Rudyard Kipling Part 3

_Tods' Amendment_ promises _Baa Baa Black Sheep_, and _Just So Stories_; it even promises _Stalky & Co._, which is simply the best collection of boisterous boy farces ever written. Then, again, there is _In the Rukh_, out of _Many Inventions_, which looks forward to the _Jungle Book_. Finally, there is, in _The Day's Work_, clear evidence of Mr Kipling's intention ultimately to abandon the hills and plains of India and to take literary seisin of the country and chronicles of England.

The first undoubted evidence that Mr Kipling, who started with skilful tales of India, was bound in the end to turn homewards for a deeper inspiration is contained in a story from _The Day's Work_. _My Sunday at Home_ is ostensibly broad farce, of the _Brugglesmith_ variety--farce which might well call for a chapter to itself were it not that broad farce is much the same whoever the writer may be. But _My Sunday at Home_ is really less important as farce than as evidence of Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for the stillness and ancientry of the English wayside. The pages of this story distil and drip with peace.

Moreover, the story is neighboured with two others, all beckoning Mr Kipling home to Burwash in Suss.e.x. There is the Brushwood Boy, who after work comes home and finds it good--good after his work is done.

There is also _An Error in the Fourth Dimension_ wherein Mr Kipling is found playing affectionately with the idea that England is quite unlike any other country. There is in England a fourth dimension which is beyond the perception, say, of an American railway king, who after much amazement and wrath concludes that the English are not a modern people and thereafter returns to his own more reasonable land.

Of the miscellaneous stories in which Mr Kipling surrenders utterly to this later theme perhaps the most memorable is _An Habitation Enforced_ from _Actions and Reactions_. Here we are in quite another plane of authorship from that in which we have moved in the tales of India.

There is a wide difference between _The Return of Imray_--to take one of the most skilful tales of India--and _An Habitation Enforced_. _The Return of Imray_ betrays the conscious resolution of a clever man of letters to make the most effective use of good material. But _An Habitation Enforced_ is the spontaneous gesture of pure feeling. The Indian stories are ingenious and well managed. Their point is made.

Their workmanship is excellent. Atmospheres and impressions are cunningly arranged. But they very rarely succeed in carrying the reader as the reader is carried upon this later tide.

The feeling of _An Habitation Enforced_, as of all the English tales, is that of the traveller returned. The value of Mr Kipling's traffics and discoveries over the seven seas is less in the record he has made of these adventures than in their having enabled him to return to England with eyes sharpened by exile, with his senses alert for that fourth dimension which does not exist for the stranger. _An Habitation Enforced_ is inspired by the nostalgia of inveterate banishment. Some part of its perfection--it is one of the few perfect short stories in the English tongue--is due to the perfect agreement of its form with the pa.s.sion that informs its writing. It is the story of a homing Englishwoman, and of her restoration to the absolute earth of her forbears. In writing of this woman Mr Kipling has only had to recall his own joyful adventure in picking up the threads of a life at once familiar and mysterious, in meeting again the homely miracle of things that never change. Finally England claims her utterly--her and her children and her American husband. It was an American who bade Cloke, man of the soil and acquired retainer of the family, bring down larch-poles for a light bridge over the brook; but it was an Englishman reclaimed who needs consented to Cloke's amendment:

"'But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have them down here ready.'

"'We'll get 'em down _if_ you, say so,' Cloke answered, with a thrust of the underlip they both knew.

"'But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here for? We aren't building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.'

"'I don't know nothin' about that,' said Cloke. 'An' I've nothin' to say against larch--_if_ you want to make a temp'ry job of it. I ain't 'ere to tell you what isn't so, sir; an' you can't say I ever come creepin' up on you, or tryin' to lead you farther in than you set out----'

"A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he sc.r.a.ped a little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.

"'All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp'ry job of it; and by the time the young master's married it'll have to be done again.

Now, I've brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers as we've ever drawed. You put 'em in an' it's off your mind for good an'

all. T'other way--I don't say it ain't right, I'm only just sayin'

what I think--but t'other way, he'll no sooner be married than we'll 'ave it _all_ to do again. You've no call to regard my words, but you can't get out of _that_.'

"'No,' said George, after a pause; 'I've been realising that for some time. Make it oak then; we can't get out of it.'"

This story is the real beginning of Puck--to whom Mr Kipling's latest volumes are addressed. In _Puck of Pook's Hill_ Mr Kipling takes seisin of England in all times--more particularly of that trodden nook of England about Pevensey. This book is less a book of children and fairies than an English chronicle. Dan and Una are the least living of Mr Kipling's children--they are as shadowy as the little ghost who dropped a kiss upon the palm of the visitor in the mansion of _They_.

The men, too, who come and go, are shadows. It is the land which abides and is real. We hum continually a variation of Shakespeare's song:

"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

_Puck of Pook's Hill_ is a final answer to those who think of the Imperial idea as loose and vast, without roots in any dear, particular soil. _Puck of Pool's Hill_ suggests in every page that England could never for its lovers be too small. We would know intimately each place where the Roman trod, where Weland came and went, where Saxon and Norman lost themselves in a common league.

From this England, fluttered with memories and the most ancient magic, it is a natural step into the regions of pure fancy where Mr Kipling is happiest of all. _The Children of the Zodiac_ and _The Brushwood Boy_ are the earliest proofs that Mr Kipling flies most surely when he is least impeded by a human or material doc.u.ment. We have here to make a last protest against a too popular fallacy concerning the tales of Mr Kipling. Mr Kipling's pa.s.sion for the concrete, which is a pa.s.sion of all truly imaginative men, together with his keen delight in the work of the world, has caused him to be falsely regarded as a note-book realist of the modern type. He is a.s.sumed to be happiest when writing from direct experience without refinement or trans.m.u.tation. We cannot trace this error to its source and expose the many fallacies it contains without going deeper into aesthetics than is here necessary or desirable. The simple fact that Mr Kipling's best stories are those in which his fancy is most free is answer enough to those who put him among the reporters of things as they are. It sufficiently excuses us from the long and difficult inquiry as to whether Mr Kipling's account of the people who live next door is accurate and minute, and allows us to a.s.sume, without starting a controversy which only a heavy volume could determine, that, if Mr Kipling had ever set out to describe the people who live next door, he would have simplified them out of all recognition. Mr Kipling has pretended, often with some success, that his people are really to be met with in the Royal Navy or in the Indian Civil Service. But let the reader consider for a moment whom they remember best. Is it Mowgli or is it someone who is a C.I.E.? Is it the Elephant Child, or is it Mr Grish Chunder De? When does Mr Kipling more successfully convey to us the impression that his people are alive and real? Is it when he is supposed to be drawing men from the life, or is it when he has set free his imagination to call up the People of the Hills or the folk in the Jungle?

The grain of Mr Kipling's work is the finer, his vision is more confident and clear, the further he gets from the world immediately about him. Already we have seen how happily in India he left behind his impression of the alert tourist, his experience of the mess-room and bazaar, to enshrine in his fairy tale of _Kim_ the faith and simplicity of two of the children of the world--each, the old and the young, a child after his own fashion. _Kim_ is Mr Kipling's escape from the India which is traversed by the railway and served by the "Pioneer." It is the escape of Dan and Una into the Kingdom of Puck, and the escape of Mowgli into the Jungle. It is the escape, finally, of Mr Kipling's genius into the region where it most freely breathes.

We have noted that Kim is one of the Indian doors by which we enter; but there is a more open door in the first story of _The Second Jungle Book_. It is the best of all Mr Kipling's stories, just as the _Jungle Books_ are the best of all his books. It concerns the Indian, Purun Bhagat.

He was learned, supple, and deeply intimate in the affairs of the world. He had shared the counsels of princes; he had been received with honour in the clubs and societies of Europe. He was, to all appearances, a polite blend of all the talents of East and West. Then suddenly Purun Bhagat disappeared. All India understood; but of all Western people only Mr Kipling was able to follow where he walked as a holy man and a beggar into the hills. There he became St Francis of the Hills, living in a little shrine with the friendly creatures of the woods, venerated and cared for by a village on the hillside.

All Mr Kipling's readers know how that story ends--how on a night of disaster there came together as of one blood the saint and his people and the wild creatures who had housed with him. It is quoted here as showing how the old piety of India beckoned Mr Kipling into the jungle as inevitably as the old loyalty of England beckoned him into a region where on a summer day we can meet without surprise a Flint Man or a Centurion of Rome.

Always the bent of Mr Kipling, in his best work, is found to be away from the world. To appreciate his finer quality we must pa.s.s with him into the Rukh, or into the country beyond Policeman Day, into the mansion of lost children, or into a region where it is but a step from the Zodiac to fields under the plough. The tales of Mr Kipling which will longest survive him are not the tales where he is competently brutal and omniscient, but the tales where he instinctively flies from the necessity of giving to his vision the likeness of the modern world.

We may now realise more clearly the peril which lies in the popular fallacy concerning Mr Kipling described in the first few pages of this book. So far is Mr Kipling from being an author inspired and driven to claim a share in the active life of the present, an author who unloads upon us a store of memories and experience, that he is only able to do his finest work as an unchecked and fantastic dreamer. The stories in which he imposes upon his readers the illusion that he would never have written books if he had stayed at home, that his stories are the carelessly flung reminiscences of a full life--these stories are themselves instances of the skill whereby a cunning author has been able to conceal from his generation the deep difference between artifice and inspiration. A crafty author will often employ his best phrases to describe the thing he has never really seen with the eye of genius. His manner will be most a.s.sured where his matter is the least authentic. His points will be most effectively made where there is the least necessity to make them. Mr Kipling, writing as a soldier, is more a soldier than any soldier who ever lived. Thereby the discerning reader will infer that Mr Kipling was not born to write as a soldier.

He will know that Mr Kipling is not profoundly and instinctively an atavistic prophet, because his atavism is more atavistic than the atavism of the first man who ever was born. He will also realise that Mr Kipling writes so effectively about India because he ought to be writing about England and Fairyland and the Jungle. He will realise, in short, that Mr Kipling is an imaginative man of letters who has wonderful visions when he stays at home, and who needs all his craft as an expert literary artificer to persuade his readers that these visions are not seriously impaired when he ventures abroad.

