Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1275 page)

Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to song, and a man on the Bombay side would answer him, and a man in Bengal would echo back, till at last we would all be crowing tog-ether like cocks before daybreak, when it is too dark to see your fellow. And, occasionally, some unhappy Chaaszee, away in the China Ports, would lift up his voice among the tea-chests, and the queer-smelling yellow papers of the Far East brought us his sorrows. . . . My verses had the good fortune to last a little longer than some others, which were more true to facts and certainly better workmanship. Men in the Army, and the Civil Service, and the Railway, wrote to me saying that the rhymes might be made into a book. Some of them had been sung to the banjoes round campfires, and some had run as far down coast as Rangoon and Moulmein, and up to Mandalay. A real book was out of the question, but I knew that Rukn-Din and the office plant were at my disposal at a price, if I did not use the office time. Also, I had handled in the previous year a couple of small books, of which I was part owner, and had lost nothing. So there was built a sort of a book, a lean oblong docket, wire- stitched, to imitate a D. O. Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed to all heads of departments and all Government officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty years’ service. Of these ‘ books ‘

we made some hundreds, and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being to my hand, I took reply-postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore, and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, the left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The down- country papers complained of the form of the thing. The wire binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. This was not intentional, but Heaven helps those who

help themselves. Consequently, there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time I exchanged the pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real publisher’s imprint on the title-page. More verses were taken out and put in, and some of that edition travelled as far as Hong Kong on the map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and, at last, the book came to London with a gilt top and a stiff back, and was advertised in the publishers’ poetry department.

But I loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a pink string round its stomach; a child’s child, ignorant that it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments; and before people had learned, beyond doubt, how its author lay awake of nights in India, plotting and scheming to write something that should ‘ take’ with the English public.”

This little brown baby is, very naturally, one of the collector’s treasures to-day, just as Mr. Kipling’s first sock, or his first sailor-hat, would have its commercial value. Even a critic lingers thus unduly over his first book — if “ Departmental Ditties “ can be called a first book after the reference in the foregoing to “a couple of small books, of which I was part owner.” What these books were I must leave the bibliographer to tell us.

From a literary, or any serious, point of view, indeed, “ Departmental Ditties” are hardly more important than Mr. Kipling’s first sailor-hat. That they should be scattered broadcast at sixpence is a little unfair to his position at the moment, though in many respects they are the very thing for a sixpenny public. For the most part they are sprightly imitations of American farcical verse-writers; the kind of knock-about poetry you find in comic recitation books — and often very funny poetry, too, in my humble opinion. For example, not spedally of the funniness, but of the type —

“
Potiphar Gubbins, C.E.,

Stands at the top of the tree;

And I muse in my bed on the reasons that led

To the hoisting of Potiphar G . . .

Potiphar Gubbins, C.E.,

Is coarse as a chimpanzee;

And I can’t understand why you gave him your hand,

Lovely Mehitabel Lee.”

‘Boanerges Blitzen “ and “ Ahasuerus Jenkins” of the “Operatic Own” are two more names which give the genre better than many words — Anglo-Indian humours and ironies set to American farce-metres. For typical examples, and most amusing, read “The Post that Fitted” and “A Code of Morals.” Then you have comic Poe to this tune:

“As I left the Halls at Lumley, rose the vision of a comely

Maid last season worshipped dumbly, watched with fervour from afar.”

Comic Swinburne to this:

“Will you conquer my heart with your beauty; my soul going out from afar?

Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautious shikar?

Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking and blind?

Shall I meet you next session at Simla, oh sweetest and best of your kind?”

Comic sentimental as thus:

“Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,

For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.”

Comic Omar, too, applied to the dilemmas of the Indian budget:

“Now the New Year, reviving last Year’s Debt,

The thoughtful Fisher casteth wide his Net;

So I with begging Dish and ready Tongue

Assail all Men for all that I can get.”

You will find, also, a comic “ ballade,” duly furnished with an envoi beginning “ Princess.”

Personally, I like Mr. Kipling for beginning with the “ bones.” It was a healthy sign. And here and there amid all the imitative patter there were struck notes, somewhat deeper, which we can recognise now for signs of what was to come. In “ Pa- gett, M.P.” we first hear his impatience with the dilettante grandees who make their fair-weather studies of the East, and pooh- pooh the hard lot of the Anglo-Indian official. Pagett didn’t believe in the stories of Indian heat, till April with its sandflies, May with its dust-storms, June with its dysentery, and July with its “ Cholera Morbus,” convinced him, and he returned home:

“And I laughed as I drove from the station, but the mirth died out on my lips

As I thought of the fools like Pagett who write of their ‘ Eastern trips,’

And the sneers of the travelled idiots who duly misgovern the land,

And I prayed to the Lord to deliver another one into my hand.”

Then there was the ballad of Jack Barrett, who was sent to Ouetta for official reasons worth quoting at length:

“
Jack Barrett went to Ouetta

Because they told him to.

He left his wife at Simla

On three-fourths his monthly screw.

Jack Barrett died at Ouetta

Ere the next month’s pay he drew.

Jack Barrett went to Ouetta

And there gave up the ghost’

Attempting two men’s duty

In that very healthy post;

And Airs. Barrett mourned for him

Five lively months at most.

Jack Barrett’s bones at Ouetta

Enjoy profound repose;

But I shouldn’t be astonished

If now his spirit knows

The reason of his transfer

From the Himalayan snows.

And, when the Last Great Bugle Call

Adown the Hurnai throbs,

When the last grim joke is entered

In the big black Book of Jobs,

And Quetta graveyards give again

Their victims to the air,

I shouldn’t like to be the man

Who sent Jack Barrett there.”

And there were two sea-ballads: “ The Ballad of Fisher’s Boarding-House,” and “The Galley Slave” particularly which secreted hints of the brutal vigour and knock-down metaphor of “ The Ballad of the ‘ Bolivar.’ “ There were also early spring shoots of Mr. Kipling’s aphoristic gift: for example —

“The toad beneath the harrow knows

Exactly where each tooth-point goes,

The butterfly upon the road

Preaches contentment to that toad.”

And —

“
If She have spoken a word, remember thy lips are sealed,

And the Brand of the Dog is upon him by whom is the secret revealed.

If She have written a letter, delay not an instant but burn it.

Tear it in pieces, O Fool, and the wind to her mate shall return it!

If there be trouble to Herward, and a lie of the blackest can clear,

Lie, while thy lips can move or a man is alive to hear.”

In spite of the chivalry of the last quotation, there were hints not uncertain of Mr. Kipling’s general, amused, somewhat contemptuous and bitter, and entirely fatherly, view of women:

“
For Maggie has written a letter to give

me my choice between

The wee little whimpering

Love and the great god Nick o’ Teen.”

That was the trouble referred to in an earlier quotation. The surface moral of the story is that no true man could think twice before choosing — the cigar; but, of course, the real moral, if I am not taking a triviality too seriously, is that a woman worth having wouldn’t make such a silly condition. It is the old story of the lady who threw her glove down among the lions, and received it back in her face. Women are not like that quite always in Mr. Kipling’s writings.

To make an end with “ Departmental Ditties,” one may further instance a prologue and an epilogue, striking a note of artistic seriousness which the intermediate pages hardly support; as though a nigger- minstrel with banjo and blackened face should whisper that he is M. Paderewski in disguise; a note of beauty and pathos, too:

“
For it may be, if still we sing

And tend the Shrine,

Some Deity on wandering wing May here incline;

And, finding all in order meet,

Stay while we worship at Her feet.”

That deity was to visit the shrine in another volume. Meanwhile, “ Departmental Ditties,” to one looking forward, could have little significance; but to us, looking backward, we can see that Mr. Kipling was already tuning his banjo to such purpose that it might even, on occasion, do duty as a lyre.

2. “ Barrack-Room Ballads.”

Mr. Kipling has followed the pleasant old fashion, chiefly associated with Scott, of giving his stories a verse motto usually written bv himself. Often in “ Plain Tales” these verses struck one more than the tales themselves. There had been nothing in “ Departmental Ditties “ so good as:

“
Go, stalk the red deer o’er the heather,

 Ride, follow the fox if you can!

But, for pleasure and profit together,

Allow me the hunting of Man, —

The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul