Title: Rudyard Kipling
Author: Palmer, John, 1885-1944
Language: English
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RUDYARD KIPLING

by

JOHN PALMER



[Frontispiece: Rudyard Kipling]



New York
Henry Holt and Company
First Published in 1915



CONTENTS


    I.  INTRODUCTION
   II.  SIMLA
  III.  THE SAHIB
   IV.  NATIVE INDIA
    V.  SOLDIERS THREE
   VI.  THE DAY'S WORK
  VII.  THE FINER GRAIN
 VIII.  THE POEMS
        BIBLIOGRAPHY
        AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
        INDEX



I

INTRODUCTION

There is a tale of Mr Kipling which relates how Eustace Cleever, a
celebrated novelist, came to the rooms of a young subaltern and his
companions who were giving an account of themselves.  Eustace Cleever
was a literary man, and was greatly impressed when he learned that one
of the company, who was under twenty-five and was called the Infant,
had killed people somewhere in Burma.  He was suddenly caught by an
immense enthusiasm for the active life--the sort of enthusiasm which
sedentary authors feel.  Eustace Cleever ended the night riotously with
youngsters who had helped to govern and extend the Empire; and he
returned from their company incoherently uttering a deep contempt for
art and letters.

But Eustace Cleever was being observed by the First Person Singular of
Mr Kipling's tale.  This receiver of confidences perceived what was
happening, and he has the last word of the story:


"Whereby I understood that Eustace Cleever, decorator and colourman in
words, was blaspheming his own Art and would be sorry for this in the
morning."


We have here an important clue to Mr Kipling and his work.  Mr Kipling
writes of the heroic life.  He writes of men who do visible and
measurable things.  His theme has usually to do with the world's work.
He writes of the locomotive and the engineer; of the mill-wheel and the
miller; of the bolts, bars and planks of a ship and the men who sail
it.  He writes, in short, of any creature which has work to do and does
it well.  Nevertheless we must not be misled into thinking that because
Mr Kipling glorifies all that is concrete, practical, visible and
active he is therefore any the less purely and utterly a literary man.
Mr Kipling seems sometimes to write as an engineer, sometimes as a
soldier.  At times we would wager that he had spent all his life as a
Captain of Marines, or as a Keeper of Woods and Forests, or as a
Horse-Dealer.  He gives his readers the impression that he has lived a
hundred lives, mastered many crafts, and led the life, not of one, but
of a dozen, active and practical men of affairs.  He has created about
himself so complete an illusion of adventure and enterprise that it
seems almost the least important thing about him that he should also be
a writer of books.  His readers, indeed, are apt to forget the most
important fact as to Mr Kipling--the fact that he is a man of letters.
He seems to belong rather to the company of young subalterns than to
the company of Eustace Cleever.

Hence it is necessary to consider closely the moral of that excellent
tale.  When Eustace Cleever blasphemed against his art, Mr Kipling
predicted he would be sorry for it.  Mr Kipling recorded that
prediction because he had the best of reasons to know how Eustace
Cleever would feel upon the morning after his debauch of enthusiasm for
the heroic life.  Let each man keep to his work, and know how good it
is to do that work as well as it can be done.  Eustace Cleever's work
was to live the life of imagination and to handle English words--work
as difficult to do and normally as useful as the job of the Infant.
Though for one heady night Eustace Cleever yearned after a strange
career, Mr Kipling knew that he would return without misgiving to the
thing he was born to do.  Mr Kipling, like Eustace Cleever, knows that
though nothing is more pleasant than to talk with young subalterns, yet
the born author remains always an author.  He knows, too, that even the
deeds he admires in the men who make history are, for him, no more than
raw stuff to be taken in hand or rejected according to the author's
need.

Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, before
we have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful man
of letters.  Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out of
the jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men are
working and building and fighting, come really out of the study of an
expert craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care.
This may seem an unnecessary warning.  The intelligent reader will
protest that, since Mr Kipling writes books, it does not seem very
necessary to deduce that he is a man of letters.  It is true that no
such warning would be necessary in the case of most writers of books.
It would be pure loss of time, for example, to begin a study of the
work of Mr Henry James by asserting that Mr Henry James was a man of
letters.  But Mr Kipling is in rather a different case.  The majority
of readers with whom one discusses Mr Kipling's works are sometimes far
astray, simply because they have not realised that Mr Kipling is as
utterly a man of letters as Mr Henry James, that he lives as completely
the life of fancy and meditation as William Blake or Francis Thompson.
Mr Kipling does not write tales out of the mere fullness of his life in
many continents and his talk with all kinds of men.  He is not to be
understood as a man singular only in his experience, unloading
anecdotes from a crowded life, excelling in emphasis and reality by
virtue of things actually seen and done.  On the contrary, Mr Kipling
writes tales because he is a writer.

Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and been
more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his
literary contemporaries.  But this does not imply that he is any the
less devoted to the craft of letters.  Indeed, we shall realise that he
is one of the craftiest authors who ever lived.  He is more crafty than
Stevenson.  He often lives by the word alone--the word picked and
polished.  That he has successfully disguised this fact from many of
his admirers is only a further proof of his literary cunning.  Mr
Kipling often uses words with great skill to create in his readers the
impression that words matter to him hardly at all.  He will work as
hard as the careful sonneteer to give to his manner a tang of rawness
and crudity; and thereby his readers are willing to forget that he is a
literary man.  They are content simply to listen to a man who has seen,
and possibly done, wonders in all parts of the world, neglecting to
observe that, if the world with its day's work belongs to Mr Kipling,
it belongs to him only by author's right--that is, by right of
imagination and right of style.

It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless and contemptuous of literary
formality; and that whenever he talks of "Art," as in certain pages of
_The Light That Failed_, he tries to talk as though there were really
no such thing.  But Mr Kipling's cheerful contempt of all that is
pedantic and magisterial in "Art" does not imply that he is innocent of
literary discipline.  It is true that Mr Kipling is lawless in the
sense that all good work is more than a conscious adherence to formula.
It is not true in the sense that Mr Kipling is more lawless than
Tennyson or Walter Scott.  Readers of Mr Kipling's stories must not be
misled by his buccaneering contempt for formal art.  Mr Kipling's art
is as formal as the art of Wilde, or the art of Baudelaire, which he
helped to send out of fashion.

A few preliminary words are necessary (1) as to the half-dozen dates
which bear upon Mr Kipling's authorship and (2) as to the arrangement
of his works here to be followed.

Mr Kipling was born in 1865, the son of J. Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E.
His intimacy with India was determined at birth.  He was educated at
the United Services College, Westward Ho, but was again in India in
1882, as assistant editor on _The Civil and Military Gazette_ and _The
Pioneer_.  He remained on the staff of _The Pioneer_ for seven years,
and travelled over the five continents.  By this time he had learned to
think of the world as a place rather more diversified than a walk from
Charing Cross to Whitehall would lead one to imagine; to see something
of men upon its frontiers, and to love England as men do who come back
to her from the ends of the earth.  The whole of Mr Kipling's literary
biography is contained in the fact that Mr Kipling has been a great
traveller who is now inveterately at home.

Perhaps we should also note that Mr Kipling was a literary prodigy.
_Plain Tales from the Hills_ appeared in 1887.  Mr Kipling at
twenty-two had shown his quality and had already mapped out in little
his career.  In _Plain Tales from the Hills_ there are hints for almost
everything that their author afterwards accomplished.  As the book of a
young journalist whose name had not yet been whispered among the
publishers and critics of London it was a miracle.  If Mr Kipling had
been able to improve on _Plain Tales from the Hills_ as much as
Shakespeare improved on _Love's Labour's Lost_, as much as Shelley
improved on _Queen Mab_, Robert Browning on _Pauline_, Byron on _Hours
of Idleness_, he would to-day be without a peer.  Mr Granville Barker
is often cited as a classical modern example of precocity, but he was
twenty-four when he wrote _The Marrying of Anne Leete_.  Mr Henry James
was twenty-eight before he had published a characteristic word.  Mr
Thomas Hardy at twenty-five had only printed a short story, and he was
more than thirty when his first novel appeared.  Mr Kipling came upon
the public in 1886 without a preliminary stutter.  Mr Kipling at
twenty-two could write as craftily as Mr Kipling can write after nearly
thirty years' experience.  We shall not be greatly concerned in these
pages to trace the progress of Mr Kipling's craft and wisdom.  He was
always crafty and always wise.  He had done some of his best work at
thirty.  He recalls Hazlitt's curious saying that an improving author
is never a great author.  Mr Kipling is not an improving author.  There
has been a little moving up and down the scale of excellence; many
things hinted in the early volumes from _Plain Tales from the Hills_ to
_Many Inventions_ are developed more elaborately and surely in later
volumes; the old craft has come to be used with an ease that has in it
more of the insolence of a master than was possible in the author of
1887.  But so far as literary finish is concerned, _Plain Tales from
the Hills_ leaves little to be acquired.  Already Mr Kipling wields his
implement as deftly and firmly as many a skilled writer who was
learning his lesson before Mr Kipling was born.  Few authors have so
surely scored their best in their earliest years.  Authors are
considered young to-day at thirty.  Mr Kipling at that age had already
written _The Jungle Book_.

This does not, of course, imply that all Mr Kipling's stories are of
equal merit.  On the contrary, we shall henceforth be mainly concerned
with looking for the inspired author under a mass of skilful
journalism.  It is not a simple enterprise.  Mr Kipling is so competent
an author that he is usually able to persuade his readers that his
heart is equally in all he writes.  Moreover, Mr Kipling has fallen
among many prejudices, literary and political, which have caused his
least important work to be most discussed.  For these reasons the
actual, as distinguished from the legendary, Mr Kipling is not easily
discovered.  Mainly it is a work of excavation.

Mr Kipling has been writing short stories for nearly thirty years.  His
tales are too numerous for disparate discussion.  It will be necessary
to take them in groups.  One or two stories in each group will be taken
as typical of the rest.  Thereby we shall avoid repetition and be able
to show some sort of plan to the maze of Mr Kipling's diversity of
subjects and manners.



