Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues/The Anglo-Indian Story-teller
AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER
AN ANGLO-INDIAN STORY-TELLER
It was inevitable that sooner or later some one should make a systematic effort, in the interests (say) of literature and art, to exploit India and the Anglo-Indian life. England has awakened at last to the astonishing fact of her world-wide Empire, and has now an ever-growing curiosity concerning her great possessions outre mer. The writer who can 'explain, in a vivid and plausible manner, the social conditions of India, Australia, Canada, and South Africa—who can show, even approximately, how people there live, move, and have their being, is assured of at least a vogue. Several vogues of this sort have already been won on more or less inadequate grounds: have been won, and lost, and the cry is still. They come! From among them all, so far, one writer alone, led on to fortune on this flood-tide in the affairs of men, has consciously and deliberately aimed high; taken his work seriously, and attempted to add something to the vast store of our English literature. The spectacle of a writer of fiction who is also a man of letters, and not merely a helpless caterer for the circulating libraries and the railway bookstalls, is unfortunately as rare among us as it is frequent among our French friends. Literature and Art are organised in France, and have prestige and power. In England they are impotent and utterly at the mercy of Philistine and imperfectly educated newspaper men, who, professed caterers for the ignorant and stupid cravings of the average English person, male and female (and especially female), foist upon us painters, poets, novelists, and musicians of the most hopeless mediocrity. In France this sort of thing is impossible. Such efforts would only provoke a smile. People would say to you when you were taking seriously a poet (for instance) like Mr. Lewis Morris or Sir Edwin Arnold, or a novelist like Mr. Besant or Mr. Haggard, 'Why, you must be joking! These gentlemen are not writers—are not artists at all. Surely you know that what they concern themselves with is the nourishment of the babes and sucklings who have to be provided with pap somehow; but serious workers, contributors to critical and creative thought—allez!' It seems something to be at last able to go to our French friends, and say, 'Well, here at any rate we have a young Englishman who has won a remarkable vogue, and for all that is a serious worker, is a contributor to critical and creative thought, is an artist, is a writer'—to be able to go and say this, and to advance reasons for our belief in it of sufficient cogency to extort, perhaps, from our friends a genuine assent. If for this alone, we ought to be grateful to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, our Anglo-Indian story-teller.
I
From the very beginning, Mr. Kipling struck a strong and solemn personal note. To his first booklet, Soldiers Three, a collection of seven 'stories of barrack-room life,' and designed to 'illustrate' one of 'the four main features of Anglo-Indian life,' viz. the military, he attached the following sombre, proud, and yet pitiful envoi:
'And they were stronger hands than mine
That digged the ruby from the earth—
More cunning brains that made it worth
The large desire of a king;
And bolder hearts that thro' the brine
Went down the Perfect Pearl to bring.
'Lo, I have wrought in common clay
Rude figures of a rough-hewn race;
For Pearls strew not the market-place
In this my town of banishment
Where with the shifting dust I play,
And eat the bread of Discontent.
'Yet is there life in that I make,—
O Thou who knowest, turn and see,
As Thou hast power over me,
So have I power over these,
Because I wrought them for Thy sake,
And breathed in them mine agonies.
'Small mirth was in the making. Now
I lift the cloth that clokes the clay,
And, wearied, at thy feet I lay
My wares, ere I go forth to sell.
The long bazar will praise—but Thou—
Heart of my heart, have I done well?'
