Rudyard Kipling | Page 9

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