2. “ Barrack-Room Ballads.”
Mr. Kipling has followed the pleasant old fashion, chiefly associated with Scott, of giving his stories a verse motto usually written bv himself. Often in “ Plain Tales” these verses struck one more than the tales themselves. There had been nothing in “ Departmental Ditties “ so good as:
“Go, stalk the red deer o’er the heather,
Ride, follow the fox if you can!
But, for pleasure and profit together,
Allow me the hunting of Man, —
The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul
To its ruin, — the hunting of Man.”
Or this:
“Wherefore slew you the stranger?
He brought me dishonour.
I saddled my mare Bijli. I set him upon her.
I gave him rice and goat’s flesh. He bared me to laughter;
When he was gone from my tent, swift I followed after,
Taking a sword in my hand. The hot wine had filled him:
Under the stars he mocked me. Therefore I killed him.”
Or, in another vein, this:
“In the daytime, when she moved about me,
In the night, when she was sleeping at my side, —
I was wearied, I was wearied of her presence,
Day by day and night by night I grew to hate her —
Would God that she or I had died.”
Or this:
‘‘ Not though you die to-night, O Sweet, and wail, A spectre at my door,
Should mortal Fear make Love immortal fail —
I shall but love vou more,
Who, from Death’s house returning, give me still
One moment’s comfort in my matchless ill.”
Then there was this of “ Little Tin Gods “:
“Pleasant it is for the Little Tin Gods When great Jove nods;
But Little Tin Gods make their little mistakes
In missing the hour when great Jove wakes “;
and the longer mystical poem in front of “ To be Filed for Reference.” But, perhaps, more than by any of these one’s fancy had been caught by a few snatches in Cockney dialect labelled “ Barrack-Room Ballad,” and particularly this:
“Oh! Where would I be when my froat was dry?
Oh! Where would I be when the bullets fly?
Oh! Where would I be when I come to die? Why,
Somewheres anigh my chum.
If ‘e’s liquor ‘e’ll give me some,
If I’m dyin’ ‘e’ll ‘old my ‘ead,
An’ ‘e’ll write ‘em ‘Ome when I’m dead. —
Gawd send us a trusty chum!”
We hoped for more like that, and we had not long to wait. Presently the news went round that Mr. Kipling was contributing some quite fascinating ballads to The Scots Observer, a weekly journal, since defunct, edited with sword and pen by Mr. W. E. Henlcv; and, long before the volume en- •’• titled “ Barrack-Room Ballads” appeared, “ Dannv Deever,” u Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” and “ Mandalav “ had become household words. There was a go and a catchincss about them that no English ballads had possessed since Macaulay. When the volume appeared it was more widely read than any poetry published for some vcars. It was that rare thing in poetry, a genuinely popular success; and the success was significant of the achievement.
By that volume Mr. Kipling as a poet must still be judged. It contained poems which he has certainlv not surpassed since, if, indeed, he has equalled them, and it revealed limitations which he has not yet sur mounted. In few volumes has the cleavage between what a man can do and what he can not do been so marked. And, with one or two exceptions presently to be noted, the cleavage was between the “ Barrack-Room Ballads” and the “Other Verses.” Rereading the volume again to-day, one returns to one’s first conclusion. The best of the “ Barrack-Room Ballads” still retain their magic, but the “ Other Verses “ still leave one cold, and, to be frank, a little bored.
Of the ballad, or rather of one kind of ballad, Mr. Kipling is clearly a master; that is the singing ballad, with swinging jingle choruses and catchy refrains, and written in dialect; but not the narrative ballad written in simple English. Nor, broadly speaking, can he write any kind of poetry in simple English. As a poet he stands or falls with dialect. Any minor qualifications this statement may seem to need will be made in due course. Our concern, for the moment, is with the “ Barrack-Room Ballads.”
These are not, of course, of equal excellence. Out of twenty-one there are, perhaps, not more than seven that one cares about reading again, but these seven are “ Man- dalav,” “ Danny Deever,” “ Fuzzy-Wuz- zy,” “Tommy,” “Oonts,” “ Gunga Din,” and “ Soldier, Soldier.” Of these the first four are, in their several ways, perfect things. The delicious humour, the biting irony, and the irresistible music- hall swing of “ Fuzzy-Wuzzy “ and “ Tommy “; the tragic shiver and mournful music of “ Danny Deever”; the romance and melody and passion of “ Man- dalay.’’