Certainly three of these tales constituted something very like a revelation not only of one of 'the four main features of Anglo-Indian life,' but also of a new writer of considerable force and originality. Nothing like either 'The Big Drunk Draf' or 'With the Main Guard' had been presented to the reading public before, and the praise of the long bazar was justifiable enough. But as a gallery of characters, as manifest fictional creations, the success of the book is not great. Indeed, here right at the very start, one of the weakest sides of all Mr. Kipling's work is just the want of this very gift, on the assured possession of which he seems to pique himself. His characterisation is never excellent; often it is mediocre; sometimes it is abominable. He cannot escape from his own subjectivity. Never was work more acutely personal than his. Never did a writer consciously or unconsciously insist with such passionate persistence on the special form of milieu which has given him what he feels to be (so far, at least) the dominant factor in his view of things. And this is why, in nine cases out of ten, his dramatis persona melt away so rapidly in the memory, leaving us with nothing but the impression of an admirably piquant and clever delineation. He has probably spent more time and trouble over his 'Soldiers Three,' Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, than over any other of the characters of his tales; yet Mulvaney alone is recognisable as anything approaching an organic creation. Mr. Kipling sacrifices everything to his mordant individuality. Mulvaney, the drunken, pugnacious, loquacious, kindly Irish ruffian of the old school, will tell you how 'Brazenose walked into the gang wid his sword, like Diarmid uv the Gowlden Collar,' and will not mention the name of the Queen in ordinary conversation without devoutly invoking upon her the blessing of the Creator! Ortheris, the little vulgar rascal of a cockney, urges his comrade on to an adventure with the quotation:
"Go forth, return in glory,
To Clusium's royal 'ome:
And round these bloomin' temples 'ang
The bloomin' shields o' Rome.'
And, when he is rebuked for loquacity under trial, inquires: 'D'you stop your parrit screamin' of a 'ot day when the cage is a-cookin' 'is pore little pink toes orf?' Similarly a regimental carpenter likens the splitting open of a boat to 'a cock-eyed Chinese lotus,' or a London street-girl entreats: 'But cou—couldn't you take and live with me till Miss Right comes along? I'm only Miss Wrong, I know, but I'd,' etc. etc. Well, I respectfully submit that the speaker here is Mr. Rudyard Kipling, not Mulvaney, nor Ortheris, nor another. Instances of this sort of utterly inartistic insertion of little bits of Mr. Rudyard Kipling into Mr. Rudyard Kipling's 'rude figures of a rough-hewn race' are very plentiful, and are certainly not edifying samples of the way he shows his godlike 'power over these.' But how, when taken from the larger point of view, this defect limits the value of his criticism of the main features of Anglo-Indian life, which he designs to 'illustrate'! To-day we are all full of eagerness and curiosity to know of what sort our short-service soldiers are. Mr. Kipling dedicates his booklet to 'that very strong man, T. Atkins,' who is surely the very person in question. But what does he tell us about him? Little or nothing. It is the old long-service man who is his game. Into the mouth of Mulvaney, who gives us most of the military criticism, is put the ancient and stock abuse of the short-service system, backed up with the stock and ancient chauvinism about the glory and gain of the good old gentleman officer, all of the olden time, the individual with the courage of a mastiff and the brains of a rabbit. The poor old Irishman in his degradation is even made to consolingly kick himself with the reflection that, if he could have kept out of one big drink a month, he would have been an honorary lieutenant by this time, 'a nuisince to my betthers, a laughin'-shtock to my equils, an' a curse to meself.' And thus we settle the modern military question, incidentally throwing in a few jeers at Lord Wolseley as a drawing-room man, who doesn't know his business. With what heartfelt rapture, on the other hand, do we approach the sacred exhibitions of the Old Style! Take the first toast at the mess, which is the same as Mulvaney's loyal conversational prayer. 'That Sacrament of the Mess,' says Mr. Kipling solemnly and deliberately in his own person, 'never grows old and never ceases to bring a lump into the throat of the listener, be he by sea or by land. Dirkovitch' [a mere unregenerate Cossack] 'rose with his "brothers glorious," but he did not understand. No one but an officer' [the italics are mine] 'can tell what that means; and the bulk,' etc. etc. Now, what I want to know is this: Does Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his most calm and disillusionised hours, in the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof, seriously believe in this sort of thing? There are other excesses to which the sightless tradition of the old hide-bound Jingoistic, Anglo-Indian officialism leads Mr. Kipling, but they are excusable and even defensible. It is only abject silliness which can be neither defended nor excused. None the less, he carries some of these excesses to considerable length. Dickie, the most gentle and lovable of his male characters, blind, and going to his death, 'stretches himself on the floor' [of a carriage in an armed train at Suakim] 'wild with delight at the sounds and the smells' of the machine-gun, pouring out lead through its five noses upon hapless Arabs, fighting for their freedom in their native land. '"God is very good—I never thought I'd hear this again. Give 'em hell, men! oh, give 'em hell!" he cried.'
The exceeding goodness of God in relation to Englishmen and 'niggers' seems always to consist in the opportunity and ability of the former to give the latter 'hell.' Never once in his tales does Mr. Kipling appear to be aware that these same miserable aliens may have a point of view of their own—they also. There is always the tacit assumption of the fact that they are made merely to be fought with, conquered, and ruled. I am not quarrelling with this genial and enlightened manner of treating the 'inferior races.' I am only saying that in the case of Mr. Rudyard Kipling it makes one feel how much less interesting and valuable his criticism on the Indian people is than it might be.
Pieces of his description of fighting have been spoken of as unique. Wonderful as was his first effort in this direction, the 'jam' in 'the gut betune two hills, as black as a bucket an' as thin as a gurl's waist,' where the Pathans waited, 'like rats in a pit,' for the onslaught of the two regiments, one of which (the Black Tyrone) 'had seen their dead'—wonderfully as this was presented in the Mulvaney brogue, when Mr. Kipling trusted to himself alone he did better and achieved a masterpiece. 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft' is one of those performances which are apt to reduce criticism to the mere tribute of a respectful admiration. It is absolutely and thoroughly well done. It 'explains' everybody and everything. We follow the raw-recruited regiment step by step in the process of its demoralisation. We feel the approach of the inevitable catastrophe. Equally clear is the demonstration of the personal incident of the two little drummer-boys, who are to be on this occasion the chance gods from the machine. It all passes before us like a piece of illuminated life. And with what dramatic power is it all gathered together and swept forward to the culminating scene, where the two lads step out from the rocks with drum and fife, 'and the old tune of the old Line shrills and rattles.' Then from the purely descriptive writing which follows, take a specimen like this: 'The English were not running. They were hacking and hewing and stabbing. . . . The Fore and Aft held their fire till one bullet could drive through five or six men, and the front of the Afghan force gave on the volley. They then selected their men, and slew them with deep gasps and short hacking coughs, and groanings of leather belts against strained bodies.' Scarcely less fine is the charge of the Lancers, which 'detached the enemy from his base as a sponge is torn from a rock, and left him ringed about with fire in that pitiless plain. And as a sponge is chased round the bath-tub by the hand of the bather, so were the Afghans chased.' Whenever Mr. Kipling touches on a battle-scene, especially a mêlée, he writes with this absolute mastery of it all. It is real pictorial magic. The charge of Arabs on the square on the Nile bank (The Light that Failed, chap, ii.) is too long for full quotation here, and too good to be mutilated; but the following may be taken as a sample of the way in which he can render a personal incident in such surroundings. It is from a tale in his last book, Life's Handicap, 'The Mutiny of the Mavericks,' which is for the most part a bad piece of special pleading, but which ends with this admirable portrayal of the madness of a coward: 'Dan and Horse Egan kept themselves in the neighbourhood of Mulcahy. Twice the man would have bolted back in the confusion. Twice he was heaved, kicked, and shouldered back again into the unpaintable inferno of a hotly contested charge. At the end, the panic excess of his fear drove him into madness beyond all human courage. His eyes staring at nothing, his mouth open and frothing, and breathing as one in a cold bath, he went forward demented, while Dan toiled after him. The charge checked at a high mud-wall. It was Mulcahy who scrambled up tooth and nail and hurled down among the bayonets the amazed Afghan who barred his way. It was Mulcahy, keeping to the straight line of the rabid dog, who led a collection of ardent souls at a newly unmasked battery and flung himself on the muzzle of a gun, as his companions danced among the gunners. It was Mulcahy who ran wildly on from that battery into the open plain, where the enemy were retiring in sullen groups. His hands were empty, he had lost helmet and belt, and he was bleeding from a wound in the neck. . . . Dan and Horse Egan, panting and distressed, had thrown themselves down upon the ground by the captured guns, when they noticed Mulcahy's charge. . . . The last of a hurrying crowd of Afghans turned at the noise of shod feet behind him, and shifted his knife ready to hand. This, he saw, was no time to take prisoners. Mulcahy tore on, sobbing; the straight-held blade went home through the defenceless breast, and the body pitched forward almost before a shot from Dan's rifle brought down the slayer. The two Irishmen went out to bring in their dead.'
'Description,' said Byron, in his riper time, when he had begun to understand himself a little, 'description is my forte.'
It is also Mr. Rudyard Kipling's.
II
The second of the four main features of the Anglo-Indian life is the domestic, and Mr. Kipling chooses The Story of the Gadsbys as his typical illustration of it. The difference, however, between the 'domestic' and the last of the four, which he calls the 'social' feature, is slight, and the latter term is quite comprehensive enough for the two. Here, indeed, he is on his special ground. Here his critical limitations do not come into play; his pet prejudices and theories are unaffected, and he sets himself to render Anglo-Indian 'society' as seen and felt from within as well as from without, with an unimpeachable disinterestedness. The Story of the Gadsbys showed, in at least one scene of that dramatised 'tale without a plot' ('The Tents of Kedar'), a really remarkable gift of dialogue. It was true drawing-room comedy of a high order, and indeed throughout the whole of the piece the talking and gesturing of the puppets were undeniably actual. In the Soldiers Three there was a piece of first-rate dialogue ('The Solid Muldoon,' pp. 45, 46, the talk between Mulvaney and Annie Bragin); but it is obviously one thing to write two pages of conversation and quite another to write eighty. The characters chosen for analysis, however, are on a rather low plane, and prove tedious when treated at such length. Seven pages of the silly delirium of a silly girl are rather too large an instalment of predetermined pathos on one note, coming on the top of two even larger and more monotonous instalments of honeymooning and conjugal 'tiffing.' An obviously much-experienced I.C.S. man of his has a happy phrase for the Anglo-Indian 'society' ladies, married or single. He calls them 'fire-balloons,' and every type of 'fire-balloon,' from the empty-headed little girl aforesaid (whose maiden experience so soon corroborates the touching aphorism of her maiden friend that 'being kissed by a man who didn't wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt'), through the savage man-exploiting Mrs. Reiver, up to Mrs. Hawksbee, 'the most wonderful woman in India,'—every one of them he treats with a loving, patient, and elaborate detail. Some of them are not worth it, 'the most wonderful woman in India' among them (he dedicates Plain Tales from the Hills, with a mild fatuity, 'to the wittiest woman in India,' who must run that terrible Mrs. Hawksbee close); but others are drawn with the hand of a master, and are among his most living creations. The same is to be said of many of the men.
Here, then, we have at last the Anglo-Indian 'society' life of to-day, and we see it from every side. Duty and red-tape tempered by picnics and adultery—it is a singular spectacle. But we are to ascribe much, very much, to the climate. Simla holds 'the only existence in this desolate land worth the living.' For the rest, it is six months purgatory and six months hell. 'One of the many curses of our life in India is the want of atmosphere in the painter's sense. There are no half-tints worth noticing. Men stand out all crude and raw, with nothing to tone them down, and nothing to scale them against.' For instance, we speak of 'all the pleasures of a quiet English wooing, quite different from the brazen businesses of the East, when half the community stand back and bet on the result, and the other half wonder what Mrs. So-and-so will say to it.' Thus Minnie Threegan competes successfully with her 'poor, dear mamma' (who is not precisely a widow) for Mr. Gadsby, who, in his turn, throws over Mrs. Herriott (also apparently not a widow to any alarming extent) in order to enter into the matrimonial 'garden of Eden.' Out of the six tales specially designed to 'illustrate' the 'social' feature, five are based, some more, some less, on the Seventh Commandment. In the way of short stories Mr. Kipling has done nothing better than the three central ones—'At the Pit's Mouth,' 'A Wayside Comedy,' and 'The Hill of Illusion'; the last containing the most admirably sustained piece of dialogue he has yet written. The other side to the picture of the reckless, light-hearted revelry of the Hills is to be found in the doggedly heroic work of, at any rate, the male portion of these people down in the Plains. Picnics, rides and drives, with garden-parties and promenades, are suddenly forgotten in a scene like this:—'The atmosphere within was only 104°, as the thermometer bore witness, and heavy with the foul smell of badly trimmed kerosene lamps; and this stench, combined with that of native tobacco, baked brick, and dried earth, sends the heart of many a strong man down to his boots, for it is the smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns herself for six months into a house of torment.' The temper induced by this sort of thing, when mixed up well with fever and finally flavoured with cholera ad libitum, is scarcely likely to be lamblike.
