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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
Rudyard Kipling
The Complete Stalky & Co.
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Isabel Quigly
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Introduction, Note on the Text, and Explanatory Notes © Isabel Quigly 1987
General Preface, Select Bibliography, and Chronology © Andrew Rutherford 1987
Updated Select Bibliography © Andrew Rutherford 1996
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First issued as a World’s Classics paperback 1987 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1999 Reissued 2009
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kipling, Rudyard 1865–1936. Stalky & Co. (Oxford world’s classics) Bibliography: p. I. Quigly, Isabel. II. Title. III. Series Stalky and Company PR4854.S68 1987 823’.8 86-16524
ISBN 978-0-19-955503-1
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General Preface
Isabel Quigly
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was for the last decade of the nineteenth century and at least the first two decades of the twentieth the most popular writer in English, in both verse and prose, throughout the English-speaking world. Widely regarded as the greatest living English poet and story-teller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, recipient of honorary degrees from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Durham, McGill, Strasbourg, and the Sorbonne, he also enjoyed popular acclaim that extended far beyond academic and literary circles.
He stood, it can be argued, in a special relation to the age in which he lived. He was primarily an artist, with his individual vision and techniques, but his was also a profoundly representative consciousness. He seems to give expression to a whole phase of national experience, symbolizing in appropriate forms (as Lascelles Abercrombie said the epic poet must do) the ‘sense of the significance of life he [felt] acting as the unconscious metaphysic of the time’.1 He is in important ways a spokesman for his age, with its sense of imperial destiny, its fascinated contemplation of the unfamiliar world of soldiering, its confidence in engineering and technology, its respect for craftsmanship, and its dedication to Carlyle’s gospel of work. That age is one about which many Britons—and to a lesser extent Americans and West Europeans—now feel an exaggerated sense of guilt; and insofar as Kipling was its spokesman, he has become our scapegoat. Hence, in part at least, the tendency in recent decades to dismiss him so contemptuously, so unthinkingly, and so mistakenly. Whereas if we approach him more historically, less hysterically, we shall find in this very relation to his age a cultural phenomenon of absorbing interest.
Here, after all, we have the last English author to appeal to readers of all social classes and all cultural groups, from lowbrow to highbrow; and the last poet to command a mass audience. He was an author who could speak directly to the man in the street, or for that matter in the barrack-room or factory, more effectively than any left-wing writer of the ’thirties or the present day, but who spoke just as directly and effectively to literary men like Edmund Gosse and Andrew Lang; to academics like David Masson, George Saintsbury, and Charles Eliot Norton; to the professional and service classes (officers and other ranks alike) who took him to their hearts; and to creative writers of the stature of Henry James, who had some important reservations to record, but who declared in 1892 that ‘Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known’, and who wrote an enthusiastic introduction to Mine Own People in which he stressed Kipling’s remarkable appeal to the sophisticated critic as well as to the common reader.2
An innovator and a virtuoso in the art of the short story, Kipling does more than any of his predecessors to establish it as a major genre. But within it he moves confidently between the poles of sophisticated simplicity (in his earliest tales) and the complex, closely organized, elliptical and symbolic mode of his later works which reveal him as an unexpected contributor to modernism.
He is a writer who extends the range of English literature in both subject-matter and technique. He plunges readers into new realms of imaginative experience which then become part of our shared inheritance. His anthropological but warmly human interest in mankind in all its varieties produces, for example, sensitive, sympathetic vignettes of Indian life and character which culminate in Kim. His sociolinguistic experiments with proletarian speech as an artistic medium in Barrack-Room Ballads and his rendering of the life of private soldiers in all their unregenerate humanity gave a new dimension to war literature. His portrayal of Anglo-Indian life ranges from cynical triviality in some of the Plain Tales from the Hills to the stoical nobility of the best things in Life’s Handicap and The Day’s Work. Indeed Mrs Hauksbee’s Simla, Mulvaney’s barrack-rooms, Dravot and Carnehan’s search for a kingdom in Kafiristan, Holden’s illicit, star-crossed love, Stalky’s apprenticeship, Kim’s Grand Trunk Road, ‘William’ ’s famine relief expedition, and the Maltese Cat’s game at Umballa, establish the vanished world of Empire for us (as they established the unknown world of Empire for an earlier generation), in all its pettiness and grandeur, its variety and energy, its miseries, its hardships, and its heroism.
