Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1274 page)

In estimating the value of any writer’s work you must take his range into consideration. Kipling stretches, in emotion, from deep seriousness to exuberant laughter; and his grasp of character is quite firm and sure, whether he deal with Mrs. Hawksbee or with Dinah Shadd; with a field officer or with Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd; with the Inspector of Forests or with Mowgli. He knows the ways of thinking of them all, and he knows the tricks of speech of all, and the outer garniture and daily habitudes of all. His mind seems furnished with an instantaneous camera and a phonographic recorder in combination; and keeping guard over this rare mental mechanism is a spirit of catholic affection and understanding.

Finally, he is an explorer, one of the original discoverers, one of the men who open new regions to our view. A revelation has waited for him. He is as much the master of his English compeers in originality as Stevenson was their master in finished craftsmanship.

RUDYARD KIPLING - A CRITICISM by Richard Le Gallienne

Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947) was an English author and poet. He published this critical appreciation of Kipling’s work in 1900.

Richard Le Gallienne

CONTENTS

NOTE

CHAPTER I

THE POETRY

1. Introductory — ”Departmental Ditties”

2. “ Barrack-Room Ballads.”

3. “ The Seven Seas.”

4. Scattered Poems.

5. General.

CHAPTER II

THE STORIES

I

II

CHAPTER III

MR. KIPLING’S GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE AND INFLUENCE

A CRITICISM BY

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

NOTE

The author acknowledges with thanks, permission to include extracts from the works of Mr. Kipling from .Mr. Kipling himself, Mr. A. P. Watt, his agent, Messrs. Methuen & Co., Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Messrs. George Newnes, Ltd., Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., the Century Company, and the Doubleday McClure Company, his publishers in England and America; also to Messrs. Chatto and “Windus, for similar permission in regard to Mr. Kipling’s contribution to their publication, “ My First Book.”

RUDYARD KIPLING: A CRITICISM

CHAPTER I

THE POETRY

1. Introductory — ”Departmental Ditties”

The history of Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s reputation, in this spring of 1899, lies between two phrases. In 1890 we were saying to each other, with a sense of freemasonry in a new cult: “But that is another story.” To-day we are exhorting each other to: “Take up the white man’s burden.” The value of each phrase is about the value of Mr. Kipling’s reputation in 1890 and 1899, respectively. The smart young Anglo-Indian story-teller is now a prophet. His fame is a church. Meanwhile, he has proved himself a poet such as no one could have foretold from those “Departmental Ditties” which made his introduction to English, as to Anglo-Indian, readers.

Considered merely abstractly, as one considers a meteor for its flight, the phenomena of Mr. Kipling’s reputation are remarkable — the suddenness of his appearance, the decisiveness of it, and the speed of his publicity. In our day the reputation of Aubrey Beardsley is only more remarkable; for its instantaneousness, as by cable all round the world, was not, as in Mr. Kipling’s case, the sudden spark of fame to a mine of work accumulated and already well known in another land — nor, need one say, was Beardsley gifted to be the darling of the Anglo-Saxon.

I have no sufficient data for considering Mr. Kipling’s earlier Indian incarnation.

But I believe I am not wrong in thinking that the first man who said “ Kipling” in an English journal was Sir William Hunter, the journal being The Academy (then edited by that enthusiastic Indian scholar, Mr. J. S. Cotton), and the occasion a review of “ Departmental Ditties.” The article impressed one rather by its prophetic note, than by the case Sir William Hunter was able to make out for quotations that seemed in themselves but little to prognosticate a great reputation. One gathered from the article that the young writer was already a person in India, and that his reputation was even then furiously on its way to us. So, indeed, it proved. Within a fortnight it had fallen upon us like a monsoon, and every paper one took up blew the beautiful shining trumpets of a fair young fame. Kipling was born.

If there had only been “Departmental Ditties” and “Plain Tales,” things might not have gone so merrily. But Mr. Kip ling had heavier metal in readiness to follow up this first attack, and almost immediately the book-stalls were stacked with green paper-backed pamphlets, looking shabby and weary as colonial books have a way of looking, bearing such titles as “ Soldiers Three,” “Under the Deodars,” “Black and White,” “ The Story of the Gadsbys.” Thus it was that all the work at the back of “ Departmental Ditties,” all the prodigious precocity of experience, told. It was when we read “the little green books” that we understood what Sir William Hunter meant.

Now “ Departmental Ditties “ was verse strictly ‘‘ for those whom it might concern ‘‘; that is, for those whose lot was cast among the humours and chicaneries of Anglo-Indian officialdom. We can imagine them enjoying the hits hugely, as they read them week by week in various Indian papers. So do lawyers chuckle over the wicked little verses in The Laiv Times. The laughter which greets the u departmental “ Is necessarily limited in area, but it is proportionally hearty. And Mr. Kipling’s first business was to win the laugh, or the tear, nearest to him.

The reader will remember the vivid picture of an Indian provincial newspaper office which occurs in “The Man who Would be King.” As it was under the conditions there described that “ Departmental Ditties” came into being, a quotation from that storv will not be out of place:

“One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone. A King or courtier or a courtesan or a Community was going to die or get a new Constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram.

It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red- hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our wear)’ world knew that was only pretence. It was a shade cooler in the pressroom than the office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the nightjars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and called for water. The thing that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the loo dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event. I drowsed, and wondered whether the telegraph was a blessing, and whether this dying man, or struggling people, might be aware of the inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason be yond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three o’clock, and the machines spun their flywheels two or three times to see that all was in order before I said the word that would set them off”, I could have shrieked aloud.”

To this it will be interesting to add something from Mr. Kipling’s own account of the birth of his “ little brown baby,” contributed to The Idler a few years ago:

“As there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is but one man in charge of a newspaper, and he is the editor. My chief taught me this on an Indian journal, and he further explained that an order was an order, to be obeyed at a run, not a walk, and that any notion or notions as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the young had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press.

He was breaking me into harness, and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude, which I did not discharge at the time. The path of virtue was very steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed a certain play to the mind, and, unlike the filling in of reading matter, could be done as the spirit served. Now, a sub-editor is not hired to write verses: he is paid to sub-edit. At the time, this discovery shocked me greatly. . . . This is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from office work. They came without invitation, unmanneredly, in the nature of things; but they had to come, and the writing out of them kept me healthy and amused. To the best of my remembrance, no one then discovered their grievous cynicism, or their pessimistic tendency, and I was far too busy, and too happy, to take thought about these things. So they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about me, and they were very bad indeed, and the joy of doing them was payment a thousand times their worth. Some, of course, came and ran away again, and the dear sorrow of going in search of these (out of office hours, and catching them) was almost better than writing them clear. Bad as they were, I burned twice as many as were published, and of the survivors at least two-thirds were cut down at the last moment. Nothing can be wholly beautiful that is not useful, and therefore my verses were made to ease off the perpetual strife between the manager extending his advertstisements and my chief fighting for his reading-matter. They were born to be sacrificed. Rukn-Din, the foreman of our side, approved of them immensely, for he was a Muslim of culture. He would say: ‘ Your potery very good, sir; just coming proper length to-day. You giving more soon? One-third column just proper. Always can take on third page. . . .’ And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the paper. I was in very good company, for there is always an undercurrent of song, a little bitter for the most part, running through the Indian papers. The bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful, and is done by those less than Sir Alfred Lyall — to whom I would apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery — ’ Pekin,’ ‘ Latakia,’ ‘ Cigarette,’ ‘O.,’ ‘ T. W.,’ ‘Foresight,’ and others, whose names come up with the stars out of the Indian Ocean going eastward.