II

SIMLA

Mr Kipling's Indian stories fall into three groups.  There are (1) the
tales of Simla, (2) the Anglo-Indian tales, and (3) the tales of native
India.  There is also _Kim_, which is more--much more--than a tale of
India.

Mr Kipling's Indian stories necessarily tend to fill a disproportionate
amount of space.  They are of less account than their number or the
attention they have received would seem to imply.  Their discussion in
this and the two following chapters will be more of a political than a
literary discussion.  Mr Kipling as journalist and very efficient
colourman in words has made much of India in his time.  He has
perceived in India a subject susceptible of being profitably worked
upon.  Here was a vast continent, the particular concern of the
English, where all kinds of interesting work was being done, where
stories grew too thickly for counting, and where there was, ready to
the teller's eye, a richness and diversity of setting which beggared
the most eager penmanship.  Moreover, this continent was virtually
untouched in the popular literature of the day.  Naturally Mr Kipling
made full use of his opportunity.  He did not write of India because
India was essential to his genius, but because he was shrewd enough to
realise that nothing could better serve the purpose of a young author
than to exploit his first-hand acquisition of an inexhaustible store of
fresh and excellent material.  India was annexed by Mr Kipling at
twenty-two for his own literary purposes.  He was not born to interpret
India, nor does he throw his literary heart and soul into the business.
When, in the Indian stories, we meet with pages sincerely inspired we
discover that their inspiration has very little to do with India and a
great deal to do with Mr Kipling's impulse to celebrate the work of the
world, and even more to do with his impulse to escape the intellectual
casuistry of his generation in a region where life is simple and
intense.  These aspects of his work will be more clearly revealed at a
later stage.  For the moment we are considering the Indian tales simply
as tales of India; and from this point of view they obviously belong to
the journalist rather than to the author who has helped to make the
English short story respectable.  Mr Kipling simply gets out of India
the maximum of literary effect as a teller of tales.  India, for
example, is mysterious.  Mr Kipling exploits her mystery competently
and coolly, making his points with the precision, clarity and force of
one to whom the enterprise begins and ends as an affair of technical
adequacy.  The point is made with equal ability that India is not
without peril and difficulty ruled and administered by the sahibs; or
that India has a complicated history; or that India is thickly peopled.
Mr Kipling in his Indian tales makes the most of his talent for
observing things, always with a keen eye for their effective literary
employment.  His Indian tales are descriptive journalism of a high
quality; and, being journalism, their matter and their doctrine have
hit hard the attention of their particular day.

This reduces us to the necessity of considering not so much their form
and quality as the ideas and doctrines they contain--a barren task but
necessary in order to clear away many misconceptions with regard to Mr
Kipling's work.  Regarded as literature, Mr Kipling's Indian tales are
mainly of note as preparing in him that enthusiasm for the work of the
world which, later, was to inspire his greatest pages; as finally
leading him in _Kim_ to a door whereby he was able to pass into the
region of pure fancy where alone he is supremely happy, and as
prompting in him the instinct to simplify which urged him into the
jungle and into the minds of children.  But all this has very little to
do with India.  So long as we are dealing with Mr Kipling's Indian
stories as in themselves finished and intrinsic studies of India, we
remain only in the suburbs of Mr Kipling's merit as an author.  The
Simla tales are not more than a skilful employment of a literary
convention which Mr Kipling did not inherit.  The Anglo-Indian and
native tales are the not less skilful work of a young newspaper man
breaking into a storehouse of new material.  We are interested firstly
in Mr Kipling's craft as a technician, as one who makes the most of his
theme deliberately and self-consciously; and secondly in Mr Kipling's
point of view, in the impressions and ideas he has collected concerning
the country of which he writes.  Until we arrive at _The Day's Work_ we
shall be mainly occupied in clearing the ground of impertinent
prejudices concerning Mr Kipling's temperament and politics.  For
though the Indian and soldier tales are as literature not impregnable
to criticism, they can at any rate be rescued from those who have
annexed or repudiated them from motives which have little to do with
their literary value.

We will begin with the Simla tales.

Characteristically the author who began virtually at the end of his
career--proclaiming himself a finished virtuoso at the start--entered
into prose with a volume of tales, radiating from Simla, which betray
qualities that are usually associated with the later rather than with
the early work of an author.  _Plain Tales from the Hills_ number more
Simla stories to the square page than any other volume of Mr Kipling.
Now Mr Kipling's Simla stories are the least important, but in some
ways the most significant of all the stories he wrote.  They begin and
they end in sheer literary virtuosity.  We feel in reading Mr Kipling's
studies of the social world at Simla that he had no intuitive call to
write them; that they are exercises in craft rather than genuine
inspirations.  Mrs Hawksbee stands for nothing in Mr Kipling's
achievement save only for his power to create an illusion of reality
and enthusiasm by sheer finish of style.  She is not a creation.  She
is only the best possible example of the clever sleight-of-hand of an
accomplished artificer.  She is in literary fiction cousin to the
witty, flirtatious ladies of the modern English theatre.  Her
conversation is delightful, but it belongs to nobody.  It does not even
belong to her author.  Mrs Hawksbee talks as all well-dressed women
talk in the best books.  She does it with a volubility and
resourcefulness which almost disguises the fact that she lives only by
hanging desperately to the end of her author's pen; but she cannot
deceive us always.  Mr Kipling does not really believe in Mrs Hawksbee.
He has no real sympathy or knowledge of the social undercrust where the
tangle of three is a constant theme.  The talk of Mrs Hawksbee and her
circle is derived.  Its conduct is fashionable light comedy in an
Indian setting.

Simla really does not deserve to be known outside the Indian Empire.
It is a comparatively cool place whither Indian soldier and civilians
send their wives in the hot weather and whither they retire themselves
under medical advice.  It is not unlike any other warm and idle city of
rest where there is every kind of expensive amusement provided for a
migratory population.  Mr Kipling has failed to make Simla interesting,
because Simla is Biarritz and Monte Carlo or any place which in fiction
is frequented by people who behave naughtily and enjoy themselves, and
in real life is frequented by the upper middle classes mechanically
passing the time.  Mr Kipling's ingenious pretences regarding Simla are
amusing, but they cannot long conceal from his readers that these
tales, apart from literary exhibition, were really not worth the
telling.  Mr Kipling pretends, of course, even at twenty-four, to know
of all that passes between women unlacing after a ball; but Mr
Kipling's pretended omniscience is part of his literary method, and he
does not quite carry it off in the Simla tales.  He gives us not Simla
or any place under the sun, but a sparkling stage version of Simla--all
dancing and delight, a little intrigue, a touch of sentiment, patches
of excellent fun, and now and then a streak of Indian mystery.  But Mr
Kipling's heart is not really in this business.  His Simla tales will
not endure, and they have been given too much prominence in the popular
idea of his work.  They are not plain tales, but tales very artfully
coloured.  They fall far short of the standard to which Mr Kipling has
raised the English short story.  Yet even here we may note the skill
with which the author has concealed his failure.  Mrs Hawksbee may be
taken as a symbol of the distinction between the work of an inspired
author and the work of an author playing with his tools.  Mr Kipling of
_The Jungle Books_ and _The Day's Work_ is an inspired author.  Mr
Kipling of the Simla tales, on the other hand, is simply concerned to
show that he can work a conventional formula of the day as well as any
man; that he can redeem the formula with individual touches beyond the
reach of most; and can enliven it with impudent pretences which please
by virtue of their being utterly preposterous.  Take, for example, the
pretence that Mrs Hawksbee is a charming woman.  Mrs Hawksbee is really
nothing of the kind.  She is an anthology of witty phrases.  She is the
abstract perfection of what a clever head and a good heart is expected
to be in a fashionable comedy.  But Mr Kipling desires her to be
accepted as a charming woman.  His procedure, on a high and delicate
plane, is precisely the procedure to which we are accustomed on a low
and obvious plane in the majority of popular novels where the hero has
to be accepted for a man of brilliant genius.  We have to take the
author's word for it.  The author who tells us that his hero is a
genius usually requires us to believe it without further proof.  He
does not show us a page of the hero's music or the hero's poetry, but
we must believe that it is very fine, even though the hero loves Pietro
Mascagni and worships Martin Tupper.  Similarly Mr Kipling, presenting
us with Mrs Hawksbee, nowhere affords us direct evidence that she is a
charming woman.  He assumes it, gets everyone else in the story to
assume it, and expects his readers to assume it--his cunning as a
writer being of so remarkable a quality that there are very few of the
Simla tales in which the reader is not prepared to assume it for the
sake of the story.

Mrs Hawksbee is typical of the majority of Mr Kipling's studies in
social comedy.  His success in this kind is remarkable, but it is
barren.  Mr Kipling realised this himself quite early, for he quite
soon abandoned Simla.  There are some sixteen stories in _Plain Tales
from the Hills_ into which the Simla motive is threaded.  In the books
immediately following, published in 1888 and 1889, Simla is not wholly
abandoned, but the proportion of Simla stories is less.  _The Phantom
Rickshaw_ (1889) is the last story which can fairly be brought within
the list, and this story can only be included by straining its point to
vanishing.  Of all the groups of stories in _Plain Tales from the
Hills_ the Simla group, though it was largest, promised least for the
future.



III

THE SAHIB

There is another group of Indian tales, a group which deals with the
governance of India--with the men who are spent in the Imperial
Service.  The peculiar charm and merit of these tales is best
considered as a special case of Mr Kipling's delight in the world's
work--a subject which claims a chapter to itself.  But apart from this,
Mr Kipling's Anglo-Indian tales--his presentation of the work of the
Indian Empire, of the Anglo-Indian soldier and civilian--have an
unfortunate interest of their own.  They are mainly responsible for a
misconception which has dogged Mr Kipling through all his career.  This
misconception consists in regarding Mr Kipling as primarily an
Imperialist pamphleteer with a brief for the Services and a contempt
for the Progressive Parties.  It is an error which has acted
mischievously upon all who share it--upon the reader who mechanically
regrets that Mr Kipling's work should be disfigured with fierce heresy;
upon the reader who chuckles with sectarian glee when the "much
talkers" are mocked and confounded; upon Mr Kipling himself who has
been encouraged to mistake an accident of his career as the essence of
his achievement and to regard himself as a sort of Imperial laureate.
The origin of this misconception is not obscure.  Mr Kipling has
written intimate tales of the British Army: he is, therefore, a
"militarist."  He has lived in India many years, and realised that men
who live in India, and administer India, and come into personal contact
with Hindus and Mohammedans, know more about India than Members of
Parliament who run through the Indian continent between sessions: he
is, therefore, a reviler of the free democratic institutions of Great
Britain.  He has realised that Government departments in Whitehall are
not always thought to be very expeditious, well informed and devoted by
men who are often confronted with matters that cannot afford to wait
for a telegram: he is, therefore, a lover of the high hand and of
courses brutal and irregular.  He has celebrated the toil and the
adventure of pioneers and of outposts: he is, therefore, one who
brandishes unseasonably the Imperial sword.

The grain of truth in these deductions is heavily outweighed by the
massive absurdity of regarding them as in any sense essential.  Mr
Kipling brings political prejudice into his work less than almost any
living contemporary.  At a time when there was hardly an English novel
or an English play of consequence which was not also a political
pamphlet it was completely false to regard Mr Kipling as a pamphleteer.
When most of our English authors were talking from the platform, Mr
Kipling--with a few, too few, others--remained apart.  He is suspect,
not because his Anglo-Indian tales or his army tales are political, but
because they record much that is true of the English Services, which
fails to square with much that once was popularly believed about them.
The real reason of Mr Kipling's false fame as a politician is, not that
he is an Imperial pamphleteer, but that, writing of the Army and the
Empire, he fails to be a pamphleteer on the other side.  His
detachment, not his partiality, is at fault.

Mr Kipling's detachment from the politics of his day explains virtually
everything that has offended his modern critics.  Almost the first
thing to realise in discussing Mr Kipling's attitude to modern life is
that Mr Kipling has kept absolutely clear of the political and social
drift of the last thirty years.  He has been conspicuously out of
everything.  He has had nothing to say to any of the ideas or
influences which have formed his contemporaries.  While others of his
literary generation were growing up amid intellectual movements,
democratic tendencies and advances of humanity, Mr Kipling was standing
between two civilisations in India which were hardly susceptible of
being reconciled till they had been reduced to very simple terms.  The
instinct to simplify--to get down to something in nature that included
the East with the West, the First with the Twentieth century, was
naturally strong in one who was born between two nations; and it was an
instinct which drove Mr Kipling in the opposite direction from that in
which his contemporaries were moving.  While Mr Kipling's generation
was learning to analyse, refine and interrogate, to become super-subtle
and incredulous, to exalt the particular and ignore the general, to
probe into the intricate and sensitive places of modern life, Mr
Kipling was looking at mankind in the mass, looking back to the
half-dozen realities which are the stuff of the poetry of every climate
and period--to love of country which is as old as the waters of
Babylon, to the faith of Achates, and the affliction of Job.  While Mr
Kipling's contemporaries have been working towards minute studies of
individuals and groups, Mr Kipling has been content to catch the metal
of humanity at the flash point, to wait for the passionate moment which
reveals all mankind as of one kindred.  "We be of one blood, ye and
I"--the phrase of the Jungle holds.

To find here evidence of a bias merely political, of an attitude
reactionary and hostile to the progress o the world, is to deny sense
and meaning to the greatest literature of the world.  Mr Kipling's
instinctive simplifying of life he shares with the immortals.  It is,
as we shall see, the immortal part of him.  To write of Mr Kipling as
though he celebrates the ape and the tiger; extols the Philistine and
the brute; calls always for more chops--"bloody ones with gristle";
delights in the savagery of war, and ferociously despises all that
separates the Englishman of to-day from his painted ancestor--this is
the mistake of critics who cannot distinguish the cant of progress from
its reality.

We shall be driven more particularly to consider Mr Kipling's atavism
in discussing his tales of the British Army.  For the present we are
dealing only with India and the "Imperialism" which some of Mr
Kipling's critics have taken for an offensive proof of his political
prejudice.  Mr Kipling's treatment of the Anglo-Indian, and of the
dealing of the Anglo-Indian with the Indian Empire, has nothing to do
with the Yellows and the Blues.  The real motive of Mr Kipling's
attitude towards the men on the frontier, in places where deadly things
are encountered and there is work to be done, is no more a matter of
politics, "progressive" or "reactionary," than is his celebration of
the Maltese Cat or of .007.  "The White Man's Burden" is the burden of
every creature in whom there lives the pride of unrewarded labour, of
endurance and courage.  In India this pride has to be wholesomely
tempered with humility; for India is old and vast and incomprehensible,
to be handled with care, to be approached as a country which, though it
shows an inscrutably smiling face to the modern world, has the power
suddenly to baffle its modern rulers by opening to them glimpses of an
intricate and unassailable life which cannot be ruffled by Orders in
Council or disturbed by the weak ploughing of teachers from the West.
The task of the Anglo-Indian administrator is, indeed, the finest
opportunity for that heroic life to the celebration of which Mr Kipling
has devoted so many of his tales.  This hero has a task which taxes all
his ability, which promises little riches and little fame, and is known
to be tolerably hopeless.  It offers to him a supreme test of his
virtue--a test in which the hero is accountable only to his personal
will; whose best work is its own reward and comfort.


"Gentlemen come from England," writes Mr Kipling in one of his Indian
tales, "spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great sphinx of the
Plains, and write books upon its ways and its work, denouncing or
praising it as their ignorance prompts.  Consequently all the world
knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself.  But no one, not even
the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of
the Empire.  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 overwork, 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 eventually 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, and yearly the work of pushing
and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes
forward.  If an advance be made, all credit is given to the native,
while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads.  If a failure
occurs, the Englishmen step forward and accept the blame."


This passage declares the heroic spirit of Mr Kipling's Anglo-Indian
tales; and many readers will fail to understand how exactly this spirit
has been found vainglorious.

There is a passage in Shakespeare where a king's envoy comes to claim
of a high-mettled and sweating warrior the fruits of victory.  The
warrior grudges less surrendering the fruits of victory to the king
than he grudges surrendering his anger at being easily and prettily
addressed on the field of battle by a polite and dainty fellow who has
no idea how dearly the fruits of victory are purchased.  Mr Kipling's
heroes are frail enough to feel some of this very natural indignation
when unbreathed politicians lecture them in the heat of their Indian
day.  They come into touch with things simple and bitter.  India has
searched out the value of many a Western shibboleth, destroyed many
doctrines, principles, ideas and theories.  Phrases which look well in
a peroration look foolish when there is immediate work to be done, and
expediency begins to rule.  The first lesson which the Indian civilian
learns, a lesson which is rarely omitted from any of Mr Kipling's
Indian stories, is that practical men are better for being ready to
take the world as they find it.  The men who worship the Great God
Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, most terrible, One-eyed,
Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk--men who are set on saving their own
particular business--have no time for saving faces and phrases.  They
have small respect for a principle.  They have seen too many principles
break down under the particular instance.  Hence there is in all Mr
Kipling's work a disrespect of things which are printed and made much
of in the contemporary British press; and this, again, has encouraged
the idea that he is "reactionary," contemptuous of the humanities, and
enemy of all the best poets and philosophers.

It will perhaps be well to look a little closely at one or two of Mr
Kipling's Indian series.  They will help us to realise how the charges
we are discussing have arisen and exactly how unreasonable they are.
The first of two excellent examples is the story of _Tods' Amendment_.
_Tods' Amendment_ is the story of a Bill brought in by the Supreme
Legislative Council of India.  Tods was an English baby of six, and he
mixed on friendly terms with Indians in the bazaar and with members of
the Supreme Legislative Council.  The Council was at this time devising
a new scheme of land tenure which aimed at "safeguarding the interests"
of a few hundred thousand cultivators of the Punjab.  The Bill was
beautiful on paper; and the Legal Member, who knew Tods, was settling
the "minor details."  The weak part of the business was that European
legislators, dealing with natives, are often puzzled to know which
details are the major and which the minor.  Also the Native Member was
from Calcutta, and knew nothing about the Punjab.  Nevertheless, the
Bill was known to be a beautiful Bill till Tods happened one evening to
be sitting on the knee of the Legal Member, and to hear him mention
_The Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment_.  Tods had heard the
bazaar talking of a new plan for the Ryotwari, as bazaars talk when
there is no white man to overhear.  Tods began to prattle, and the
Legal Member began to listen, till he soon realised that there was only
one drawback to the beautiful Bill.  The beautiful Bill, in short, was
altogether wrong, more especially in the Council's pet clause which so
clearly "safeguarded the interests of the tenant."  It therefore came
about that the rough draft of the Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised
Enactment was put away in the Legal Member's private paper-box--"and,
opposite the twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed
by the Legal Member, are the words, 'Tods' Amendment.'"

The moral of the tale is not obscure.  A baby who runs in the bazaar is
better able to legislate for India than a Supreme Legislative Council.
India, in short, is a vast and uncertain land, whose ways are not
always learned in a lifetime by the men whose business it is.  The
argument _a fortiori_--namely, that amiable and humane political
philosophers, well bred in the latest European theories of government,
are even less likely to be infallible--need not be pursued.

