Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1305 page)

square squadrons of writing men would have annexed and used it most strenuously and shamelessly as far back as 1888! Leeb-Lundberg tries hard to catch and pin down for you the aletricious butterfly of style, but it perpetually slips away like a willis in a dark wood. Ever it evades, and we pursue, and, in the end, in spite of the toiling Doctor’s Onomatopes, Parasynthetics, Substantives, and Derivatives, we are all of us as far off from finding out Kipling’s uncanny witchery with words as the children were in attempting to find the Blue Bird. But there are pleasing and appreciative criticisms in Leeb-Lundberg. A few of these are subjoined :

“At the present day there is certainly nobody that would deny that in the world’s literature Kipling stands as the master of ‘The Short Story.’ It is natural that his merits in the development of this literary form should be due to the fact that he, more than anyone before him, possesses the temperament and the style that suit his purpose.

“Kipling’s power of setting off what is essential to a character or a situation is great and undisputed. By a couple of bold strokes — a few brief sentences packed with suggestive words — he knows how to present to the reader a picture of the most intricate situation conceivable, the vividness of which often reminds us of the best achievements of impressionist painters.”

“As pointed out before, Kipling’s popularity as a writer is universal, and not confined to the English public only. It need hardly be said that his universality is not due to such qualities as made the everlasting fame of a Shakespeare, a Goethe, or an Ibsen. The secret of Kipling’s world-wide popularity is, no doubt, hidden in the fact that he, to an epoch of over-civilised passiveness, has preached the simple and age-old gospel of action.”

“For the following survey of Kipling’s development as an author I accept, on the whole, the division into three periods made by Knowles, and based upon the author’s different treatment of character. It hardly needs pointing out that any limitation of these periods by dates is quite out of the question. The periods are :

(1)   Satirical Treatment of Character.

(2)   Sympathetic Treatment of Character (3)        Spiritual Treatment of Character.”

“It appears that Kipling’s real sympathies are not for the educated classes of society, but centre in individuals of a more primitive stage of culture. Whenever he writes about the Indian native or the private of the British army his accents are really true and moving. So in some of the stories in ‘ In Black and White,’ and above all in ‘ Soldiers Three ‘; and if we examine the stories in 1 Plain Tales,’ one of Kipling’s earliest prose works, it will strike us that the only one revealing real tenderness of heart is ‘ The Story of Muhammed Din,’ the hero of which is a native baby.”

“In the ‘Barrack Room Ballads’ of 1892 a sympathetic view of men has gained the complete ascendency over the poet’s juvenile-satirical vein. The years spent in the struggling heart of gigantic London cannot have failed to impress him with the fact that man is in many respects grimly dependent on certain established conditions, and consequently more worthy of sympathy than scornful laughter.”

“If there is one feature that particularly characterises Kipling as a man, it is his passionate love of action. So it does not astonish one that in almost all his writings there is a certain tendency always one and the same. Kipling is, and has been for many years, the preacher of Anglo-Saxon Imperialism. But he is far from being a jingo. His sound and virile judgment shows him the right way, and so, for the most part, he appears as a reformer. But whenever he gives us a picture of the common Englishman, loyally ‘ standing by the day’s work,’ he does not fail to inspire us with a strong belief in the mission of the Anglo- Saxon race.”

Kipling’s interest is so exclusively centred in “ the activities of men and women” that he transfers it to the description of nature. Thus he speaks of “ the seawater’s choking and chuckling,” of “ the kiss of the rain,” of “ the drinking earth,” etc. So the narrative gets a vividness and clearness that sometimes grows almost dazzling. It is also by means of this metaphorising way of observing and thinking that Kipling has accomplished something that is very rarely undertaken — a poetical treatment of modern machinery and industrialism.

Knowles’s remark that “ Kipling has the gift of the inevitable word” is indeed very much to the point. But, after all, the capacity of choosing the right word for the right moment proves — in many cases — to be nothing but a manifestation of metaphorism. So when it is said of Kaa, the huge python, that “ he seemed to pour himself along the ground,” of Mulvaney, when he returned from his “ Incarnation,” that he “ disappeared to the waist in a wave of joyous dogs,” or of the sun that he is “ driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango trees,” the reader really sees the thing as concretely as if he had it for the moment before his eyes. So Kipling always aims at concreteness, and Knowles is right in saying that “ his aversion to the indefinite and abstract amounts almost to horror.”

