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.