Halleck's New English Literature Part 68

Above all stands the character of Mowgli, the wolf-adopted man-cub, human and yet brother to the animals. With a touch of genius, Kipling revealed the kinship between Mowgli and the denizens of the jungle.

Kipling's eyes could see both the harsh realism of animal existence and the genuine idealism of Mother Wolf and the Pack and the Jungle-law.

_Just So Stories_ (1902), written primarily for children, but entertaining to all, is a collection of romantic stories, mostly of animals, ill.u.s.trated by Kipling himself. One of the best of these tales is _The Cat that Walked by Himself_, which has distinct ethical value in showing how the cat through service won his place by the fireside.

Though Kipling has written four novels, only two, _The Light that Failed_ (1891) and _Kim_ (1901), can compare with his best short stories. _The Light that Failed_, the tragedy of an artist who becomes blind, proves that Kipling was able to handle a long plot sufficiently well to sustain interest. _Kim_ is an attempt to present as a more completed whole that India of which the stories give only glimpses. On the slenderest thread of plot is strung a bewildering array of scenes, characters, and incidents. His intimate knowledge of India and his photographic power of description are here used with remarkable picturesque effect.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CAT THAT WALKED. _Copyright, 1902, by Rudyard Kipling._]

Verse.--Kipling's poetry has many of the same qualities as his prose,--originality, force, love of action. In _Barrack Room Ballads_ (1892), the soldier is again celebrated in vigorous songs with swinging choruses. _Mandalay, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Danny Deever_, show what spirited verse can be fashioned from a common ballad meter and a bold use of dialect.

"So 'ere's _to_ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen, but a first cla.s.s fightin' man; An' 'ere's _to_ you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air-- You big black boundin' beggar--for you broke a British square!"

Much of his verse is political. His opinion of questions at issue is sometimes given with much heat, but always with sincerity and true patriotism. The best known of his patriotic songs, and perhaps his n.o.blest poetic effort, _The Recessional_ (1897), was inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of Victoria's reign. _The Truce of the Bear_ (1898) is a warning against Russia. _The Native-Born_ is a toast to the colonies in every clime.

Kipling's verse breaks with many of the accepted standards of English verse. He does not aim at such pure beauty of form as we find in Tennyson. He can handle skillfully many kinds of meter, as is shown in _The Song of the English_, _The Ballad of East and West_, _The Song of the Banjo_, and many sea lyrics. Yet he uses mostly the common measures, attaining with these a free swing, a fitting of sound to sense, that are irresistible to the many--

"Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan-- I can rip your very heart-strings out with those."[17]

Some of his later work shows increasing seriousness of tone. _The Recessional_ and the _Hymn before Action_ are elevated in thought and expression. The bigness of _L'Envoi_ shows poetic power capable of higher flights:--

"And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame; But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the G.o.d of Things as They Are!"[18]

General Characteristics.--Kipling has carried to their highest development the principles of the Bret Harte School of short story writers. His style possesses those qualities necessary for telling a short tale,--directness, force, suggestiveness. Rarely has any writer so mastered the technique, the craftsmanship of this particular literary form. He has the gift of force and dramatic power, rather than of beauty and delicacy.

He excels in suggestive vivid description, and he draws wonderful pictures of all out-of-doors, especially of the sea; but nature remains merely the background for the human figures. Much of his vividness lies in the use of specific words. If he should employ the phraseology of his jungle laws to frame the first commandment for writers, it would be: "_Seven times never_ be vague." Few authors have at the very beginning of their career more implicitly heeded such a commandment, obedience to which is evident in the following description from _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_:--

"Over our heads burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not all p.r.i.c.ked in on one plane, but preserving an orderly perspective, draw the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a grey shadow more unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began to sing, the mail train thundered past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting crow cawed drowsily."

Abundant and vivid use of metaphors serves to render his concreteness more varied and impressive. We find these in such expressions as "the velvet darkness," "the kiss of the rain," "the tree-road." His celestial artists splash at a ten-league canvas "with brushes of comet's hair." Five words from Mulvaney explain why he does not wish to leave his tent: "'Tis rainin' intrenchin' tools outside."

Kipling's spirit is essentially masculine. He prefers to write of men, work, and battle, rather than of women and love. Since his interest is mainly in action, he shows small ability in character drawing. His people are clear-cut and alive, but we do not see them grow and develop as do George Eliot's characters.

