And when he came to England again, a youth of five-and-twenty, his fame had come before him. He settled down from 1889 to 1891, on an upper floor of a gloomy building squeezed between shops, at 19 Villiers Street, Strand, and in that somewhat squalid London thoroughfare were written some of the best stories in “Life’s Handicap,” and two of his comparative failures—“The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot,” and his first novel, “The Light that Failed.” Stevenson in his letters, about then, deplored his “copiousness and haste,” said, “He is all smart journalism and cleverness; it is all bright and shallow and limpid, like a business paper—a good one, s’entendu; but there’s no blot of heart’s blood and the Old Night ... I look on and admire; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature, I am wounded.” But, naturally, Stevenson, conjuring fastidiously with words, like a lapidary with jewels, felt that his literary ideals were outraged by this exuberant, amazing young man who, coming with a banjo for a lyre, took the sacred temple of the Muses by violence and disturbed it with raucous echoes of the music hall; who brought the manners and speech of the canteen into the library, made free use of slang and ugly colloquialisms with the most brilliant effectiveness, and in general strode rough-shod over so many accepted artistic conventions. It was easy to say his verse was meretriciously catchy, but its cleverness, the bite of its irony and humor were indisputable; that his Anglo-Indian stories were marred by vulgarities and crudities of characterization; that the riotous humors of Mulvaney and his soldier-chums showed nothing but a boisterous, schoolboyish sense of fun; but there was no denying the originality of mind, the abounding genius that was experimentally at work in all these things.
Not only had Kipling broken new ground; he had defied conventions and broken it in a new way of his own, and through the following ten years he was justified of his daring by the maturer, more masterly poems and stories in “Barrack-Room Ballads,” “The Seven Seas,” “Many Inventions,” the two “Jungle Books,” and, above all, by “Kim”—that wonderful story, steeped in the magic of the Orient, with its rich gallery of characters, native and European, and its intimately pictured panorama of the strange, motley life that flows along the Grand Trunk Road.
He was a born story-teller, and could interest you as keenly in ships, bridges, machinery and mechanical objects as in the human comedy and tragedy. He could take his tone with an equal mastery, as occasion served, from the smoke-room, the bar or the street, and from the golden phrasing and flashing visions of the biblical prophets. However much the critics might qualify and hesitate, the larger world of readers, men and women, cultured and uncultured, took him to their hearts without reserve. Never since Dickens died had any author won so magical a hold on the admiration and affection of our people.
In those days, at the height of his fame, when he lay dangerously ill in New York, the cables could not have flung more bulletins across the world, nor the newspapers followed his hourly progress more excitedly if it had been a ruling monarch in extremis. The Kaiser cabled enquiries; all England and America stood in suspense, as it were, at the closed door of that sick chamber, as those who loved Goldsmith lingered on his staircase, when he was near the end, waiting for news of him. Yet, curiously enough, in the personality of Kipling, so far as it has revealed itself to his readers, there is little of the gentleness and lovableness of Goldsmith, nor of the genial, overflowing kindness that drew the multitude to Dickens. It was the sheer spell and brilliance of his work, I think, that drew them to Kipling more than the lure of any personal charm.
During the Boer War he developed into the poet and apostle of Imperialism; became our high-priest of Empire, Colonial expansion, commercial supremacy and material prosperity. You may see in some of his poems of that period and in his recently published “Letters of Travel” how he has failed to advance with the times, how out of touch he is with the spirit of modern democracy. A certain arrogance and cocksureness had increased upon him; his god was the old Hebrew god of battles, his the chosen race, and even amid the magnificent contritions of the “Recessional” he cannot forget that we are superior to the “lesser breeds without the law.” He is no idealist and has no sympathy with the hopes of the poor and lowly; there is scornfulness in his attitude toward those who do not share his belief that the present social order cannot be improved, who do not join him in worshipping “the God of things as they are,” but pay homage rather to the God of things as they ought to be. And yet I remember the beauty, the wisdom and whimsical understanding there is in his stories for children—I remember that children’s song in “Puck of Pook’s Hill”—
“Teach us the strength that cannot seek,
By deed or thought, to hurt the weak;
That, under Thee, we may possess
Man’s strength to comfort man’s distress.”
—I remember stray, poignant things in this book and that, especially in “The Years Between,” and am ready to think I misjudge him when I take his intolerant Imperialism too seriously, and that these rarer, kindlier moods, these larger-hearted emotions are at least as characteristic of him.
Someday somebody will gather into one glorious volume “The Finest Story in the World,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” “At the End of the Passage,” “The Man Who Would Be King,” “The Brushwood Boy,” “They,” and a score or so of other short stories; and with “Kim,” and a book of such poems as “Sussex,” “Tomlinson,” “To the True Romance,” “M’Andrew’s Hymn,” “The Last Chantey,” those great ballads of “The Bolivar” and “The Mary Gloster,” and half a hundred more, there will be enough and more than enough to give him rank with those whose work shall endure “while there’s a world, a people and a year.” After all, most of his Imperialistic verse and his prose essays into political and economic problems were mainly topical and are already pretty much out of date; he is rich enough to let them go and be none the poorer.
If his popularity has waned it is chiefly, as I have said, because he has not advanced with the times—he has lost touch with the real spirit of his age; and I believe that is a result of his having withdrawn too much from contact with his fellows. Dickens did not immure himself at Gads’ Hill; he was always returning to those planes where ordinary folk do congregate and found inspiration, to the last, out among the stir and business of the world. Shakespeare’s work was done in the hurly-burly of London—he stagnated, after he settled down at Stratford, and wrote no more; and one feels that if Kipling would only come out from his hermitage at Burwash and mingle again in the crowded ways of men, as he did in the fulness of his powers, he has it in him yet to be “a bringer of new things,” that shall add new luster even to his old renown.