Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1291 page)

“‘But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have them down here ready.’

“‘We’ll get ‘em down
if
you, say so,’ Cloke answered, with a thrust of the underlip they both knew.

“‘But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here for? We aren’t building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen two-by-four bits would be ample.’

“‘I don’t know nothin’ about that,’ said Cloke. ‘An’ I’ve nothin’ to say against larch —
if
you want to make a temp’ry job of it. I ain’t ‘ere to tell you what isn’t so, sir; an’ you can’t say I ever come creepin’ up on you, or tryin’ to lead you farther in than you set out —  — ’

“A year ago George would have danced with impatience. Now he scraped a little mud off his old gaiters with his spud, and waited.

“‘All I say is that you can put up larch and make a temp’ry job of it; and by the time the young master’s married it’ll have to be done again. Now, I’ve brought down a couple of as sweet six-by-eight oak timbers as we’ve ever drawed. You put ‘em in an’ it’s off your mind for good an’ all. T’other way — I don’t say it ain’t right, I’m only just sayin’ what I think — but t’other way, he’ll no sooner be married than we’ll ‘ave it
all
to do again. You’ve no call to regard my words, but you can’t get out of
that
.’

“‘No,’ said George, after a pause; ‘I’ve been realising that for some time. Make it oak then; we can’t get out of it.’”

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. We hum continually a variation of Shakespeare’s song:

“This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

Puck of Pook’s Hill
is a final answer to those who think of the Imperial idea as loose and vast, without roots in any dear, particular soil.
Puck of Pool’s Hill
suggests in every page that England could never for its lovers be too small. We would know intimately each place where the Roman trod, where Weland came and went, where Saxon and Norman lost themselves in a common league.

From this England, fluttered with memories and the most ancient magic, it is a natural step into the regions of pure fancy where Mr Kipling is happiest of all.
The Children of the Zodiac
and
The Brushwood Boy
are the earliest proofs that Mr Kipling flies most surely when he is least impeded by a human or material document. We have here to make a last protest against a too popular fallacy concerning the tales of Mr Kipling. Mr Kipling’s passion for the concrete, which is a passion of all truly imaginative men, together with his keen delight in the work of the world, has caused him to be falsely regarded as a note-book realist of the modern type. He is assumed to be happiest when writing from direct experience without refinement or transmutation. We cannot trace this error to its source and expose the many fallacies it contains without going deeper into aesthetics than is here necessary or desirable. 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. Mr Kipling has pretended, often with some success, that his people are really to be met with in the Royal Navy or in the Indian Civil Service. But let the reader consider for a moment whom they remember best. Is it Mowgli or is it someone who is a C.I.E.? Is it the Elephant Child, or is it Mr Grish Chunder Dé? When does Mr Kipling more successfully convey to us the impression that his people are alive and real? Is it when he is supposed to be drawing men from the life, or is it when he has set free his imagination to call up the People of the Hills or the folk in the Jungle?

The grain of Mr Kipling’s work is the finer, his vision is more confident and clear, the further he gets from the world immediately about him. Already we have seen how happily in India he left behind his impression of the alert tourist, his experience of the mess-room and bazaar, to enshrine in his fairy tale of
Kim
the faith and simplicity of two of the children of the world — each, the old and the young, a child after his own fashion.
Kim
is Mr Kipling’s escape from the India which is traversed by the railway and served by the “Pioneer.” It is the escape of Dan and Una into the Kingdom of Puck, and the escape of Mowgli into the Jungle. It is the escape, finally, of Mr Kipling’s genius into the region where it most freely breathes.

We have noted that Kim is one of the Indian doors by which we enter; but there is a more open door in the first story of
The Second Jungle Book
. It is the best of all Mr Kipling’s stories, just as the
Jungle Books
are the best of all his books. It concerns the Indian, Purun Bhagat.

He was learned, supple, and deeply intimate in the affairs of the world. He had shared the counsels of princes; he had been received with honour in the clubs and societies of Europe. He was, to all appearances, a polite blend of all the talents of East and West. Then suddenly Purun Bhagat disappeared. All India understood; but of all Western people only Mr Kipling was able to follow where he walked as a holy man and a beggar into the hills. There he became St Francis of the Hills, living in a little shrine with the friendly creatures of the woods, venerated and cared for by a village on the hillside.

