They " rushed in from all quarters. He dragged 
 the child through the stifling garden, voices chanting 
 behind them, and they rode the Thirty-Mile-Ride 
 under whip and spur along the sandy beach by the 
 booming sea, till they came to the downs, the lamp- 
 post and the brushwood-pile, which was safety. 
 
 Mr. Kipling has not always handled love 
 scenes with insight, but in this case, when the 
 explanation between the two comes to be 
 made, he has told the tale of the love of an 
 English man and maid as tenderly as the very 
 different scenes between Holden and his be- 
 loved native mistress in Without Benefit of 
 Clergy. 
 
 Many of these stories are told with an 
 earnestness that compels us to believe that he 
 does seriously credit the interference of the 
 
 128 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 supernatural with the destinies of men. Yet 
 he is always ready to poke fun at a society 
 affecting to have evidence of such interference. 
 The Sending of Dana Dan is an amusing 
 account of the way in which an old native 
 tricks a knot of mystery-mongers by filling 
 the quarters of one of them with a never- 
 ending stream of kittens, which the society 
 takes for a " manifestation." 
 
 One of the best " horror tales," which has in 
 it nothing of the supernatural, is The Strange 
 Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, who, when out 
 riding, falls into a pit where dwell the Hindus 
 who have had the misfortune to recover from 
 trance or catalepsy, especially from the 
 collapse of the cholera, when " you are carried 
 to be burnt almost before you are dead." 
 These creatures — ^they can scarce be called 
 men — live in badger-holes in the sand, and 
 food is occasionally tossed down to them from 
 above. Some of them catch crows by the 
 expedient of the decoy that I have already 
 mentioned. It is impossible to climb the sides 
 of shifting sand, and the one side towards a 
 river from whence exit might be possible is 
 guarded both by a quicksand and a boat 
 moored in the river containing riflemen. 
 
 The striking part of the tale is not its plot, 
 which is trivial, but the power and subtlety 
 I 129 
 
 X 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 and rather savage skill with which is pictured 
 this loathsome community, its customs and 
 its manner of life. There is in it a certain 
 resemblance to A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, 
 for these creatures are no less horrible than 
 the Yahoos. It is not so much a story as an 
 ugly allegory of the human race. I think Mr. 
 Kipling rouses our disgust yet more than 
 Swift, because he is apparently more sincere, 
 less obviously malicious and eager to paint 
 things in their vilest form. 
 
 Bertran and Bimi The Spectator called 
 " detestable," which is the most appropriate 
 epithet that could be found. It is the story 
 of a marvellous orang-outang, spoiled and 
 petted by a French naturalist, that sits at his 
 table and smokes cigars. The fellow marries 
 a pretty half-caste French girl, and neglects 
 the great ape ; whereupon the latter bursts 
 through the ceiling of the room in which the 
 terror-stricken girl has locked herself, and 
 tears her into little pieces. When he has 
 returned, in the words of the German who 
 tells the story : 
 
 " Den Bimi come to dinner at der same table mit 
 us, und the hair on his hands was all black und thick 
 mit — mit what had dried on der hands. Bertran 
 gave him sangaree till Bimi was drunk and stupid, 
 
 und den " 
 
 130 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 Hans paused to puff at his cigar. 
 
 " And then ? " said I. 
 
 " Und den Bertran he kill mit his hands, und I go 
 for a walk upon der beach. It was Bertran's own 
 piziness. Wlien I come back der ape he was dead, 
 und Bertran he was dying abofe him ; but still he 
 laughed liddle und low und he was quite content. . . ." 
 
 " But why in the world didn't you help Bertran 
 instead of letting him be killed ? " I asked. 
 
 " My friend," said Hans, composedly stretching 
 himself to slumber, " it was not nice even to mineself 
 dot I should live after I haf seen dot room mit der 
 hole in der thatch. Und Bertran, he was her husband. 
 Goot night, und — sleep well." 
 
 The Spectator was of opinion that Bertran 
 and Bimi exceeded what was permitted, that 
 it should never have been written. I suggested 
 that the same thing has been said of The Mark 
 of the Beast, and possibly of The Strange Ride 
 of Morrowbie Jukes. I am inclined to argue 
 that these last two, with The Return of Imray 
 and At the End of the Passage, stand on the 
 right side of the line, if one is to be drawn, and 
 Bertran and Bimi on the wrong. And the chief 
 reason I would urge for this conclusion is that 
 this story is full of unnecessary horror and 
 ugliness. It is not, to begin with, in any 
 sense a good story judged by the high standard 
 I am striving to apply ; it does not hold us 
 captive or set us thinking. The other four, and 
 
 131 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 particularly The Mark of the Beast, have these 
 qualities. The horror in them is not un- 
 necessary. It is applied with skill to a definite 
 purpose, which purpose it achieves. 
 
 The Quarterly Review said of some of the 
 more ebullient of his verses, " Mr. Kipling, 
 though often a swashbuckler, is never a 
 charlatan." Never was fairer criticism, and 
 it can be applied also to the subject under 
 discussion. If Mr. Kipling sometimes leaves 
 dross and dirt in the figures he forms, it is not 
 because he is a clumsy and careless craftsman, 
 but because he works for great and wide 
 effects, and is not always as nice as he might 
 be in his treatment of small. Maupassant, 
 perhaps the greatest master of the short story 
 that any literature can show, errs far more 
 often than he in the way I have described. 
 Scattered among masterpieces he gives us 
 stories whose brutality and sordidness there 
 is no genius or power to excuse, stories at 
 once uglier, more sickening and less interesting 
 than Bertran and Bimi. 
 
 We shall notice, if we make careful study of 
 these stories, how, over and over again, Mr. 
 Kipling " works up " the situation, as a 
 journalist would say, with a few deft touches. 
 Sometimes the touches are too obviously those 
 of a journalist, but not often, and that is a 
 
 132 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 risk which has to be run. Consider, for 
 example, the effect of this one sentence from 
 My Ozvn True Ghost Story : 
 
 Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly 
 rent, and there is something — not fever — wrong with 
 a big bungalow in Allahabad. 
 
 Or this from At the End of the Passage : 
 
 The resonant hammering of a coffin-lid is no pleasant 
 thing to hear, but those who have experience main- 
 tain that much more terrible is the soft swish of the 
 bed-linen, the reeving and unreeving of the bed-tapes, 
 when he who has fallen by the roadside is apparelled 
 for burial, sinking gradually as the tapes are tied 
 over, till the swaddled shape touches the floor and 
 there is no protest against the indignity of hasty 
 disposal. 
 
 Most of these touches may be more profit- 
 ably considered in discussing Mr. Kipling's 
 prose style. I mention them now to lay stress 
 upon the skill with which he plays on our 
 apprehension as upon a stringed instrument. 
 That is what the great journalist does, and 
 the successful writer of short stories must 
 resemble the journalist in keeping up the 
 interest from start to finish. Maupassant had 
 this power, Hoffmann had it in a less degree ; 
 Poe and Villiers de I'lsle Adam lost it seldom, 
 Balzac too often. Pater, Wilde and Anatole 
 France, though one had exquisite grace, the 
 
 133 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 second dancing wit, and the third possesses 
 both, are often found lacking. Their stories 
 sag somewhere or other. They interest us 
 intensely, but we can read them in sections. 
 With regard to Mr. Kipling I can only give 
 my own experience on this point. In writing 
 these chapters it has happened again and 
 again that, referring to some particular passage, 
 I have against my will read on to the end of 
 the story, which I had probably read half a 
 dozen times before. This is the precise opposite 
 of the leisurely art of Dickens or— in our own 
 day — Mr. de Morgan. It may not be the 
 highest form of literature, but it is the highest 
 form of the short story. 
 
 134 
 
VII 
 
 SHORT STORIES: III 
 
 Perhaps the best story Mr. Kipling ever 
 wrote is The Man who would he King. Sir 
 J. M. Barrie has declared that it is " the most 
 audacious thing in fiction, and yet it reads as 
 true as Robinson Crusoe." The late S. R. 
 Crockett tells us that several literary men of 
 his acquaintance, striving to arrive at a verdict 
 as to Mr. Kipling's best story in which none 
 should be influenced by his neighbour, each 
 wrote the name of that which he considered 
 best on a slip of paper, which he then put into 
 a bowl. On every slip was written The Man 
 who would he King. 
 
 It is perhaps, like Mr. Wells' fine tale The 
 Country of the Blind — which, by the way, 
 always seems to me a sermon in favour of the 
 dogma which Mr, Wells elsewhere condemns — 
 in the nature of an allegory. Two adventurers ) 
 establish themselves in the midst of a little 
 mountain tribe in Afghanistan, and become 
 its absolute rulers. The people, deceived by 
 trumpery miracles, hold them gods. They 
 
 135 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 flourish exceedingly, make laws, form an 
 army, live in splendour and luxury. All is 
 well till one of them desires a woman to live 
 with him, and demands a woman from the 
 tribe. A girl is brought, but she comes sullen 
 and struggling, dazed with fear at the idea 
 of the embraces of a god. When he touches 
 her she bites him, and draws blood. That 
 dispels the illusion. At the very instant the 
 king's blood flows, his kingdom falls. He is a 
 man, the people realize, and therefore an 
 impostor. He is seized after a fight, tortured 
 and slain. 
 
 No summary can give any adequate idea of 
 this story. It is, as Sir J. M. Barrie says, as real 
 as Robinson Crusoe ; it moves breathlessly, with 
 an elan like a cavalry charge. No collection of 
 the best short stories could be considered 
 representative if it were omitted. 
 
 Mr. Kipling, when he portrays types other 
 than those which are associated with his name, 
 is not always successful. I have already made 
 mention of the Russian officer in Kim, and the 
 picture he draws elsewhere of the doings of a 
 French spy on an English man-of-war is even 
 worse. There is no nation in Europe less 
 likely to employ a complete fool for such work 
 than the French. So his Liberal is generally a 
 caricature, like Mr. Groombride in Little Foxes 
 
 136 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 — if an exceedingly able and malicious carica- 
 ture. He has, however, on occasion drawn 
 types that might have seemed unsympathetic 
 to his talent with great skill. 
 
 One of these is Mcintosh Jellaludin in To 
 he Filed for Reference, one of the best stories in 
 Plain Tales from the Hills. This man is exiled 
 and outcast, a white man living with a native 
 woman, drunken and degraded, and all the 
 time writing a wonderful book of philosophy. 
 It is merely an episode, but a fascinating 
 episode. 
 
 There has been some difference of opinion 
 with regard to the merits of Mr. Kipling's 
 later collections of stories for children, Puck 
 of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. As 
 children's stories I doubt whether they are 
 successful. They are too complicated, they 
 do not move directly enough on their path. 
 Compared, for example, with Mr. Andrew 
 Lang's historical stories for children, they are 
 far higher literature, but — as I have proved 
 to my own satisfaction — less interesting to 
 children. No child, in fact — if we decide to 
 apply that name to persons only who are 
 below the age of fifteen — can really understand 
 them. Many " grown-ups," on the other hand, 
 delight in them. I have known women who 
 were shocked and wearied by what they con- 
 
 137 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 sidered the brutality of the earHer stories, who 
 were fascinated by these. Undoubtedly, if 
 they possess less of the old force and brilliance, 
 the apparent truth and ease that brought 
 Mr. Kipling his first fame, they show at its 
 highest a polished beauty that had been in- 
 creasing in each book he published. 
 
 The method of telling these stories is 
 infinitely clever, and shows Mr. Kipling's use 
 of the " machinery " of fiction, always skilful, 
 at its highest. Puck introduces to two children 
 a number of representatives of England in 
 various ages, each of whom tells them what 
 life was like in his day. There is a man of the 
 Stone Age, who, in The Knife and the Naked 
 Chalk, tells how the early inhabitants of Britain 
 discovered the use of steel to defend them- 
 selves against the wolf, their ancient foe. 
 There is a Roman born in Britain during the 
 occupation, who has never seen Rome, who 
 tells of the days of her decline and the last 
 fights upon the wall. There is a Norman who 
 tells of the Conquest, and others. 
 
