UNIVERSITY OF CALIFO! AT LOS ANGELES SEMICENTENNIAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 1868-1918 42 1 6 KIPLING THE STORY-WRITER BY WALTER MORRIS HART UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY 1918 28412 TO A. B. H. VA PREFACE In the course of an attempt to trace the history of the Short- Story in English it came to seem desirable, three or four years ago, to examine with some thoroughness, as the terminus ad quern, the work of Rudyard Kipling. The results of this study were rather fully set forth in the form of notes intended for class-room lectures. Revision and publication of these notes was advised by Professor Bliss Perry of Harvard College and by Professor Charles Mills Gayley of the University of Califor- nia. To these good friends of the writer this little book owes its being. Without their criticisms and suggestions, moreover, it would have been even less worthy than it is of the author with whom it is concerned. To him, to Mr. Kipling himself, thanks are due for gracious permission to take from his works the many illustrative passages with which these pages are adorned. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 1 PART ONE: THE INDIAN PERIOD CHAPTER I Settings 5 CHAPTER II Characters and Psychology 12 CHAPTER III Plots and Their Significance 33 CHAPTER IV General Characteristics of the First Period Ill PART TWO: THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION CHAPTER V The Transitional Technique 131 PART THREE: THE ENGLISH PERIOD CHAPTER VI Settings 160 CHAPTER VII Characters and Psychology 170 CHAPTER VIII Plots and Their Significance 192 CHAPTER IX Conclusion 2 1 7 KIPLING THE STORY WRITER 5 3-2./. S H- -2.S- INTRODUCTION It was as a writer of short-stories that Kipling first estab- lished his fame, and it is mainly as a writer of short-stories that he is known to-day. One associates with his name, it is true, some significant utterances in verse ; everyone who knows his work at all knows Danny Dcever, Mandalay, and the Recessional. But the body of well-known and popular verse is much smaller than the body of well-known and popular prose. Of his novels only one has enjoyed anything like the vogue of the short-stories ; andtewi reveals less the art of the novelist than the art of the short-story writer?] For it is a series of independent scenes, more numerous, indeed, yet scarcely more closely connected one with another than the separate tales ^of the Soldiers Three, or of Stalky and Company, or of Sir Richard and Sir Hugh in Puck of Pook's Hill. It seems then not unlikely that Kipling is to be remembered primarily as a writer of short-stories. And probably as the greatest English writer of short-stories ; conceiv- ably, even, as the greatest of all. His work, it must be admitted, is so different from Maupassant 's that it would be folly to attempt to establish the superiority of either. Yet if the Frenchman's technique is more subtle and more highly polished — the result KIP1 ING l III STOBl H /.// / B .hi apprenticeship which f powers of observation and memory no Less accurate and vivid, and al the same time it combines with these a roman- tic, ideal, and even ;i stimulating or uplifting quality, no1 found in Maupassant. These differences are due in pari to tin' Longer od of Kipling's ; n ■ t i \ ity. However, it is always vain to attempl to anticipate the verdict lit' posterity, to predetermine the precise rank which one of our own contemporaries may achieve. It is too early to distinguish in Kipling's work, with anything Like certainty, 1 1 » * • Bound from the unsound or only half sound. For, no1 the leasl astonishing of the many astonishing facts aboul him, Kip- Ling lias, al the present writing, not yet celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Ami there is no more reason now, at what looks like the conclusion of a third period of his work, to suppose that his production has ceased than there was some twenty-five years ago when, at the conclusion of the tirsi period, the critics ex- pressed th'- fear that he was "written out." lint if it is too early to pas^ final judgment, it is nut too early to attempt an initiation of his technique, to pay him the compliment that his preeminence justifies ami demands. This is the purpose of th.- pr.s.nt study. It aims to observe from a definite point of view, as objectively and dispassionately as may he, the tech- nique of his stores, to point out simply what is there. Such a study, it is hoped, may lead to an increased appreciation of his skill, may col ivably make clear in a measure some of the INTRODUCTION 3 reasons for his success, and may prove instructive and stimulat- ing to those who would profit by his example. A point of view must be arbitrarily established ; and, not as a standard of excellence, but rather to insure the relative com- pleteness of the survey, it becomes necessary to offer a kind of definition or description of the Short-Story. The Short-Story is, then, to be conceived as having for its distinguishing mark the elaboration in brief and concrete narrative form of all pos- sible story elements — of the settings of time, place, and society, of characters, emotions, and motives, of plot, and of the attitude toward life which all these reveal or imply. From this point of view it is proposed to examine the whole body of Kipling's short-stories, and to study the development of his art as it may be traced through the three periods into which it naturally divides itself — the first or Indian period, in which he wrote stories mainly of Indian life and manners, the third or English period, in which he wrote stories mainly of English life and manners, and the second or transition period, in which he wrote some stories of Indian life, some of English life, and some of both, combining the technical characteristics of the third period with those of the first. PAET ONE THE INDIAN PERIOD Rudyard Kipling was horn in Bombay in L865. AYith the exception of a risil to England in 1868 1 v o!i he spenl the firsl six years of his lit" in India. Prom 1M71 to 1r them the gorgeous pasl of the land in which they were Living, and in so doing he illicit have found an agreeable relief from his own pre< upations. Happily, however, he believed, with Brel Harte, thai it was the function of the short-story writer to por- tray what was characteristic and distinctive in the world he knew; li«' chose to make use of his own unparalleled gifts and equipment, to carry over his journalistic methods into fiction, and tn offer, nol an escape from reality, but a criticism and an imaginative interpretation of it. He dealt with the Here and the Now. He deall with his Own People, whose bread and salt he had eaten, whose wine he had drunk, whose vigils and toil and ease he had shared, with whose lives he passionately identi- fied his own. And it was primarily for Ids own people that he wrote. Read, for example, the opening paragraphs of .1/ the . End of iln Passage, which establish by effective massing of char- acteristic detail a highly significant setting. The thermometer marks one hundred and one degrees of heat ; sky, sun. and hori- zon are lost in a brown purple haze or in clouds of tawny dust. [nside a squat, four-roomed bungalow, four men, stripped to the thinnesl of sleening-suits, play whist crossly, wrangling over leads and returns, while the tattered punkah puddles the hot air, whining dolefully at each strake. This moving picture interests at oner even mere outsiders; ii is an emphatic answer to Englishmen at home, who assort that the Civil Service in India is the preserve of the aristocracy; and for the men them THE SETTINGS 7 selves, the matter-of-fact, cynical heroes — heroes without heroics — of whom and for whom the story is written, the recognition of their own phase of life must have been a keen delight. Tech- nically, the significant thing in these opening paragraphs is the skilful interweaving of the narrative elements : Time, Place, People, and tragic Plot are powerfully suggested. And the significance of the whole, the arraignment of the home miscon- ceptions, is at once apparent. For time and place the story is typical. Without significant exception the one hundred and ten stories of this first period deal with Kipling's own time and with the India that he. knew. Mairy, like At the End of the Passage, deal with the drought and heat of summer on the plains ; others deal with the moun- tains, with the winter rains, with rivers in flood, with the jungle, with the teeming cities, with the open fields, with clubs and garrisons. Every visible phase of India — it is not too much to say — appears in these pages. It is an important part of Kipling's achievement to have made India known and interesting to the West. This emphasis upon settings is natural with Kipling, or even inevitable. Having spent his childhood in India and his youth in England, he would be, by virtue of the sharp and striking contrasts, intensely conscious of the world about him. He would not accept his India as a matter of course, failing really to see it because of its very familiarity, as men who have lived always in one place accept their environment and necessarily remain unaware of the characteristics which distinguish it from others. Because of his English education, he could see with an English- man's eyes; because of his Indian childhood and his newspaper experience, he could sympathize with the natives and, like his X v KIPLING fill 8T0R1 R 1: 1 1 / 8 creation, and the projection of himself, Strickland of the Police, kin'W as much aboul them as they knew themselves. \'lin'_ r is more than a mere Englishman, or Anglo-Indian, al large. Educated in the United Services College, subeditor of the "Civil and Military Gazette," he would inevitably be deeply impressed with English institutions and with their significance in relation to Anglo Indian affairs. He would be intensely aware of The System. His conception of this system is, perhaps, besl summarized in Tht Conversion of Aurelian McGoggm. McGoggin had been reading Comte and Spencer and came ou1 to India with a soul- less and godless religion which would not work there. " For this reason. The Deputy is above the Assistant, the Commissioner above the Deputy, the Lieutenant-Governor above the Commis- sioner, and the Viceroy above all four, under the orders of the Secretary of State who is responsible to the Empress. It' the Empress be oo1 responsible to her Maker— if there is no Maker for her to be responsible to— the entire system of Our admin- istration must be wrong. Which is manifestly impossible." This pragmatism, this estimate of a creed solely by its practical bearing on definite and immediate human interests, is thoroughly characteristic of Kipling, as the creed itself is characteristic. Submission to the discipline of the system! He learned it in school. He learned it in the Civil and Military Gazette: "As there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is bu1 our man in charge of ;i newspaper, and he is the editor. My chief taughl me this on an Indian journal, and he further explained thai an order was an order, to 1"' obeyed at a run, not a walk, and thai any notion or notions as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the young THE SETTINGS <) had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press. ... A sub-editor is not hired to write verses; he is paid to sub- edit. At the time, this discovery shocked me greatly. . . ." Throughout his stories Kipling preaches this doctrine, or illus- trates the lengths to which devotion or submission to the system must be carried. In India, he says, men "do their work, and grow to think that there is nothing but their work, and nothing like their work, and that they are the real pivots on which the Administration turns." The phrase "all in the clay's work" has the same significance. It occurs first in the third story in Plain Tales: "Sickness does not matter, because it's all in the clay's work, and if you die, another man takes over your place and your office in the eight hours between death and burial." 1 Kipling may seem sometimes to celebrate lawlessness, the individual at the expense of the system; he may seem to criticise the system ; but it is always the good of the system that he has in mind. I n The In carnatio ji of Krishna M ulvaneii. Mulvaney is drunk and disorderly, overstays his leave, is in danger of arrest as a deserter, and merits twenty-eight days imprisonment. He escapes punishment. But it is on the ground of his useful- ness to the system, to his regiment, for the colonel "never knew a man who could put a polish on young soldiers as quickly as Mulvaney can." Kipling evidently sympathizes with Otis Yeere's having once proceeded on his own initiative and so 1 Kipling humorously exaggerates the possibilities of the paternalism of The System iu the plea for a Matrimonial Department in Kidnapped; and again in his prediction of how the Supreme Government would "handle the situation" on the Day of Judgment, in On the City Wall. "Were the Day of Doom to dawn to-morrow, you would find the Supreme Government ' taking measures to allay popular excitement ' and putting guards upon the graveyards that the Dead might troop forth orderly. The youngest Civilian would arrest Gabriel on his own responsibility if the Archangel could not produce a Deputy Commissioner 's permission to ' make music or other noises ' as the license says. ' ' 10 KIPLING Till 8TOB1 ll /,// / 5 having accomplished things in spite of the system. And now ;inorganic social groupsj he is less Likely to deal with man as a human being than as type of the group of which he is a member. I rtain of these types, because of their repetitions, stand oul very clearly. There is, for example, the subaltern, the young officer who comes c.ui from England, pink and white and wholly inexperienced, ignoranl of the silent, sullen races whom lie must control, of the men whom he niiisi command, and, most dangerous of all, of tin' Anglo-Indian society in which he must mingle. He succeeds or fails, according as he is fitted or not, by character and training, for his duties and his pleasures. We meet him iirst in Thrown Away, as The Boy who had been broughl up under the ••sheltered Life system," whose career ends promptly in suicide. In contrast with him, Bobby Wick, in Only a Sub- altern, is the type of successful officer. He follows the wise counsels of his father and slicks to his regiment with matter-of- CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 13 fact and unsentimental devotion. Instinctively he knows how to handle men. He reclaims Dormer, a dirty soldier who is the butt of his company, and in the end, to save Dormer's life sacri- fices his OAvn. He is eminently modest, completely lacking in self-consciousness, an inexpressive and effective Englishman. None of these adjectives, however, are to be found in the story ; it is purely by virtue of what he does and says that we reach our conclusions about him. — — Adjective and epithet play a more important part in the delineation of the Kipling heroine, Mrs. Hauksbee. "She was clever, witty, brilliant, and sparkling beyond most of her kind ; but possessed of many devils of malice and mischievousness. She could be nice, though, even to her own sex. But that is another story." In Thre e and — an Extra she was quite the opposite. She attempted to "annex" Mr. Cusack-Bremmil. Mrs. Cusack- Bremmil, however, though not Mrs. Hauksbee 's equal, was no fool, and defeated Mrs. Hauksbee in a carefully planned cam- paign. Clearly our first impression of Mrs. Hauksbee is not pleasant. But in the "other story" — indeed in all the other stories in which she plays a part — it is in order to be kind, not only to her own sex, but to the other, though sometimes by doubtful means. The other story is The Rescue of Pluffles, wherein she saves a youthful subaltern from the wiles of Mrs. Keiver and restores him to his fiancee. "Mrs. Hauksbee was honest . . . and, but for her love of mischief, would have been a woman's woman." "She had the wisdom of the Serpent, the logical coherence of the Man, the fearlessness of the Child, and the triple intuition of the Woman." That is, she belonged to the great class of wicked persons who are sound at heart, who make no claims to virtue, yet do more good in the world than 1 \ K1PLI VC / /// S3 0R\ 'I A// / B many who are reputed virtuous, sin- was of the same class as John Oakhurel or Jack Hamlin, sh<- is a kind of rogue- heroine, a descendant of the picaresque characters of seventeenth or eighteenth century fiction. She is thus a literary relative of Terence Mulvanej . For Mulvaney, though in ;i very different walk of life, is similarly compounded of ^r< •« >< 1 and evil, of much thai is best and worsl in the character of Tommy Atkins. He is more memor- able, more real, and more vivid than any of Kipling's characters. This is perhaps < 1 h -• to the fad thai he tells bo many Btories, thus revealing his character ;i> Chaucer's Pilgrims 'I"; and appears in bo many, thus reminding us again and again of hi* >d looks, his Btrength, his wit. ins eloquence, bis devotion to his chums, to the service, and to 1 r. Mulvaney himself u r iv<-s the besl accounl of his own character: "An" what am I'.'" he says in Th< C ourting of Dumb ShadcL "<>h. Mary Mother av Hiven, an ould dhrunken, untrustable baste av a privil that has n the reg'menl change oul from colonel to drummer-boy, not wansl or twice, bul scores av times !"... Good cause the reg'menl lias to know me for the besl soldier in ut. Better cause have I to know^nesilf for the worsl man. ['m <>nly jit to tache the oew drafts what I"ll oiver learn mesilf," j> .1. M. Barrie, tasing his judgmenl on Tin Light that Failed, ^declared that Kipling was unable t<> draw children. One besi- tates t<> disagree with tin- author of /''/f view, Kipling portrays, in Muhammed Di/ru the native child. This is doI a Btory, bu1 a sketch of the baby's taking ways and of Ids death. In Tods' Amendment finally, a child not unlike Wee Willie Winkie, through Ids unconscious repetition of native gossip and criticism, suggests an importanl amendment to a proposed land law. In all of these stories the children, while precocious and idealized, are thoroughly humanized, mainly by traits of lovable badness. They are thus the results of the same theor y of human nature aj9 Mrs. Hauksbee and Mulvaney] their defects make their virtues tolerable. It is through this min gling of good and evil thai they differ essentially from the saintly clergeon of ( lhaucer's Prioress. Bu1 for all this, they are in common with all Kipling's heroes and heroines, distinguished persons. Only superlatives can describe them: Mrs. Hauksbee was "the most wonderful woman in India'": Mulvaney was "the Inst soldier in the regiment"; and Tods was "the only baby who ever broke the holy calm of the Supreme Legislative Council." They are all. moreover, persons who do things; they are vigorous, active, self-assertive. You cannol imagine Kipling writing a whole story aboul a hanger-back, like Stevenson's Will o' the Mill. These, tin n. are some of the character-types portrayed in the lier -tories the official, the subaltern, the garrison "widow." Tommy Atkins, the precocious child. These do not by any CHAEACTEES AND PSYCHOLOGY 17 means, however, exhaust the list; for these are, themselves, subject to infinite modifications — there is Mrs. Reiver, beside Mrs. Hauksbee, there are Learoyd and Ortheris beside Mul- vanej'; and there is, over and above these, a- great number of types quite distinct from them. There is, for example, the whole group of native characters ; and these I have not discussed because no one figure stands out like Mrs. Hauksbee or Mulvaney or Wee Willie Winkie, as representative of them all. In the portrayal of these natives, however, Kipling reveals the same power of sympathy and understanding. He can put himself in their places, see the world through their eyes, realize for himself their emotions, their motives, to a degree possible only for one who had been brought up among them, who had spoken, like Tods or Wee Willie Winkie, many of their dialects, delighted in their society, and regarded them as brothers. 2 It is from this point of view then, the point of . view of emotions and motives, that Kipling's portrayal of the natives is best discussed. There is no better illustration of this phase of his dramatic power than the first story in the first volume — Lispeth. Lispeth was the daughter of Sonoo a Hill-man of the Himalayas, and Jadeh, his wife. She had the misfortune to save the life of a young Englishman, and, in consequence, to fall in love with him. The 2 In this connection it is interesting to recall what may be safely re- garded as a bit of self-characterization in Kim. Lurgan Sahib trains Kim and a younger disciple in the art of disguising or ' ' dressing up. " " Lurgan Sahib had a hawk 's eye to detect the least flaw in the make-up ; and lying on a worn teak-wood couch, would explain by the half-hour together how such and such a caste talked or walked, or coughed, or spat, or sneezed, and, since 'hows' matter little in this world, the 'why' of everything. The Hindu child played this game clumsily. That little mind, keen as an icicle when tally of jewels [a game to develop power of observation and memory of details] was concerned, could not temper itself to enter another's soul; but a demon in Kim woke up and sang with joy as he put on the changing dresses, and changed speech therewith. ' ' Kipling is endowed with this power of tempering his mind to enter another 's soul. is KIPL1 Vfi / /// 8T0B1 n A'// //■■ chaplain's wife, being a g I Christian and disliking anything in the shape <>f fuss or scandal, had told him to tell Lispeth thai li-' would come hark to marry her. Three months after his departure the Chaplain's wife told her the truth. "Then you have lied to me," said Lispeth, "you and he?" "The Chaplain's wife bowed her head and said nothing. Lispeth was silent, too, for a Little time; then she went ou1 down the valley, and returned in the dress of a Eill-girl — infamously dirty, bul without the aose stud and ear-rings. ... In a Little time she married a woodcutter who beal her, . . . and her beauty faded soon." The missionary is seen again from the native point of view- in the pathetic farce of Tin Judgment of Dungara) and the ways pf the Governmenl are seen from the native's point of view in Tods' Amcndmeiii and in TJu H<r coolie, soldier or merchant there is almost always a glimpse or hint of his way of Looking a1 things. For pure native psychology there is Dray Wara Yow l>< i . an Odyssey of revenge of the wronged husband who follows his enemy over all India. '"It may be," he concludes his dramatic monologue, "It may be that I shall find Daoud Shah in this city going northward, since a Hilltnan will ever head hack to his Hills when the spring warns. ... There shall no harm befall Daoud Shah till I come; for I would fain kill him quick and whole with the life sticking firm in his body. A pomegranate is sweetest when the cloves break away unwilling from the rind. Let it he in the daytime, that I may see his face, and my delighl may 1 rowned. And when I shall have accomplished the matter and my Honour is made clean, I shall return thanks unto God, the CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 19 Holder of the Scale of the Law, and I shall sleep. From the night, through the day, and into the night again I shall sleep ; and no dream shall trouble me." 3 , Though Kipling is concerned mainly with the outward ex- pression of feeling, 4 he has, nevertheless, the gift of seeing the / \- ... y. inside of a great variety of minds; he has also the power to vdepict a great variety of emotions. He is interested mainly in the simpler, elemental feelings, but he deals sometimes with the more complex ones as well. The Odyssey of revenge, just cited, has as its central motive, Hate. Grief is sufficiently illustrated by such stories as) Thrown Away and Only a Subaltern. In the latter it is interesting to see how the more dignified and re- strained yet somewhat grotesque sorrow of Bobby's captain is contrasted with grief characteristically disguised as wrath by Private Dormer. For mirth — for the swiftly shifting emotions that accompany an intense situation — read the climax of Miss Youghal's 8a is. Such a scene is not part of a psychological study. The emotions are obvious and expressed in obvious ways. The significant thing is that, in such a story, they should be represented with so much variety and completeness. Kipling approaches, perhaps, nearest to the psychological manner in stories of Fear and Love, and of certain diseased conditions of the mind. In The Drums of the Fore and Af t he s This reads like an expansion of the close of Maupassant 's story of revenge, Vendetta: "Elle dormit bien cette nuit-la. " * Interesting evidence of this is to be found in a passage in From Sea to Sea (I, 427). Kipling is describing a woman terrified by a storm at sea : ' ' By the heave of the labouring bust, the restless working of the fingers on the tablecloth, and the uncontrollable eyes that turned always to the companion stairhead, I was able to judge the extremity of her fear. . . . The contrast between the flowing triviality of her speech and the strained intentness of eye and hand was a quaint thing to behold. I know now how Fear should be painted. ' ' m KIPLINO THE 8T0E1 R RJTEB Ihms Bight, for tli'' must part, of his two little heroes, to trace with care the «-• >i ■ 1 1 ■ i • > 1 1 or mob fear of a regimenl under fire for the firsl time, marching slowly through ;i hostile country, and I » 1 1 1 to tli'_ r lit in the first encounter with the enemy. Even in such stories as this, however, his main interesl is not psychology ; he is by uo means giving us soul history to the exclusi< f other matters. In this instance his business is primarily to convince the reader thai a green regimenl should nut be sent into action without a leaven of veterans; and his story is a warning example. Again, if you read Th< Strangi /.'"