In a completely different vein Kipling’s genius for the animal fable as a means of inculcating human truths opens up a whole new world of joyous imagining in the two Jungle Books. In another vein again are the stories in which he records his delighted discovery of the English countryside, its people and traditions, after he had settled at Bateman’s in Sussex: England, he told Rider Haggard in 1902, ‘is the most wonderful foreign land I have ever been in’;3 and he made it peculiarly his own. Its past gripped his imagination as strongly as its present, and the two books of Puck stories show what Eliot describes as ‘the development of the imperial … into the historical imagination.’4 In another vein again he figures as the bard of engineering and technology. From the standpoint of world history, two of Britain’s most important areas of activity in the nineteenth century were those of industrialism and imperialism, both of which had been neglected by literature prior to Kipling
’s advent. There is a substantial body of work on the Condition of England Question and the socio-economic effects of the Industrial Revolution; but there is comparatively little imaginative response in literature (as opposed to painting) to the extraordinary inventive energy, the dynamic creative power, which manifests itself in (say) the work of engineers like Telford, Rennie, Brunel, and the brothers Stephenson—men who revolutionized communications within Britain by their road, rail and harbour systems, producing in the process masterpieces of industrial art, and who went on to revolutionize ocean travel as well. Such achievements are acknowledged on a sub-literary level by Samuel Smiles in his best-selling Lives of the Engineers (1861-2). They are acknowledged also by Carlyle, who celebrates the positive as well as denouncing the malign aspects of the transition from the feudal to the industrial world, insisting as he does that the true modern epic must be technological, not military: ‘For we are to bethink us that the Epic verily is not Arms and the Man, but Tools and the Man,—an. infinitely wider kind of Epic.’5 That epic has never been written in its entirety, but Kipling came nearest to achieving its aims in verses like ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ (The Seven Seas) and stories like ‘The Ship that Found Herself’ and ‘Bread upon the Waters’ (The Day’s Work) in which he shows imaginative sympathy with the machines themselves as well as sympathy with the men who serve them. He comes nearer, indeed, than any other author to fulfilling Wordsworth’s prophecy that
If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself.6
This is one aspect of Kipling’s commitment to the world of work, which, as C. S. Lewis observes, ‘imaginative literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had [with a few exceptions] quietly omitted, or at least thrust into the background’, though it 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. … It was Kipling who first reclaimed for literature this enormous territory.7
He repudiates the unspoken assumption of most novelists that the really interesting part of life takes place outside working hours: men at work or talking about their work are among his favourite subjects. The qualities men show in their work, and the achievements that result from it (bridges built, ships salvaged, pictures painted, famines relieved) are the very stuff of much of Kipling’s fiction. Yet there also runs through his oeuvre, like a figure in the carpet, a darker, more pessimistic vision of the impermanence, the transience—but not the worthlessness—of all achievement. This underlies his delighted engagement with contemporary reality and gives a deeper resonance to his finest work, in which human endeavour is celebrated none the less because it must ultimately yield to death and mutability.
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
1 Cited in E. M. W. Tillyard, The Epic Strain in the English Novel, London, 1958, p. 15.
2 See Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green, London, 1971, pp. 159–60. Mine Own People, published in New York in 1891, was a collection of stories nearly all of which were to be subsumed in Life’s Handicap later that year.
3 Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard, ed. Morton Cohen, London, 1965, p. 51.
4 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, London, 1957, p. 247.
5 Past and Present (1843), Book iv, ch.1. cf. ibid., Book iii, ch. 5.
6 Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, London, 1963, pp. 253–4.
7 ‘Kipling’s World’, Literature and Life: Addresses to the English Association, London, 1948, pp. 59–60.
Introduction
Isabel Quigly
‘An unpleasant book about unpleasant boys at an unpleasant school’:1 comments like this one of George Sampson’s have dogged Stalky & Co since the stories first appeared in book form in 1899. And this was by no means the harshest. From Wells’s condemnation of the heroes as self-righteous bullies and A. C. Benson’s description of them as ‘little beasts’ to Maugham’s magisterial ‘a more odious picture of school life can seldom have been drawn’,21 the disapproval of Kipling’s contemporaries was made thunderously clear. ‘Mr Kipling obviously aims at verisimilitude; the picture he draws is at any rate repulsive and disgusting enough to be true,’ wrote Robert Buchanan, his most virulent critic. ‘Only the spoiled child of an utterly brutalised public could possibly have written Stalky & Co … It is simply impossible to show by mere quotation the horrible vileness of the book describing these three small fiends in human likeness; only a perusal of the whole work would convey to the reader its truly repulsive character … The vulgarity, the brutality, the savagery … reeks on every page.’3 If at this point one feels like saying, with Stalky, something like ‘Phew!’, there are more recent comments in much the same vein—Edmund Wilson’s, for instance: ‘a hair-raising picture of the sadism of the English public-school system’4—and even today the book can arouse passionate feelings of dislike, resentment, even disgust.
