The Kipling That Nobody Read

THE eclipse of the reputation of Kipling, which began about 1910, twentyfive years before Kipling’s death and when he was still only forty-five, has been of a peculiar kind. Through this period he has remained, from the point of view of sales, an immensely popular writer. The children still read his children’s books; the college students still read his poetry; the men and women of his own generation still reread his early work. But he has in a sense been dropped out of modern literature. The more serious-minded young people do not read him; the critics do not take him into account. During the later years of his life and even at the time of his death, the logic of his artistic development attracted no intelligent attention.

At a time when W. B. Yeats had outgrown his romantic youth and was receiving the reward of an augmented glory for his severer and more concentrated work, Rudyard Kipling, Yeats’s coeval, who had also achieved a new concentration through the efforts of a more exacting discipline, saw the glory of his young manhood fade away. And during the period when the late work of Henry James, who had passed into a similar eclipse, was being retrieved and appreciated, when the integrity and interest of his work as a whole were finally being understood, no attempt, so far as I know, was made to take stock of Kipling’s work as a whole.¹ The ordinary person said simply that Kipling was ‘written out’; the reviewer rarely made any effort to trace the journey from the breeziness of the early short stories to the bitterness of the later ones. The thick, dark, and surly little man who had dug himself into Bateman’s, Burwash, Sussex, was left to his bristling privacy, and only occasionally evoked a rebuke for the intolerant and vindictive views which, emerging with the suddenness of a snapping turtle, he sometimes expressed in public.

But who was Kipling? What did he express? What was the history of that remarkable talent which gave him a place, as a craftsman of English prose, as one of the few genuine masters of his day? How was it that the art of his short stories became continually more skillful and intense, and yet that his career appears broken?

I

The publication of Kipling’s posthumous memoirs — Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown — has enabled us to see more clearly the causes for the anomalies of Kipling’s career.

First of all, he was born in India, the son of an English artist and scholar, who had gone out to teach architectural sculpture at the Fine Arts School in Bombay and who afterwards became curator of the museum at Lahore. This fact is, of course, well known; but its importance must be specially emphasized. It appears that up to the age of six Kipling talked, thought, and dreamed, as he says, in Hindustani, and could hardly speak English correctly. A drawing of him made by a schoolmate shows a swarthy boy with lank straight hair, who might almost pass for a Hindu.

The second important influence in Kipling’s early life has not hitherto been generally known, though it figures in the first chapter of The Light That Failed and furnished the subject of ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,’ one of the most powerful things he ever wrote. This story had always seemed rather unaccountably to stand apart from the rest of Kipling’s work by reason of its sympathy with the victims rather than with the inflictors of a severely repressive discipline; and its exceptional character is now explained by a chapter in Kipling’s autobiography and by a memoir recently published by his sister. When Kipling was six and his sister four and a half, they were farmed out for six years in England with a relative of Kipling’s father. John Lockwood Kipling was the son of a Methodist minister, and this woman was a religious domestic tyrant in the worst English tradition of Dickens and Samuel Butler. The boy, who had been petted and deferred to by the native servants in India, was now beaten, bullied with the Bible, pursued with constant suspicions, and broken down by cross-examinations. If one of the children spilled a drop of gravy or wept over a letter from their parents in Bombay, they were forbidden to speak to one another for twenty-four hours. Their guardian had a violent temper and enjoyed making terrible scenes, and they learned to propitiate her by fawning on her when they saw that an outburst was imminent.

‘Looking back,’ says Kipling’s sister, Mrs. Fleming, in a memoir writ ten after her brother’s death, ‘I think the real tragedy of our early days, apart from Aunty’s bad temper and unkindness to my brother, sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us. We had had no preparation or explanation; it was like a double death, or rather, like an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar. . . . We felt that we had been deserted, “almost as much as on a doorstep,” and what was the reason? Of course, Aunty used to say it was because we were so tiresome, and she had taken us out of pity, but in a desperate moment Ruddy appealed to Uncle Harrison, and he said it was only Aunty’s fun, and Papa had left us to be taken care of, because India was too hot for little people. But we knew better than that, because we had been to Nassick, so what was the real reason? Mamma was not ill, like the seepy-weepy Ellen Montgomery’s mamma in The Wide, Wide World. Papa had not had to go to a war. They had not even lost their money; if they had, we could have swept crossings or sold flowers, and it would have been rather fun. But there was no excuse; they had gone happily back to our own lovely home, and had not taken us with them. There was no getting out of that, as we often said.

‘Harry (Aunty’s son), who had all a crow’s quickness in finding a wound to pick at, discovered our trouble and teased us unmercifully. He assured us we had been taken in out of charity, and must do exactly as he told us. . . . We were just like workhouse brats, and none of our toys really belonged to us.’

Rudyard had bad eyes, which began to give out altogether, so that ho was unable to do his work at school. He destroyed one of his monthly reports so that his guardians at home shouldn’t see it; and for punishment was made to walk to school with a placard reading ‘Liar’ between his shoulders. He had a severe nervous breakdown, accompanied by partial blindness, and was punished by isolation from his sister. This breakdown, it is important to note, was made horrible by hallucinations. As a mist, which seemed to grow steadily thicker, shut him in from the rest of the world, he would imagine that blowing curtains were spectres or that a coat on a nail was an enormous black bird ready to swoop upon him.

His mother came back at last, saw how bad things were, — when she went up to kiss him good-night, he instinctively put up his hand to ward off the accustomed blow, — and took the children away. But the effects of the experience were lasting. Kipling asserts that it had ‘drained me of any capacity for real, personal hate for the rest of my days.’ Of personal hate, perhaps; but not of hatred itself. Here is the conclusion of the story which Kipling made out of this episode: ‘There! “Told you so,’” says the boy to his sister. ‘It’s all different now, and we see just as much of mother as if she had never gone.’ But, Kipling adds, ‘not altogether, O Punch, for when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge; though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach Faith where no Faith was.’

Mrs. Fleming says that her revulsion against Aunty’s son Harry conditioned her reactions toward people who resembled him in certain particulars throughout her whole life, and tells how, thirty years later, she set out in Southsea one day to see if the ‘House of Desolation’ were still standing, but her heart failed her, and she hurried back: ‘I dared not face it.’ Rudyard himself had had a similar experience: ‘I think we both dreaded a kind of spiritual imprisonment that would affect our dreams. Less than four years ago [she is writing in 1939], I asked him whether he knew if the house still stood. “I don’t know, but if so, I should like to burn it down and plough the place with salt.” ‘

The whole work of Kipling’s life is to be shot through with hatred.

Rudyard Kipling was next sent to a public school in England. This school, the United Services College, at a place called Westward Ho!, had been founded by Army and Navy officers who could not afford to send their sons to the more expensive schools. The four and a half years that Kipling spent there gave him Stalky & Co., and the relation of the experience to the book provides an interesting psychological study. The book itself, of course, presents a hairraising picture of the sadism of the English public-school system. The older boys have fags to wait on them and they sometimes torment these younger boys till they have almost reduced them to imbecility; the masters are constantly caning the boys in scenes that become as bloody as those of the floggings in old sea stories; the boys revenge themselves on the masters with practical jokes as catastrophic as the Whams and Zows of the comic strip. It was not until after Kipling’s death — when the original of his character McTurk, one of the companions of Stalky in the stories, a man named G. C. Beresford, published a book called Schooldays with Kipling — that one got any more factual evidence on conditions at the United Services College. Mr. Beresford, who in Stalky & Co. is made to read Ruskin at school, turns out to be a Nationalist Irishman, who is disgusted with his old friend’s later imperialism and who may lean too far in the opposite direction in his attempt to correct Kipling’s picture; but it throws a rather startling light on Kipling’s habits of mind to learn that, as a matter of fact, the fagging system did not exist at Westward Ho!; that the boys were never caned on their bare shoulders; that Kipling himself, so far as Beresford remembers, was never caned at all except by a single exceptional master; and that the terrific Stalky himself, whose exploits in the stories spread devastation, was distinguished, in reality, by a smoothness and good humor which enabled him to carry off his pranks with a minimum of actual scandal.

Kipling admits in Something of Myself that he invented the fagging system at Westward Ho!, but he asserts that the discipline there was brutal and that the students were wretchedly fed, and that he himself, much given to books and too blind to participate in games, endured a good deal of baiting. The important thing is that he suffered. It is significant that the single master whom Beresford mentions as persecuting the boys should have been inquisitorial and morbidly suspicious — that is, that he should have treated Kipling in the same way that he had already been treated by the Baa, Baa, Black Sheep people. And it is also significant that this master does not figure in Stalky & Co., but only appears later in one of the more scrupulous stories which Kipling afterwards wrote about the school. The stimulus of unjust suspicion, which did not leave any lasting bitterness with Beresford, had evidently the effect upon Kipling of throwing him back into the state of mind which had been created by the earlier relationship. And for a boy who has been habitually beaten during the second six years of his life, subsequent callings, however occasional, may have the effect of reawakening the terror and hatred of childhood. It thrust him back into the nightmare again, and made a delirium of the whole of Westward Ho! Stalky & Co. — from the artistic point of view certainly the worst of Kipling’s books, crude in writing, trashy in feeling, implausible in a series of contrivances which resemble moving-picture gags — is in the nature of an hysterical outpouring of emotions kept over from school days, and it owes its popularity partly to the fact that it provides the young with hilarious and violent fantasies on the theme of what they would do to the school bully and to their mentors if the laws of probability were suspended.

We shall deal presently with the social significance which Kipling, at a later period, was to read back into Westward Ho! In the meantime, we must follow his adventures when he leaves it in July 1882, not yet quite seventeen, but remarkably mature for his age and with a set of grown-up whiskers. He went back to his family in India, and there he remained for seven years. The Hindu child, who had lain dormant in England, came to life when he reached Bombay, and he found himself reacting to the old stimuli by saying things in Hindustani which his conscious mind did not understand. ‘Seven Years Hard’ is his heading for his chapter on this part of his life. He started right in on a newspaper in Lahore as sole assistant to the editor, and worked his head off for a chief he detested.

It was one of the duties of the English journalist in India to play down the frequent epidemics. Kipling himself survived dysentery and fever, and kept on working through his severest illnesses. One hot night in 1886, when he felt, as he says, that he ‘had come to the edge of all endurance’ and had gone home to his empty house with the sensation that there was nothing left in him but ‘the horror of a great darkness, that I must have been fighting for some days,’ he read a novel by Walter Besant about a young man who had wanted to be a writer and who had eventually succeeded in his aim. Kipling decided he Would save some money and get away to London. He wrote short stories called Plain Tales from the Hills, which were run to fill up space in the paper, and he brought out a book of verse. His superiors disapproved of his flippancy, and when he finally succeeded in leaving India the managing director of the paper, who had considered him overpaid, told the young man that he could take it from him that he would never be worth anything more than four hundred rupees a month.

The young Kipling is a sympathetic figure. He shares the life and sees into the experience of the natives of all faiths and castes, of the English of all classes and ranks, the bored English ladies, the vagabond adventurers, the officers and the soldiers both. ‘Having no position to consider,’ he writes, ‘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. . . . Lord Roberts, at that time Commander-in-chief of India, who knew my people, was interested in the men, and — I had by then written one or two stories about soldiers — the proudest moment of my young life was when I rode up Simla Mall beside him on his usual explosive red Arab, while he asked me what the men thought about their accommodations, entertainment-rooms, and the like. I told him, and he thanked me as gravely as though I had been a full Colonel.’ Kipling’s interest in people here is personal: ‘All the queer outside world would drop into our workshop sooner or later — say a Captain just cashiered for horrible drunkenness, who reported his fall with a wry, appealing face, and then — disappeared. Or a man old enough to be my father, on the edge of tears because he had been overpassed for Honors in The Gazette. . . . One met men going up and down the ladder in every shape of misery and success.’ And he describes in his soldier stories with an artist’s detachment and sympathy the hunger of Ortheris for London when the horror of exile seizes him; the vanities and vices of Mulvaney, which prevent him from rising in the service — ‘The Courting of Dinah Shadd,’ admired by Henry James, is one of the most thoroughly human of Kipling’s stories; even the manias and breakup of the rotter gentleman ranker who figures in ‘Love o’ Women.’

Through all these years of school and newspaper apprenticeship, with their warping and thwarting influences, Kipling worked at mastering his craft. For he had been subjected to yet another influence which has not been mentioned yet. His father was a painter and sculptor, and two of his mother’s sisters were married to artists, one to Edward Poynter, the Academician, and the other to the pre-Raphaelite, Burne-Jones. Besides India and the United Services College, there had been the pre-Raphaelite movement. In England, Kipling’s vacation had always been spent in London with the Burne-Joneses. Mr. Beresford says that at school Kipling’s attitude had been that of the æsthete who disdains athletics and has no aptitude for mechanics, that he was already preoccupied with writing, and that his literary proficiency and cultivation were amazingly developed for his age. He had had thus from his childhood the example of men who loved the arts for their own sake and who were particularly concerned about craftsmanship (it is also of interest that his father’s family had distinguished themselves in the eighteenth century as founders of bronze bells). Kipling evidently owes to this inspiration and training his superiority as a craftsman to most of even the ablest English writers of fiction of the end of the century and the early nineteen hundreds. Just as the ballad of ‘Danny Deever’ derives directly from the ballad of ‘Sister Helen,’ so the ideal of an artistic workmanship which shall revert to earlier standards of soundness and distinction is probably derived from William Morris and his associates. In 1878, when Rudyard was twelve years old, his father had taken him to the Paris Exhibition and insisted that he learn to read French. The boy had conceived an enthusiasm for French civilization which led him to work with intensity at perfecting the short story in English. His earlier life with the relatives who had mistreated him had equipped him, he says, with a training not unsuitable for a writer of fiction, in that it had ‘demanded constant wariness, the habit of observation, and attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanor; and automatic suspicion of sudden favors.’

With such a combination of elements, what might one not expect? It is not surprising to learn that Kipling contemplated, after his return to England, writing a colonial Comédie Humaine. ‘ Bit by bit, my original notion,’ he writes, ‘grew into a vast, vague conspectus — Army and Navy List, if you like — of the whole sweep and meaning of things and efforts and origins throughout the Empire.’ Henry James, who wrote a preface to a collection of Kipling’s early stories, said afterwards that he had thought at the time that it might perhaps be true that Kipling ‘contained the seeds of an English Balzac.’

II

What became of this English Balzac? Why did the author of the brilliant short stories never develop into an important novelist?

Let us return to ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ and the experience with which it deals. Kipling says that his BurneJones aunt was never able to understand why he had never told anyone in the family about how badly he and his sister were being treated, and he tries to explain this on the principle that ‘children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established,’ and says that ‘badlytreated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.’ But is this necessarily true? Even young children do sometimes run away. And, in any case, Kipling’s reaction to this experience seems an abnormally docile one. After all, Dickens made David Copperfield bite Mr. Murdstone’s hand and escape; and he continued to dislike and attack Mr. Murdstone. But though the anguish of these years had given Kipling a certain sympathy with the neglected and persecuted, and caused him to write this one moving short story, it left him — whether as the result of the experience itself or because he was already so conditioned — with a fundamental submissiveness to authority.

