John Palmer

“ 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. ”

“ Here, however, we approach Kim merely as a tale of India—as a link artfully used by Mr Kipling to connect and pass in review the whole pageant of Imperial India as it is revealed to Western eyes—priests, peasants, soldiers, civilians, people of the plains and hills, women of the latticed palanquin and the bazaar, Hindu and Mohammedan, Afghan and Bengali. The picture of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim is an almost unsurpassed piece of descriptive writing. The diversity of the picture dazzles and bewilders us at first. ”

“ It is a lawful adventure, and for some it is an absolute duty, to follow and challenge the Presence in word and deed. Englishmen who live in her shadow have sometimes for their honour to grasp and defy her; to assume that they are bound to question her authority. India for all her unknown terror has to be wrestled with for the blessing that England requires upon the labour of the English. ”

“ Some poor soul has risen to throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes like heliographic signals.... Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest. It is only the lower-class women who sleep on the house-tops. ”

“ When Mr Kipling tells how a released piston-rod drove up fiercely and started the nuts of the cylinder-cover, it is an incantation. His machines are more alive than his men and women. It is more important to know about the cast-iron supporting-column of Mr Kipling's forward engine than to know that Maisie had long hair and grey eyes, or to know what happened to any of the people whom it concerned. ”

“ McGoggin, in fact, was converted; for, as Mr Kipling explains, his story is really a tract—a tract whose purpose is to convey that India is able to cure the most resolute positivist of his positivism. Mr Kipling's India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips. You do not talk of Humanity in India, because in India "you really see humanity—raw, brown, naked humanity—with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot." ”

“ He is not to be understood as a man singular only in his experience, unloading anecdotes from a crowded life, excelling in emphasis and reality by virtue of things actually seen and done. On the contrary, Mr Kipling writes tales because he is a writer.
Mr Kipling has seen more of the scattered life of the world and been more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his literary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any the less devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that he is one of the craftiest authors who ever lived. ”

“ The simple fact that Mr Kipling's best stories are those in which his fancy is most free is answer enough to those who put him among the reporters of things as they are. It sufficiently excuses us from the long and difficult inquiry as to whether Mr Kipling's account of the people who live next door is accurate and minute, and allows us to assume, without starting a controversy which only a heavy volume could determine, that, if Mr Kipling had ever set out to describe the people who live next door, he would have simplified them out of all recognition. ”

“ This story is the real beginning of Puck—to whom Mr Kipling's latest volumes are addressed. In Puck of Pook's Hill Mr Kipling takes seisin of England in all times—more particularly of that trodden nook of England about Pevensey. This book is less a book of children and fairies than an English chronicle. Dan and Una are the least living of Mr Kipling's children—they are as shadowy as the little ghost who dropped a kiss upon the palm of the visitor in the mansion of They. The men, too, who come and go, are shadows. It is the land which abides and is real. ”

“ There is a continuously implicit protest in all Mr Kipling's soldier tales that a soldier's killing is like an editor's leader-writing or a painter's sketching from the nude—a protest which by its frequent over-emphasis shows that Mr Kipling, not having Shakespeare's gift of intuition into every kind of man, has not quite succeeded in identifying himself with the soldier's point of view. ”

“ So far is Mr Kipling from being an author inspired and driven to claim a share in the active life of the present, an author who unloads upon us a store of memories and experience, that he is only able to do his finest work as an unchecked and fantastic dreamer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As we look back upon these stories of men and women we realise, in the light of The Day's Work, that machinery—the machinery of Army and Empire—enters repeatedly as a leading motive. Far from regarding Mr Kipling's passion for technical engineering as something which gets in the way of his natural genius for telling human tales, we are brought finally to realise that many of these human tales are no more than an excuse for the indulging of a passion that helplessly spins them. ”

“ We feel in reading Mr Kipling's studies of the social world at Simla that he had no intuitive call to write them; that they are exercises in craft rather than genuine inspirations. Mrs Hawksbee stands for nothing in Mr Kipling's achievement save only for his power to create an illusion of reality and enthusiasm by sheer finish of style. She is not a creation. She is only the best possible example of the clever sleight-of-hand of an accomplished artificer. ”