Yet its supporters have been quite as fervent, and its popularity with the young, that only guarantee of a school story’s longevity, has never waned. Intensity and exuberance in the hands of a writer like Kipling can hardly fail to arouse partisan attitudes, and the immediacy of Stalky & Co is one of the most remarkable things about it. That, and the fact that its outlook, its central characters, its ideals and ideas, still hold lessons for us today. The world it belonged to may have gone, but the points it makes still have relevance to ours, and the exuberance with which it makes them hammers this home.
Although it belongs to the school-story genre, it is unlike any other school story. Tom Brown’s School Days started a literary industry which produced hundreds of school stories over the next century, all dealing with the self-contained, rule-ridden world of the Victorian—and later the Edwardian and Georgian—public school. Twenty-five years later Talbot Baines Reed with The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s and other books gave the genre a recognizable popular form. His many followers were undistinguished and mostly indistinguishable, and stuck closely to the conventions he laid down. Parallel with their books went a more literary, more seriously intentioned brand of school story, aiming to give a more realistic or more romantic, sometimes a more adult, view of public-school life. Between the two and quite unlike either—the popular or the more individual, more ambitious stories—came Stalky & Co. It appeared exactly in the middle of the genre’s century of life, several stories coming out at various dates after the early ones had appeared in book form, and the whole being collected as The Complete Stalky & Co as late as 1929.
The fact that Kipling was an incomparably better writer than the others (only P. G. Wodehouse, whose earliest books were school stories, can be mentioned beside him) makes Stalky & Co unlike the other school stories in quality, of course. When a writer of genius takes up a popular genre without condescension or casualness, indeed with the greatest commitment and (jokes notwithstanding) seriousness, and an enthusiasm for the task which is clear in every line, something happens to the genre, it shows possibilities and depths which, in the hands of others, it never seemed to possess. In Kipling’s, the school story managed to cross the often uneasily described division between adult life and boyhood, and between the mature attitude of the writer and the unripe outlook of his heroes (a transition no other school-story writer coped with adequately). For all its ‘commitedness’ of mood, its sense of sharing totally the everyday life and outlook of fifteen-year-olds, looking back on them became not an exercise in nostalgia but a way of understanding and working out what was to come, what they were to grow into.
What happened to these boys? How did they apply the lessons lear
ned at school to the world of warfare and imperial administration? These questions are implied throughout the book and answered explicitly in the final chapter. Stalky & Co is the only school story which shows school as a direct preparation for life. Most others actually make the world outside school seem irrelevant, an anticlimax, an unimaginable void. Kipling, for all his intense feeling for the school atmosphere and the moods of adolescence, shows school as the first stage of a much larger game, a pattern-maker for the experiences of life. This is mainly what makes it unlike the others, with their narrow, school-centred preoccupations and their belief, often implied and sometimes even stated, in the overwhelming importance of this preliminary stage of life, which was actually presumed to outdo the rest in importance. In Kipling, not only is a later life envisaged very clearly at school, but the divisions between school and the world outside are less clearly defined than they are in most other school stories; not just in the sense that the boys make free with the surrounding countryside and hobnob happily with the locals, bilingual in standard English and broad Devon, but in a metaphorical sense: school teaches lessons (obviously), but, less obviously, the lessons are much more than those of the classroom. It teaches the boys how to live; but above all, the boys teach one another.
But Stalky & Co was unlike the other school stories not merely in quality, or even in form. It was unlike them in kind. It dealt with an odd school, based on the United Services College where Kipling was sent, and it had few of the interests, accepted few of the conventions, of other school stories. The Coll, as it is called in the book, was a raw new foundation set up for boys destined for the army or the colonial service in some form, whose parents could not afford the smarter Haileybury, of which it was an offshoot. Those who came expecting the familiar features of school life barked their shins on the reality soon enough. ‘The Head should have warned Mr Brownell of the College’s outstanding peculiarity, instead of leaving him to discover it for himself the first day of term,’ ‘The United Idolators’ begins, and this oddity is stressed again and again with a sort of sly pride. Difference, oddity, practicality, even poverty: these made for a certain truculence in Kipling and in the boys he describes, and brought a feeling of modernity and a sense of facing up to the facts of life and of careers that are noticeably absent from other school stories.
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