Rudyard Kipling

by John Palmer

THE SAHIB

There is another group of Indian tales, a group which deals with the governance of India—with the men who are spent in the Imperial Service. The peculiar charm and merit of these tales is best considered as a special case of Mr Kipling's delight in the world's work—a subject which claims a chapter to itself. But apart from this, Mr Kipling's Anglo-Indian tales—his presentation of the work of the Indian Empire, of the Anglo-Indian soldier and civilian—have an unfortunate interest of their own. They are mainly responsible for a misconception which has dogged Mr Kipling through all his career. This misconception consists in regarding Mr Kipling as primarily an Imperialist pamphleteer with a brief for the Services and a contempt for the Progressive Parties. It is an error which has acted mischievously upon all who share it—upon the reader who mechanically regrets that Mr Kipling's work should be disfigured with fierce heresy; upon the reader who chuckles with sectarian glee when the "much talkers" are mocked and confounded; upon Mr Kipling himself who has been encouraged to mistake an accident of his career as the essence of his achievement and to regard himself as a sort of Imperial laureate. The origin of this misconception is not obscure. Mr Kipling has written intimate tales of the British Army: he is, therefore, a "militarist." He has lived in India many years, and realised that men who live in India, and administer India, and come into personal contact with Hindus and Mohammedans, know more about India than Members of Parliament who run through the Indian continent between sessions: he is, therefore, a reviler of the free democratic institutions of Great Britain. He has realised that Government departments in Whitehall are not always thought to be very expeditious, well informed and devoted by men who are often confronted with matters that cannot afford to wait for a telegram: he is, therefore, a lover of the high hand and of courses brutal and irregular. He has celebrated the toil and the adventure of pioneers and of outposts: he is, therefore, one who brandishes unseasonably the Imperial sword.

The grain of truth in these deductions is heavily outweighed by the massive absurdity of regarding them as in any sense essential. Mr Kipling brings political prejudice into his work less than almost any living contemporary. At a time when there was hardly an English novel or an English play of consequence which was not also a political pamphlet it was completely false to regard Mr Kipling as a pamphleteer. When most of our English authors were talking from the platform, Mr Kipling—with a few, too few, others—remained apart. He is suspect, not because his Anglo-Indian tales or his army tales are political, but because they record much that is true of the English Services, which fails to square with much that once was popularly believed about them. The real reason of Mr Kipling's false fame as a politician is, not that he is an Imperial pamphleteer, but that, writing of the Army and the Empire, he fails to be a pamphleteer on the other side. His detachment, not his partiality, is at fault.

Mr Kipling's detachment from the politics of his day explains virtually everything that has offended his modern critics. Almost the first thing to realise in discussing Mr Kipling's attitude to modern life is that Mr Kipling has kept absolutely clear of the political and social drift of the last thirty years. He has been conspicuously out of everything. He has had nothing to say to any of the ideas or influences which have formed his contemporaries. While others of his literary generation were growing up amid intellectual movements, democratic tendencies and advances of humanity, Mr Kipling was standing between two civilisations in India which were hardly susceptible of being reconciled till they had been reduced to very simple terms. The instinct to simplify—to get down to something in nature that included the East with the West, the First with the Twentieth century, was naturally strong in one who was born between two nations; and it was an instinct which drove Mr Kipling in the opposite direction from that in which his contemporaries were moving. While Mr Kipling's generation was learning to analyse, refine and interrogate, to become super-subtle and incredulous, to exalt the particular and ignore the general, to probe into the intricate and sensitive places of modern life, Mr Kipling was looking at mankind in the mass, looking back to the half-dozen realities which are the stuff of the poetry of every climate and period—to love of country which is as old as the waters of Babylon, to the faith of Achates, and the affliction of Job. While Mr Kipling's contemporaries have been working towards minute studies of individuals and groups, Mr Kipling has been content to catch the metal of humanity at the flash point, to wait for the passionate moment which reveals all mankind as of one kindred. "We be of one blood, ye and I"—the phrase of the Jungle holds.

To find here evidence of a bias merely political, of an attitude reactionary and hostile to the progress o the world, is to deny sense and meaning to the greatest literature of the world. Mr Kipling's instinctive simplifying of life he shares with the immortals. It is, as we shall see, the immortal part of him. To write of Mr Kipling as though he celebrates the ape and the tiger; extols the Philistine and the brute; calls always for more chops—"bloody ones with gristle"; delights in the savagery of war, and ferociously despises all that separates the Englishman of to-day from his painted ancestor—this is the mistake of critics who cannot distinguish the cant of progress from its reality.

