Kipling is intensely loved and hated. Hardly any reader likes him a little. Those who admire him will defend him tooth and nail, and resent unfavourable criticism of him as if he were a mistress or a country rather than a writer. The other side reject him with something like personal hatred. The reason is not hard to find and will, I hope, become apparent as we go on. For the moment, I will only say that I do not fully belong to either side.
I have been reading him off and on all my life, and I never return to him without renewed admiration. I have never at any time been able to understand how a man of taste could doubt that Kipling is a very great artist. On the other hand, I have never quite taken him to my heart. He is not one of my indispensables; life would go on much the same if the last copy of his works disappeared. I can go even further than this. Not only is my allegiance imperfect, it is also inconstant. After I have been reading Kipling for some days together there comes a sudden check. One moment I am filled with delight at the variety and solidity of his imagination; and then, at the very next moment, I am sick, sick to death, of the whole Kipling world. Of course, one can reach temporary saturation point with any author; there comes an evening when even Boswell or Virgil will do no longer. But one parts from them as a friend: one knows one will want them another day; and in the interval one thinks of them with pleasure. But I mean something quite different from that; I mean a real disenchantment, a recoil which makes the Kipling world for the moment, not dull (it is never that), but unendurable—a heavy, glaring, suffocating monstrosity. It is the difference between feeling that, on the whole, you would not like another slice of bread and butter just now, and wondering, as your gorge rises, how you could ever have imagined that you liked vodka.
I by no means assume that this sudden change of feeling is reasonable. But it must certainly have causes, and I hope that to explore them may cast some light on Kipling. I am going to suggest that they are two in number, one arising from what may be called the formal, the other from what may be called the material, character of his work. I admit that this distinction of form from matter breaks down if you press it too far, or in certain directions, but I think it will do for the purpose I have in hand.
The first cause for my sudden recoil from Kipling, I take to be not the defect but the excess of his art. He himself has told us how he licked every story into its final shape. He dipped a brush in Indian ink and then re-read the manuscript ‘in an auspicious hour’, considering faithfully ‘every paragraph, sentence and word’ and ‘blacking out where requisite’. After a time he re-read the story and usually found that it would bear ‘a second shortening’. Finally there came a third reading at which still more deletion might or might not be found necessary.1 It is a magnificent example of self-discipline, which Horace would have approved. But I suggest that even an athlete can be over-trained. Superfluous flesh should be sweated off; but a cruel trainer may be too severe in judging what is superfluous. I think Kipling used the Indian ink too much. Sometimes the story has been so compressed that in the completed version it is not quite told—at least, I still do not know exactly what happened in “Mrs Bathurst”.2 But even when this is not so, the art overreaches itself in another way. Every sentence that did not seem to Kipling perfectly and triumphantly good has been removed. As a result the style tends to be too continuously and obtrusively brilliant. The result is a little fatiguing. Our author gives us no rest: we are bombarded with felicities till they deafen us. There is no elbow room, no leisureliness. We need roughage as well as nourishment in a diet; but there is no roughage in a Kipling story—it is all unrelieved vitamins from the first word to the last.
To this criticism I think Kipling could make an almost perfectly satisfactory answer. He might say that he was writing short stories and short poems, each of which was to be the only specimen of Kipling in some number of a periodical. His work was meant to be taken in small doses. The man who gobbles down one story after another at a sitting has no more right to complain if the result is disastrous than the man who swills liqueurs as if they were beer. This answer, I have said, seems to me almost complete. Almost—because even inside a single story the brilliance of the parts, in my opinion, sometimes damages the effect of the whole. I am thinking of “My Sunday at Home”.3 The fancied situation is excellent; one ought to remember the story with chuckles as one remembers The Wrong Box.4 But I know I am not alone in finding that one actually laughed less than one would have thought possible in the reading of it and that in remembering it one always reverts to the summer drowsiness of the Wiltshire country around the railway station. That superb piece of scene painting has almost blotted out the comic action. Yet I suppose it was originally introduced for no other purpose than to emphasize the solitude of the place.
The fault of which I am here accusing Kipling is one which only a great artist could commit. For most of us the old rule of cutting out every word that can be spared is still a safe one: there is no danger that even after this process the result will be too vivid and too full of sense. And, as far as mere art is concerned, I think this is almost the only fault I can find in Kipling’s mature work; I say his mature work for, of course, like all men he made some unsuccessful experiments before he found his true vein. It is when I turn to his matter that my serious discontents begin.
The earliest generation of Kipling’s readers regarded him as the mouthpiece of patriotism and imperialism. I think that conception of his work is inadequate. Chesterton did a great service to criticism by contradicting it in a famous chapter of Heretics. In that chapter he finds the essential characteristics of Kipling’s mind to be two. In the first place he had discovered, or rediscovered, the poetry of common things; had perceived, as Chesterton says, ‘the significance and philosophy of steam and of slang’.5 In the second place, Kipling was the poet of discipline. Not specially, nor exclusively, of military discipline, but of discipline of every shape. ‘He has not written so well of soldiers’, says Chesterton, ‘as he has about railway men or bridge builders, or even journalists.’6 This particular judgement may be disputed, but I feel no doubt at all that Chesterton has picked up the right scent.
To put the thing in the shortest possible way, Kipling is first and foremost the poet of work. It is really remarkable how poetry and fiction before his time had avoided this subject. They had dealt almost exclusively with men in their ‘private hours’—with love-affairs, crimes, sport, illness and changes of fortune. Mr Osborne may be a merchant, but Vanity Fair has no interest in his mercantile life. Darcy was a good landlord and Wentworth a good officer, but their activities in these capacities were all ‘offstage’. Most of Scott’s characters, except the soldiers, have no profession; and when they are soldiers the emphasis is on battles and adventures, not on the professional routine. Business comes into Dickens only in so far as it is criminal or comic. With a few exceptions* imaginative literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had quietly omitted, or at least thrust into the background, the sort of thing which in fact occupies most of the waking hours of most men. And this did not merely mean that certain technical aspects of life were unrepresented. A whole range of strong sentiments and emotions—for many men, the strongest of all—went with them. For, as Pepys once noted with surprise, there is a great pleasure in talking of business. It was Kipling who first reclaimed for literature this enormous territory.
His early stories of Anglo-Indian society still conform to the older convention. They are about love-affairs, elopements, intrigues and domestic quarrels. They are indeed connected with his later and more characteristic work by a thread which I shall discuss presently; but on the surface they are a different kind of thing. The ‘Departmental Ditties’ are much more typical of the author’s real interests. The point about Potiphar Gubbins is not simply that he is a cuckold, but that his horns bring him advancement in the Civil Service, and that he builds very bad bridges.7 The sting of ‘The Story of Uriah’ lies not merely in the wife’s depravity but in the fact that the husband was sent, for her lover’s convenience, to die at Quetta, ‘Attempting two men’s duty In that very healthy post’.8 Exeter Battleby Tring, who really knows something about railways, has his mouth silenced with rupees in order that ‘the Little Tin Gods (long may Their Highnesses thrive!)’ may keep ‘their Circle intact’.9 Boanerges Blitzen ruins his official career by exposing ‘office scandals’ in the papers.10 The whole bitter little collection presents a corrupt society, not in its leisure, but in its official corruption. In his later work this preference for depicting men at their jobs becomes his most obvious characteristic. Findlayson’s hopes and fears about his bridge,11 McPhee’s attitude both to engines and owners,12 William the Conqueror’s work in the famine district, a lighthouse-keeper at his post on a foggy night,13 Gisborne and his chief in the forest,14 McAndrew standing his watch15—these are the things that come back to us when we remember Kipling; and there had really been nothing like them in literature before. The poems again and again strike the same note. Lord Dufferin (heavily influenced by Bishop Blougram) hands on the arcana imperii to Lord Lansdowne; the professional spies set out, ‘Each man reporting for duty alone, out of sight, out of reach, of his fellow’;16 the crew of the Bolivar, ‘Mad with work and weariness’, see ‘Some damned Liner’s lights go by like a grand hotel’;17 H. Mukerji sends with the Boh’s head a covering letter in perfect Babu officialese;18 the fans and beltings in a munition factory roar round a widowed war worker.19 The rhythms of work—boots slogging along a road,20 the Harrild and the Hoe devouring ‘Their league-long paper-bale’,21 the grunting of a waterwheel22—echo through Kipling’s verse and prose as through no other man’s. Even Mowgli in the end accepts a post in the Civil Service.23 Even “The Brushwood Boy”24 turns aside from its main theme to show how much toil its hero suffered and inflicted in the course of his profession. Even when we are taken into the remote past, Kipling is not interested in imagining what it felt like to be an ancient and pagan man; only in what it felt like to be a man doing some ancient job—a galley slave, a Roman officer. How the light came in through the oar-holes in the galley—that little detail which everyone who had served in a galley would remember and which no one else would know25—that is Kipling’s quarry.
It would be a mistake, however, to accuse Kipling of swamping the human interest in his mass of material and technical detail. The detail is there for the sake of a human interest, but that human interest is one that no previous writer had done justice to. What Kipling chiefly communicates—and it is, for good and for ill, one of the strongest things in the world—is the peculiar relation which men who do the same work have to that work and to one another; the inescapable bond of shared experiences, and, above all, of shared hardships. It is a commitment for life:
Oh, was there ever sailor free to choose,
That didn’t settle somewhere near the sea? . . .
We’ve only one virginity to lose,
And where we lost it, there our hearts will be!26
That is why in “Steam Tactics” Hinchcliffe, who, when starting on his leave, had ‘thanked his Maker, . . . that he wouldn’t see nor smell nor thumb a runnin’ bulgine till the nineteenth prox’,27 nevertheless fell immediately to studying the engine of Kipling’s steam-car.
For the same reason, Kipling, the old journalist, writes:
But the Jew shall forget Jerusalem
Ere we forget the Press!28
In the next stanza he goes on to explain why. The man who has ‘stood through the loaded hour’ and ‘lit his pipe in the morning calm’—who has, in fact, been through the nocturnal routine of producing a newspaper—‘hath sold his heart’.29 That is the whole point. We who are of one trade (whether journalists, soldiers, galley slaves, Indian Civilians, or what you will) know so many things that the outsiders will never, never understand. Like the two child lovers in The Light that Failed, ‘we belong’.30 It is a bond which in real life sometimes proves stronger than any other:
The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.31
How true to life is the immediate alliance of the three journalists whom chance has thrown together in the story called “A Matter of Fact”.32
This spirit of the profession is everywhere shown in Kipling as a ruthless master. That is why Chesterton got in a very large part of the truth when he fixed on discipline as Kipling’s main subject. There is nothing Kipling describes with more relish than the process whereby the trade-spirit licks some raw cub into shape. That is the whole theme of one of his few full-length novels, Captains Courageous.33 It is the theme of ‘The Centaurs’,34 and of ‘Pharaoh and the Sergeant’,35 and of ‘The ’Eathen’.36 It is allegorically expressed in “The Ship that Found Herself”.37 It is implicit in all the army stories and the sea-stories; indeed, it may be thought that the author turns aside from his narrative rather too often to assure us that Mulvaney was invaluable for ‘lick[ing] the new batch of recruits into shape’.38 Even when we escape into the jungle and the wolf pack we do not escape the Law. Until he has been disciplined—‘put through it’, licked into shape—a man is, for Kipling, mere raw material. ‘Gad’, says Hitchcock to Findlayson in “The Bridge-Builders”, ‘what a Cooper’s Hill cub I was when I came on the works!’ And Findlayson muses, ‘Cub thou wast; assistant thou art.’39 The philosophy of the thing is summed up at the end of “A Walking Delegate” where the yellow horse (an agitator) has asked the old working horse, ‘Have you no respec’ whatever fer the dignity o’ our common horsehood?’ He gets the reply, ‘Horse, sonny, is what you start from. We know all about horse here, an’ he ain’t any high-toned, pure-souled child o’ nature. Horse, plain horse, same ez you, is chock-full o’ tricks, an’ meannesses, an’ cussednesses, . . . an’ monkeyshines . . . Thet’s horse, an’ thet’s about his dignity an’ the size of his soul ’fore he’s been broke an’ raw-hided a piece.’40 Reading ‘man’ for ‘horse’, we here have Kipling’s doctrine of Man.
This is one of the most important things Kipling has to say and one which he means very seriously, and it is also one of the things which has aroused hatred against him. It amounts to something like a doctrine of original sin, and it is antipathetic to many modern modes of thought. Perhaps even more antipathetic is Kipling’s presentation of the ‘breaking’ and ‘raw-hiding’ process. In “His Private Honour” it turns out to consist of prolonged bullying and incessant abuse; the sort of bullying (as we learn from ‘The ’Eathen’) which sends grown men off to cry in solitude, followed by the jeers of the old hands. The patient is not allowed to claim any personal rights whatever; there is nothing, according to Kipling, more subversive. To ask for justice is as the sin of witchcraft. The disaster in the poem called ‘That Day’ began with the fact that ‘every little drummer ’ad ’is rights an’ wrongs to mind’.41 In contrast, ‘My right!’ Ortheris answered with deep scorn, ‘My rights! I ain’t a recruity to go whinin’ about my rights to this an’ my rights to that, just as if I couldn’t look after myself. My rights! ’Strewth A’mighty! I’m a man.’42
Now there is no good whatever in dismissing this part of Kipling’s message as if it were not worth powder and shot. There is a truth in it which must be faced before we attempt to find any larger truths which it may exclude. Many who hate Kipling have omitted this preliminary. They feel instinctively that they themselves are just the unlicked or unbroken men whom Kipling condemns; they find the picture intolerable, and the picture of the cure more intolerable still. To escape, they dismiss the whole thing as a mere Fascist or ‘public school’ brutality. But there is no solution along those lines. It may (or may not) be possible to get beyond Kipling’s harsh wisdom; but there is no getting beyond a thing without first getting as far. It is a brutal truth about the world that the whole everlasting business of keeping the human race protected and clothed and fed could not go on for twenty-four hours without the vast legion of hard-bitten, technically efficient, not-over-sympathetic men, and without the harsh processes of discipline by which this legion is made. It is a brutal truth that unless a great many people practised the Kipling ethos there would be neither security nor leisure for any people to practise a finer ethos. As Chesterton admits, ‘We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness—but we are glad that the net-maker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine carelessness.’43 In ‘The Pro-Consuls’, speaking of those who have actually ruled with a strong hand, Kipling says:
On the stage their act hath framed
For thy sports, O Liberty!
Doubted are they, and defamed
By the tongues their act set free.44
It is a true bill, as far as it goes. Unless the Kipling virtues—if you will, the Kipling vices—had long and widely been practised in the world we should be in no case to sit here and discuss Kipling. If all men stood talking of their rights before they went up a mast or down a sewer or stoked a furnace or joined an army, we should all perish; nor while they talked of their rights would they learn to do these things. And I think we must agree with Kipling that the man preoccupied with his own rights is not only a disastrous, but a very unlovely object; indeed, one of the worst mischiefs we do by treating a man unjustly is that we force him to be thus preoccupied.
But if so, then it is all the more important that men should in fact be treated with justice. If we all need ‘licking into shape’ and if, while undergoing the process, we must not guard our rights, then it is all the more important that someone else should guard them for us. What has Kipling to say on this subject? For, quite clearly, the very same methods which he prescribes for licking the cub into shape, ‘making a man of him’ in the interests of the community, would also, if his masters were bad men, be an admirable method of keeping the cub quiet while he was exploited and enslaved for their private benefit. It is all very well that the colts (in ‘The Centaurs’) should learn to obey Chiron as a means to becoming good cavalry chargers; but how if Chiron wants their obedience only to bring them to the knacker’s yard? And are the masters never bad men? From some stories one would almost conclude that Kipling is ignorant of, or indifferent to, this possibility. In “His Private Honour” the old soldiers educate the recruits by continued bullying. But Kipling seems quite unaware that bullying is an activity which human beings enjoy. We are given to understand that the old soldiers are wholly immune to this temptation; they threaten, mock, and thrash the recruits only for the highest possible motives. Is this naïvety in the author? Can he really be so ignorant? Or does he not care?
He is certainly not ignorant. Most of us begin by regarding Kipling as the panegyrist of the whole imperial system. But we find when we look into the matter that his admiration is reserved for those in the lower positions. These are the ‘men on the spot’: the bearers of the burden; above them we find folly and ignorance; at the centre of the whole thing we find the terrible society of Simla, a provincial smart set which plays frivolously with men’s careers and even their lives. The system is rotten at the head, and official advancement may have a teterrima causa. Findlayson had to see ‘months of office work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of paper’.45 The heart-rending death of Orde (one of Kipling’s best tragic scenes) is followed by the undoing of his life’s work when the ignorant Viceroy sends a Babu to succeed him.46 In “Tod’s Amendment” disaster is averted by a child who knows what all the rulers of India (the ‘little Tin Gods’) do not know.47 It is interesting to compare ‘The ’Eathen’ with ‘The Sergeant’s Weddin”.48 In the one, the sergeants are benevolent despots—it is only the softness and selfishness of the recruit that make him think they are cruel tyrants. In the other, we have a sergeant who uses his position to make money by cheating the men. Clearly this sergeant would have just as strong a motive as the good ones for detesting privates who talked about their ‘rights and wrongs’.
All this suggests that the disciplinary system is a very two-edged affair; but this does not in the least shake Kipling’s devotion to it. That, he says in effect, is what the world has always been like and always will be like. Even in prehistoric times the astute person
Won a simple Viceroy’s praise
Through the toil of other men.49
And no one can rebuke more stunningly than Kipling those who exploit and frustrate the much-enduring ‘man on the spot’:
When the last grim joke is entered
In the big black Book of Jobs,
And Quetta graveyards give again
Their victims to the air,
I shouldn’t like to be the man
Who sent Jack Barret there.50
But this makes no difference to the duty of the sufferer. Whatever corruptions there may be at the top, the work must go on; frontiers must be protected, epidemics fought, bridges built, marshes drained, famine relief administered. Protest, however well grounded, about injustice, and schemes of reform, will never bring a ship into harbour or a train into the station or sow a field of oats or quell a riot; and ‘the unforgiving minute’51 is upon us fourteen-hundred and forty times a day. This is the truest and finest element in Kipling; his version of Carlyle’s gospel of work. It has affinities with Piers Plowman’s insistence on ploughing his half-acre. But there are important differences.
The more Kipling convinces us that no plea for justice or happiness must be allowed to interfere with the job, the more anxious we become for a reassurance that the work is really worthy of all the human sacrifices it demands. ‘The game’, he says, ‘is more than the player of the game.’ But perhaps some games are and some aren’t. ‘And the ship is more than the crew’52—but one would like to know where the ship was going and why. Was its voyage really useful—or even innocent? We want, in fact, a doctrine of Ends. Langland could supply one. He knows how Do Well is connected with Do Bet and Do Best; the ploughing of the half-acre is placed in a cosmic context and that context would enable Langland, in principle, to tell us whether any given job in the whole universe was true worship or miserable idolatry; it is here that Kipling speaks with an uncertain voice. For many of the things done by his Civil Servants the necessity is perhaps obvious; but that is not a side of the matter he develops. And he writes with equal relish where the ultimate ends of the work described are much less obvious. Sometimes his choice of sides seems to be quite accidental, even frivolous. When William the Conqueror met a schoolmaster who had to teach the natives the beauties of Wordsworth’s Excursion she told him, rather unnecessarily, ‘I like men who do things.’53 Teaching English Literature to natives is not ‘doing things’, and we are meant to despise that schoolmaster. One notes that the editor of the local paper, whom we met a few pages before, is visited with no similar ignominy. Yet it is easy enough to imagine the situations reversed. Kipling could have written a perfect Kipling story about two men in the Educational Department working eighteen hours a day to conduct an examination, with punkah flapping and all the usual background. The futility of the curriculum which makes them set Wordsworth to Indian schoolboys would not in the least have detracted from their heroism if he had chosen to write the story from that point of view. It would have been their professional grievance—ironically and stoically endured—one more instance of that irresponsible folly at the top which wastes and breaks the men who really do the work. I have a disquieting feeling that Kipling’s actual respect for the journalist and contempt for the schoolmaster has no thought-out doctrine of ends behind it, but results from the accident that he himself worked for a newspaper and not for a school. And now, at last, I begin to suspect that we are finding a clue to that suffocating sensation which overtakes me if I read Kipling too long. Is the Kipling world really monstrous in the sense of being misshaped? How if this doctrine of work and discipline, which is so clear and earnest and dogmatic at the periphery, hides at the centre a terrible vagueness, a frivolity or scepticism?
Sometimes it hides nothing but what the English, whether fairly or unfairly, are inclined to call Americanism. The story called “Below the Mill Dam” is an instance. We are expected to rejoice that the native black rat should be superseded by the alien brown rat; that the mill wheel could be yoked to a dynamo and the countryside electrified. None of the questions which every thinking man must raise about the beneficence of this whole transition have any meaning for Kipling. They are to him mere excuses for idleness. ‘We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing’, say the Waters; and, to the Wheel itself, ‘while you’re at work you’ll work’.54 The black rat is to be stuffed. Here is the creed of Activism—of ‘Progress’, hustle, and development—all blind, naked, uncritical of itself. Similarly in ‘The Explorer’, while we admire the man’s courage in the earlier stanzas, the end which he has in view gives us pause. His Holy Grail is simply the industrialisation of the country he has discovered. The waterfalls are ‘wasting fifty thousand head an hour’ and the forests are ‘axe-ripe’;55 he will rectify this. The End, here as in the Mill Dam story, may be a good one; it is not for me to decide. But Kipling does not seem to know there is any question. In “Bread Upon the Waters” all the usual hardships are described and with all Kipling’s usual relish; but the only end is money and revenge—though I confess, a very excusable revenge. In “The Devil and the Deep Sea”56 the job, which is treated with his usual reverence, the game, which is still more than the player of the game, is merely the triumph of a gang of criminals.
This might be explained by saying that Kipling is not a moralist but a purely objective writer. But that would be false. He is eminently a moralist; in almost every story we are invited, nay forced, to admire and condemn. Many of the poems are versified homilies. This is why this chanciness or uncertainty about the End to which the moralism of his bushido is applied in any particular instance makes us uncomfortable. And now we must take a step farther. Even Discipline is not a constant. The very people who would be cubs to be licked into shape in one story may, in another, be the heroes we are asked to admire.
Stalky and his friends are inveterate breakers of discipline. How easily, had his own early memories been different, could Kipling have written the story the other way round. In “Their Lawful Occasions”57 Moorshed, because he is rich and able to leave the navy next year, can afford to take an independent line. All Kipling’s sympathy is with him and against the ship which is significantly named H.M.S. Pedantic. Yet Kipling need only have altered the lighting (so to speak) to make Moorshed, and the grounds of his independence, particularly odious and the odium would have been of a characteristically Kiplingese kind. In “Without Benefit of Clergy”58 Holden’s inefficiency as a civil servant is made light of; but had Kipling written in a different mood the very cause of this inefficiency—namely keeping a native mistress—would have been made into a despicable aggravation. In the actual story it is almost an excuse. In “A Germ-Destroyer” we actually find Kipling laughing at a man because he has ‘a morbid passion for work’!59 In “The Bisara of Pooree” that whole Anglo-Indian world, whose work for the natives elsewhere seems so necessary and valuable, is contrasted with the natives as ‘the shiny, top-scum stuff that people call “civilisation’ ”.60 In the “Dream of Duncan Parrenness”, the apparition offers the hero success in the Anglo-Indian career in return for his Trust in Man, his Faith in Woman, and his Boy’s Conscience. He gives them all and receives in return ‘a little piece of dry bread’.61 Where is now the Kipling we thought we knew—the prophet of work, the activist, the writer of ‘If’? ‘Were it not better done as others use . . . ?’
You may say that some of these examples are taken from early stories; perhaps Kipling held these sceptical views in his youth and abandoned them in his maturity. Perhaps—as I once half-believed myself—he is a ‘lost leader’; a great opposition writer who was somehow caught by government. I think there was a change in his views, but I do not think that goes to the root of the matter. I think that nearly all his work (for there are a few, and very valuable exceptions), at all periods is dominated by one master passion. What he loves better than anything in the world is the intimacy within a closed circle—even if it be only a circle of shared misery as in “In the Same Boat”,62 or of shared crime as in “The Devil and the Deep Sea”. In the last resort I do not think he loves professional brotherhood for the sake of the work; I think he loves work for the sake of professional brotherhood. Out of that passion all his apparently contradictory moods arise. But I must attempt to define the passion itself a little more closely and to show how it has such a diversified offspring.