/< of Marrowbu Jukes — which is, as Andrew Lang said, "the must dreadful nightmare of the most awful Bunker in the realms of fancy," and which mighl well be primarily a study of fear— you find that emotion is emphasized just enough to satisfy the short-story demand of impartial elaboration, no more. The narrator finds himself trapped in the sand pit. "The sensation of nameless terror which i had in vain attempted to strive against, overmastered me completely. My long East ... combined with the violent agitation of the ride had exhausted me, and I verily believe that, for a few minutes, 1 acted as one mad. 1 hurled myself against the sand-slope. I ran around the base of the crater, blaspheming and praying by turns. I crawled on1 among the sedges of the river-front, only to be driven hack each time in an agony of nervous dread by the rifle bullets which cu1 up the sand round me for I dared not face the (hath of a mad dog among that hideous crowd and so fell, spenl and raving, at the curb of the well. No one had taken the slightesl notice of an exhibition which makes me blush hotly even when I think of it now." Contrast with this Poe's 77" Pit and lh' Pendulum; or contrast .Maupassant's /.,// or his /.,/ f, ur. The latter story begins with CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 21 a discussion of the real nature of fear, and, in the two narra- tives that follow, focuses the attention wholly upon that emotion. The events are nothing. Fear, according to Maupassant 's theory, or at least, according to that of the narrator of this story, is not felt by a brave and energetic man in the face of an attack, or of certain death, or of any form of known peril. It is felt only under abnormal circumstances, mysterious influences, vague dangers. It is a kind of reminiscence of ancestral terrors. A man who believed in ghosts and thought that he saw a spectre in the night would experience fear in all its frightful horror. It is a matter then of terror inspired by the supernatural. We must, for fair comparison, turn to Kipling's stories in this kind. Do any of these concern themselves mainly with the emotion inspired, or are they told as effective or significant stories merely? Of the twelve or fourteen stories which deal with one phase or another of the supernatural, the most im-* portant are The Phantom 'Rickshaw, The Return of Imray, and The Mark of the Beast. In The Phantom 'Rickshaw Mrs. Keith- Wessington comes back from the dead to haunt a faithless lover, who writes the story of his experiences. She comes back again and again, always in the same way, in the yellow-panelled 'rick- shaw, with the four coolies in the black and white livery, wearing the same dress, carrying the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand, and the same card case in her left ("A woman eight months dead with a card-case!" exclaims the narrator), arid she is always saying : ' It 's some hideous mistake, I 'm sure. Please forgive me, Jack, and let 's be friends again ! ' Only Jack, of course, hears the voice or sees the 'rickshaw. Others ride through it, horses, coolies, Mrs. Keith-Wessington and all, in the conventional fashion. The ghost lacks" dignity, comes too K1P1 ING l 111 8T0B1 M //// / 8 often, '"" openly, and talks t auch; evidently Kipling was unaware of Scott's warning againsl the "chatty" ghost. Ami this one provokes in the victim rather dis gust , irritation, aston- ishment, bewilderment, than pure terror. Tfu Return of Imray is more effective; its methods are less conventional, [mray had disappeared, and Strickland of the Police, the same Strickland who later disguised himself as Miss Ybughal's sais, had rented [mray 's bungalow and taken over tmray 's servants. Ami Kip- ling, the Club quarters being full, had quartered himself upon Strickland. A dim figure stood by the windows. The doe- was uneasy she ••made the twilight more interesting by glaring into the darkened rooms with every hair erect": then- was a Bound of footsteps at uighl ; the curtains between the rooms quivered as if s< 'one had .just passed through; the chairs creaked as the bamboos sprung under a weight that had .just quitted them. All this is effective enough; we can understand Kipling's desire not to interfere with this strange tenant: and we arc not surprised when tin' body of [mray is discovered and Strickland at once detects the murderer. S !l more effective, more carefully worked ou1 along original lines, i- 77" M( tin Beasfj in which Fleete, after a riotous celebration of New Year's Eve, enters a native temple, and grinds the ashes of his cigar-butl into the forehead of the red. stone image of Hanuman. Thereupon a leper priest, mewing like an otter, touches him and endows him with the nature of a leopard. The point is. of course, held hack: I am not sure that it is more than suggested anywhere; hut it is necessary to know what it is. in order to follow the gradual approach to it. Tie- leopard's 8po1 on Pleete's body, his insatiable desire for chops "lots of '.in. ami underdone bloody ones with gristle," CHABACTEBS AND PSYCHOLOGY 23 his offensive manner of bolting them, the mad terror with which he inspires the horses, his delight in rolling on the ground, the green light behind his eyes, the final dying-out of the human spirit in his wolfish snarls — these are some of the nicely graded details of Fleete's transformation which lead up to the climax ofjiorror, the scene in which the leper priest is compelled, by torture, to undo his work. As for the emotions which accom- pany these terrifying incidents — the matter with which we are at present concerned — the mental states of both the witnesses are traced with considerable care. Yet it is apparent through- out that Kipling is more interested in the bewitching of Fleete than in his own or Strickland's horror. To depict their feelings he falls back upon more or less conventional words and phrases — hair rising, blood running cold, sickness, frightened horses. The style is, furthermore, characteristic in its grotesqueness and occasional jocosity of manner. Kipling, for example, says that he "laughed and gasped and gurgled." And when he and Strickland hear, in the silence of the watching, something mew- ing outside, he says that, like the man in Pinafore, they told each other that it was the cat. To some readers these phrases do not seem appropriate to the dignity really inherent in the situation, they do not like to be reminded, at such a moment, of a comic opera, they are disturbed by a lack of unity of tone. Certain famous stories which deal with similar horrors, like Merimee's Lokis, or Stevenson's Okdla, illustrate a consistently and frankly poetic treatment of the theme. And S. Carleton's The Lame Priest is an admirable example of the successful handling of the werewolf motif in the modern short-story. Here convincing realism is combined with dignity and beauty of style, and no one can find the result less effective as a tale •j i A//7 ING I III 8T0R1 ii /.7/ / I; of terror than TK( Marl, of Hi' Beast. The COntrasI is sharp. 8 I trleton ventures to write rhythmic prose, to made use of sonorous and nicely chosen words, to indulge in what we should perhaps call fine writing. Kipling is more modern, the boh of an age which in its sophistication Looks askance at much thai was once frankly enjoyed. We have become timid, Belf-conscious. We are afraid of "ranting," ye1 some of the finesl pas in Shakespeare Lear's greal speeches in the nes, for example -were written i'or no other purpose. We remind ourselves thai the pun is the lowest form of wit, and disguise our real and human enjoyment with a groan. We no Longer venture to say with Peter Pan and Beowulf. •1 am the finesl boy thai ever lived.'' And we stand in ter- ror of "fine writing:" We ->> to the other extreme — "coarse writing," perhaps, or slang. Hut fine writing sometimes fits tin- subject. It nnist be well done, of course; it must be sin- cere, no1 a mere succession of threadbare phrases. Strong emotions, heightened moods naturally express themselves in heightened Language, in a Language which approximates to that of poetry. To exprt ^ them otherwise, if one has such language al one's command, is insincere. There are moments when slang, when breezy commonplace, is the height of affectation. In this Bense, Kjpling is sometimes affected. It is an affectation of which his characters, and doubtless their prototypes in real lite us well, are often guilty. Perhaps Kipling learned it from them. *4^ After all it is at bottom nothing more than the w-ell-bred Anglo-Saxon's deep rooted prejudice against self-expression. A form of it appears in the familiar understatements in the Be< wulf. chancer La aware of it when he permits the lower CHABACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 25 persons to do most of the talking and holds the gentlefolk silent, in the connecting links of the Canterbury Tales. Wordsworth wrote by preference of peasants because he believed that they felt more deeply and expressed their feelings more sincerely. And Masefield, doubtless, is of the same opinion. And so with Kipling, it is perhaps simply a phase of the characteristic reticence of the Anglo-Saxon man of the world which leads him to belittle the great events of his own stories by speaking lightly of them, just as his characters speak lightly of their own great deeds. Hence this prosaic treatment of the supernatural ; hence the/absence of heroics in his heroes. And hence, also, the sophisticated attitude toward the passion of love. For in none of these stories of the Indian period does ^ Kipling dally with the innocence of love. Not one has the 7 romantic emotional quality of — for example — The Sire de Male- trait's Door. There are sometimes glimpses of it, like the unfinished love letter on Bobby Wick's table. But even in such cases as this, if Kipling had elaborated the glimpse into a complete picture, the object of the hero's affection would surely have proved to be unworthy. Kipling delights to dwell upon little ironies of this sort. Thus in Wressley of the Foreign Office, the hero, a mere statistician and hack-writer, fell in love and wrote an inspired book on Native Rule in Central India. "And, because this sudden and new light of Love was upon him, he turned those dry bones of history and dirty records of mis- deeds into things to weep or to laugh over as he pleased. His heart and soul were at the end of his pen, and they got into the ink. He was dowered with sympathy, insight, humor, and style for two hundred and thirty days and nights ; and his book was a Book. . . . [He] bore the first copy ... to Simla and . . . hifl / m. I III 8T0B1 R /.'// I i: presented ii to Miss Venner. She read a little of it. I give I,,. u verbatim '<>h, yum- book! It's all about those u ahs. I didn'1 understand it.' ■ ■ \\ , of the Foreign Office was broken, smashed, 1 am not orating, by this one frivolous Little girl." There is no less ironj in the notorious Mrs. Reiver's becom- g an influence for •_; I. Moriarty, the civil engineer, was drinking Becretly, when he was drawn into the power of Mrs. Reiver, and he fell down in fronl of her and made of her. He swore a big oath to himself and kept it. Ami he will go down to his grave vowing and protesting thai Mrs, Reiver saved him from ruin in both worlds. "Moriarity . . . is married now to a woman ten thousand times better than .Mrs. Reiver," but that, as Kipling is monotonously fond of saying, is another story. Had he told it, Moriarity's relations with Mrs. Reiver would have played an important pari ; it would have involved a conflicl between the old, unworthy love ami the new. ideal one, Like Thi Phantom 'Rickshaw or The Gadsbys <>r Thi Courting of Dinah sh-[_H\s heroes and heroines have inconvenienl pasts, and it is these, it is mainly their unworthy loves, that interesl Kipling. He delights to perpetuate the ancienl "triangle," the tradition unbroken in Prance, from the fabliau to Maupassant, the tradition of "men and women playing tennis with the Seventh Commandment. y \\ One phase of this tradition is what may be called the story of the incriminating corpse : the lover dies in the lady's presence. or Bhe is confronted with the corpse, and there is danger lest she betray herself, or thai she may be suspected of murder. Several the thirteenth-century fabliaux deal with this theme. It is the basis of the eighth novel of the fourth day in the Decameron, CHABACTEBS AND PSYCHOLOGY 27 of Maupassant's line Ruse, of Arthur Schnitzler 's Die Todten Schweigen, and of two of Kipling's stories. In At the Pit's Mouth the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid are riding together on the Himalayan-Thibet Road, when suddenly the edge gives way and man and horse vanish over the precipice. The Man's Wife is discovered later, ' ' a temporarily insane woman, . . . with her eyes and mouth open, and her head like the head of a Medusa." In The Other Man the lover dies in a tonga and is brought into Simla dead, "sitting in the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the awning-stanchion, . . . the wet pouring off his hat and moustache," and a grin on his face. Kipling finds Mrs. Schreiderling kneeling in the mud by the tonga, screaming hideously — "Then she began praying for the Other Man's soul. Had she not been as honest as the day she would have prayed for her own soul too." Maupassant's Madame Lelievre is not so honest, and Maupassant preserves something of the lighter tone of the fabliaux, which seems, with Kipling, to survive only in the grin on the Other Man's face. Kipling, moreover, avoids details ; and in general he does not venture, with the Gallic frankness of Maupassant, to dwell upon the animal aspect of love. Nevertheless his conception is much the same. For both authors, love is a kind of disease, a source of evil, of bitter unhappiness, an object of cynical or ironical comment. Bobby Wick's advisers warn him against it; it puts an end, at best, to a promising career — to Gadsby's for example in the army, or to Strickland's in the police. It is only in the tales of the unions of native women with Englishmen that it comes to have an ideal or poetic quality. Not, of course, in such stories as Yoked with an Unbeliever, To be Filed for Reference, or On the City Wall; yet even these KIP1 ING 3 ill si in;) II /.'/ / / B again maj be contrasted, for Anglo-Saxon reticence, restraint, or coldness, with Maupassant's narratives of the French in North- ern Africa, for Gallic frankness and passion. (jBul in such B '/«///(/ tin I', tit and WUhuui Benefit of Clergy\ the beauty of tragic devotion dignifies and ennobles a Bordid sit nation. The mystery of these women of another and an inscrutable race , ndows them with a charm akin to thai of those beings of the fairy other-world who elude one in the pages of Marie de France.^ So thai it' Kipling carries on the fabliau tradition, he carries on, in a sense, the lai tradition as well — both unconsciously, of course, \_ From this point of view Without /:. efit of Clergy deserves special study. Indeed it may per- haps be regarded as the masterpiece of the Indian period, and I am reserving it for examination as a kind of summary or i,\ pe of all the a-)., cts of the earlier mannejj. K iplin g, then, was not interested in the ordinary course of true love, which, as Mr. Crothers assures us, is smooth enough except iii fiction. y\h- was interested rather in its abnormal manifestations. And this is true of his interest in mental states in general. When he permitted himself to psychologize at any Length, it was usually with reference to pathological — diseased or abnormal conditions. Half a do/en stories are of this sort. Two of these deal with the special aberrations of the private soldier. Tin Mml hiss of I'riruti Ortheris is the story of a homesickness for which even his friend Mulvaney knows no remedy. It is the omniscient Kipling who remembers having o a man nearly mad with drink cured by being made a fool of, who successfully pursues the same method with Ortheris. In point of structure, of concentration and significant concrete detail, this is one of the besl short-stories in the volume. In CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 29 this respect it is far superior to In the Matter of a Private, which is begun by a long disquisition on hysteria in the army, the result of hot weather and overfeeding, very similar to an out- break of hysterics in a girls' school. The story follows as an illustration. It recounts how Private Simmons ran amuck, slew Private Losson, and defied the regi- ment. "And they hanged Private Simmons . . . ; and the Colonel said it was Drink; and the Chaplain was sure it was the Devil; and Simmons fancied it was both, but he didn't know; . . . and half a dozen 'intelligent publicists' wrote six beautiful leading articles on 'The Prevalence of Crime in the Army.' "But not a soul thought of comparing the 'bloody-minded Simmons' to the squawking, gaping schoolgirl with which this story opens." Others of these stories may be regarded as warnings against overwork. Combined with a wife 's infidelity it leads to insanity in In the Pride of His Youth. Combined with an impracticable creed it leads to temporary loss of speech and memory in The Conversion of Aurelian MeGoggin. Similarly afflicted with loss of memory, even of personality, is Lieutenant Lam- mason, The Man Who Was. This is perhaps the most highly concentrated short-story of the Indian period. In a single scene, powerfully dramatic and suggestive, the strange and unrecognizable being returns to his old regiment, the White Hussars. Bit by bit he reestablishes his identity : he recognizes the regimental tune, finds the secret spring in a piece of silver plate, asks for the old picture of the piebald drum-horse, the king of the regimental band, and responds correctly to the toast to the Queen, snapping the shank of his glass between his fingers iu the ancient fashion. Gradually, with the help of a Cossack is KIPL1 VG l III ST0B1 WBI1 EE oflBcer, the White Hussars Learn that Lieutenanl Limmason had l ii made prisoner by the Russians in L854. He could ool explain how he had found his way to his old mess again; and of what he had suffered or seen he remembered nothing. The mosl complete stud} in pathological psychology, finally. - .1/ tin End of tin Passage^ which opens with the accounl of the four men playing whist in the heat of 1 1 1 « • Indian summer. I Iiiininil. the host, is the protagonist. Solitude, overwork again, and th<' heal are the causes. The results are insomnia, melan- cholia, irritability, dreams that make of the man a terrified child, when the doctor gives him a few hours of artificial sleep. Hum- niil said g l-bye and "turned on his heel to face the echoing desolation of his bungalow, and the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself. . . . "This is had. already,' he said, rubbing his eyes. 'If the thing slides away from me all in i piece, like a ghost, I shall know that it is only my eyes and stomach that are out of order, [f it walks- my head is going....' "When he came in to dinner he found himself sitting at the table. The vision fuse and walked ou1 hastily. Except that it casl no shadow it was in all respects real." No living man knows what that week held for Ilummil. At the end of it they found him. "The body lay on its back, hands clinched by the side... In tin- staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen"; in the bed a iong- i ked hunting spur, to prevent sleep because of the terrors which it brought. These, then, are the stories wherein Kipling permits himself to psychologize at greatest length; hut even these have not the study of pathological conditions toe their main purpose. Tin PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 31 M adness of Privati Ortheris is to show how near Ortheris came to deserting and how revolting the thought of desertion was when he was in his right mind — proof of the deep loyalty of the British soldier. In the Matter of a Private is really the story of the daring capture of the murderer by Corporal Slane, who risked his life — as he explains with characteristic modesty and dislike of heroic pose — in order that he might have four battery horses to draw the carriage at his wedding. In the J'ride of His Youth is a disquisition on the ancient text, a young man married is a young man marred. The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin is perhaps an exception; it is mainly a studj' in aphasia. But it expounds also McGoggin 's creed and explains why that creed won't work in India. The Man Who Was is largely a warning against the Russian peril and an attack 'on the Russian character. And finally, At the End of the Passage is concerned with many things beside the hallucina- tions of Hummil. Its aim is, primarily, to picture time and place, and to show the heroic, unassuming, hopeless, and utterly unappreciated self-sacrifice of Hummil and his three friends. This reaches a climax in Hummil 's refusal to ask for sick leave, because the man who would have to take his place was married; yet Hummil foresaw his own end. With this story Maupas- sant's Lc Horla offers a suggestive contrast. It deals with a single theme and there is nothing in the story that is not related to it. It is in the form of a journal; the reader's attention is focused on the emotional experiences of the writer; all else is ill-defined. The style is poetic ; nowhere else does Maupassant, who cared little for the enchantments of the Middle Age, write so eloquently of Rouen or of Mont St. Michel. Again and again, and more and more emphatically he speaks of the mystery of hin 1 \<. 1 II I 8T0B1 n LI 1 1 i: the unseen world all about us. It' 1 1 « - seems for a momenl to •i a matter which is in reality connected with this t In ii i Qraduall) it becomes clear thai he has been en- I by the Horla, tli<- invisible, impalpable, ye1 material o has taken possession of his very soul, subjected liis will, mastered him, as man masters horse or dog. Incidentally tin!-.- is an experiment in hypnotism, the narrator's cousin car- ag (.in much ;ilt;! in-i her will a posthypnotic suggestion. This, ii appears presently, is for analogy: just as the hypnotisl controls the actions of his subject, even so the Horla controls hi-; victim. CHAPTEE III PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE What one may perhaps call the static elements of narration — the time, the place, the social group, the persons, with their characters and their mental states — all these are bodied forth with extraordinary variety and completeness. It remains to study the means by which they are made effective and active, and the implications of their actions. v The impression that one carries away from the reading of Kipling is the impression of vividness, of having had a real experience. After a day with those moving pictures of Indian life — Plain Talcs, or Soldiers Three, or Black and White — I come out into the California sunlight, blinking and rubbing my eyes, astonished to find myself at home. This immediacy of effect, this illusion of reality, is not wholly explicable. It is Kipling's special secret, the professional trick which is his stock in trade. . Undoubtedly it is due to a variety of causes, and some of these, at least, are not wholly concealed by the perfection of his art. One of them is what the rhetoricians call "external structure" — — j the method of setting the story before the reader. Exactly half IV of the stories of this first period are told in the first person, or definitely betray, in some way, the presence of a narrator behind the narrative. /In many instances Kipling himself, in his own person, tells the story, and plays, at the same time, a minor, though more or less active, part in it. I mean that when lie is KIP1 ING l Hi BTOBl H A'/// B function is more than thai of mere eyewitness. i . when the Major Learns of The Boy's nee appeals to Kipling for help to Kipling the EL thought for ;i minute, and said, 'Can you lie?' Vmii know best,' I answered. 'It's my profession.' El h Kipling the journalist, again, thai we Learn the u ho Would b< Kii ". K ipling the reporter /; m manifestly Thi Pioneer), who some- times wore dress clothes and consorted with Princes and Politi- b, drinking from crystal and eating from silver, ami sometimes lay "Ht upon the ground and devoured what he could gel from a plate made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as his servant. It was "all in the day's rk." It is in the pressroom of the paper thai the great adventure begins and ends; and it is. in part, by means of this ilistic, vivid, and. so to speak, highly personalized setting for the t«-llin'_ r of the tale, thai the story of the wanderer is made dible. "I" of these stories is. then, Kipling himself, Kipling journalist, nol a mere idealized projection of* his own per- ils has Little adventures, amusing or otherwise, of which he makes copy. Be entertains .1 Friend's Friend with ■ous and comic results; a sweetmeal seller takes gradual sion of a corner of his garden; he becomes attached to a native baby, wi : he finds a terrible hidden well, a trap the reporter's or author's notebook in The Three I in Tin <-,,„,■■ ■ /, sin, ,1,1, he is ,.ii duty as special at with the A i in \ of the South. It is dearly Kipling the jour- /'" Tracl of a Lie. Be follows it through all the PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 35 for man and beast, in a maze of jungle-grass ; he visits "The City of Dreadful Night." In the story of sham magic, In the House of Sv. ddhoo] he plays a more more important part, and though present a,s mere observer, he lays himself "open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretences" and fears that he will presently be privy to a murder in the House of Suddhoo. 2 Kipling appears in his own person, briefly but impressively, because unexpectedly, at the end of a number of these stories. "This is true," he implies, "for I was there and saw it all or even took part in it." Thus Three and — an Extra concludes: "Then said Mrs. Hauksbee to me — she looked a trifle faded and jaded in the lamplight — ' Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man ; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.' Then we went in to supper." And in the course of Miss Toughed' 's Seiis, while Strickland, in disguise, was serving as Miss Youghars groom, "all trace of him was lost, until a sals met me on the Simla Mall with this extraordinary note: Dear old Man, — Please give "bearer a box of cheroots. ... I '11 repay when 1 reappear ; but at present I 'm out of society. Yours, E. Strickland. That so/is was Strickland. . . . The poor fellow was suffering for an English smoke, and knew that, whatever happened, I should hold my tongue till the business was over." At the end of Wressley of the Foreign Office Kipling comes across, on Wressley 's shelves, the only existing copy of Native 2 In From Sea to Sea, a record of actual events, Kipling's account of a similar entanglement in Chinatown, San Francisco, is written in precisely the same manner. KIPLING l III 8T0B1 M SITES l; Central I na ;. the copy thai Miss Venner could ool un< rake it and keep it." said Wressley. "Write iur | •• 1 1 1 1 \ farthing yarns aboul its birth. Perhaps — perhaps the whole business ma} have been ordained to thai end." V the end of fin Other Man, it was Kipling who saw. under the Tonga Office lamps, Mrs. Schreiderling kneeling in .i.l l.