 There is a certain sameness in the characters 
 he draws in these different ages. He puts the 
 stories very often into the mouths of noble 
 young men like Parsenius the Roman and Sir 
 Richard Dalyngridge the Norman, who serve 
 powerful, less scrupulous, more truculent over- 
 
 138 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 lords such as Maximus and De Aquila. I 
 imagine that he does this because he desires 
 not to present flawed heroes to children, and 
 yet cannot avoid drawing strong, ruthless men 
 of power with the faults as well as the merits 
 of their kind. A particularly fine character is 
 De Aquila, the man who aims at the amalgama- 
 tion of Norman and Saxon rather than the 
 subjugation of the latter, who works with the 
 vision before his eyes of the great and united 
 England that was to come long after him. 
 
 In all these stories Mr. Kipling displays a 
 great deal of historical knowledge, but he 
 also shows a quality that is even better for his 
 purpose. In every one of them there is an 
 intuition, a bold attempt to grip the spirit of 
 the age with which he deals, a daring power of 
 invention in those details which give reality 
 and conviction to his pictures. With infinite 
 skill he gives to these historical figures all the 
 outward truth and accuracy that Merejkowski 
 imparts to his, though he never succeeds, like 
 the Russian, in drawing characters which 
 belong to any age but his own. It scarce needs 
 to say that in this fine gallery of portraits there 
 is not one that approaches that of Leonardo 
 da Vinci as he appears in Tlie Forerunner. 
 That Leonardo is in thought as well as in word 
 and deed the great genius of the Renaissance, 
 
 139 
 
 / 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 of the time when men were awakening. 
 Mr. Kiphng's Emperor Maximus is a Lord 
 Kitchener, his Parsenius a yomig Enghsh sub- 
 altern, two thousand years before their time. 
 
 Before I pass on to speak of the stories of 
 machines, I would mention some animal stories 
 besides the tales of Mowgli, and first one that 
 stands very nigh the summit of his art. Those 
 who know the great game of polo may be 
 inclined to set The Maltese Cat as high as The 
 Man who would he King or Without Benefit of 
 Clergy. If " the tale's the thing " be a sound 
 motto, if a man should value a story for that 
 in it which appeals to him, then are they 
 thoroughly justified. This truly delightful 
 story — which, like The Strange Ride of Morrow- 
 hie Jukes, The Return of Imray and many 
 others, has been translated into French — tells 
 how a game of polo for the championship of 
 Northern India is played from the point of 
 view of the winning ponies. These are led by a 
 little grey wonder, The Maltese Cat, who by his 
 science and judgment and undaunted courage 
 not only inspires the other ponies and wins 
 the match against the most expensive cattle in 
 India, but saves the life of the captain of his 
 team by his sagacity. Mr. Kipling, it need 
 hardly be said, knows the game of polo, at any 
 rate as then played in India, as he knows the 
 
 140 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 oaths of the private soldier and the chatter of 
 the bazaar. He tells this story with a rattle 
 and rush that keep us in a high state of excite- 
 ment from its start to its thrilling climax. As 
 in so many of his stories, we fancy that, 
 though he does not obtrude it upon us, he 
 pokes a lesson slyly at us. The ponies are 
 discussing the game in advance somewhat 
 lugubriously, wondering how they can make 
 shift to stand up against their formidable 
 opponents. 
 
 " Money means pace and weight," said Shiraz, rub- 
 bing his black silk nose dolefully along his neat -fitting 
 boot, " and by the maxims of the game as I know 
 it 
 
 " Ah, but we aren't playing the maxims," said the 
 Maltese Cat, " we're playing the game." 
 
 In later editions the Jungle Books have been 
 rearranged. All the stories of Mowgli have 
 been put together in the first, and all the 
 stories in which he does not appear in the 
 second. Many of these are excellent, though 
 far below Red Dog or Kaa^s Hunting. Among 
 the best are The White Seal and The Under- 
 takers, an amusing account of a cynical con- 
 versation between three of the world's most 
 evil scavengers, a crocodile, an adjutant crane 
 and a jackal. Mr. Kipling has done us one 
 poor service by these tales ; he has prepared 
 . 141 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 the way for a whole flood of imitations, most 
 of them exceeding indifferent. No popular 
 monthly magazine is now complete without its 
 " tale of the wild," though not more than two 
 of the authors combine knowledge with the 
 power of telling a good story. 
 
 The Just So Stories are children's stories in a 
 far truer sense than Puck of Pookas Hill and 
 Rewards and Fairies. One is sorry for the 
 child between the ages of ten and fifteen who 
 has not learned how the Whale got his Throat, 
 how the Leopard got his Spots, of the Cat that 
 Walked by Himself and the Butterfly that 
 Stamped. Best of all perhaps is How the 
 Alphabet was Made, wherein the forming of 
 letters is described with much ingenuity and 
 a good deal of science. Some of the poems 
 between the stories are delightful, particularly 
 that after How the Camel got his Hump, 
 which tells little boys and girls how to avoid a 
 like calamity. 
 
 Even in these stories there are many things, 
 many of Mr. Kipling's most characteristic 
 quips, that children will not understand. 
 Sometimes, indeed, he seems to be winking at 
 the grown-ups from his pages, over the children's 
 shoulders, as when he draws an Egyptianized 
 baboon, and in the note appended to the 
 picture says : " The umbrella-ish thing about 
 
 142 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 his head is his Conventional Mane." He shows 
 himself, by the way, in this book an excellent 
 draughtsman, not only humorous and imagina- 
 tive, but with a real gift for line. The picture 
 of Old Man Kangaroo running away, and 
 finding time to "be rude to " Yellow-Dog 
 Dingo over his shoulder as he runs, is as full of 
 life as it is of fun. The Just So Stories desei^e 
 their place on the nursery bookshelf with 
 Alice in Wonderland and Edward Lear's 
 Nonsense Songs and Stories. No praise can be 
 higher than that. 
 
 Everyone has loved The Maltese Cat, and 
 no one has objected to the sentiments and 
 ideas that have been put into his clever little 
 grey head. On the other hand, some of the 
 severest criticism has been directed against 
 those stories in which he has endowed machines 
 with life. Now it is obvious that this is a 
 problem which each individual reader must 
 solve for himself. It is perfectly legitimate 
 to endow machines with life, to make them 
 sentient beings, if you can give reality to your 
 sketch and if you can make it interesting. 
 Has Mr. Kipling done this in '007 and The 
 Ship that Found Herself? There are not 
 wanting critics who complain that he has not ; 
 I can only say that for me he has, that the 
 illusion is complete. 
 
 143 
 
 / 
 
 ( 
 
 \ 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 I believe, in fact, that in my boyhood the 
 former was my favourite of all short stories. 
 •007 is a locomotive engine, of the highest type, 
 and the story merely tells of his first intro- 
 duction to the yard, of his dread of the noise 
 and rush and clatter, of his first run — to rescue 
 an engine that has been derailed — of his success, 
 and his final promotion to draw the White 
 Moth that takes the overflow from the Purple 
 Emperor, the great express of the American 
 millionaire. The talk of the engines awaiting 
 their turn, the boasting of the several types 
 over their several high qualities, is most 
 amusing and convincing. And the run of -007 
 is splendid. We thrill with his hopes and 
 fears as he flies through the night for the first 
 time, fleeing from his own shadow, shuddering 
 at each unrailed bridge, with the tool-car 
 clattering behind him. 
 
 I am prepared to admit, however, that 
 there is a little too much mechanism in The 
 Ship that Found Herself. Its central idea is 
 excellent ; any sailor will proclaim its truth. 
 It is, shortly, that a ship is not a ship till she 
 has " found herself." She is, to begin with, a 
 conglomeration of ribs and girders and rivets ; 
 when she has " found herself" she is a perfect 
 unity. And to arrive at this point she must 
 endure a certain battering from the elements 
 
 144 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 she has to face, and all the theories of her 
 construction must be vitiated. For in theory 
 none of her rivets can move the hundredth 
 fraction of an inch ; they are immovable as a 
 rock. In practice, however, everything must 
 give a little, everywhere there must be a little 
 " play," till that whole that is the ship is an 
 elastic, living thing. Then, and not till then, 
 has the ship " found herself." 
 
 The story tells of the first crossing of the 
 Atlantic by the Dimbula, a first-class cargo- 
 boat, a more wonderful machine, Mr. Kipling 
 contends, than a great liner. The one for 
 success must simply be more gorgeous than 
 the most gorgeous of hotels ; in the other, 
 every inch of cargo-capacity and every extra 
 knc^t of speed must be weighed anxiously 
 against the cost of fuel. The Dimbula en- 
 counters very heavy weather. Her groaning 
 as she meets it is the groaning of her countless 
 parts, frames, deck-beams, stringers, capstan, 
 screw-shaft, funnel, rivets. Just as she makes 
 harbour, apparently severely damaged, since 
 she shows signs of her treatment that to the 
 inexperienced eye seems serious, a new voice 
 is heard. It is the voice of the Dimbula, no 
 longer of her parts. She is all one now, a ship 
 in truth. She has " found herself." 
 
 The record of all the different voices, the 
 K 145 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 enumeration of a hundred different parts of 
 the ship with which none but a seaman — 
 perhaps, rather, none but a ship-builder — is 
 likely to be conversant, becomes after a time 
 a little wearisome. It is not, as some critics 
 have maintained, bad in itself. There is 
 rather too much of it. Yet the story is a good 
 one, and the final emergence of the " person- 
 ality " of the Dimbula well told. 
 
 The love of machinery has not waned. 
 With the Night Mail in Actions and Reactions 
 is its latest proof. In this story Mr. Kipling 
 meets Mr. Wells on his own ground ; he looks 
 into the future and he describes the machines 
 he sees there. He has not to fear from com- 
 parison. This is a story told, as a special 
 reporter would tell it, of the crossing of the 
 Atlantic in the aerial postal packet. The air- 
 ship, its machinery, are described with a gusto 
 that seems to show a boyish delight in their 
 invention. The description of the great storm 
 that is met merits the hard-used adjective 
 " epic." He fits in, incidentally as it were, a 
 little sketch of the society of the time. In 
 reality all is in the hands of the A.B.C. ; the 
 Aerial Board of Control. It has come to be 
 recognized by all the principalities and powers 
 of the world that the world's supreme concern 
 is the traffic. Gradually every other interest 
 
 146 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 has been subordinated to this, and so gradually, 
 even unwillingly, the A.B.C. has found all the 
 affairs of mankind upon its shoulders. It is a 
 less intellectual, less thoughtful picture than 
 that of Mr. Wells in The World Set Free— but 
 it makes better reading. 
 
 He has appended to With the Night Mail a 
 series of announcements of the A.B.C, a 
 number of advertisements, answers to corre- 
 spondents, etc., which are supposed to be taken 
 from the newspaper in which it appeared. 
 
 It has been said that these mock advertise- 
 ments are unworthy of a serious artist. I 
 must repeat an argument I have already used. 
 If they interest or amuse intelligent persons, 
 then they are not unworthy, and I cannot 
 believe that they fail in this respect. They are 
 interesting because, even if merely examples 
 of the quackery that fills the advertisement 
 pages of our newspapers, they show thought in 
 its adaptation to another, an imaginary, age. 
 
 But best of all is a review of the biography, 
 by his son, of the great scientist of aeronautics, 
 often mentioned in the story, Xavier Lavalle. 
 Lavalle's theory of the cyclone has revolution- 
 ized knowledge, and upset the theories of the 
 hitherto dominant " Spanish School." Would 
 that all book-reviewing were as vivid as the 
 relation of this incident : 
 
 147 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 M. Victor Lavalle tells us of that historic colHsion 
 (en plane) on the flank of Hecla between Herrera, 
 then a pillar of the Spanish School, and the man 
 destined to confute his theories and lead him intellec- 
 tually captive. Even through the years, the immense 
 laugh of Lavalle as he sustains the Spaniard's wrecked 
 plane, and cries : " Courage ! / shall not fall till I 
 have found Truth, and I hold you fast ! " rings like 
 the call of trumpets. 
 
 I have spoken of the similarity of Mr. 
 Kipling's humour to that of the Americans. 
 There are one or two stories, on the lines of 
 The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney, that 
 depend on humour and that alone for their 
 effect. Their plot is of the simplest, and very 
 often quite absurd, so that, if the fun flags for 
 an instant, if the note is not sustained from 
 start to finish, we find ourselves cold and 
 carping. My Sunday at Home, for example, 
 is, though it too has its joyful moments, 
 grotesque and strained. But there are two 
 others, Brugglesmith and The Puzzler, that 
 cannot be beaten in this type. The latter tells 
 how the narrator detects a famous judge and 
 two dignified elderly friends striving to solve 
 the problem, with the aid of a monkey taken 
 from an organ, whether or not the tree known 
 as the " monkey-puzzler " deserves its name, 
 and of the consequences of the experiment. 
 
 148 
 
SHORT STORIES 
 
 My memory of my first acquaintance with 
 Brugglesmiih, a bacchanalian adventure with 
 a blackguardly old Scottish engineer whom the 
 author pretends he wheeled home through the 
 streets of London at night, is peculiarly vivid. 
 On that occasion I came as near as I trust will 
 ever be my fate to being thrust out of the 
 British Museum Reading Room by its dignified 
 officials. 
 
 These stories reveal Mr. Kipling as a master 
 of that roaring mirth which is peculiarly a 
 mark of the Anglo-Saxon race. He cannot 
 exercise it at will, he fails sometimes when he 
 would appear to have striven most. It is 
 indeed the rarest of gifts, and often fails the 
 few who possess it. There is one other living 
 Englishman only who can, as the saying is, 
 " make you laugh till you cry," and it was in 
 one book only that he succeeded in the feat. 
 This power of producing helpless laughter that 
 Mr. Kipling and Mr. Jerome possess, is some- 
 thing altogether apart from the ordinary 
 standards by which literature is judged. It 
 is some indefinable quality, very human, very 
 near to the foundations of our being, some 
 current that passes between certain chosen 
 persons and the crowd. The man who has it 
 may fail sometimes in judgment of his fellow- 
 men, but he has with them a closer bond even 
 
 149 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 than the mind. He is Hnked to that in them 
 which defies analysis, the common conscious- 
 ness of humanity set amid incongruous 
 elements, the hidden inner spirit, " the thing 
 call'd soul." 
 
 150 
 
VIII 
 
 NOVELS 
 
 The novel is to-day as assuredly the chief 
 means of expression as it was in the days of 
 Fielding, Sterne, Richardson and Smollett, as 
 was the drama under Elizabeth and rimed 
 verse from Cleveland to Pope. Short stories, 
 the publishers tell us, do not sell. Save for the 
 work of a few masters in the craft, Mr. Kipling, 
 Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, Mr. Blackwood, Mr. 
 Mason, and one or two others, they are a drug 
 in the market. The lending libraries are 
 inclined to frown upon them, and the dis- 
 pleasure of these potentates of letters is not 
 lightly to be faced. 
 
 It is not then surprising that an author such 
 as Mr. Kipling, the greatest in his own par- 
 ticular art that English literature has produced, 
 should yet have been tempted to try his mettle 
 in a field that did not suit nearly so well his 
 peculiar powers, and where he had to meet 
 and bear comparison with rivals infinitely 
 more redoubtable. He has not been entirely 
 successful. He has written four long books, 
 
 151 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 one of them with a collaborator. Of these the 
 first three, all interesting, all good stories well 
 told, have added nothing to his fame, and will 
 take a place when his work is tried by posterity 
 far below the best of the Jungle Books, Life's 
 Handicap and The Day's Work. In the last 
 he has justified his ambition, and produced 
 one of the finest novels that has appeared since 
 the beginning of this century. 
 ^ The Light that Failed has been much abused, 
 and has merited some of the abuse. It is raw, 
 uncomely, and "unpleasant" in the sense 
 that hardly one of its characters is sympathetic. 
 The Athenaeum declared of it, " it is an organic 
 whole — a book with a backbone — and stands 
 out boldly among the nerveless, flaccid, in- 
 vertebrate things called novels that enjoy an 
 expensive, but ephemeral existence in the 
 circulating libraries." That may be, but the 
 praise is in itself an admission that the book 
 is no masterpiece, for masterpieces are not 
 compared, however favourably, with the 
 " nerveless, flaccid, invertebrate things called 
 novels." As a " novel of the year " it is well 
 enough; as a novel of its generation it is not 
 Yeiy noticeable. The more we admire Mr. 
 Kipling, the higher the standard by which we 
 judge his work, the less attention shaU we 
 pay to The Light that Failed. 
 
 152 
 
NOVELS 
 
 But judged by lower standards, by the 
 standard of the everyday tale of adventure 
 and character, it is at least " a rattling good 
 story." Dick Heldar is a real and living 
 figure. The accounts of his unhappy boyhood 
 and companionship with Maisie are real and 
 living likewise, and pathetic as well. His 
 adventures in the Soudan, whither he goes as 
 artist war-correspondent, the comradeship with 
 Torpenhow, the return, and, after a terrible 
 struggle, the wild joy of success, when his 
 pictures and his fame are everywhere, all these 
 are exciting, yet always credible. There is 
 something intensely pathetic in the worship 
 of this fierce, brutal man for the refound 
 Maisie, for we can see from the first that that 
 chilly little person will never bring him happi- 
 ness. She also is an artist, but without in- 
 spiration, and filled with a selfish dread of 
 being overmastered by Dick's genius and 
 personality. He fights manfully to win her, to 
 impress upon her all the joys of the roving life 
 he has led, to set her aflame with desire for all 
 the things he has seen and can show her. 
 There is one passage in particular that has 
 been much quoted, wherein he rises to high 
 and rare eloquence, and puts all the lure of 
 romance in a few shining sentences. 
 
 What do you think of a big, red, dead city built of 
 153 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 red sandstone, with raw green aloes growing between 
 the stones, lying out neglected on honey-coloured 
 sands ? There are forty dead kings there, Maisie, 
 each in a gorgeous tomb finer than all the others. 
 You look at the palaces and streets and shops and 
 tanks, and think that men must live there, till you 
 find a wee gray squirrel rubbing its nose all along the 
 market-place, and a jewelled peacock struts out of a 
 carved door-way and spreads its tail against a marble 
 screen as fine pierced as point -lace. Then a monkey 
 — a little black monkey — walks through the main 
 square to get a drink from a tank forty feet deep. He 
 slides down the creepers to the water's edge, and 
 a friend holds him by the tail, in case he should 
 fall in. 
 
 Tragedy has never been far off, and at last 
 it comes. Dick, despairing at the ill-success of 
 his suit, and left alone in their quarters by 
 Torpenhow, is at work upon a picture which 
 he hopes to make his masterpiece. It is a 
 modern " Melancholia," and his model is a 
 little girl of the streets who has been taken up 
 and befriended by Torpenhow. As the work 
 progresses he is much worried by failing eye- 
 sight. At last going to an oculist, he hears 
 the dread verdict. His optical nerves have 
 been badly damaged by a wound received in 
 the Soudan, and the loss of his sight is a matter 
 of months at the longest. He returns, plunged 
 into despair, and works feverishly to complete 
 his picture, keeping himself going and pur- 
 
 154 
 
NOVELS 
 
 chasing forgetfulness by fierce bouts of drink- 
 ing. When Torpenhow returns, he finds him 
 a dirty, dishevelled, unshaven wreck — but the 
 great picture is finished. 
 
 Almost at once blindness descends upon 
 him, and at the same time the model, who has 
 fallen in love with Torpenhow and is fiercely 
 jealous of Dick's influence with him, destroys 
 the picture. The truth is kept from Dick for 
 a long time, and he believes the picture to be 
 intact and talks of the fame it will bring him. 
 And then at last, when Maisie comes to see 
 him she reveals the truth, and reveals also — 
 what is far harder for him to bear — her dread 
 and horror of his blindness. That is the end. He 
 accompanies Torpenhow to Africa once again, 
 and "a merciful bullet" comes to his succour. 
 
 That at least is the only version I care to 
 discuss, the version its author originally con- 
 ceived. The sentimentalized, sugared version 
 which ends with Dick in Maisie's arms is weak, 
 and — in view of the girl's character — most 
 unlikely. 
 
 There is in this book an extraordinary 
 collection of unpleasant people. The woman 
 who is the guardian of Dick and Maisie in child- 
 hood is vile, the firm that buys Dick's sketches 
 is represented by a bandit, Maisie is a cowardly, 
 selfish soul, Dick himself brutal and savage. 
 
 155 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 His paintings, Maisie declares, " smell of 
 tobacco and blood," and the same might be 
 said of his character. Yet he is at least brave v^ 
 and loyal and honest and a dreamer of fine 
 dreams, and Maisie is none of these things. 
 The pleasantest personage is undoubtedly 
 " the Red-haired Girl," who herself loves Dick 
 silently. 
 
 / The affection of Dick and Torpenhow is of 
 /that close, silent, yet almost fiercely-possessive 
 'kind that is common between such men. 
 Torpenhow looks upon him, "his eyes full of 
 the austere love that springs up between men 
 yv^ho have tugged at the same oar together and 
 4re yoked by custom and use and the intimacies 
 6f toil." 
 
 And the conversations between the two are 
 excellently rendered. When, for example, 
 Dick finds the little weary prostitute, whom his 
 friend has taken in out of compassion and 
 without his knowledge, asleep on the sofa, he 
 exclaims : 
 
 " Oh, I say, old man, this is too bad ! You 
 mustn't bring this sort up here. They steal 
 things from the rooms." 
 
 Now this is exactly the tone which one 
 bachelor would adopt to another under the 
 circumstances, but there are few other than 
 Mr. Kipling who would have dared to say so. 
 
 156 
 
NOVELS 
 
 Most writers would have dragged in a word 
 or two of reproof or disgust for the edification 
 of the righteous, Dick is merely anxious as to 
 the fate of the spoons. 
 
 There lies one of Mr. Kipling's great merits. 
 Always he strives, not always with success, but 
 never relinquishing the effort from lack of 
 courage, to " draw the thing as he sees it." 
 
 The Naulakha, written in collaboration with 
 his brother-in-law Wolcott Balestier, is even 
 less satisfactory than The Light that Failed. 
 It is without doubt the least known of Mr. 
 Kipling's books. It is as a story perhaps 
 more exciting than The Light that Failed, but 
 less balanced, with less precise sketches of 
 character, and a purely trivial plot. The tale 
 of the quest of the rajah's wonderful jewel is 
 merely an excuse for the introduction of thril- 
 ling and gorgeous Indian scenes. And even if 
 India is well described, there is none of that 
 magic suggestion of atmosphere that we expect 
 from Mr. Kipling. It is quite unlike his 
 ordinary work. It might be, in fact, a good 
 translation of a book on India, supposing him 
 to have studied it, of M. Jean Richepin, who 
 is well enough, but an artist of inferior calibre 
 to Mr. Kipling. It has its moments, but there 
 are not enough of them. I shall not deal with 
 it at greater length. 
 
 157 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Captains Courageous is a far better book, I 
 think a book that would appeal to boys more 
 than Puck of Pook's Hill, written expressedly 
 for them. But, as was said of Treasure Island, 
 it will appeal to " all boys from nine to ninety." 
 There is an infectious vigour about the tale, 
 the smell of salt is borne to us from its pages. 
 It is a fine epic of high and manful endeavour, 
 of the hard and dangerous yet happy lives of 
 simple men. A Mr. James Oliphant, I am 
 reminded by my allusion to Treasure Island, 
 sets it above this book. The value of his 
 criticism may be gauged by the intelligent 
 remark elsewhere in his book (Victorian 
 Novelists) : " Not many people would think 
 of reading Treasure Island a second time." 
 Captains Courageous, good as it is, is a long 
 way below Stevenson's splendid book. There 
 is no figure to compare with that terrible sea- 
 cook John Silver. I am inclined to agree with 
 this critic in assigning definitely to Mr. Kipling 
 a place in literature higher than Stevenson's, 
 but that is no reason for setting one of his 
 inferior works above what is very nigh the 
 latter's masterpiece. I think that the Mr. 
 Kipling who declared that Stevenson was his 
 master would object very strongly to seeing 
 Captains Courageous accorded a higher place 
 than Treasure Island. 
 