If we consider Kipling’s great sympathies with the “ lower orders” and his intimate intercourse with such different types as British soldiers, fashionable Anglo-Indian society, children of British officials, and natives, London bank-clerks, Gloucester fishermen, Cali- fornian millionaires, New York journalists, and Devonshire schoolboys — we need not wonder that his own language should bear marks of the cants of almost every social stratum of the Anglo-Saxon world. For Kipling makes a point of speaking to every individual in his own caste-speech.

In such stories as “ 007,” “ The Ship that Found Herself,” and “ The Devil and the Deep Sea,” the author cannot, owing to the nature of the subject, escape writing in a merely professional language; and so hosts of words become unintelligible to the ordinary reader. Nevertheless, we cannot but acknowledge that Kipling has succeeded in giving a highly poetical presentment of the great spectacle of modern machinery, and that perhaps it might be worth while to learn the technical words in order to be capable of enjoying this kind of contemporary romance.

In 1900 L’Humanite Nouvelle — the splendid French review of Science, Art, and Letters — published the following :

“M. Rudyard Kipling ne se preserve pas des ses amis. II a bien ecrit a G. F.

Monkshood une lettre dans laquelle sa modestie offensee (son orgueil s’offense- rait peut-etre a meilleur droit) par le panegyrique de 236 pages que vient de lui consacrer ce dernier, proteste, mais elle proteste un peu faiblement. Aussi M. Monkshood a-t-il passe outre. D’ailleurs, sauf en ce qui regarde le bon renom de M. Kipling, et lui-meme est seul juge de ce qu’il lui plait qu’on fasse de lui, il eut ete regrettable que M. Monkshood brulat son manuscrit. J’en cite quelques passages :

“1 Rudyard Kipling ne s’appartient pas, comme vous ou moi nous nous appar- tenons. II fait corps avec le pays. II y a des milliers de gens qui ecrivent, il y en a des douzaines qui savent ecrire, mais il n’y a qu’un Rudyard Kipling.1 Voici un peu de critique d’apres Taine Apres avoir concede que Rudyard Kipling a de la commiseration pour l’lrlandais, de 1’estime pour TEcossais, M. Monkshood ajoute: 1 Mais le plus profond de son cceur est anglais,’ etablissant ainsi que M. Kipling — qui n’eut cru, a voir l’homme, ou a lire 1’ecrivain! — est l’incarnation meme de la race anglaise ou anglo-saxonne, car le critique ne precise pas. II a hate de conclure : ‘ D’ailleurs, c’est l’opinion enracinee de Kipling que la plus belle chose qui se soit jamais produite dans le monde, c’est l’avenement de l’Anglais. Et il y a quelques pages ecrites dans l’historie qui pourront peut-etre lui donner raison.’ Mais voici un passage de critique purement litteraire : 1 Que dirai- je du poeme Le Drapeau anglais? Seulement ceci : Voila une ceuvre qui inspire, qui n’est pas theatrale, qui est concrete, qui n’est pas anemique, qui est brave, qui n’est pas boursuflue, qui est bonne, belle, vraie. Mais par dessus tout, c’est litteraire.’

“Je trouve un charme infini a cette derniere phrase. Mais il faut resister au plaisir de citer M. Monkshood. Je note seulement, que d’apres son critique, les ceuvres de M. Kipling ne plaisent pas aux femmes (j’avais cru le contraire) parce que d’abord 1 il ne croit pas a la superiority de la femme sur se despote brutal qu’est l’homme ‘; qu’en second lieu 1 il ne croit pas que les femmes aient fait 1’Empire Britannique, bati des docks et invente des cuirasses’; et parce qu’enfin * il ne parle pas d’intrigues adulteres joliment.’ M. Monkshood a Tironie un peu lourde.

“Une derniere constatation a propos de son livre : j’ai observe avec soulagement que, dans toute Tceuvre de Kipling, il y a deux volumes qui laissent froid son panegyriste. Ce sont justement les admirables contes de la Jungle.”

Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s happy poem, “ Pan in Vermont,” was issued by the publishers of “ The Seven Seas.” At first the edition was one of twenty-five copies only. Now very rare.

“Pan in Vermont “ is a spring song, or Renouveau. It bears at its head the quaint epigraph :

“About the 15th of this month you may expect our Mr.   , with the usual spring seed, etc., catalogues. — Florists’ Announcement.”

The poem opens :

“It’s forty in the shade to-day, the spouting eaves declare; The boulders rise above the drift, the southern slopes are bare; Hub-deep in slush Apollo’s car swings north along the Zodiac. Good lack, the spring is back, and Pan is on the road.”

The second stanza carries further the conceit of spring (by personification, Pan), quickening the wintry earth, and leads the reader to a really comical fancy.

Every man who has carried home a seedsman’s catalogue will understand the next few verses, such as :

“What though his phlox and hollyhocks ere half a month demised? What though his ampelopsis clambered not as advertised? Though every seed was guaranteed and every standard true, Forget, forgive, they did not live! Believe, and buy anew.”

SOME RECENT WORDS UPON KIPLING.

Quoted from Barry Pain.

If you read a translation of Kipling into French — however conscientious the translation may be — you will find that the original has gained nothing in the process, but, on the contrary, has lost a good deal. De Maupassant has frequently been translated into English, and never satisfactorily. How can one translate the tale 4 4 Bel-ami” into English? One cannot even get past the title without spoiling something. How are you to render into French without missing a shade, “ No more you can’t pauperise them as ‘asn’t things to begin with. They’re bloomin’ well pauped “?

But here we come to a point which is at first sight puzzling. A male or female duffer writes stories and attains vast popularity. A man of genius, like Kipling, writes stories and also attains vast popularity. In the first case the public is quite wrong : in the second it is quite right. How does this happen?

In the first place, the duffer’s public is not the same as Kipling’s public throughout, though, as some readers are extraordinarily omnivorous, it may be in part the same. Secondly, a great

consensus of enthusiastic critical approval, such as Kipling received, has its weight.

In the eighties Kipling wrote for the Allahabad Pioneer work which reached this country early in the following decade. Critics have spoken of the easy cynicism of “ Plain Tales from the Hills.” Some of them — if it very much matters — may be cynical, but that they had a common quality, easily acquired by a writer, cannot be said. One would need only to quote a page or two from “ Beyond the Pale “or “ The Madness of Private Ortheris” to prove it. This and the succeeding volumes raised the position of the short story. It was with Kipling that many readers began to see that the short story had its own special art — the art of suggestion.

“No, I ain’t mammysick, because my uncle brung me up, but I’m sick for  London again; sick for the sounds of ‘er, an’ the sights of ‘er, and the stinks of ‘er; orange-peel and hasphalte an’ gas comin’ in over Vaux’all Bridge. Sick for the rail goin’ down to Box ‘111, with your gal on your knee an’ a new clay pipe in your face. That, an’ the Stran’ lights where you knows ev’ryone, an’ the copper that takes you up is a old friend that tuk you up before, when you was a little, scritchy boy lyin’ loose between the Temple an’ the Dark Harches.”

In these few lines of dialogue are suggested much of the psychology and much of the biography of Private Stanley Ortheris, No. 22639, B Company.

WHEN KIPLING “ GOT THE SACK.”

Rumour has been busy recently concerning the fee paid to Rudyard Kipling for his series of three articles on the

doings of our submarine officers, and which were published simultaneously in practically every paper of note in this country, and also in the United States.

That the cheque was one “worth having” may be taken for granted, and this is a reminder that Kipling’s first venture in journalism was a ghastly failure.

The affair happened in America. Kipling, then quite unknown to fame, had applied for work on the San Francisco Examiner.

He was given a trial assignment, and returning to the office later he proceeded to write up his “ story “ in his own quaint and inimitable style.

We know enough of Kipling now to be sure that his copy was a perfect piece of work of its kind, but the sub-editor failed altogether to appreciate its peculiar virtues.