“ The tales of Mr Kipling which will longest survive him are not the tales where he is competently brutal and omniscient, but the tales where he instinctively flies from the necessity of giving to his vision the likeness of the modern world. ”

“ This is quite the wrong direction from which to approach Mr Kipling's soldier tales. Mr Kipling's ferocity on paper is not to be explained as the result of a natural delight in violence and blood. On the contrary, it is distinctively a literary ferocity—the ferocity, not of a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people. It is essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in speculative politics. ”

“ His first claim to our delight in him is that he is the quickest of young creatures, his senses sharp and clean, of a conscience untroubled, of a spirit that rejoices in nimble work, of a will in which loyalty and courage and the peace of self-confidence are firmly rooted. In a word, he is Mowgli among men. ”

“ For a craftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prose successfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his least abandoned moments, it is child's play to use the more obvious devices of the metrician to similar effect. So far as mere formal excellence is concerned, verse is a journeyman's matter as compared with prose; and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetry troubles Mr Kipling not at all. But we must look beyond the formality of verse to find a poet. ”

“ There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness found in all Mr Kipling's native tales. If the premises of life in India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naïvely innocent as a problem in geometry.
It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East. The white side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in Kim, and in all the hints and small studies for Kim that preceded Mr Kipling's best of all Indian tales. ”

“ Mr Kipling recorded that prediction because he had the best of reasons to know how Eustace Cleever would feel upon the morning after his debauch of enthusiasm for the heroic life. Let each man keep to his work, and know how good it is to do that work as well as it can be done. Eustace Cleever's work was to live the life of imagination and to handle English words—work as difficult to do and normally as useful as the job of the Infant. Though for one heady night Eustace Cleever yearned after a strange career, Mr Kipling knew that he would return without misgiving to the thing he was born to do. ”

“ The stories in which he imposes upon his readers the illusion that he would never have written books if he had stayed at home, that his stories are the carelessly flung reminiscences of a full life—these stories are themselves instances of the skill whereby a cunning author has been able to conceal from his generation the deep difference between artifice and inspiration. A crafty author will often employ his best phrases to describe the thing he has never really seen with the eye of genius. ”

“ When, in the Indian stories, we meet with pages sincerely inspired we discover that their inspiration has very little to do with India and a great deal to do with Mr Kipling's impulse to celebrate the work of the world, and even more to do with his impulse to escape the intellectual casuistry of his generation in a region where life is simple and intense. ”

“ When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over like the rattle of fire-irons in the fender and the grunt of a pole-axed ox, or of a hot encounter between two combatants wherein one of them after feeling for his opponent's eyes finds it necessary to wipe his thumb on his trousers, or of gun wheels greasy from contact with a late gunner—when Mr Kipling writes like this, we admit that his pages are disagreeable. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Mr Kipling, like Eustace Cleever, knows that though nothing is more pleasant than to talk with young subalterns, yet the born author remains always an author. He knows, too, that even the deeds he admires in the men who make history are, for him, no more than raw stuff to be taken in hand or rejected according to the author's need. ”

“ The marvel is that they can even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued. Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch sleepers turning to and fro, shifting their beds and again resettling them. ”

“ Mr Kipling, in short, is a man of letters, and we shall realise, before we have done with him, that he is an extremely crafty and careful man of letters. Tales which seem to come out of the barrack-yard, out of the jungle or the deep sea, out of the dust and noise where men are working and building and fighting, come really out of the study of an expert craftsman using the tools of his craft with deliberate care. ”

“ Even Mr Kipling, in his anxiety to emphasise that a regular soldier, apart from any personal and heroic qualities he may happen to possess, is to be regarded as just a skilled practitioner whose work asks for courage and resource, fails to take soldiering with the magnificent nonchalance of Shakespeare's soldiers. ”

“ Second, there is a clever writer of soldier stories, showing us some nasty fighting at close range, with a far too elaborate pretence that he can take it all for granted as a professional combatant. Finally there is an inspired author celebrating the world's work—an author we have agreed to put in a higher rank than those other literary experts who have quite unjustifiably stolen his greener laurels. ”