\ the back seal of the oewly arrived tonga, scream- iusIj . metimes Kipling reveals the fad thai he has been presenl )>\ d opinion concerning some phase of the action. When The Worm ^<>\ even with the senior subaltern by imper Bonating a wife whom the latter had married and deserted, "no ng, ..." Bays Kipling, "could account for The Worm's dis- . thai night. Personally, I think it was in bad taste. Besides being dangerous." In Tht Bronckkorsl Divorce Cast, "no jni' knew, would convid a man . . . on native evidence in a land where yon can buy a murder charge." And one of the aracters in Tin Bisara of Poor a was "Pack — 'Grubby" Pack, as W( used to call him." Sometimes it turns out that Kipling has played a more important pari in the events of the story. He was responsible for the Rout of tin Whiti Hussars by the appearance, as if from the grave, of the old drum-horse, who been supposedly shot, with a skeleton on his back. "I happen to know something aboul it." he says, "because I pre- pared the Drum-Horse for his resurrection. He did not take kindly to the skeleton at all." Kipling assists his friend Strick- land in 7/ Return of Imray and in Tin Mark <>f tin Beast, wh( the relatively passive part of Dr. Watson to Strickland's Sherlock Holmes. In Thrown Away he aids the Major in disguising and concealing the tacts of The Boy's death. PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 37 J 11 False Dawn it is he who manages to set things right when Saumarez proposes in a dust-storm to the wrong Miss Copleigh. In The Madness of Private Ort heris) it is he who suggests and effects the cure. And it is he, similarly, who suggests to the King the proper method of dealing with the recalcitrant Namgay Doola, the Irish-Indian, who is constitutionally "agin the gov- ernment" by virtue of his Celtic blood, but is won over to devoted loyalty when he is made commander-in-chief of the army. Kipling plays a less intelligent part, finally, in On the City WalU wherein he is tricked by a clever woman into assist- ing in the escape of a native prisoner of importance from the English fort where he is confined. On the whole, however, Kipling presents us, in the glimpses of himself, with material for a sufficiently flattering portrait — not the real Kipling, nor Kipling as the world saw him, but Kipling as Kipling, aged twenty-two, saw him. He is a member of the club, he moves in the best society ; he is guide, philosopher, and friend to the best people in his stories, to Mrs. Hauksbee, the cleverest woman in India ; to Strickland, who knew as much of the natives as the natives knew themselves. It is natural, then, that when he follows a different method and creates a narrator for his story, he, Kipling, should be the inti-, mate friend of that narrator, receive his confidences, and be a prominent figure in the situation which frames the story. ^ These frame-situations, often very elaborate, are particularly characteristic of the stories of the Soldiers Three. And they are peculiarly interesting, historically, because they carry on, unconsciously no doubt, a very old tradition, the tradition of the oral tale. Ballad and folk tale, lad and fabliau, were composed for oral presentation. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales KIPLING THE 8T0B1 WR1T1 S w;t-. Indeed, composed rather for private reading than for public recitation, bul it dramatized the old situation, providing for each tale a narrator and an audience. Chaucer described the characters of narrators and audience, and motived the tales in these characters, in their relations to one another, and in their actions along the road to Canterbury. He himself was One might say, then, that for most of the later stories Kipling combines the two methods — an elaborate situation, as in The Madness of Private Ortheris, with a story told by a soldier, as in The Three Musketeers, The Taking of Lungtungpen, The Daughter of the Regiment. Black Jack, which might have for subtitle "the Madness of Private Mulvaney," would be exactly the result of such a combination. Here, as the story opens, Mulvaney is doing pack drill, and seven pages of introduction are required to show how his friends persuade him to walk off his anger and shame, before he begins the story proper. The rest of these stories are all of this more elaborate type and involve a similar narrative or even plot element, quite distinct from the story they enclose. In The ( God from the Machine} Kipling finds his three friends enjoying 40 KIPLING THE STOL'Y WHITER refreshment begged or stolen from an officers' dance. The Solid Muldoon begins with a dog-fight. The Big Drunk Draf reveals Mulvaney as a civilian, foreman of a gang of coolies, and intro- duces Dinah Shadd. In With the Main Chuard Mulvaney tells the story of the Black Tyrone regiment in "Silver's Theatre" — perhaps the best fight in all Kipling — to "blandandher" Ortheris and Learoyd through the h orrors of a hot night in Fort Amara. The frame for Greenhow II ill, Learoyd 's love story, is a complete story in itself. Learoyd is inspired by the resemblance of the bare sub-Himalayan spur to his Yorkshire moors, and by the notion that the native whom Ortheris has come out to shoot may have deserted "for the sake of a lass." \Kip- ling was not one of the party that morning; but it was he, and lie alone, who heard Mulvaney tell his love story — The_Courtiny of_J2hiah ^ Shadd. As special correspondent he had been fol- lowing all day the fortunes of a pursuing army engaged in a sham battle, and in the evening had fallen into the hands of Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd. An account of the evening follows — the doings of officers and men, practical jokes, songs and stories, about the camp fires. Mulvaney tells how he played Hamlet in Dublin, and, at last, the story of Dinah Shadd. Then, more eamp nonsenseT) "When I woke I saw Mulvaney, the night-dew gemming his moustache, leaning on his rifle at picket, lonely as Prometheus on his rock, with I know not what vultures tearing his liver." More complex, most complex of all, is the relation of frame- work and story in The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney. The two are so intertwined that the story comes to be told from four distinct points of view, with the result that the reader seems to move along with the action, to follow it as one follows the events PLOTS AND THEIB SIGNIFICANCE 41 of contemporary history, day by day. After Soldiers Three there came the collections called The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie. In none of these is there a story of the three soldiers. In Life's Handicap, written after Kipling's departure from India, he returns to them with three stories, The Incarnation, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, and Greenhow Hill. 'The Incarnation comes first ; and because he had so long neglected his three friends, or because he did not venture to assume that the English public, for whom he now wrote, was familiar with them, Kipling began this story with an account of the Three and of his relations with them. It is interesting to contrast this relatively formal and elaborate statement with the two sentences which introduced the Three Musketeers for the first time to the Anglo-Indian public. The point is a significant one as showing the care of the journalist and short-story writer to make himself intelligible to his readers. After this formal introduction comes the first scene of The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney. Story and framework are held distinct yet cleverly interwoven. The account of Mulvaney \s incarnation is, moreover, the best ex- ample, in the early period, of Kipling's mastery of the comic, and demands discussion at this point, even at the risk of digres- sion. It fulfils the short-story requirement of containing much in little; it works out all the ludicrous possibilities of these gay adventures, makes use of every possible source of comic effect. For character, Mulvaney patently falls below the moral norm ; he is a drunkard and a thief, willing to take by force what is not his — justifying his act indeed by a kind of comic poetic justice: Dearsley "has robbed the naygur-man, dishonust. We rob him honust for the sake of the whiskey he gave me" — heed- 42 KIP1 1 W, //// sioi.) /i Ull I i; Less of discipline, a disobedient soldier, careless of his own good name and thai of the English army. Bu1 he Is seen from the comic point of view. No more Ludicrous contrasts are possible than Mulvaney in the royal palanquin his Legs wavin' out of the windy .Mulvaney at a Queens' Praying, Mulvaney imper- sonating the Maharanee of a Central Indian state, or posing as the god Krishna. Be is seen, moreover, with the eye of sym- pathy father than the eye of reason. Kipling takes care to insure this. The colonel wishes he had a few more like him — no one knows so well how to put the polish (iii young soldiers. And the sergeanl adds thai he is worth a couple of non-commissioned officers with an Irish draft, and the London lads adore him. Moreover, he wins our sympathy by a touch of pathos just a1 the heighl of the comic situation. The queens, it appears, have come to the temple to pray for children. "That," says .Mul- vaney. "That made me more sorry I'd come, me bein', as you well know, a childless man.*' 1 Thanks to this touch of pathos, and to Mulvaney's many lovable qualities, he is a humorous, rather than a merely comic figure. And on the positive sid<\ there are .Mulvaney's wit. the wonderful phrasing of Ins nar- rative, his cleverness, his readiness to take advantage of every situation. For plot, we have here, as in the best fabliaux, intriguer pitted againsl intriguer. Dearsley, deprived of his profitable palanquin, thinks to outwit Mulvaney; bu1 the comic disappoint- ments are all his. and poetic just ice is done. Mulvaney parading ;i> the f Dinah Shadd for the account of the child's death. PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 43 pain as a source of comic effect — the rough handling of Dearsley, and Mulvaney's seizing some ten or fifty of the coolies and knocking their heads together. Kipling does not here, as he does sometimes, go to the length of death. There is nothing like the passage in The Taking of Lungtungpcn, where "they ran ... an' we wint into thim, baynit an' butt, shriekin' wid laughin'. We counted seventy-five dead.'X; Some of Kipling's critics have been troubled by a peculiar hardness or lightness in dealing with serious matters; perhaps it can be accounted for on the ground of fabliau tradition persisting down through the cen- turies in the. essentially fabliau characters whom he depicts. This method of narration — through the mouth of a narrator created for the purpose — is not confined to the Soldiers Three group. There are other story-tellers, like Hans Breitman, the far-travelled German naturalist, who tells, in German dialect, the tales of Reingelder and the German Flag and Bert ran and Bimi. These and Of Those Called, The Wreck of the Visigoth, and The Lang Men o' Larut are told at sea. The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows is the monologue of an opium-eater, with a curiously well-held, monotonous, and whining style. From this point of view it is one of the best of the early stories. In certain other monologues — Dray Wara Yow Dee, At Hoivli Thana and In Flood Time, Kipling's questions are implied; we feel his presence as ^interlocu tor? throughout. These tales are, therefore, to be regarded as Dramatic Monologues, somewhat after the manner of Browning. But none of these other framed tales are as effective as those of the Soldiers Three. For none are so highly personalized; in none are the narrators so interesting, and in none does Kip- ling make his own presence so distinctly felt. For this intrusion 44 KIPLING THE 8T0B1 WBJTEB of the author into his own work is not to be regarded, with Kipling, as a defect. In spite of his youthful eagerness for flattering self-portraiture, lie never seems to stand between the reader and the story. He never has the manner of Boccaccio or of Addison, who seem to be visibly manufacturing their stories, or worse, summarizing in cool, correct, and elegant fashion the stories of others. Kipling, on the contrary, seems tn be dealing with matters of fact: lie was present when the thing happened; or he himself played an active part; or the story was told to him on a definite occasion, under conditions involving a certain emotional stress; in hearing he suffered that emotion, he had something more than the receptivity of a phono- graph making a record ; he was never a mere mechanical recorder of another's words. And though, on the other hand, his stories are never studies in introspective psychology, yet in many of them the reader can follow rather closely Kipling's own "line of emotion.** particularly when that emotion happens to be fear, as in Tht R< turn of Imray or The Mark of the Beast, or sorrow, as in Thrown Away or Th< Story of Muhammad Din. Kipling's own emotion, however, is mainly evident as sympathy with the persons of his stories. No reader can fail to share his astonish- ment, his amusement, his anxiety, his sorrow, as Kipling listens to -Muhaney. or as he tells such stories as The Madness of Private Ortheris, Wressley of the Foreign Office, or Nanigay Doola. And this sympathy with hero or heroine is no less evident in many of the stories told in the third person, where neither a narrator nor Kipling himself openly intervenes. That Kip- ling takes sides with Lispeth against the missionaries is evident enough, in spite of the briskly impersonal and somewhat Mau- passantian manner. lie sides continually with the commonly PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 45 misunderstood — with the natives, in The Judgment of Dungara; with the British soldier, in In the Matter of a Private; with the civilian officials, in At the End of the Passage; with the people of doubtful reputation as against the respectable hypocrites, as in Watches of the Night and A Bank Fraud, and with children, as in Baa Baa Black Sheep and His Majesty the King. In gen- eral, he takes sides with his hero ; for while that commonplace of criticism, which would make Kipling's heroes always Kipling himself, must be regarded as an exaggeration, still it is true that there are many projections of himself, as child or man, in his stories ; so that these, too, have the vividness and immediacy of effect of highly personalized narrative. And even stories told, like so many of those in Plain Tales from the Hills, to prove a point in morals or to establish some phase of human character, even these exempla, have much of the same quality. This is due not merely to an autobiographical quality, as in Baa Baa ~~ Black Sheep — which proves that small boys are not as black as they are painted ; it is due not merely to his taking sides, as in Lispeth; it is due also to the fact that the story, though merely illustrative, is mainly significant for a phase of life in which he is himself an active participant. Thus even The Con- version of Aurelian McGoggin, though Kipling styles it a tract, has none of the dullness, the painfully manifest didactic inten- tion of that wearisome literary kind. Though Kipling endows McGoggin with his own grandfathers, the two Methodist preachers, yet McGoggin is not Kipling, and Kipling sides against him. The story interests, rather, because it has all the external realities, and because Kipling thoroughly believes it. Here, perhaps, is the secret of the effectiveness of personal narra- tive : Kipli ng believes his own stories ; consequently, as he writesp^ 46 KIPLIXC Till: STUl.'Y WRITER In' shares the emotions of his characters: hie grieves with them, laughs with them; he shares their anxiety, their dread, their fear, their wrath, their sense <>l' triumph. [nevitably we too believe ; we too suffer their emol ions. There are other ways of being effective. There is the im- personal way, the way of Shakespeare and the great dramatists, who create characters of surpassing reality, ye1 quite distinct from themselves, and sel them before us by means of dialogue alone, without com 1 it or explanation. Kipling's experimenl in this way is an interesting study. The Gadsbys is not drama: it could not be acted; but it is wholly dialogue — dialogue which contrives to imply character, emotion, and resulting situations of great moment. There are eight parts. In Poor Dear Mainiiiti, Captain Gadsby, who has been attentive to Mrs. Three- gan, meets Minnie Threegan, her dau ghter, and after an interval of five weeks is engaged to her. In The World Without , men at the club, in a desultory and realistic conversation full of simp. discuss the engagement. It appears that Captain Gadsby is rich, and it is predicted that he will retire when he marries. But he is likely to have difficulty in breaking with Mrs. Herriott. 'l'h' Tints of Kedar is a dinner-party. Captain Gadsby is seated next to Mrs. Berriott. "How on earth" —says he, aside — "am I to tell her that I am a respectable, engaged member of society and it's all over between us.'" However, he man- ages to do it. In With Ami Amazement, the wedding is solemnized. Thi Garden of Eden is the honeymoon and first exchange of confidences. "Never," says Mrs. Gadsby, "never, m i-i r tell your wife anything that you do not wish her to re- member and think over all her life. Because a woman . . . can't forget. . . . And 1 shall want to know every one of your secrets PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 47 — to share everything you know with you. . . . You must not tell me!" In Fatima, wife and work come into conflict. Mrs. Gadsby, moreover, reads a letter from Mrs. Herriott, and there follows a falling out and a making up, with tears. In The Valley of the Shadow) a scene of moving pathos, Gadsby says "good-bye" to his dying wife. However, she recovers, and in Th( Swell ing of Jordan, Gadsby has decided to give up the service for her sake. "Jack," he says to his friend Captain Mafflin, "be very sure of yourself before you marry. I'm an ungrateful ruffian to say this, but marriage — even as good a marriage as mine has been — hampers a man's work, it cripples his sword-arm, and oh, it plays Hell with his notions of duty!" Gadsby has lost his nerve. "Wait till you've got a wife and a 3'oungster of your own, and then you'll know how the roar of the squadron behind you turns you cold all up the back. ... I 'm talking like a cur, I know : but I tell you that, for the past three months, I've felt every hoof of the squadron in the small of my back every time that I've led." Had Kipling been reading Virginibiis Pucrisque? "In mar- riage," wrote Stevenson at twenty-five, "a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. . . . The air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to everything else on earth, his wife included. Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day 'his first duty is to his family,' and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down vintages and husband- ing the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism ; now he is fit for neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without con- 48 hiri.isi; rui: sroin writer straintj you will qo1 wake him." Had Kipling been reading Virgimbus Puerisquef Or had he, born fifteen years after Stevenson, merely reached the same stage in his development, the age when, like Will Honeycomb, a young man rails at matri- mony " to show his parts"? As an experiment in the development of plot and character by means of dialogue TJit Gad shy's is not wholly successful. 5 Kipling does no1 play the game strictly according to rule. That is to say. if he docs not himself utter comment or explanation, he calls in characters to do so. Thus the men at the club — the ■"world without" — talk their shop naturally enough, yet talk obviously for the purpose of expounding Gadsby and his sit- uation. The story is not completely self-revealing; it transpires in part through the comments of others. Kipling, again, makes free use of the sta^e direction to indicate mental state: "Captain G. (insoli ntly) "; Mrs. II. (drawiny herself up) ; Mrs. H. (soft- i ning) ; Mrs. II. (fiercely) ; Capt. G. (feebly) ; and so on. As if Shakespeare had written: "Hamlet (sadly), "To be or not to be?" One sees at once how the speeches of a real dramatist carry their own emotional implications. And Kipling, finally, makes reckless use of the aside. When Captain Gadsby meets Minnie Threegan : Capt. G. Do you ride much then? I've never seen you on the Mall. Miss T. (Aside) I haven't passed him more than fifty times. (Aloud) Nearly every day. Capt. G. By Jove! I didn't know that. Ha-Hmmm. (Pulls at his moustacJu and is silent for forty seconds.) s Sec, however, Barrie's praise — significant from a fellow-craftsman — of Kipling's nvclation of character by dialogue in The Gadsby s. He does succeed, though, as I say, not by purely dramatic means. It is interesting to knew that he had had some experience in acting. And he has recently produced a play. PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 49 Miss T. {Desperately, and wondering what will happen next) It looks beautiful. I shouldn't touch it if I were you. (Aside) It's all Mamma's fault for not coming before. I will be rude! A raore thoroughgoing experiment in this way, though on a smaller scale, is The Hill of Illusion. There are only two speakers, He and She. There are no comments, no explanations by others, no stage directions, and no asides. The conversation reveals the situation and at the same time changes it. She says : Do you mean that still? I didn't dare to write to you about it — all these months. He. Mean it! I've been shaping my affairs to that end since Autumn. What makes you speak as though it had occurred to you for the first time? She. I? Oh! I don't know. I've had long enough to think, too. He. And you've changed your mind? She. No. You ought to know that I am a miracle of constancy. What are your — arrangements ? . . . He. The arrangements are simple enough. Tonga in the early morn- ing — reach Kalka at twelve — Umballa at seven — down, straight by night train, to Bombay, and then the steamer of the twenty-first for Rome. That's my idea. The Continent and Sweden — a ten-week honeymoon. So it begins. But She thinks of the scandal, of her brother and mother; She cannot trust Him. It can't last, Guy. It can't last. You'll get angry, and then you'll swear, and then you'll get jealous, and then you'll mistrust me — you do now — and you yourself will be the best reason for doubting. And I — ■ what shall 7 do? I shall be no better than Mrs. Buzgago found out — no better than any one. And you'll know that. Oh, Guy, can't you see? He. I see that you are desperately unreasonable, little woman. . . . May I call to-morrow? . . . She. Ye-es. Good-night, Guy. Don't be angry with me. He. Angry! You know I trust you absolutely. Good-night and — God bless you! (Three seconds later. Alone) Hmm! I'd give something to discover whether there's another man at the back of all this. X 50 KIPLING THK STORY 117,77/./,' The peculiar vividness, the air of reality of Kipling's stories is then, due in part fee the peculiarities of external structure. 