Mr Kipling’s detachment from the politics of his day explains virtually everything that has offended his modern critics. Almost the first thing to realise in discussing Mr Kipling’s attitude to modern life is that Mr Kipling has kept absolutely clear of the political and social drift of the last thirty years. He has been conspicuously out of everything. He has had nothing to say to any of the ideas or influences which have formed his contemporaries. While others of his literary generation were growing up amid intellectual movements, democratic tendencies and advances of humanity, Mr Kipling was standing between two civilisations in India which were hardly susceptible of being reconciled till they had been reduced to very simple terms. The instinct to simplify — to get down to something in nature that included the East with the West, the First with the Twentieth century, was naturally strong in one who was born between two nations; and it was an instinct which drove Mr Kipling in the opposite direction from that in which his contemporaries were moving. While Mr Kipling’s generation was learning to analyse, refine and interrogate, to become super-subtle and incredulous, to exalt the particular and ignore the general, to probe into the intricate and sensitive places of modern life, Mr Kipling was looking at mankind in the mass, looking back to the half-dozen realities which are the stuff of the poetry of every climate and period — to love of country which is as old as the waters of Babylon, to the faith of Achates, and the affliction of Job. While Mr Kipling’s contemporaries have been working towards minute studies of individuals and groups, Mr Kipling has been content to catch the metal of humanity at the flash point, to wait for the passionate moment which reveals all mankind as of one kindred. “We be of one blood, ye and I” — the phrase of the Jungle holds.
To find here evidence of a bias merely political, of an attitude reactionary and hostile to the progress o the world, is to deny sense and meaning to the greatest literature of the world. Mr Kipling’s instinctive simplifying of life he shares with the immortals. It is, as we shall see, the immortal part of him. To write of Mr Kipling as though he celebrates the ape and the tiger; extols the Philistine and the brute; calls always for more chops — ”bloody ones with gristle”; delights in the savagery of war, and ferociously despises all that separates the Englishman of to-day from his painted ancestor — this is the mistake of critics who cannot distinguish the cant of progress from its reality.
We shall be driven more particularly to consider Mr Kipling’s atavism in discussing his tales of the British Army. For the present we are dealing only with India and the “Imperialism” which some of Mr Kipling’s critics have taken for an offensive proof of his political prejudice. Mr Kipling’s treatment of the Anglo-Indian, and of the dealing of the Anglo-Indian with the Indian Empire, has nothing to do with the Yellows and the Blues. The real motive of Mr Kipling’s attitude towards the men on the frontier, in places where deadly things are encountered and there is work to be done, is no more a matter of politics, “progressive” or “reactionary,” than is his celebration of the Maltese Cat or of .007. “The White Man’s Burden” is the burden of every creature in whom there lives the pride of unrewarded labour, of endurance and courage. In India this pride has to be wholesomely tempered with humility; for India is old and vast and incomprehensible, to be handled with care, to be approached as a country which, though it shows an inscrutably smiling face to the modern world, has the power suddenly to baffle its modern rulers by opening to them glimpses of an intricate and unassailable life which cannot be ruffled by Orders in Council or disturbed by the weak ploughing of teachers from the West. The task of the Anglo-Indian administrator is, indeed, the finest opportunity for that heroic life to the celebration of which Mr Kipling has devoted so many of his tales. This hero has a task which taxes all his ability, which promises little riches and little fame, and is known to be tolerably hopeless. It offers to him a supreme test of his virtue — a test in which the hero is accountable only to his personal will; whose best work is its own reward and comfort.
“Gentlemen come from England,” writes Mr Kipling in one of his Indian tales, “spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its work, denouncing or praising it as their ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no one, not even the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of the Empire. Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or broken in health and hope, in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone; but the idea is a pretty one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes forward. If an advance be made, all credit is given to the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs, the Englishmen step forward and accept the blame.”
This passage declares the heroic spirit of Mr Kipling’s Anglo-Indian tales; and many readers will fail to understand how exactly this spirit has been found vainglorious.
