Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1273 page)

LIVING MASTERS — RUDYARD KIPLING by David Christie Murray

This essay was published by the novelist David Christie Murray and is taken from the book
My Contemporaries in Fiction
, first published in 1897.  The essay explores Kipling’s  poetic abilities, among other things.

The novelist and critic David Christie Murray

V. — LIVING MASTERS — RUDYARD KIPLING

I was ‘up in the back blocks’ of Victoria when I lighted upon some stray copies of the weekly edition of the ‘Melbourne Argus,’ and became aware of the fact that we had amongst us a new teller of stories, with a voice and a physiognomy of his own. The ‘Argus’ had copied from some journal in far-away India a poem and a story, each unsigned, and each bearing evidence of the same hand. A year later I came back to England, and found everybody talking about ‘The Man from Nowhere,’ who had just taken London by storm. Rudyard Kipling’s best work was not as yet before us, but there was no room for doubt as to the newcomer’s quality, and the only question possible was as to whether he had come to stay. That inquiry has now been satisfactorily answered. The new man of half a dozen years ago is one of England’s properties, and not the one of which she is least proud. About midway in his brief and brilliant career, counting from his emergence until now, people began to be afraid that he had emptied his sack. Partly because he had lost the spell of novelty, and partly because he did too much to be always at his best, there came a time when we thought we saw him sinking to a place with the ruck.

Sudden popularity carries with it many grave dangers, but the gravest of all is the temptation to produce careless and unripe work. To this temptation the new man succumbed, but only for awhile. Like the candid friend of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, he saw the snare, and he retired. But at the time when, instead of handing out the bread of life in generous slices, he took to giving us the sweepings of the basket I wrote a set of verses, which I called ‘The Ballad of the Rudyard Kipling.’ I never printed it, because by the time it was fairly written.

Kipling’s work had not merely gone back to its first quality, but seemed brighter and finer than before, and the poor thing, such as it was, was in the nature of a satire. I venture to write down the opening verses here, since they express the feeling with which at least one writer of English fiction hailed his first appearance.

 I

 Oh, we be master mariners that sail the snorting seas,

 Right red-plucked mariners that dare the peril of the storm

 But we be old and worn and cold, and far from rest and ease,

 And only love and brotherhood can keep our tired hearts warm.

 II

 We were a noble company in days not long gone by,

 And mighty craft our elders sailed to every earthly shore.

 Men of worship, and dauntless soul, that feared nor sea nor sky;

 But God’s hand stilled the valiant hearts, and the masters sail no more.

 III

 And for awhile, though we be brave and handy of our trade,

 We sailed no master-galleon, but wrought in cockboats all,

 Slight craft and manned with a single hand; yet many a trip we made,

 Though we but crept from port to port with cargoes scant and small.

 IV

 But on a day of wonder came ashining on the deep,

 A royal Splendour, proud with sail, and generous roar of guns;

 She passed us, and we gaped and stared.

 Her lofty bows were steep,

 And deep she rode the waters deep with a weight of countless tons.

 V

 Her rig was strange, her name unknown, she came we knew not whence,

 But on the flag at her peak we read ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft.’

 And — I speak for one — my breath came thick and my pulse beat hard and tense,

 And we cheered with tears of splendid joy at sight of the splendid craft.

 VI

 She swept us by; her master came and spoke us from the side;

 We knew our elder, though his beard was scarce yet fully grown;

 She spanked for home through churning foam with favouring wind and tide,

 And while we hailed like mad he sailed, a King, to take his own.

Some men are born rich, and some are born lucky, and some are born both to luck and riches. Kipling is one of the last. Nature endowed him with uncommon qualities, and circumstances sent him into the sphere in which those qualities could be most fortunately exercised. It seems strange that the great store of treasure which he opened to us should have been unhandled and unknown so long. His Indian pictures came like a revelation. It is always so when a man of real genius dawns upon the world. It was so when Scott showed men and women the jewelled mines of romance which lay in the highways and byways of homely Scotland. It was so when Dickens bared the Cockney hearth to the sight of all men. Meg Merrilies, and Rob Roy, and Edie Ochiltree were all
there
— the wild, the romantic, the humorous were at the doors of millions of men before Scott saw them. In London, in the early days of Dickens, there were hordes of capable writers eager for something new. Not one of them saw Bob Cratchit, or Fagin, or the Marchioness until Dickens saw them. So, in India, the British Tommy had lived for many a year, and the jungle beasts were there, and Government House and its society were there, and capable men went up and down the land, sensible of its charm, its wonder, its remoteness from themselves, and yet not discerning truly. At last, when a thousand feet have trodden upon a thing of inestimable price, there comes along a newspaper man, doing the driest kind of hackwork, bound to a drudgery as stale and dreary as any in life, and he sees what no man has ever seen before him, though it has been plain in view for years and years. Through scorn and discouragement and contumely he polishes his treasure, in painful hours snatched from distasteful labour, and at last he brings it where it can be seen and known for what it is.*

     * I learn, on the very best authority, that Mr. Kipling

     regards his early and unrecognised days in India with much

     kindlier eyes than this would seem to indicate. It may be

     thought that, knowing this, I should amend or delete the

     passage. I let it stand, however, with this note as a

     qualification, because I think it possible that he, like the

     rest of us, looks on the past through tinted spectacles.