Our second story is the story of Aurelian McGoggin.  Aurelian McGoggin
had read too many books, and he had too many theories.  He also had a
creed: "It was not much of a creed.  It only proved that men had no
souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry
along somehow for the good of humanity."  McGoggin had found it an
excellent creed for a Government office, and he brought it to India and
tried to teach it to all his friends.  His friends had found that life
in India is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one
particular at the head of affairs, and they objected.  They also warned
McGoggin not to be too good for his work, and not to insist on doing it
better than it needed to be done, because people in India wanted all
their energy for bare life.  But McGoggin would not be warned, and one
day, when he had steadily overworked and overtalked through the hot
season, he was suddenly interrupted at the club, in the middle of an
oration.  The doctor called it _aphasia_; but McGoggin only knew that
he was struck sensationally dumb: "Something had wiped his lips of
speech as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child, and he was
afraid.  For a moment he had lost his mind and memory--which was
preposterous and something for which his philosophy did not allow.
Henceforth he did not appear to know so much as he used to about things
Divine."

McGoggin, in fact, was converted; for, as Mr Kipling explains, his
story is really a tract--a tract whose purpose is to convey that India
is able to cure the most resolute positivist of his positivism.  Mr
Kipling's India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic
philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips.  You do not
talk of Humanity in India, because in India "you really see
humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing between it and the
blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot."  Mr
Kipling's Indian administrators are practical and simple men, who obey
orders and accept the incredible because their position requires them
to administer India as though they were never at fault, whereas their
experience tells them that, if they are never to be at fault in India,
it is wise to be not too original and fatal to be too rigid.

_Tods' Amendment_ and _The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin_ are printed
among _Plain Tales from the Hills_.  They look forward to a whole
series of Anglo-Indian tales which present Mr Kipling's idea of the
English in India.  Out of his later books we can illustrate a hundred
times his conviction that in India the simplest wisdom is the best.

But there are two kinds of simplicity.  The one kind is illustrated in
a tale from _The Day's Work_; it is the right kind of simplicity.  In
no story of Mr Kipling is the devoted service and practical
resourcefulness of the good Civilian so movingly celebrated as in the
story of _William the Conqueror_.  It is the story of a famine, and of
how it was met by the servants of the Indian Government.  The
administration of famine relief would seem to be a simple thing when
the grain has come by rail and only waits to be distributed.  But the
district served by the little group of English in _William the
Conqueror_ was a district which did not understand the food of the
North, and, if it could not get the rice which it knew, was ready to
starve within reach of bagsful of unfamiliar wheat or rye.  The hero of
the tale is finally reduced to distributing the Government rations to
the goats, and keeping the starving babies alive with milk.  It was a
simple idea, and the man to whom it occurred worked himself to death's
door, which was no more than another simple idea of what was due from
him to the district and to his superior officer.

The wrong kind of simplicity is illustrated in a story from _Life's
Handicap_.  It is called _The Head of the District_, and it has to do
with a simple idea which occurred to the Viceroy.  A Deputy
Commissioner who understood the lawless Khusru Kheyel and had put into
them the fear of English law had died and a successor had to be
appointed.  The man for the post was a certain Tallentire who had
worked with the late head of the district and knew the tribe with whom
he had to deal.  But the Viceroy had a Principle.  He wished to educate
the natives in self-government; and here was an opportunity--a vacant
post of responsibility and a native candidate to fill it.


"There was a gentleman and a member of the Bengal Civil Service who had
won his place and a university degree to boot in fair and open
competition with the sons of the English.  He was cultured, of the
world, and, if report spoke truly, had wisely and, above all,
sympathetically ruled a crowded district in South-Eastern Bengal.  He
had been to England and charmed many drawing-rooms there.  His name, if
the Viceroy recollected aright, was Mr Grish Chunder Dé, M.A.  In
short, did anybody see any objection to the appointment, always on
principle, of a man of the people to rule the people?  The district in
South-Eastern Bengal might with advantage, he apprehended, pass over to
a younger civilian of Mr G. C. Dé's nationality (who had written a
remarkably clever pamphlet on the political value of sympathy in
administration); and Mr G. C. Dé could be transferred northward.  As
regarded the mere question of race, Mr Grish Chunder Dé was more
English than the English, and yet possessed of that peculiar sympathy
and insight which the best among the best Service in the world could
only win to at the end of their service."


The principle was sound; but the consequences were such as usually
follow when ideas which are simple in one continent are applied in
another.  Any man on the frontier could have told what would come of
asking the Khusru Kheyel to respect and obey Mr Grish Chunder Dé.  It
was not a matter of religion or ability, but of history.  The Khusru
Kheyel had had relations with the countrymen of their new Head for
generations and they were not relations of respect and obedience.  How
there was riot and some rapid blood-letting on the border, and how the
new Head resigned his office before he had taken it over, is told as a
warning that there is a wrong kind of simplicity in dealing with India.
It is fatal to have invented simple and embracing phrases about a
country which holds more races than all Europe; has had a long and
private history of its own; has been more often conquered than Great
Britain; and has had every sort of experience except that of being
governed according to constitutional law.

This chapter being mainly devoted to rescuing Mr Kipling from his
political admirers and censors, it may be well to conclude upon his
vision of the devoted civilian Scott, the hero of a tale already
quoted, the man who fed the Indian babies from a herd of goats fattened
on the food which the starving people of the Deccan distrusted and
refused.  Scott appears in that story at sunset, delectable and humane,
sneezing in the dust of a hundred little feet, "a god in a halo of gold
dust, walking slowly at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran
small naked cupids."

Clearly there is something wrong with the popular habit of regarding Mr
Kipling as essentially concerned with the carving of men to the "nasty
noise of beef-cutting on the block."  His "god in a halo of gold dust"
seriously discourages any attempt to brand him with the mark of the
reverting carnivor.



IV

NATIVE INDIA

From Simla we have come down to the plains and the work of the English
in Imperial India.  Thence we pass to India herself.  Concerning native
India Mr Kipling's principle thesis--a thesis illustrated with point
and competency in many excellent tales--is that for the people of the
West there can be no such thing as the real India--only here and there
an understanding that wavers and frequently expires.  Mr Kipling does
not insolently explain that India is thus and thus.  He allows the
impression to grow upon us, as once it grew upon himself, that in India
all the settled ways of the West are insecure, that at any moment we
may be looking into the House of Suddhu.


    "A stone's throw out on either hand
    From that well-ordered road we tread,
    And all the world is wild and strange:
  Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
  Shall bear us company to-night,
  For we have reached the Oldest Land
    Wherein the Powers of Darkness range."


It is not for an Englishman to speak of the real India.  Let him stand
with Mr Kipling between East and West, and allow each thing he sees to
add to his dark and intricate impression.  India will then assume her
own uneasy and vast form, will press upon the nerves, and be declared
mysterious.

There are a few pages in _Life's Handicap_ describing the City of
Lahore by night.  There is great heat in these pages; there is distance
also, and the breathless air of streets where the formic swarming of
India, her callous fecundity, the tyranny of her skies, and her old
faith, prepare us for the House of Suddhu and the return of Imray:


"The roof-tops are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air
is full of undistinguishable noises.  They are restless in the City of
Dreadful Night; and small wonder.  The marvel is that they can even
breathe.  If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they
are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued.
Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch sleepers turning to and
fro, shifting their beds and again resettling them.  In the pit-like
courtyards of the houses there is the same movement.

"The pitiless Moon shows it all.  Shows, too, the plains outside the
city, and here and there a hand's-breadth of the Ravee without the
walls.  Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a house-top
almost directly below the mosque Minar.  Some poor soul has risen to
throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling
water strikes faintly on the ear.  Two or three other men, in far-off
corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the
water flashes like heliographic signals. . . .  Still the unrestful
noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat,
and of a people seeking in vain for rest.  It is only the lower-class
women who sleep on the house-tops.  What must the torment be in the
latticed zenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling?  There are
footfalls in the court below.  It is the _Muezzin_--faithful minister;
but he ought to have been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that
prayer is better than sleep--the sleep that will not come to the city.

"The _Muezzin_ fumbles for a moment with the door of one of the Minars,
disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar--a magnificent bass
thunder--tells that he has reached the top of the Minar.  They must
hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself!  Even across
the courtyard it is almost overpowering.  The cloud drifts by and shows
him outlined black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad
chest heaving with the play of his lungs--'Allah ho Akbar'; then a
pause while another _Muezzin_ somewhere in the direction of the Golden
Temple takes up the call--'Allah ho Akbar.'  Again and again; four
times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up
already.--'I bear witness that there is no God by God.'"

      *      *      *      *      *      *

"Several weeks of darkness pass after this.  For the Moon has gone out.
The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawn
before making my way homeward.  Again the noise of shuffling feet.  The
morning call is about to begin, and my nightwatch is over.  'Allah ho
Akbar!  Allah ho Akbar!'  The east grows grey, and presently saffron;
the dawn wind comes up as though the _Muezzin_ had summoned it; and, as
one man, the City of Dreadful Night rises from its bed and turns its
face towards the dawning day. . . .

"'Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?'  What is it?
Something borne on men's shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I
stand back.  A woman's corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a
bystander says, 'She died at midnight from the heat.'"


This passage may stand as a fair example of Mr Kipling's method of
dealing with India.  It is an able piece of descriptive writing.  It is
marked by a conscious and deliberate resolve that the "effect" shall be
made.  It shows us the Indian city from a high distance, as it appeared
to an observer with a knack for vividly delivering his impressions.  It
is in no sense an inspired wrestle with the reality of India; and in
that it is typical.  Mr Kipling has never claimed to grasp or interpret
his Indian theme.  He has stood away almost ostentatiously from the
material he was exploiting.

It is indeed the chief merit of his Indian tales that he admits himself
to be no more, so far as India is concerned, than an adventurer making
the literary most of his adventure.  He has at any rate the sensibility
to be conscious that often he is in the position of a tripper before
the Sphinx.  His tales are thrilled with respect and a sense of India's
power.  She it is who wipes the lips of Aurelian McGoggin, who flouts
the Greatest of All the Viceroys, humbles the Legal Member of the
Supreme Legislative Council, and drives the lonely white intruder to
illusion and death.  She is indifferent to every conqueror.  She feeds
her multitudes like a mother; and then suddenly her bounty dries and
there is famine and pestilence.  Always she is a confronting Presence
dwarfing to one height masters and slaves.  Mr Kipling has followed
this Presence as Browning's poet followed a more familiar quest:

  "Yet the day wears,
  And door succeeds door;
  I try the fresh fortune--
  Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
  Still the same chance!  She goes out as I enter."