VIII

THE POEMS

Only the briefest epilogue is necessary concerning Mr Kipling's poetry.

We have concluded as to his prose stories that his best work is in the pure fancy of _The Jungle Book_, and that we descend thence through his English tales and his celebration of the work of the world to clever stories of India and _Soldiers Three_. Upon each of these levels we meet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once be said that at all times, except where the rule is proved by the exception, Mr Kipling's verse is less urgently inspired than his prose.

The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of a quality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery the beat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm of sense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, at first, to contradict it. Pope's _Essay on Man_, for example, which at first seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, is really not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appears to be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there is a rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is being actually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-century philosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in the best of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifest reason why prose would not have served the author's purpose equally well.

Can we say this of Mr Kipling's poetry? Is Mr Kipling's poetry the result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?

A careful reading of Mr Kipling's verse, comparing it subject for subject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a more direct pa.s.sionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariably more wrought and careful and elaborate. It does not suggest the poet driven into song. It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing the manner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet's tools, without any urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way. He has merely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed. Of his technical success there is seldom any doubt at all. For a craftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prose successfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his least abandoned moments, it is child's play to use the more obvious devices of the metrician to similar effect. So far as mere formal excellence is concerned, verse is a journeyman's matter as compared with prose; and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetry troubles Mr Kipling not at all. But we must look beyond the formality of verse to find a poet. Poetry flies higher than prose only when the poet's feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say. Mr Kipling is a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question. The question is, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author's feeling with the author's expression? And the answer to that will be, Not in the author's poems.

Take as an example the English motive:

"See you our little mill that clacks, So busy by the brook?

She has ground her corn and paid her tax Ever since Domesday Book."

Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose tale _Below the Mill Dam_, or with the pa.s.sage it paraphrases in the story to which it stands as motto:

"The English are a bold people. His Saxons would laugh and jest with Hugh, and Hugh with them, and--this was marvellous to me--if even the meanest of them said such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor, then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might be near forsake everything else to debate the matter--I have seen them stop the mill with the corn half ground--and if the custom or usage were proven to be as it was said, why, that was the end of it, even though it were flat against Hugh, his wish and command."

It may be said of the verse that, possibly, it is more carefully considered than the prose, more deliberate and formally more excellent.

But it is certainly more remote from the pa.s.sion it conveys. There is more drive in a single fragment of_ An Habitation Enforced_ than in all the songs of Puck.

Similarly let us take another of Mr Kipling's themes--his delight in the world's work. Think first of _The Bridge-Builders_ and of _William the Conqueror_ and then turn to _The Bell Buoy_ (_Five Nations_) or _The White Man's Burden_ (_Five Nations_). In each case--and we repeat the result every time the experiment is made--we find that the author's motive, which lives in his prose, tends in his verse to expire. In _The White Man's Burden_ it expires outright, so that reading it, it is difficult to realise that _William the Conqueror_ has had the power so deeply to move us.

This is true even where Mr Kipling's subject, which in prose has not taken him to the top of his achievement, has in verse taken him as high as in verse he is able to go. Mr Kipling's best verse is contained in _Barrack Room Ballads_; but even these do not compare in merit with _Soldiers Three_. _Barrack Room Ballads_ are the best of Mr Kipling's poetry, because in these poems rhyme and beat are essential to their inspiration. They are the exception which prove the rule that normally Mr Kipling has no right to his metre. _Barrack Room Ballads_ are robust and vivid songs of the camp, choruses which require no music to enable them to serve the purpose of any gathering where the first idea is that there should be a cheerful noise. Complete success in this kind only required Mr Kipling to fill in the skeleton of a metre which brings the right words at the right moment to the tip of the galloping tongue, and this he has admirably done.

Where in _Barrack Room Ballads_ Mr Kipling has attempted to do more than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. We have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point of view. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In _Barrack Room Ballads_ it is more p.r.o.nounced.

We may take three stanzas of _Snarleyow_ as evidence that Mr Kipling's _Barrack Room Ballads_, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater ma.s.s of his verse, _really had to be metrical_; also as evidence that, in so far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. The Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field:

"'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' sh.e.l.l A little right the battery an' between the sections fell; An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels, There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.

"Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain, 'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain.'

They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best, So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest.

"The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt, But 'e swung 'is 'orses 'andsome when it came to 'Action Front!'

An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head 'Twas juicier for the n.i.g.g.e.rs when the case began to spread."

The brutality in this incident is forced in idea and expression beyond anything we find in _Soldiers Three_. It is this continuous _forcing_ of idea and expression which persists in virtually all Mr Kipling's verse except where the jingle is all that matters. We have only to recall recitations from the platform or before the curtain of some of Mr Kipling's popular poetry to realise, sometimes a little painfully, that verse is for him not a threshold of the authentic Hall of Song, but, too often, a door out of reality into the sentimental and overwrought.