We shall be driven more particularly to consider Mr Kipling's atavism in discussing his tales of the British Army. For the present we are dealing only with India and the "Imperialism" which some of Mr Kipling's critics have taken for an offensive proof of his political prejudice. Mr Kipling's treatment of the Anglo-Indian, and of the dealing of the Anglo-Indian with the Indian Empire, has nothing to do with the Yellows and the Blues. The real motive of Mr Kipling's attitude towards the men on the frontier, in places where deadly things are encountered and there is work to be done, is no more a matter of politics, "progressive" or "reactionary," than is his celebration of the Maltese Cat or of .007. "The White Man's Burden" is the burden of every creature in whom there lives the pride of unrewarded labour, of endurance and courage. In India this pride has to be wholesomely tempered with humility; for India is old and vast and incomprehensible, to be handled with care, to be approached as a country which, though it shows an inscrutably smiling face to the modern world, has the power suddenly to baffle its modern rulers by opening to them glimpses of an intricate and unassailable life which cannot be ruffled by Orders in Council or disturbed by the weak ploughing of teachers from the West. The task of the Anglo-Indian administrator is, indeed, the finest opportunity for that heroic life to the celebration of which Mr Kipling has devoted so many of his tales. This hero has a task which taxes all his ability, which promises little riches and little fame, and is known to be tolerably hopeless. It offers to him a supreme test of his virtue—a test in which the hero is accountable only to his personal will; whose best work is its own reward and comfort.

"Gentlemen come from England," writes Mr Kipling in one of his Indian tales, "spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its work, denouncing or praising it as their ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no one, not even the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of the Empire. Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or broken in health and hope, in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone; but the idea is a pretty one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes forward. If an advance be made, all credit is given to the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs, the Englishmen step forward and accept the blame."

This passage declares the heroic spirit of Mr Kipling's Anglo-Indian tales; and many readers will fail to understand how exactly this spirit has been found vainglorious.

There is a passage in Shakespeare where a king's envoy comes to claim of a high-mettled and sweating warrior the fruits of victory. The warrior grudges less surrendering the fruits of victory to the king than he grudges surrendering his anger at being easily and prettily addressed on the field of battle by a polite and dainty fellow who has no idea how dearly the fruits of victory are purchased. Mr Kipling's heroes are frail enough to feel some of this very natural indignation when unbreathed politicians lecture them in the heat of their Indian day. They come into touch with things simple and bitter. India has searched out the value of many a Western shibboleth, destroyed many doctrines, principles, ideas and theories. Phrases which look well in a peroration look foolish when there is immediate work to be done, and expediency begins to rule. The first lesson which the Indian civilian learns, a lesson which is rarely omitted from any of Mr Kipling's Indian stories, is that practical men are better for being ready to take the world as they find it. The men who worship the Great God Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, most terrible, One-eyed, Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk—men who are set on saving their own particular business—have no time for saving faces and phrases. They have small respect for a principle. They have seen too many principles break down under the particular instance. Hence there is in all Mr Kipling's work a disrespect of things which are printed and made much of in the contemporary British press; and this, again, has encouraged the idea that he is "reactionary," contemptuous of the humanities, and enemy of all the best poets and philosophers.

It will perhaps be well to look a little closely at one or two of Mr Kipling's Indian series. They will help us to realise how the charges we are discussing have arisen and exactly how unreasonable they are. The first of two excellent examples is the story of Tods' Amendment. Tods' Amendment is the story of a Bill brought in by the Supreme Legislative Council of India. Tods was an English baby of six, and he mixed on friendly terms with Indians in the bazaar and with members of the Supreme Legislative Council. The Council was at this time devising a new scheme of land tenure which aimed at "safeguarding the interests" of a few hundred thousand cultivators of the Punjab. The Bill was beautiful on paper; and the Legal Member, who knew Tods, was settling the "minor details." The weak part of the business was that European legislators, dealing with natives, are often puzzled to know which details are the major and which the minor. Also the Native Member was from Calcutta, and knew nothing about the Punjab. Nevertheless, the Bill was known to be a beautiful Bill till Tods happened one evening to be sitting on the knee of the Legal Member, and to hear him mention The Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment. Tods had heard the bazaar talking of a new plan for the Ryotwari, as bazaars talk when there is no white man to overhear. Tods began to prattle, and the Legal Member began to listen, till he soon realised that there was only one drawback to the beautiful Bill. The beautiful Bill, in short, was altogether wrong, more especially in the Council's pet clause which so clearly "safeguarded the interests of the tenant." It therefore came about that the rough draft of the Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment was put away in the Legal Member's private paper-box—"and, opposite the twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal Member, are the words, 'Tods' Amendment.'"