6 It is due to the personalized quality of the narrative; it is due mi the other hand, in other stories, to just the opposite quality, to the dramatic impersonality. We are permitted to overhear the natural Conversation of the characters, and, as in Tht Gads- bys or Tht Hill of Illusion, we are permitted in large measure to draw our own conclusions. Yet another trick of external structure contributes to the impression of reality. This is the reeurrenee of the same persons in numerous stories. By the time that we have semi Mulvaney in half a dozen different moods, under different circumstances. engaged in different adventures grave or gay, we come to have a feeling of the complexity of his character, we think of him as an old friend. Subconsciously we apply the test of reality: we conceive of him as cause and as effect, we can predict of him as accurately as of our friends what he will do under all circumstances. And this is true, though in less degree, of Learoyd and Ortheris, of Mrs. Hauksbee and Mrs. Reiver, as well. Particularly telling is Kipling's manifest foreknowledge of the lives of these persons. From the first he seems to know all about them, to have in mind not only all the stories that he is going to tell hut also many others which he does not choose to tell. On Mrs. Hauksbee 's first appearance it is said that "she could be idee even to her own sex. But that is another story." The other story is The Rescue of Pluffles. In The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney, .Mulvaney refers to his childlessness, [in Tht Courtmg of Dinah SJiut a little child," echoed the Head Groom's wife. "But who art thou, weak as a fowl and small as a day-old colt, what art thou?" "I who was empty am now full," said Little Tobrali, stretching him- self upon the dust. ' ' And I would sleep. ' ' The groom's wife spread a cloth over him while Little Tobrah slept the sleep of the just. The sudden revelation of childish cynicism — or is it the pathos of childish hopelessness? — at the close, is worthy of Maupassant. And Little Tobrah 's story has something of Mau- passant's matter-of-fact manner of dealing with heart-rending facts. Of a roughly similar theme, a dog that slowly starves to death at the bottom of a pit calling his penurious mistress, .Maupassant made a full length short-story. And the notion of a sister given up as dead, calling her terrified brother from the depths, is the central idea of the plot of the Fall of the House of Usher. It is easy to see, then, how Kipling might have made of this anecdote of Littli Tobrah, had he chosen to do so, a short- story, simply by elaborating the elements of the narrative. Just how much elaboration is necessary it is impossible to say; the difference between anecdote and short-story, when the anecdote is capable of elaboration, is a difference in degree, not in kind. The line has always to be drawn arbitrarily, and general agree- ment is impossible. PLOTS AND TEEIE SIGNIFICANCE 57 Kipling's early stories, then, reveal the tendency to write anecdote. They reveal also the tendency to write condensed long-story; but this is much less pronounced. In the condensed long-story, the idea, the motif, is not suitable for short-story treatment. It may require for its elaboration time too ex- tended, places too numerous, a social group too large or too complex, the development of a character, a plot with too many essential episodes. Here again, manifestly, the distinction is an arbitrary one. Just how much time, how many places and persons — and so on — -are permissible in the short-story, it is impossible to say. However, when so much is attempted that the story has to be wholly in the form of summary, of narrative in general terms, then, it would be generally agreed, we have condensed long-story. When, on the other hand, the story in all its elements is suggested by means of a single, highly elab- orated scene, then, it would be generally agreed, we have typical short-storv. These are the extremes ; somewhere or other be- tween them one has to draw the arbitrary line. It would be difficult to find in Kipling a story consisting wholly of summary ; it would be difficult, also, to^flti. one altogether free from it. For it is natural that a man T>f Kipling's vividness of memory, of his keen sense of fact, should make free use of concrete inci- dent. And it is no less natural that a man who composes brief narrative rapidly, a man of impetuous imagination, should make free use of summary, should deal, as we say, "in summary fashion," with the events of that narrative. If style is any indication of character, the young journalist was not without a certain impatience of disposition ; he would feel that his own time was too limited, as well as that the columns of his paper offered too little space, for the slow and painstaking elaboration KIPLING THE 8T0BY WRITER of single scenes, for the ingenious translation into narrative terms, into incidenl and dialogue, of all thai he wished to convey in regard to the time, the place, the social group, the characters, the story as a whole, and its moral significance. For whatever cause, his tendency is rather to catch the nearer way, which was, also, the more natural wav. and come oul frankly with his rapid generalizations. (_Thus in Lispl;) ll /,// /•/,• effed of the assumed personality of the infamous Mrs. Decker, Oakhursl the gambler "read more; he i<><»k long walks, he sold his fast hoiM's; he wni tn church." Be even ordered a new suit of clothes "something respectabli something thai doesn'1 exactly til me, yon know." Even so, in Kipling's /" Error, Moriarity is led to reform through the influence of the aotorious .Mi's. Reiver. These, then, an' a few of the many points in which Kipling's stories are similar to Harte's. In many of them there is. of course, a difference of degree, where, for example, Harte's de- scriptions are vivid, Kipling's an' still more so; where Harte emphasizes tin- admixture of good with evi] in his characters, Kipling is still more emphatic; where Harte intervenes now and then in his own stories, Kipling is intensely self-assertive; and so on. And. of course, the contrasts arc in general more strik- ing than the resemblances. Certainly Kipling, even in the beginning, was never a mere imitator of Harte. It would seem rather that he was indebted to him for the first impulse and for 'In' genera] form of the work in which his genius found expression. Had Harte never lived or written there would still be a Kipling, bu1 a Kipling not precisely the same. To take up once more the discussion of the structure of Kipling's stories: we have seen that his work reveals two ten- dencies which make away from the short-story manner: the anecdote tendencv, which leads sometimes to the selection of a motive too slight and insignificant, and which leads to the fail- ure to elaborate sufficiently even an adequate motive; and the condensed long-story tendency, which leads sometimes to the selection of a motive too large to he worked out within short- story limits, and results inevitably in the writing of summary. PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 69 But these tendencies are by no means always carried so far as to result in actual anecdote or condensed long-story ; for many of Kipling's tales are, of course, true short-stories. And yet these tendencies are always or nearly always present and modify to some extent the structure even of the true short-stories themselves. In dealing with these our best method will be, as with anec- dote and condensed long-story, to take a typical example. CFor this purpose none is better suited than Without Benefit of Clergy. It was first published in Maomllan's Magazine for June, 1890, and may be regarded as marking, in a way, the close and climax, and summing up most of the characteristics of the first period. It is nearly ten thousand words in length. Writ- ten at greater leisure, not for a newspaper but for a magazine, not bound by the early limitations, it was yet written by the same Kipling, the Kipling trained in the offices of the Gazette and the Pioneer. It is perhaps the best known and the most popular of all Kipling's stories; no summary is necessary. Without Benefit of Clergy is a punning title. "Benefit of Clergy" is manifestly not used here in the proper sense of "privilege of exemption from trial by a secular court, allowed to or claimed by clergymen arraigned for felony"; it implies rather that the union of Holden and Ameera had not the sanction of the mar- riage ceremony, civil or religious?/ That, in Kipling's view, this ceremony might be something of an empty formality, and did not always insure the sanctity of the marriage tie, one may gather from a passage in In the Pride of His Youth: Excepting, always, falling off a horse, there is nothing more fatally easy than marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less than fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a paAvn-shop. After the declarations of residence have been put in, four minutes will cover the 7- KIPLING Till 8T0B1 WRITER rest of the proc lings fees, attestation, and all. Then the Registrar slides tlif blotting-pad over the nanus, and Bays grimly with his pen l»- tween his teeth. ''Now vim 're man ami wife''; ami the couple walk out into the street feeling as if something were horribly illegal Bomewhere. Bui that ceremony holds ami can drag a man to his undoing jusl as thoroughly as the "long as ye both shall live' - curse from the altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, ami "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" lifting the root' off. In this manner was Dicky Ilatt kidnapped. .. • With all such ceremony Eoldes and Ameera had dispensed, ami their union proved more sweet, more pure, more lasting, than Dicky llatt s. or half the regular marriages of Anglo- Indian society. This, the central theme of the story, is thus a moral concept; and Kipling's purpose is, primarily, not to tell a pathetic of tragic tale, hut, just as definitely as Addison in his essays, to utter a criticism of life. 8 It is a phase of his favorite theme — the essential excellence of the non-respectable — the theme that finds incarnation in such characters as Mulvaney or Mrs. Bauksbee and in such stories as A Bank Fraud. [Kip- ling had dealt in earlier stories with unions of this sort ; he had. so to speak, made experiments in the treatment of this motif; Without Benefit of Clcrfjij is his last word, the final perfection in its kind. Idealization of the heroine, and of her relations with the hero is the way to success in such a story, and in no previous attempt is the idealization carried so far. Ameera has something of the beauty, the strangeness, the mystery, the elusiveness of the fairies of the Celtic other-world, beloved of Arthur's knights, and like the amorous adventures of Guinga- mor, of Guigemar, or Tyolet in the lais of Marie de France, her story is removed from reality and the judgments of reality. 8 From this point of view — as indeed from all points of view — it is interesting to compare Kipling's story with Stevenson's tale of a similar union, The lixuh of Falisu, which is told primarily for the romance of the action. PLOTS AND TEEIE SIGNIFICANCE 71 Ameera herself, the Ameera who sat with Holclen upon the roof of their dwelling, counting the stars, might well be the creature of another world. When she speaks, her words have the dignity, the oriental imagery, the rhythm of a language utterly alien to the shop and slang of the Anglo-Indians. The mutual devotion of the two is, like that of medieval lovers, all the greater because it is free, unconstrained by marriage vows. When cholera comes, Holden urges Ameera to go to the mountains. She refuses, "Let the mem-log run," she says. "Their husbands are sending them, beloved." ". . . Since when hast thou been my husband to tell me what to do? I have but borne thee a son. Thou art only all the desire of my soul to me. How shall I depart when I know that if evil befall thee by the breadth of so much as my littlest finger- nail. ... I should be aware of it though I were in paradise. . . . My lord and my love, let there be no more foolish talk of going away. Where thou art, I am. It is enough." Thus Ameera unconsciously echoes Bret Harte 's heroine : "... If we were man and wife we'd both know that I was hound to do what I do now of my own accord" — another version, simply, of the medieval theory that love and marriage were incompatible. Only Ameera goes further; being less than wife she will be more. But such unions cannot last. The fairy queen carried Sir Lanval away to Avalon and men saw him no more ; and so it was with Guigemar. Chaucer's Dorigen and Arveragus sought to perpetuate their union by wedlock and became for the Middle Ages a paradox — married lovers. But Holden and Ameera could find no such solution for their problem. To lose himself in fairyland — to bury himself in India with a native wife — was as impossible to a man of Holden 's temperament as return to 71" KIPLING ill I sun:) WB1TEB England with her would have been. There was no way ou1 bul death. And in a Eew months fame the cholera, and carried off mother and child. And Ameera's mother vanished, and Pir Khan went upon pilgrimage. Even the house was de- stroyed. "It shall be pulled down," said Durga Dass, "and the Municipality shall make a road across, as they desire, from the burning-ghaul to the city wall, so that no man may say where this house stood." Much of the pathos of the story lies in Ameera's dread of the end. in her vain yearning, her hoping againsl hope, Eor permanence. The pathos, too, is the pathos of childhood. Anieera herself is hut a child; and her son has many of the endearing traits which Kipling had recorded in his earlier stories of children/ notably in Muhammad Din, and the simple and obvious methods which children everywhere employ to win the hearts of those about them. There is deeper tragedy, but there is no more piercing pathos, than in the death of a little child, even though it is a theme somewhat overworked by the senti- mentalists, by Dickens and by Harte, for example; and it is involved, characteristically enough, in the tale of Chaucer's sentimentalist, the Prioress. If Kipling emphasizes the ideal and sympathetic aspect of this union, its beauty, its strangeness, its transitoriness, its pathos, he means, as 1 have said, to contrast it with the prosaic, regular marriages of everyday. The whole story, indeed, is a story of contrasts. The two phases of life, the Indian and the English, are set one over against the other. Once more it is the English System that Kipling celebrates, the organization, with ils intelligence, its discipline, its unquestioning obedience of orders, in contrast with the native ignorance and panic. PLOTS AND THE IE SIGNIFICANCE 73 Holden himself is part of the system, simply, neither better nor worse than his fellows. The evil and the good in his nature are evident on our first glimpse of him. He is, one may suppose, essentially selfish, with manifest moral limitations, yet capable of tenderness, of generous impulses, of stern devotion to duty. But he is not an individual. He is simply the type of Anglo- Indian official as Kipling conceives him. The other persons of the story are types also. Ameera is but typical native, typical child-wife, with the native and childish superstitions and little jealousies, who charms Holden by her beauty, her helplessness, her dependence, her complete self-abandonment. In her pride of motherhood — "I am his mother, and no hireling. . . . Shall I look to him more or less for the sake of monev?" — she is to be contrasted with her own mercenary mother — "a withered hag" as the fairy-tale demands — who "would have sold Ameera shrieking to the Prince of Darkness if the price had been sufficient," and who, when Ameera lay dead, "shuffled down the staircase, and in her anxiety to take stock of the house-fittings forgot to mourn." The persons are types, but they stand out clearly enough ; and, what is more remarkable, there is in the whole story scarcely one epithet to describe them. They are permitted to reveal themselves wholly by what they do and say and so achieve a peculiarly vivid reality. Read, for example, the portrait of the least important of all the characters, who doesn't really come into the story at all : The Member for Lower Tooting, wandering about India in pot-hat and frock-coat, [who] talked largely of the benefits of British rule and suggested as the one thing needful the establishment of a duly qualified electoral system. ... It was the Deputy Commissioner . . . who lightly told a tale that made Holden 's blood run cold. ..."He [the Member for 7 1 KIPLING THE 8T0B1 R l:i I I 5 Lower Tooting] wdii *t bother any one any more. Never saw a man so astonished in my life. Bj Jove, I thought he meanl to a>k n question in the Hon-.- aboul it. Pellon passenger in bis ship -dined aexl him — bowled over by cholera and died in eighteen hours. You aeedn'1 laugh, you fellows. The Member for Lower Tooting is awfully angry about it; but he's more search I think he's tfuing to take his enlightened sell' out of India. There is the member for Lower Tooting; oo adjectives arc needed. And there, too, is the lighl talk of grave matters, the cynicism, so thoroughly characteristic of Kipling's Anglo- Indians, 'idic discussion of impending cholera goes on, and one adds. "There won't be much leave this year, bu1 there oughl to be a great deal of promotion."' This Lightness and cynicism, which, as we have seen, holds Kipling down to the level of prose, which prevents anything like fine writing is. however, confi I to the English side, the real world of this story. Llf Ilolden and Ameera and the rest are types, this is not to say that they are personified abstractions, that they lack human- ity. If they are not highly complex individuals, if they are in no way peculiar, they are, all the more, normal or elemental human beings. Certainly it is not as a type, not as an Aiiirlo- Indian official, but as man simply, that Ilolden, like every hus- band and father, suffers hope, anxiety, joy, sorrow, dread, and poignant grief. And so it is with Ameera; though it is true that both suffer in pari because they are types: Holden because his connection with Ameera must remain unknown; Ameera because she knows that one of her white sisters will inevitably win Ilolden in the end. But these social vicissitudes only in- crease a sorrow — and a joy as well — which are in themselves elemental. It is largely because of this universal human quality of the emotion, because it is the result of experience common PLOTS AND TEEIE SIGNIFICANCE 7o to all humanity, that Without Benefit of Clergy is so widely regarded as the best of Kipling's stories. There is no lack of emphasis upon the emotional element. On almost every page there is some reference to it, and the reader can follow Holden's mental state from beginning to end. The lines of emotion are singularly complete ; or, perhaps, one should say rather that Kipling never loses sight of the emotional value of his material. For he is continually introducing bits of dialogue and action, little incidents like the clutch of the baby's hand on Holden's finger, simply because of their moving quality. There are two emotional crises, two climaxes of grief, in which the situations are allowed to stand for themselves. In general there is little analysis, little direct description of emotional states. Though the story as a whole is largely a study in emotion, it is not a psychological study. It is a study — or rather it is not a study at all, but a presentation of the dramatic expression of emotion, by action, gesture, word, by involuntary physical reaction. The description of the setting at the close is full of emotional suggestion : ' ' He found that the rains had torn down the mud pillars of the gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that had guarded his life hung lazily from one hinge. [This gate has had throughout, a kind of symbolic significance, as if it were the barrier of fairyland which shut out the real world.] There was grass three inches high in the courtyard; Pir Khan's lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch sagged between the beams. . . . Ameera 's room and the other one where Tota had lived were heavy with mildew; and the narrow stair- case leading to the roof was streaked and stained with rain-borne mud. ' ' KIPLING Til I 8T0ST WEITEE Without Benefit of Clergy is Largely t'i-« ■< ■ from those sudden descents to prose which destroy the dignity of emotional sit- uations in other stories bul no1 wholly free. Occasionally there are banal phrases: "Ameera was wild with delight." "A vast ... tenderness ... made him choke." [Kipling's common formula Eor the self-repressed Englishman's expression of grief or tender feeling.] "Holden's gift ... delighted her im- mensely." "Ameera, wild with terror." "A tale.. .made Holden "s blood run cold." "Holden, sick with fear." "He tied ... with his heart in his mouth.*' Passages of this sort are qoI many, but they do mar the story. They show that, though Without Benefit of Clergy marks the heighl of Kipling's pathetic prose, he was still writing after the manner of the journalist who cannot stop to find the one perfect word or phrase and makes use instead of the well-worn coin of everyday speech. In the matter of Structure, also, the author of Without Benefit of Clergy is still the Kipling of Plain Tales from tin Hills. The two tendencies which make away from the short- story are still present, the tendency to write anecdote and the tendency to summarize The first, it must be confessed, is scarcely felt; it appears perhaps only in the account of the Member for Lower Tooting; the second is more pronounced. Tie- motif itself of Without Benefit of Chrfjij has some of the characteristics of a long-story: a considerable time niiisl elapse; Tota's history must be traced from his birth until the moment when he walks and talks and calls himself a man. This material, indeed, is capable of concentration, capable of short-story treatment, but it is not wholly concentrated; it is not wholly free from summary, from narrative in general terms, from the manner typical of the condensed long-story. PLOTS AND THEIE SIGNIFICANCE 77 But, after all, as one reads Without Benefit of Clergy, One is scarcely conscious of any lack either of concentration or of concreteness. For the passages that are not part of organic scenes, the summaries and the explanations, deal with narrative material, with matter germane to the story/} There is no dis- cussion of marriage in general, as there is in In the Pride of His Youth, or of the unions of Englishmen with native women; and the matters summarized — the connective parts of the narrative, the feelings of the chief persons, the course of the cholera — all these are strictly parts of the story. The summaries, moreover, have a remarkable effect of concreteness, owing to the introduc- tion of bits of dialogue, here and there, or of little incidents, like those which adorn the account of Tota's childhood, and also owing to their own peculiar picturesqueness, as in the passage that tells in rapid summary of the spread of the cholera: "The people crowded the trains, hanging on to the footboards and squatting on the roofs of the carriages, and the cholera followed them, for at each station they dragged out the dead and the dying. They died by the roadside, and the horses of the Englishmen shied at the corpses in the grass. The rains did not come, and the earth turned to iron lest man should escape death by hiding in her." Xo individual, no single instance is mentioned — the passage is pure generalization — but, at the same time, it is pure narrative; and it is immensely picturesque; the mind of the reader automatically supplies the concrete pictures. Kipling writes summary, but it is the summary of genius. It is the summary of a special type of genius : not of one whose main strength lies in his intellectual powers, for he would have generalized about the nature of the disease, the character of the native, and so on, and given us some figures by way of pallid > KIP1 ING I HI- 8T0B1 WRITES, illustration. h is the summary of the genius whose strength lies rather in memory, in a marvelously vivid sense of fact, who sees, even when he summarizes, and makes us see. No1 tin- genius whose strength Lies in his intellectual powers, for such a one would group his material, the product <»i* memory and imagination, in carefully constructed scenes, few and elab- orate. And it is likely that he would, moreover, organize the pint of his story so as to produce the greatesl possible effect on the reader, so as to hold his attention by mystery or suspense; proportion his narrative so as to give most space to what should be most impressive and dwell longest upon it. Bui these things Kipling does not do. The facts recalled by memory, brough.1 together into new combinations by imagination, crowd in too fasl upon him, to permit the slow elaboration of a long scene, the hold- ing back of a point, the gradual enfolding and unfolding of a mystery. The reader knows as well as the author that the story can end in only one way. And the author reveals his grasp of the whole, his underlying consciousness of the inevitable end by only two methods: one of them is the ominous hints of how the end is to come; the other is the contrasts, in place and time and society, between the Indian and the English worlds, and the emotional contrasts between joy and sorrow. lieyond such touches as these Kipling does not go. He does not proportion the parts of his story. Of his three parts the third and most important is, indeed, the longest. But in Part II, Tota's illness and death are passed over in a few words and five pages are devoted to the scene on the roof. Tota's death should, of course, have less space and emphasis than Ameer a 's, but even Ameera's with all the preliminaries, has only one page. The excellence of the structure of Willi out Benefit of Clergy PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 79 lies, then, rather in the crowding of vivid, picturesque, and interesting details, 9 rather in incident, than in carefully planned and elaborated scenes. By virtue of this concreteness of hand- ling, of the weight and significance of its theme, and of the sufficient elaboration of all the elements of narrative it is to be regarded not as anecdote or condensed long-story, but as true short-story. To sum up the results of our analysis: Without Benefit of Clergy is typical of Kipling's work of this period in that it has for initial impulse the desire to show the superiority of this irregular union over many regular marriages — a phase of his celebration of the non-respectable as compared with the respect- able. It is the best representative of the group of stories which deal with the union of Englishmen and Indian women. It is the best of the group of stories which deal with the pathos of child- hood. It illustrates Kipling's skill in adopting the points of view of the child, the native, the English official of the System. The characters are types and their emotions are simple and elemental, if not deeply studied, yet convincingly and affect- ingly represented. So far as all these matters of technique are concerned Without Benefit of Clergy may be regarded as an admirable representative of Kipling's early manner. "We have still to analyze the structure of the early tales in general, and here, we shall find, Without Benefit of Clergy is less thoroughly typical. For, while its summary though pictur- esque narrative, the brevity of its structural units, its crowding with vivid incident, can be paralleled elsewhere, the preference 9 Stevenson, whose own practice illustrated the perfection of scenic struc- ture, yet, in theory, insisted upon the value of mere concrete incident, rather than action or complexity of plot, to ' ' realize the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear." B IPLING I Hi 8 i OBI n i:i I I I; of situations to scenes, the large Dumber of these, the hints of tragedy to come, the tragic irony, and the opening exposition in dialogue are nol of common occurrence. It is difficult to generalize in regard to any phase of Kipling's technique, and particularly difficult in regard to the matter of structure, even when one confines oneself to a single period of his work. He seems to have had no regular plan or plans of attack on his material; his stories ca »t be classified according to their architectural designs, according to schemes or patterns, simply because these are so numerous, v.. various, that, for the one hundred and ten stories there would be one hundred and ten classes. One can do no more, therefore, than note a few of the methods of handling the various parts of a story, which seem to be roughly characteristic. He begins his stories in a dozen differenl ways. Sometimes he begins with a statement of* the doctrine which the story is to enforce or illustrate, giving out a text for a sermon, so to speak, like his grandfathers, the Methodist preachers. This text may stand alone, as it does in Beyond tht Pale: "A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. . . . This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily.' - Or Kipling may pause to expound and elaborate the text before he goes on to the story. Thrown Away, for example, begins: "To real' a boy under ... the 'sheltered life system' is not safe," and this text is followed by a page or so of disquisition. This manner of opening is confined to the earlier stories; the majority of the Plain Tnhs begin in this way. Very seldom does Kipling begin in the formal and old- fashioned way, as [rving began Rip Van Winkle, or Poe, Tht PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 81 Fall of the House of Usher, with a description of place-setting. ' ~" He does so only when the scene is structurally necessary, an organic part of the story, as in The House of Suddhoo, a tale of terror and sham magic, or in A Wayside Comedy, where the tragi-comic situation is largely the result of the segregation of the persons at a lonely outpost. He does not begin with Time, — except as combined with Place in such a story as At the End of the Passage, where the terrors of the East Indian summer are responsible for the death of the hero. And he does not begin b with the Social Group, unless the action of the story is in some way conditioned by it. His most common opening is an account of the chief char- acter or characters of the story, and of their relations to one another, an account, that is, not of the whole phase of life, but merely of that small part of it with which the story is to be concerned. More commonly this account of character or dramatis personae takes the form of direct description, or of a summary of their past history. Sometimes, however, the char- , acter is introduced in the dramatic way, by an incident which has no other function, that is, which does not carry forward the action of the story itself. Mcintosh Jellaludin enters singing : " 'Say is it dawn, is it dusk in thy Bower, Thou whom I long for, who longest for me? Oh, be it night — be it — ' "Here he fell over a little camel-colt that was sleeping in the Serai where the horse-traders and the best of the blackguards from Central Asia live . . . When a loafer, and drunk, sings ' The Song of the Bower,' he must be worth cultivating." There at once you have the two extremes that unite so strangely in Jellaludin, and make the story. 