It is a lawful adventure, and for some it is an absolute duty, to
follow and challenge the Presence in word and deed.  Englishmen who
live in her shadow have sometimes for their honour to grasp and defy
her; to assume that they are bound to question her authority.  India
for all her unknown terror has to be wrestled with for the blessing
that England requires upon the labour of the English.  Though the Gods
of India are sacred, the devils of India, filthy and lawless, must be
driven out.  When India put the mark of the beast upon Fleete the
powers of darkness had of necessity to be brought to heel, and this
story may be read as a parable.  The mark of the beast, wherever it may
appear, is the Imperial concern of the English in India.

But a warning enters here.  Mr Kipling, celebrating Imperial India, has
shown us the English at close war with the India of black magic and
secret murder, of cruelty and fear.  But he has balanced the account.
There is another set of stories, showing us how the white man comes to
disaster, who, not content with his exact and simple duty, insolently
overleaps the breach between East and West--the breach which Mr Kipling
himself so scrupulously observes.  There was Trajego:

"He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the
second.  He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never
do so again."


His story is entitled _Beyond the Pale_, and is to be found among
_Plain Tales from the Hills_.  There is also _The Man Who Would Be
King_.  He, too, neglected the barriers.  India may be ruled by the
resolute and challenged by the brave; but India may never be embraced.

India, who strikes out of a brazen sky; who poisons with her infected
breath and is served to the death without reward; who physically cows
her people with dust and fever and heat, and is possessed with devils
who must be pacified; where successive civilisations have left their
bones upon the soil and a hundred religions have decayed, leaving the
old air heavy with exhalations--this India slowly takes shape in Mr
Kipling's native stories.  Her physical immensity and pressure is felt
in stories like _The End of the Passage_ and _William the Conqueror_.
Her sleepless tyranny, which has made men intricate and incalculable,
driving them to subterranean ways of thought and fancy, rules in every
page of a tale like _The Return of Imray_.  Imray was an amiable
Englishman who incautiously patted the head of his servant's child.
Bahadur Khan speaks of it thus to Strickland of the Police:

"'Walking among us, his servants, he cast his eyes upon my child who
was four years old.  Him he bewitched, and in ten days he died of the
fever, my child!'

"'What said Imray Sahib?'

"'He said he was a handsome child and patted him on the head; wherefore
my child died.  Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he
had come, and was sleeping.  Wherefore I dragged him up into the
roof-beams and made all fast behind him--the Heaven-born knows all
things.  I am the servant of the Heaven-born. . . .  Be it remembered
that the Sahib's shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an
extra piece of soap in his wash-basin.  My child was bewitched and I
slew the wizard.'"


There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness
found in all Mr Kipling's native tales.  If the premises of life in
India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naïvely innocent as a
problem in geometry.

It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story
breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East.  The white
side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in _Kim_, and in all
the hints and small studies for _Kim_ that preceded Mr Kipling's best
of all Indian tales.

But _Kim_ is something of a paradox.  It is the best of all Indian
tales by virtue of qualities which have little to do with India.  It is
an Indian book only upon its least important side.  It is true that Kim
himself is upon one side the most cunning of Mr Kipling's studies of
the meeting of East and West; but that, for us, is not his final merit.
It is the final merit of Kim to be first cousin of Mowgli, the child of
the Jungle.  His first claim to our delight in him is that he is the
quickest of young creatures, his senses sharp and clean, of a
conscience untroubled, of a spirit that rejoices in nimble work, of a
will in which loyalty and courage and the peace of self-confidence are
firmly rooted.  In a word, he is Mowgli among men.

Here, however, we approach _Kim_ merely as a tale of India--as a link
artfully used by Mr Kipling to connect and pass in review the whole
pageant of Imperial India as it is revealed to Western eyes--priests,
peasants, soldiers, civilians, people of the plains and hills, women of
the latticed palanquin and the bazaar, Hindu and Mohammedan, Afghan and
Bengali.  The picture of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim is an almost
unsurpassed piece of descriptive writing.  The diversity of the picture
dazzles and bewilders us at first.  Then out of all this diversity
there gradually comes a conviction that fundamentally India is
unimaginably simple at heart in spite of her medley of religions and
conquests and races; that it is precisely this simplicity which baffles
the intruder.  There is the simplicity of Bahadur Khan, whose child was
bewitched: _therefore_ he killed Imray Sahib and hid his body behind
the ceiling cloth.  There is the simplicity of the hunter of Daoud
Shah, whose house was dishonoured: _therefore_ he killed his wife and
went upon the trail of her seducer.  There is the simplicity of men who
starve and are burnt with the sun: _therefore_ they deprecate the wrath
of devils and put food in the beggar's bowl.  There is, above all, the
simplicity of clean hunger, thirst, adventure, piety, friendliness and
love that threads the whole story of the Lama and his _Chela_.

_Kim_ is one of the few really beautiful stories in modern literature.
The brain and fancy of thousands of readers to-day are richer and
sweeter by that tale of the Master and his Friend of All the World.  We
would not leave him and his Wheel of Things, the River he sought in
simple faith, the trust he had in the charity of men, the message that
bade him seek release in Nirvana from the importunity of life quaintly
warring with instinctive gestures of delight and sympathy with all that
made life precious--we would not leave this exquisite story so soon,
were it not that it brings forward the imperishable side of Mr
Kipling's work to which we shall have shortly to return.  _Kim_ bridges
the gap between the Indian stories and The _Jungle Book_, which means
that _Kim_ is all but the top of Mr Kipling's achievement.



V

SOLDIERS THREE

Mr Kipling's three soldiers--Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd--are a
literary tradition.  They are the Horatii and the Curatii, the three
Musketeers; Og, Gog and Magog; Captains Fluellin, Macmorris and Jamy;
Bardolph, Pistol and Nym.  That Kipling's soldiers three are a literary
tradition is significant of their quality and rank as part of their
author's achievement.  They belong rather to the efficient literary
workman who wrote the Simla tales than to the inspired author of the
Jungle books.  Though we have run from the House of Suddhu to the
barrack-yard, we have not yet lost sight of Mr Kipling, decorator and
colourman in words.  We shall find him conspicuously at work upon
Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd.  Where, at first, he seems most closely
to rub sleeves with the raw stuff of life we shall find him most aloof,
most deliberately an artificer.  Mr Kipling has seemed to the
judicious, who have duly grieved, to be in his soldier tales throwing
all crafty scruples to the winds in order that he may the more joyfully
indulge a natural genius for ferocity.  Mr Kipling's soldiers are
regarded as an instance of his love for low company, of his readiness
to sacrifice aesthetic beauty to vulgar truth.

This is quite the wrong direction from which to approach Mr Kipling's
soldier tales.  Mr Kipling's ferocity on paper is not to be explained
as the result of a natural delight in violence and blood.  On the
contrary, it is distinctively a literary ferocity--the ferocity, not of
a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and
conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people.  It is
essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the
ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in
speculative politics.  When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to
the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over
like the rattle of fire-irons in the fender and the grunt of a
pole-axed ox, or of a hot encounter between two combatants wherein one
of them after feeling for his opponent's eyes finds it necessary to
wipe his thumb on his trousers, or of gun wheels greasy from contact
with a late gunner--when Mr Kipling writes like this, we admit that his
pages are disagreeable.  But let us be clear as to the reason.  These
things are disagreeable, not because they are horrible fact, but
because they are deliberate fiction.  We feel that these things have
been written, not from inspired impulse, but by taking careful thought.
Here, clearly, is a writer who writes of war, not because he is by
nature full of pugnacity, or necessarily loosed from hell to speak of
horrors, but because war is a good "subject" with opportunities for
effective treatment.

It is incorrect to say that Mr Kipling naturally delights in savage
war.  He has been accused of a positive gusto for knives and bayonets,
for redly dripping steel and spattered flesh.  The gusto must be
confessed; but it is not a gusto for the subject.  It is the skilled
craftsman's gusto for doing things thoroughly and effectively.  Mr
Kipling cannot conceal his delight in his competency to make war as
nasty as Zola or Tolstoi have made it.  But this has nothing to do with
a delight in war.  Professors have gloried in blood and iron who would
probably faint away in the nice, clean operating theatre of a London
hospital.  Philosophers who cannot run upstairs have preached the
survival of the physically fittest.  The politest of Roman poets has
felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior's head fell to
right and left of his vertebral column.  Mr Kipling's savagery is of
this excessively cultivated kind.  It is not atavism or a sinister
resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility.  Mr Kipling's
warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling's
real inspiration and interest is far away from the battle-field and the
barrack.  They are the kind of battle story which is usually written by
sedentary poets who live in the country and are fond of children.  Only
they are the very best of their kind.

Mr Kipling's study of the professional soldier is best observed in
Private Ortheris.  Mulvaney is more popular, but Mulvaney in no sense
belongs to Mr Kipling.  He is the stage Irishman of the old Adelphi and
the hero of many tales by Lever and Marryat.  He is as purely a
convention of the days of Mr Kipling's youth as are Mrs Hawksbee and
the Simla ladies.  His chief importance lies in the opportunities he
gives Mr Kipling for indulging his joyful gift for pure farce.
_Krishna Mulvaney_ and _My Lord the Elephant_ are farce of the first
quality, whose merit liberally covers the charge that their hero is of
no human importance.  Ortheris is in rather a different case.  He has
just that air of being authentic which is needed for an anecdote or
narrative.  He is not a profound and original document in human nature.
There is no such document in any one of Mr Kipling's books.  But he
stands well erect among the professional soldiers of literature.