'It's an insult to the intelligence of the Deity,' observes one of the sufferers, 'to pretend we're anything but tortured rebels.' Who shall be surprised, then, that when the tortured rebels go away for a holiday to 'the only existence in this desolate land worth the living,' they are devotees of the gospel of eating, drinking, and being merry, for only too obvious reasons? At the bad times this same gospel leads to astonishing effects in the way of kindliness and self-sacrifice. A savage Stoicism holds all things cheap, even death. 'Bah! how these Christians funk death!' It is the grim and contemptuous jeer of the eternal heathen, whose heart says to him with a fraternal candour, 'Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return, and what on earth does it matter?' Yet what a depth of passion and emotion lies in these Stoics, and how paltry and factitious all other men seem beside them—children babbling of the moon or cowards sucking at their spiritual opium pipes to drug their 'funk' into 'faith'! Mr. Kipling loves his heathens with all his heart, and even the silliest of his 'fire-balloons' seeks not succour 'from on high' in the troubles and agonies of 'life's handicap.' As for his men, they have all more or less of the nature of the eternal barbarian, the atavistic impulse of ruthless action which lies so deeply and so ineradicably in almost all of us, under the thin veneer of our civilised refinement and 'good manners.' Speaking of his Dickie, he calls it the 'go-fever, which is more real than many doctor's diseases, waking and raging, urging him, who loved Maisie beyond anything in the world, to go away and taste the old, hot, unregenerate life again—to scuffle, swear, gamble, and live light loves with his fellows; to take ship and know the sea once more, and by her beget pictures; to talk to Binat among the sands of Port Said, while Yellow Tina mixed the drinks,' and so on. Very little respect or care has he, therefore, for those who shout to us perpetually, 'Great is the Respectability of the English people!' 'Oh, you rabbit hutches!' cries out Dickie, in the black hour of his poverty in London, 'do you know what you've got to do later on? You have to supply me with men-servants and maid-servants'—here he smacked his lips—'and the particular treasure of kings. Meantime I'll get clothes and boots, and presently I will return and trample on you.' Strange, passing strange, that in the throat of men who talk like this a lump should rise, 'be they by sea or by land,' at the mystic formula which sums up the cult of the Sovereign who doesn't rule. Yet such, it appears, are we English, a 'peculiar people' in all conscience. Nor is even the saving grace of humour denied to our Anglo-Indian story-teller, to temper the foolisher aspects of that bilious and fiery jingoism of the devasted and terrible clime. The preface to Life's Handicap is a delicious proof of this, and paragraphs, sentences, and phrases that have the true piquant flavour are rarely to seek. Yet his touch is never certain. His false characterisation has its parallel in false criticism, sometimes merely the smart superficialities of the imperfectly educated journalist (to whom culture stands for nothing more than 'culchaw'): at other times quite shocking tributes of respect and admiration to tenth-rate personages. Mr. Kipling knows little beyond modern English prose. The secret of the art and literature of the great Continental peoples is hid from him. He is too young, and he has lived too hard, not to be considerably in the dark about himself. How else is one to explain the insertion of work absolutely vile and detestable in his latest book? The sacra fames auri might explain its composition; but it is another thing in the full flood-tide of your vogue, with name, and fame, and fortune all at your hand, to write in this way of your work:
'The depth and dream of my desire,
The bitter paths wherein I stray,
Thou knowest Who hast made the fire,
Thou knowest Who hast made the clay.
'One stone the more swings to her place
In that dread Temple of Thy worth—
It is enough that thro' Thy grace
I saw nought common on Thy earth.
'Take not that vision from my ken;
Oh, whatso'er may spoil or speed,
Help me to need no aid from men
That I may help such men as need!'—
to write like this, and then to present to us such unspeakably mediocre and wretched stuff as 'The Lang Men o' Larut' or 'Namgay Doola'! 'Under any circumstances, remember,' says the sagacious Dickie, in his final character as the pictorial journalist in the heyday of his London vogue, 'four-fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.' Very true: but is this any reason that a man who can give us such a splendid sample of story-telling as 'The Courting of Dinah Shadd,' or touch the very spring of the lacrimœ rerum in the piteous narrative of 'The Man Who Was,' should proceed to inflict on us work which even the most sympathetic criticism can only designate as beneath contempt? Mr. Kipling asks too much of his most devoted admirers when he leaves them to try and justify the existence of 'Namgay Doola,' and 'The Lang Men o' Larut, and 'The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney.' Balzac could not afford to sign his name to such rubbish. For Mr. Rudyard Kipling to do so is to send snakes to strangle his reputation in its cradle.