Here again in poetry was something that made us unspeakably glad. You might rank them this high or that, but without doubt they were real things, perfect things of their kind; in their degree as satisfactory as “ Kubla Khan,” or a number from “The Mikado,” or a song by Mr. Albert Chevalier. They were, indeed, as Orphic in their possession of us as “ Knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road,” or “ Ta-ra-ra- boom-de-av “; but, unlike those fascinating masterpieces, they were not dependent upon histrionic or musical interpretation. They won us by sheer literary effect. You had but to read them, and they provided their own dance-music. They lose, in my opinion, by being set to music — which is one of the signs of their being real poetry. Real poetry can as seldom be “set” as it can be illustrated. Also, one is struck, particularly in “ Mandalay,” with Mr. Kipling’s wonderful transmuting use of the commonest material. Its magic is made of the very refuse of language. It reminds one of the magic of certain paintings, say a portrait by Mr. Sargent, which, close at hand, looks all slaps and dashes of paint, like an untidy palette; but, as we move further and further away, the vision comes out of the chaos, and soon we forget the brush-marks in the beauty. Similarly with the best of these “ Barrack-Room Ballads,” the poor Cockneyisms are transfigured out of recognition by imagination working at white heat, and a rhythm that might set rocks to dance-music. And could love- poetry be tenderer than:
“‘Er petticoat was yaller an’ ‘er little cap was green,
An’ ‘er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Oueen,
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot,
An’ a-wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot:
Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud — Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd —
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I
kissed ‘er where she stud! On the road to Mandalay. . . .”
Never is the miracle of art more fully brought home to us than when such coarse material is thus touched to finer issues. There is a piquant beauty, coming, of course, of the meeting of extremes in form and material, about a modelling in clay that, perhaps, hardly survives in the marble: though this observation suggests another. It reminds us that clay is perishable.
The other fourteen “ Barrack-Room Ballads “ have, of course, their interest, their humours, and their good lines; but that interest is mainly technical. They contribute their share to Mr. Kipling’s picture of the British soldier in India, but their value stops there. They are not universalised, as work that remains with us must be. No doubt “ that strong man T. A.” (to whom Mr. Kipling dedicated “ Soldiers Three “) might rejoice in them were they published within his reach, just in the same way as Anglo- Indian Civil servants may still chuckle over “Departmental Ditties”; but they might as well be the slang ditties of Roman soldiers at the siege of Carthage for all their general, and anything like permanent, significance.
To consider now the “ Other Verses.” These, I said before, are mainly inte
resting as showing what Mr. Kipling can not do. But I referred to one or two exceptions. Of these much the most important is “ The Ballad of the ‘ Bolivar,’ “ which is of the same genre as the “ Barrack-Room Ballads.” Mr. Kipling has written more ambitious sea-ballads, but this is easily first. It is marred bv the inartistic use of technical terms incomprehensible to any but the nautical reader, but its imaginative vitality is such, its metaphor is so simply forcible, its rhvthm so compelling, that they overcome all its flaws, and fix it securely in the memory.
With less emphasis I would except also the nautical “ L’Envoi “:
“There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield, And the ricks stand grey to the sun,
Singing: —
‘Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
And your English summer’s done.’
You have heard the beat of the offshore wind,
And the thresh of the deep-sea rain;
You have heard the song — how long!
how long? Pull out on the trail again! . . .
Fly forward, O my heart, from the Foreland to the Start —
We’re steaming all too slow,
And it’s twenty thousand mile to our little lazy isle
Where the trumpet-orchids blow!
You have heard the call of the offshore wind,
And the voice of the deep-sea rain;
You have heard the song — how long! how long?
Pull out on the trail again!
Two more exceptions I would make — poems of a different nature: “ The Conundrum of the Workshops” and “ Tomlin- son.” For satire in verse Mr. Kipling has a marked gift. He hits as hard as Tennyson could do now and again when he was so minded, though his method is rougher and more diffuse. The method of “ Tomlinson,” so far as its metre and rough-and-ready imagination go, Mr. Kipling learnt, I think, from Mr. Buchanan in such ballads as “ The Vision of the Man Accurst.” Using it thus, humorously, Mr. Kipling achieves his end of introducing “ Tomlinson “; that is, of fixing in caricature a type not before pinned down. Tomlinson now stands for one of those book-fed, half-and-half dilettante products of civilisation, who have never really lived at all, never done good enough to take them to heaven, or evil enough to gain them admission into hell:
“‘ This I have read in a book,’ he said,
‘and that was told to me,
And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy.’”
Tomlinson, as the phrase is, has passed into the language; at all events, into current mythology. But, once having been introduced to him, we have no further desire to read his letter of introduction. The method is just a little common even for satire. Only the force of the idea saves it. Tomlinson steps out of the verses, as a chicken out of its shell — and we think no more of the shell. The method is what one might call Mr. Kipling’s “cosmic” method. For purposes of satire it is very effective; but to see into what disaster it may lead, one must read (to refer back a moment) the poem in which Mr. Kipling dedicates his ballads to the memory of his brother-in-law, Wolcott Balestier. The poem is too long to quote entire, but a verse or two will suffice:
“Beyond the path of the outmost sun
through utter darkness hurled —
Further than ever comet flared or vagrant star-dust swirled —
Live such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world. . . .
‘Tis theirs to sweep through the ringing
deep where Azrael’s outposts are,
Or buffet a path through the Pit’s red wrath
when God goes out to war,
Or hang with the reckless Seraphim on the rein of a red-maned star. . . .
