Although Mr. Kipling is British to the core, there is nothing insular about his experience; he is as much-travelled as Ulysses.
"For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known: cities of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all."
Born in India, educated at an English school, circumnavigator of the globe, he is equally at home in the snows of the Canadian Rockies, or in the fierce heat east of Suez; in the fogs of the Channel, or under the Southern Cross at Capetown. Nor is he a mere sojourner on the earth: he has lived for years in his own house, in England, in Vermont, and in India, and has had abundant opportunity to compare the climate of Brattleboro with that of Bombay.
A born journalist and reporter, his publications first saw the light in ephemeral Indian sheets. In the late eighties he began to amuse himself with the composition of squibs of verse, which he printed in the local newspaper; these became popular, and were cited and sung with enthusiasm. Emboldened by this first taste of success, he put together a little volume bound like a Government report; he then sent around reply post-cards for cash orders, in the fashion already made famous by Walt Whitman. It is needless to say that copies of this book command a fancy price to-day. He immediately contracted what Holmes used to call "lead-poisoning," and the sight of his work in type made a literary career certain. He produced volume after volume, in both prose and verse, with amazing rapidity, and his fame overflowed the world. A London periodical prophesied in 1888, "The book gives hope of a new literary star of no mean magnitude rising in the East." The amount and excellence of his output may be judged when we remember that in the three years from 1886 to 1889 he published Departmental Ditties, Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three, In Black and White, The Story of the Gadsbys, The Man Who Would Be King, The Phantom 'Rickshaw, Wee Willie Winkie, and other narratives.
The originality, freshness, and power of all this work made Europe stare and gasp. For some years he had as much notoriety as reputation. We used to hear of the Kipling "craze," the Kipling "boom," the Kipling "fad," and Kipling clubs sprang up like mushrooms. It was difficult to read him in cool blood, because he was discussed pro and con with so much passion. He was fashionable, in the manner of ping-pong; and there were not wanting pessimistic prophets who looked upon him as a comet rather than a fixed star. So late as 1895 a well-known American journal said of him: "Rudyard Kipling is supposed to be the cleverest man now handling the pen. The magazines accept everything he writes, and pay him fabulous prices. Kipling is now printing a series of Jungle Stories that are so weak and foolish that we have never been able to read them. They are not fables: they are stories of animals talking, and they are pointless, so far as the average reader is able to judge. We have asked a good many magazine editors about Kipling's Jungle Stories; they all express the same astonishment that the magazine editors accept them. Kipling will soon be dropped by the magazine editors; they will inevitably discover that his stories are not admired by the people. Robert Louis Stevenson died just in time to save him from the same fate."
Many honestly believed that Mr. Kipling could write only in flashes; that he was incapable of producing a complete novel. His answer to this was The Light that Failed, which, although he made the mistake of giving it a reversible ending, indicated that his own lamp had yet sufficient oil. In 1895 he added immensely to the solidity of his fame by printing The Brushwood Boy, the scenes of which he announced previously would be laid in "England, India, and the world of dreams." Here he temporarily forsook the land of mysterious horror for the land of mysterious beauty, and many were grateful, and said so. In 1896 the appearance of The Seven Seas proved beyond cavil that he was something more than a music-hall rimester—that he was really among the English poets. The very next year The Recessional stirred the religious consciousness of the whole English-speaking race. And although much of his subsequent career seems to be a nullification of the sentiment of that poem, it will remain imperishable when the absent-minded beggars and the flannelled fools have reached the oblivion they so richly deserve.
In 1897 he tried his hand for the second time at a complete novel, Captains Courageous, and the result might safely be called a success. The moral of this story will be worth a word or two later on. The next year an important volume came from his pen, The Day's Work—important because it is in this volume that the new Kipling is first plainly seen, and the mechanical engineer takes the place of the literary artist. Such curiosities as The Ship that Found Herself, The Bridge-Builders, .007, became anything but curiosities in his later work. This collection was sadly marred by the inclusion of such wretched stuff as My Sunday at Home, and An Error in the Fourth Dimension; but it was glorified by one of the most exquisitely tender and beautiful of all Mr. Kipling's tales, William the Conqueror. And it should not be forgotten that the author saw fit to close this volume with the previously printed and universally popular Brushwood Boy. Then, at the very height of his ten years' fame, Mr. Kipling came closer to death than almost any other individual has safely done. As he lay sick with pneumonia in New York, the American people, whom he has so frequently ridiculed, were more generally and profoundly affected than they have been at the bedside of a dying President. The year 1899 marked the great physical crisis of his life, and seems also to indicate a turning-point in his literary career.
Whatever may be thought of the relative merits of Mr. Kipling's early and later style, it is fortunate for him that the two decades of composition were not transposed. We all read the early work because we could not help it; we read his twentieth-century compositions because he wrote them. It is lucky that the Plain Tales from the Hills preceded Puck of Pook's Hill, and that The Light that Failed came before Stalky and Co. Whether these later productions could have got into print without the tremendous prestige of their author's name, is a question that has all the fascination and all the insolubility of speculative philosophy. The suddenness of his early popularity may be perhaps partly accounted for by the fact that he was working a new field. The two authors who have most influenced Mr. Kipling's style are both Americans—Bret Harte and Mark Twain; and the analogy between the sudden fame of Harte and the sudden fame of Mr. Kipling is too obvious to escape notice. Bret Harte found in California ore of a different kind than his maddened contemporaries sought; his early tales had all the charm of something new and strange. What Bret Harte made out of California Mr. Kipling made out of India; at the beginning he was a "sectional writer," who, with the instinct of genius, made his literary opportunity out of his environment. The material was at hand, the time was ripe, and the man was on the spot. It was the strong "local colour" in these powerful Indian tales that captivated readers—who, in far-away centres of culture and comfort, delighted to read of primitive passions in savage surroundings. We had all the rest and change of air that we could have obtained in a journey to the Orient, without any of the expense, discomfort, and peril.
But after the spell of the wizard's imagination has left us, we cannot help asking, after the manner of the small boy, Is it true? Are these pictures of English and native life in India faithful reflexions of fact? Can we depend on Mr. Kipling for India, as we can depend (let us say) on Daudet for a picture of the Rue de la Paix? Now it is a notable fact that local colour seems most genuine to those who are unable to verify it. It is a melancholy truth that the community portrayed by a novelist not only almost invariably deny the likeness of the portrait, but that they emphatically resent the liberty taken. Stories of college life are laughed to scorn by the young gentlemen described therein, no matter how fine the local colour may seem to outsiders. The same is true of social strata in society, of provincial towns, and Heaven only knows what the Slums would say to their depiction in novels, if only the Slums could read. One reason for this is that a novel or a short story must have a beginning and an end, and some kind of a plot; whereas life has no such thing, nor anything remotely resembling it. When honest people see their daily lives, made up of thousands of unrelated incidents, served up to remote readers in the form of an orderly progression of events, leading up to a proper climax, the whole thing seems monstrously unreal and untrue. "Why, we are not in the least like that!" they cry. And I have purposely omitted the factor of exaggeration, absolutely essential to the realistic novelist or playwright.
In a notice of the Plain Tales from the Hills, the London Saturday Review remarked, "Mr. Kipling knows and appreciates the English in India." But it is more interesting and profitable to see how his stories were regarded in the country he described. In the Calcutta Times, for 14 September, 1895, there was a long editorial which is valuable, at any rate, for the point of view. After mentioning the Plain Tales, Soldiers Three, Barrack-room Ballads, etc., the Times critic said:—