V
In Mr. Kipling's first volume there was one story which struck quite a different note from all the others, and gave promise of a new delineator of children. Tods' Amendment, which is a curiously constructed piece of work, is in itself a political allegory. It is to be noticed that when he warms to his theme the author puts aside the trifling fact that Tods is an infant of six summers, and makes him give a clear statement of collated native opinion worthy of a barrister in ample practice. What led to the story, one sees without difficulty, was the wish to emphasise the fact that unless the Indian Government humbles itself, and becomes like Tods, it can never legislate with efficiency, because it never can tell what all the jhampanis and saises in the bazar really wish for. If this were all, Mr. Kipling in creating Tods would have shown no more real acquaintance with children than other political allegorists have shown with sylphs or Chinese philosophers. But Mr. Kipling is always an artist, and in order to make a setting for his child-professor of jurisprudence, he invented a really convincing and delightful world of conquering infancy. Tods, who lives up at Simla with Tods' mamma, and knows everybody, is "an utterly fearless young pagan," who pursues his favourite kid even into the sacred presence of the Supreme Legislative Council, and is on terms of equally well-bred familiarity with the Viceroy and with Futteh Khan, the villainous loafer khit from Mussoorie.
To prove that Tods' Amendment was not an accident, and also, perhaps, to show that he could write about children purely and simply, without any after-thought of allegory, he brought out, as the sixth instalment of the Indian Railway Library, a little volume entirely devoted to child-life. Of the four stories contained in this book one is among the finest productions of its author, while two others are very good indeed. There are also, of course, the children in The Light that Failed, although they are too closely copied from the author's previous creations in Baa, Baa, Black Sheep; and in other writings of his, children take a position sufficiently prominent to justify us in considering this as one of the main divisions of his work.
In his preface to Wee Willie Winkie, Mr. Kipling has sketched for us the attitude which he adopts towards babies. "Only women," he says, but we may doubt if he means it, "understand children thoroughly; but if a mere man keeps very quiet, and humbles himself properly, and refrains from talking down to his superiors, the children will sometimes be good to him, and let him see what they think about the world." This is a curious form of expression, and suggests the naturalist more than the lover of children. So might we conceive a successful zoologist affirming that the way to note the habits of wild animals and birds is by keeping very quiet, and lying low in the grass, and refraining from making sudden noises. This is, indeed, the note by which we may distinguish Mr. Kipling from such true lovers of childhood as Mrs. Ewing. He has no very strong emotion in the matter, but he patiently and carefully collects data, partly out of his own faithful and capacious personal memory, partly out of what he still observes.
The Tods type he would probably insist that he has observed. A finer and more highly developed specimen of it is given in Wee Willie Winkie, the hero of which is a noble infant of overpowering vitality, who has to be put under military discipline to keep him in any sort of domestic order, and who, while suffering under two days' confinement to barracks (the house and verandah), saves the life of a headstrong girl. The way in which Wee Willie Winkie—who is of Mr. Kipling's favourite age, six—does this is at once wholly delightful and a terrible strain to credence. The baby sees Miss Allardyce cross the river, which he has always been forbidden to do, because the river is the frontier, and beyond it are bad men, goblins, Afghans, and the like. He feels that she is in danger, he breaks mutinously out of barracks on his pony and follows her, and when she has an accident, and is surrounded by twenty hill-men, he saves her by his spirit and by his complicated display of resource. To criticise this story, which is told with infinite zest and picturesqueness, seems merely priggish. Yet it is contrary to Mr. Kipling's whole intellectual attitude to suppose him capable of writing what he knows to be supernatural romance. We have therefore to suppose that in India infants "of the dominant race" are so highly developed at six, physically and intellectually, as to be able to ride hard, alone, across a difficult river, and up pathless hilly country, to contrive a plan for succouring a hapless lady, and to hold a little regiment of savages at bay by mere force of eye. If Wee Willie Winkie had been twelve instead of six, the feat would have been just possible. But then the romantic contrast between the baby and his virile deeds would not have been nearly so piquant. In all this Mr. Kipling, led away by sentiment and a false ideal, is not quite the honest craftsman that he should be.
But when, instead of romancing and creating, he is content to observe children, he is excellent in this as in other branches of careful natural history. But the children he observes, are, or we much misjudge him, himself. Baa, Baa, Black Sheep is a strange compound of work at first and at second hand. Aunty Rosa (delightfully known, without a suspicion of supposed relationship, as "Antirosa"), the Mrs. Squeers of the Rocklington lodgings, is a sub-Dickensian creature, tricked out with a few touches of reality, but mainly a survival of early literary hatreds. The boy Harry and the soft little sister of Punch are rather shadowy. But Punch lives with an intense vitality, and here, without any indiscretion, we may be sure that Mr. Kipling has looked inside his own heart and drawn from memory. Nothing in the autobiographies of their childhood by Tolstoi and Pierre Loti, nothing in Mr. R. L. Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses, is more valuable as a record of the development of childhood than the account of how Punch learned to read, moved by curiosity to know what the "falchion" was with which the German man split the Griffin open. Very nice, also, is the reference to the mysterious rune, called "Sonny, my Soul," with which mamma used to sing Punch to sleep.
By far the most powerful and ingenious story, however, which Mr. Kipling has yet dedicated to a study of childhood is The Drums of the Fore and Aft. "The Fore and Aft" is a nickname given in derision to a crack regiment, whose real title is "The Fore and Fit," in memory of a sudden calamity which befell them on a certain day in an Afghan pass, when, if it had not been for two little blackguard drummer-boys, they would have been wofully and contemptibly cut to pieces, as they were routed by a dashing troop of Ghazis. The two little heroes, who only conquer to die, are called Jakin and Lew, stunted children of fourteen, "gutter-birds" who drink and smoke and "do everything but lie," and are the disgrace of the regiment. In their little souls, however, there burns what Mr. Pater would call a "hard, gem-like flame" of patriotism, and they are willing to undergo any privation, if only they may wipe away the stigma of being "bloomin' non-combatants."
In the intervals of showing us how that stain was completely removed, Mr. Kipling gives us not merely one of the most thrilling and effective battles in fiction, but a singularly delicate portrait of two grubby little souls turned white and splendid by an element of native greatness. It would be difficult to point to a page of modern English more poignant than that which describes how "the only acting-drummers who were took along," and—left behind, moved forward across the pass alone to the enemy's front, and sounded on drum and fife the return of the regiment to duty. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole story is that a record of shocking British retreat and failure is so treated as to flatter in its tenderest susceptibilities the pride of British patriotism.
1891.
AN ELECTION AT THE ENGLISH ACADEMY