When we forgather with three or four trusted cronies of our own calling, a strong sense of community arises and is enjoyed. But that enjoyment can be prolonged by several different kinds of conversation. We may all be engaged in standing together against the outer world—all those fools outside who write newspaper articles about us which reveal their ghastly ignorance of the real work, and propose schemes which look very fine on paper but which, as we well know, are impracticable. As long as that conversation lasts, the profession appears a very fine one and its achievements very remarkable; if only those yapping outsiders would leave us alone to get on with the job. And that conversation, if we could do it well enough, would make one kind of Kipling story. But we might equally spend the evening standing together against our own seniors; those people at the top—Lord knows how they got there while better men rot in provincial lectureships, or small ships, or starving parishes!—who seem to have forgotten what the real work is like and who spoil all our best efforts with their meddling and are quite deceived about our relative merits. And while that conversation lasted, our profession would appear a very rotten and heart-breaking profession. We might even say it was high time the public learned the sort of things that really go on. A rousing scandal might do good. And out of all that, another kind of Kipling story might be made. But then, some other evening, or later the same evening, we might all be standing together against our juniors. As if by magic our profession would now once more appear in a favourable light—at least, our profession as it used to be. What may happen with the sort of young cubs we’re getting into it nowadays is another question. They need licking into shape. They’ll have to learn to pull their socks up. They haven’t begun to realize what is expected of them. And heaven knows, things are made easy enough for them now! They haven’t been through the sort of mill we were through. God! If they’d worked under old So-and-so . . . and thus, yet another Kipling story might arise. But we sometimes like talking about our juniors in exactly the opposite way. We have been in the job so long that we have no illusions about it. We know that half the official regulations are dead letters. Nobody will thank you for doing more than you need. Our juniors are laughably full of zeal, pedantic about discipline, devoured with a morbid passion for work. Ah, well, they’ll soon get over it!
Now the point is that the similarity between all these conversations is overwhelmingly more important than the differences. It may well be chance which launches the evening on one of them rather than another, for they all give the same sort of pleasure, and this is the kind of pleasure which the great majority of Kipling’s works both express and communicate. I am tempted to describe it as the pleasure of freemasonry; but this would be confusing because Kipling became a Mason in the narrower and official sense. But in the wider sense you may say he was born a Mason. One of the stories that pleased his childhood was, significantly, about ‘lions who were all Freemasons’ and in ‘confederacy against some wicked baboons’.63 The pleasure of confederacy against wicked Baboons, or even of confederacy simpliciter, is the cardinal fact about the Kipling world. To belong, to be inside, to be in the know, to be snugly together against the outsiders—that is what really matters; it is almost an accident who are cast for the rôle of outsiders (wicked Baboons) on any given occasion. And no one before Kipling had fully celebrated the potency of that snugness—the esoteric comedies and tragedies, the mutual understanding, the highly specialised smile, or shrug, or nod, or shake of the head, which passes between fellow-professionals; the exquisite pleasure of being approved, the unassuaged mortification of being despised, within that charmed circle, compared with which public fame and infamy are a mere idle breath. What is the good of the papers hiding it ‘’andsome’ if ‘you know the Army knows’?64 What is the good of excuses accepted by government if ‘the men of one’s own kind’ hold one condemned?
And this is how the Simla stories really fit in. They are not very good—all Kipling’s women have baritone voices—and at first sight they are not very mature work. But look again. ‘If you do not know about things Up Above’, says Kipling, after recording one of Mrs Hauksbee’s most improbable exploits, ‘you won’t understand how to fill in, and you will say it is impossible.’65 In other words, at this stage of Kipling’s career Simla society (to which, it may be supposed, his entrée was rather precarious) is itself a secret society, an inner ring, and the stories about it are for those who are ‘in the know’. That the secrets in this case should be very shabby ones and the knowledge offered us very disillusioned knowledge, is an effect of the writer’s youth. Young writers, and specially young writers already enchanted by the lure of the Inner Ring, like to exaggerate the cynicism and sophistication of the great world; it makes them feel less young. One sees how he must have enjoyed writing ‘Simla is a strange place . . . nor is any man who has not spent at least ten seasons there qualified to pass judgement!’66 That is the spirit of nearly all Kipling’s work, though it was later applied to inner rings more interesting than Simla. There is something delicious about these early flights of esotericism. ‘In India’, he says, ‘where everyone knows everyone else’;67 and again, ‘I have lived long enough in this India to know that it is best to know nothing.’68
The great merit in Kipling is to have presented the magic of the Inner Ring in all its manifold workings for the first time. Earlier writers had presented it only in the form of snobbery; and snobbery is a very highly specialised form of it. The call of the Inner Ring, the men we know, the old firm, the talking of ‘shop’, may call a man away from high society into very low society indeed; we desire not to be in a junto simply, just to be in that junto where we ‘belong’. Nor is Kipling in the least mistaken when he attributes to this esoteric spirit such great powers for good. The professional point of honour (it means as much, said McPhee, as her virginity to a lassie),69 the Aidôs we feel only before our colleagues, the firm brotherhood of those who have ‘been through it’ together, are things quite indispensable to the running of the world. This masonry or confederacy daily carries commonplace people to heights of diligence or courage which they would not be likely to reach by any private moral ideals. Without it, no good thing is operative widely or for long.