 158 
 
NOVELS 
 
 The story begins with a young American 
 "bounder" of fifteen, son of a millionaire, 
 plaguing the passengers of an Atlantic liner 
 crossing the Grand Bank with his insolence. A 
 sardonic German presents him with a very 
 strong cigar, which quite overwhelms him. He 
 falls overboard and is picked up by a dory 
 belonging to the smack We're Here of Glou- 
 cester, Massachusetts. He meets his rescuers 
 with his usual insolence, and offers them a 
 large sum to take him at all speed to New 
 York. But the crew of the We're Here dis- 
 believe his tales of wealth. They have only 
 just begun their fishing, and the price they 
 will obtain for their catch seems much bigger 
 than any vague sum the young millionaire can 
 promise. They decide to continue their fish- 
 ing, and to make young Harvey work like the 
 rest. After an attempt at rebellion, when he 
 is knocked down by Disco Troop, the owner, 
 he is set to assist the ' boy,' young Dan, his 
 son. 
 
 Then follows the weakest part of the story, 
 for Harvey seems transformed by that blow on 
 the nose, casts off at once his selfishness and 
 ill-natured precocity, and becomes the best 
 of good fellows. We are given to understand 
 that he always was this at bottom, but that 
 he had been spoiled by the injudicious treat- 
 
 159 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 ment of his mother. That is quite possible, but 
 it is scarcely credible that the evil qualities 
 of years of mismanagement and indulgence 
 should so quickly remove under the influence 
 even of such fine characters as the crew of the 
 We're Here. 
 
 They are splendid people one and all, from 
 stern Disco Troop to his merry son Dan. 
 Even Uncle Salters, the farmer and booby of 
 the crew, is lovable. Most charming of all is 
 Manuel, the " Portugee," whose dory rescued 
 Harvey. When work was finished for the day, 
 and they sat round the cabin, 
 
 Manuel's talk was slow and gentle — all about pretty 
 girls in Madeira washing clothes in the dry beds of 
 streams, by moonlight, under waving bananas ; 
 legends of saints, and tales of queer dances or fights 
 away in the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports. 
 
 The accounts of the fishing from dories, of 
 the salting and packing of the cod, of the 
 habits and customs of the sailors, suggest that 
 Mr. Kipling, during the years he spent in the 
 United States, served his time on one of these 
 smacks. That does not mean that there is 
 anything pedantic in the tale — far from it. It 
 is a splendid, realistic story of a splendid race 
 of men. 
 
 When the We're Here with Harvey aboard 
 has finally reached port, there is an account 
 
 160 
 
NOVELS 
 
 of his father's dash across America to meet 
 him, with all the detail and all the sheer love 
 of speed that Mr. Kipling puts into his stories 
 of the railway. 
 
 Captains Courageous, better than The Light 
 that Failed, far better than The Naulakha, is 
 yet not to be mentioned in the same breath as 
 Kim. The publication of Kiin marks in some 
 respects the highest point of Mr. Kipling's 
 career. Many of his best books were published 
 before he had reached his full fame. He was 
 now, at the beginning of the new century, in 
 the sun of his highest popularity. His stories 
 and his poems were read everywhere and 
 everywhere quoted. Yet his complete novels 
 had not borne out the promise of his other 
 work. Malicious critics had labelled The Light 
 that Failed ' The Book that Failed,' and I 
 have given my reasons for holding that they 
 were not altogether wrong. It had been said 
 that he could not write a great novel, and Kim 
 seemed to some the proof of a deliberately 
 accepted challenge. If that were so, his 
 confidence was triumphantly vindicated. 
 
 As compared with The Light that Failed, 
 the whole book is elaborate. Here are no 
 hasty, impressionist sketches, but careful, 
 loving full-length portraits. Kim himself, his 
 saintly lama, the delightful Hurree Chiuider 
 L 161 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Mookerjee, Mahbub AH, the old princess, even 
 the lesser characters like Lurgan and Colonel 
 Creighton, are people whom, looking back on 
 the book, we seem to have known. And 
 nowhere has Mr. Kipling been so successful in 
 creating for us the atmosphere of the East, its 
 silence and its cruelty and its mystery, the 
 smells of the bazaars, the colours and the 
 glare, the heat and the flies, the sweetmeats 
 ^-^ and the dust. 
 
 Kim is a tale of the Secret Service of India, 
 which is itself probably in no way a thing of 
 the author's imagination, however much he 
 may have embellished it for the purposes of 
 his story. Kim is a little Avhite boy stranded 
 and alone in India, son of an Irish private 
 who died of drink and opium. His only friend 
 is one Mahbub Ali, a swaggering, rakish 
 Afghan horse-dealer, who is one of the most 
 trusted players of " The Game," as the work 
 of the Secret Service is called. Kim first 
 takes a hand in the Game by conveying to 
 Colonel Creighton, the head of the service, a 
 note that Mahbub is anxious to be rid of, since 
 it threatens his life. When he has delivered 
 it he lies outside the house, as the native chil- 
 dren among whom he has lived would have 
 done, and overhears plans for putting down a 
 rising in the north which the letter forebodes. 
 
 162 
 
NOVELS 
 
 Meantime Kim has made the acquaintance 
 of a wonderful Thibetan lama outside the 
 " Wonder House " at Lahore — the Museum 
 of which Mr. Lockwood Kipling was Curator 
 — and has become his chela or disciple. The 
 lama is on a quest, the quest of a river that 
 sprang from the arrow of Gaudama when he 
 excelled all that strove against him in shooting. 
 Kim is neither convinced nor sceptical ; India 
 is full of priests and every one has a quest of 
 some sort. This one he loves, so he decides to 
 accompany him. Together they take the 
 road, Kim begging for his master according to 
 the custom, and owing to his skill and im- 
 pudence they live well. 
 
 The description of the Grand Trunk Road 
 is one of the most marvellous passages in 
 Mr. Kipling's works. He is perhaps, less 
 concise, less determined to spare every word 
 that he can do without than is his wont. He 
 paints his picture in leisurely fashion and 
 takes many pages to do it. It were of little 
 use to quote anything from the description if 
 one did not quote nigh all, which is of course 
 impossible. That description is an answer to 
 the cry that the world has become in every 
 corner a sober and monotonous place. We 
 feel as we read Kim's own delight in that scene 
 of ten thousand shifting bright-garbed actors. 
 
 163 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Presently they fall in with the train of an 
 old princess, returning to her native hills 
 after a visit to her daughter. Kim manages 
 discreetly to bring himself and his master to 
 her notice and into a favour that serves them 
 well in later days. The witty, foul-tongued, 
 rusee dame is altogether delightful, one of the 
 most humorous characters Mr. Kipling has 
 created. 
 
 All this time Kim has been prophesying a 
 great war " with guns," telling of the exact 
 number of men who will be engaged, exactly 
 as he heard it from the lips of Colonel Creighton. 
 In India, apparently, fame comes from glib 
 prophecy even before it is fulfilled, and Kim 
 is considered a prodigy. When, later, the 
 prophecy is fulfilled, and the exact force he 
 has named is sent forward, he is not far short 
 of a god. 
 
 Kim is eventually captured by his father's 
 old regiment, straying near to it in curiosity 
 when he sees its badge, a red bull on a green 
 field. The Indian woman who had lived with 
 O'Hara his father had told him after the latter's 
 death that " nine hundred first-class devils, 
 whose god was a Red Bull on a green field, 
 would attend to Kim," which was all she could 
 remember of the man's rambling directions. 
 Instantly the chaplains of the regiment decide 
 
 164 
 
NOVELS 
 
 that he must be sent to school, and the old 
 lama offers to pay his expenses so that he 
 may go to a first-class school instead of 
 learning with the drummer-boys. So Kim 
 finds himself at one of the great Roman 
 Catholic schools of India where the sons of 
 English officials and of the richer " half- 
 sahibs " are educated. There he abides some 
 years, varying work with delightful holiday 
 trips in native costume with the lama, who 
 yet continues his quest. But those mighty 
 players of the Game, Colonel Creighton and 
 Mahbub Ali, have marked an apt pupil, and 
 are determined that he shall not slip through 
 their fingers. Kim is sent to the house of 
 Lurgan, " the Healer of Sick Pearls," to receive 
 his training. 
 
 Here he is taught scientifically to observe 
 and memorize the slightest details of costume, 
 of colour, of speech that are presented to him, 
 to scorn all the most mysterious forms of fear, 
 to wear a dozen different disguises and to 
 assume with each the language, the bearing, 
 the manner of walking and sitting and sleeping 
 of the race or caste he represents. He comes 
 through all his tests, gains the approval of the 
 Babu Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, one of the 
 very best players of the Game, and is sent 
 forth. He is at first given no direct duties, 
 
 165 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 but is to serve his apprenticeship to the Road 
 by following the lama upon his quest. 
 
 Then follow countless adventures, of which 
 the old lama is of course kept ignorant. If an 
 objection can be made against this part of the 
 story, it is on the ground that, in such a vast 
 beehive as India, some of Kim's meetings with 
 old friends and foes stretch coincidence rather 
 far. This can be forgiven for the sake of the 
 thrilling vista of intrigue, of stealthy plot and 
 more cunning counter-plot, which now opens 
 before us. Kim performs one great feat in 
 disguising a Mahratta fellow-worker, who is 
 fleeing from his foes. He has been marked so 
 that he will be known when the train in which 
 he travels reaches its destination, where he 
 will be arrested on a charge of murder, the 
 corpse and a dozen witnesses ready to swear 
 they saw the act being all prepared. Kim 
 changes him to the likeness of a fakir, and 
 enables him to elude the police, gaining great 
 credit for his resource. Finally he aids Hurree 
 Chunder to trick two Russian spies, to steal 
 their papers and break up their camp. 
 
 After long wanderings the saintly old lama 
 ends his quest in a fashion in which pathos and 
 humour are equally blended. He sees a canal, 
 which to his half-blind eyes bears all the signs 
 of his river, falls into it, and is with difficulty 
 
 166 
 
NOVELS 
 
 saved from drowning by Hurree Babu. His days 
 come to an end at the hill-castle of the old prin- 
 cess, who loves him and his disciple very dearly. 
 
 Of all the characters in this book Hurree is 
 the best. I think that he will share immor- 
 tality with Mulvaney if it comes to any of 
 Mr. Kipling's people. Mr. Lockwood Kipling's 
 fine illustrations have made us familiar with 
 the huge, cow-like figure, 'his enormous flabby 
 calves bare from the knee to the tops of his 
 socks. He is, as he is never tired of asseverating, 
 " a fearful man," afraid of his own shadow, 
 but he has been in " dam'-tight places more 
 than hairs on my head," and come out of 
 them with credit. He affects, like many of his 
 class, to be a free-thinker, but he is super- 
 stitious to the last degree. He is something 
 of an ethnologist and a student of religious 
 beliefs. " It is," says Mr. Kiphng, " an awful 
 thing still to dread the magic that you con- 
 temptuously investigate — to collect folk-lore 
 for the Royal Society with a lively belief in 
 all Powers of Darkness." 
 
 Philosophy is at times a very real aid to 
 him, however. When he tells Kim that he is 
 about to attach himself to the camp of the 
 Russian spies as an interpreter, to spy upon 
 them in his turn, the latter, knowing the risks 
 and his natural cowardice, is astonished. 
 
 167 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 " Will they kill thee ? " he asks. 
 
 " Oah, thatt is nothing," says Hiirree. " I am good 
 enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little 
 thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know." 
 
 Mr. Kipling revels in the speech of the 
 university-trained Bengalee, and its mixture 
 of slang and pomposity. When Kim has 
 done well, and Hurree is going to report the 
 same to Colonel Creighton, he says to him : 
 
 " I tell our mutual friend you take the bally 
 bun, by Jove ! " and when handing over to 
 Kim the dress in which he is to take the road : 
 
 " Oho ! That is inconspicuous dress of chela 
 attached to service of lamaistic lama. Complete in 
 every particular," said Hurree Babu, rolling into the 
 balcony to clean his teeth at a goglet. " I am of 
 opeenion it is not your old gentleman's precise 
 religion, but rather sub-variant of same. I have con- 
 tributed rejected notes to Asiatic Quarterly Review 
 on these subjects. Now it is curious that the old 
 gentleman himself is totally devoid of religiosity. 
 He is not a dam' particular." 
 
 The old princess sums up her philosophy thus : 
 
 " I have seen something of this world, and there 
 are but two sorts of women in it — ^those who take the 
 strength out of a man and those who put it back. 
 Once I was that one, and now I am this." 
 
