Rudyard Kipling | Page 8

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