We will take one look at Private Ortheris at work:


"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."


This passage has been quoted against Mr Kipling as evidence of his
inhuman delight in the hunting of man.  If we look at it closely we
shall find (1) an obvious delight in Ortheris as a professional expert
who knows his business, the same delight which we find in Mr
Hinchcliffe the engineer or in Dick Heldar the painter, and (2) the
extremely self-conscious and cold-blooded effort of a competent author
to write like a professional soldier, and (3) the intrusion of a born
sentimentalist in Learoyd's little touch of feeling at the close.

The War Office book of infantry training contains some very curt and
calm directions for getting a "good point" in bayonet exercise.  The
bayonet has to be correctly driven in, left in the enemy for a
reasonable time, and extracted with a minimum of effort to the
practitioner and a maximum of damage to the subject.  Disabling the
enemy in war is a professional and technical matter, and Mr Kipling is
always able to be enthusiastic when things are beginning to be
technical.  Whether it be sighting a deserter at seven hundred yards,
painting a charge of horse, writing what Dr Johnson would describe as
the "most poetical paragraph in the English language," or building a
bridge over the Ganges, Mr Kipling is ready to be interested so long as
the workman is competent, and the work of a highly skilled and special
nature.  Naturally, therefore, Mr Kipling has succeeded in getting very
near to the professional view of soldiering.  All Mr Kipling's soldiers
take their soldiering as men of business.  This was what so terribly
astonished and interested Cleever when he met the Infant and heard that
after he had killed a man he had felt thirsty and "wanted a smoke too";
and Cleever has been followed in his astonishment by many of Mr
Kipling's literary critics.

The greatest study in literature of the professional soldier--though he
is infinitely more than that--is Shakespeare's Falstaff.  It will be
remembered that Falstaff, after having led his men where they were
finely peppered, also suffered from thirst; and, being an old
campaigner, he was not unprovided.  The fate of Falstaff upon the
British stage for many centuries--where he has actually been played,
not as a professional soldier, but as an incompetent poltroon!--seems
to indicate that no figure is more liable to be misunderstood than the
man whose business or duty it is to fight between meals.  Even Mr
Kipling, in his anxiety to emphasise that a regular soldier, apart from
any personal and heroic qualities he may happen to possess, is to be
regarded as just a skilled practitioner whose work asks for courage and
resource, fails to take soldiering with the magnificent nonchalance of
Shakespeare's soldiers.  Shakespeare takes the professional view for
granted.  But Mr Kipling does not quite do that.  There is a
continuously implicit protest in all Mr Kipling's soldier tales that a
soldier's killing is like an editor's leader-writing or a painter's
sketching from the nude--a protest which by its frequent over-emphasis
shows that Mr Kipling, not having Shakespeare's gift of intuition into
every kind of man, has not quite succeeded in identifying himself with
the soldier's point of view.  It is always present in his mind as
something novel and surprising, needing insistence and emphasis.

This is equally true of all Mr Kipling's essays in brutality.  His
ferocity is as forced as his tenderness is natural.  Violence and war
are clearly foreign to his unprompted imagination.  Only it happens
that Mr Kipling has talked with soldiers; and, like Eustace Cleever, he
is prompted occasionally to spend a perversely riotous evening in their
company.  The literary result is far from being contemptible; but it is
far from being as precious as the result of his unprompted intrusion
into the country of the Brushwood Boy, into Cold Lairs and the Council
Rock.

The soldier tales rank not very far above the tales from Simla.  Their
interest is mainly the interest of watching a skilled writer
consciously using all his skill to give an air of authenticity to
things not vitally realised.  Mulvaney is pure convention, and
Ortheris, though he more individually belongs to Mr Kipling, is rather
an effort than a success.  We have not yet got at the heart of Mr
Kipling's work.  It yet remains to cross the barrier which divides some
of the best journalism of our time from literature which will outlive
its author.



VI

THE DAY'S WORK

When we come to _The Day's Work_ we are getting very near to Mr Kipling
at his best.  We should notice at this point that in all the stories we
have so far surveyed the men have mattered less than the work they do.
The great majority of Mr Kipling's tales are a song in praise of good
work.  Almost it seems as if, in the year 1897, their author had
himself realised the significance of this; for it was in that year he
published the volume entitled _The Day's Work_; and it was the best
volume, taking it from cover to cover, that had as yet appeared.

The first and best story in _The Day's Work_ at once introduces the
theme which threads all the best work of Mr Kipling.  _The
Bridge-Builders_ is the story of a Bridge and incidentally of the men
who built it.  The crown has yet to be set upon a long agony of toil
and disappointment.  The master builder of the Bridge has put the prime
of his energy and will into its building.  Now it stands all but
complete, with the Ganges gathering in her upper reaches for a mighty
effort to throw off her strange fetters.  The Bridge before the night
of the flood has passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between
the most ancient gods and the young will of man.  Mr Kipling has put
the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the
really sentient figure of the tale.  Here definitely he writes the
first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware
of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs
which preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as well
as almost anybody else.  In _The Day's Work_ he passes into a province
which he was insistently urged to occupy by right of inspiration.

_The Day's Work_ brings us directly into touch with one of the most
distinctive features of Mr Kipling's method.  He has never been able to
resist the lure of things technical.  If he writes of a horse he must
write as though he had bred and sold horses all his life.  If he writes
of a steam-engine he must write as though he had spent his life among
pistons and cylinders.  He writes of ships and the sea, of fox-hunting,
of the punishing of Pathans, of drilling by companies and of
agriculture; and he writes as one from whom no craft could hide its
mysteries.  This fascination of mere craft, this delight in the
technicalities and dialect of the world's work, is not a mannerism.  It
is not a parade of omniscience or the madness of a note-book worm.  It
is fundamental in Mr Kipling.  It is wrong to think of _Between the
Devil and the Deep Sea_ or of _.007_ as the unfortunate rioting of an
amateur machinist.  To those who object that Mr Kipling has spoiled
these stories with an absurd enthusiasm for bolts and bars it has at
once to be answered that but for this very enthusiasm for bolts and
bars, which the undiscerning have found so tedious, the great majority
of Mr Kipling's stories would never have been written at all.  A
powerful turbine excites in Mr Kipling precisely the same quality of
emotion which a comely landscape excited in Wordsworth; and this
emotion is stamped upon all that he has written in this kind.  There is
a passage in _Between the Devil and the Deep Sea_ which runs:


"What follows is worth consideration.  The forward engine had no more
work to do.  Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely,
with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the
cylinder-cover.  It came down again, the full weight of the steam
behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as
the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right and
struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column of the
forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches above the
base, and wedging the upper portion outwards three inches towards the
ship's side.  There the connecting-rod jammed.  Meantime, the after
engine, being as yet unembarrassed, went on with its work, and in so
doing brought round at its next revolution the crank of the forward
engine, which smote the already jammed connecting-rod, bending it and
therewith the piston-rod cross-head--the big cross-piece that slides up
and down so smoothly."


This is the method of Homer as applied to the shield of Achilles, the
method of Milton in enumerating the superior fiends, the method of
Walter Scott confronted with a mountain pass, the method of the
sonneteer to his mistress' eyebrow.  Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for these
broken engines would be intolerable if it were not obviously genuine.
Unless we shut our ears and admit no songs that sing of things as yet
unfamiliar to the poets of blue sky and violets dim as Cytherea's eyes,
we cannot possibly mistake the lyrical ecstasy of the above passage.
When Mr Kipling tells how a released piston-rod drove up fiercely and
started the nuts of the cylinder-cover, it is an incantation.  His
machines are more alive than his men and women.  It is more important
to know about the cast-iron supporting-column of Mr Kipling's forward
engine than to know that Maisie had long hair and grey eyes, or to know
what happened to any of the people whom it concerned.  _.007_, which is
the story of a shining and ambitious young locomotive, is ten times
more vital--it calls for ten times more fellow-feeling--than the heart
affairs of Private Learoyd or the distresses of the Copleigh girls at
Simla.  The pain that shoots through .007 when he first becomes
acquainted with a hot-box is a more human and recognisable bit of
consciousness than anything to be shared with the Head of the District
or the Man Who Was.  The psychology of the Mill Wheel in _Below the
Mill Dam_ is quite obviously accurate.  That Mill Wheel, unlike scores
of Mr Kipling's men and women, is a creature we have met, who refuses
to be forgotten.  When he is dealing with men Mr Kipling celebrates not
so much mankind as the skill and competency of mankind as severely
applied to a given and necessary task.  It follows that Mr Kipling's
men at their best are most excellent machines.  It follows, again, that
when Mr Kipling drops the pretence that he is deeply concerned with man
as man, and begins to celebrate with all his might the machine as the
machine, we realise that his machine is the better man of the two.

The inspiration which Mr Kipling first indulged to its full bent in
_The Day's Work_ lives on through all the ensuing books.  It reaches a
climax in _With the Night Mail_, a post-dated vision of the air.  It is
one of the most remarkable stories he has written--a story produced at
full pressure of the imagination which, but for its fatal prophesying,
would keep his memory green for generations.  The detail with which the
theme is worked out is extravagant; but it is the extravagance of an
inspired lover.  To quarrel with its technical exuberance on the ground
that Mr Kipling should have made it less like the vision of an engineer
is simply to miss almost the main impulse of Mr Kipling's progress.  It
is true that unless we share Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for The Night Mail
as a beautiful machine, for the men who governed it as skilled
mechanicians, and for all the minutiae of the control and distribution
of traffic by air, we are not likely to be greatly held by the story.
But this is simply to say that unless we catch the passion of an author
we may as well shut the author's book.

