Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1284 page)

“But for pleasure and profit together, Allow me the hunting of Man.”

Such is the Tommy Atkins whom Mr. Kipling has chosen for his hero, and a rather superior example, one gathers, from his creator’s evident affection for him.

That his hero’s taste for murder is not unsympathetic to Mr. Kipling, one is hardly left in doubt by one or two other of the stories. Take, for instance, the story in which Ortheris, again the hero, is struck on parade by a nervous young officer. Mr. Kipling represents himself as watching the whole thing from the glacis of the fort, and he sympathetically explains how the young officer came to do it. He was new to his work; had not yet learned to give his commands with confidence, and, hot and flustered with the stupidity of the raw men he was drilling — a batch of recruits with a sprinkling of old hands amongst them — he had struck the nearest man lightly with his cane. The man chanced to be one of the old hands — Ortheris. The captain, happening to go by, had seen the thing, and the young officer is about to betray himself, when Ortheris salutes, and tells the captain a cock-and-bull story to save his officer. In fact, he behaves like a brick.

But it is to Mr. Kipling’s own comment that I wish to draw attention. “ If Ortheris,” he says, “ had slipped in a cartridge and cleared the account at once I should have rejoiced! ‘‘

I should have rejoiced. There is no mistake about the verb. And this is not Tommy Atkins. It is Mr. Kipling in his own person. Had Ortheris, for an offence which Mr. Kipling, at all events, clearly saw to be a slip of nervous petulance, taken his officer’s life, Mr. Kipling would have rejoiced.

But the story which leaves no doubt as to Mr. Kipling’s genuine, unaffected love of brutality is “The Light that Failed.” We are not justified in regarding Dick Heldar as entirely autobiographical; but there can be no fair denial that he is so in certain particulars important in our present connection. He was a war correspondent in love with soldiers. “ O my men, my beautiful men!” he cries, as in his blindness he hears the soldiers pass in Hyde Park. After some years of adventure and campaign his pictures from the Soudan suddenly “ catch on,” and he goes to London, to find himself a famous man. There he meets with a great deal of talk about “ Art,” on which he expresses himself much after the fashion of Mr. Kipling. He has loads of tenderness underneath, but his manners, as those of his fellow war artists and correspondents, are as truculently masculine as all known methods can make them. He loves nobly and once for all, and is rewarded with a coldness which, under the final circumstances, becomes quite inhuman. Yet he never utters a word of complaint. The stoicism, which is one of Mr. Kipling’s good lessons, supports him. And, great as is his love for Maisie, there is just a hinted doubt whether his love for “ the old hot, unregenerate life is not stronger.” Even before his blindness, on his one comparatively happy day with Mai- sie, the “ go-fever” came strong upon him with the sight of the sea. The reader can hardly be blamed then for thinking that in many essential respects Dick Heldar and Rudyard Kipling are one.

Well, remembering that, recall again the scene when Heldar, blind, and hopeless of his love, returns to the Soudan determined on the one thing left him — to die among the spears. Just one smell of the old life he could no longer see, and then to go out for ever. The journey, full of muffled recognitions of the old life, is terrible in its tragedy; but as it nears its end, one almost loses the tragedy in the horrible glee with which the mere darkened nearness to slaughter fills the blind man.

“‘Listen!’ said Dick. A flight of heavy-handed bullets was succeeded by yelling and shouts. The children of the desert valued their nightly amusement, and the train was an excellent mark.

“‘ Is it worth while giving them half a hopper full? ‘ the subaltern asked of the engine which was driven by a Lieutenant of Sappers.

“‘ I should just think so! This is my section of the line. They’ll be playing old Harry with my permanent way if we don’t stop ‘em.’

“‘Right O! ‘

“‘ Hrrmpb! ‘ said the machine gun through all its five noses as the subaltern drew the lever home. The emptv cartridges clashed on the floor and the smoke blew back through the truck. There were indiscriminate firing at the rear of the train, a return fire from the darkness without and unlimited howling. Dick stretched himself on the floor, wild with delight at the sounds and the smells.

“‘ God is very good — I never thought I’d hear this again. Give ‘em hell, men! Oh, give ‘em hell! ‘ he cried.”