It is only genius which owns the seeing eye. There are in Great Britain to-day a dozen writers of fine faculty, trained to observe, trained to give to observation its fullest artistic result; and they are all panting for something new. The something new is under their noses. They see it and touch it every day. If I could find it, my name in a year would sail over the seas, and I should be a great personage. But I shall not find it. None of the men who are now known will find it. It is always the unknown man who makes that sort of discovery. He will come in time, and when he comes we shall wonder and admire, and say: ‘How new! How true!’ Why, in that very matter of Tommy Atkins, whose manifold portraits have done as much as anything to endear Kipling to the English people — it is known to many that in my own foolish youth I enlisted in the Army. I lived with Tommy. I fought and chaffed and drank and drilled and marched, and went ‘up tahn’ with him, and did pack drill, and had C.B. with him. I turned novel-writer afterwards, and never so much as dreamt of giving Tommy a place in my pages. Then comes Kipling, not knowing him one-half as well in one way, and knowing him a thousand times better in another way, and makes a noble and beautiful and merited reputation out of him; shows the man inside the military toggery, and makes us laugh and cry, and exult with feeling. There was a man in New South Wales — a shepherd — who went raving mad when he learnt that the heavy black dust which spoilt his pasture was tin, and that he had waked and slept for years without discovering the gigantic fortune which was all about him. I will not go mad, if I can help it, but I do think it rather hard lines on me that I hadn’t the simple genius to see what lay in Tommy.

A good deal has been said of the occasional coarseness of Kipling’s pages. There are readers who find it offensive, and they have every right to the expression of their feelings. I confess to having been startled once or twice, but never in a wholly disagreeable fashion — never as ‘Jude the Obscure’ startled. Poor Captain Mayne Reid, who is still beloved by here and there a schoolboy, wrote a preface to one of his books — I think ‘The Rifle Rangers,’ but it is years on years since I saw it — in order to put forth his defence for the introduction of an occasional oath or impious expletive in the conversation of his men of the prairies. He pleaded necessity. It was impossible to portray his men without it. And he argued that an oath does not soil the mind ‘like the clinging immorality of an unchaste episode.’ The majority of Englishmen will agree with the gallant Captain. Kipling is rough at times, and daring, but he is always clean and honest. There are no hermaphroditic cravings after sexual excitement in him. He is too much of a man to care for that kind of thing.

What a benefactor an honest laughter-maker is! Since Dickens there has been nobody to fill our lungs like Kipling. Is it not better that the public should have ‘My Lord the Elephant’ and ‘Brugglesmith’ to laugh outright at than that they should be feebly sniggering over the jest-books begotten on English Dulness by Yankee humour, as they were eight or nine years ago? That jugful of Cockney sky-blue, with a feeble dash of Mark Twain in it, which was called ‘Three Men in a Boat’ was not a cheerful tipple for a mental bank-holiday, but we poor moderns got no better till the coming of Kipling. We have a right to be grateful to the man who can make us laugh.

The thing which strikes everybody who reads Kipling — and who does not? — is the truly astonishing range of his knowledge of technicalities. He is very often beyond me altogether, but I presume him to be accurate, because nobody finds him out, and that is a thing which specialists are so fond of doing that we may be sure they would have been about him in clouds if he had been vulnerable. He gives one the impression at times of being arrogant about this special fund of knowledge. But he nowhere cares to make his modesty conspicuous to the reader, and his cocksureness is only the obverse of his best literary virtue. It comes from the very crispness and definiteness with which he sees things. There are no clouds about the edges of his perceptions. They are all clear and
nette
, Things observed by such a man dogmatise to the mind, and it is natural that he should dogmatise as to what he sees with such apparent precision and completeness.

A recent writer, anonymous, but speaking from a respectable vehicle as platform, has told us that the short story is the highest form into which any expression of the art of fiction can be cast. This to me looks very like nonsense. I do not know any short story which can take rank with ‘Père Goriot,’ or ‘Vanity Fair,’ or ‘David Copper-field.’ The short story has charms of its own, and makes demands of its own. What those demands are only the writers who have subjected themselves to its tyranny can know. The ordinary man who tries this form of art finds early that he is emptying his mental pockets. Kipling’s riches in this respect have looked as if they were without end, and no man before him has paid away so much. But it has to be remembered here that in many examples of his power in this way he has been purely episodic, and the discovery or creation of an episode is a much simpler thing than the discovery or creation of a story proper, which is a collection of episodes, arranged in close sequence, and leading to a catastrophe, tragic or comic, as the theme may determine.