This does not imply that we must love machinery in order to love Mr
Kipling's enthusiasm for machinery.  We have to share the author's
passion; but not necessarily to dote upon its object.  It is not
essential to an admiration of Shakespeare's sonnets that the admirer
should have been a suitor of the Dark Lady.  It matters hardly at all
what is the inspiration of an imaginative author.  So long as he
succeeds in getting into a highly fervent condition, which prompts him
to write, with entire forgetfulness of himself and the reader, of
things whose beauty he was born to see, it is of little moment how he
happens to be kindled.  We do not need to be suffering the pangs of
adolescent love, or even to know the story of Fanny Brawne, to hear the
immortal longing of John Keats sounding between all the lines of the
great Odes:

  "Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
  Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve;
  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
  For ever wilt thou love and she be fair."

We do not need to be the enemy of the Arminians to resolve the music of
Milton; and we may live all our lives in a city and yet know Wordsworth
for a great poet.  Shelley does not suffer because philosophic anarchy
has gone out of fashion; and the poetry of the Hebrews lives for ever,
though its readers have never lived in the shadow of Sinai.  These
mighty instances are here intended not to establish a comparison but to
establish a principle.  The exact source of Mr Kipling's inspiration
matters not a straw.  We simply know that his machinery is alive and
lovely in his eyes.  He communicates his passion to his reader though
his readers are unable to distinguish between a piston-rod and a
cylinder-cover.

_The Day's Work_ throws back a clear and searching light upon some of
the tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed in
review.  As we look back upon these stories of men and women we
realise, in the light of _The Day's Work_, that machinery--the
machinery of Army and Empire--enters repeatedly as a leading motive.
Far from regarding Mr Kipling's passion for technical engineering as
something which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling human
tales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human tales
are no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion that
helplessly spins them.  As literature _William the Conqueror_ and _The
Head of the District_ have less to do with the politics of India than
with the nuts and bolts of _The Ship That Found Herself_.  The same
truth applies equally to a book which has been discussed beyond all
proportion to its rank among the stories of Mr Kipling.  _The Light
That Failed_ is often read as the high and tragical love story of Dick
Heldar; but it is really nothing of the kind.  It really belongs to
_The Day's Work_.  As the love story of Dick Heldar it is of small
account.  Mr Kipling thinks very little of it from that point of view.
He has even allowed it, upon that side, to be deprived of all its
significance in order to meet the needs of a popular actor.  Mr Kipling
is not the man to sell his conscience.  Therefore his admirers may
infer from the fact that he has sold Dick and Maisie to British and
American playgoers that Dick and Maisie are not regarded by their
author as of the first importance.  We cannot think of Mr Kipling as
allowing one screw of the ship that found herself to be misplaced.  But
he has cheerfully allowed his story of Dick and Maisie to be turned
with a few strokes of the pen into an effective curtain for a
negligible play.

This does not mean that _The Light That Failed_ is not a characteristic
and a fine achievement.  It means that its character and fineness have
nothing to do with Dick and Maisie or with any of that stuff of the
story which contrives to exist behind the footlights of Sir Johnston
Forbes Robertson's theatre.  _The Light That Failed_ must not be read
as the love story of a painter who goes blind.  It must be read, with
_.007_ and _The Maltese Cat_, as an enthusiastic account of the day's
work of a newspaper correspondent.  The really vital passages of the
story have all to do with Mr Kipling's chosen text of work for work's
sake.  Dick's work and not Dick himself is the hero of the play.  The
only incident which really affects us is the scraping out of his last
picture.  We do not bother in the least as to whether Maisie returns to
him or stays away; because we do not believe in the reality of Maisie
and we cannot imagine anything she may or may not do as affecting
anyone very seriously.  Dick's wrestle with his picture is another
matter.  He and his friends may talk a great deal of nonsense about
their work (nonsense which would strictly require us to condemn every
good page which Mr Kipling has written), but there is no doubt whatever
that the enthusiasm of men for men's work is the vital and moving
principle of _The Light That Failed_.  The motive of the whole story is
the motive of _The Bridge-Builders_.  The rest is merely accessory.

_The Light That Failed_ is full of instruction for the close critic of
Mr Kipling.  We discover in it three out of the many levels of
excellence in which he moves.  First there is a cunning artificer
pretending to a knowledge and admiration which he does not really
possess--an artificer who tries to impose Maisie and the Red-Haired
Girl upon us in the same deceiving way as the way in which he tried to
impose upon us Mrs Hawksbee and the Copleigh girls.  Second, there is a
clever writer of soldier stories, showing us some nasty fighting at
close range, with a far too elaborate pretence that he can take it all
for granted as a professional combatant.  Finally there is an inspired
author celebrating the world's work--an author we have agreed to put in
a higher rank than those other literary experts who have quite
unjustifiably stolen his greener laurels.



VII

THE FINER GRAIN

It has been Mr Kipling's habit all through his career to peg out
literary claims for himself as evidence of his intention later on to
work them at a profit.  Thus, writing _Plain Tales from the Hills_, he
includes one or two stories, such as _The Taking of Lungtungpen_ and
_The Three Musketeers_, which clearly look forward to _Soldiers Three_
and all the later stories in that kind.  Or, again, he looks forward in
_Tods' Amendment_ and _Wee Willie Winkie_ to the time when he will
write many stories, and, in a sense, whole books concerning children.
_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 Sussex.  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 passion 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 scraped 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 blessèd 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 document.  We have here to make a
last protest against a too popular fallacy concerning the tales of Mr
Kipling.  Mr Kipling's passion for the concrete, which is a passion 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 assumed to be happiest when writing
from direct experience without refinement or transmutation.  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 assume, 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 Dé?  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 pass 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 assured 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 passionate 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 passage 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 passion 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 pronounced.

We may take three stanzas of _Snarleyow_ as evidence that Mr Kipling's
_Barrack Room Ballads_, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass
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' shell
  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 niggers 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.

Comparing the soldier tales and the soldier songs it is often possible,
however, to miss the author's flagging, because, as we have seen, the
soldier songs are the best songs, whereas the soldier tales are not the
best tales.  The full extent of the inferiority of Mr Kipling's verse
to Mr Kipling's prose cannot, however, be missed if we compare the
finer grain of Mr Kipling's prose with the poems that deal with similar
themes.  Read first _The Story of Ung_ (_The Seven Seas_) and
afterwards the tale of the Flint Man found upon the Downs by Dan and
Una (_Rewards and Fairies_).  Or, to take an even more telling
instance, recall the most perfect of all Mr Kipling's tales _The
Miracle of Purun Bhagat_, and afterwards read the poem that is proudly
set at the head of it:

  "The night we felt the earth would move
    We stole and plucked him by the hand,
  Because we loved him with the love
    That knows but cannot understand.

  "And when the roaring hillside broke,
    And all our world fell down in rain,
  We saved him, we the Little Folk;
    But lo! he does not come again!

  "Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
    Of such poor love as wild ones may.
  Mourn ye!  Our brother will not wake,
    And his own kind drive us away!"
          --_Dirge of the Langurs._

The poem is excellent cold craft, but leaves us precisely in the state
of mind in which it found us.  The story which follows it is rooted in
the same idea; but, where the one is a literary exercise, the other is
a supreme feat of imagination.

Here, with _The Miracle of Purun Bhagat_, the story itself and not the
dirge of the Langurs, we may conveniently leave the reputation of our
author.  Critics of a future generation may need to apologise for
including within the limits of a brief monograph a specific chapter
upon Mr Kipling's verse.  They will not need to apologise for its
brevity.



A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF RUDYARD KIPLING'S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS

[Separate issues of single poems or stories have not generally been
included in this list.  Dates of first publication of books are given;
new editions only when they involve revision of text, alteration of
format or transference to a different publisher.]

Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (_Lahore: The Civil and Military
Gazette Press_).  1886.  New editions (_London: Thacker_).  1888; 1890;
1898; (_Newnes_).  1899; (_Methuen_).  1904; 1908; 1913.

Plain Tales from the Hills (_Thacker_).  1888.  New editions
(_Macmillan_).  1890; 1899; 1907.

Soldiers Three: A Collection of Stories (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).  1888.
New edition (_London: Sampson Low_).  1890.

The Story of the Gadsbys: a Tale without a Plot (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).
N.D.  [1888].  New edition (_London: Sampson Low_).  1890.

In Black and White (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).  N.D.  [1888].  New edition
(_London: Sampson Low_).  1890.

Under the Deodars (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).  N.D.  [1888].  New edition
(_London: Sampson Low_).  1890.

The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).  N.D.
[1888].  New edition (_London: Sampson Low_).  1890.

Wee Willie Winkie and other Child Stories (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).  N.D.
[1888].  New edition (_London: Sampson Low_).  1890.

Soldiers Three: The Story of the Gadsbys: In Black and White (_Sampson
Low_).  1890.  New editions (_Macmillan_).  1895; 1899; 1907.

Wee Willie Winkie: Under the Deodars: The Phantom Rickshaw (_Sampson
Low_).  1890.  New editions (_Macmillan_).  1895; 1899; 1907.

The City of Dreadful Night and Other Sketches (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).
1890.  This edition was cancelled.

The Smith Administration (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).  1891.  This edition
was cancelled.

The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).
1891.  English edition (_Sampson Low_).  1891.  These were suppressed
as far as possible.

Letters of Marque (_Allahabad: Wheeler_).  1891.  This edition was
suppressed.

The Light that Failed (_Macmillan_).  1891.  New editions, 1899; 1907.

Life's Handicap, being Stories of Mine Own People (_Macmillan_).  N.D.
[1891].  New editions, 1899; 1907.

Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses (_Methuen_).  1892.  New
editions, 1908; 1913.

The Naulahka: a Story of West and East.  By Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott
Balestier (_Heinemann_).  1892.  New editions (_Macmillan_).  1901;
1908.

Many Inventions (_Macmillan_).  1893.  New editions, 1899; 1907.

The Jungle Book (_Macmillan_).  1894:.  New editions, 1899; 1903; 1907;
1908.

The Second Jungle Book (_Macmillan_).  1895.  New editions, 1899; 1908.