But also—and this Kipling never seems to notice—without it no bad thing is operative either. The nostalgia which sends the old soldier back to the army (‘I smelt the smell o’ the barricks, I ’eard the bugles go’)70 also sends the recidivist back to his old partner and his old ‘fence’. The confidential glance or rebuke from a colleague is indeed the means whereby a weak brother is brought or kept up to the standard of a noble profession; it is also the means whereby a new and hitherto innocent member is initiated into the corruption of a bad one. ‘It’s always done’, they say; and so, without any ‘scenes’ or excitement, with a nod and a wink, over a couple of whiskies and soda, the Rubicon is crossed. The spirit of the Inner Ring is morally neutral—the obedient servant of valour and public spirit, but equally of cruelty, extortion, oppression, and dishonesty.71
Kipling seems unaware of this, or indifferent to it. He is the slave of the Inner Ring; he expresses the passion, but does not stand outside to criticise it. He plays for his side; about the choice of sides, about the limitations of partisanship after the side has been chosen, he has nothing very much to say to us. Mr Eliot has, I think rightly, called him a Pagan.72 Irreverence is the last thing of which one could accuse him. He has a reverent Pagan agnosticism about all ultimates. ‘When man has come to the turnstiles of Night’, he says in the preface to Life’s Handicap, ‘all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colourless.’73 He has the Pagan tolerance too; a tolerance so wide (which is unusual) that it extends even to Christianity, whose phraseology he freely uses for rhetorical effect in his more Swinburnian moments.* But the tolerance is weary and sceptical; the whole energy of the man goes into his worship of the little demigods or daemons in the foreground—the Trades, the Sides, the Inner Rings. Their credentials he hardly examines. These servants he has made masters; these half-gods exclude the gods.
There are, I allow, hints of another Kipling. There are moments of an almost quivering tenderness—he himself had been badly hurt—when he writes of children or for them. And there are the ‘queer’ or ‘rum’ stories—“At the End of the Passage”,74 “The Mark of the Beast”,75 “They”,76 “Wireless”.77 These may be his best work, but they are not his most characteristic. If you open him at random, the chances are you will find him enslaved to some Inner Ring. His English countryside with its way of life is partly loved because American millionaires can’t understand it, aren’t in the know.78 His comic stories are nearly all about hoaxes: an outsider mystified is his favourite joke. His jungle is not free from it. His very railway engines are either recruits or Mulvaneys dressed up in boilers.79 His polo-ponies are public school ponies.80 Even his saints and angels are in a celestial civil service.81 It is this ubiquitous presence of the Ring, this unwearied knowingness, that renders his work in the long run suffocating and unendurable. And always, ironically, that bleak misgiving—almost that Nothingness—in the background.
But he was a very great writer. This trade-passion, this business of the Inner Ring, fills an immense area of human life. There, though not in the conventional novel, it frequently proves itself stronger than family affection, national loyalty, religion, and even vice. Hence Kipling deserved success with thousands of readers who left older fiction to be read by women and boys. He came home to their bosoms by coming home to their business and showed them life as they had found it to be. This is merit of a high order; it is like the discovery of a new element or a new planet; it is, in its way and as far as it goes, a ‘return to nature’. The remedy for what is partial and dangerous in his view of life is to go on from Kipling and to add the necessary correctives—not to deny what he has shown. After Kipling there is no excuse for the assumption that all the important things in a man’s life happen between the end of one day’s work and the beginning of the next. There is no good putting on airs about Kipling. The things he mistook for gods may have been only ‘spirits of another sort’; but they are real things and strong.