82 KIPLING THE 8T0BI WRITES Bu1 while, as I have said, many stories begin with an account of character, relatively few begin in this dramatic way; and tVw begin with action which is an integral part of the plot. The Hill of Illusion must of course begin in this way, and so musl tlic eighl stories of Tht Gadsbys, since these consist wholly of dialogue and stage directions. And The Education of Otis Teen and .1 Second h'atr Woman begin in this way, because tiny are conveyed to the reader almost wholly through the con- versations of Mrs. Hauksbee and Mrs. Mallowe. For tbese and other apparent exceptions there are good reasons: it is. then. not normally the way of Kipling to begin with dialogue, and action. In this respect Without Benefit of CI* run is distinctly exceptional. Not uncommonly he begins with a fairly elaborate explana- tion or summary of antecedent action or situation. But such summaries arc always interesting. They are adorned with concrete, picturesque, and suggestive detail. The Man Who Was, for example, begins with a general account of Dirkovitch as a typical Russian. Abstract discussion of Russian character might well be dull. Kipling makes it anything but dull: "Le1 it be clearly understood," be begins, "that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt." This epigram — right or wrong as to facts — shocks the reader into attention at once. He is willing to read a few sentences to find out what Kipling means. Now and then it is by a preliminary summary of the storj- to come — after the manner of the daily press — or by a descrip- tion of this story, or by a hint as to its nature, that Kipling catches the reader's eye and mind. Beyond the Pale is said to be "the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 83 limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily. He knew too much in the first instance ; and he saw too much in the second. He took too deep an interest in native life ; but he never will do so again." Such an introduction, manifestly, does not "give away" the point, or deprive the story of unexpected- ness. Our eagerness to know why "he will never do so again," tells for, not against suspense. The framed tales, naturally, begin with the framework; and the frameworks begin, as do the tales themselves, in every possible fashion — with Time or Place or Society or Character or Plot, in general summary, con- crete incident, or hint of what is to come. For simplicity, and in the interests of scientific method, T have been at pains to devise these categories and to make this attempt to classify Kipling's methods of beginning his stories. But categories are purely academic affairs; they were no con- cern of Kipling the artist in fiction. Manifestly he did not say to himself, "The nature of this story is such that I can best begin with place-setting, or with character, or with a hint of what is to come." He had, I imagine, rather a general im- pression of his story — not a definite plan — and when he sat down to write, the story came with tremendous rapidity, helter- skelter, from the end of his pen. I scarcely exaggerate when I say that he began with everything at once ; he immediately flung a dozen oranges in the air, and kept them all up to the last paragraph. In other words, while this or that element may predominate in the introduction, others are always present. Thus a certain incoherence is characteristic of all the more elaborate introductions, and now and again one sympathizes with Ortheris, when Mulyaney was trying to tell the story of The God from the Machine and tacked about and about without 84 K1PL1SG THE SI oil) Willi I S moving forward: " 'Mulvaney, the dawn's pisin',' said Ortheris, 'an' we're qo nearer 'ome than we was a1 the beginnin'.' ' Ilrrr are some of the matters thai Kipling (Iimmism's a1 the begin- ning of On Hi' City Will!: character of thr heroine, social set- ting, history of the heroine, place-setting, character of the hero, social setting, history of the hero, character of the hero, prelim- inary hint of the story, social setting (relations of England and India), character of the heroine, place-setting, social setting; thru a dialogue reveals, once more, social setting, character of the heroine, character and history of the hero; and then follows an account of the character-revealing habits of the heroine. Everybody knows that one must write about one thing at a time, and finish with that before one goes on to the next. If one does not, one's writing will Vie incoherent. This passage might be cited as an example. But, after all, it is the incoher- ence of genius, it comes from over-plus of imagination and sensr of fact, like Shakespeare's mixed metaphors. And somehow you have, when you begin the story itself, a sufficient under- standing of the situation. If Kipling begins his stories in all possible ways, sometimes in all possible ways at once, he 'proceeds in the same fashion. If his first step is character, his second may be text, or hint of what is to come, or incident of the plot, or explanation, or com- ment : he has, as I have said, no settled habit, no definite plan of attack, each story seems to tell itself, after its own fashion. In general, however, one seems to see in Kipling a preference for scenes — wherein something happens, over situations — cross- sections of the narrative wherein the action stands still. One seems to see, also, a certain preference for the single scene — the proposal iii the dust-storm, in False Dawn, the repulse of the PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 85 rioters in His Chance in Life, the sham magic in The House of Suddhoo, the escape from the coal-mine in At Twenty-Two, the riot in the city in On the City Wall. A few have two scenes, like the plotting against Mulvaney and the attempted shooting of O'Hara in Black Jack. But one scene is the rule. Only a few of the stories can be said to consist mainly of a single sit- uation rather than of a scene. The Madness of Private Ortheris, for example, in Plain Tales, and The Man Who Was, in Life's Handicap, are both noteworthy pieces of concentration. The j Madness of Private Ortheris is a single and highly elaborated situation, free from summary, and free or almost free from explanation. It traces the gradual coming on of the nostalgia, the climax of the attack, the change into civilian dress, which is also the beginning of the cure, the hours of suspense while Mul- vaney and Kipling wait for Ortheris alone by the river to come to himself, and the happy conclusion. The whole is enacted in one place, within a few hours, by three persons, who represent, however, the English army and the vicissitudes of its life _in India. The Man Who Was is nearly twice as long, more sig- nificant, more dramatic, but not so completely translated into terms of concrete narrative. It is the work of Kipling the patriot, the imperialist, inspired by hatred of Russia, by con- sciousness of the conflict of Russian and English interests in the Far East. It has certain dramatic incidents more stirring than anything in The Madness of Private Ortheris: the cere- monial drinking of the Queen's health, a traditional rite of the White Hussars; the speech of Hira Singh, the native officer, concluding, "But if by the will of God there arises any other game which is not the polo game, then be assured, Colonel Sahib and officers, that we will play it out side by side, though they," 86 Kiri.IXt, i in STOBI WBIT1 l: again his eye sought Dirkovitch, "though they, I say, have fifty ponies tn Din' one horse" ; the si mi heard outside and the entrance of the limp heap of rags upheld by three soldiers; his gradual and unconscious self-revelation of identity, and of the Bad thai lie had Keen a Russian prisoner. It is a more stirring and sig- nifieant situation than the Madness of Ortheris, but it is prefaced by four pages of summary and explanation, giving an account of Dirkovitch, the Russian officer, his character and his history, of the genera] character of the White Hussars, his hosts at din- ner, and of the theft of carbines from the regiment by the Pathans across the river. And it is concluded by the suggestive incident of the departure of Dirkovitch. Tht str(/< Bide of Marrowbu Jukeq is a less certain instance of single situation. Through fifteen pages, however, he is imprisoned in the sand pit, in the village of the living dead; and there seems no possi- bility of escape. And though he is intensely active all the time, his activity is that of the squirrel in the cage; it leads to nothing; and his rescue, in the end, comes from without. These are stories of a single situation; they are not numerous; and stories of more than one situation are still fewer. The story of The Man Who Would hi King, prefaced by the incidents of Kipling's first meetings, on railway trains, with the two adventurers, is told in two situations in the newspaper office, one before, one after, the great adventure; but the second of these is rather frame for story than story proper. The best example of the two-situation story is At the End of the Passage, with its two Sunday gatherings of the friends, one before, the other after, Hummil's death, in The Education of Otis Yecre it is possible to distinguish as many as four distinct situations. In this re- spect, also, then. Without Benefit of Clergy is exceptional. I PLOTS AND THEIE SIGNIFICANCE 87 do not think that its series of seven situations strung on a thread of summary can be paralleled from the true short-stories of Kipling's early work. However, a number of these stories do consist mainly of a series of incidents, of little happenings, that is, too brief and too slightly elaborated to be regarded either as situations or as scenes. But the line between incident and scene or situation, is one of the many arbitrary lines which have to be drawn, and the distinction, though in general a useful one, is often doubt- ful in individual cases. In Kidnapped, clearby enough, the narrative is intentionallv confined to minor incidents, from which we are to infer the main action of the story. In Bertran and Bimi it is simply a matter of lack of elaboration. In Beyond the Pale, too, there is little elaboration, but here one can not be so certain. In general, incidents — little, detached bits of action, not organized into scenes, but floating loose, so to speak, in a stream of summary — are extremely common in Kipling's stories. It is largely by this means that Carnehan, the companion of the man who would be king, and Learoyd, in ( On Gr eenhow II ill, tell their tales. I have noted Kidnapped as an instance of the suggestive method : the incidents narrated are not those of the real storv, that we must construct for ourselves. Kipling was to do later great things with this method, but in this early period there are few instances of it; one is His Majesty the King, where we read much more than the child hero into the incidents which he observes. However, Kipling does not venture to let these sug- gestions stand alone. In Kidnapped his title clears away any possible doubt ; in His Majesty the King he inserts a needless explanation. In To Be Filed for Reference, the powerful sug- 88 KIPLING THE ST0B1 WRITES gestion of the last words of the drunkard and Loafer who was once an Oxford man— "Not guilty, my Lord!" is. however, allowed to stand alone, or almosl alone; Eor even here Kipling adds, lest we miss the point: "Perhaps Ins last sentence in life told what Mcintosh had once gone through." The ends of Kipling's stories are not less various than the beginnings. The earlier i s are Likely to c lose with a comme nl of his own, sometimes recurring to his opening texl with a triumphant Q. E. D. Thus Kidnapped begins with a jocose plea for a Governmental Matrimonial Bureau, "with a Jury of Matrons, a Judge of the Chief Court, a Senior Chaplain, and an Awful "Warning, in the shape of a love-match that lias gone wrong, chained to the trees in the courtyard." After making it apparent that Peythroppe had to be kidnapped for six weeks to prevent a misalliance it concludes: "But just think how much trouble and expense . . . might have been saved by a prop- erly conducted Matrimonial Department...." In other cases Kipling's concluding remark is mere comment on the story as story: "no one will believe," he says, "a rather unpleasant story [The Mark of the Beast], and it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned.' Occasionally this critical comment is entrusted to one of the persons of the story or of the framework — to Mul- vaney, for example, as in The Daughter of the Regiment, or to Mrs. Hauksbee, as in A Second Rate Woman, or to the English onlookers, as in At Twenty-Two. Sometimes the close explains — somewhat weakly, indeed — how it was possible that certain events should have taken place. Thus Marrowbie Jukes ac- counts for his escape: "It seems that [Dunoo, my dog-boy] had 1 PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 89 tracked Pornic's footprints fourteen miles across the sands to the crater ;... had taken one of niy ponies and a couple of punkah ropes, returned to the crater, and hauled me out as I have described." Suggestive of medieval narrative, particularly of the habit of the fabliau, is the close which sums up the situation - resulting from the story. Thus Kipling tells us how, as the result of his presence in the house of Suddhoo, he was open to the charge of aiding and abetting in obtaining money under false pretences. Suggestive of the fairy-tale, "lived happily ever after," are those conclusions which sum up the lives of the persons after the close of the story : " In the end, Strickland and Miss Youghal were married, on the strict understanding that Strickland should drop his old ways. . . . He is forgetting the slang and the beggar's cant, and the marks, and the signs, and the drift of the under-currents. . . . But he fills in his Depart- mental returns beautifully." These last two types of conclu- sion, which represent the story as resulting in a situation or in a way of life which still continues, have a certain value : they add distinctly to the air of reality of the story as a whole. But for the rest it will be manifest that Kipling's conclusions of the types thus far discussed are not particularly impressive ; he does not aim to end with words that deserve distinction as an organic part of the story; nor is it his habit to attempt to shock us with a sudden surprise or with an epigram at the close, after the fashion of Maupassant or 0. Henry. There is something akin to this trick, however, in the later stories of this first period, a suggestive incident or bit of dialogue which accomplishes, " much more powerfully than direct statement, something more than the comment or the summary of resulting situation. Ad- mirable instances are to be found in On the City Wall, At the KIPLING THE 8T0B1 R EITSB Pit's l/"*///'. Only a Subaltern, Th> Man Who Would &< King, J I s Majesty tin King, 1 1>> Man Who Was, and 7/" Return of Imray. Bui perhaps the mosl telling one occurs in Bertran and Bimi, the story told bj Hans Breitmann, the German scientist, of the friend who had a pel orang-outang. The beasl was ex- tremely jealous. < me day he lefl it alone wit h bis wife, and, when he returned, neither wife nor orang-outang answered his call. 1 1 is wife's door was lurked. ••I broke down der d ■ mit mj Bhoulder, " said Breitmann, "und der thatch of der roof was torn into a great hole, and der sun came in apon der floor, llai' you ever Been paper in der waste basket or cards at whist on >lcr table Bcatteredf Dere was no wife dot could be Been.... I looked at dese things and I was very sick; but Bertran looked a liddle longer at what was apon der floor und der walls, und der hole iii der thatch. Den he pegan to laugh, soft und low, and I knew und thank (iott dot he was mad. . . . After ten days Bimi, the ape. came back and Bertran gave him sangaree until he was drunk and stupid, and then . . . "Bertran he kill him mit his hands, und I go for «'i walk upon der beach. It was Bertran 'a own piziness. When I come bach der u\«- he was dead, und Bertran he was dying abofe him; but still he laughed liddle und low und he was quite content. " "But why in the world didn't you help Bertran instead of letting him be killed."" I asked, "My friend," said Hans, . . . " it was not nice even to mineself dot I should live after I haf seen dot room mit der hole in der thatch. Und Bertran, he was her husband." This, if you will, is a somewhat crude sensationalism. Bu1 it is the same art that gave us the far more subtle visit of Holden to his ruined borne at the end of Without li<>ufit of Clergy. In each ease the full emotional value of the story is impressively borne in upon us by the closing incident. PLOTS AND THE IP SIGNIFICANCE 91 What remains to be said in regard to structure can perhaps be summed up by a generalization to the effect that while Kip- ling is not a severely impersonal or dramatic author, he can upon occasion make effective use of. the dramatic and impersonal methods. As we have already seen, his narrative is, normally, highly personalized; he tells the story himself, as he saw it, or makes one of an audience to whom it is told by an eyewitness of it or actor in it ; and his comments on it are not confined to beginning or end. He is continually entering in his own person to admonish, to explain, to take sides. Furthermore, he puts us in possession of necessary information in regard to action ante- cedent to the story, or occurring in the early part of it, by means of the nightly undramatic method of summary; and he uses summary freely also for purposes of characterization. Again, he has no prejudice against indirect discourse — his version of the speeches, instead of the speeches themselves after the fashion of drama. On the other hand, his summaries are adorned with concrete, dramatic and picturesque touches which completely destroy dull barrenness. And if he uses indirect discourse, he makes liberal use of dialogue as well. It must be admitted, indeed, that Kipling often uses dialogue in brief conversations less as an organic and necessary part of his narrative, than as illustration or enforcement of some summary of events or of some history of a character. There are instances of this in Without Benefit of Clergy and in On the City Wall. But, for the other extreme, there are the eight stories of The Gadsbys and The Hill of Illusion, where tales are told and characters revealed wholly by dialogue and stage direction, that is, where the form closely approximates that of the drama itself. With this limi- tation, however, that, in The Gadsbys at least, comment and 92 KIPLING i ill sun;) w i;i 1 1 i; explanation are freely introduced, being pu1 into the mouths of characters the men al the club who exist for oo other pur pose. I argely by means of a similar sorl of running comment, by means of talk aboul what has happened and what is going to happen, are told the two stories in which .Mrs. Eauksbee and her friend Mrs. Mallowe are concerned Tin Education of Otis Teen and .1 Second Rati Woman. Both are extremely interest- ing experiments in method. In the other stories, generally, dialogue is less common, Kipling being too impatient, too pressed for time and space, to work out the subtle translation of events and characters into words and gestures. And yet — for you ran say nothing about Kipling's technique without Endless modi- fication and exception— and yet it is largely by means of dia- logue that his best characterization is accomplished. It is thus, for example, that the "three musketeers" are differentiated — primarily and most obviously by dialect, though by the content of their speeches as well. Careful critics have found errors in Mulvaney's brogue, in Ortheris's cockney, and Learoyd's fork- shire dialect; indeed it is obvious to any reader that Kipling is not consistent, that Riulvaney, for example, does not turn all his ee's into a's — not all Ins queens are quanes. Bui Kipling was not writing for phoneticians: and he does always accomplish what lie sets out to do: no one can mistake a sp -h of one of the soldiers three for that of one of the others. Writers of dialect do not often go further than this. There is no more famous dialect literature than the Mans Breitmann Ballads; Kipling knew and loved them ; lie calls his < German scienl ist I lans Breitmann, and now and again he quotes some of the verses. A glance at these is enough to convince the most unobservant that no German ever spoke English, or American, in this PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 93 fashion; thus between the language of Kipling's Hans Breit- mann and the pretended Pennsylvania Dutch of the original, the Hans Breitmann of Charles Godfrey Leland, there is not much to choose. Yet both are effective, both are comic, and both serve, like the Yorkshire, Cockney, and Irish brogue, to differentiate character types. But, as I have said, Kipling does not depend on pronunciation alone; matter as well as manner is characteristic. In On Grecnhow Hill, for example, when Learoyd tells his love story and Mulvaney and Ortheris break in with characteristic comments, it is not dialect, it is rather the sense and the emotional coloring of what they say that reveal the humorous and tender-hearted Irishman, the solemn and sentimental Yorkshireman, the matter-of-fact and cynical Cock- ney. Here again, however, the critics object that there is sometimes too much Kipling, too little soldier in these speeches. And the objection is sound enough. You can account for Mulvaney 's "Discourse, Don Juan! The a-moors av Lotharius Learoyd!" — you can account for Mulvaney 's literary allusions on the basis of his experience in Silver's Theatre in Dublin, of which he gives an amusing description in The Courting of Dinah Shadd. And you can account for Ortheris 's misquota- tion of Macaulay's Horatius on the basis of his common-school education. But there remains much that you can not account for. Learoyd, for example, might well say, "You could tell Greenhow Hill folk by the red-apple colour o' their cheeks an' nose-tips" ; bat he could hardly add, "and their blue eyes, driven into pin-points by the wind." And Ortheris 's simile — -"Sort o' mad country. Like a grate when the fire's put out by the sun" — bespeaks rather the observant man of letters than the cockney private. But for all this, style and matter, like dialect, '.i l KIP1 I VG THE STOm H BITES Berve to differentiate and establish the types. Only the critical academic reader is offended, and be does qo1 count. I 3ture and minor incidenl serve the same purpose. Words and action are exactly equivalent in the welcome home of Mul- vanej after his incarnation: "'You damned fool!' said they, and severally pounded him with their lists." Again, for the gestures characteristic of the type: "Ortheris suddenly rose to Ins knees, his rifle at Ins shoulder, and peered across the valley in the clear afternoon light. His chin cuddled the stock, and there was a twitching of the muscles of the right cheek as he sighted; Private Stanley Ortheris was engaged on his business." These professional gestures, the gestures which establish the type, have a certain charm of their own, the charm of tin- char- acteristic and specific, which is not lessened by the fad that to the uninitiated they are not always wholly intelligible. In Black Jack Mulvaney counters the plot againsl O'Hara and himself by removing the bullel from the cartridge and so tam- pering with his rifle that it injures the would-be murderer. In his own words i without the dialect) : '"Sure and true, there was a cartridge gone from my pouch and lying snug in my rifle. - T was hot with rage against them all, and I worried the bullet out with my teeth as fast as I could. ... Then I took my boot and the cleaning-rod and knocked out the pin of the falling- block. Oh, 'twas music when that pin rolled on the floor. I put it into my pouch and stuck a dab of dirt on the holes in the plate, putting the falling block back." In a general way. of course, any reader can make out what Mulvaney did. Bu1 Kipling, in his search for the technically exact and the pictur- esque word, the slang or jargon of the class he is depicting, may go much further than this and become wholly unintelligible to PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 9o the normal reader. "Never, so long as a tonga buckets down the Solon dip . . . will there be such a genius as Mrs. Hauksbee. ' ' Evidently it is, somewhere, a well-known fact that the tonga will continue for many years, or centuries, to bucket down the Solon dip, and doubtless that is all we need to know. Moreover, there is local color in these words, even though we do not understand them. We have a pleasant sense of being in India (since Kip- ling says that it is India) just as a realization of the fact that one is in Paris is increased by the sounds of an unintelligible language about one, which one assumes to be French. But Kipling can be even less intelligible : "If a man wants your money, he ought to ask for it, or send round a subscription-list, instead of juggling about the country, with an Australian lar- rikin ; a ' brumby, ' with as much breed as the boy ; a brace of chumars in gold-laced caps; three or four ckk a -ponies with hogged manes, and a switch-tailed demirep of a mare called Arab because she has a kink in her flag." From all this you get nothing more than a faint sense of an unfamiliar and dis- reputable world — apparently the world of the race-track — much the kind of impression you would get from a conversation on > the same subject overheard in a smoking-car. Here, then, is another of the means by which Kipling contrives to convey the impression of reality — and reality, be it remembered, is often unintelligible — the means of the specific and differencing lan- guage of human types and classes, the jargon of trades or pro- fessions. This habit grows, and leads in the later period, to stories that are wholly, or almost wholly, unintelligible. This is perhaps the final outcome of the dramatic or objective method. Words and gestures are given : the real words, so to speak, of conversations overheard, mere unintelligible fragments of con- 96 KIPLING THE ST0B1 WBITEB versations, or conversations in slang, jargon, technical terms; ami real gestures, gestures of the shop or the game, technical gestures, meaningless to the uninitiated. Neither words nor gestures are selected or explained. Without help <>i* any kind from the author, the reader has to draw his own inferences, construd the story for himself. He is thus in the position of one who watches a street incident in a foreign city where he knows but little of the language and nothing of the customs involved. Kipling, then, while he commonly employed the non- dramatic methods — summary, explanation, comment, indirect discourse, all the methods that remind you that there is an author behind the story — could, if he would, employ tin- other methods — the dramatic, objective, unexplained speech and ges- ture and minor incident — even to the point of unintelligibilty. Similarly, though it was not ordinarily his habit to write the beginning and middle of his stories with an intense con- sciousness of the end, he could upon occasion — when it happened to suit his purpose, or when he happened to be in the mood to take the trouble — he could prepare, foreshadow, anticipate with no mean skill. There are some effective touches in this way in Beyond the Pale and in At the Pit's Mouth; but examples are to be found mainly in the last volume of this period, in Life's Handicap, particularly in the later stories of the volume, the stories of mystery and terror. We have already studied the hints and suggestions which prepare the way for the death of llummil in At the End of the P-assaqej, for the transformation of Fleete in Th< Mark of the Beast, for the return of Imray, in the story of that name. We may add the preparation for the destruction of Bertran's wife by the ape in Bertran and Bimi. Yliii'_ r is never weary of illustrating. It is implied in most of the stories of Mrs. Hauksbee and of the soldiers three, in .1 Bank Fraud, in Umi Baa Black Sheep; and one phase of it is clearly formulated in Watches of th< Night: \nw may have noticed thai many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem for purely religious purposes, of course — to know more aboul iniquity than the Qnregenerate. Per- haps tiny were specially bad before they became converted! At any rate, in the imputation of things evil, and in putting the worst construction on things innocent, a certain type of good people may be trusted to surpass all others. The Colonel and his Wife," continues Kipling, "were of thai type. Bu1 the Colonel's Wife was the worst." This is characteristic of Kipling's view of women, a view- that does not. it must he admitted, undergo material change, from the early verse to the effect that "a woman is only a woman, hut a good cigar is a smoke' 7 to the recent declaration that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male." Naturally, we look in vain for a Viola or a Portia, a Rosalind or a Cordelia, in Kipling's stories. It is, indeed, difficult to remember as definite personalities, any of his heroines; and if we did, we should not yearn to meet any of them. Even Mrs. Hauksbee is a dangerous person, and the best that can he said for her is that she has "redeeming qualities." Kipling, of course, has views in regard to the relations of the sexes; inevitably, for him, a young man married is a young man marred. This is the text of the eight stories of The Gads- bys; it is the text of hi the Pridi of His Youth, and even, incidentally, of Miss Youghal's Sais, though the later Deal in Cothjn reconciles one with this union. And two stories show PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 103 that, though a wicked or stupid woman may exert an influence for good, it is without her knowledge or intention. 