There is a passage in Shakespeare where a king’s envoy comes to claim of a high-mettled and sweating warrior the fruits of victory. The warrior grudges less surrendering the fruits of victory to the king than he grudges surrendering his anger at being easily and prettily addressed on the field of battle by a polite and dainty fellow who has no idea how dearly the fruits of victory are purchased. Mr Kipling’s heroes are frail enough to feel some of this very natural indignation when unbreathed politicians lecture them in the heat of their Indian day. They come into touch with things simple and bitter. India has searched out the value of many a Western shibboleth, destroyed many doctrines, principles, ideas and theories. Phrases which look well in a peroration look foolish when there is immediate work to be done, and expediency begins to rule. The first lesson which the Indian civilian learns, a lesson which is rarely omitted from any of Mr Kipling’s Indian stories, is that practical men are better for being ready to take the world as they find it. The men who worship the Great God Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, most terrible, One-eyed, Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk — men who are set on saving their own particular business — have no time for saving faces and phrases. They have small respect for a principle. They have seen too many principles break down under the particular instance. Hence there is in all Mr Kipling’s work a disrespect of things which are printed and made much of in the contemporary British press; and this, again, has encouraged the idea that he is “reactionary,” contemptuous of the humanities, and enemy of all the best poets and philosophers.
It will perhaps be well to look a little closely at one or two of Mr Kipling’s Indian series. They will help us to realise how the charges we are discussing have arisen and exactly how unreasonable they are. The first of two excellent examples is the story of Tods’ Amendment. Tods’ Amendment is the story of a Bill brought in by the Supreme Legislative Council of India. Tods was an English baby of six, and he mixed on friendly terms with Indians in the bazaar and with members of the Supreme Legislative Council. The Council was at this time devising a new scheme of land tenure which aimed at “safeguarding the interests” of a few hundred thousand cultivators of the Punjab. The Bill was beautiful on paper; and the Legal Member, who knew Tods, was settling the “minor details.” The weak part of the business was that European legislators, dealing with natives, are often puzzled to know which details are the major and which the minor. Also the Native Member was from Calcutta, and knew nothing about the Punjab. Nevertheless, the Bill was known to be a beautiful Bill till Tods happened one evening to be sitting on the knee of the Legal Member, and to hear him mention The Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment. Tods had heard the bazaar talking of a new plan for the Ryotwari, as bazaars talk when there is no white man to overhear. Tods began to
prattle, and the Legal Member began to listen, till he soon realised that there was only one drawback to the beautiful Bill. The beautiful Bill, in short, was altogether wrong, more especially in the Council’s pet clause which so clearly “safeguarded the interests of the tenant.” It therefore came about that the rough draft of the Submontane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment was put away in the Legal Member’s private paper-box — ”and, opposite the twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal Member, are the words, ‘Tods’ Amendment.’”
The moral of the tale is not obscure. A baby who runs in the bazaar is better able to legislate for India than a Supreme Legislative Council. India, in short, is a vast and uncertain land, whose ways are not always learned in a lifetime by the men whose business it is. The argument a fortiori — namely, that amiable and humane political philosophers, well bred in the latest European theories of government, are even less likely to be infallible — need not be pursued.
Our second story is the story of Aurelian McGoggin. Aurelian McGoggin had read too many books, and he had too many theories. He also had a creed: “It was not much of a creed. It only proved that men had no souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry along somehow for the good of humanity.” McGoggin had found it an excellent creed for a Government office, and he brought it to India and tried to teach it to all his friends. His friends had found that life in India is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one particular at the head of affairs, and they objected. They also warned McGoggin not to be too good for his work, and not to insist on doing it better than it needed to be done, because people in India wanted all their energy for bare life. But McGoggin would not be warned, and one day, when he had steadily overworked and overtalked through the hot season, he was suddenly interrupted at the club, in the middle of an oration. The doctor called it aphasia; but McGoggin only knew that he was struck sensationally dumb: “Something had wiped his lips of speech as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child, and he was afraid. For a moment he had lost his mind and memory — which was preposterous and something for which his philosophy did not allow. Henceforth he did not appear to know so much as he used to about things Divine.”
McGoggin, in fact, was converted; for, as Mr Kipling explains, his story is really a tract — a tract whose purpose is to convey that India is able to cure the most resolute positivist of his positivism. Mr Kipling’s India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips. You do not talk of Humanity in India, because in India “you really see humanity — raw, brown, naked humanity — with nothing between it and the blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot.” Mr Kipling’s Indian administrators are practical and simple men, who obey orders and accept the incredible because their position requires them to administer India as though they were never at fault, whereas their experience tells them that, if they are never to be at fault in India, it is wise to be not too original and fatal to be too rigid.
Tods’ Amendment and The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin are printed among Plain Tales from the Hills. They look forward to a whole series of Anglo-Indian tales which present Mr Kipling’s idea of the English in India. Out of his later books we can illustrate a hundred times his conviction that in India the simplest wisdom is the best.
