Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated), page 972
Well, remembering that, recall again the scene when Heldar, blind, and hopeless of his love, returns to the Soudan determined on the one thing left him — to die among the spears. Just one smell of the old life he could no longer see, and then to go out for ever. The journey, full of muffled recognitions of the old life, is terrible in its tragedy; but as it nears its end, one almost loses the tragedy in the horrible glee with which the mere darkened nearness to slaughter fills the blind man.
“‘Listen!’ said Dick. A flight of heavy-handed bullets was succeeded by yelling and shouts. The children of the desert valued their nightly amusement, and the train was an excellent mark.
“‘ Is it worth while giving them half a hopper full? ‘ the subaltern asked of the engine which was driven by a Lieutenant of Sappers.
“‘ I should just think so! This is my section of the line. They’ll be playing old Harry with my permanent way if we don’t stop ‘em.’
“‘Right O! ‘
“‘ Hrrmpb! ‘ said the machine gun through all its five noses as the subaltern drew the lever home. The emptv cartridges clashed on the floor and the smoke blew back through the truck. There were indiscriminate firing at the rear of the train, a return fire from the darkness without and unlimited howling. Dick stretched himself on the floor, wild with delight at the sounds and the smells.
“‘ God is very good — I never thought I’d hear this again. Give ‘em hell, men! Oh, give ‘em hell! ‘ he cried.”
This is the bellowing; of mere homicidal lust. It is not the fine battle rapture which, under certain inspiring conditions, one can understand. It is the sheer glee of the slaying of men — or rather of hearing them slain. It is an even less restrained exhibition of murderous passion than Orthe- ris’s exhibition of artistry. It is the mere delight in the smell of blood. It is blood- madness. But war correspondents, like soldiers, are nowadays allowed a certain blood-madness, and the alacrity with which they hasten to indulge their privilege on the first whisper of a war is but another sign of that renaissance of cruelty which is characteristic of the time.
I am not writing from the point of view of one who has no knowledge of such feelings. That it would be difficult to do, for there are few of us, I fear, who have not something, indeed a good deal, somewhere in us that gloatingly responds to cruelty and bloodshed. But, remembering that it has taken all these centuries even to chain, not to speak of taming, that beast in us; remembering the agonies of human history for which it has been responsible; remembering, too, how ever ready it is to snap the all too slight chain of civilisation: surely his is an evil service to humanity who shall in any way help to set loose again so terrible a monster as human cruelty. And that is what it means to glorify war.
Who, knowing what war is — and none knows better than Mr. Kipling — shall deliberately glorify war, horrible always, but ten times more horrible to-day, however brilliantly, humourously, persuasively he does it, is an enemy of society; and the more brilliantly he does it, the greater is his crime.
Mr. Kipling not only glorifies war, but he is never tired of hinting his poor opin ion of the stay-at-home man of peace who cannot take murder in his light and airy fashion, and for whom death retains some of its pity and solemnity. What good fun he makes out of the distinguished novelist talking with three young officers home from India, and realising, bit by bit, what their profession means!
‘‘ ‘ You! Have you shot a man? . . . And have you too r ‘
“‘ Think so,’ saicl Nevin sweetly. “ ‘ Good heavens! And how did you feel afterwards r ‘
“‘ Thirsty. I wanted a smoke too.’ “ How fine to be able to feel — or rather not to feel — like that; and what charming taste in the expression of that heroic nonchalance! No wonder the great novelist felt himself a poor milksop “ intellectuel “ in the presence of these noble boys; for, as Mulvaney has said, “ Canteen bacey’s like the Army. It shpoils a man’s taste for milder things.”
And what a fine contempt is Mr. Kipling’s for the young recruit, who, as yet unused to bloodshed, turns white in his first action, and “ grows acutely miserable when he hears a comrade turn over with the rattle of fire-irons falling into the fender, and the grunt of a pole-axed ox “! Perhaps no one ever wrote so profanely of death as Mr. Kipling, or with such heartless vulgarity.
But one has only to read the newspaper headlines to realise that in this respect, too, Mr. Kipling is the child, as well as the voice, of the moment. A railway accident is now a “ smash,” a fatal fire is a “ big blaze,” and, of course, such are only indicative straws. Whatever the reason may be, there is unmistakably at the moment a general indifference to human suffering, and in some quarters a marked revival of interest in brutalitv. And one encounters it more often, perhaps, among women than men. The Roman lady of the gladiatorial shows is by no means uncommon in English society at the moment.
The Englishman has always been a strange combination of gentleman and brute. The gentleman has been besung to weariness. In Mr. Kipling we have him too; but for the most part Mr. Kipling’s work is an appeal to, and a vindication of, the Englishman as brute. The Englishman, too, as Philistine. That particular Englishman has had rather a dull time of it, in regard to literature, for the past fifty years. In fact, Victorian literature has been painfully spiritual and intellectual. It has gone in for problems and making the world better, for solving “ the riddle,” and keeping down the ape and tiger. Between Ruskin societies, and Browning societies, and pre-Raphaelite poetry (not to speak of those terrible Burne-Joncs women) what wonder if the young Englishman has not yawned and longed to go out and shoot something he could understand! However, being exceedingly docile and, despite his physical courage, of small moral courage, he has gone on submitting to his sisters in these matters. For there was not a single writer of genius to take his part. Then came Stevenson, with his books of adventure, and his gospel of manliness; and the young Englishman began to hope. But then Stevenson was far from brutal enough. Then, too, he had a style. Fatal disadvantage. It gets in the way so.