11 However, the men appear in no better light. If they are marred it is clearly enough because they are usually fragile or worse — badly damaged in fact — to begin with.- In Three and — an Extra Kip- ling notes a certain reaction after marriage, which he regards as inevitable. In The Bronckhorst Divorce Case he traces the substitution for terms of endearment of terms of abuse, used first affectionately and ironically, then, as love dies — an in- evitable death — quite seriously and passionately. The only unions that he idealizes are those beyond the pale and without benefit of clergy, which are, however, by their very nature, unreal and transitory. He distrusts love matches, advocates the continental system of marriages arranged by parents, and, humorously, the establishment of a Governmental Matrimonial Department. In The Education of Otis Ycere he illustrates the impossibility of "platonic friendships," as they used to be called. Many of the stories, it must be admitted, do concern them- selves with games of tennis with the seventh commandment. However, the number of such stories tends to decrease — the statistician reports fifteen per cent in Life's Handicap as against twenty-five per cent in Plain Tales. And of these stories many represent the game as not yet begun, as wholly prevented even, thanks to the intervention perhaps of Mulvaney or Mrs. Hauks- bee, perhaps of Death itself. Others represent the embarrassing consequences; others, the tragic ending of the last set. It is significant that in none is the game represented as agreeable. 11 In Error and Wressley of the Foreign Office. Cf. also His Chance in Life, where the hero is inspired by love for an ugly half-breed. 104 KIPLING l III 8TOB1 WBI1 I B The players lark the gaiety and animal spirits, the unconscious ami naturalness of Maupassant's Light-hearted and unmoral cynics. It is true thai W i | > I i 1 1 «_r- danced on ground, no1 where ntln r nun lists, as Barrie says, bul other English novelists, had feared to tread. He touched i1 with lighl and hasty feet; he did m>t venture to walk with the natural gail of his continental confreres, scarcely conscious that the ground differed from any other. II'' skated over thin ice; he did not, Like the Englishmen of today, break through. He was like the English Boldiers after the taking of LJungtungpen, who, as our French critic puts it. saw thr sun rise upon their too-simple apparel, while the Hindoo women bursl into Laughter, and they, worthy suns of modesl Albion, blushed to the whites of their eyes. Himself a worthy son of modest Albion. Kipling did not venture to call a spade a spade; "Janoo and Azi/.un," he wrote in /// tin HOUSI of Smhllioo, "are ... Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancienl and more or less honourable profession." Lalun, in On th< City Wall, was "a member of the most ancienl profession in the world.'" And .1/ tin Pit's Month is a story of a man and his wife and a Tellium Quid. Kipling was thus very hesi- tant in his daring. And he did not make vice attractive; he was never frankly animalistic, like the French naturalists, nor did lie ever aim. like certain insidious American novelists of the present day, to trouble (in .Matthew Arnold's phrase about Tolstoi ) the senses of those who like to have their senses troubled. His aim seems to have been rather that of the youth who wishes to persuade you that he has lost his illusions, that he knows life, that he is a man. If his first triumph was. like Harte's, and as Barrie would have us believe, a succes d< scandale, its scandal was of a sort that can no longer shock or surprise; the Liqueurs, PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 105 which, Barrie says, he brought from India, now seem mild enough ; just as, in 1891, when Barrie wrote his review, Tenny- son 's Idylls of the King had lost its early repute as a scandalous production improper for the young person to read. Thus far we have been concerned with Kipling the satirist. The satirist, who holds up to ridicule that of which he does not approve, must of necessit}' be something of a muckraker, must concern himself with the dirty corner of a room which, as a whole, may be beyond reproach. Contemporary with Kipling' the satirist, or coming perhaps a little later, is Kipling the humorist. The humorist does not, like the satirist, sit in judg- ment upon his fellow men ; he views them rather with s\-mpathy and tolerance. He does not try so much to make them better by holding their vices up to ridicule, as he tries to make us, his readers, better by showing us that these vices are perhaps in- evitable, or counterbalanced by cpialities wholly admirable and lovable. The humorist holds his moral judgment, for the moment, in abeyance, isolates his hero from the rest of the world, forgetting what harm his evil ways may cause to his fellow men, recording those evil ways for the laughter that is in them, yet not forgetting, all the while, to sympathize with the evildoer in his inevitable suffering. It is as humorist, with the humorist's mingling of laughter and pity and SA'mpathy, that Kipling writes of the soldiers three. If they are sometimes drunk and disorderly, if they are petty thieves, if they are too careless gallants in their love affairs, we are not to forget that all is told in jest, and we are not to forget that these privates of the line are effective soldiers, highly valued by their officers, loyal to country, regiment, and friends, warm-hearted and humorous. As they themselves would put it : 106 KIPLING l III 8TOB1 R BITES w ■ aren'1 do thin red 'eroes, nor we aren'1 no blackguards too, B ' single men in barricka, mosl remarkable 1 ik<- you; Ami it' Bometimes our conduck isn't all your fancj paints: Why, singlo men in barricka don'1 grow into plaster saints. We are not to sil in judgment upon them; we are to Laugh at them good-naturedly, shed a tear upon them, and remember that they are their own worsl enemies. Our attitude toward them should perhaps be the attitude which we assume toward children, the attitude so charmingly defined and exemplified at the end of Baa Baa, Black Sh( < p: "Mother would be awfully cross if you walked through that ditch," says Judy, continuing a conversation. • ' Mother \s never angry, ' ' says Punch. "She'd just say, ' Von 're a little pagal,' and that's not nice, but I'll show." Punch walks through the ditch and mires himself to the knees. "Mother, dear," he shouts, " I 'm just as dirty as I can ipos-sib-ly be! ' "Then change your clothes as quickly as you pos-st'My can! " Mother's char voice rings out from the house. "And don't be a little pagal!" Punch, of course, being no less than Kipling himself, is an exceptional child. The passage, therefore, suggests the limita- tion as well as the quality of Kipling's humor. He views with amused tolerance or sympathy only the exceptional children, of whatever growth. His heroes and heroines alike are, as we have seen, of that type. Superlatively effective they are, all of them; people who do things, who succeed, who advance; people who ask for what they want or who help themselves. Kipling thus stops far short of the breadth of tolerance of a Chaucer, a Dickens, or a Bret Ilarte. One might say, perhaps with_a certain degree of truth, thai the function of the satirist is to reveal the evil in the hearts of respectable people; the function of the humorist, to reveal the good in the hearts of non-respect able people. Kipling performs PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 107 now one function, now the other, often both. For in all his stories there are touches both of humor and of satire ; in the satirical stories there is often humorous tolerance ; and in the humorous stories, shafts of satire. In none, I think, can he be regarded as immoral. Kipling's moralizing is by no means restricted to the conduct involved in the more intimate and personal relations. He is, as I pointed out at the beginning, the singer of the clan, of the race and nation, of the empire, the administration, and the army, of the officials and the officers. Whether as satirist or humorist his comments range over every phase of The System, the system that he outlined, in The Conversion of Aurelian MoGoggin, as the only creed that will work in India. Concerning Kipling's views of The System, it is difficult, as usual, to generalize. How- ever, one may venture to assert that what he chiefly criticizes is the failure of one part to understand or appreciate another; it is for understanding and appreciation, for the necessity of seeing things from other men's points of view, that he chiefly pleads. It is essential to understand the native Indian point of view, for the dominant race to understand its subjects. So obvious a matter as this seems to demand continual emphasis. Strickland, says Kipling ironically, "held the extraordinary theory that a Policeman in India should try to know as much about the natives as the natives knew themselves." It is therefore Strickland, and Strickland alone, who can save Fleete from the consequences of defiling the idol of Hanuman, and Biel from the destruction of his character by the easily purchased native evidence in The Bronckhorst Divorce Case. But he could not save Imray, who was murdered because he had patted on the head a native child L08 KIPLING THE 8T0B1 WBITEB who, later, * I i * - * 1 of fever. It was not Strickland, however, bu1 Tods, a six-year-old boy, who was aware ihat a bill which re- stricted leases to five years was not popular with the natives. and so unwittingly introduced whal came to be known as Tods' Amendment. .Manifestly it is accessary to know these things, just as it is accessary to know that a native Head of a District cannol command the reaped of the governed, and that, it" such a is appointed, confusion and murder will result. Even the independence of villages is dangerous; 12 and all clemency is construed as weakness." 13 Yet. in the evenl of a conflict with Russia, the native can be counted on to fighl side by side with the English." Incidentally one might extend this plea for a knowledge of the native point of view, to include the points of view of the elephanl (Moti Guj—Mutineet) who will work just as long as his master tells him to and no Longer; and of the orang-outang, who is afraid only of snakes, and subject to murderous jealousy (Bertran and Bimi). These stories are significant as anticipat- ing the further variation of point of view in The Junglt Hooks. Among the English themselves the main object of Kipling's attack is home ignorance of Indian affairs, of civilian officials and of the army alike. In such stories as At the End of tht Passage and Without Benefit of Clergy, while Kipling celebrates the generous courage and devotion of the English officials, who step forward unhesitatingly to fill the gaps made in their ranks by death, he at the same time bitterly satirizes those "vestry- men" at home, who denounce the Indian Civil Service as the preserve of English aristocracy, or who, like the Member for 12 Marrowbit Juki *. 13 On tin City Wall. 14 The Mm, Who Was. PLOTS AND THE1E SIGNIFICANCE 109 Lower Tooting, wander ignorantly about India, talking of the benefits of British rule, and fly at the approach of cholera. There exists, or existed, also, in England a curious inapprecia- tion of Thomas Atkins. Learoyd and Mulvaney had found that the prevalent opinion held enlistment as the final act and climax in a career of crime. And Ortheris had been "turned out of a measly 'arf -license pub down Lambeth way, full o' greasy kebmen," because he was wearing the Queen's uniform. Doubt- less Kipling has done a real service in making Thomas Atkins better known and better liked and appreciated by his fellow- countrymen. In addition to the continual illustration of the essential soldierly virtues of courage and loyalty, Kipling makes two studies in the peculiar psychology of the soldier in India. One is in nostalgia, and shows how attacks of homesickness may develop a kind of temporary insanity, in which so good a soldier as Ortheris may be so far out of his mind as to desert. The other is in hysteria, and shows how heat, enforced idleness, and over- feeding may result in a man's "running amuck," when talk about the prevalence of crime in the army is sheer nonsense. T he Drums of the Fore and . Aft was written in part as a study of a green regiment under fire for the first time, to prove the necessity of a few old soldiers in the ranks to teach the "rookies" how to make themselves snug at night and how to play the game of battle, and convey much other military information of great value to officers and men. These are a few — relatively a very few — of the vast number of the views concerning the conduct of life which are implied, or, more often, explicitly stated in Kipling's stories. Exhaustive discussion is impossible. There have been among the writers of short-stories profounder moralists, who have held higher HO KIPLING l 111 8TOB1 WBI1 / S ideals, who have thoughl more systematically and made a more thoroughgoing attempl to find the meaning of the mighty maze which confronted them. Bui nunc has deall with Buch a number and such a variety of phases of human conduct. Perhaps it is most enlightening to regard Kipling the moralist simply as another phase of Kipling the journalist. For the journalist mils! not only have at command all kinds of knowledge, hut also opinions and judgments on all the subjects which may interest his readers. He must be ready to speak with an air of authority and finality on any question. It may be that writing for the Gazette or the Pioneer, writing as the Gazette or the Pioneer, Kipling developed the editorial manner, the manner of the c.r-rathedra pronouncement. He spoke through the paper much as the basso with the megaphone sings the part of the dragon through the dragon's mouth in the opera of Siegfried. Appearing in the stories, in Ids own person, Kip- ling forgets to lay aside his megaphone, the editorial manner of confident assurance. But for all this assurance, for all the vast number of subjects he conceives himself able to discuss with authority, he develops, as I have said, no moral system. He is, once more, not the thinker, he is still the genius of imagination, of sense of fact. ''The evidence," says the (Quarterly reviewer, from whom I have already quoted, "The evidence of his senses bewilders and staggers him; in the hurly-burly of events, the ^ I jumbling of eharacters, the disappointments of fortune, he seems to have lost all clue to their meaning." CHAPTER IV GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD If Kipling- was bewildered and staggered by the evidence of his senses and found no clew to the meaning of it all, the critic of Kipling, after an analysis of the technique of his early stories, finds himself in much the same position. He is im- pressed with the variety, with the richness, with the profusion and confusion of Kipling's methods. /An attempt to give an orderly and reasonable account of it all may very properly be based on an analysis of the personality and training of Kipling himself. These can, I think, be shown to have developed nat- urally, if not inevitably, the prevailing characteristics of his technique. And the se ch aracteristics can, I think, be summed up in three adjectivesys Kjpling 's teehnique- Ji^aaJisti%-mma/ntio' 1 and intense. 1 The causes of Kipling's realism are not far to seek. He had, by nature, a certa in clearness of visio n ; he had rather mar- velous powers of observation ; and he had an insatiable curiosity, a desire to turn all the pages of the book of life, dwelling not too long upon any one of them, an instinct like his own Tommy Atkins 's : For to admire an' for to see, For to be 'old this world so wide — It never done no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried. 1 As these terms are denned in Professor W. A. Neilson's The Essentials of Poetry. Ul> KIPLING Till 8T0B1 R //// I 8 These qualities of Kipling's character were inherited, it is per- haps qoI too much to assume, from his father, the artist and antiquarian. The accurate detail of the latter's illustrations bf y. Kim is significant. Separated from his parents Kipling found himself ai an early age fact- tn face with the real and unfriendly world outside. It is not to be assumed that all of l>aa I'xm, Black . Sheep is literally true; bu1 it may 1h' safely regarded as an ^ accurate summary of Kipling's own impression of this period of his life. Be saw the seamy side of human nature -narrow religiosity, hypocrisy, jealousy; he "drank deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair." We may read the plater stories of school life, Stall,;/ and Company, in the same way. Kipling is manifestly the spectacled Beetle of these tales; in the last one he is, indeed, no longer Beetle, but "I." He is not writing accurate autobiography; hut he does give us many clews as to his own nature, his early tastes, his likes and dislikes, the kind of training he received in the Tinted Services College; he makes clear, so to speak, Why he is Who. There was much to cultivate the imagination, as we shall see presently, hut more to cultivate the already keen sense of fact in the future realist. The college was, to begin with, purely practical in purpose ; its aim was not general culture, but preparation for Army or Navy or Civil Service. Seventy-five per cent of its students were sons of officers. It did not set out to make scholars; and in pure scholarship Kipling — or Beetle — had no interest whatever. King, the master who taught Latin, a Balliol man, a wit and scholar, inexcusably sarcastic and hope- lessly ignorant of hoys, is the "villain" of the book. He is continually holding forth concerning the "crass an' materialized brutalitv of the middle classes — readiif solely for marks. Not GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 113 a scholar in the whole school." Beetle is, says King, "with the single exception of Stalky, the very vilest manufacturer of 'bar- barous hexameters' that I have ever dealt with." If Beetle was not in sympathy with pure classical scholarship, no more was he in sympathy with pure science. He and his friends looked down with infinite scorn on those who professed an inter- est in natural history. And Beetle himself "is as the brutes that perish about sines and cosines." Evidently Kipling's curiosity was not insatiable as regards useless things like the structure of Latin verse or trigonometry. But it was aroused by facts which seemed to have a useful bearing. He read Viollet-le-Duc and bribed workmen to let him examine a house under construction, in order that he might properly place a dead cat between floor and ceiling of a rival dormitory ; he made a study of the control of the gas supply, in order that all the college lights might go out at the proper moment ; and his knowl- edge of the art of the compositor, gained as editor of the college magazine, enabled him to shift about the w T ords in a Latin exam- ination paper, to the discomfiture of King. The "student activities" of Beetle and his friends took mainly the form of practical jokes at the expense of masters and school-fellows; and these, as Kipling shows very clearly in the last story, were the best possible preparation for the activities of after life. In general they hated the organized sports of the colleges; they had little sympathy "with the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goal" ; they preferred their own individual activities. They distrusted sentiment, or at least all talk of sentiment. It is only King who holds forth about the spirit of the school and the great traditions of ancient seats of learning. An M. P. puts an end, by his ill-advised twaddle ill KIPLING TH1 ST0B1 n HI I ES aboul patriotism, to a volunteer cadel corps which, previous to his coming, had flourished in the school. .Much of Beetle's time was given to reading. The Head Master gave him the run of his own brown-bound, tobacco scented library without prohibition or recommendation. Kip- ling's lisl mentions for the mosl pari rather romantic than classical writers; elsewhere there is much talk of Browning and of cramming Shakespeare for examinations. Neither Browning Dor Shakespeare was ignoranl of the seamy side of human nature of failed to look fact in t he face. The seamy side revealed itself in actual Life to the clear vision of Beetle and his friends, in masters and school-fellows alike. They rea d charac ter with uner ring precision and justice -the self-satisfied wit, cheap though clever sarcasm, and Oxford 'side" of King; the weakness an. I peculiar susceptibility to suggestion of Prout, their own house-master; the gullibility of Bartopp, the natural historian; the cowardice of bullies, the ignorance of the good scholars and masters' pets. A year before the end of the course the three friends left the college, Beetle at the age of seventeen, to become subeditor of an Indian newspaper, his passage paid and a hundred pounds a year. Here again his ■- -Kipling's activities brougb.1 him face to face with facts, more and more with the seamy side. Ik- had wide opportunities for observation, and it was his business to observe and to report. He dealt, by profession, not with whai happened far away and long ago, bu1 with the world im- mediately about him. lie was immersed in its vivid details, in details all the more vivid because they were strange, because of the contrast with the English life of his school days, and because of his familiarity with them in childhood. It was a combination GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 115 peculiarly fitted to grip the attention, to stimulate the powers of observation — this recognition of the familiar in the strange, with the sharp contrast of utterly different civilizations, under conditions which inevitably brought out realities of character and swept all shams aside. The result of all this training was Realism, realism of the peculiar type practised by Kipling, a realism essentially orig- inal. His originality as realist — not his originality as romancer, which is quite a different matter — is of the sort advocated by Flaubert in his famous advice to the young Maupassant, an originality which consists wholly in seeing things for oneself and expressing what one really sees. This realism of Kipling's , is reflected in the representative character of his work, in the / wealth of details of time and place and people. I Yet Kipling] never collects details as a scientist does ; he is not seeking classi- fied or classifiable knowledge; he is not a meteorologist, or a geographer, or an ethnologist. It is for the pure joy of the working that he delights to "draw the Thing as he sees it for the God of Things as they are." He seeks, as he had sought as schoolboy and as journalist, facts that are in themselves humanly interesting or have some bearing upon a possible plot. He feels under no obligation to give uSi a complete or a precisely accurate picture of human life. "Get your facts first,'' Mark Twain once told him, "...and then you can distort 'em as much as you please." He seems to fol- low this advice. He limits himself to superlative characters ; he takes no interest in the commonplace ones, nor yet in the queer or the problematic. His representative quality is thus_ 116 KIPLING l ll I 8T0B1 WBITEM limited and ;i matter of accident. He did nol Bel ou1 to cover his field with scientific thoroughness and system. You cannol imagine his stories, like Balzac's novels, classified as Scenes from Private Life, Scenes from Parisian Life, from Country Life, from Military Life, and so on. Y<>n cannol imagine Kipling conceiving a large plan and working it ou1 on a Large scale, in a thoroughgoing manner. He lias rather the journ alist- novelist's desire for what will make interesting copy; hence his superlative characters, and his picturesquely evil ones as well. '■ Hence his social satire for what is social satire, after all. but a kind of glorified gossip, of artistic scandal.' Yet for all his preoccupation with the scandalous side of human nature, K ipling's art is never naturalism; his characters are always something more than animals, they have human motives and ideals; and Kipling is too much the Anglo-Saxon, to follow Zola or .Maupassant in their relentless pictures of the animal aspect of man. In the psychology of these characters Kipling is never inter ested for its own sake. It is with him. though always present, yet never the chief element in the story. Its purpose is rather to increase the intensity of the whole. He does not deal with difficult psychological problems, with peculiar or unusual motives. And he emphasizes the external expression of emotion by word and gesture. Here again his method is not the result of analysis or of introspection but of observation. In Structure, the resull of this observation is a wealth of minor incidents which crowd in too rapidly to permit themselves to be gathered up and organized into greal scenes. A further result is a certain incoherence. For Kipling, from the presenl point of view, may be classed with those realists who do not GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 117 impress themselves much upon the structure of their stories, who prefer rather to follow the waywardness of events in real life. It is because of the brevity of his stories that Kipling- does not wander very far. If the}' are not distinguished examples of proportion and coherence, they fulfil the other requirement of short-story structure, they are admirably con- crete. There is in them a wealth of significant detail, of characteristic gesture, of characteristic speech — the slang or jargon of various professions or walks in life. More dramatist than grammarian, he delighted rather to get up a particular vocabulary for this or that purpose, than to polish and correct his own style. In Stalky and Company Beetle's friends urged him not to be so "beastly professional" or so "filthy technical" in his talk. Kipling's readers sometimes echo this protest; for the special word is often unintelligible ; he achieves, not sim- plicity, but precision of style — a habit of the realists. When you read Zola you turn continually to your dictionary, and often in vain. Kipling 's Moral Interpretations keep close to the facts ; he is not given to speculation, to discovering new duties. He delights to emphasize the fact that many respectable people are bad (as many respectable people are aware). It is well that the}- should be reminded of their own shortcomings in order that they may judge less harshly the openly and honestly wicked. Doubtless his criticism of the English administration of India is sound enough ; in any case it is concerned wholly with practical prob- lems, not with such general questions as the duties of powerful nations with reference to the weak, for example; and he ex- presslj' condemns Aurelian McGoggin's preoccupation with the ethics of a Comte or a Spencer. 