The Seven Seas (_Methuen_).  1896.  New editions, 1908; 1913.

Soldier Tales (_A selection of stories from earlier volumes_)
(_Macmillan_).  1896.

The Novels, Tales and Poems of Rudyard Kipling (_Edition de luxe_)
(_Macmillan_).  1897, etc.  27 volumes have so far been issued.

"Captains Courageous."  A Story of the Grand Banks (_Macmillan_).
1897.  New editions, 1899; 1907.

An Almanac of Twelve Sports for 1898.  By William Nicholson.  Words by
Rudyard Kipling (_Heinemann_).  1897.

The Day's Work (_Macmillan_).  1898.  New editions, 1899; 1908.

A Fleet in Being: Notes of Two Trips with the Channel Squadron
(_Macmillan_).  1898.

Stalky & Co.  (_Macmillan_).  1899.  New edition, 1908.

From Sea to Sea (_Macmillan_).  2 volumes.  1900.  New edition, 1908.
The volumes contain also Letters of Marque, The City of Dreadful Night
and The Smith Administration.

The Science of Rebellion [Pamphlet] (_Vacher_).  1901.

Kim (_Macmillan_).  1901.  New edition, 1908.

Just-So Stories, for Little Children (_Macmillan_).  1902.  New
editions, 1903; 1908; 1913.

The Five Nations (_Methuen_).  1903.  New editions, 1908; 1913.

Traffics and Discoveries (_Macmillan_).  1904.  New edition, 1908.

Puck of Pook's Hill (_Macmillan_).  1906.  New edition, 1908.

A Pocket Edition of Mr Kipling's Works was issued during 1907 and 1908,
the verse by Methuen & Co., the prose by Macmillan & Co.  After 1908
the works issued by Macmillan & Co. appear simultaneously in the
ordinary library edition, the pocket edition and the edition de luxe.

Doctors: an Address delivered at the Middlesex Hospital (_Macmillan_).
1908.

Actions and Reactions (_Macmillan_).  1909.

The Dead King.  [A Poem] (_Hodder & Stoughton_).  1910.

Rewards and Fairies (_Macmillan_).  1910.

A School History of England, By C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling
(_Clarendon Press_).  1911.

The Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling (_Hodder & Stoughton_).  1912.
This edition does not contain the Departmental Ditties nor the Rhymes
for Nicholson's Almanac.

Simples Contes des Collines (_Nelson_).  1912.

The Bombay Edition of the Works in Verse and Prose of Rudyard Kipling.
23 volumes (_Macmillan_).  1913-1915.

Songs from Books (_Macmillan_).  1913.

The Service Edition of some of the works of Rudyard Kipling: Verse, 8
volumes (_Methuen_); prose, 26 volumes (_Macmillan_).  1914-1915.

The New Army in Training (_Macmillan_).  1915.



AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

[Some of Mr Kipling's earlier stories and poems, as well as certain
later poems that are non-copyright in America, have been issued in an
almost bewildering variety of arrangement and by many different
publishers.  Full enumeration of these variants is not attempted in
this bibliography.]

Plain Tales from the Hills (_Lovell_).  N.D.  [1890].  (_Macmillan_).
1890.

The Story of the Gadsbys (_Lovell_).  1890.  (_Munro_).  1890.

The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories (_Harper_).  1890.

Indian Tales (_Lovell_).  1890.

The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales (_U.S. Book Co._).  N.D. [1890].
(_Rand, M'Nally & Co._).  1890.

Soldiers Three and Other Stories (_Munro_).  N.D.  [1890].

American Notes, by Rudyard Kipling, and The Bottle Imp, by Robert Louis
Stevenson (_Ivers_).  1891.  New edition (_Brown_).  1899.

Mine Own People: with Introduction by Henry James (_Munro_).  N.D.
[1891].  (_U.S. Book Co._).  1891.

Under the Deodars (_U.S. Book Co._).  1891.

The Story of the Gadsbys; Under the Deodars (_U.S. Book Co._).  1891.

Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories (_Rand_).  1891.

The Light that Failed (_Rand_).  1891.  (_Munro_).  N.D.  [1891].
(_U.S. Book Co._).  1891.

Life's Handicap, being Stories of Mine Own People (_Macmillan_).  1891.

Ballads and Barrack Room Ballads (_Macmillan_).  1892.  New edition,
1893.

Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses (_U. S. Book Co._).  N.D.  [1892].

The Naulahka: a Story of West and East.  By Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott
Balestier.  (_Rand_).  1892.  New edition (_Macmillan_).  1895.

Many Inventions (_Appleton_).  1893.

The Jungle Book (_Century Co._).  1894.

Prose Tales.  New uniform edition.  6 volumes (_Macmillan_).  1895.

Out of India: Things I saw and failed to see, in certain days and
nights at Jeypore and elsewhere (_Dillingham_).  1895.  [Included in
From Sea to Sea, 1899, under the title, Letters of Marque.]

The Second Jungle Book (_Century Co._).  1895.

The Seven Seas (_Appleton_).  1896.

Soldier Stories (_Macmillan_).  1896.

The "Outward Bound" Edition of Rudyard Kipling's Works (_Scribner_).
1897, etc.

"Captains Courageous."  A Story of the Grand Banks (_Century Co._).
1897.

An Almanac of Twelve Sports.  By William Nicholson.  Words by Rudyard
Kipling (_Russell_).  1897.

Collectanea: Reprinted Verses (_Mansfield_).  1898.  [Contains: The
Explanation, Mandalay, Recessional, The Rhyme of the Three Captains,
The Vampire.]

The Day's Work (_Doubleday_).  1898.

The City of Dreadful Night (_Grosset_).  1899.

Letters of Marque (_Caldwell_).  1899.

From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (_Doubleday_).  1899.

Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack Room Ballads
(_Doubleday_).  1899.  [The first authorised American edition.]

Stalky & Co. (_Doubleday_).  1899.

Kim (_Doubleday_).  1901.

Just-So Stories for Little Children (_Doubleday_).  1902.

The Five Nations (_Doubleday_).  1903.

Traffics and Discoveries (_Doubleday_).  1904.

Puck of Pook's Hill (_Doubleday_).  1906.

Collected Verse (_Doubleday_).  1907.

Actions and Reactions (_Doubleday_).  1909.

Abaft the Funnel (_Dodge_).  1909.

Rewards and Fairies (_Doubleday_).  1910.

Songs from Books (_Doubleday_).  1912.

A School History of England.  By C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling
(_Oxford University Press_).  1912.

The Seven Seas Edition of the Works in Verse and Prose of Rudyard
Kipling (_Doubleday_).  23 volumes.  1913.



  INDEX

  _Baa Baa Black Sheep_, 91
  Barker, Granville, 16
  _Barrack Room Ballads_, 110, 111
  _Bell Buoy, The_, 109
  _Below the Mill Dam_, 82, 108
  _Between the Devil and the Deep Sea_, 79, 80
  _Beyond the Pole_, 60
  Birth, 14
  _Bridge-Builders, The_, 77, 89, 109
  _Brugglesmith_, 92
  _Brushwood Boy, The_, 98
  Brutality, 113

  _Candide_, 106
  _Children of the Zodiac, The_, 98
  "Civil and Military Gazette, The," 14
  Cleever, 7-10, 73
  Cloke, 95

  _Day's Work, The_, 23, 46, 77, 86, 87, 92

  _End of the Passage, The_, 60
  England, feeling for, 93, 97
  _Error in the Fourth Dimension, An_, 93

  Falstaff, 74

  _Habitation Enforced, An_, 93, 94, 109
  Hardy, Thomas, 16
  Hawksbee, Mrs, 24, 25, 28
  Hazlitt, 10
  _Head of the District, The_, 87

  Imperialism, 97
  India, influence of, 38, 45
  Indian Stories--Classification, 19
  _In the Rukh_, 92

  _Jungle Book, The_, 17, 65, 92
  _Just-So Stories_, 91

  Keats, John, 85
  _Kim_, 19, 22, 62-64, 100, 101
  Kipling, J. Lockwood, 14
  _Krishna Mulvaney_, 70

  Lahore, 53
  Learoyd, 66
  _Life's Handicap_, 47, 53
  _Light that Failed, The_, 13, 87, 88, 89

  Machinery, 84, 86
  Maisie, 89
  _Maltese Cat, The_, 88
  Malthus, 67
  _Man Who Would be King, The_, 60
  _Many Inventions_, 17
  _Marrying of Anne Leete, The_, 16
  Metre, 107
  Milton, 85
  _Miracle of Purun Bhagat, The_, 114
  Mowgli, 100
  Mulvaney, 66, 70
  _My Lord the Elephant_, 70
  _My Sunday at Home_, 92

  Nietzsche, 67

  Ortheris, 66, 70

  _Phantom Rickshaw, The_, 29
  "Pioneer, The," 14
  _Plain Tales from the Hills_, 15, 17, 24, 29, 46, 60
  Politics, 33
  Pope, 106
  _Puck of Pook's Hill_, 97, 98
  Purun Bhagat, 101

  Realism, 98
  Red-Haired Girl, The, 89
  _Return of Imray, The_, 61, 93

  _Second Jungle Book, The_, 101
  Shakespeare, 74
  Shelley, 85
  _Ship that Found Herself, The_, 87
  Simla, 24, 26
  Simplicity, 46, 47
  _Snarleyow_, 111
  _Soldiers Three_, 110
  _Stalky & Co._, 91
  Sussex, 92

  _Taking of Lungtungpen, The_, 91
  Technical enthusiasm, 79
  _They_, 97
  _Three Musketeers, The_, 91
  _Tods' Amendment_, 41, 91
  Trajego, 59

  Verse and Prose, 107, 111

  War, 68
  _Wee Willie Winkie_, 91
  _White Man's Burden, The_, 109, 110
  _William the Conqueror_, 47, 60, 86, 109
  _With the Night Mail_, 83
  Wordsworth, 85

  _.007_, 79, 82, 88





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