Above all, he stands as the interpreter of the ideals and the interests of the Anglo-Saxons of his time. Those tendencies of the age, which seem to others so dangerously materialistic, are the very causes of his zest in life. In an age of machinery, he writes of the romance of steam, the soul of an engine, the flight of an airship.

His is a work-a-day world; but in work well done, in obedience to the established law, and in courage, he sees the proving of manhood, the test of the true gentleman--

"Who had done his work and held his peace and had no fear to die."

Underlying all his thought is a deep belief in the "G.o.d of our fathers," a G.o.d just to punish or reward, whom the English have reverenced through all their history. Linked with this faith is an intense feeling of patriotism toward that larger England of his imperialistic vision.

These qualities justly brought Kipling the 1907 n.o.bel prize for idealism in literature. He is truly the idealist of a practical age, teaching the romance, the joy, the vision in the common facts and virtues of present-day life.

SUMMARY

The history and literature of the Victorian age show the influence of science. Darwin's conception of evolution affected all fields of thought. The tendency toward a.n.a.lysis and dissection is a result of scientific influence.

In describing the prose of the Victorian age, we have considered the work of thirteen writers; namely, Macaulay, the brilliant essayist and historian of the material advancement of England; Newman, essayist and theologian, who is noted for clear style, acute thought, and argumentative power; Carlyle, who awoke in his generation a desire for greater achievement, and who championed the spiritual interpretation of life in philosophy and history; Ruskin, the apostle of the beautiful and of more ideal relations in social life; the essayist Pater, whose prose is tinged with poetic color and mystic thought; Arnold, the great a.n.a.lytical critic; d.i.c.kens, educational and social reformer, whose novels deal chiefly with the lower cla.s.ses; Thackeray, whose fiction is not surpa.s.sed in keen, satiric a.n.a.lysis of the upper cla.s.ses of society; George Eliot, whose realistic stories of middle-cla.s.s life show the influence of science in her conception of character as an orderly ethical growth; Stevenson, an artist in style, writer of romances, essays, and poems for children; Meredith, subtle novelist, distinguished for his comic spirit and portrayal of male egotism; Hardy, realistic novelist of the lowly life of Wess.e.x; Kipling, whose _Jungle Books_ are an original creation, and whose short stories surpa.s.s those of all other contemporaries.

In poetry, the age is best represented by five men; namely, Arnold, who voices the feeling of doubt and unrest; Browning, who, by his optimistic philosophy, leads to impregnable heights of faith, who a.n.a.lyzes emotions and notes the development of souls as they struggle against opposition from within and without, until they reach moments of supreme victory or defeat; Tennyson, whose careful art mirrors in beautiful verse much of the thought of the age, the influence of science, the unrest, the desire to know the problems of the future, as well as to steal occasional glances at beauty for its own sake; Swinburne, the greatest artist since Milton in the technique of verse; and Kipling, the poet of imperialistic England, whose ballads sing of her soldiers and sailors, and whose lyrics proclaim the Anglo-Saxon faith and joy in working.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

Walker's _Essentials in English History_, Cheney's _A Short History of England_, McCarthy's _History of Our Own Times_, Cheney's _Industrial and Social History of England_, Traill's _Social England_, VI.

LITERARY

_The Cambridge History of English Literature_.

Walker's _The Literature of the Victorian Era_.

Magnus's _English Literature in the Nineteenth Century_.

Saintsbury's _A History of English Literature in the Nineteenth Century_.

Kennedy's _English Literature_, 1880-1905.

Walker's _Greater Victorian Poets_.

Brownell's _Victorian Prose Masters_.

Payne's _The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century_.

Brooke's _Four Victorian Poets_ (Rossetti, Arnold, Morris).

Perry's _A Study of Prose Fiction_.

Benson's _Rossetti_. (E.M.L.)

Noyes's _William Morris_. (E.M.L.)

Trevelyan's _Life and Letters of Macaulay_. Morrison's _Macaulay_.

(E.M.L.)

Minto's _English Prose Literature_ (Macaulay and Carlyle).

Barry's _Newman_.

Ward's _The Life of John Henry, Cardinal Newman_, 2 vols.

Newman's _Letters and Correspondence, with a Brief Autobiography_.

Carlyle's _Reminiscences_.

Froude's _Thomas Carlyle_, 2 vols. Nichol's _Carlyle_. (E.M.L.)

Garnett's _Thomas Carlyle_. (G.W.)