1 is KIPLING l II I si U7io Would b( King, or in Wit html Benefit of Clergy and stories of its class, does he seem to offer an escape manifestly qoI always an agreeable escape from fact. Mis own "problematic" personality, his early lark of ad justmenl to the world about him, is reflected in certain of the character-types which he creates. Mulvaney and Company have Hindi the same relation to officers and fellow-soldiers thai Stalky and Company have to masters and school-fellows. Only the Colonel understands one group; only the Head, the other. Both groups are irregular, highly individualized: their social func- tions are not easily classified. Yet they are not "queer" characters; they are merely superlative, idealized superstructure resting upon a solid basis of fact. This basis of fact is largely conveyed by vividly conjured up mental images, by a kind of imagination which is close to memory. In the variety of races represented there is something of that exotism which not uncommonly accompanies the romantic tendency. A phase or extension of the same principle is in- volved in Kipling's power of tempering his own mind to enter another's soul, be that other English officer or official or child, or native, man or woman. In the matter of Structure, it is manifest that the imagination of the journalist and writer of fiction has been at work in the perception and selection of facts, of such facts as are humanly interesting. The results of this imaginative observation are combined with imaginative spontaneity, with an unconsidered naturalness, which does not permit the reader's perception of form to stand in the way of his seeing, hearing, feeling with the writer, reflecting the mood of the story, answering not to an intellectual but to an emotional appeal. And while, in the GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 121 invention of plot, the imagination as a rule runs close to what may well have happened, it breaks free, now and again, from the world of observed or observable events and creates astound- ing adventures — serious or tragic, like those of the Man Who Would be King — comic, like those of Krishna Mulvaney. The third quality of Kipling's work, its intensity,, is more ' j striking than the other two, and perhaps more influential in the /^determination of his technique. Like his imaginative or roman- tic quality, it springs primarily from personality, from the problematic character of the writer. His early ill adjustment to the world about him led, as always with the strong and cour- ageous, to vigorous self-assertion. The greater the opposition / of the narrow Aunty Rosas and Masters of Latin, who do not comprehend, the greater the opposition of the "system" — - ■^ whether in the form of the boys' school, where Black Sheep was bullied by the sons of shop-keepers, or of the United Services College, or of the Pioneer, where Kipling learned that the busi- ness of a subeditor was to subedit, and that he had to obey an order on the run — whatever the form of the opposition to the young Kipling, the more powerful it was, the more powerful was the individuality which he perforce developed to resist it — "2»the more self-assertive, the more Kipling, he became. So that his very name has for some readers the air of a present parti- oiple, connoting the perpetual self-activity of the bearer. He shows, however, the marks of the struggle. We have already noted a certain cynicism as a phase of his sense of fact. As a phase of his intensity we should note a certain impatience of disposition, a natural irritability perhaps sharpened by the demands of journalism. This intense personality, intensified by the vicissitudes of his 122 KIPLING 7 /// 8T0B1 H /.'/ / / S training, Kipling was able to project into his work, so thai one in. iy quite safely affirm that of all short-stories in the English language Kipling's are the must intense. In every paragraph thai he wrote you feel bis vital energy. 8 h reveals itself in the general air of spontaneity, in a certain •in of tin' conventionalities of form 3 in the spontaneous over- flow "f Peelings evoKe3 by the story, in tli" vigorous appeal to the reader's sympathy. When Kipling is realistic or romantic he is intensely realistic or romantic. Thai is. it is the quality of intensity that raises realism and romance tn a degree so high; intensity that seems to compel the elaboration and determine the nature of every one of the elements id' narration. The time of action must he the present, for the situation must he new and vital, nut such as to call up tender regrel Cor the past, or any of the milder emotions with which we contemplate what is finished and pul away. It is significanl that there is in Baa Baa, Black Sin, /> no delight, no regret, no sentiment, in memories of childhood, bu1 only presenl indignation aroused by Aunty Rosa's criminal religiosity*. Presenl seems are intensely visualized. Paragraphs like those at the beginning of -1/ //>< End <>f tin Passag\ produce 7^a~ri ineradicable impression of the hardship of the hot season in India: and one feels, at the same time, the author's delighl in his selection of characteristic and suggestive detail. One feels too and shares his sympathy with the persons condemned to lead this life, or choosing to lead it rather than give way to others less able to endure its terrors. Kipling's intensity expresses itself in the choice of characters 2 "There is a lol of living devil in Kipling," said Stevenson. "It is his quick beating pulse that gives him a position very much apart. Even with his love of journalistic effect, there is a tide of life through it all." GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PEBIOD 123 — intensely, living, active, effective, self-assertive. The reader, again, is conscious of Kipling's sympathy with these persons, even in defiance of accepted morals ; and of his delight in his discovery of their characteristic gestures and their slang or jargon. Though, here, at times, one intensity clashes with another: Kipling's own personality shines too clearly through that of his creatures. Kipling delights to depict intense emotion — tragic or comic or sentimental; elemental emotions, which stand out clearly, require no hair-splitting analysis. Here his intensity often takes the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form of repression or belittling of emotion, resulting in those breaks in mood which are his chief defect. These are due also to an intense conviction of the reality of emotion, to a strong personal prejudice against anything like /V. sentiment, which would permit the enjoyment or the inducing Aof emotion for its own sake. You feel the intense personality of Kipling in every phase . of structure. You are convinced that he believes his own stories, that he is not merely playing with you or perforn^ig a tour de force. He openly asserts his own presence by the use of the pronoun of the first person, and by frequent comment ; and even when the story is purely dramatic in form, personality asserts itself in the emotional quality, as in The Gadsbys, or in implied moral interpretation, as in The Hill of Illusion. The intense realization of narrators and audience ; the connection of story and story by recurring characters, are further assertion of the author 's personality. The internal structure of Kipling's stories may be described as, in part, the result of the conflict of the author's intense per- sonality on the one side, and his intense sense of fact on the 124 hiri ING l HI 8T0B1 u l:l I I B other, a conflicl of subjective and objective, of Belf with the world outside. For though Kipling can, at will, make effective use of dramatic and impersonal methods, he is. in general, aeither severely dramatic aor severely impersonal. His oarra tive is. mi the cunt racy, highly personalized. He intervenes in his stories oo1 only to admonish, to comment, to take sides, hut als<, to explain, to put us in possession of accessary information, as regards character or antecedent action, by means of the highly undramatic method of summary. He has. moreover, qo prejudice againsl indirecl discourse — his version of the speeches instead of the speeches themselves, after the fashion of the drama. There are, again, traces of a conflicl between intensity and sense of form. For the impatience, the rapid personal rhythm , so to speak, of this intense character, is reflected in the sliced of the narrative — that is to say in the short sentences and crowd- ing minor incidents, in the hrevity of the events, in the prefer- ence of the movement of a scene to the immobility of a situation, in a ceitain0neoherence of method, a skipping about from one subject to another, in the general tendency to write anecdote or condensed long-story; to take the nearest way, which is sum- mary, rather than to translate painfully character and event into concrete detail, and withdraw, destroying all evidence of the presence of a workman. For summary has necessarily a per- sonal quality, since it requires and implies the intervention of the author. There is intense personality, finally, behind some of those offences against unity of tone which we have now so often considered. Thus Kipling sometimes asserts his own choice of words when Mulvaney or Ortheris should be speaking. He GENEEAL CHAEACTEBISTICS OF THE FIEST PEEIOD 125 asserts his own fear of sentiment in the sudden descents to the prosaic level. And it is the intensity of his own convictions concerning such matters as the English ignorance of India, that leads to the obnoxious presence of the Member for Lower Toot- ing in Without Benefit of Clergy? and to that bitterness of tone quite out of keeping with the dominant mood of the story. It is this same intensity of conviction that chiefly distin- guishes the moral interpretations and comments of the stories. You get the impression that Kipling has observed widely and felt deeply, not that he has reasoned carefully. His cocksure- ness whether right or wrong is prejudice, not science. His satire is marked by^_mtense antipathies, as to missionaries, M. P. 's, and respectable hypocrites. His humor, similarly, is marked by intense tolerance, as of Thomas Atkins, the junior subaltern, or the woman of the world. In a philosophy which is felt rather than reasoned, there are naturally contradictions; it is not sur- prising that Kipling should appear as advocate of The System, and at the same time glorify the self-assertion of the individual in conflict with it. Manifestly, then, in spite of the strong tendency to moralize, in spite of the variety and certainty of opinion which we found to be characteristics of Kipling's work, the main strength of his stories does not, by any means, lie in the moral significance. He has transcribed a vast deal of life, but he has found no clue to its meaning. /_The natural bent of his genius is observation, imag- ination, intensity, not thought, not intellect. This is not, of s If there is a basis of truth in the story of how the M. P. destroyed the cadet corps in Stalky and Company, it is not inconceivable that Kip- ling formed upon this incident his conception of members of parliament as incarnations of stupidity, ignorance, and bad taste. See also Little Foxes, and the verses concerning ' ' Pagett, M.P. ' ' 12 i B //'/./ M. I ll r 8T0B1 )i 1: 1 1 / B course, to say thai he is lacking in intellectual powers. He is a genius. Bui he is qoI ;i genius as thinker, or even as poel or oovelisl of the primarily intellectual type. This is merely to state the sufficiently obvious fad thai he is nol a Carlyle, an Emerson, a Goethe, a George Eliot. His genius does nol run to abstracl reasoning; oor does it run to thai other expression nt' intellect and judgment, to sense of form. I mean simply thai his special strength does not lie in form; I mean thai he is qo1 for sty] i, an Addison ; thai he is nol for structural technique, a Poe or a Stevenson or a Merimee or a Maupassant. The same forces which, in his character and in Ins education and training, mad'' for Realism, for Romance, !'<>r Intensity, made againsl Reason. Any school education must obviously aim primarily at tin' training nt' the intellect; bul some studies an' more abstracl than others, some appeal in high degree to tl motions. It is significanl that Beetle was a failure in mathematics and that he scorned natural history. Manifestly science not im- mediately applicable 1<> human life did not interest him. Nor did questions of conduct. " You know." said the school chap- lain, "'I don't talk alioui ethics and moral codes, because I don't believe that the young of the human animal realises what they mean for some years to come." And the beloved "Head," who was quite capable of setting an example by deeds of devotion and courage, once saving a hoy's life at the very greal risk of his own. even the beloved Head talked with the old hoys rather as man of tin- world than as an idealist in ethics. He "was father-confessor and agent-general to them all.... Young blood who had stumbled into an entanglemenl with a pastry-cook's daughter at Plymouth; experience who had come into a small legacy hut mistrusted lawyers; ambition halting at cross-roads, GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD 127 anxious to take the one that would lead him farthest; extrava- gance pursued by the money-lender; arrogance in the thick of a regimental row — each carried his trouble to the Head ; and Chiron showed him, in language quite unfit for little boys, a quiet and safe way round, out, or under." Manifestly this is not instruction in ethics, m principles of conduct, in ideals; it is merely a safe guide to respectability, to just the kind of sham- ming that Kipling delighted to expose when he found it in people of another type. Furthermore, the Head in his dealings with the boys frankly discarded consistency, legality, regularity, as shibboleths of small minds. He was never entangled in moral hesitations; and when Stalky and Company were technically innocent of wrong-doing, yet essentially guilty, he punished them vigorously. His notion was that if law and reason did not provide adequate means for a good end, the thing to do was to step outside law and reason and reach the end by any means that came to hand. The school chaplain encouraged the same kind of thing. It was with his connivance that Stalky and his friends stopped the bullying of a little boy — a highly desirable end, by torturing the bullies — a doubtful and manifestly illegal- means. In the last story of the book, Stalky, now an officer of the Indian army, accomplishes laudable results by similarly questionable tactics. If these stories of school life are in any sense true, they are exceedingly interesting accounts of the beginnings of that characteristic assertion of the individual against law, order, and The System. If, then, Kipling's early training seems to have made for vigorous action in a seemingly good cause rather than for power to estimate causes, for deeds rather than for thought, it made at the same time for the development of creative rather than 128 KIP1 ING l ill 8T0R1 WRITER of critical powers. The Head encouraged Beetle's efforts as editor of the college magazine and trained him for letters by turning him loose in his library and stimulating him to read and taste widely rather than critically. In the list already quoted there occurs bul one name associated primarily with perfection of form, the name of Dryden. Ami while the boys were compelled to study Horace and Virgil, there is nothing to show that they were aware of their beauties of form and style or desired to imitate them. Sense of form seems to have been restricted, with Beetle, to delighl in words, Ins "beastly profes- sional" or "filthy technical " talk: ami he delighted in King's vocabulary of invective, storing up adjectives for future use. However, we do find Beetle developing his art by practice in oral narrative controlled by the effect on his audience. A mas- ter heard him telling a story in the twilight in a whisper. And Orrin. a school-mate, said just as he opened the door, "Shut up Beetle; it's too beastly." Questioned afterward. Beetle ex- plained that he had go1 the notion from .Mrs. Oliphant's Beleaguered City. "Only." he went on. •'instead of a city I made it the College in a fog — besieged by idiosts of dead hoys, who hauled chaps out of their beds in the dormitory. All the names are quite real. You tell it in a whisper, you know with the uames. < >rrin didn't like it one little hit. None of 'em have ever let me finish it. It gets just awful at the end part." Here is the typical Kipling combination of imagination and fact, "all the nanus are quite real." and the place is the familiar dormi- tory. Here is the obvious device of saving the best for the end. And added to this, the typical intensity of effect, the desire to produce a sensation in the audience. If this is substantially true as autobiography, as an account of early practice, it is GENEEAL CHARACTERISTICS OE THE FIRST PERIOD \12'.i extremely interesting. And even as an account of the methods of the mature Kipling, aged thirty-two, it is very significant. Journalism again, the next step in Kipling's training, though an excellent school for the young writer, can hardly be calculated to develop the larger critical and intellectual powers or the sense of formal excellence. No subeditor, I judge, is precisely encouraged to form his own opinions. His business is rather to express the opinions of his paper or to form new ones of his own on the basis of its established principles. Such opinions must inevitably have something of the nature of snap judgments ; the}' cannot be the result of long deliberation, of careful collecting and weighing of evidence. Yet they must be set forth with emphasis, with an air of perfect certainty and assurance. They will concern themselves with a multitude of subjects, yet they will be limited to questions of the day, con- cerned with current events, with shop and gossip. They will be the swift judgments of a man immersed in the vivid details of actual life, political and social. They are likely to be some- what sensational, to savor of jingoism and the divorce court. I The subeditor, again, has not much time to ponder over I matters of form ; he must be interesting, he must be more or less / intelligible, his work must wear a semblance of truth. But "\inevitably he works for immediate and for temporary effects. He must write in the manner of the present moment; he must /avoid a "literary'' or a "classical" manner, or the higher levels I of prose. He must get up special vocabularies, the vocabulary \ of the art critic, the dramatic critic, the sporting editor, the I race-track reporter, the society reporter, writing in each case ' for a special audience, aiming to be intelligible to that audience, and paying it and himself the subtle compliment of being in- telligible to it alone. KIPLING I III 8T0B1 WBU I l: [nevitably habits acquired as subeditor will Leave their mark on the technique of the short-story writer, [nevitably his moral interpretation of Life can be summed up as we have summed up Kipling's. He satirizes respectable hypocrites, women, mar- riage; he is concerned with those who play tennis with the enth commandment, he is concerned with the English admin- istration of India in all its parts, with the English conflicl with the natives or with Russia. But he develops no moral system, no large general principles of conduct. "To do one's duty, to Live stoically, to Live cleanly, to live cheerfully," arc the old-fashioned virtues which, as Mr. Le Gallienne says, he "nobly enforces"; but, as we have seen, he expressly condemns any thoughtful questioning as to what one's duly may be. He condemns, in the same way, all discussion of theory and of technique. He is opposed to the attitude of the critic and the theorist. His distrust of their activities is clearly expressed in the "ballad" of The Conundrum of the Workshop, which implies that every man is a law unto himself. Let him produce, let him paint, let him write, and leave the critics to talk vainly and unintelligently of the aims of art and of its history and its eternal laws. It was characteristic that Irving, that Poe, that Stevenson, that Maupassant, should have left us theoretical and critical discussions of the technique of fiction and the work of their predecessors and contemporaries; it is characteristic that Kip- Ling should have nothing to say on these matters. In all his work there is scarcely a critical passage. You cannot construct for him, as you can from even Chaucer's obiter dicta, anything like an esthetic creed. He mentions, indeed, with admiration the descriptive powers of Zola and Poe. He writes of his GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OE THE FIRST PERIOD 131 enthusiasm for Mark Twain. He praises the rhythm of Bret Harte's prose. There is, indeed, a significant sentence in From Sea to Sea which does imply study of form: "A writing-man," he says, "who plays with shadows and dresses dolls that others ma}' laugh at their antics, draws help and comfort and new methods of working old ideas from the stored shelves of a library." Yet he may, even here, have been thinking of the practice of writing-men other than himself. And there is no other evidence that he was given to contemplation of methods, and none whatever that he regarded form as an essential element. Those shortcomings in the matter of form, to which attention has been already called, are then natural enough. Formal excellence is with Kipling not a matter of sustained effort, of large planning, of the architecture of the whole. His special excellences are, precisely, not "proportion, fitness, coherence, harmony, and the like. ' ' Nor is there in his work any persistent /> attack on the special problems of short-story technique. Writ- I ing as a journalist he avoids subtleties, he utters direct comments \ and explanations and so spares his readers the trouble of draw- ing inferences. On the contrary, he hits them hard, knocks them down, chokes them with emotion. Writing for temporary £ effects, he does not concern himself with the things that are not noticed in a single rapid reading. Hence the familiar fail- ure to hold the proper level of tone or impression or style, the curious descents to prose, the strange false connotations, by means of which Kipling contrives to belittle an impressive story as he tells it. And so, while he fulfils admirably enough the short-story requirement of a sufficient and impartial elaboration of all the elements of narration, Kipling falls short of complete translation of these elements into concrete and suggestive terms, L32 KIPLING I ill 8T0B1 n Ell I i; falls shorl in the construction of the storj as a whole, and in the construction of greal scenes. And while thanks perhaps mainly to temperament, he preserves well enough the unities of time and place and action, he sometimes Tails in the matter <>\' unity of tone or impression. These are the qualities and defects of a genius whose natural bent, accentuated by training, is Sense of Pact, Imagination, Intensity, rather than Reason and Judgment. PAET TWO THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION In 1891 Kipling left England for a voyage to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Ceylon, and thence to visit his parents in Lahore. His biographers record no other return to India. After his arrival in England he was married to Miss Balestier of New York. After a visit to Japan, Mr. and Mrs. Kipling established their home at Brattleboro, Vermont, where they lived from August, 1892, to September, 1896. Dur- ing these four years Kipling made three visits to England to see his parents, who had left India. Many Inventions, begun in 1890, was completed and published in 1893 ; The Jungle Booh was published in 1894, The Second Jungle Book in 1895. 