Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1290 page)

“What follows is worth consideration. The forward engine had no more work to do. Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely, with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the cylinder-cover. It came down again, the full weight of the steam behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right and struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column of the forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches above the base, and wedging the upper portion outwards three inches towards the ship’s side. There the connecting-rod jammed. Meantime, the after engine, being as yet unembarrassed, went on with its work, and in so doing brought round at its next revolution the crank of the forward engine, which smote the already jammed connecting-rod, bending it and therewith the piston-rod cross-head — the big cross-piece that slides up and down so smoothly.”

This is the method of Homer as applied to the shield of Achilles, the method of Milton in enumerating the superior fiends, the method of Walter Scott confronted with a mountain pass, the method of the sonneteer to his mistress’ eyebrow. Mr Kipling’s enthusiasm for these broken engines would be intolerable if it were not obviously genuine. Unless we shut our ears and admit no songs that sing of things as yet unfamiliar to the poets of blue sky and violets dim as Cytherea’s eyes, we cannot possibly mistake the lyrical ecstasy of the above passage. 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.
.007
, which is the story of a shining and ambitious young locomotive, is ten times more vital — it calls for ten times more fellow-feeling — than the heart affairs of Private Learoyd or the distresses of the Copleigh girls at Simla. The pain that shoots through .007 when he first becomes acquainted with a hot-box is a more human and recognisable bit of consciousness than anything to be shared with the Head of the District or the Man Who Was. The psychology of the Mill Wheel in
Below the Mill Dam
is quite obviously accurate. That Mill Wheel, unlike scores of Mr Kipling’s men and women, is a creature we have met, who refuses to be forgotten. When he is dealing with men Mr Kipling celebrates not so much mankind as the skill and competency of mankind as severely applied to a given and necessary task. It follows that Mr Kipling’s men at their best are most excellent machines. It follows, again, that when Mr Kipling drops the pretence that he is deeply concerned with man as man, and begins to celebrate with all his might the machine as the machine, we realise that his machine is the better man of the two.

The inspiration which Mr Kipling first indulged to its full bent in
The Day’s Work
lives on through all the ensuing books. It reaches a climax in
With the Night Mail
, a post-dated vision of the air. It is one of the most remarkable stories he has written — a story produced at full pressure of the imagination which, but for its fatal prophesying, would keep his memory green for generations. The detail with which the theme is worked out is extravagant; but it is the extravagance of an inspired lover. To quarrel with its technical exuberance on the ground that Mr Kipling should have made it less like the vision of an engineer is simply to miss almost the main impulse of Mr Kipling’s progress. It is true that unless we share Mr Kipling’s enthusiasm for The Night Mail as a beautiful machine, for the men who governed it as skilled mechanicians, and for all the minutiae of the control and distribution of traffic by air, we are not likely to be greatly held by the story. But this is simply to say that unless we catch the passion of an author we may as well shut the author’s book.

This does not imply that we must love machinery in order to love Mr Kipling’s enthusiasm for machinery. We have to share the author’s passion; but not necessarily to dote upon its object. It is not essential to an admiration of Shakespeare’s sonnets that the admirer should have been a suitor of the Dark Lady. It matters hardly at all what is the inspiration of an imaginative author. So long as he succeeds in getting into a highly fervent condition, which prompts him to write, with entire forgetfulness of himself and the reader, of things whose beauty he was born to see, it is of little moment how he happens to be kindled. We do not need to be suffering the pangs of adolescent love, or even to know the story of Fanny Brawne, to hear the immortal longing of John Keats sounding between all the lines of the great Odes:

“Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.”

We do not need to be the enemy of the Arminians to resolve the music of Milton; and we may live all our lives in a city and yet know Wordsworth for a great poet. Shelley does not suffer because philosophic anarchy has gone out of fashion; and the poetry of the Hebrews lives for ever, though its readers have never lived in the shadow of Sinai. These mighty instances are here intended not to establish a comparison but to establish a principle. The exact source of Mr Kipling’s inspiration matters not a straw. We simply know that his machinery is alive and lovely in his eyes. He communicates his passion to his reader though his readers are unable to distinguish between a piston-rod and a cylinder-cover.

The Day’s Work
throws back a clear and searching light upon some of the tales, Indian and political, which we have already passed in review. 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. As literature
William the Conqueror
and
The Head of the District
have less to do with the politics of India than with the nuts and bolts of
The Ship That Found Herself
. The same truth applies equally to a book which has been discussed beyond all proportion to its rank among the stories of Mr Kipling.
The Light That Failed
is often read as the high and tragical love story of Dick Heldar; but it is really nothing of the kind. It really belongs to
The Day’s Work
. As the love story of Dick Heldar it is of small account. Mr Kipling thinks very little of it from that point of view. He has even allowed it, upon that side, to be deprived of all its significance in order to meet the needs of a popular actor. Mr Kipling is not the man to sell his conscience. Therefore his admirers may infer from the fact that he has sold Dick and Maisie to British and American playgoers that Dick and Maisie are not regarded by their author as of the first importance. We cannot think of Mr Kipling as allowing one screw of the ship that found herself to be misplaced. But he has cheerfully allowed his story of Dick and Maisie to be turned with a few strokes of the pen into an effective curtain for a negligible play.