This is the bellowing; of mere homicidal lust. It is not the fine battle rapture which, under certain inspiring conditions, one can understand. It is the sheer glee of the slaying of men — or rather of hearing them slain. It is an even less restrained exhibition of murderous passion than Orthe- ris’s exhibition of artistry. It is the mere delight in the smell of blood. It is blood- madness. But war correspondents, like soldiers, are nowadays allowed a certain blood-madness, and the alacrity with which they hasten to indulge their privilege on the first whisper of a war is but another sign of that renaissance of cruelty which is characteristic of the time.

I am not writing from the point of view of one who has no knowledge of such feelings. That it would be difficult to do, for there are few of us, I fear, who have not something, indeed a good deal, somewhere in us that gloatingly responds to cruelty and bloodshed. But, remembering that it has taken all these centuries even to chain, not to speak of taming, that beast in us; remembering the agonies of human history for which it has been responsible; remembering, too, how ever ready it is to snap the all too slight chain of civilisation: surely his is an evil service to humanity who shall in any way help to set loose again so terrible a monster as human cruelty. And that is what it means to glorify war.

Who, knowing what war is — and none knows better than Mr. Kipling — shall deliberately glorify war, horrible always, but ten times more horrible to-day, however brilliantly, humourously, persuasively he does it, is an enemy of society; and the more brilliantly he does it, the greater is his crime.

Mr. Kipling not only glorifies war, but he is never tired of hinting his poor opin ion of the stay-at-home man of peace who cannot take murder in his light and airy fashion, and for whom death retains some of its pity and solemnity. What good fun he makes out of the distinguished novelist talking with three young officers home from India, and realising, bit by bit, what their profession means!

‘‘ ‘ You! Have you shot a man? . . . And have you too r ‘

“‘ Think so,’ saicl Nevin sweetly. “ ‘ Good heavens! And how did you feel afterwards r ‘

“‘ Thirsty. I wanted a smoke too.’ “ How fine to be able to feel — or rather not to feel — like that; and what charming taste in the expression of that heroic nonchalance! No wonder the great novelist felt himself a poor milksop “ intellectuel “ in the presence of these noble boys; for, as Mulvaney has said, “ Canteen bacey’s like the Army. It shpoils a man’s taste for milder things.”

And what a fine contempt is Mr. Kipling’s for the young recruit, who, as yet unused to bloodshed, turns white in his first action, and “ grows acutely miserable when he hears a comrade turn over with the rattle of fire-irons falling into the fender, and the grunt of a pole-axed ox “! Perhaps no one ever wrote so profanely of death as Mr. Kipling, or with such heartless vulgarity.

But one has only to read the newspaper headlines to realise that in this respect, too, Mr. Kipling is the child, as well as the voice, of the moment. A railway accident is now a “ smash,” a fatal fire is a “ big blaze,” and, of course, such are only indicative straws. Whatever the reason may be, there is unmistakably at the moment a general indifference to human suffering, and in some quarters a marked revival of interest in brutalitv. And one encounters it more often, perhaps, among women than men. The Roman lady of the gladiatorial shows is by no means uncommon in English society at the moment.

The Englishman has always been a strange combination of gentleman and brute. The gentleman has been besung to weariness. In Mr. Kipling we have him too; but for the most part Mr. Kipling’s work is an appeal to, and a vindication of, the Englishman as brute. The Englishman, too, as Philistine. That particular Englishman has had rather a dull time of it, in regard to literature, for the past fifty years. In fact, Victorian literature has been painfully spiritual and intellectual. It has gone in for problems and making the world better, for solving “ the riddle,” and keeping down the ape and tiger. Between Ruskin societies, and Browning societies, and pre-Raphaelite poetry (not to speak of those terrible Burne-Joncs women) what wonder if the young Englishman has not yawned and longed to go out and shoot something he could understand! However, being exceedingly docile and, despite his physical courage, of small moral courage, he has gone on submitting to his sisters in these matters. For there was not a single writer of genius to take his part. Then came Stevenson, with his books of adventure, and his gospel of manliness; and the young Englishman began to hope. But then Stevenson was far from brutal enough. Then, too, he had a style. Fatal disadvantage. It gets in the way so.

