Debits and Credits
New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1926. 12mo. viii+354 pp. $.00.
THIS new book by Rudyard Kipling, appearing after a long interval, with its fourteen prose tales and its eighteen poems, presents the variety that we have come to expect in the work of this author. Here are gathered up many aspects of experience and of thought. A charming, whimsical bit of verse pays tribute to Jane Austen; other poems range in theme from an arraignment of America for its laggard part in the war to the childlike humor of ‘We and They.’ ‘Gipsy Vans’ brings an appealing outbound swing of foot and mood on the open road. There are stern echoes of the war among the diverse themes of the prose tales, its struggle, its hard-earned wisdom, with grim impressionist pictures of moments of the conflict. In ‘The Eye of Allah’ we are taken back to mediæval days, and follow, in a striking story, where detail is worked out with vivid, Kiplingesque concreteness, the discovery by a genius, appearing centuries before the appointed time, of germs, revealed by a microscope. ‘The Enemies to Each Other’ is a study of peasant life and growth and a prophecy for the future, in a fabled presentation of Adam and Eve.
The old humor is here, the old sympathy, the sense of tragedy in human life, and of the quickening strength that rises to face it; here is the old sense of the dramatic in character and incident that we associate with this story-teller. There are quick, kaleidoscopic happenings, flashes of incident, of conversation, in a few cases so swift as to be almost unintelligible. The author’s repeatedly expressed enthusiasm for Jane Austen is all the more interesting because her work is so unlike his own, having that quiet note of unheightened truth which contrasts with Kipling’s note of humorous or emotional exaggeration whereby he sometimes sacrifices the exact shade of truth for effect, as in ‘The Prophet and the Country. ’
This master story-teller, working ‘in common clay rude figures of a rough-hewn race,’ and breathing into them his agonies, has charmed successive generations. Perhaps he was most markedly the idol of the nineties, poet and prophet of a transition time that was full of dissatisfaction with old forms and old appreciations, of blind groping for the new. The s winging rhythms, the hard-hitting rhymes and stresses of verse, vital, dramatic action, the swift and vivid concrete touches in prose and in verse, arrested and held attention, and the many-sidedness of his work, full of the vibrating life Of man, animal, machine, pictured an epoch throbbing with new and as yet uncomprehended growth.
This new book represents that strange complex of ideas, energies, and imaginative insights that is Kipling. His creative activities, constantly manifesting themselves in new ways, must have been a continual surprise to himself as to his readers. Why should he not write a story about himself as ‘The Man Who Could Never Do the Same Thing Twice Over’? Lovers of Kipling will care for the book, partly because it suggests — if it does not, as a whole, equal — that early work; it will bring memories of more resounding melodies and deeper inspirations.
One writes this sentence with misgiving, for here, as always, this versatile author is a surprise, a paradox, a contradiction. Flashes in different stories here, the whole of ‘The Wish House,’ with its deep insight, show him still
. . . in his separate star, [Drawing] the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as They Are.
MARGARET SHERWOOD