Let us examine the two books in which Kipling deals, respectively, with his school days and with his youth in India — Stalky & Co. and Kim. These works — published, the first in 1899, the second in 1901 — are the products of the author’s thirties, and Kim, at any rate, represents Kipling’s most serious attempt to allow himself to grow to the stature of a first-rate creative artist. Each of these books begins with an antagonism which in the work of a greater writer would have developed into a fundamental conflict; but in neither Stalky nor Kim is the conflict ever allowed to mount to a real crisis. Nor can it even be said to be resolved: it simply ceases to figure as a conflict. In Stalky, we are at first made to sympathize with the baiting of the masters by the schoolboys as a rebellion against a system which is an offense against human dignity; but then we are immediately shown that all the ragging and flogging are justified by their usefulness as a training for the military caste which is to govern the British Empire. The boys are finally made to recognize that their Headmaster not only knows how to dish it out but is also able to take it, and the book culminates in the ridiculous scene — as we gather from Mr. Beresford, wholly a product of Kipling’s imagination — in which the Head, in his inflexible justice, undertakes personally to cane the whole school while the boys stand by cheering him wildly.

There is a real subject in Stalky & Co., but Kipling has not had the intelligence to deal with it. He cannot see around his characters and criticize them, he is not even able properly to dramatize; he simply allows the emotions of the weaker side, the side that is getting the worst of it, to go over to the side of the stronger. You can see the process all too plainly in the episode in which Stalky and his companions turn the tables on the cads from the crammer’s school. These cads have been maltreating a fag, and a clergyman who is represented by Kipling as one of the more sensible and decent of the masters suggests to Stalky & Co. that they teach the bullies a lesson. They proceed to clean up on the bullies in a scene which goes on for pages, to the violation of taste and proportion. The oppressors, true enough, are taught a lesson, but the cruelty with which we have already been made disgusted has now passed over to the castigators’ side, and there is a disagreeable implication that, though it is caddish for the cads to be cruel, it is all right for the sons of English gentlemen to be cruel to the cads.

Kim is more ambitious and much better. It is Kipling’s only successful long story: an enchanting, almost a first-rate book, the work in which, more perhaps than in any other, he gave the sympathies of the imagination free rein to remember and to explore, and which has in consequence more complexity and density than any of his other works. Yet the conflict from which the interest arises, though it is very much better presented, here also comes to nothing: the two forces never really engage. Kim is the son of an Irish soldier and an English nursemaid, who has grown up as an orphan in India, immersed in and assimilated to the native life, so that he thinks, like the young Kipling, in Hindustani. The story deals with the gradual dawning of his consciousness that he is really a Sahib. As a child he has been in the habit of making a little money by carrying messages for a native agent of the British secret service, and the boy turns out to be so bright and so adept at acting the rôle of a native that the authorities decide to train him for the service. He is sent to an English school but does not willingly submit to the English system. Every vacation he dresses as a native and disappears into the sea of native life. The Ideal of this side of his existence is represented by a Thibetan Lama, a wandering Buddhist pilgrim, whom he accompanies in the rôle of a disciple.

Now what the reader tends to expect is that Kim, as he grows older, will come to realize that he is betraying to the British invaders those whom he has always considered his own people, and that a struggle between allegiances will result. Kipling has admirably established for the reader the contrast between the East, with its mysticism and its sensuality, its extremes of saintliness and roguery, and the English, with their superior organization, their confidence in modern method, their instinct to brush away like cobwebs the myths and beliefs of the native world. We have been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other, and we have watched the oscillations of Kim, as he passes to and fro between them. But the parallel lines never meet; the alternating attractions felt by Kim never result in a genuine struggle. And the climax itself is double: the adventures of the Lama and of Kim simply arrive at different consummations, without any final victory or synthesis ever taking place. Instead, there are a pair of victories, which occur on separate planes and which do not influence one another: the Lama attains to a condition of trance which releases him from what the Buddhists call the Wheel of Things at the same moment that the young AngloIndian achieves promotion in the British service.

The salvation of the Lama has been earned by penitence for a moment of passion: he had been tempted to kill a man who had torn his sacred chart and struck him, a Russian agent working against the British. But Kim’s pretenses to a spiritual vocation turn out to have been merely a comedy inspired by his affection for the Lama: he knocks the Russian down and bangs his head against a boulder. ‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’ his soul repeats again and again, in his exhaustion and collapse after this episode. He feels that his soul is ‘out of gear with its surroundings — a cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugarcrusher laid by in a corner.’ But he now gets his soul to do its work in the crusher — note the mechanical metaphor: dissociating himself from the hierarchy represented by the Abbot-Lama, he commits himself to a rôle in the hierarchy of a practical organization. (So the wolf-reared Mowgli of the Jungle Books, the prototype of Kim, ends up, rather disappointingly, as a ranger in the British Forestry Service.) Nor does Kipling allow himself to doubt that his hero has chosen the better part. Kim must now exploit his knowledge of native life for the purpose of preventing and putting down native resistance to the British; but it never seems to occur to his creator that this constitutes a betrayal of the Lama. A sympathy with the weaker party in a relationship based on force has again given way without a qualm to a glorification of the stronger. As the bullying masters of Stalky & Co. turn into beneficent Chirons, so even the overbearing officer who figures on his first appearance in Kim as a symbol of British stupidity turns out to be none other than Strickland, the wily police superintendent, one of the recurrent official heroes of Kipling’s Indian stories, who has here been acting a part.

