Rudyard Kipling | Page 4

the
popular literature of the day. Naturally Mr Kipling made full use of his
opportunity. He did not write of India because India was essential to his
genius, but because he was shrewd enough to realise that nothing could
better serve the purpose of a young author than to exploit his first-hand
acquisition of an inexhaustible store of fresh and excellent material.
India was annexed by Mr Kipling at twenty-two for his own literary
purposes. He was not born to interpret India, nor does he throw his
literary heart and soul into the business. When, in the Indian stories, we
meet with pages sincerely inspired we discover that their inspiration
has very little to do with India and a great deal to do with Mr Kipling's
impulse to celebrate the work of the world, and even more to do with
his impulse to escape the intellectual casuistry of his generation in a
region where life is simple and intense. These aspects of his work will
be more clearly revealed at a later stage. For the moment we are
considering the Indian tales simply as tales of India; and from this point
of view they obviously belong to the journalist rather than to the author
who has helped to make the English short story respectable. Mr Kipling
simply gets out of India the maximum of literary effect as a teller of
tales. India, for example, is mysterious. Mr Kipling exploits her
mystery competently and coolly, making his points with the precision,
clarity and force of one to whom the enterprise begins and ends as an
affair of technical adequacy. The point is made with equal ability that
India is not without peril and difficulty ruled and administered by the
sahibs; or that India has a complicated history; or that India is thickly
peopled. Mr Kipling in his Indian tales makes the most of his talent for
observing things, always with a keen eye for their effective literary
employment. His Indian tales are descriptive journalism of a high
quality; and, being journalism, their matter and their doctrine have hit
hard the attention of their particular day.

This reduces us to the necessity of considering not so much their form
and quality as the ideas and doctrines they contain--a barren task but
necessary in order to clear away many misconceptions with regard to
Mr Kipling's work. Regarded as literature, Mr Kipling's Indian tales are
mainly of note as preparing in him that enthusiasm for the work of the
world which, later, was to inspire his greatest pages; as finally leading
him in Kim to a door whereby he was able to pass into the region of
pure fancy where alone he is supremely happy, and as prompting in
him the instinct to simplify which urged him into the jungle and into
the minds of children. But all this has very little to do with India. So
long as we are dealing with Mr Kipling's Indian stories as in themselves
finished and intrinsic studies of India, we remain only in the suburbs of
Mr Kipling's merit as an author. The Simla tales are not more than a
skilful employment of a literary convention which Mr Kipling did not
inherit. The Anglo-Indian and native tales are the not less skilful work
of a young newspaper man breaking into a storehouse of new material.
We are interested firstly in Mr Kipling's craft as a technician, as one
who makes the most of his theme deliberately and self-consciously; and
secondly in Mr Kipling's point of view, in the impressions and ideas he
has collected concerning the country of which he writes. Until we
arrive at The Day's Work we shall be mainly occupied in clearing the
ground of impertinent prejudices concerning Mr Kipling's temperament
and politics. For though the Indian and soldier tales are as literature not
impregnable to criticism, they can at any rate be rescued from those
who have annexed or repudiated them from motives which have little
to do with their literary value.
We will begin with the Simla tales.
Characteristically the author who began virtually at the end of his
career--proclaiming himself a finished virtuoso at the start--entered into
prose with a volume of tales, radiating from Simla, which betray
qualities that are usually associated with the later rather than with the
early work of an author. Plain Tales from the Hills number more Simla
stories to the square page than any other volume of Mr Kipling. Now
Mr Kipling's Simla stories are the least important, but in some ways the
most significant of all the stories he wrote. They begin and they end in

sheer literary virtuosity. We feel in reading Mr Kipling's studies of the
social world at Simla that he had no intuitive call to write them; that
they are exercises in