 The lama is wonderful. This saintly old 
 yellow man embodies all the qualities that in 
 
 168 
 
NOVELS 
 
 the East make for holiness, — reverence, gentle- 
 ness, abstention from all interference in the 
 lives of others, skill in the law and philosophy 
 of his ancient creed, the power of prolonged 
 silent prayer and ecstasy. If he lacks some 
 of the attributes of perfect holiness as it is 
 generally pictured amongst us of the West, we 
 can yet love and understand him. He is no 
 knight of God setting forth to attack wrong, 
 no valiant soldier leading the battle against 
 the legions of evil. But the holiness of Madame 
 de Guyon and of Fenelon, the doctrines of 
 Quietism which were in effect those of some 
 of the most venerated saints of the Catholic 
 Church, and notably of Saint Teresa, are not 
 very far from him. They are an admirable anti- 
 dote to what may be termed the " fussy " 
 forms of religion so prevalent in England to-day, 
 .when attention to ashpits in mean streets — 
 how estimable in itself ! — is held an effective 
 substitute for praise and prayer. 
 
 As a " detective story " alone, Kim stands 
 above any I have read, but it is far more than 
 a detective story. It is also the best English 
 novel of Indian life that has ever been written. 
 It roused in this country, indeed also in 
 America and on the Continent, an interest in 
 India and its life, as opposed to the life of its 
 English garrison, that not even its author's 
 
 169 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 short stories had been able to awaken. It has 
 an indescribable fascination ; one reads it 
 again and again with new delight. It has that 
 quality which is the hall-mark of a great book 
 — it never grows stale. 
 
 It is curious and to be deplored that Kim 
 should have had no successor, that Mr. Kipling 
 should since have attempted no complete 
 novel. It may be that he feels the critics to 
 be right, that he is not fitted for novel-writing, 
 that he has exhausted his powers in that 
 respect by struggling on past three very partial 
 successes to this master-stroke. It must indeed 
 be remembered that he has written but little 
 of any kind since its publication. If that 
 supposition be true, ours is the misfortune, and 
 it is heavy. , 
 
 170 
 
IX 
 
 STYLE 
 
 L^Mr. James Oliphant, of whose criticism I 
 have spoken elsewhere disparagingly, has his 
 moments, and in one of them he says : 
 
 " With Mr. Kipling ten pages will go for 
 fifty pages of many novelists. Every sentence, 
 every phrase, every word almost, tells its own 
 tale. If the strokes are few, there is yet no 
 vagueness in the sketch, for every line is 
 placed where it is most significant." 
 
 Compression is indeed one of the most 
 striking characteristics of Mr. Kipling's style. 
 He makes use of the short story, of the short 
 paragraph, of the short sentence. He puts 
 both thought and description into the narrowest 
 possible space. Sometimes he leaves us, as it 
 were, to complete a story for ourselves. This 
 must always be taken into account in esti- 
 mating the volume of his work. When we 
 look at Mr. Kipling's published work in bulk, 
 it seems large enough, but when we come to 
 think that there is here what would be for 
 another man the bones and materials for 
 
 171 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 hundreds of books, we realize the vast strain 
 of production to which he must have put 
 himself in early days. It is small wonder if 
 the fount begins now to run dry. 
 
 The following sentence from The Return of 
 Imray is a really amazing example of compres- 
 sion. Speaking of Tietjens, Strickland's great 
 Rampur hound, Mr. Kipling says : 
 
 Strickland owed his life to her, when he was on the 
 Frontier, in search of a local murderer, who came in 
 the gray dawn to send Strickland much farther than 
 the Andaman Islands. 
 
 In thirty words we are not only told in what 
 place and circumstances Strickland owed his 
 life to his slut, but it is implied that when 
 Strickland caught the man it would be his 
 fate to be imprisoned, probably for life, in the 
 convict settlement of the Indian Government 
 in the Andaman Islands, that the man knew 
 this, and intended that Strickland should be 
 sent " much farther." That is surely the limit 
 of possible compression. 
 
 Of the short sentence he is indubitably a 
 master. He loves to begin a story or a para- 
 graph with a sentence of not more than a 
 dozen words that drive straight to the heart 
 of the situation. I take the following almost 
 at random from various stories in Lifers 
 Handicap : 
 
 172 
 
STYLE 
 
 The Indus had risen in flood without warning. 
 
 Imray achieved the impossible. Without warning, 
 for no conceivable motive, in his youth, at the thres- 
 hold of his career he chose to disappear from the 
 world — which is to say, the little Indian station where 
 he lived. 
 
 " Prisoner's head did not reach to the top of the 
 dock," as the English newspapers say. 
 
 The Biblical sentence is as a rule — though 
 not always — a long sentence, so that it may 
 seem contradictory after extolling Mr. Kipling's 
 prowess in the management of the short to 
 add that he has been greatly influenced by 
 the language of the Bible. But Mr. Kipling 
 uses long sentences on occasion, and certainly 
 in a form that would not have been used had 
 there been no English Bible. Take for example 
 this sentence from The Head of the District : 
 
 Wherefore the Very Greatest of All the Viceroys 
 took another step in advance, and with it counsel of 
 those who should have advised him on the appoint- 
 ment of a successor to Yardley-Orde. 
 
 Or this passage from Without Benefit of Clergy : 
 
 It struck a pilgrim-gathering of half a million at a 
 sacred shrine. Many died at the feet of their god ; 
 the others broke and ran over the face of the land 
 carrying the pestilence with them. It smote a walled 
 city and killed two hundred a day. 
 
 This use of Old Testament language is 
 particularly assumed when Mr. Kipling speaks 
 
 173 
 
 y 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 of such things as are common in the Old 
 Testament, the Goodness or the Wrath of God, 
 the greatness of a king's might, peace and 
 prosperity or war, famine, pestilence and 
 death. 
 
 One of the reasons why Mr. Kipling's com- 
 pression seldom leaves us in doubt as to his 
 meaning is the vigour of his phrases. Another 
 is the special significance that he attaches to 
 single words, and the bold use he makes of the 
 hyphen. He is never afraid to take a word or 
 an expression from vulgar use, even in a 
 passage of lofty tone, if it will add force to his 
 sentence. M. Chevrillon was very greatly 
 impressed by the power of his phrases, and 
 has collected a great number of them. A few 
 of the following are taken direct from him, the 
 rest struck my own eye in perusing his works. 
 
 Kaa, the rock python of The Jungle Book, 
 " seemed to pour himself along the ground.'^'' 
 
 The sun is spoken of as " driving broad 
 golden spokes through the lower branches of 
 the mango trees." 
 
 Mulvaney in With the Main Guard relates : 
 
 " I saw a sword lick out past Crook's ear, an' the 
 Paythan was tuk in the apple av his throat like a pig 
 at Dromeen Fair." 
 
 In summer, through the furious May heats, the 
 ruhh reeled in the haze. {In the Rukh.) 
 
 174 
 
STYLE 
 
 The lightning spattered the sky as a thrown egg 
 spatters a barn-door. {The Return oflmray.) 
 
 Any regiment can advance, but few know how to 
 retreat with a sting in the tail. {The Brushwood Boy.) 
 
 The gilt-edged Purple Emperor, the milHonaires' 
 south-bound express, laying the long miles over his 
 shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft hoard. 
 {■007.) 
 
 The steady wolf's trot that eats up the long miles 
 like fire. {The Jungle Booh.) 
 
 Dr. Leeb-Lundberg has made a careful 
 study of the words used by Mr. Kipling, but 
 he sometimes overreaches himself in his 
 erudition. It is interesting to consider Mr. 
 Kipling's use of the hyphen in such instances 
 as ' tree - land,' ' capable - of - ruling - men,' 
 ' dust-haze,' ' man -talk,' but it is utterly ab- 
 surd to comment gravely upon such hyphened 
 and compound words as ' tight - lipped,' 
 * unprintable,' ' unproven,' ' unlover - like,' 
 ' round - eyed,' any one of which could be 
 found in a thousand books by the most con- 
 servative authors. And to put such a word as 
 ' goose - rumped ' under the heading ' Trans- 
 ferred Meaning ' betrays sheer ignorance of the 
 language. Dr. Leeb-Lundberg has certainly 
 never discussed the points of an Irish hunter. 
 
 Mr. Kipling has that power, given to but a 
 few, of imparting by means of a single word a 
 peculiar form and significance to his sentence, 
 
 175 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 so that there are certain sentences which if 
 read aloud to any who knew the rest of his 
 work would be instantly recognized. I can 
 think of no author of recent years to whom 
 this applies so strongly as to him except 
 George Borrow. I give the following instances 
 of that " extra word " that makes magic of a 
 whole sentence : 
 
 Mahbub All, whose caravans penetrated far and 
 far into the Back of Beyond. {Kim.) 
 
 So did the scar of the stake burn on my hide till we 
 watched their villages die under in the spring growth. 
 {The Second Jungle Book.) 
 
 It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their 
 centres by clumps of brambles. {An Habitation 
 Enforced.) 
 
 I shall, without attempting to emulate Dr. 
 Leeb-Lundberg, just mention Mr. Kipling's 
 frequent and effective use of onomatopoeia. 
 He speaks of the ' phut ' of a bullet, the 
 ' soft wheep, wheep of unscabbarded knives,' 
 ' the indefinite " Euh " that runs through the 
 speech of the pundit class,' exemplified in 
 this case by Eustace Cleever in A Confer- 
 ence of the Powers. Snake hisses are vari- 
 ously represented by the sounds ' Kssha ! ' 
 ' Ngssh ! ' and others. A body falls feet first 
 into water with a ' keen, clean schloop.^ 
 
 I have mentioned Mr. Kipling's skilful use 
 176 
 
STYLE 
 
 of dialect. It must be admitted that he uses 
 bad, outworn Irish jargon of the stage Irish- 
 man. The ' fwhat,' ' reshume,' ' bhoys,' 
 ' bekaze,' become a httle wearisome after a 
 time. The modern method of representing the 
 speech of Irish people is, of course, to avoid all 
 eccentricities of spelling as far as possible, and 
 rely for effect on skilfxil inversions and turns 
 of phrase. I do not think, however, that it is 
 possible for an Englishman to do this with 
 success. Let anyone — be he native or no — 
 who has lived among Irish people compare Mr. 
 Kipling's Irish with the following from one of 
 the books of the greatest masters of Irish 
 dialect that have ever written, and he will see 
 the difference between the real thing and the 
 able imitation : 
 
 " I had a lovely coit one time from that one's dam," 
 remarked James Hefferman, " the grandest one ever 
 I bred. Sure I thought the world wasn't good enough 
 for him. And I put him within in the best house I 
 had. Sun, moon, nor stars didn't shine on him, nor 
 the breath of Heaven didn't touch him ; and after all 
 he died on me ! I wouldn't have wished it for twenty 
 pounds." 
 
 " You would not indeed, sir," said Tim, sympatheti- 
 cally. 
 
 " Well, that's the way always," resumed James 
 Hefferman in philosophic acceptance of the mysterious 
 decrees of providence. " And look now at this one, 
 
 M 177 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 that I didn't lave hand nor foot to, only to throw her 
 out on the hill with the bullockeens, she's as healthy 
 as a stone." 
 
 But the Misses Somerville and Martin are 
 wizards, and I am not at all sure that the 
 dialect of Mulvaney is not closer to the talk 
 of the real Irishman than the flowery and 
 conventional language put into his mouth by 
 Synge and Lady Gregory. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's officers' slang is as good and 
 as true as that of the men. " I can shove a 
 crock along a bit," says a character in The 
 Story of the Gadshys in modest deprecation of 
 his horsemanship, and the hero of The Brush- 
 wood Boy is delighted to " snaffle out of the 
 campaign " a year's leave. Where he does not 
 know he invents with amazing boldness. When 
 we hear the young Roman officer in Puck of 
 Book's Hill invite a friend to drink with the 
 summons : " Come and wet the Eagles ! " 
 we are amused, but filled with admiration as 
 well. It is so ingenious that we feel it must be 
 true. 
 