The Lama’s victory is not of this world: the sacred river for which he has been seeking, and which he identifies in his final revelation with a brook near which his trance has occurred, has no objective existence, it is not on the British maps. Yet the anguish of the Lama’s repentance — a scene, so far as I remember, elsewhere unmatched in Kipling — is one of the most effective things in the book; and we are to meet this Lama again in strange and unexpected forms still haunting that practical world in which Kipling, like Kim, has chosen to live. The great eulogist of the builder and the man of action was no more able to leave the Lama behind than the boy Kim had been able to reconcile himself to playing the game of English life without him.

III

The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatize any fundamental conflict because Kipling would never face one. This is probably the real explanation of his lack of success with long novels. You can make an effective short story, as Kipling so often does, about somebody’s scoring off somebody else; but this is not enough for a great novelist, who must show us large social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic impulses of the human spirit, struggling with one another. With Kipling, the right and the wrong of any opposition of forces is always quite plain from the beginning; and there is not even the suspense which makes possible the excitement of melodrama. There is never any doubt as to the outcome. The Wrong is made a guy from the beginning, and the high point of the story comes when the Right gives it a kick in the pants. Where both sides are sympathetically presented, the battle is not allowed to occur.

But this only drives us back on another question: how did the sensitive early Kipling, who was capable of understanding the mixed population of India, come to turn into the official Kipling, who, like Kim, elected as his lifework the defense of the British Empire?

The two books we have been discussing mark the end of a period in the course of which Kipling had arrived at a decision. Stalky came out in 1899 and Kim in 1901. The decade of the nineties had been critical for Kipling; and, in order to understand the new phase which had begun by the beginning of the century, we must follow his adventures in the United States, which he visited in 1889, where he lived from 1892 to 1896, having married an American wife, and to which he tried to return in 1899. Kipling’s relations with America are certainly the most important factor in his experience during these years of his later twenties and early thirties; yet they are the link which has been dropped out of his story in most of the accounts of his life and which even his posthumous memoirs, revelatory in respect to his earlier years, markedly fail to supply.

The young man who arrived in London in the fall of 1889 was very far from being the truculent British patriot whom we knew in the nineteen hundreds. He had not even gone straight back to England, but had first taken a trip around the world, visiting Canada and the United States. Nor did he remain long in the mother-country when he got there. His whole attitude was that of the colonial who has sweated and suffered at the outposts of Empire, making the acquaintance of more creeds and customs than the philosophy of London dreamt of, and who feels a slight touch of scorn toward the smugness of the people at home, unaware of how big, varied, and active the world around them is. His ‘original notion,’ he says, had been to try ‘ to tell the Empire something of the world outside England — not directly but by implication’: ‘What can they know of England who only England know?’ He rounded out his knowledge of the colonies by traveling in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Southern India. In January of 1892, he married an American woman.

Kipling’s experience of the United States was not unlike that of Dickens. Neither fitted very well into the English system, and both seem to have sought in the new English-speaking nation a place where they could be more at ease. Both winced at the crudeness of the West; both were contemptuously shocked by the boasting — the Pacific Coast in Kipling’s day was what the Mississippi had been in Dickens’. Both, escaping from the chilliness of England, resented the familiarity of the States. Yet Kipling, on the occasion of his first visit, which he records in From Sea to Sea, is obviously rejoiced by the naturalness of social relations in America. He tells of ‘a very trim maiden’ from New Hampshire, with ‘a delightful mother and an equally delightful father, a heavy-eyed, slow-voiced man of finance,’ whom he met in the Yellowstone. ‘Now an English maiden who had stumbled on a dust-grimed, lime-washed, sun-peeled collarless wanderer come from and going to goodness knows where, would, her mother inciting her and her father brandishing his umbrella, have regarded him as a dissolute adventurer. Not so those delightful people from New Hampshire. They were good enough to treat me — it sounds almost incredible — as a human being, possibly respectable, probably not in immediate need of financial assistance. Papa talked pleasantly and to the point. The little maiden strove valiantly with the accent of her birth and that of her reading, and mamma smiled benignly in the background. Balance this with a story of a young English idiot I met knocking about inside his high collars, attended by a valet. He condescended to tell me that “you can’t be too careful who you talk to in these parts,” and stalked on, fearing, I suppose, every minute for his social chastity. Now that man was a barbarian (I took occasion to tell him so), for he comported himself after the manner of the head-hunters of Assam, who are at perpetual feud one with another.’