But there are two kinds of simplicity. The one kind is illustrated in a tale from The Day’s Work; it is the right kind of simplicity. In no story of Mr Kipling is the devoted service and practical resourcefulness of the good Civilian so movingly celebrated as in the story of William the Conqueror. It is the story of a famine, and of how it was met by the servants of the Indian Government. The administration of famine relief would seem to be a simple thing when the grain has come by rail and only waits to be distributed. But the district served by the little group of English in William the Conqueror was a district which did not understand the food of the North, and, if it could not get the rice which it knew, was ready to starve within reach of bagsful of unfamiliar wheat or rye. The hero of the tale is finally reduced to distributing the Government rations to the goats, and keeping the starving babies alive with milk. It was a simple idea, and the man to whom it occurred worked himself to death’s door, which was no more than another simple idea of what was due from him to the district and to his superior officer.
The wrong kind of simplicity is illustrated in a story from Life’s Handicap. It is called The Head of the District, and it has to do with a simple idea which occurred to the Viceroy. A Deputy Commissioner who understood the lawless Khusru Kheyel and had put into them the fear of English law had died and a successor had to be appointed. The man for the post was a certain Tallentire who had worked with the late head of the district and knew the tribe with whom he had to deal. But the Viceroy had a Principle. He wished to educate the natives in self-government; and here was an opportunity — a vacant post of responsibility and a native candidate to fill it.
“There was a gentleman and a member of the Bengal Civil Service who had won his place and a university degree to boot in fair and open competition with the sons of the English. He was cultured, of the world, and, if report spoke truly, had wisely and, above all, sympathetically ruled a crowded district in South-Eastern Bengal. He had been to England and charmed many drawing-rooms there. His name, if the Viceroy recollected aright, was Mr Grish Chunder Dé, M.A. In short, did anybody see any objection to the appointment, always on principle, of a man of the people to rule the people? The district in South-Eastern Bengal might with advantage, he apprehended, pass over to a younger civilian of Mr G. C. Dé’s nationality (who had written a remarkably clever pamphlet on the political value of sympathy in administration); and Mr G. C. Dé could be transferred northward. As regarded the mere question of race, Mr Grish Chunder Dé was more English than the English, and yet possessed of that peculiar sympathy and insight which the best among the best Service in the world could only win to at the end of their service.”
The principle was sound; but the consequences were such as usually follow when ideas which are simple in one continent are applied in another. Any man on the frontier could have told what would come of asking the Khusru Kheyel to respect and obey Mr Grish Chunder Dé. It was not a matter of religion or ability, but of history. The Khusru Kheyel had had relations with the countrymen of their new Head for generations and they were not relations of respect and obedience. How there was riot and some rapid blood-letting on the border, and how the new Head resigned his office before he had taken it over, is told as a warning that there is a wrong kind of simplicity in dealing with India. It is fatal to have invented simple and embracing phrases about a country which holds more races than all Europe; has had a long and private history of its own; has been more often conquered than Great Britain; and has had every sort of experience except that of being governed according to constitutional law.
This chapter being mainly devoted to rescuing Mr Kipling from his political admirers and censors, it may be well to conclude upon his vision of the devoted civilian Scott, the hero of a tale already quoted, the man who fed the Indian babies from a herd of goats fattened on the food which the starving people of the Deccan distrusted and refused. Scott appears in that story at sunset, delectable and humane, sneezing in the dust of a hundred little feet, “a god in a halo of gold dust, walking slowly at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran small naked cupids.”
Clearly there is something wrong with the popular habit of regarding Mr Kipling as essentially concerned with the carving of men to the “nasty noise of beef-cutting on the block.” His “god in a halo of gold dust” seriously discourages any attempt to brand him with the mark of the reverting carnivor.
IV
NATIVE INDIA
From Simla we have come down to the plains and the work of the English in Imperial India. Thence we pass to India herself. Concerning native India Mr Kipling’s principle thesis — a thesis illustrated with point and comp
etency in many excellent tales — is that for the people of the West there can be no such thing as the real India — only here and there an understanding that wavers and frequently expires. Mr Kipling does not insolently explain that India is thus and thus. He allows the impression to grow upon us, as once it grew upon himself, that in India all the settled ways of the West are insecure, that at any moment we may be looking into the House of Suddhu.
”A stone’s throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange:
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.”
It is not for an Englishman to speak of the real India. Let him stand with Mr Kipling between East and West, and allow each thing he sees to add to his dark and intricate impression. India will then assume her own uneasy and vast form, will press upon the nerves, and be declared mysterious.
There are a few pages in Life’s Handicap describing the City of Lahore by night. There is great heat in these pages; there is distance also, and the breathless air of streets where the formic swarming of India, her callous fecundity, the tyranny of her skies, and her old faith, prepare us for the House of Suddhu and the return of Imray:
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 974