 But if he is always forceful and sometimes 
 brutal in his style, he has passages of exceeding 
 beauty, phrases as flawless as those of Pater 
 or Gautier. Those who read him hastily or 
 carelessly will scarce recognize the following : 
 
 178 
 
STYLE 
 
 The smoke-scented evening, copper-dun and tur- 
 quoise across the fields. (Kim.) 
 
 At this level the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly 
 combed by the dry fingers of the East. {With the 
 Night Mail.) 
 
 It is noticeable that his most beautiful 
 phrases are called forth not by the Indian 
 scenes that have made him famous, but by 
 the English country-side, particularly by the 
 visions of old English country-houses. In 
 another age and other circumstances Mr. 
 Kipling might well have been the painter of 
 the leisurely life of manor and farm, meadow 
 and corn-field, covert-side and gun-room, 
 village green and bar-parlour. The following 
 sentences will show that if he has " heard the 
 East a-callin'," the voice of England has been, 
 if not so loud, at least as insistent. 
 
 The humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, 
 cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some 
 gardener was clipping ; a mumble of bees and broken 
 voices that might have been doves. (They.) 
 
 The house, accepting another day at end, as it had 
 accepted an hundred thousand gone, seemed to settle 
 deeper into its rest among the shadows. (Ibid.) 
 
 Here they found the ghost of a patch of lucerne 
 that had refused to die ; there a harsh fallow sur- 
 rendered to yard-high thistles ; and here a breadth 
 of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop. {An 
 Habitation Enforced.) 
 
 179 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Everything else was a sort of thick, sleepy stillness 
 smelling of meadow-sweet and dry grass. {Puck of 
 Book's Hill.) 
 
 Georgie was looking at the round-bosomed woods 
 beyond the home paddock, where the white pheasant - 
 boxes were ranged ; and the golden air was full of a 
 hundred sacred scents and sounds. {The Brushwood 
 Boy.) 
 
 Mr. Kipling in early days must have worked 
 fast. His output of work between 1890 and 
 1900 was very great and very diversified. 
 Yet, though the prose of those days was less 
 graceful than that of Kim and Actions and 
 Reactions, it was no less precise and well- 
 balanced. If a man has, as Mr. Knowles says 
 of Mr. Kipling, "the gift of the inevitable 
 word," there is no need for him to search long 
 for it. It is hard to find anywhere in his work 
 any trace of slackness, any evidence of care- 
 lessness where style is concerned. His sentences 
 never sag ; long or short they are always 
 crisp, always under control, as strong in the 
 conclusion as in the commencement. He 
 describes an Indian Station as he describes 
 the monkeys moving through the jungle, with 
 wonderful brevity, in short ringing sentences 
 that at their best are magnificent and at their 
 worst those of a good journalist of the present 
 day who has left " journalese " long behind. 
 
 180 
 
STYLE 
 
 The following are good examples of his powers 
 of description. The first is from A Wayside 
 Comedy, the second a scene from The Jungle 
 Book wherein Mowgli is kidnapped by the 
 monkeys. 
 
 Kashima is bounded on all sides by the rock-tipped 
 circle of the Dosehri hills. In Spring, it is ablaze with 
 roses ; in Summer, the roses die and the hot winds 
 blow from the hills ; in Autumn, the white mists 
 from the jhils cover the place as with water, and in 
 Winter the frosts nip everything young and tender 
 to earth level. 
 
 Then they began their flight ; and the flight of the 
 Monkey-People through tree-land is one of the things 
 nobody can describe. They have their regular roads 
 and cross-roads, up hills and down hills, all laid out 
 from seventy or a hundred feet above ground, and 
 by these they can travel even by night if necessary. 
 Two of the strongest monkeys caught Mowgli under 
 the arms and swung off with him through the tree- 
 tops, twenty feet at a bound. Had they been alone 
 they could have gone twice as fast, but the boy's 
 weight held them back. Sick and giddy as Mowgli 
 was, he could not help enjoying the wild rush, though 
 the glimpses of earth far down below frightened him, 
 and the terrible check and jerk at the end of the swing 
 over nothing but empty air brought his heart between 
 his teeth. His escort would rush him up a tree till 
 he felt the thinnest topmost branches crackle and 
 bend under them, and then with a cough and a whoop 
 would fling themselves into the air outwards and 
 
 181 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 downwards, and bring up, hanging by their hands or 
 their feet to the lower Umbs of the next tree. Some- 
 times he could see for miles and miles across the still 
 green jungle, as a man on the top of a mast can see 
 for miles across the sea, and then the branches and 
 leaves would lash him across the face, and he and his 
 two guards would be almost down to earth again. 
 So, bounding and crashing and whooping and yelling, 
 the whole tribe of the Bandar-log swept along the tree 
 roads with Mowgli their prisoner. 
 
 The first of these passages I quoted chiefly 
 for its briefness. Scarcely any other author 
 now writing could have induced himself to 
 give s6 short a description of his stagery, even 
 though such absence of detail is the highest 
 merit in a short story. No other would have 
 contrived to tell us so much of what life in the 
 station was likely to be all the year round in 
 the same space. 
 
 The other passage is longer and more brilliant. 
 It would be impossible to call up more vividly 
 the rush and sweep, the slash of the branches, 
 the whooping and the noise of the monkeys' 
 swift journey through the trees. It is in such 
 swiftly-described detail that Mr. Kipling dis- 
 plays that kinship with Defoe that Sir J. M. 
 Barrie has noted. He is not a realist in the 
 acceptation of the word to-day, certainly not 
 a " naturalist " of the school Brunetiere so 
 much disliked. He writes often of ugly things 
 
 182 
 
STYLE 
 
 but never of commonplace things. But he 
 has the reahstic style at its best ; by which I 
 mean that his style is such as to give his 
 reader a sense of the reality of the things he 
 describes. And this is true quite apart from 
 those clever tricks that I have mentioned, of 
 telling the story in the first person with 
 allusions to other stories in which the same 
 characters play a part, of poking fun at him- 
 self, as where he says of a wild boar : " There- 
 fore I wished to shoot him, in order to produce 
 the tushes in after years, and say that I had 
 ridden him down in fair chase." All these 
 things give a semblance of reality, but not all 
 of them are sufficient to account for the reality 
 that is in Mr. Kipling's stories. There is, 
 besides them, an incommunicable and in- 
 explicable power in his style. 
 
 In style as well as in matter, Mr. Kipling 
 ayoided the prevailing tendencies of the age 
 in which he began to write. He can make a 
 sparkle with epigram and paradox now and 
 then, but he never seeks to set whole pages 
 ablazing. A subaltern in The Story of the 
 Gadsbys remarks that " Simla's stiff with 
 Colonels' daughters," which is reminiscent of 
 Mr. Dumby's remark as to the number of good 
 women in the world. Yet nothing could have 
 been further removed than the style of Wilde's 
 
 183 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 stories and essays and those of Mr. Kipling. 
 It is the same with ornamentation. The 
 passages I have quoted are comparatively- 
 rare, Mr. Kipling being for the most part 
 content to write vivid, clean-cut prose, without 
 much regard to its beauty and adornment. It 
 is, as I have explained, as a rule only when 
 dealing with subjects that seem to him 
 beautiful — and I am sure that the English 
 country-side is to him the most beautiful 
 thing in the world — ^that he appears deliber- 
 ately to arrange and choose his words with an 
 eye for comeliness as well as for effectiveness. 
 
 To sum up then, Mr. Kipling is not a master 
 of uniformly beautiful prose such as — to take 
 widely different examples — Addison, Gold- 
 smith, Pater or Mr. Thomas Hardy, but there 
 are to be found, particularly in his later work, 
 passages of a grace and charm that cannot be 
 surpassed. Apart from this, he has at his 
 command a vigour of phrase, a power of com- 
 pression, a mastery of the weighty short 
 sentence, a gift of " working up " a situation 
 by means of a few deft touches, that set him 
 alone among the writers of to-day. 
 
 184 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 The word " Imperialism " held a few years 
 ago — and retains to-day to a considerable 
 extent — a great glamour for Englishmen. 
 England was slow in awakening to the fact 
 that her colonies, children of her body, were 
 growing up, till some of them, like not too 
 well-mannered maidens in their late teens and 
 early twenties, began to proclaim that they 
 could no longer be kept tied to the apron- 
 strings of an elderly and rather fussy mother. 
 They objected to being called Colonies at all. 
 One, the best-beloved, called herself a 
 Dominion ; another could not brook even the 
 slight hint of dependence this word seemed to 
 imply — she would be a Commonwealth. Even 
 before these things came about there had been 
 men who saw the danger in the situation. 
 Disraeli did something to amend it ; it was 
 left to Chamberlain to change it altogether. 
 
 His weapons were tact, sympathy, justice, 
 iron firmness where need was. The grumblers 
 
 185 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 were converted into friendly daughters, 
 managing their own estabhshments, but not 
 above coming to their mother for advice. 
 The bonds between them were those of senti- 
 ment on England's side, sentiment and self- 
 interest on their own. Chamberlain made a 
 great effort to strengthen those of self-interest 
 by means of trade preference, and it was from 
 small beginnings of this sort that the great 
 Tariff Reform movement, that for several 
 years completely dominated English politics 
 and obscured all other issues, sprung. And 
 no intelligent observer can imagine that, if 
 for the moment Tariff Reform be, as Punch 
 suggests, the neglected wife of the party that 
 swore allegiance to it, its day is yet done. 
 ^J But if Tariff Reform did not at once " sweep 
 the country," Imperialism did. The name 
 and the thing gripped the English people so 
 firmly that even those who disliked the latter 
 intensely were forced — if they desired to 
 obtain a hearing — to pay lip service to the 
 former. One London Liberal newspaper alone 
 was found with the courage to attack Im- 
 perialism by name ; the rest spoke of 
 " jingoism " as the enemy and advocated a 
 sane and healthy " Liberal Imperialism " 
 which they found it not over-easy to define. 
 If the first name that association sum- 
 186 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 moned to the mind on mention of the word 
 ImperiaHsm was that of Joseph Chamberlain, 
 the second was undoubtedly Rudyard Kipling. 
 Mr. Kipling was not only an Imperialist, but 
 seems to have taken very seriously his role of 
 Imperialist leader. He made, for example, 
 about seven years ago, a long tour in Canada, 
 and published in The Morning Post a series of 
 papers entitled Letters to the Family, which i^ 
 are one of the most notable contributions to 
 Imperialist literature from the point of view 
 of the Colonies that has yet appeared. He 
 took no great part in the Tariff controversy, and 
 was wise to confine himself to the great ideal 
 of Imperial Federation, and not to follow 
 some of the Unionist leaders in their some- 
 what crude incursions into the domain of 
 Economics. I cannot but think that, had 
 Mr. Kipling had any close connection with the 
 Unionist organization or any control over 
 Unionist policy in those years, there would 
 have been less of the sordid appeal to " make 
 the Foreigner pay," a closer realization on 
 Unionist platforms and in the Unionist Press 
 of the nature of international trade and of the 
 fact that it did not precisely mean that we 
 were hastening to our ruin because our imports 
 exceeded our exports by so many millions or 
 tens of millions. The equally sordid but more 
 
 187 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 successful Radical parrot-cry, " Your food 
 will cost you more ! " would have been 
 countered by the honest reply : " Yes, your 
 food — or some small portions of your food — 
 may cost you a very little more. But we hope 
 thereby, at the cost of whatever slight sacrifice 
 this may entail, to knit closer the bonds of our 
 Empire, to strengthen throughout the world 
 the spread of Anglo-Saxon civilization. We 
 hope also, by increasing and encouraging the 
 agricultural population of this country, to 
 check national deterioration, and so, by in- 
 creasing our vigour, to increase also our 
 combative power in the world's markets. 
 We believe that any small sacrifices made for 
 these ends would be repaid twofold." 
 \^ I I have said something of Imperialism in 
 / connection with Mr. Kipling's poetry. A 
 great deal of this is of course indirectly im- 
 perialistic, because it glorifies the strong men 
 on the frontiers, but there were certain poems 
 in which Mr. Kipling attempted, and with fair 
 success, to define the philosophy of British 
 y Imperialism. A Song of the English is perhaps 
 chief of these, and therein he stated the 
 position occupied by the Colonies with reference 
 to England. It was not perhaps great poetry, 
 but at least pleasant poetry, as well as straight- 
 forward and clear. 
 