This does not mean that
The Light That Failed
is not a characteristic and a fine achievement. It means that its character and fineness have nothing to do with Dick and Maisie or with any of that stuff of the story which contrives to exist behind the footlights of Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson’s theatre.
The Light That Failed
must not be read as the love story of a painter who goes blind. It must be read, with
.007
and
The Maltese Cat
, as an enthusiastic account of the day’s work of a newspaper correspondent. The really vital passages of the story have all to do with Mr Kipling’s chosen text of work for work’s sake. Dick’s work and not Dick himself is the hero of the play. The only incident which really affects us is the scraping out of his last picture. We do not bother in the least as to whether Maisie returns to him or stays away; because we do not believe in the reality of Maisie and we cannot imagine anything she may or may not do as affecting anyone very seriously. Dick’s wrestle with his picture is another matter. He and his friends may talk a great deal of nonsense about their work (nonsense which would strictly require us to condemn every good page which Mr Kipling has written), but there is no doubt whatever that the enthusiasm of men for men’s work is the vital and moving principle of
The Light That Failed
. The motive of the whole story is the motive of
The Bridge-Builders
. The rest is merely accessory.

The Light That Failed
is full of instruction for the close critic of Mr Kipling. We discover in it three out of the many levels of excellence in which he moves. First there is a cunning artificer pretending to a knowledge and admiration which he does not really possess — an artificer who tries to impose Maisie and the Red-Haired Girl upon us in the same deceiving way as the way in which he tried to impose upon us Mrs Hawksbee and the Copleigh girls. 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.

VII

THE FINER GRAIN

It has been Mr Kipling’s habit all through his career to peg out literary claims for himself as evidence of his intention later on to work them at a profit. Thus, writing
Plain Tales from the Hills
, he includes one or two stories, such as
The Taking of Lungtungpen
and
The Three Musketeers
, which clearly look forward to
Soldiers Three
and all the later stories in that kind. Or, again, he looks forward in
Tods’ Amendment
and
Wee Willie Winkie
to the time when he will write many stories, and, in a sense, whole books concerning children.
Tods’ Amendment
promises
Baa Baa Black Sheep
, and
Just So Stories
; it even promises
Stalky & Co.
, which is simply the best collection of boisterous boy farces ever written. Then, again, there is
In the Rukh
, out of
Many Inventions
, which looks forward to the
Jungle Book
. Finally, there is, in
The Day’s Work
, clear evidence of Mr Kipling’s intention ultimately to abandon the hills and plains of India and to take literary seisin of the country and chronicles of England.

The first undoubted evidence that Mr Kipling, who started with skilful tales of India, was bound in the end to turn homewards for a deeper inspiration is contained in a story from
The Day’s Work
.
My Sunday at Home
is ostensibly broad farce, of the
Brugglesmith
variety — farce which might well call for a chapter to itself were it not that broad farce is much the same whoever the writer may be. But
My Sunday at Home
is really less important as farce than as evidence of Mr Kipling’s enthusiasm for the stillness and ancientry of the English wayside. The pages of this story distil and drip with peace. Moreover, the story is neighboured with two others, all beckoning Mr Kipling home to Burwash in Sussex. There is the Brushwood Boy, who after work comes home and finds it good — good after his work is done. There is also
An Error in the Fourth Dimension
wherein Mr Kipling is found playing affectionately with the idea that England is quite unlike any other country. There is in England a fourth dimension which is beyond the perception, say, of an American railway king, who after much amazement and wrath concludes that the English are not a modern people and thereafter returns to his own more reasonable land.

Of the miscellaneous stories in which Mr Kipling surrenders utterly to this later theme perhaps the most memorable is
An Habitation Enforced
from
Actions and Reactions
. Here we are in quite another plane of authorship from that in which we have moved in the tales of India. There is a wide difference between
The Return of Imray
— to take one of the most skilful tales of India — and
An Habitation Enforced
.
The Return of Imray
betrays the conscious resolution of a clever man of letters to make the most effective use of good material. But
An Habitation Enforced
is the spontaneous gesture of pure feeling. The Indian stories are ingenious and well managed. Their point is made. Their workmanship is excellent. Atmospheres and impressions are cunningly arranged. But they very rarely succeed in carrying the reader as the reader is carried upon this later tide.

The feeling of
An Habitation Enforced
, as of all the English tales, is that of the traveller returned. The value of Mr Kipling’s traffics and discoveries over the seven seas is less in the record he has made of these adventures than in their having enabled him to return to England with eyes sharpened by exile, with his senses alert for that fourth dimension which does not exist for the stranger.
An Habitation Enforced
is inspired by the nostalgia of inveterate banishment. Some part of its perfection — it is one of the few perfect short stories in the English tongue — is due to the perfect agreement of its form with the passion that informs its writing. It is the story of a homing Englishwoman, and of her restoration to the absolute earth of her forbears. In writing of this woman Mr Kipling has only had to recall his own joyful adventure in picking up the threads of a life at once familiar and mysterious, in meeting again the homely miracle of things that never change. Finally England claims her utterly — her and her children and her American husband. It was an American who bade Cloke, man of the soil and acquired retainer of the family, bring down larch-poles for a light bridge over the brook; but it was an Englishman reclaimed who needs consented to Cloke’s amendment: