双语·聪明的消遣：毛姆谈英国文学 吉卜林与其短篇小说

Choice of Kipling's Best (Introduction) (1953)

In this essay it is my business to deal only with Rudyard Kipling's short stories. I am not concerned with his verse nor, except in so far as they sometimes directly affected his stories, with his political opinions.

In making a selection of them I have had to decide whether I should choose only those I most liked. In that case I should have chosen nearly all the Indian stories. For in them to my mind he was at his best. When he wrote stories about Indians and about the British in India he felt himself at home and he wrote with an ease, a freedom, a variety of invention which gave them a quality which in stories in which the subject matter was different he did not always attain. Even the slightest of them are readable. They give you the tang of the East, the smell of the bazaars, the torpor of the rains, the heat of the sun-scorched earth, the rough life of the barracks in which the occupying troops were quartered, and the other life, so English and yet so alien to the English way, led by the officers, the Indian Civilians and the swarm of minor officials who combined to administer that vast territory.

A great many years ago, when Kipling was still at the height of his popularity, I used sometimes to meet Indian Civilians and professors at Indian universities who spoke of him with something very like contempt. That was partly due to an ignoble but natural jealousy. They resented it that this obscure journalist, of no social consequence, should have achieved world-wide renown. They protested that he did not know India. Which of them did? India is not a country, it is a continent. It is true that Kipling seems to have been intimately acquainted only with the North-West. Like any other sensible writer he placed the scene of his stories in the region he knew best. His Anglo-Indian critics blamed him because he had not dealt with this and that subject which they thought important. His sympathies lay with the Muslims rather than with the Hindus. He took but a very casual interest in Hinduism and the religion which has so deep-rooted an influence on the great mass of the teeming populations of India. There were qualities in the Muslims that aroused his admiration: he seldom spoke of the Hindus with appreciation. It never seems to have occurred to him that there were among them men of erudition, distinguished scientists and able philosophers. The Bengali, for instance, to him was a coward, a muddler, a braggart, who lost his head in an emergency and shirked responsibility. This is a pity, but it was Kipling's right, as it is of every author, to deal with the subjects that appealed to him.

But I felt that if in this volume I confined myself to Kipling's Indian stories I should not give the reader a fair impression of his varied talent. I have therefore included a few stories with an English setting which have been very widely admired.

It is not to my purpose to give more biographical details of Kipling's life than seem to me useful in my consideration of his short stories. He was born in 1865 at Bombay, where his father was Professor of Architectural Sculpture. When a little more than five his parents took him with his younger sister back to England and placed the two of them in a family where, owing to the unkindness and stupidity of the woman who looked after them, they were miserably unhappy. The wretched little boy was nagged, bullied and beaten. When his mother, after some years, once more came home she was deeply shocked by what she discovered and took the two children away. At the age of twelve Kipling was sent to a school at Westward Ho! It was called the United Services College and had been recently founded to provide education at a small cost for the sons of officers who were to be prepared to go into the army. There were about two hundred boys and they were herded together in a row of lodging-houses. Now, what the school was really like has nothing to do with me; I am only concerned with the picture Kipling has drawn of it in the work of fiction to which he gave the title Stalky＆Co. A more odious picture of school life can seldom have been drawn. With the exception of the headmaster and the chaplain the masters are represented as savage, brutal, narrow-minded and incompetent. The boys, supposedly the sons of gentlemen, were devoid of any decent instincts. To the three lads with whom these stories deal Kipling gave the names of Stalky, Turkey and Beetle. Stalky was the ringleader. He remained Kipling's ideal of the gallant, resourceful, adventurous, high-spirited soldier and gentleman. Beetle was Kipling's portrait of himself. The three of them exercised their humour in practical jokes of a singular nastiness. Kipling has narrated them with immense gusto and it is only just to say that the stories are so brilliantly told that though it may give you goose flesh to read them, when you have once begun you will read them to the end. I should not have dwelt on them at all if it were not plain to me that the influence Kipling was exposed to during the four years he spent at what he called“the Coll”gained a hold on him which throughout his career he never outgrew. He was never quite able to rid himself of the impressions, the prejudices, the spiritual posture he then acquired. Indeed there is no sign that he wanted to. He retained to the end his relish for the rough and tumble, the ragging, the brutal horseplay of fourth-form schoolboys and their delight in practical jokes. It never seems to have occurred to him that the school was third-rate and the boys a rotten lot. In fact after visiting it many years later he wrote a charming account of it, in which he paid a glowing tribute to that harsh disciplinarian, his old headmaster, and expressed his gratitude for the great benefits he had received during the period he had spent under his care.

When Kipling was a little less than seventeen, his father, who was then curator of the museum at Lahore, got him a job as assistant editor of the English paper, The Civil and Military Gazette, which was published in that city, and he left school to return to India. This was in 1882. The world he entered was very different from the world we live in now. Great Britain was at the height of her power. A map showed in pink vast stretches of the earth's surface under the sovereignty of Queen Victoria. The mother country was immensely rich. The British were the world's bankers. British commerce sent its products to the uttermost parts of the earth, and their quality was generally acknowledged to be higher than those manufactured by any other nation. Peace reigned except for small punitive expeditions here and there. The army, though small, was confident (notwithstanding the reverse on Majuba Hill) that it could hold its own against any force that was likely to be brought against it. The British navy was the greatest in the world. In sport the British were supreme. None could compete with them in the games they played, and in the classic races it was almost unheard-of that a horse from abroad should win. It looked as though nothing could ever change this happy state of things. The inhabitants of these islands of ours trusted in God, and God, they were assured, had taken the British Empire under his particular protection. It is true that the Irish were making a nuisance of themselves. It is true that the factory workers were underpaid and overworked. But that seemed an inevitable consequence of the industrialisation of the country and there was nothing to do about it. The reformers who tried to improve their lot were regarded as mischievous troublemakers. It is true that the agricultural labourers lived in miserable hovels and earned a pitiful wage, but the Ladies Bountiful of the landowners were kind to them. Many of them occupied themselves with their moral welfare, sent them beef tea and calves-foot jelly when they were ill and often clothes for their children. People said there always had been rich and poor in the world and always would be, and that seemed to settle the matter.

The British travelled a great deal on the Continent. They crowded the health resorts, Spa, Vichy, Homburg, Aix-les-Bains and Baden-Baden. In winter they went to the Riviera. They built themselves sumptuous villas at Cannes and Monte Carlo. Vast hotels were erected to accommodate them. They had plenty of money and they spent it freely. They felt that they were a race apart and no sooner had they landed at Calais than it was borne in upon them that they were now among natives, not of course natives as were the Indians or the Chinese, but—natives. They alone washed, and the baths that they frequently travelled with were a tangible proof that they were not as others. They were healthy, athletic, sensible, and in every way superior. Because they enjoyed their sojourn among the natives whose habits were so curiously un-English, because, though they thought them frivolous (the French), lazy (the Italians), stupid but funny (the Germans), with the kindness of heart natural to them, they liked them. And they in turn thought that these foreigners liked them. It never entered their heads that the courtesy which they received, the bows, the smiles, the desire to please were owing to their lavish spending, and that behind their backs the“natives”mocked them for their uncouth dress, their gawkiness, their bad manners, their insolence, their silliness in letting themselves be consistently overcharged, their patronising tolerance; and it required disastrous wars for it to dawn upon them how greatly they had been mistaken. The Anglo-Indian society into which Kipling was introduced when he joined his parents at Lahore shared to the full the prepossessions and the self-complacency of their fellow-subjects in Britain.

Since his short sight prevented him from playing games, Kipling had had the leisure at school to read a great deal and to write. The headmaster seems to have been impressed by the promise he showed and had the good sense to give him the run of his own library. He wrote the stories which he afterwards published in book form as Plain Tales from the Hills during such leisure as his duties as sub-editor of The Civil and Military Gazette allowed him. To me their chief interest is in the picture they give of the society with which he was dealing. It is a devastating one. There is no sign that any of the persons he wrote about took any interest in art, literature or music. The notion seems to have been prevalent that there was something fishy about a man who took pains to learn about things Indian. Of one character Kipling wrote: “he knew as much about Indians as it is good for a man to know.”A man who was absorbed in his work appears to have been regarded with misgiving; at best he was eccentric, at worst a bore. The life described was empty and frivolous. The self-sufficiency of these people is fearful to contemplate. And what sort of people were they? They were ordinary middle-class people, who came from modest homes in England, sons and daughters of retired government servants and of parsons, doctors and lawyers. The men were empty-headed; such of them as were in the army or had been to universities had acquired a certain polish; but the women were shallow, provincial and genteel. They spent their time in idle flirtation and their chief amusement seems to have been to get some man away from another woman. Perhaps because Kipling wrote in a prudish period which made him afraid of shocking his readers, perhaps from an innate disinclination to treat of sex, though in these stories there is a great deal of philandering, it very rarely led to sexual intercourse. Whatever encouragement these women gave the men whom they attracted, when it came to a showdown they drew back. They were, in short, what is described in English by a coarse hyphenated word, and in France, more elegantly, by allumeuses.

It is surprising that Kipling, with his quick mind and wonderful power of observation, with his wide reading, should have taken these people at their face value. He was, of course, very young. Plain Tales from the Hills was published when he was only twenty-two. It is perhaps natural that, coming straight from the brutalities of Westward Ho! to the unpretentious establishment of the curator of the Lahore museum, he should have been dazzled on his first acquaintance with a society that to his inexperienced eyes had glamour. So was the little bourgeois Marcel dazzled when he first gained admittance to the exclusive circle of Madame de Guermantes. Mrs. Hauksbee was neither so brilliant nor so witty as Kipling would have us think. He reveals her essential drabness when he makes her compare a woman's voice to the grinding brakes of an underground train coming into Earl's Court station. We are asked to believe that she was a woman of fashion. If she had been she would never have gone to Earl's Court except to see an old nurse and then not by underground, but in a hansom cab.

But Plain Tales from the Hills is not only concerned with Anglo-Indian society. The volume contains stories of Indian life and stories of the soldiery. When you consider that they were written when their author was still in his teens or only just out of them they show an astonishing competence. Kipling said that the best of them were provided for him by his father. I think we may ascribe this statement to filial piety. I believe it to be very seldom that an author can make use of a story given to him ready made, as seldom indeed as a person in real life can be transferred to fiction just as he is and maintain an air of verisimilitude. Of course the author gets his ideas from somewhere, they don’t spring out of his head like Pallas-Athene from the head of her sire in perfect panoply, ready to be written down. But it is curious how small a hint, how vague a suggestion, will be enough to give the author's invention the material to work upon and enable him in due course to construct a properly disposed story. Take, for instance, the later story, The Tomb of his Ancestors. It may very well have needed no more than such a casual remark from one of the officers Kipling had known at Lahore as: “Funny chaps these natives are. There was a feller called So-and-So who was stationed up country among the Bhils, whose grandfather had kept them in order for donkeys’ years and was buried there, and they got it into their thick heads that he was a reincarnation of the old man, and he could do anything he liked with them.”That would have been quite enough to set Kipling's vivid imagination to work upon what turned out to be an amusing and delightful tale. Plain Tales from the Hills is very uneven, as indeed Kipling's work always was. That I believe to be inevitable in a writer of short stories. It is a ticklish thing to write a short story and whether it is good or bad depends on more than the author's conception, power of expression, skill in construction, invention and imagination: it depends also on luck. So the clever Japanese, taking from his little pile of seed pearls, all to his eyes indistinguishable from one another, the first that comes to hand and inserting it into the oyster, cannot tell whether it will turn into a perfect, rounded pearl or a misshapen object neither of beauty nor of value. Nor is the author a good judge of his own work. Kipling had a high opinion of The Phantom ’Rickshaw. I think if he had been more sophisticated when he wrote it, it might have occurred to him that there was more to be said in extenuation of the man's behaviour than he apprehended. It is very unfortunate that you should fall out of love with a married woman with whom you have had an affair and fall in love with someone else and want to marry her. But such things happen. And when the woman won’t accept the situation, but pursues you and waylays you and pesters you with tears and supplications it is not unnatural that at last you should grow impatient and lose your temper. Mrs. Keith-Wessington is the most persistent crampon in fiction, for even after her death she continued to harry the wretched man in her phantom ’rickshaw. Jack Pansay deserves our sympathy rather than our censure. Because a story has been difficult to write an author may well think better of it than of a story that has seemed to write itself, sometimes there is a psychological error at the basis of it which he has not noticed, and sometimes he sees in the finished story what he saw in his mind's eye when he conceived it rather than what he has presented to the reader. But we should not be surprised that Kipling sometimes wrote stories which were poor, unconvincing or trivial; we should wonder rather that he wrote so many of such excellence. He was wonderfully various.

In the essay Mr. T. S. Eliot wrote to preface his selection of Kipling's verse he seems to suggest that variety is not a laudable quality in a poet. I would not venture to dispute any opinion of Mr. Eliot's on a question in which poetry is concerned, but though variety may not be a merit in a poet, it surely is in a writer offiction. The good writer offiction has the peculiarity, shared to a degree by all men, but in him more abundant, that he has not only one self, but is a queer mixture of several, or, if that seems an extravagant way of putting it, that there are several, often discordant aspects of his personality. The critics could not understand how the same man could write“Brugglesmith”and“Recessional”, and so accused him of insincerity. They were unjust. It was the self called Beetle who wrote“Brugglesmith”and the self called Yardley-Orde who wrote Recessional. When most of us look back on ourselves we can sometimes find consolation in believing that a self in us which we can only deplore has, generally through no merit of ours, perished. The strange thing about Kipling is that the self called Beetle which one would have thought increasing age and the experience of life would have caused to disintegrate, remained alive in all its strength almost to his dying day.

As a child at Bombay Kipling had spoken Hindustani with his ayah and the servants as his native language and in Something of Myself he has told that when he was taken to see his parents he translated what he had to say into broken English. It may be supposed that on his return to India he quickly recovered his old knowledge of the language. In the same book he has related in terms that couldn’t be bettered how at Lahore he got the material which so soon afterwards he was to make effective use of. As a reporter“I described openings of big bridges and suchlike, which meant a night to two with the engineers; floods on railways—more nights in the wet with wretched heads of repair gangs; village festivals and consequent outbreaks of cholera or smallpox; communal riots under the shadow of the Mosque of Wazir Khan, where the patient waiting troops lay in timber-yards or side-alleys till the order came to go in and hit the crowds on the feet with the gunbutt, and the growling, flaring, creed-drunk city would be brought to hand without effusion of blood”…. Often at night“I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places—liquor-shops, gambling-and opium-dens, which are not a bit mysterious, wayside entertainments such as puppet-shows, native dances; or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque of Wazir Khan for the sheer sake of looking…And there were‘wet’ nights too at the Club or one Mess, when a tableful of boys, half crazed with discomfort, but with just sense enough to stick to beer and bones which seldom betray, tried to rejoice and somehow succeeded…I got to meet the soldiery of those days in visits to Fort Lahore and, in a less degree, at Mian Mir Cantonments…. Having no position to consider, and my trade enforcing it, I could move at will in the fourth dimension. I came to realize the bare horrors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he endured on account of the Christian doctrine that lays it down that‘the wages of sin is death.’”

I have included in this selection two stories in which figure the three privates, Mulvaney, Learoyd and Ortheris. They have been immensely popular. I think they have the disadvantage for most readers that they are written in the peculiar dialect of the speakers. It is no easy matter to decide how far an author should go in this direction. Manifestly it would be absurd to make men like Mulvaney and Ortheris deliver themselves in the cultured language of a don at King's, but to make them speak consistently in dialect may well make a narrative tedious. Perhaps the best plan is to use the turns of phrase, the grammar and the vocabulary of the persons concerned, but to reproduce peculiarities of pronunciation so sparingly as not to incommode the reader. That was not, however, Kipling's way. He reproduced the accents of his three soldiers phonetically. No one has found fault with Learoyd's Yorkshire, which was corrected by Kipling's father, himself a Yorkshireman; but critics have claimed that neither Mulvaney's Irish nor Ortheris's cockney was real. Kipling was a master of description and could relate incident brilliantly, but it does not seem to me that his dialogue was always plausible. He put into the mouth of Ortheris expressions he could never have used and one may well ask oneself how on earth he came by a quotation from Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. I cannot believe that a well-bred woman such as the Brushwood Boy's mother is supposed to be would speak to him of his father as“the pater.”Sometimes the language used by the officers and officials in Indian is unconvincingly hearty. To my mind Kipling's dialogue is only beyond reproach when he is translating into measured, dignified English the speech of Indians. The reader will remember that as a child talking with his parents he had to translate what he had to say from Hindustani into English: it may be that that was the form of speech that came most naturally to him.

In 1887 Kipling, after five years as sub-editor of The Civil and Military Gazette, was sent to Allahabad, several hundred miles to the south, to work on the much more important sister-paper, The Pioneer. The proprietors were starting a weekly edition for home, and he was given the editorship. An entire page was devoted to fiction. The Plain Tales from the Hills had been restricted to twelve hundred words, but now he was allotted sufficient space to write stories up to five thousand. He wrote“soldier tales, Indian tales, and tales of the opposite sex.”Among them were such powerful but gruesome stories as The Mark of the Beast and The Return of Imray.

The stories Kipling wrote during this period were published in six paper-covered volumes in Wheeler's Indian Railway Library, and with the money he thus earned and a commission to write travel sketches he left India for England“by way of the Far East and the United States.”This was in 1889. He had spent seven years in India. His stories had become known in England and when he arrived in London, still a very young man, he found editors eager to accept whatever he wrote. He settled down in Villiers Street, Strand. The stories he produced there are of the highest quality, a quality which later he often achieved but never surpassed. Among them are On Greenhow Hill, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, The Man Who Was, Without Benefit of Clergy and At the End of the Passage. It looks as though the new surroundings in which he found himself brought into greater vividness his recollections of India. That is a likely enough thing to happen. When an author is living in the scene of his story, perhaps among the people who have suggested the characters of his invention, he may well find himself bewildered by the mass of his impressions. He cannot see the wood for the trees. But absence will erase from his memory redundant details and inessential facts. He will get then a bird's-eye view, as it were, of his subject and so, with less material to embarrass him, can get the form into his story which completes it.

It was then too that he wrote the tale which he called“The Finest Story in the World.”It is interesting because he dealt in it, for the first time, I think, with metempsychosis. It was natural that the theme should interest him, for the belief in it is ingrained in the Hindu sensibility. It is as little a matter of doubt to the people of India as were the Virgin Birth of Christ and the Resurrection to the Christians of the thirteenth century. No one can have travelled in India without discovering how deep-rooted the belief is not only among the uneducated, but among men of culture and of experience in world affairs. One hears in conversation, or reads in the papers, of men who claim to remember something of their past lives. In this story Kipling has dealt with it with great imaginative power. He returned to it in a story which is less well-known called“Wireless.”In this he made effective use of what was then a new toy for the scientifically minded amateur to persuade the reader of the possibility that the chemist's assistant of his tale, dying of tuberculosis, might under the effect of a drug recall that past life of his in which he was John Keats. To anyone who has stood in the little room in Rome overlooking the steps that lead down to the Piazza di Spagna and seen the drawing Joseph Severn made of the emaciated, beautiful head of the dead poet, Kipling's story is wonderfully pathetic. It is thrilling to watch the dying chemist's assistant, in love too, worrying out in a trancelike state, lines that Keats wrote in The Eve of St. Agnes. It is a lovely story admirably told.

Six years later Kipling, in the entrancing tale The Tomb of his Ancestors, to which I have already referred, took up once more the theme of metempsychosis, and this time in such a way as not to outrage probability. It is the Bhils, the mountain tribes among whom the story is set, who believe that the young subaltern, its hero, is a reincarnation of his grandfather who spent many years in their midst and whose memory they still revere. Kipling never succeeded better in creating that indefinable quality which for want of a better word we call atmosphere.

After spending two years in London, years of hard work, Kipling's health broke down, and he very sensibly decided to take the rest of a long journey. He returned to England to be married and with his bride started off on a tour of the world, but financial difficulties obliged him to cut it short, and he settled down in Vermont where his wife's family had long been established. This was in the summer of 1892. He stayed there off and on till 1896. During those four years he wrote a number of stories many of which were of a quality which only he could reach. It was then that he wrote In the Rukh in which Mowgli makes his first appearance. It was a propitious inspiration, for from it sprang the two Jungle Books in which, to my mind, his great and varied gifts found their most brilliant expression. They show his wonderful talent for telling a story, they have a delicate humour and they are romantic and plausible. The device of making animals talk is as old as Aesop's fables, and for all I know much older, and La Fontaine, as we know, employed it with charm and wit, but I think no one has performed the difficult feat of persuading the reader that it is as natural for animals to speak as for human beings more triumphantly than Kipling has done in The Jungle Books. He had used the same device in the story called A Walking Delegate in which horses indulge in political discussion, but there is in the story an obviously didactic element which prevents it from being successful.

It was during these fertile years that Kipling wrote The Brushwood Boy, a story which has deeply impressed so many people that, though it is not one of my favourites, I have thought it well to print it in this selection. He availed himself in this of a notion which has attracted writers of fiction both before and after him, the notion, namely, of two persons systematically dreaming the same dreams. The difficulty of it lies in making the dreams interesting. We listen restlessly when someone at the breakfast table insists on telling us of the dream he had during the night, and a dream described on paper is apt to arouse in us the same impatience. Kipling had before done the same sort of thing, though on a smaller scale, in The Bridge-Builders. There I think he made a mistake. He had a good story to tell. It is about a flood that suddenly rushes down on a bridge over the Ganges which, after three years of strenuous labour, is on the point of completion. There is doubt in the minds of the two white men in charge of the operations whether three of the spans, still unfinished, will stand the strain, and they fear that if the stone-boats go adrift the girders will be damaged. They have received by telegram warning that the flood is on the way, and with their army of workmen spend an agonized night doing what they can to strengthen the weak places. All this is described with force and the telling detail of which Kipling was a master. The bridge stands the strain and all is well. That is all. It may be that Kipling thought it wasn’t enough. Findlayson, the chief engineer, has been too anxious and too fully occupied to bother about eating anything and by the second night is all in. His lascar aide persuades him to swallow some opium pills. Then news comes that a wire hawser has snapped and the stone-boats are loose. Findlayson and the lascar rush down to the bank and get into one of the stone-boats in the hope of preventing them from doing irreparable injury. The pair are swept down the river and landed half-drowned on an island. Exhausted and doped they fall asleep and dream the same dream in which they see the Hindu Gods in animal form, Ganesh the elephant, Hanuman the ape and finally Krishna himself, and hear them talk. When the two wake in the morning they are rescued. But the double dream is needless and because the conversation of the Gods is needless too it is tedious.

In The Brushwood Boy the identical dreams are an essential element in the story. It is here for the reader to read and I hope he will agree with me that Kipling has described these dreams with felicity. They are strange, romantic, frightening and mysterious. The long series of dreams which these two people have shared from their childhood seems, though you don’t quite know why, so significant of something of high import that it is somewhat of a disappointment that such amazing occurrences should result in no more than“boy meets girl.”It is of course the same difficulty that confronts the reader of the first part of Goethe's Faust. It seems hardly worth while for Faust to have bartered his soul to see Mephistopheles do conjuring tricks in a wine-cellar and to effect the seduction of a lowly maid. I find it difficult to look upon The Brushwood Boy as one of Kipling's best stories. The persons concerned in it are really too good to be true. The Brushwood Boy is heir to a fine estate. He is idolized by his parents, by the keeper who taught him to shoot, by the servants, by the tenants. He is a good shot, a good rider, a hard worker, a brave soldier adored by his men, and after a battle on the North-West Frontier is awarded a D.S.O. and becomes the youngest major in the British army. He is clever, sober and chaste. He is perfect and incredible. But though I carp I cannot deny that it remains a good and moving story admirably told. One must look upon it not as a tale that has any relation to real life, but as much of a fairy story as The Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella.

It was on his short periods of leave that Kipling came to know that Anglo-Indian society which he wrote about in Plain Tales from the Hills, but his experiences as a reporter, so well set forth in the passage I quoted earlier in this essay, surely made it plain to him that in those little stories he had described but one aspect of Anglo-Indian life. What he saw on his various assignments deeply impressed him. I have already spoken of The Bridge-Builders with its fine account of those men who on little pay, with small chance of recognition, gave their youth, their strength, their health to do to the best of their ability the job it was their business to do. In the unfortunately named William the Conqueror Kipling has written a tale in which he shows how two or three ordinary, rather commonplace men, and a woman, the William of the story, fought a disastrous famine all through the hot weather and saved a horde of children from dying of starvation. It is a tale of selfless, stubborn tenacity soberly narrated. In these two stories and in several more, Kipling has told of the obscure men and women who devoted their lives to the service of India. They made many mistakes, for they were but human. Many were stupid. Many were hidebound with prejudice. Many were unimaginative. They kept the peace. They administered justice. They built the roads, the bridges, the railways. They fought famine, flood and pestilence. They treated the sick. It remains to be seen whether those who have succeeded them, not in high place, but in those modest situations in the hands of whose occupants the lot of the common man depends will make as good a job of it as they did.

William the Conqueror is not only the story of a famine; it is a love story as well. I have mentioned the fact that Kipling seems to have shied away, like an unbroken colt, from any treatment of sex. In the Mulvaney stories he makes casual reference to the amours of the soldiery and in Something of Myself he has an indignant passage in which he remarks on the stupid and criminal folly of the authorities who counted it impious“that bazaar prostitutes should be inspected; or that the men should be taught elementary precautions in their dealings with them. This official virtue cost our army in India nine thousand expensive white men a year always laid up from venereal disease.”But he is concerned then not with love, but with an instinct of normal man that demands its satisfaction. I can only remember two stories in which Kipling has attempted (successfully) to represent passion. One is“Love-o’-Women, ”which for this reason I have inserted in this book. It is a terrible, perhaps brutal story, but it is finely and vigorously told, and the end, mysterious and left unexplained though it be, is powerful. Critics have found fault with this end. Matisse once showed a picture of his to a visitor who exclaimed: “I’ve never seen a woman like that”, to which he replied: “It isn’t a woman, madam, it's a picture.”If the painter is permitted certain distortions to achieve the effect he is aiming at, there can be no reason why the writer of fiction should not accord himself the same freedom. Probability is not something settled once for all; it is what you can get your readers to accept as such. Kipling was not writing an official report, he was writing a story. It was his right to make it dramatically effective, if that is what he wanted to do, and if the gentleman-ranker of the story might not have said in real life to the woman he had seduced and ruined the words Kipling has put into his mouth, that is no matter. It is plausible and the reader is moved as Kipling intended him to be.

The other story in which Kipling has depicted genuine passion is Without Benefit of Clergy. It is a beautiful and pathetic tale. If I had to choose for an anthology the best story Kipling ever wrote, this I believe is the one I would choose. Other stories are more characteristic, The Head of the District, for instance, but in this one he has come as near as the medium allows to what the story-teller aims at, but can hardly hope to achieve—perfection.

I have been led to write the above on account of the love scene which gives William the Conqueror its happy ending. It is strangely embarrassing. The two persons concerned are in love with one another; that is made clear; but there is nothing of ecstasy in their love, it is a rather humdrum affair, with already a kind of domestic quality about it. They are two very nice sensible people who will make a good job of married life. The love scene is adolescent. You would expect a schoolboy home for the holidays to talk like that with the local doctor's young daughter, not two grown, efficient persons who have just gone through a harrowing and dangerous experience.

As a rough generalization I would suggest that an author reaches the height of his powers when he is between thirty-five and forty. It takes him till then to learn what Kipling made a point of calling his trade. Till then his work is immature, tentative and experimental. By profiting by past mistakes, by the mere process of living, which brings him experience and a knowledge of human nature, by discovering his own limitations and learning what subjects he is competent to deal with and how best to deal with them, he acquires command over his medium. He is in possession of such talent as he has. He will produce the best work he is capable of for perhaps fifteen years, for twenty if he is lucky, and then his powers gradually dwindle. He loses the vigour of imagination which he had in his prime. He has given all he had to give. He will go on writing, for writing is a habit easy to contract, but hard to break, but what he writes will be only an increasingly pale reminder of what he wrote at his prime.

It was different with Kipling. He was immensely precocious. He was in full possession of his powers almost from the very beginning. Some of the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills are so trivial that later in life he would probably not have thought them worth writing, but they are told clearly, vividly and effectively. Technically there is no fault to find with them. Such faults as they have are owing to the callowness of his youth and not to his want of skill. And when, only just out of his teens, he was transferred to Allahabad and was able to express himself at greater length he wrote a series of tales which can justly be described as masterly. On his first arrival in London, the editor of Macmillan's Magazine, whom he had gone to see, asked him how old he was. It is no wonder that when Kipling told him that in a few months he would be twenty-four, he cried‘My God!’ His accomplishment by then was truly amazing.

But all things have to be paid for in this world. By the end of the century, that is by the time Kipling was thirty-five, he had written his best stories. I do not mean that after that he wrote bad stories, he couldn’t have done that if he’d tried, they were well enough in their way, but they lacked the magic with which the early Indian stories had been infused. It was only when, returning in fancy to the scene of his early life in India, he wrote Kim, that he regained it. Kim is his masterpiece. It must seem strange at first that Kipling after leaving Allahabad never went back to India except for a short visit to his parents at Lahore. After all it was his Indian stories that had brought him his immense fame. He himself called it notoriety, but it was fame. I can only suppose that he felt India had given him all the subjects he could deal with. Once, after he had spent a period in the West Indies he sent me a message to say that I should do well to go there, for there were plenty of stories to be written about the people of the islands, but they were not the sort of stories he could write. He must have felt that there were plenty of stories in India besides those he had written, but that they too were not the sort of stories he could write. For him the vein was worked out.

The Boer War came to pass and Kipling went to South Africa. In India he had conceived a boyish, touching if rather absurd admiration for the officers with whom he was brought in contact. But these gallant gentlemen who cut so fine a figure on the polo field, at gymkhanas, dances and picnics, showed a horrifying incapacity when it came to waging a war very different from the punitive expeditions they had conducted on the North-West Frontier. Officers and men were as brave as he had always thought them, but they were ill led. He surveyed the muddle of that unhappy war with consternation. Did he see that this was the first rent in that great fabric, the British Empire, which was his pride and to the awareness of which he had done so much, in verse and prose, to awaken his fellow-subjects? He wrote two stories, The Captive and The Way that He Took, in which he attacked the inefficiency of the authorities at home and the incompetence of the officers in command. They are good stories, and if I have not given them a place in this volume it is because of the strong element of propaganda in them and because like all stories that have a topical interest the passage of time has deprived them of significance.

I should warn the reader that my opinion that Kipling's best stories are those of which the scene is laid in India is by no means shared by eminent critics. They think those Kipling wrote in what they call his third period show a depth, an insight and a compassion of which they deplore the lack in his Indian tales. For them the height of his achievement is to be found in such stories as An Habitation Enforced, A Madonna of the Trenches, The Wish House and Friendly Brook. An Habitation Enforced is a charming story, but surely rather obvious; and though the other three are good enough they do not seem to me remarkable. It did not need an author of Kipling's great gifts to write them. Just So Stories, Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies are children's books and their worth must be judged by the pleasure they afforded children. This Just So Stories must have done. One can almost hear the squeals of laughter with which they listened to the story of how the elephant got his trunk. In the two other books Puck appears to a little boy and a little girl and produces for their instruction various characters by means of whom they may gain an elementary and romantic acquaintance with English history. I don’t think this was a happy device. The stories are of course well contrived; I like best On the Great Wall, in which Parnesius, the Roman legionary, appears, but I should have liked it better if it had been a straightforward reconstruction of an episode in the Roman occupation of Britain.

The only story Kipling wrote after he settled down in England that I would on no account leave out of this selection is“They.”(In reading it you must keep in mind that his use of the House Beautiful for the country house in which the events he relates take place, reminding one of Ye Olde TeaShoppe and horrors of the same sort, had not been made obnoxious by the vulgar purveyors of whimsy and the pretty-pretty.)“They”is a fine and deeply moving effort of the imagination. In 1899 Kipling went with his wife and children to New York, and he and his elder daughter caught colds which turned into pneumonia. Those of us who are old enough can remember the world-wide concern when the cables told us that Kipling lay at death's door. He recovered, but his daughter died. It cannot be doubted that“They”was inspired by his enduring grief at her loss. Heine said: “Out of my great griefs I make these little songs.”Kipling wrote an exquisite story. Some people have found it obscure and others sentimental. One of the hazards that confront the writer offiction is the danger of slipping from sentiment into sentimentality. The distinction between the two is fine. It may be that sentimentality is merely sentiment that you don’t happen to like. Kipling had the gift of drawing tears, but sometimes, in his stories not for children, but about children, they are tears you resent, for the emotion that draws them is mawkish. There is nothing obscure in“They”and to my mind nothing sentimental.

Kipling was deeply interested in the invention and discoveries which were then transforming our civilization. The reader will remember what effective use he made of wireless in the story of that name. He was fascinated by machines and when he was fascinated by a subject he wrote stories about it. He took a great deal of trouble to get his facts right, and if sometimes he made mistakes, as all authors do, the facts were so unfamiliar to most readers that they did not know. He indulged in technical details for their own sake, not to show off, since though argumentative and self-opinionated as a man, he was modest and unassuming as an author, but for the fun of it. He was like a concert pianist rejoicing in the brilliant ease of his execution who chooses a piece not because of its musical value, but because it gives him an opportunity to exercise his special gift. In one of his stories Kipling says that he had to interrupt the narrator over and over again to ask him to explain his technical terms. The reader of these stories, and he wrote a number of them, unable to do this, remains perplexed. They would be more readable if their author had been less meticulous. In“Their Lawful Occasions, ”for instance, I surmise that only a naval officer could fully understand what goes on, and I am quite prepared to believe that he would find it a jolly good yarn. .007 is a story about a locomotive, The Ship that Found Herself, a story about an ocean tramp; I think you would have to be respectively an engine-driver and a ship-builder to read them with comprehension. In The Jungle Books, and indeed in The Maltese Cat, Kipling made the various animals concerned talk in a highly convincing manner; he used the same device in the locomotive numbered .007 and in the ship named Dimbula. I do not think with advantage. I cannot believe that the ordinary reader knows (or cares) what a garboard strake is, or a bilge-stringer, a high-pressure cylinder or a web-flame.

These stories show another side of Kipling's varied talent, but I have not thought it necessary to include any of them in this selection. The object of fiction (from the reader's standpoint from which the author's may often be very different) is entertainment; and as such to my mind their value is small.

I have been more doubtful about those stories concerned with practical joking, ragging, and drunkenness which he wrote from time to time. There was a Rabelaisian streak in him which the hypocrisy of the times, with its deliberate turning away from what are known as the facts of life, constrained him to express in the description of horseplay and inebriation. In Something of Myself he tells how he showed a story about the“opposite sex”to his mother, who“abolished it”and wrote to him: “Never you do that again.”From the context one may conclude that it dealt with adultery. Whether you find drunkenness amusing depends, I suppose, on your personal idiosyncrasies. It has been my ill-fortune to live much among drunkards, and for my part I have found them boring at their best and disgusting at their worst. But it is evident that this feeling of mine is rare. That stories dealing with drunkards have a strong allure is shown by the popularity of Brugglesmith, a crapulous ruffian, and of Pyecroft, a sottish petty officer, who amused Kipling so much that he wrote several tales about him. Practical joking, till the very recent past, seems to have had an appeal that was universal. Spanish literature of the Golden Age is full of it and everyone remembers the cruel practical jokes that were played on Don Quixote. In the Victorian Age it was still thought funny and from a recently published book we may learn that it was practised with delight in the highest circles. Here again it depends on your temperament whether it amuses you or whether it doesn’t. I must confess that I read Kipling's stories which deal with this subject with discomfort. And the hilarity which overcomes the perpetrators of the exploit grates upon me; they are not content with laughing at the humiliation of their victim; they lean against one another helpless with laughter, they roll off their chairs, they collapse shrieking, they claw the carpet; and in one story the narrator takes a room at an inn so that he may have his laugh out. There is only one of these tales that I have found frankly amusing and since I thought it only right to give the reader at least one example of this kind of story I have printed it in this volume. It is called The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat. Here the comedy is rich, the victim deserves his punishment, and his punishment is severe without being brutal.

I have in this essay only referred casually to Kipling's success. It was enormous. Nothing like it had been seen since Dickens took the reading world by storm with The Pickwick Papers. Nor did he have to wait for it. Already in 1890 Henry James was writing to Stevenson that Kipling, “the star of the hour, ”was Stevenson's nearest rival and Stevenson was writing to Henry James that Kipling was“too clever to live.”It looks as though they were both a trifle taken aback by the appearance of this“infant monster”as James called him. They acknowledged his brilliant parts, but with reservations.“He amazes me by his precocity and various endowment, ”wrote Stevenson.“But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste...I was never capable of—and surely never guilty of—such a debauch of production…I look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded….Certainly Kipling has gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening: what will he do with them?”

But copiousness is not a defect in a writer; it is a merit. All the greatest authors have had it. Of course not all their production is of value; only the mediocre can sustain a constant level. It is because the great authors wrote a great deal that now and then they produced great works. Kipling was no exception. I don’t believe any writer is a good judge of the writing of his contemporaries, for he naturally likes best the sort of thing he does himself. It is difficult for him to appreciate merits that he does not possess. Stevenson and James were not ungenerous men and they recognized Kipling's great abilities, but from what we know of them we can guess how disconcerted they were by the boisterous exuberance and the sentimentality of some of his tales and the brutality and grimness of others.

Of course Kipling had his detractors. The plodding writers who after years of labour had achieved but a modest place in the literary world found it hard to bear that this young man, coming from nowhere, without any of the social graces, should win, apparently with little effort, so spectacular a success; and as we know, they consoled themselves by prophesying (as once before they had of Dickens) that as he had come up like a rocket he would go down like the stick. It was objected to Kipling that he put too much of himself into his stories. But when you come down to brass tacks what else has an author to give you but himself? Sometimes, like Sterne for instance, or Charles Lamb, he gives you himself with a beguiling frankness, it is both the inspiration and the mainstay of his creativity; but even though he tries his best to be objective what he writes is inevitably infused with his ego. You cannot read a dozen pages of Madame Bovary without receiving a strong impression of Flaubert's irascible, pessimistic, morbid and self-centred personality. Kipling's critics were wrong to blame him for introducing his personality into his stories. What they meant of course was that they did not like the personality he presented to them; and that is understandable. In his early work he exhibited characteristics which were offensive. You received the impression of a bumptious, arrogant young man, extravagantly cock-sure and knowing; and this necessarily excited the antagonism of his critics. For such an assumption of superiority as these rather unamiable traits indicate affronts one's self-esteem.

Kipling was widely accused of vulgarity: so were Balzac and Dickens; I think only because they dealt with aspects of life that offended persons of refinement. We are tougher now: when we call someone refined we do not think we are paying him a compliment. But one of the most absurd charges brought against him was that his stories were anecdotes, which the critics who made it thought was to condemn him (as they sometimes still do); but if they had troubled to consult the Oxford Dictionary they would have seen that a meaning it gives to the word is: “The narration of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting or striking.”That is a perfect definition of a short story. The story of Ruth, the story of the Matron of Ephesus, Boccaccio's story of Federigo degli Alberighi and his falcon are all anecdotes. So are Boule de Suif, La Parure and L’Héritage. An anecdote is the bony structure of a story which gives it form and coherence and which the author clothes with flesh, blood and nerves. No one is obliged to read stories, and if you don’t like them unless there is something in them more than a story, there is nothing to do about it. You may not like oysters, no one can blame you for that, but it is unreasonable to condemn them because they don’t possess the emotional quality of a beefsteak and kidney pudding. It is equally unreasonable to find fault with a story because it is only a story. That is just what some of Kipling's detractors have done. He was a very talented man, but not a profound thinker—indeed I cannot think of any great novelist who was; he had a consummate gift for telling a certain kind of story and he enjoyed telling it. He was wise enough for the most part to do what he could do best. As he was a sensible man, he was no doubt pleased when people liked his stories and took it with a shrug of the shoulders when they didn’t.

Another fault found with him was that he had little power of characterization. I don’t think the critics who did this quite understood the place of characterization in a short story. Of course you can write a story with the intention of displaying a character. Flaubert did it in Un Coeur Simple and Chekhov in The Darling, which Tolstoi thought so well of; though a purist might object that they are not short stories, but potted novels. Kipling was concerned with incident. In a tale so concerned you need only tell enough about the persons who take part in it to bring them to life; you show them at the moment you are occupied with; they are inevitably static. To show the development of character an author needs the passage of time and the elbow-room of a novel. Perhaps the most remarkable character in fiction is Julien Sorel, but how could Stendhal have shown the development of his complicated character in a short story? Now, I suggest that Kipling drew his characters quite firmly enough for his purpose. There is a distinction to be made between“characters”and character. Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd are“characters.”It is easy enough to create them. Findlayson in The Bridge-Builders, and Scott and William in William the Conqueror have character; and to delineate that is much more difficult. It is true that they are very ordinary, commonplace people, but that gives point to the narrative, and surely Kipling was well aware of it. The father and mother of the Brushwood Boy are not, as Kipling thought, “County, ”landed gentry living on an ancestral estate, but a nice, worthy couple from Arnold Bennett's Five Towns who, after amassing a competence, had settled down in the country. Though lightly sketched, they are alive, recognizable human beings. Mrs. Hauksbee was not the fashionable and distinguished creature he thought her, she was a rather second-rate little woman with a very good opinion of herself, but she is far from a lay-figure. We have all met her. Yardley-Orde in The Head of the District dies four pages after the story opens, but so sufficiently has Kipling characterized him that anyone could write his life-history, after the pattern of one of Aubrey's Lives, with a very fair chance that it would be accurate. I hurry on so that I may not yield to the temptation of writing it here and now to show how easily it could be done.

A distinguished author not long ago told me that he disliked Kipling's style so much that he could not read him. The critics of his own day seem to have found it abrupt, jerky and mannered. One of them said that“it must be insisted that slang is not strength, nor does the abuse of the full stop ensure crispness.”True. An author uses slang to reproduce conversation accurately and in the course of his narrative to give his prose a conversational air. The chief objection to it is that its vogue is transitory and in a few years it is dated and may even be incomprehensible. Sometimes of course it passes into the language and then gains a literary validity so that not even a purist can object to its use. Kipling wrote in shorter sentences than were at that time usual. That can no longer surprise us, and since the lexicographers tell us that a sentence is a series of words, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought, there seems no reason why, when an author has done just this, he should not point the fact with a full stop. He is indeed right to do so. George Moore, no lenient critic of his contemporaries, admired Kipling's style for its sonority and its rhythm.“Others have written more beautifully, but no one that I can call to mind has written so copiously…. He writes with the whole language, with the language of the Bible, and with the language of the street.”Kipling's vocabulary was rich. He chose his words, often very unexpected words, for their colour, their precision, their cadence. He knew what he wanted to say and said it incisively. His prose, with which alone I am concerned, had pace and vigour. Like every other author he had his mannerisms. Some, like his unseemly addiction to biblical phrases, he quickly discarded; others he retained. He continued throughout his life to begin a sentence with a relative. Which was a pity. He continued to make deplorable use of the poetic ere when it would have been more natural to say before. Once at least he wrote e’en for even. These are minor points. Kipling has so made his style his own that I don’t suppose anyone to-day would care to write like him, even if he could, but I don’t see how one can deny that the instrument he constructed was admirably suited to the purpose to which he put it. He seldom indulged in long descriptions, but with his seeing eye and quick perception he was able by means of this instrument to put before the reader with extreme vividness the crowded Indian scene in all its fantastic variety.

If in this essay I have not hesitated to point out what seemed to me Kipling's defects, I hope I have made it plain how great I think were his merits. The short story is not a form of fiction in which the English have on the whole excelled. The English, as their novels show, are inclined to diffuseness. They have never been much interested in form. Succinctness goes against their grain. But the short story demands form. It demands succinctness. Diffuseness kills it. It depends on construction. It does not admit of loose ends. It must be complete in itself. All these qualities you will find in Kipling's stories when he was at his magnificent best, and this, happily for us, he was in story after story. Rudyard Kipling is the only writer of short stories our country has produced who can stand comparison with Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov. He is our greatest story writer. I can’t believe he will ever be equalled. I am sure he can never be excelled.