Rudyard Kipling

by John Palmer

The Day's Work throws back a clear and searching light upon some of the tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed in review. As we look back upon these stories of men and women we realise, in the light of The Day's Work, that machinery—the machinery of Army and Empire—enters repeatedly as a leading motive. Far from regarding Mr Kipling's passion for technical engineering as something which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling human tales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human tales are no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion that helplessly spins them. As literature William the Conqueror and The Head of the District have less to do with the politics of India than with the nuts and bolts of The Ship That Found Herself. The same truth applies equally to a book which has been discussed beyond all proportion to its rank among the stories of Mr Kipling. The Light That Failed is often read as the high and tragical love story of Dick Heldar; but it is really nothing of the kind. It really belongs to The Day's Work. As the love story of Dick Heldar it is of small account. Mr Kipling thinks very little of it from that point of view. He has even allowed it, upon that side, to be deprived of all its significance in order to meet the needs of a popular actor. Mr Kipling is not the man to sell his conscience. Therefore his admirers may infer from the fact that he has sold Dick and Maisie to British and American playgoers that Dick and Maisie are not regarded by their author as of the first importance. We cannot think of Mr Kipling as allowing one screw of the ship that found herself to be misplaced. But he has cheerfully allowed his story of Dick and Maisie to be turned with a few strokes of the pen into an effective curtain for a negligible play.

This does not mean that The Light That Failed is not a characteristic and a fine achievement. It means that its character and fineness have nothing to do with Dick and Maisie or with any of that stuff of the story which contrives to exist behind the footlights of Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson's theatre. The Light That Failed must not be read as the love story of a painter who goes blind. It must be read, with .007 and The Maltese Cat, as an enthusiastic account of the day's work of a newspaper correspondent. The really vital passages of the story have all to do with Mr Kipling's chosen text of work for work's sake. Dick's work and not Dick himself is the hero of the play. The only incident which really affects us is the scraping out of his last picture. We do not bother in the least as to whether Maisie returns to him or stays away; because we do not believe in the reality of Maisie and we cannot imagine anything she may or may not do as affecting anyone very seriously. Dick's wrestle with his picture is another matter. He and his friends may talk a great deal of nonsense about their work (nonsense which would strictly require us to condemn every good page which Mr Kipling has written), but there is no doubt whatever that the enthusiasm of men for men's work is the vital and moving principle of The Light That Failed. The motive of the whole story is the motive of The Bridge-Builders. The rest is merely accessory.

The Light That Failed is full of instruction for the close critic of Mr Kipling. We discover in it three out of the many levels of excellence in which he moves. First there is a cunning artificer pretending to a knowledge and admiration which he does not really possess—an artificer who tries to impose Maisie and the Red-Haired Girl upon us in the same deceiving way as the way in which he tried to impose upon us Mrs Hawksbee and the Copleigh girls. Second, there is a clever writer of soldier stories, showing us some nasty fighting at close range, with a far too elaborate pretence that he can take it all for granted as a professional combatant. Finally there is an inspired author celebrating the world's work—an author we have agreed to put in a higher rank than those other literary experts who have quite unjustifiably stolen his greener laurels.

VII

THE FINER GRAIN

It has been Mr Kipling's habit all through his career to peg out literary claims for himself as evidence of his intention later on to work them at a profit. Thus, writing Plain Tales from the Hills, he includes one or two stories, such as The Taking of Lungtungpen and The Three Musketeers, which clearly look forward to Soldiers Three and all the later stories in that kind. Or, again, he looks forward in Tods' Amendment and Wee Willie Winkie to the time when he will write many stories, and, in a sense, whole books concerning children. Tods' Amendment promises Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Just So Stories; it even promises Stalky & Co., which is simply the best collection of boisterous boy farces ever written. Then, again, there is In the Rukh, out of Many Inventions, which looks forward to the Jungle Book. Finally, there is, in The Day's Work, clear evidence of Mr Kipling's intention ultimately to abandon the hills and plains of India and to take literary seisin of the country and chronicles of England.

The first undoubted evidence that Mr Kipling, who started with skilful tales of India, was bound in the end to turn homewards for a deeper inspiration is contained in a story from The Day's Work. My Sunday at Home is ostensibly broad farce, of the Brugglesmith variety—farce which might well call for a chapter to itself were it not that broad farce is much the same whoever the writer may be. But My Sunday at Home is really less important as farce than as evidence of Mr Kipling's enthusiasm for the stillness and ancientry of the English wayside. The pages of this story distil and drip with peace. Moreover, the story is neighboured with two others, all beckoning Mr Kipling home to Burwash in Sussex. There is the Brushwood Boy, who after work comes home and finds it good—good after his work is done. There is also An Error in the Fourth Dimension wherein Mr Kipling is found playing affectionately with the idea that England is quite unlike any other country. There is in England a fourth dimension which is beyond the perception, say, of an American railway king, who after much amazement and wrath concludes that the English are not a modern people and thereafter returns to his own more reasonable land.

Of the miscellaneous stories in which Mr Kipling surrenders utterly to this later theme perhaps the most memorable is An Habitation Enforced from Actions and Reactions. Here we are in quite another plane of authorship from that in which we have moved in the tales of India. There is a wide difference between The Return of Imray—to take one of the most skilful tales of India—and An Habitation Enforced. The Return of Imray betrays the conscious resolution of a clever man of letters to make the most effective use of good material. But An Habitation Enforced is the spontaneous gesture of pure feeling. The Indian stories are ingenious and well managed. Their point is made. Their workmanship is excellent. Atmospheres and impressions are cunningly arranged. But they very rarely succeed in carrying the reader as the reader is carried upon this later tide.

The feeling of An Habitation Enforced, as of all the English tales, is that of the traveller returned. The value of Mr Kipling's traffics and discoveries over the seven seas is less in the record he has made of these adventures than in their having enabled him to return to England with eyes sharpened by exile, with his senses alert for that fourth dimension which does not exist for the stranger. An Habitation Enforced is inspired by the nostalgia of inveterate banishment. Some part of its perfection—it is one of the few perfect short stories in the English tongue—is due to the perfect agreement of its form with the passion that informs its writing. It is the story of a homing Englishwoman, and of her restoration to the absolute earth of her forbears. In writing of this woman Mr Kipling has only had to recall his own joyful adventure in picking up the threads of a life at once familiar and mysterious, in meeting again the homely miracle of things that never change. Finally England claims her utterly—her and her children and her American husband. It was an American who bade Cloke, man of the soil and acquired retainer of the family, bring down larch-poles for a light bridge over the brook; but it was an Englishman reclaimed who needs consented to Cloke's amendment: