MR. RUDYARD KIPLING
1. The Good Story-teller
Mr. Kipling is an author whom one has loved and hated a good deal. One has loved him as the eternal schoolboy revelling in smells and bad language and dangerous living. One has loved him less, but one has at least listened to him, as the knowing youth who could tell one all about the ladies of Simla. One has found him rather adorable as the favourite uncle with the funny animal stories. One has been amazed by his magnificent make-believe as he has told one about dim forgotten peoples that have disappeared under the ground. One has detested him, on the other hand, as the evangelist with the umbrella—the little Anglo-Indian Prussian who sing hymns of hate and Hempire.
Luckily, this last Kipling is allowed an entirely free voice only in verse. If one avoids Barrack Room Ballads and The Seven Seas, one misses the worst of him. He visits the prose stories, too, it is true, but he does not dominate them in the same degree. Prose is his easy chair, in which his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand. Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. Recessional surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr. Kipling has written. But, apart from Recessional, most of his political verse is a mere quickstep of bragging and sneering.
His prose, certainly, stands a third or a fourth reading, as his verse does not. Even in a world which Henry James and Mr. Conrad have taught to study motives and atmospheres with an almost scientific carefulness, Mr. Kipling's "well-hammered anecdotes," as Mr. George Moore once described the stories, still refuse to bore us.
At the same time, they make a different appeal to us from their appeal of twenty or twenty-five years ago. In the early days, we half-worshipped Mr. Kipling because he told us true stories. Now we enjoy him because he tells us amusing stories. He conquered us at first by making us think him a realist. He was the man who knew. We listened to him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us with his cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in a mysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with the barrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives of generals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's trick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy hands of Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaborate detail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood of belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike life as A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. His characters are inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak—dialects which used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of realism—are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's or Ortheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the real thing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling does undoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. There are false touches in the boys' conversation in The Drums of the Fore and Aft, but the humour and energy with which the progress of the regiment to the frontier, its disgrace and its rescue by the drunken children, are described, make it one of the most admirable short stories of our time.
His humour, it must be admitted, is akin to the picaresque. It is amusing to reflect as one looks round the disreputable company of Mr. Kipling's characters, that his work has now been given a place in the library of law and order. When Stalky and Co. was published, parents and schoolmasters protested in alarm, and it seemed doubtful for a time whether Mr. Kipling was to be reckoned among the enemies of society. If I am not mistaken, The Spectator came down on the side of Mr. Kipling, and his reputation as a respectable author was saved.
But the parents and the schoolmasters were not nervous without cause. Mr. Kipling is an anarchist in his preferences to a degree that no bench of bishops could approve. He is, within limits, on the side of the Ishmaelites—the bad boys of the school, the "rips" of the regiment. His books are the praise of the Ishmaelitish life in a world of law and order. They are seldom the praise of a law and order life in a world of law and order. Mr. Kipling demands only one loyalty (beyond mutual loyalty) from his characters. His schoolboys may break every rule in the place, provided that somewhere deep down in their hearts they are loyal to the "Head." His pet soldiers may steal dogs or get drunk, or behave brutally to their heart's content, on condition that they cherish a sentimental affection for the Colonel. Critics used to explain this aspect of Mr. Kipling's work by saying that he likes to show the heart of good in things evil. But that is not really a characteristic of his work. What he is most interested in is neither good nor evil but simply roguery. As an artist, he is a barn rebel and lover of mischief. As a politician he is on the side of the judges and the lawyers. It was his politics and not his art that ultimately made him the idol of the genteel world.