III
'In India,' he says, speaking in his proper person, 'you really see humanity—raw, brown, naked humanity—with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, over-handled earth under foot' One of the results of the overwhelming nature of this fact is that, at any rate in any close consideration of the 'native feature,' you are soon driven to take refuge in 'simpler theories' than those current among the benighted English home officials. Herein, of course, is the great difference between these and the Anglo-Indian officials. The latter have ever treated the 'native feature' from the 'simpler theory' point of view. Hence the stupendous success of our Indian administration, as an administration, from the days of Clive to those of Lord Lytton and onwards. Our sympathetic comprehension of the races we have ruled, our intimate knowledge and appreciation of their religious and social feelings: all this is due to the 'simpler theories' of our Anglo-Indian officials, civil and military. The events of the year 1857 were the crowning proof of it. In that year we simplified even these simpler theories into the one simplest theory of all. 'We gave 'em hell' to an extent that they have never forgotten, and Mr. Kipling smiles knowingly over the still active native prejudice against being blown away from the mouths of cannons. The foolish person in search of a little disinterested information about things may find the so-called Indian Mutiny an unexplained historical phenomenon, and eagerly hope for some enlightenment on the subject from a writer of indisputable talent who is 'illustrating' the 'native feature.' He will get little or none from Mr. Kipling. Firstly, he will find the scantiest mention of, or even allusion to, the social movements of the natives. They are viewed merely (as we have seen) in the light of a huge mass of raw, brown, naked humanity to be manipulated by the civil and military officials for the arcane purposes of the Great Indian Empire, or by the inspired amateur detective (Strickland is Mr. Kipling's name for him) as material for his dexterous energy and sagacity, or by the male portion of the Anglo-Indians as a happy hunting-ground for more or less animating, if monotonous, sexual experiences 'without benefit of clergy.' We see the officials perpetually hustling the childlike natives about all over the country. We see Strickland, or somebody else, not quite so clever perhaps, but still far too clever for childlike natives, perpetually exposing their villainies. We see rows of Anglo-Indian bachelors of all sorts (some the most commonplace sorts) inspiring dark-eyed little native girls with doglike adorations. But that is all, or almost all, and it is scarcely a workable statement of the great Indian equation, even from the 'simpler theory' point of view.
There is in these narratives all the ability of the thoroughly good story-teller we know, here and there bits of excellent dialogue (the final scene in 'The Sending of Dana Da,' for example), the same exquisite little descriptive cameos, the same rapid and piquant dogmatism—one has nothing less to praise here than in the tales of the 'military' feature, but unhappily also nothing more. Now and then vivid touches seem to bring us into contact with the peculiar and essential nature of the more active members of the alien races, and we realise for a moment something of the qualities in them which have made history; but how rare and partial such glimpses are! Thus Mr. Kipling shows us the Afghan Amir in his Court, and 'the long tail of feudal chiefs, men of blood, fed and cowed with blood.' But such things are not his game. It is the little personal experiences and the 'begetting of pictures' from the same that he is keen for. This is what interests and absorbs him. 'If I were Job ten times over,' says one of his characters in the most unnatural manner for the character, and in the most natural manner for Mr. Rudyard Kipling, 'I should be so interested in what was going to happen next that I'd stay in and watch.' And he makes his Mrs. Hawksbee repeat the sentiment. 'Colour, light, and motion,' he says elsewhere with his own voice, 'without which no man has much pleasure in living.' He loves the demonstrative instinct of the Oriental. 'You cannot explain things to the Oriental. You must show.' He has in him, too, the Oriental love of story-telling for its own sake; and even their superstition strikes a responsive chord in him. 'I have lived long enough in this India,' he says, 'to know that it is best to know nothing'; and on the force of this he mars a little masterpiece like 'The Courting of Dinah Shadd' with a large allowance of second-rate second-sight prediction, which is all fulfilled to the letter. I cannot tell whether it is simply due to the benumbing chill of incredulity, but his deliberately supernatural tales, from 'The Phantom Rickshaw' downwards, impress me as distinct failures. On the other hand, when he deals in natural horror (take 'At the Pit's Mouth' as a sample, or 'The Other Man') I often find him admirable.
But do not let me seem to strike with too great insistence the note of depreciation and disappointment. That would be to be unjust as well as ungracious. The best Mr. Kipling has to give he gives, and the best of that best is veritably good, and what more should we ask of him? Nowhere in his more elaborate efforts to delineate child-life (and some of them are something rather like successes) does he give us so perfect a piece of work as the little child-idyl called 'The Story of Muhammad Din': nowhere does his gift of natural horror find more artistically harrowing expression than in 'The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,' or in 'Bubbling Well Road': nowhere does he paint the 'ewig Weibliche' with a more liquid depth of simple love than in 'Lispeth' or 'Beyond the Pale.' And all of these are stories that illustrate the 'native' feature.
There is one obvious quality in all literary work without which the name or fame of a writer has no possible chance of survival, and that is the literary quality. Its manifestations are many, far more diverse, indeed, than jejune critics like Matthew Arnold will admit. Arnold loved to quote a line of Sophokles above a line of Homer, a line of Dante below a line of Shakespeare, and to assure us that these were all perfect samples of 'style.' The fact is, that of style in the sense known to Sophokles or Milton, Shakespeare and Homer had little, and Dante had less. Shakespeare achieves his unique effects through a verbal magic unequalled in the world's literature. No man ever created such lines and phrases. Dante (to take his case alone) wins by something quite different—by a sheer and simple sincerity of outlook. He watches, and watches, and watches, till he sees things before him with an actuality that burns achingly into his sight, and what he sees he puts down simply—as he sees it; but style in the sense of Sophokles, verbal magic in the sense of Shakespeare, he has little or none of either.
Our business here is obviously with things on a smaller scale, but the same line of judgment must be held as with those of the largest. No one can claim for Mr. Kipling the possession of a real prose style, or, indeed, of anything approaching to it. He cannot even, at least in this respect, for a moment be placed beside his French contemporaries and fellow-story-tellers—Maupassant and Bourget, let alone the great names of French and English prose. Such style, quâ style, as he has is mere journalistic smartness, and he never begins to do good work till he has consciously forgotten all about it, and has set himself down to paint his 'pictures' or express his emotions as he best may. Neither has he that sheer and simple sincerity of outlook, that patient and relentless realism which (for example) lifts the best work of Zola so high. His youth and ardour, worked to white-heat by the Indian climate and his hard life, have intensified his individualism to such a pitch that he cannot get out of himself—cannot render any one or any thing objectively. The types he hates he caricatures, and mingles up men, and women, and children with puppets tricked out in semblance of the same, with a splendid want of discrimination. What side, then, of this precious, this indispensable quality does he possess as the 'Open, Sesame' of the years to come, where newspaper 'boomers' cease from troubling and serious workers are at rest? The reply can happily be given without much hesitation. Beyond all question (to put it in the particular form) he has the gift both of the happy simile and of the happy phrase. 'You pass through big still deodar forests, and under big still cliffs, and over big still grass-downs swelling like a woman's breasts; and the wind across the grass, and the rain among the deodars says, "Hush—hush—hush."' A touch of verbal trickery here, and Nature is rendered purely in the focus of the spectator's subjectivity, but how well she is rendered! Or, again, 'A large, low moon turned the tops of the spear-grass to silver, and the stunted camel-thorn-bushes and sour tamarisks into the likeness of trooping devils. The smell of the sun had not left the earth, and little aimless winds, blowing across the rose-gardens to the southward, brought the scent of dried roses and water.' He is almost as keen a connoisseur of scents and smells as M. Guy de Maupassant himself. He realises their powers. Several such samples have been given already. Here are the Himalayas from the nasal point of view: 'The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roots in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will, at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.' Admirable, indeed, are these little descriptive cameos which he strews broadcast. Sometimes they are enclosed in two or three lines. 'The witchery of the dawn turned the grey river-reaches to purple, gold, and opal: and it was as though the lumbering barge crept across the splendour of a new Heaven.' Again he achieves the same result in one single epithet. 'The drinking earth'—three words to describe the drought-laden Indian land under the heavy, unceasing downpour of the longed-for, welcome rains. 'Nothing save the spikes of the rain without and the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.' Verbal magic of this sort is of the poet: it is thrown out whole, so to say, not constructed. Or take this: 'There was nothing but grass everywhere, and it was impossible to see two yards in any direction. The grass-stems held the heat exactly as boiler-tubes do.' No more: not another word. Veritably in Art the part is ever greater than the whole. But it follows that when he deliberately sets himself down to exploit this supreme gift of his, he succeeds but moderately. 'The City of Dreadful Night' may be taken as a good example. It is excellent better-class journalism, and all the third-rate 'word-painters' are in raptures over it; but (alas!) it is not the third-rate, nor the second-rate, nor even the first-rate 'word-painters' who precisely know what they are talking about, let alone what people twenty years hence will talk about. Yet (alas! once more) for how much do they and their wrong-headed praise and undiscriminating enthusiasm count in the creation of vogues! Must a man ever owe three-fourths of his temporary success to his defects and limitations? Smartness and superficiality. Jingoism and aggressive cocksureness, rococo fictional types and overloaded pseudoprose, how much too much have these helped to make the name of our young Anglo-Indian storyteller familiar to the readers of the English-speaking race all over the earth!