Then at last came Mr. Kipling, and the young Englishman had the permission of a man of undoubted genius to be just as brutal as he liked. The thing was as true to life as the cinematograph of a prize-fight, and everyone said it was genius too. He had waited a long while for it, but at last it came, a complete Triumph of the Philistines. And now the literature of beauty, of thought, of fancy, all the literature of idealism, can go pack. It must subscribe to the new fashion, or die. All the old lit erary ideals must be discarded even by the literary journals. Idealism flies in panic; or bows down, abjectly sacrificing in terror one reputation after another before the conqueror. The old masters were milksops and knew nothing about writing whatsoever. Literary oracles in New York declare that Mr. Kipling is the greatest master of English prose that has ever written, and an authoritative English journal timidly suggests that there may be one or two of the higher notes of poetry in which Tennyson is Mr. Kipling’s superior. But you feel that the editor has taken his life in his hands. Wilder and wilder grows the popular taste for blood. “ More chops,” goes up the cry more fiercely every hour, “ more chops, bloody ones with gristle.” No one writer can keep pace with the gruesome demand for blood-stained fiction, and so a vast school of battle-and-murder novelists arises, with horses and carriages and country scats and much-photographed babies; and ever the ery goes up, growing to a veritable roar: “More chops, can’t you! Bloody ones with gristle.”
No doubt there is an element of fantastic generalisation in this statement of the situation; but, broadly speaking, it is true of the main current of popular taste. Perhaps we need not seek far for the reason of this widespread reversion to brutality and sensationalism in literature. Is it not the revulsion of an age sick at heart with much thinking; a pessimistic age that is tired to death with the riddle of things; an age that has lost one faith and not yet found another? an age, therefore, that sees but one immediate resource: to take its material pleasures, ruthlessly if need be, and in the coarse excitements life offers to silence the pangs of thought.
For all the humour and buoyancy of his writings Mr. Kipling is at heart a pessimist, and, perhaps, his sincerest expression of opinion in regard to the government of the universe is contained in the fierce Omarian exclamation of Holden in u Without Benefit of Clergy,” addressed to no one in particular, but evidently meant to reach far up into the skies: “ () you brute! You utter brute!” So Omar bade Allah “man’s forgiveness give and take.”
One often sees Mr. Kipling praised as being startlingly “ modern.” It is true that lie is — remarkably contemporary. Contemporaneousness he carries to the point of genius. But modern, in the larger sense of the term, he is not. In fact, of all European writers of importance to-day he is least modern. True, he is modern in that pessimism to which I have just referred; but of modern hope and modern endeavour he knows nothing or has nothing good to say. For typically modern movements he has nothing but cynical or good-humoured contempt. Democracy, the woman-movement, the education of the masses; these arc favourite butts of his laughter, and u the Refining Influence of Civilisation and the March of Progress” one of his favourite sneers. Wiser men have dreamed of a gradual rapprochement of the nations, a dwindling of meaningless race-hatreds, even an ultimate union of separate peoples, for the general good of mankind. His influence, however, is all on the side of a narrow patriotism that can see no nation but its own, and against a nation so near to us in blood as America he is not above directing the antiquated sneer.
His work nobly enforces those old-fashioned virtues of man which, it is to be hoped, will never go out of fashion — to do one’s duty, to live stoically, to live cleanly, to live cheerfully. Such lessons can never be taught too often, and they are of the moral bone and fibre of Mr. Kipling’s writing. But with them go all the old-fashioned vices of prejudiced Toryism. For progressive thought there has been no such dangerous influence in England for many years. Of
all that our best poets, philosophers, and social economists have been working for he is directly, or indirectly, a powerful enemy. For is he not, on his own admission, a servant of “ the great God Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, Most Terrible, One-evcd, Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk”? A god, indeed, not unlike the Jehovah of the “ Recessional,” but very different from the gentle meliorist to whom the so-called Christian nation of England professes a hollow allegiance. Of one melioristic movement only he seems to be the friend: the crusade against drink.
It is Mr. Kipling and his followers who are the true end-of-the-century decadents, for it would seem to be their aim to begin the twentieth century by throwing behind them all that the nineteenth century has so painfully won.
I have in these pages paid my tribute to Mr. Kipling’s great gifts; paid it, I trust, with something of that generosity which beseems one of the many thousands whom he has so generously delighted. If there was nothing else to be grateful for, he is the one real humourist vouchsafed to England for some years. His farce alone is a well of precious laughter. Then it is painful to have had to write hard things of the man who made “ Mandalay,” and gave us the “ Jungle Books.” His mere vitality, apart from the variousness of it, is a joy to contemplate. Yet all these good reasons for praise are equally good reasons for fear, when we find gifts so remarkable wedded to a point of view hardly less advanced than that of the British soldier they have so handsonjely celebrated.
As a writer Mr. Kipling is a delight; as an influence he is a danger. Of course, the clock of Time is not to be set back by gifts ten times as great as Air. Kipling’s. The great world movement will still go on, moving surely, if slowly, and with occasional relapses, in the direction which it has always taken, from brute force to spiritual enlargement. But there are influences that speed it along and others that retard. It is to be regretted that Mr. Kipling’s influence should be one of those that retard.
RUDYARD KIPLING by John Palmer
First published in 1915, this detailed critical work was penned by John Palmer (1885–1944), who was a British author. Over his career as a writer, Palmer wrote extensively about early English actors and literary figures, as well as fiction under various pseudonyms.
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
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.