And ofttimes cometh our wise Lord God,
master of every trade,
And tells them tales of His daily toil, of
Edens newly made;
And they rise to their feet as
He passes by, gentlemen unafraid.
The big hyperboles with which Mr. Kipling here tries to bridge time and space suggest a too conscious stretching of the octave, and the large colloquialisms in which he presents the heavenly powers utterly fail in dignity. Nor is the impressiveness of the poem for its special purpose increased for old readers of The Scots Observer, by their remembering that a great part of it had already done duty as a satire a propos a notorious London exhibition of Rabelais pictures.
But this is by the way. There remains to speak of “ The Conundrum of the Workshops “; from a literary point of view a more piquant performance than “Tomlinson.” Mr. Kipling is fond of sneering at “ Art with a big A.” Evidently he had been, very naturally, nauseated with the cant talk about “ Art,” which, like his hero, “ Dick Heldar,” he found current in London. No doubt certain criticisms on his work provoked his bitter, witty rejoinder. All the same, Mr. Kipling knows well enough that, however you spell it, there is a form of lasting creation with pen and ink, with brushes and paint, with marble and chisel, and with musical notes, which we call “ art,” which also has its eternal laws not to be set aside for any of us, not even for Mr. Kipling; and that this art is not stultified of her foolish children, however foolish their talk.
Mr. Kipling represents the devil as the arch-critic. Whatever man has done he has always been there to cry: “ You did it, but was it Art r “ On the whole, a very proper question to ask — of the artist. Adam, and Noah, and the builders of Babel, were not artists, but strong men of action. The question was irrelevant to them. Mr. Kipling chose his examples badly for the force of his satire. Only in the last verse but one is the example to the point:
‘‘ ‘When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the Club-room’s green and gold, The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mould — They scratch with their pens in the mould of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start, For the Devil mutters behind the leaves: ‘ It’s pretty, but is it Art? ‘“
Of course. And only by steadily asking this question of contemporary reputations, as they blaze up on the horizon, can one hope to maintain a standard of serious work. Of course, if by art one means sugar-candy and stained-glass windows, it is another matter. But those who speak of art in its proper sense are not to be mocked out of their use of the only word for their purpose by satire, however telling, against those who take that word in vain.
I hope Mr. Kipling will overlook my saying it — but “ Mandalay “ is something very like Art! It’s “ human,” it’s “ striking,” it’s “ clever,” it’s “ pretty,” Mr. Kipling “ did it” — and yet, it is Art!
Yes, and as sure as “ Mandalay “ is “ art,” something like seventeen poems included in the “ Other Verses” are not. For eleven of these no one whose opinion counts could seriouslv plead. “ The Last Suttee,” “The Ballad of the King’s Mercv,” “ The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” “With Scindia to Delhi,” “The Lament of the Border Cattle Thief,” “ The Ballad of the < Clampherdown,’ “ “The Sacrifice of Er-Heb,” “The Explanation,” “ The Gift of the Sea,” “ Evarra and his Gods,” “ The Legend of Evil,” are all commonplace, dull, or bad, in their several ways. “ The Ballad of Boh Da Thone “ is cheap burlesque that might have passed in “ Departmental Ditties “ •, and “ Cleared “ and “ An Imperial Rescript” are satires wrong-headedly conceived and indifferently executed.
Three poems only remain: “ The Ballad of East and West,” “ The Rhyme of the Three Captains,” and “The English Flag.” I am aware that these poems have been highly praised. “ The English Flag “ begins well. Its first eight lines are spirited. They stir one. Were the rest of the poem equal to them, the poem had been a success. But they are not. Recondite geography — Mr. Kipling’s fatal geography — and astronomy, are called in to take the place of inspiration; and, as nothing can take its place, they fail. “ The Ballad of East and West “ is generally better, though not so good in any single passage. It tells a stirring story stirringl
y, but the Macaulay- ish method of its telling is outworn. We can Suffer ballads that go like this no more — the metre is worn out:
“Kamal is out with twenty men to raise the Border-side, And he has lifted the Colonel’s mare that is the Colonel’s pride: He has lifted her out of the stable-door between the dawn and the day, And turned the calkins upon her feet, and ridden her far away.”
As for “ The Rhyme of the Three Captains,” I may be at fault, for I have never been able to read it to the end; but so far as I have gone its story struck me as dull, its nautical technicalities, choking it like sea-weed, more than usually tiresome, and its metre open to the same objection as that brought against “ The Ballad of East and West.”
I have called eleven of Mr. Kipling’s poems commonplace, dull, or bad. The statement, I am aware, is sweeping; yet considerations of space prevent my supporting mv opinion with more than two or three quotations. Dulness is a pervasive quality difficult to illustrate in small samples. Yet one may fairly guess that a poem which begins as begins “ The Ballad of the King’s Jest” is going to be as dull all through. The lifeless beat of the couplet alone settles it. The most brilliant poetic idea could not keep itself awake in company with so somnolent a metre. Here are the opening lines:
“When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
And the snowbound trade of the North
comes down To the market-square of Peshawur town.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 966