All Mr Kipling’s readers know how that story ends — how on a night of disaster there came together as of one blood the saint and his people and the wild creatures who had housed with him. It is quoted here as showing how the old piety of India beckoned Mr Kipling into the jungle as inevitably as the old loyalty of England beckoned him into a region where on a summer day we can meet without surprise a Flint Man or a Centurion of Rome.

Always the bent of Mr Kipling, in his best work, is found to be away from the world. To appreciate his finer quality we must pass with him into the Rukh, or into the country beyond Policeman Day, into the mansion of lost children, or into a region where it is but a step from the Zodiac to fields under the plough. 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.

We may now realise more clearly the peril which lies in the popular fallacy concerning Mr Kipling described in the first few pages of this book. 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. 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. His manner will be most assured where his matter is the least authentic. His points will be most effectively made where there is the least necessity to make them. Mr Kipling, writing as a soldier, is more a soldier than any soldier who ever lived. Thereby the discerning reader will infer that Mr Kipling was not born to write as a soldier. He will know that Mr Kipling is not profoundly and instinctively an atavistic prophet, because his atavism is more atavistic than the atavism of the first man who ever was born. He will also realise that Mr Kipling writes so effectively about India because he ought to be writing about England and Fairyland and the Jungle. He will realise, in short, that Mr Kipling is an imaginative man of letters who has wonderful visions when he stays at home, and who needs all his craft as an expert literary artificer to persuade his readers that these visions are not seriously impaired when he ventures abroad.

VIII

THE POEMS

Only the briefest epilogue is necessary concerning Mr Kipling’s poetry. We have concluded as to his prose stories that his best work is in the pure fancy of
The Jungle Book
, and that we descend thence through his English tales and his celebration of the work of the world to clever stories of India and
Soldiers Three
. Upon each of these levels we meet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once be said that at all times, except where the rule is proved by the exception, Mr Kipling’s verse is less urgently inspired than his prose. The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of a quality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery the beat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm of sense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, at first, to contradict it. Pope’s
Essay on Man
, for example, which at first seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, is really not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appears to be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there is a rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is being actually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-century philosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in the best of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifest reason why prose would not have served the author’s purpose equally well.

Can we say this of Mr Kipling’s poetry? Is Mr Kipling’s poetry the result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?

A careful reading of Mr Kipling’s verse, comparing it subject for subject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a more direct passionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariably more wrought and careful and elaborate. It does not suggest the poet driven into song. It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing the manner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet’s tools, without any urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way. He has merely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed. Of his technical success there is seldom any doubt at all. 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. Poetry flies higher than prose only when the poet’s feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say. Mr Kipling is a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question. The question is, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author’s feeling with the author’s expression? And the answer to that will be, Not in the author’s poems.

Take as an example the English motive:

“See you our little mill that clacks,
        So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
        Ever since Domesday Book.”

Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose tale
Below the Mill Dam
, or with the passage it paraphrases in the story to which it stands as motto:

“The English are a bold people. His Saxons would laugh and jest with Hugh, and Hugh with them, and — this was marvellous to me — if even the meanest of them said such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor, then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might be near forsake everything else to debate the matter — I have seen them stop the mill with the corn half ground — and if the custom or usage were proven to be as it was said, why, that was the end of it, even though it were flat against Hugh, his wish and command.”

It may be said of the verse that, possibly, it is more carefully considered than the prose, more deliberate and formally more excellent. But it is certainly more remote from the passion it conveys. There is more drive in a single fragment of
An Habitation Enforced
than in all the songs of Puck.

Similarly let us take another of Mr Kipling’s themes — his delight in the world’s work. Think first of
The Bridge-Builders
and of
William the Conqueror
and then turn to
The Bell Buoy
(
Five Nations
) or
The White Man’s Burden
(
Five Nations
). In each case — and we repeat the result every time the experiment is made — we find that the author’s motive, which lives in his prose, tends in his verse to expire. In
The White Man’s Burden
it expires outright, so that reading it, it is difficult to realise that
William the Conqueror
has had the power so deeply to move us.