Grant to him, however, as we surely must, the possession of verbal magic, of this striking aspect of our precious and indispensable literary quality, and add to it such gifts as have been enumerated in our short review of his work, and surely the case for taking it and its creator seriously has been well made out. On the other hand, we must not for a moment lose sight of the fact with which we started in our consideration of his claims to a permanent literary position. We are dealing with things on a scale which can only be called small, and his limitations, his aberrations, are very real and very grave. The time is past when a writer of talent could win such a position, even for a generation, by the most nimble and vivid variations of a 'criticism of life' adapted to the use of the nursery or the schoolroom. Loud-tongued, fractious, and numerous though it still is, the Noble Army of Blockheads no longer exercises that perfect tyranny it did fifteen or twenty years ago. It is yet able to dispense the loaves and fishes, but its judgments, overwhelming though they be for a short time, are being perpetually upset by the small but evergrowing section of the public that begins in Art and Literature to know its right hand from its left. It will not be long before people come to tell Mr. Kipling that they are sick to death of his continual efforts to galvanise his most puppetlike puppets into the dreary semblance of life. 'No more Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, an you love us! No more Mrs. Hawksbee, and Strickland, and Mrs. What's-her-name! They are only visible and palpable object-lessons of your inability to create characters!' Mr. Kipling is young and full of vigour: what are we left to infer from the undeniable fact that the ascending force in his work is very slight? Nay, we might even question its existence. His work has not gone on improving in his successive efforts. He has never excelled 'The Big Drunk Draf',' or 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft,' or 'At the Pit's Mouth,' or 'Gemini,' each in its special style, and these (if I do not mistake) are all from his earlier period. There is nothing in any degree better—shall I say there is nothing in any degree so good?—in the whole collection of stories gathered up in Plain Tales from the Hills and Life's Handicap. Any attempt to classify Mr. Kipling, to give him a place, and his true place, in our modern fiction, would be premature. Hope (which, according to the Latin phrase, is 'the expectation of good') clings to this saving clause. But after his next book will this still be so? What should we make of another huge slice of 'The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney' style of thing, and 'Namgay Doola,' and 'The Lang Men o' Larut'?
But, once more, let me not seem to strike the unjust and ungracious note of depreciation and disappointment, especially at the close. We should be thankful for what we have got; but, if we chiefly show our thankfulness by energetically asking for more, let us not fall under the suspicion of want of generosity. The case, we say, for taking Mr. Kipling seriously has surely been made out beyond cavil. His vogue may pass—it seems passing somewhat already; but, at least, we shall not be able to declare of it, as of so many of its fellows—and, indeed, of some which seem at this hour to stand above all such changes and chances—that it was won on such inadequate grounds that a total extinction and oblivion were, in mercy to the vileness of the English artistic taste, its most expedient as well as its worthiest fate. That can never be said of the man who could describe Anglo-Indian society as in 'At the Pit's Mouth,' who could tell a story like 'The Courting of Dinah Shadd,' who could do a piece of such splendid analytical and dramatic work as 'The Drums of the Fore and Aft.'