Then at last came Mr. Kipling, and the young Englishman had the permission of a man of undoubted genius to be just as brutal as he liked. The thing was as true to life as the cinematograph of a prize-fight, and everyone said it was genius too. He had waited a long while for it, but at last it came, a complete Triumph of the Philistines. And now the literature of beauty, of thought, of fancy, all the literature of idealism, can go pack. It must subscribe to the new fashion, or die. All the old lit erary ideals must be discarded even by the literary journals. Idealism flies in panic; or bows down, abjectly sacrificing in terror one reputation after another before the conqueror. The old masters were milksops and knew nothing about writing whatsoever. Literary oracles in New York declare that Mr. Kipling is the greatest master of English prose that has ever written, and an authoritative English journal timidly suggests that there may be one or two of the higher notes of poetry in which Tennyson is Mr. Kipling’s superior. But you feel that the editor has taken his life in his hands. Wilder and wilder grows the popular taste for blood. “ More chops,” goes up the cry more fiercely every hour, “ more chops, bloody ones with gristle.” No one writer can keep pace with the gruesome demand for blood-stained fiction, and so a vast school of battle-and-murder novelists arises, with horses and carriages and country scats and much-photographed babies; and ever the ery goes up, growing to a veritable roar: “More chops, can’t you! Bloody ones with gristle.”

No doubt there is an element of fantastic generalisation in this statement of the situation; but, broadly speaking, it is true of the main current of popular taste. Perhaps we need not seek far for the reason of this widespread reversion to brutality and sensationalism in literature. Is it not the revulsion of an age sick at heart with much thinking; a pessimistic age that is tired to death with the riddle of things; an age that has lost one faith and not yet found another? an age, therefore, that sees but one immediate resource: to take its material pleasures, ruthlessly if need be, and in the coarse excitements life offers to silence the pangs of thought.

For all the humour and buoyancy of his writings Mr. Kipling is at heart a pessimist, and, perhaps, his sincerest expression of opinion in regard to the government of the universe is contained in the fierce Omarian exclamation of Holden in u Without Benefit of Clergy,” addressed to no one in particular, but evidently meant to reach far up into the skies: “ () you brute! You utter brute!” So Omar bade Allah “man’s forgiveness give and take.”

One often sees Mr. Kipling praised as being startlingly “ modern.” It is true that lie is — remarkably contemporary. Contemporaneousness he carries to the point of genius. But modern, in the larger sense of the term, he is not. In fact, of all European writers of importance to-day he is least modern. True, he is modern in that pessimism to which I have just referred; but of modern hope and modern endeavour he knows nothing or has nothing good to say. For typically modern movements he has nothing but cynical or good-humoured contempt. Democracy, the woman-movement, the education of the masses; these arc favourite butts of his laughter, and u the Refining Influence of Civilisation and the March of Progress” one of his favourite sneers. Wiser men have dreamed of a gradual rapprochement of the nations, a dwindling of meaningless race-hatreds, even an ultimate union of separate peoples, for the general good of mankind. His influence, however, is all on the side of a narrow patriotism that can see no nation but its own, and against a nation so near to us in blood as America he is not above directing the antiquated sneer.

His work nobly enforces those old-fashioned virtues of man which, it is to be hoped, will never go out of fashion — to do one’s duty, to live stoically, to live cleanly, to live cheerfully. Such lessons can never be taught too often, and they are of the moral bone and fibre of Mr. Kipling’s writing. But with them go all the old-fashioned vices of prejudiced Toryism. For progressive thought there has been no such dangerous influence in England for many years. Of

all that our best poets, philosophers, and social economists have been working for he is directly, or indirectly, a powerful enemy. For is he not, on his own admission, a servant of “ the great God Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, Most Terrible, One-evcd, Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk”? A god, indeed, not unlike the Jehovah of the “ Recessional,” but very different from the gentle meliorist to whom the so-called Christian nation of England professes a hollow allegiance. Of one melioristic movement only he seems to be the friend: the crusade against drink.