 188 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 A Nation spoke to a Nation, 
 
 A Queen sent word to a Throne ; 
 
 Daughter I am in my mother's house, 
 But mistress in my own. 
 
 Then follow the voices of all the great centres 
 of English life and thought and civilization, 
 each telling of its own peculiar features and 
 estate. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's Imperialism is something that 
 will be found inevitable from a study of the 
 writer and the man. Its roots are embedded 
 in just those qualities from which spring his 
 most characteristic poetry and prose. It 
 draws nourishment from his love of action, his 
 love of order, a delight in — that almost mounts 
 to a worship of — speed and strength and 
 cleanness and energy. No man echoes more i 
 loudly the cry : " My country, may she be ; 
 always right ! But — right or wrong — my 
 country ! " He has a bitter hatred for the \ 
 forms of Radicalism displayed in the Sun-T.[ 
 day gutter-paper, thinly disguised in Private 
 Copper under the name of " Jerrold's Weekly," 
 which would always support a German arti- 
 san against an English nobleman, a negro 
 against a white overseer, a mutinous soldier 
 against his officer ; which has done its best to 
 arouse hatred of Russia, our great ally, because, 
 forsooth, she is not governed on a mock-demo- 
 
 189 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 cratic party system, such as we bear with as 
 we may. 
 
 It draws nourishment also, we cannot doubt, 
 from his passionate love of England and his 
 
 k ybelief in the English race as a civilizing force. 
 
 -J( The Bridge Builders is a paean of the English. 
 
 / ^A brilliant young engineer has built a great 
 bridge across the Ganges, all supported by the 
 patent steel truss which bears his name. Just 
 as it is complete comes a terrible storm and 
 flood ; the river seems to rise in her wrath to 
 overwhelm the man who has bridled her and 
 destroy his work. That night, in the midst 
 of the storm, he hears the gods discussing, 
 hears Mother Gunga in the form of a crocodile 
 bring her plaint before them, and ask for 
 strength to sweep away this obstruction that 
 the cursed white man has set up. Krishna 
 tells her that it is useless. " To-morrow sees 
 them at work. Aye, if ye swept the bridge 
 out from end to end they would begin anew." 
 When he wakes he finds his bridge intact. 
 The White Man's Burden was written in 
 
 -^ America, where it created a great sensation. 
 There are not wanting those who believe that 
 the white man's burden is something that he 
 puts upon the shoulders of the black man 
 when he colonizes his lands. But if there is 
 the country of the Amazon on one side of the 
 
 190 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 account — and that is the domain of the half- 
 white man, who has never excited anybody's 
 enthusiasm — there is India on the other. 
 Mr. KipHng is insistent upon the devotion of 
 the sons of England who " serve and love the 
 lands they rule." He says of India, in On the 
 City Wall : 
 
 Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the 
 first fighting-line which is officially called the Indian 
 Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by over- 
 work, or are worried to death or broken in health and 
 hope in order that the land may be protected from 
 death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventu- 
 ally become capable of standing alone. It will never 
 stand alone, but the idea is a pretty one, and men are 
 willing to die for it. 
 
 Mr. Kipling does not think that we are near 
 that blessed day " when war and wounds shall J^,-^ 
 cease." In On the City Wall he speaks of U 
 " that lying proverb which says the Pen is 
 Mightier than the Sword," and certainly, at 
 this moment, with all Europe in hellish tur- 
 moil, it would be stupid to deny that he is 
 right. Being then jealous for English civiliza- 
 tion, believing, as he has rightly believed, that 
 there were those who would if they had an 
 opportunity drown that civilization in blood, 
 he has been insistent that we should stand 
 ready to defend it. It was during the Boer 
 
 191 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 War, when all the air was full of reports of 
 incompetence in the field, of untrained volun- 
 teers poured out to South Africa who had to 
 be set to drill at Cape Town because it would 
 have been murder to have sent them to the 
 front, that he burst out into bitter mockery of 
 our unpreparedness. And indirectly he mocked 
 at the statesmen who dared say no word of re- 
 proach to the touchy democracy they courted. 
 
 No doubt but ye are the People — your throne is 
 
 above the King's. 
 Whoso speaks in your presence must say acceptable 
 
 things ; 
 Bowing the head in worship, bending the knee in 
 
 fear — 
 Bringing the word well-smoothen — such as a King 
 
 should hear. 
 
 As we all know, the words made some im- 
 pression, but no very deep one. When the 
 war was over we did indeed reform our army 
 and strengthen our navy. But the former was 
 rather diminished than increased, and the 
 mass of the nation forgot it for far better- 
 beloved heroes, "the flannelled fools at the 
 wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals." 
 
 The great tide of Imperialism, that had for 
 so long stood high in England, sank after the 
 Boer War. The Unionist Party was utterly 
 defeated at the polls — for the time being 
 
 192 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 almost annihilated. The minds of men, so 
 far as they were not occupied with the positions i-^ 
 of the Chelsea and Manchester United Football 
 Clubs in the table of the Football League, 
 turned to a consideration of social evils. 
 Strikes, many of them well justified, some 
 frivolous, broke out all over England ; there 
 were collisions with the soldiery which dimmed 
 the brightness of the new affection for the 
 army that the war had brought. For the first 
 time since the days of Reform and Chartism 
 there was a widely-spread impatience with the 
 privileges of the aristocracy, now given over 
 with unlimited zest to its own pleasures and 
 allying itself more and more closely with the 
 predatory forms of wealth represented by the 
 worst type of Yankee and Israelite. A clever 
 and brilliantly successful campaign was carried 
 out against the House of Lords under the 
 inspiration of Mr. Lloyd George. Many men 
 declared, with some prima facie reason, that 
 they could not think of Empire till they had 
 seen that tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothe- 
 cary and ploughboy were properly fed, clothed 
 and housed at home. Young men of ninety 
 and veterans of nineteen met in debating clubs 
 and parliaments all over the country and did 
 these things to their own satisfaction, incident- 
 ally making England into a republic, abolishing 
 ^ 193 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 all incomes over five hundred a year, and 
 selling the navy to Turkey to devote the 
 proceeds to a fund to put an end to war. 
 
 ^ In such surroundings arose a new race of 
 readers who knew not Mr. Kipling, and a new 
 race of writers arose to minister to them. Two 
 or three skilful novelists made names for 
 themselves with books based upon the work 
 of the French naturalistic school, and gradually 
 a whole tribe of young and intelligent men and 
 women divined that there was an income to be 
 made by the exploitation of this form of 
 " degenerate Romanticism " as M. Maurras 
 called it. Many of them equalled, a few 
 excelled the leaders at this game. The brothel, 
 the slum, the chamber of accouchement, as 
 well as the stuffy parlour of a Midland town 
 and the mahogany-horned dining-room of 
 comfortable suburbia became the mines wherein 
 the modern school of novelists sought their 
 
 ^ /,raw material. 
 
 There ensued undoubtedly a considerable 
 decline in Mr. Kipling's popularity, and conse- 
 quently in his power as a national leader. It 
 was imagined, because he had not roared so 
 loudly in slum-scenes as some of the younger 
 lions, that he lacked sympathy for poverty and 
 affliction, that he was tainted by the cruel 
 doctrine of success. I believe that he refused 
 
 194 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 to follow the trend of popular literature because 
 he found it dreary and inartistic. And those 
 who accused him of lack of sympathy for the 
 poor must have forgotten the saying of 
 Badalia Herodsfoot, the heroine of his only 
 slum story : " No more you can't pauperize 
 them as 'asn't things to begin with. They're 
 bloomin' well pauped." 
 
 All might have yet been well, for all the 
 critics of any standing were already com- 
 mitted to Mr. Kipling's praise, had he himself 
 been more amenable. But not only did he 
 refuse to conform to the new ideas — he at- 
 tacked them. Not only did he attack the new 
 prophets — lie laughed at them. Now laughter 
 is more deadly than chastisement with scorpions. 
 In the criticisms of such "stories as Little Foxes 
 we can detect a note of hatred that makes 
 intelligent criticism absolutely impossible. Nor 
 is this wonderful, for no man lashes out harder 
 nor carries a sharper-toothed whip than he„ 
 Mr. Groombride sits to this day on the gre^n 
 benches at Westminster, and he never for- 
 gets. 
 
 In the story it is related how an early 
 Governor of " Ethiopia " starts a pack of 
 hounds, and hunts foxes along the banks of 
 Ethiopia's great river and the irrigating canals 
 flowing from it. He ordains that each man on 
 
 195 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 whose land earths are left unstopped shall 
 receive a certain number of strokes with his 
 crop, and that special privileges shall be 
 granted to those on whose land a fox is found. 
 The whole population takes an intense interest 
 in the pack, which gradually comes to be 
 bound up in their minds with the administra- 
 tion of justice. Eventually the beatings be- 
 come a legend, replaced by three symbolical 
 taps across the shoulders because the people 
 do not believe that without them justice is 
 really done. Meanwhile, however, a youth 
 who has spent his leave collecting hounds for 
 the sake of fresh blood speaks of the beatings 
 to a Liberal M.P., who demands further in- 
 formation as to this famous pack. In a spirit 
 of mischief the young man tells him of dreadful 
 atrocities, bastinadoes which result in the foot 
 being amputated at the ankle. The victims 
 are, he says, known as the " Mudir's Cranes," 
 and to complete the absurdity he gives, as the 
 Ethiopian translation of this expression, a 
 word so foul that its use is almost a defile- 
 ment. 
 
 Mr. Groombride writes down the story and 
 the word, and when his party comes into 
 power remembers them. The Governor sud- 
 denly receives an intimation that he is arriving, 
 and that all facilities for intercourse with the 
 
 196 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 populace are to be given to him. The despatch 
 is couched in the most insolent and over- 
 bearing terms, and the Governor is naturally 
 somewhat annoyed at the prospect of Mr. 
 Groombride preaching the wildest sedition to 
 the people for whom he is responsible. How- 
 ever, he makes the best of things, and manages 
 to convey a hint to the people that the 
 wanderer is mad. Mr. Groombride, accom- 
 panied by his servant Abdul with a large 
 umbrella, primed with a speech in the native 
 language learned by heart, sallies forth. He 
 is mocked by the people and his interpreter, 
 and imagines that he is being praised when he 
 is being laughed at. Finally he delivers his 
 speech. After telling of the speedy righting 
 of the cruel wrongs which they endure, he 
 comes to the chief point. 
 
 " Would, then, his brethren, whom he loved, show 
 him a Mudir's Crane whom he desired to love ? " 
 
 Once, twice and again in his peroration he repeated 
 his demand, using always — ^that they might see he 
 was acquainted with their local argot — using always, 
 I say, the word which the Inspector had given him in 
 England long ago — the short adhesive word which, 
 by itself, surprises even unblushing Ethiopia. 
 
 There are limits to the sublime politeness of an 
 ancient people. A bulky, blue -chinned man in white 
 clothes, his name red-lettered across his lower shirt- 
 front, spluttering from under a green-lined umbrella 
 
 197 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 almost tearful appeals to be introduced to the 
 Unintroducible ; naming loudly the Unnameable ; 
 dancing, as it seemed, in perverse joy at mere mention 
 of the Unmentionable — found those limits. There 
 was a moment's hush, and then such mirth as Gihon 
 through his centuries had never heard — a roar like 
 to the roar of his own cataracts in flood. Children 
 cast themselves on the ground, and rolled back and 
 forth cheering and whooping ; strong men, their 
 faces hidden in their clothes, swayed in silence, till 
 the agony became insupportable, and they threw up 
 their heads and bayed at the sun ; women, mothers 
 and virgins, shrilled shriek upon mounting shriek, 
 and slapped their thighs as it might have been the 
 roll of musketry. When they tried to draw breath, 
 some half-strangled voice would quack out the word, 
 and the riot began afresh. Last to fall was the 
 city -trained Abdul. He held on to the edge of 
 apoplexy, then collapsed, throwing the umbrella 
 from him. 
 
 Mr. Groombride should not be judged too harshly. 
 Exercise and strong emotion under a hot sun, the 
 shock of public ingratitude, for the moment ruffled 
 his spirit. He furled the umbrella, and with it beat 
 the prostrate Abdul, crying out that he had been 
 betrayed. 
 