He declares his faith in the Americans in a conversation with an Englishman ‘who laughed at them,’ ‘“I admit everything,” said I. “Their Government’s provisional; their law’s the notion of the moment; their railways are made of hairpins and match-sticks, and most of their good luck lives in their woods and mines and rivers and not in their brains; but, for all that, they be the biggest, finest, and best people on the surface of the globe! Just you wait a hundred years and see how they’ll behave when they’ve had the screw put on them and have forgotten a few of the patriarchal teachings of the late Mr. George Washington. Wait till the Anglo-American-GermanJew — the Man of the Future—is properly equipped. He’ll have just the least little kink in his hair now and again; he’ll carry the English lungs above the Teuton feet that can walk forever; and he will wave long, thin, bony Yankee hands with the big blue veins on the wrist, from one end of the earth to the other. He’ll be the finest writer, poet, and dramatist, ‘specially dramatist, that the world as it recollects itself has ever seen. By virtue of his Jew Blood —just a little, little drop — he’ll be a musician and a painter, too. At present there is too much balcony and too little Romeo in the life-plays of his fellow-citizens. Later on, when the proportion is adjusted and he sees the possibilities of his land, he will produce things that will make the effete East stare. He will also be a complex and highly composite administrator. There is nothing known to man that he will not be, and his country will sway the world with one foot as a man tilts a see-saw plank!”

“‘But this is worse than the Eagle at its worst. Do you seriously believe all that?” said the Englishman.

‘“If I believe anything seriously, all this I most firmly believe. You wait and see. Sixty million people, chiefly of English instincts, who are trained from youth to believe that nothing is impossible, don’t slink through the centuries like Russian peasantry. They are bound to leave their mark somewhere, and don’t you forget it.” ‘

‘I love this People . . .’ he wrote. ‘My heart has gone out to them beyond all other peoples.’

Kipling took his wife to America, and they lived for a time on the estate of her family in Brattleboro, Vermont; then Kipling built a large house: his books were already making him rich. They lived in the United States four years; two daughters were born to them there. Kipling was ready to embrace America, or those aspects of America which excited him; he began writing about American subjects: the American railroads, .007; the Gloucester fishermen, Captains Courageous. He enormously admired Mark Twain, whose acquaintance he had made on his first visit. Yet the effect of contact with the United States was eventually to drive Kipling, as it did Dickens, back behind his British defenses. A disagreeable episode occurred which, undignified and even comic though it seems, is worth studying because it provided the real test of Kipling’s fitness to flourish in America, and not merely the real test of this, but, at a critical time in his life, of the basic courage and humanity of his character.

The story has been told since Kipling’s death in a book called Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud, by Mr. Frederick F. Van de Water. A brother of Mrs. Kipling’s, Kipling’s friend Wolcott Balestier, had been in the publishing business with Heinemann in London, and Mrs. Kipling had lived much in England and was by way of being an Anglophile. Thus the impulse on Kipling’s part to assimilate himself to the Americans was neutralized in some degree by Mrs. Kipling’s desire to be English. Kipling, who was accustomed to India, had his own instinctive rudeness. In Vermont, they tended to stick to the attitudes of the traditional governing-class English, maintaining their caste in the colonics: they drove a tandem with a top-hatted English coachman, dressed every night for dinner, kept their New England neighbors at a distance.

But Mrs. Kipling had a farmer brother who — the family were partly French — was as Americanized as possible. He was a drinker, a spendthrift, and a great local card, famous alike for his ribaldry, his sleigh-racing, and his gestures of generosity of a magnificence almost feudal. Mr. Van de Water says that, when he knew him, he had the swagger of Cyrano de Bergerac and a leathery face like ‘an ailing eagle.’ His farm and family suffered. The Kiplings lent him money, and he is said to have paid it back; but they disapproved of his disorderly existence. They seem to have persisted in treating him with some lack of consideration or tact. Beatty, in any case, was the sort of fellow — unbalanced in character but independent in spirit — who is embittered by obligations and furiously resents interference. Kipling went to Beatty one day and offered to support his wife and child for a year if Beatty would leave town and get a job. He was surprised at the explosion that ensued. This was followed by a dispute about some land across the road from the Kiplings’ house. This land belonged to Beatty and he sold it for a dollar to the Kiplings, who were afraid that someone would some day build on it — on the friendly understanding, as he claimed, that he could continue to use it for mowing. When the transfer had been effected, Mrs. Kipling set out to landscape-garden it. The result was that Beatty refused to speak to them, would not see Kipling when he came to call.

This went on for about a year, at the end of which the climax came. Kipling was indiscreet enough to remark to one of the neighbors that he had had ‘to carry Beatty for the last, year — to hold him up by the seat of his breeches.’ One day, after this had reached the brotherin-law’s ears, Beatty, driving his team and drunk, met Kipling riding his bicycle. He blocked the road, making Kipling fall off, and shouted angrily: ‘See here! I want to talk to you!’ Kipling answered, ‘If you have anything to say, say it to my lawyers.’ ‘By Jesus, this is no case for lawyers!’ retorted Beatty, loosing a tirade of profanity and abuse. He threatened, according to Kipling, to kill him; according to Beatty, merely to beat him up, if he did not make a public retraction.

Kipling had always deplored the lawlessness of America; in his account of his first trip through the West, his disgust and trepidation over the shootings of the frontier are expressed in almost every chapter. And he now became seriously alarmed. He proceeded to have Beatty arrested on charges of‘assault with indecent and opprobrious names and epithets and threatening to kill.’ He did not realize that that kind of thing was not done in the United States, where such quarrels were settled man to man, and he could not foresee the consequences. Beatty, who loved scandal, was delighted. He allowed the case to come into court and watched Kipling, who hated publicity, make himself ridiculous in public. The Kiplings at last fled abroad — it was August 1896 — before the case could come before the Grand Jury.

‘So far as I was concerned,’ says Kipling of his relations with Americans in general, ‘I felt the atmosphere was to some extent hostile.’ It was a moment of antagonism toward England. Venezuela had in 1895 appealed to the United States for protection against the English in a dispute over the boundaries of British Guiana, and the United States had responded. The Jameson raid on the Transvaal Republic early in 1896, an unauthorized and defeated attempt of an agent, of the British South Africa Company to provoke a rising against the Boers, had intensified the feeling against England. Kipling was made to recognize the situation by an encounter with another American who seemed almost as unrestrained as Beatty Balestier. When Kipling met Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the latter ‘ thanked God in a loud voice that he had not one drop of British blood in him,’ that his ancestry was pure Dutch, and declared that American fear of the British would provide him with funds for a new navy. John Hay had assured him that it was hatred of the English that held the United States together.

But during the years that immediately followed the Kiplings’ return to England, American relations with England improved. The United States took over the Philippines in 1898 as a result of the Spanish War, and annexed the Hawaiian Islands; and the imperialistic England of Joseph Chamberlain, in fear of Germany, which had favored the Spanish, became extremely sympathetic with the policy of the United States. At the beginning of 1899, then, Rudyard Kipling set forth on an attempt to retrieve his position in America, where he had abandoned the big Brattleboro house. He first composed the celebrated set of verses in which he exhorted the United States to collaborate with the British Empire in ‘taking up the White Man’s burden ‘ of ‘ Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child,’ who were to be benefited and trained in spite of themselves, though at a bitter expense to their captors; and had the poem published on both sides of the Atlantic early in February, at the moment of his sailing for the United States. But what confronted him on his landing in America was an announcement in the New York papers that Beatty Balestier was bringing a $50,000 countersuit against him for ‘malicious persecution, false arrest and defamation of character,’ and the report that Beatty himself either had arrived or was about to arrive. It was simply another of Beatty’s demonstrations: no suit was ever brought; but it kept the Kiplings from returning to Vermont. Rudyard had caught cold on the boat, and he now came down with double pneumonia and seemed in danger of not pulling through. His two little girls had pneumonia, too, and one of them died while he was ill When he had recovered, he was told of her death. He went back to England in June, as soon as he was able to travel, and never set foot in the United States again.

The fear and hatred awakened in Kipling by those fatal six years of his childhood had been revived by the discipline of Westward Ho! The menaces of Beatty Balestier, behind which must have loomed for Kipling all that was wild, uncontrollable, brutal, in the life of the United States, seem to have prodded again the old inflammation. The schoolboy, rendered helpless in a fight by his bad eyes and his small stature, was up against the school bully again, and fear drove him to appeal to the authorities. How else can we account for the fact that the relations of Kipling with Beatty were ever allowed to get to this point? The truth was, as Beatty himself later confessed to Mr. Van de Water, that Rudyard had become involved in a family quarrel between himself and his sister; and one’s impulse is to say that Kipling ought to have been able to find some way of extricating himself and making contact with the rather childlike friendliness that seems to have lurked behind the rodomontade of Beatty. But the terrible seriousness of the issue which the incident had raised for Kipling is shown by his statement at the hearing that he ‘ would not retract a word under threat of death from any living man.’

IV

It was the fight he had fought at school, and he would not capitulate to Beatty Balestier, but he surrendered at last to the ‘Proosian Bates.’ He invoked the protection of the British system and at the same time prostrated himself before the power of British conquest, which was feared in the United States and which even at that moment in South Africa — the Transvaal Republic declared war on Great Britain in the October of the year of his return — was chastising truculent farmers.

It is at the time of his first flight from America and during the years before his attempt to return — 1897-1899 — that Kipling goes back to his school days and depicts them in the peculiar colors that we find in Stalky & Co. How little inevitable these colors were we learn from Mr. Beresford’s memoir. The Headmaster of Westward Ho!, it appears, though really known as the ‘Proosian Bates,’ was by no means the intent Spartan trainer for the bloody and risky work of the Empire into which Kipling had undertaken to transform him. The fact was that Mr. Cormell Price had been literary rather than military, a friend of Edward Burne-Jones and an earnest anti-imperialist. He and BurneJones had actually organized, at the time of the Russo-Turkish war, a Workers’ Neutrality Demonstration against British intervention. Nor had Kipling been whipped into shape so systematically as the ‘Beetle’ of the stories: the Headmaster was a friend of Kipling’s parents, and the boy was always treated by Mr. Price with affectionate consideration. But Kipling must now have a Headmaster who will symbolize all the authority of the educational system, and a school that will represent all he has heard and all that he now imagines of the older and more official public schools.

And now, having declared his allegiance, he is free to hate the enemies of England. His whole point of view has shifted. The bitter animus so deeply implanted by those six years of oppression of his childhood has now become almost entirely dissociated from the objects which originally aroused it. It has turned into a generalized hatred of those nations, groups, and tendencies, precisely, which stand toward the dominating authority in the relation of challengers or victims.

The ideal of the ‘Anglo-AmericanGerman Jew,’ who at the time of Kipling’s first trip to America represented for him the future of civilization, now immediately goes by the board. His whole tone toward the Americans changes. In ‘An Error in the Fourth Dimension ‘ — in The Day’s Work, published in 1898 — he makes a rich Anglicized American, the son of a railroad king, deciding for no very good reason that he must immediately go to London, flag and stop an English express train. The railroad first brings charges against him, then decides he must be insane. The officials cannot understand his temerity, and he cannot understand their consternation at having the British routine interrupted. Kipling no longer admires the boldness of the American: this story is a hateful caricature, so onesided that the real comedy is sacrificed. ‘The Captive’ followed in 1902. Here a man from Ohio named Laughton O. Zigler sells to the Boers, during their war with the English, a new explosive and a new machine gun he has invented. He is captured by the English, who grin and ask why he ‘wasn’t in the Filipeens suppressing our war.’ Later he runs into a man from Kentucky, who refuses to shake his hand and tells him that ‘he’s gone back on the White Man in six places at once — two hemispheres and four continents — America, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. . . . Go on and prosper . . . and you’ll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.’ As the result of these taunts, and of the respect inspired by the splendid behavior of the English, Mr. Zigler gives them the formula for his explosive, insists upon remaining their prisoner, and resolves to settle permanently in South Africa.

A still later story, ‘An Habitation Enforced,’ in a collection published in 1909, tells of the victory of the English countryside over an American business man and his wife, who have been aimlessly traveling in Europe as a result of the husband’s breakdown from overwork. The wife discovers that her own ancestors have come originally from the locality where they have bought a house, and they are finally accepted by the English: ‘That wretched Sangres man has twice our money. Can you see Marm Conant slapping him between the shoulders? Not by a jugful! The poor beast doesn’t exist!’ The Americans succumb, deeply gratified, their equanimity quite restored. In short, Kipling’s attitude toward Americans has now been almost reversed since the day of his first visit to the States when he had written, ‘I love this People.’ He now approves of them only when they are prepared to pay their tribute to Mother England and to identify their interests with hers.

Later on, during the first part of the World War when Americans were still figuring as neutrals, his bitterness became absolutely murderous, as in ‘Sea Constables: A Tale of ‘15.’ So had his feeling against the Germans even before the war had begun. In ‘The Edge of the Evening’ (1913), Laughton O. Zigler of Ohio turns up again, this time in England, as occupant of a Georgian mansion inherited by one of the British officers who captured him in South Africa. ‘Bein’ rich suits me. So does your country, sir. My own country? You heard what that Detroit man said at dinner. “A government of the alien, by the alien, for the alien.” Mother’s right, too. Lincoln killed us. From the highest motives — but he killed us.’ What his mother had said was that Lincoln had ‘wasted the heritage of his land by blood and fire, and had surrendered the remnant to aliens’: ‘“My brother, suh,” she said, “fell at Gettysburg in order that Armenians should colonize New England to-day.”’ (Something of Myself confirms the assumption that these were precisely Kipling’s own views.) One night a foreign plane makes a forced landing on the estate. One of the men in the plane shoots at his lordship, and Zigler lays him out with a golf club while another of the Englishmen present collars the other man and breaks his neck (it is all right for an American to be lawless, or even for the right sort of Englishman, if he is merely laying low the alien who is the common enemy of both). They put the dead German spies in the plane and send it up over the Channel.

Kipling is now, in fact, implacably opposed to every race or nation which has rebelled against or competed with the Empire, and to every movement or individual — such as the liberals and Fabians — in England that has criticized the imperial policies. His attitude toward the Irish, for example, illustrates the same simple-minded principle as his attitude toward the Americans. So long as they are loyal to England, Kipling shows the liveliest appreciation of Irish recklessness and the Irish sense of mischief: Mulvaney is Irish, McTurk is Irish, Kim is half-Irish. But the moment they display these same qualities in agitation against, the English, they become infamous assassins and traitors. Those peoples who have never given trouble, — the Canadians, the New Zealanders, the Australians, — though Kipling has never found them interesting enough to write about on any considerable scale, he credits with the most admirable virtues.

And as a basis for all these exclusions he has laid down a more fundamental principle for the hatred and fear of his fellows: the anti-democratic principle. We are familiar with the case of the gifted man who has found himself at a disadvantage in relation to his social superiors and who emerges as the champion of all who have suffered in a similar way. What is not so familiar is the inverse of this: the case of the individual who at the period when he has most needed freedom to develop superior ability has found himself cramped and tormented by the stupidity of social inferiors and in consequence acquires a distrust of all the machinery of popular government. Rudyard Kipling is a case of this kind. The fear of democracy that finally overtakes him is the fear of that household at Southsea which had tried to choke his genius at its birth. His sister tells us that through all this period he was in the habit of keeping their sense of values straight by reminding himself and her that their guardian was of ‘such low caste as not to matter’; and some very unyielding resistance was evidently built up at this time against the standards and opinions of people whom he regarded as lower-class.

(To be concluded)