 In which posture the Inspector, on horseback, 
 followed by the Governor, suddenly found him. 
 
 Is it to be wondered at if Mr. Groombride, 
 when he comes to review a book of Mr. Kipling's 
 for the journal honoured by his distinguished 
 contributions and the magic " M.P." after his 
 
 198 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 name, finds him lacking in sympathy and 
 descriptive power ? One gentleman who has 
 won some notice both as a politician and as a 
 literary critic, while allowing him " flashes of 
 higher inspiration and aspiration," speaks of 
 his " underbred and brawling imperiahsm," 
 and adds that his work is " beyond the pale of 
 great art." This is not ignorance, as it might 
 seem, for the gentleman in question has some 
 conception of great art, and knows that many 
 of Mr. Kipling's short stories stand with the 
 greatest ever written. Nothing but the bitter- 
 est, most blinding malice could account for 
 such statements by a man not altogether a 
 fool. 
 
 Lord Hugh Cecil has told us that the three ^' 
 sentiments that make a modern Conservative 
 are, firstly, conservatism with a small c, a love 
 of old and tried things, of order and symmetry ; 
 secondly, that love of Church and King, that 
 mystic attachment to the Sovran and the 
 national Church that marked the Cavaliers 
 and may be called the beginning of Toryism ; 
 and, thirdly, that Imperialism that I have 
 striven to define. Some people have some of 
 these qualities, and lack in others. Mr. Glad- 
 stone, for example, had not a trace of Im- 
 perialism in his composition, yet was a very 
 fair Tory in his devotion to the Anglican 
 
 199 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Church and his care for the privileges of the 
 Crown. Mr. KipHng is a complete Conservative, 
 though he would not always have deserved 
 the title. In earlier years it seemed that he 
 had only, of the three concomitants. Im- 
 perialism. Living, as he did, in India, and 
 later in the United States, travelling constantly 
 to and fro from one thriving colony to another, 
 he was filled with some impatience of the ease 
 and arrogance of " a sheltered people," vastly 
 well pleased with itself and its way of life. He 
 saw in the new lands he visited, many good 
 things that we were without at home, that we 
 could have acquired, but that in sheer haughty 
 ignorance we rejected. He has grown no less 
 contemptuous of our failings and slackness, 
 but he has come to love the good things of our 
 civilization more dearly. Later stories, since 
 he has resided in England, have shown more 
 and more clearly his passionate love for the 
 old, unchanging — or at least scarcely changed 
 — life and customs of the English village. That 
 feeling that M. Barres has expressed with such 
 marvellous eloquence as regards France, has 
 come to him as regards England. We are 
 part of the earth of England, and England 
 *' is not any common earth." It claims us 
 and holds us because it is pervaded with the 
 bodies of countless generations of Englishmen, 
 
 200 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 as the atmosphere about is heavy with their 
 souls. 
 
 Mr. Rupert Brooke, in some brilliant studies 
 of Western America, declares that, as the 
 curtain of dusk slips gently down upon the 
 masses of the Rocky Mountains, amid some 
 of the most splendid scenery in the world, 
 there is no sense of awe. One does not feel that 
 these wilds are haunted, that they are, as we 
 feel of scenes at home, packed thick with the 
 spirits of the dead who have looked upon them. 
 One fears no ghost ; for there are no ghosts to 
 fear. The trees that rustle softly, the breezes 
 that whisper down the gorges, carry no plaint 
 of souls departed. The beautiful land is 
 barren of hidden life, barren of mystery. 
 With us it is the contrary. When we look 
 upon Stonehenge, when we stand on a high- 
 piled barrow where Dane and Saxon lie 
 together, when we land at evening on an 
 island in some Irish lake and see the ruins of 
 a tower built long before the Folk Wandering 
 had brought those Danes and Saxons to 
 Western Europe, then we feel that we do not 
 stand alone. We are not, we cannot be, 
 independent of those that have gone before 
 and of those that follow after. We are tiny 
 links in an immeasurable chain. 
 
 That is why the English and Irish and 
 201 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 Scottish men who dwell on the land — the first 
 above all — are Conservative in truth and in 
 fact, whatever may be the passing political 
 creed they profess. That is why we have a 
 sense of permanence such as is not possible 
 in a new country. The estate carpenter of 
 An Habitation Enforced insists that the 
 American couple who have bought the land 
 of the wife's ancestors and settled down shall 
 have their farm bridge built of oak rather than 
 larch. Larch is well enough, but if it were 
 used their infant son would " no sooner be 
 married than we'll 'ave it all to do again." 
 That carpenter is the true type of English 
 .Conservative, and he is a type that his creator 
 has grown more and more to love. 
 S^ The voice of Mr. Kipling as a national 
 leader has never changed its message. He 
 would not shout with the crowd, so the crowd 
 has for a time refused to follow him. But he 
 is so very much an Englishman, has in him so 
 deeply embedded the love of the most typical 
 English traits, that the neglect of his teaching 
 will not last long. If England remains the 
 old England, and does not become the home 
 of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, Mr. 
 Kipling will always be read as an authority on 
 Englishmen. In all probability, should his 
 years reach the normal span of life, he will 
 
 202 
 
IMPERIALISM 
 
 himself witness his return to the position of 
 national seer. In any case he will remain for 
 posterity the great fount of information as to 
 the characters and fashion of Englishmen, 
 soldiers, sailors, colonizers and administrators, 
 in the closing years of the Nineteenth Century. 
 
 203 
 
XI 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 It will be long ere the final word on Mr. Kipling 
 is written. He is not, I am firmly convinced, 
 of yesterday and to-day alone, but of to- 
 morrow also and still more of the day after. 
 Mr. E. B. Osborn has declared that the sons 
 of the superior young men who sneer at him 
 now will be rediscovering him in twenty years' 
 time. There are of course precedents for this 
 sequence of intense popularity, comparative 
 neglect, and renewed lustre. Coventry Pat- 
 more has been subjected to like treatment, 
 though it must be remembered that Mr. 
 Kipling's books have continued to sell in vast 
 numbers all through the blackest period, 
 while Patmore was no more than a name for 
 twenty years or more. I should not be sur- 
 prised if the change came sooner than Mr. 
 Osborn has prophesied. I believe, in fact, 
 that it is even now on its way. 
 
 The day of naturalistic literature is not yet 
 over, but must be well-nigh done. Its gray 
 tide is still bleak and high, but it has receded 
 
 204 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 a little, and a few rare and shining shells 
 gleam in patches it has left bare. The Crock 
 of Gold was a book that may mark an epoch. 
 At a bound we went back to the beauty and 
 charm and delicious fantasy of the old French 
 faery-tales, if not to something better still. 
 Mr. James Stephens is very far removed from 
 Mr. Kipling, but they have one thing in 
 common. They are both essentially Romantics, i ^ 
 both Idealists, both, in Nietzsche's jargon, i 
 ' Dionysians ' in contrast to the " theoretical ; 
 men " who have for so long dominated English ' 
 letters. Like the English and French allies in 
 conflict with the Teuton array, they are 
 different — perhaps even unsympathetic — in } 
 temperament, but they fight the same battle. 1 
 When one drives back the foe, the other also 1 
 can mend his position. 
 
 I have striven to show that the temporary 
 falling-off in Mr. Kipling's popularity is due 
 merely to a temporary change of fashion. It 
 is indeed, a falling-off rather in the estimation 
 of critics than in that of the reading public, 
 for, as I have said, his sales have always been 
 vast, to be measured in the case of each book 
 by the ten thousand. I say this because I 
 believe he has qualities that make for per- 
 manence. He will not be remembered, I have 
 suggested, as a great poet, at least he will not 
 
 205 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 take his place among the dozen great poets of 
 England. But he will be remembered as a 
 poet sometimes great, with a mastery of the 
 technique of his art, with occasional flashes of 
 magnificent power, as in The Sea and the Hills ; 
 with an admirable gift of transmuting into real 
 poetry the dialect of the Cockney and the 
 slang of the camp, as in the Barrack-Room 
 Ballads ; with a curiosa felicitas in the blending 
 of the beautiful and the simple, as in The 
 Recall and other poems I have quoted ; and a 
 wonderful cleverness in the fashioning of 
 graceful and witty vers de societe, as in the 
 Departmental Ditties. There are many poets 
 who have made and have retained a con- 
 siderable name who will be found, if their 
 work be fairly examined and appraised, to 
 have accomplished much less. 
 
 But, while many of his poems will, so far as 
 I can judge, remain notable as long as English 
 is read, it will not be upon his poetry that his 
 chief est fame will rest. We bandy about 
 lightly enough the adjective " great." There 
 is but one English novelist now alive who is 
 great beyond all manner of doubt, and one 
 American to whom we may with slightly less 
 certainty apply the title. Mr. Kipling I do 
 not call a great novelist in the same sense as 
 Mr. Hardy and Mr. James, though he is the 
 
 206 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 author of one book, Kim, that is a great novel. 
 But I do declare, and will maintain in face of 
 all the " high-brows " that ever sneered, that 
 he is a great writer of short stories. I will add 
 that he is one of the greatest writers of short 
 stories that has ever lived. A short story does 
 not call for precisely the same qualities as a 
 novel, and there never was a man better 
 endowed with the qualities needed for almost 
 every type of short story than Mr. Kipling. 
 
 He is, to begin with, a master of pathos, not 
 of the slowly worked-up, morbid pathos of"^ 
 Dickens, but of pathos swift, clean-cutting, 
 poignant. He is a master of true tragedy, | 
 which is the conflict of man and his inexorable f 
 fate. He is a master of " blood and thunder," 
 not sheer melodrama — though he uses this 
 too when he wills— but the roar and terror of 
 the clamorous battle. He has the secret of 
 gripping the human heart with fear, knows, as 
 it were, the soft places in the compositions of 
 strong men whereon to lay his hand. No 
 writer, not Hoffmann, not Poe even, handles 
 the eerie and the supernatural more effectively 
 and more terribly. He is a humorist of the - 
 highest order, not delicate but often' subtle ; 
 at his very best when dealing with the vagaries 
 of some lovable, deeply-flawed character like 
 Mulvaney. Lastly, to make all these things 
 
 207 
 
RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 of most effect, he has a swiftness, a concise- 
 ness, a power of concentration that are unique. 
 His worst enemies, who dishke the material 
 of his stories, the characters and their actions, 
 admit that he tells them magnificently. 
 
 But, when we have thoroughly explored his 
 qualities, when we have enumerated and 
 analysed and criticized, we come always to 
 that which anneals the whole, to that energy 
 which " nourishes and directs all his art." 
 There is no other writer of whom one can read 
 " at a sitting " so much as of Mr. Kipling. 
 That is because his pages are aflame with an 
 energy that they impart to the mind of his 
 reader. Dash, glamour, spirit, verve, ilan — 
 we can exhaust our own nouns and borrow 
 from another language, and yet not add a 
 word too many. We divine always as we read 
 the presence of a powerful, domineering spirit, 
 intent on its purposes, spending itself freely 
 for the things it loves, brutal to the things it 
 hates, with more strength than sweetness and 
 more honour than courtesy. He is the English- 
 man with all his qualities at their highest, as 
 his friendliest observers — ^let us say the French 
 /of to-day — see him. His good man is a man 
 >/^( of action ; his god is a God of action. 
 
 WILLIAM BRENDOK AND SON, LTD,, PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH 
 
T^'M 
 
 14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recalL 
 
 REOD l 
 
 iT. 
 
 mrff^ 
 
 27lAay'63£F 
 
 OBRARY USB 
 
 rEC^ ED 
 
 JAN 1 1 ..m 
 
 "MTIUMI 
 
 R'TC- 
 
 Tj i 
 
 JAN 
 
 -5-^ 
 
 ■^ 
 
 UBRARY USE 
 
 i>wrtrwsr 
 
 MAY 2 7 1961 
 
 ,1 - - .j^'i' 
 
 iJ i^.iJ 
 
 i-iAY ? ? 196'! MftY2V^^->^^^' 
 
 i3Dw'61T.^ 
 
 
 w Ld 
 
 ^'^^'6 1962 
 
 LD 21A-50m-4,'60 
 (A9562sl0)476B 
 
 General Librarr 
 
 Uoivetsicy of California 
 
 Berkeley