't* i IIAI'TEK V THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE To call the sec I period a period of transition is not to imply that the others, as well, were not periods of transition. All through the first period Kipling's narrative art was under going changes which become evident as we place tht volumes in chronological order, or as we compare the last, Life's Handicap, with the first. Plain Tales from tin Mills. It is not surprising that some development should be visible when we remember that, when Lift 's Handicap was published. Kipling was but twenty-six. %/ On the whole he remains loyal to India and to his own people; Aral after leaving India, by force of reminiscence, so that some of the later stories mark the beginning of the habit of dealing with a remembered land and people, rather than those in his immediate field of vision. Extend this habit to the use of the memory of others, to national memory, and the door is opened to the com- bination of past and present peculiar to the later Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewar ds and Fairies. Similarly, such a story as Without Benefit of Clergy, with its romantic, side by side with its realistic, aspects, offers an escape from life, thus beginning a tendency which reaches its climax in VThey." Again, the last two stories in Life's Handicap extend Kipling's sympathetic understanding to the ape and the elephant, thus preparing the THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE 135 way for the Jungle Books. In no significant story, however, does the scene shift from India or deal with persons other than Anglo-Indians. (/There is no observable tendency to develop new character- types, or to depict more complex personalities, and no evidence of greater grasp of character. There is no visible increase in profundity of study of emotion and motive. tA/"There is, however, a certain decrease in the personal quality foi the narrative. The author appears less f requentlyj and more subtly ; there is less attempt at flattering self-portraiture ; and mannerisms grow less frequent and less marked ; ' ' That is an- other story" disappears altogether. The tales grow steadily longer and more elaborate. The memorable stories, the stories commonly included in collections of specimens, and on the whole the best short-stories, are to be found in the later volumes. There can be, of course, no general agreement as to which the best stories arc But in general it can be roughly stated that Plain Tales, Soldiers Three, Black and White, and Under the Deodars contain nothing equal to The Man Who Would be King (in The Phantom 'Rickshaw), to Wee Willie Winkle (in the collection of that name), or to The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, The Man Who Was, Without Benefit of Clergy, On Greenhow Hill, At the End of the Passage, The Mark of the Beast, and The Return of Imray — all in Life's Handicap. Whatever views we may hold in regard to individual stories, we must admit that Life's Handi- cap marks a general advance in narrative art beyond the earlier volumes. And we can bring home and illustrate that advance by the comparison of later with earlier treatments of similar themes of, for example, Without Benefit of Clergy with Beyond L36 KIPLING I III 8T0BI \\ EITEE th< Pale, a story In Plain Tales, which deals with the union of an Englishman with a native woman. Tl arlier story has more cruelty and less pathos, Less of the ideal quality, oothing of the Bentimenl of heroism, self-sacrifice, and domesticity, of the later. Ami the earlier has a much less complex technique; it is. one mighl say, anecdote in a state of transition to short- iry. We have noted the beginnings of the "suggested short- story," the type of tale in which certain details of action and dialogue are given, from which the reader is expected to con- struct the story or the situation itself. Examples were Kid napped, and To B< Filed for Ueferena {Plain Tales), Th( If ill of Illusion (Under //>• Deodars), and His Majesty th< King (Wet W'illit Win/, it . These are mere beginnings; and the trick is nut carried further in Lifi 's Handicap; but it is to be in later periods, and these early experiments should be kept in mind. V/ The same thing is t rue of the habil of telling stories in slang or jarL'-on, which is at times so highly specialized as to be unintelli- gible to the uninitiated reader. The most striking examples are s, to be found in /'lain 'I'ahs; Life's Handicap clearly makes con- cession to an English audience. The tendency decreases, then. but it does not die out, and in the later periods asserts itself with renewed vigor. 1 Mural interpretation, finally, is more subtly managed. While passing comment does nol cease, the formulated and detachable moral does. The later stories do not begin, like the earlier, with a text. There is less preoccupation with Anglo-Indian Society, less tennis with the seventh commandment. There is a tendency for Humor, with its more human and kindly attitude, to dis- THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE 137 place Satire, with its love for the seamy side and its violent antipathies. Yet satire does not, by any means, disappear. J On the whole, if one had the misfortune to be forced to 4nm up the tendencies of the first period in a single formula, one might venture to say that an increase in imagination was observable, a slight increase in sense of form, together with a decrease in the intensity of self-assertion, and the beginning of a new freedom from an overpowering sense of fact. — ^ In the second period these tendencies become more marked, and several important new ones take their rise. So great, indeed, are the changes, that it can be justly characterized as a Period of Transition. Only three volumes are concerned— twenty-nine stories. The first of these volumes is Many Inven- tions. It contains some admirable stories; but to the student of Kipling's art it is mainly interesting as forming the connecting link between the first period and the third. For, of the fourteen stories, three look mainly backward toward the earlier manner; three are Janus-faced, looking both forward and back ; and the remaining eight look mainly forward, more or less definitely preparing the way for what is to come. The scene of all three of the backward-looking stories is laid in India; all of them deal with the Army. The Lost Legion is the story of how a detachment of English cavalry was aided in making a capture by the ghosts of a lost native regiment, which had gone over to the enemy at the time of the Mutiny and had been destroyed by the natives who remained true to the English. Love o' Women and His Private Honor are the last, of the Soldiers Three stories. 1 i There are but faint shadows of Ortheris and Mulvaney in Garm {Actions and Reactions). 138 KIPLING THE STORY WRITES, The last, thai is, excepl the intensely amusing Mulvaney Story of My Lord thi Elephant, which harks hack to various Mulvaney stories and to the elephanl story of Moti Guj, Muti- neer (in Life's Handicap), yel prepares the way, by its more careful study of the psychology of the elephant, for the Jungle Books. Thus it is, as Mulvaney calls the elephant. Double Ends, or in the more classical metaphor, Janus-faced. In the two other stories of the sorl the scene is, for tin- firs! time. Laid in London. But .1 Conferenci of thi Power s jdeals wholly with army life in India: a group of young officers meet in Kipling's rooms and astonish a veteran English novelist by their stories of adventure, thus harking back to the earlier subaltern stories. And Om V'niv of thi Question is a letter, written from the Northbrook Club, London, by Shafiz Ullah Khan to his friend Ka/.i Jamal-ud-Din in India, pointing out the defects of the English and their government. It continues the studies of the English from the native point of view, begun in Lispeth, and comes much close]' to the original tradition represented by the Turkish Spy, Voltaire's L'Ingenu, and Addison's Four Indian Kings. In a later story, .1 Sahib's War (Traffics and Discov- eries), Kipling once more criticizes English affairs from an outsider's point of view. Of the stories in Muni; Inn ntions which look mainly forward — first experiments in motifs, characters, or methods, which were to he developed later on — The Finest Stori/ in the World deals with the reincarnation, as a London banker's clerk, of" a man who had been successively a Greek galley slave and a Viking oarsman. It thus prepares the way for Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fair'ns. A Matter of Fact, the tale of a sea- monster and an American reporter, is Kipling's first definite THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE 139 attack in fiction on the American character. Both these are, like On Greenhow Hill and The Man Who Would be King, stories of stories. The Children of the Zodiac is the first experi- ment in allegory. The Disturber of Traffic looks back to the studies in pathological psychology, but mainly forward as the first of the stories to deal with mechanical devices and to personify ships. In Judson and the Empire the mechanical part is a little more elaborate. Brugglesmith and Badalia Herodsfoot, studies of low life in London, are in a vein which, fortunately, was to be worked no further. Brugglesmith, how- ever, is interesting as introducing 2 the character of McPhee, the chief engineer of the Breslau, who tells the story of Bread Upon flic Waters in The Day's Work. In the Eukh is, finally, from the historical point of view, the most interesting tale in the vol- ume, for it is the first of the Jungle stories. It has to do with the wooing and marriage of Mowgli, thus introducing him at a later age than that at which he appears in the Jungle Books. But he has the same habits, the same power over the animals, the same natural virtues, and the same — or more than the same — charm. He enters the story like a naked god, Faunus him- self, "crowned with a wreath of the tasselled blossoms of the white convolvulus creeper." He commended himself to Gis- borne, the warden of the Forest, by "his strength, fleetness, and silence of foot, and his ever-ready open smile ; his ignorance of all forms of ceremony and salutations, and the childlike tales that he would tell ... of what the game was doing in the rukh." Again, there is a note in the prose style, a suggestion of beauty and rhythm, uncommon in the earlier stories. For example : 2 Unless he is the unnamed chief engineer "who told the story of The Lang Men o' Larut (Life's Handicap). L40 KIPLING l 111 8T0B1 117,7/ / B 'Then came the Rains with a roar, and the rukh was blotted out in fetch after Eetch of warm mist, and the broad Leavea drummed the oighl through under the big drops; and there was a noise of running water, ami of juicy green stuff crackling where the wind struck it. ami the Lightning wove patterns behind the dense matting of the foliage till the sun broke loose again ami the rukh stood with hot tlanks smoking to the newly washed sky.*' Bu1 the style does not hold this Level. It descends as of old to shop and jargon and the jerky emphasis. Even the godlike Mowgli speaks "with a grin." Ami even the godlike Mowgli is swallowed up in the great English system and In comes, under Gisborne, a paid member of the Forest Service, sborne himself, although he is an unusual Kipling hero, hold- ing it a sin to kill even the wild animals of the jungle unless there was need, is. of course, before all else a devoted official, enduring like Bummil and his friends in Ai ih< End of tin Possogel solitude, hardships and privation, too deeply interested in work to think of luxuries. The System itself is expounded and praised in the opening disquisition, beginning, "Of the wheels of public service that turn under the Indian Govern- ment, there is none more important than the Department of Woods ami Forests." The succeeding information, in regard to the activities and way of life of its members, and their wisdom, is all implied in the story that follows. Hut Kipling, accordinir to his old habit, must comment and explain. And he must. as usual, make his villain a respectable hypocrite: Abdul Gafur, • •rue's butler and the father of the girl whom Mowgli weds, is a thief and a coward and would-be murderer, who looks down on .Mowgli because of his lack of caste and manners. Mowgli himself is prepared to carry on the tradition of the alien critic. THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE . HI to comment on civilization from the point of view of the natural man. Observing Gisborne's simple household arrangements, "So much trouble to eat," he says, "and so much trouble to lie down after } t ou have eaten!" The directness of his wooing recalls that of Voltaire's Ingenu. As critic of civilization he is to go much further in the Jungle Book stories. Of these stories Kipling seems, characteristically, to have a foreknowledge. They are to account for that special hatred of the tiger, to which Mowgli here gives utterance. And they are to elaborate what he tells Abdul -Gafur's daughter of his life: I was a wolf among wolves ... till a time came when Those of the jungle bade me go because I was a man. . . . The beasts of the jungle bade me go, but these four [wolves] followed me because I was their brother. Then was I a herder of cattle among men, having learned their language. . . . The herds paid toll to my brothers till a woman . . . saw me playing by night with my brethren in the crops. They said that I was possessed of devils, and drove me from that village with sticks and stones. . . . From village to village I went, ... a herder of cattle, a tender of buffaloes, . . . but there was no man that dared lift a finger against me twice." "Mowgli," says Kipling in Tiger! Tiger! "years afterward became a man and married. But that is a story for grown- ups" — the story, that is, that we have just been considering. The stories of the Jungle Books, then, deal with the childhood and youth of Mowgli and were written primarily not for grown- ups but for children. In the first and second Jungle Books there are in all fifteen stories. Only eight of them deal with Mowgli and the jungle. They are not, in the earlier editions, arranged in chronological order. An attempt at such an arrangement is necessary for a proper understanding of the technique of the individual stories. I 12 KIPLING I II I: si OBI WBI1 I B The firsl Btory, Mowgli's Brothers, tells how Mowgli escaped Shere Kahn the tiger, came to the cave of the wolves, was accepted by them, and Introduced to the wolf-pack. The events of two Later stories precede the end of Mowgli's Brothers: Kaa's Hunting relates how Mowgli was stolen by the liandar-log, tin* monkey folk, taken to Cold Lairs, and saved in a splendid fighl by his friends Baloo, the boar, Uaghoera, the panther, and Kaa, the python, whom the Kite had told of his predicament. Ilmr Fear Cann is a "Pourquoi," a '"How" or "Why" story, in which, when peace had been proclaimed because of a great drouth and all the animals were gathered by the river, Ilathi the elephant, master of the Jungle, told how the tiger was marked with his stripes by the plants and creepers as a punish- ment for killing the first buck. These are the main events of the years of Mowgli's education in the lore of the jungle by his friends Baloo and Bagheera. They are followed by the conclusion of the first story, Mowgli's Brothers, which tells how Akela. the leader of the wolf-pack, was deposed, Shere Kahn claimed Mowgli as his prey, and Mowgli broke with the pack and frightened his enemies with fire. Tiger! Tiger! takes up the thread at this point. Mowgli went to a village, was adopted by a family which had lost a son in the Jungle, showed that he knew more about the wild animals than Buldeo, the hunter of the village, and so made him his enemy. He was set to herding cattle. Learning from his faithful brothers of the wolf-pack that Shere Kahn was hunting for him, Mowgli with the help of the wolves divided the herd, and sent half up and half down a deep ravine where Shere Kahn was sleeping. trampling him to death. Buldeo, the hunter, found the body and claimed the skin, until Akela came to Mowgli's aid. Where- THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE 143 fore Mowgli on his return to the village, was stoned and driven off. He went back to the wolf -pack with the tiger's skin, and they wished him to lead them. But he preferred to hunt alone. Letting in the Jungle continues this episode, and tells how Mowgli avenged himself on the villagers, who had stoned him and bound and condemned to death his foster-parents, and also on Buldeo, who had gone out to kill him, by persuading his friends the elephants to destroy the village. Then follow two episodes which cannot be definitely placed. One is the story of The King's Ankus, the tale of the jewelled elephant-goad which Mowgli took from Cold Lairs, and which, as the cobra said, was death, since it caused the killing of six men before Mowgli re- turned it to the treasure-vault. The other episode is the story of the Reel Dog, beasts feared by all the jungle. At Kaa's sug- gestion Mowgli led them, pursuing him, among the bees, he himself leaping over a cliff into the river where Kaa awaited him. Most of the Dhole, or Red Dog, were destroyed by the bees ; the rest met their fate further down the river where Mowgli with his knife and the wolves awaited them. In this splendid battle Akela, the old leader of the pack, was slain. The Spring Run- ning, finally, is not a story at all but rather a psychological study, a kind of Pervigilium Veneris of the Jungle, showing how one spring, two years after the Red Dog episode, when Mowgli was seventeen, his fancy turned to thoughts of his own kind. It prepares the way for In the Rukh. The Mowgli stories may then be regarded as the chapters of the romance of Mowgli. The division of the whole into stories does not follow the natural divisions of the narrative : for some stories contain more, some less, than a single episode, ^.nd some are organic parts of the whole, while others are con- ill E1P1 IM, I III 8T0B1 R in i hi: nected only by the presence of the same characters, springing from nothing thai precedes, leading to nothing thai follows. Some of the individual stories are, indeed, admirably constructed and fulfil, in this respect, short-story requirements. Kaa's Hunting, for example, is excellently pu1 together, is character- ized by well elaborated, distinct, and organic scenes, by the stirring battle, with admirable details of action and effective suspense, between the python and the monkeys at Cold Lairs, surpassing the besl battle pieces of the earlier stories. Tigerl Tiger! too. is an admirable piece of short-story architecture. And Hed Dog has an excellent battle — though somewhat long drawn out — with telling suspense, and a well managed intro- ductory informational incident. But most of the Jungle stories lack this excellence of structure. Mowgli's Brothers, for ex- ample, has a gap between jts two scenes wherein two tales can be placed. How Fea/r Ca/nn and The Spring Running can scarcely be regarded as short-stories at all. Neither better nor worse in structure than the others, and fairly typical of the whole group of Mowgli stories, is The King's Ankus. It is significant also because it illusl rates certain of the literary relationships of these tales, and because it offers opportunity for comparison with Chaucer's masterly handling of the same motif. It is peculiarly interesting as carrying on the tradition of the folk tale or miirch< >i, which crops out again and again from the beginning to the end of the history of the short-story. Kipling, by his own account, got some of his stories from "women spinning outside their cottages in the twilight." Beyond doubt he got this one from such a source, thus dipping once more into the great stream of oral tradition which had been flowing steadily on. out of sight and for the most part forgotten. THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE 14.1 since long before the Middle Ages. Though it is in a manner new to Kipling, a manner different from that of In the Rulh, from that of all the Many Inventions, from that of all the earlier volumes, with no glimpse of Anglo-Indian Society or Thomas Atkins or the English Administration, yet it is in a manner far older than Kipling, in the oldest manner of prose tale in the world, the manner of the tale told to children — modified, it must be admitted, but by no means transformed, by the insistent genius of the modern author. Of a technique originally con- trolled by the childish audience, it reckons on unquestioning belief, summoning no German scientist, like Muller in In the Rukh, to prove its truth. It makes continual appeal to its hearers: Cold Lairs, the deserted city "of which you may have heard"; "His eyes were as red as rubies, and altogether he was most wonderful" ; "The first thing to do . . . is to cast forward without leaving your own confusing footmarks on the ground." It is thus that by personal appeal the oral narrator seeks to hold the child 's attention. • •sS^The technique, however, of the story for children has passed under the more vigorous control of Kipling. The time of the action is brought forward, as by a temporal telescope, into the vivid present ; and it is not a matter of a generation, but of two days. Place, too, has lost the vagueness of the old marchen ; yet it retains something of the old mystery, the mystery of the depths of the jungle, and of the ruined city, decay of ancient splendor, vast wealth and gorgeous jewels of the cobra's hoard; suggestive in one way or another of the Old English poems of The Ruin and the Beowulf, as the gorgeous palaces mysteriously hidden in the depths of great forests, are suggestive of marchen and lai. 1 16 KIPLING THE 8T0B1 WRITES, [ntimate association, on a footing of equality, with the lower animals, again, is a habit of folk-tale society. Only here the situation is reversed. For where in the folk tale one or two animals are permitted to enter human society, here a human being, by special favor, is permitted to share the society of the beasts. 8 Bui they have the old powers of teaching, helping, and guiding the young hero. It is, as we Learn from other tales, Baloo the bear who has general supervision of Mowgli'a educa- tion. Kaa. however, instructs him in the "manly art of self- defense," in wrestling, and swimming. Jt is Kaa, who had saved him from the Bandar-log, who now Leads him to Cold Lairs and the hidden treasure, and conies to Ins aid surely and swiftly in the struggle with the White Cobra. After the win- ning of the Ankus, Mowgli turns to his friend ISa^hccra the panther, a specialist in the art of following a trail, who knows more than he. of the ways of men. tells him what the ankus was made for, and gently insists upon his learning the worst of its influence upon wicked man. No small part, of the charm, as in all the Jungle stories, depends on this appeal to the sentiment of friendship by these instances of swift mutual comprehension, trust, loyalty, and forbearance. ■^Kipling's powers of observation assert themselves as usual and give the settings an air of reality, an immediacy of effect, which is characteristically lacking in the folk tale. It is a very real python with whom Mowgli wrestles and swims in the forest pool. And there is a self-conscious esthetic sense, foreign of course to the march i n, in such a sentence as: "They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the 3 There is a suggestion of the old werewolf superstition in Mowgli 's relation to the wolves. THE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE 147 beautiful, statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again." And there are typical bits of Kipling's erudition in Mowgli's knowledge of the fact that toes widely spread signify fast run- ning, and that the mark of a small foot and something dragged beside it mean a Gond hunter with his bow. There are touches of artistic, non-popular, description again, in the trail that led "in and out through the checkers of the moonlight," or in the light that "dropped down into the darkness" from the broken roof of the treasure-vault. Here I should say, however, that Kipling 's specific verb is inferior to Poe 's ' ' the dark high turret- chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead," or even to the Anglo-Saxon poet's and Tenny- son's "long light shakes across the lakes," for the effect of sunlight on the ruffled surface of water. As for Mowgli, he is a hero more typical of the folk tale than of Kipling. He is, indeed, of a very special popular type of the "innocent," like the youthful Beowulf, like Parsifal "der reine Thor, " like Tyolet, in the lai of Marie de France. For as Tyolet, brought up in ignorance of the world of men, does not know what a knight is, so Mowgli asks the cobra, "What is a King?" He has the innocent's content, the content of simple wishes easily gratified, of the natural man closely allied to the beasts of the forests formed to feed on the joy of living, "to seek and find and feast," untroubled by care or doubt. For him money is but the stuff they play with in the Man Pack, indiffer- ently brown or yellow. The jewelled ankus pleases him because it offers a satisfactory grip, or has, when it glistens in the sunlight, almost the beauty of a bunch of new flowers to stick in his hair. Yet Mowgli is endowed with positive and ideal 1 in KIPLING l III >/"/.') n //// / S qualities. A tenderness of heart bids him fling away the ankus, when he learns its cruel use; he is Bhocked at its fearful ven- geance upon m< ii. and returns it to the cobra. He himself will never kill, save for food. He shows calm courage in the encounter with the cobra; and he has the special savage virtue, of courtesy ami good temper: for "he carried his manners with his knife, and thai never left him": and in wrestling with Kaa, he has learned to take ;i hard fall with Laughter. All in all he approaches the Rousseau ideal: he is conceived as the natural man. an animal taught by brother animals in their own virtues. Tie- moral of the Story thus lies in his contrast with man more or h'ss civilized, lies in his arraignment of "civilized" society. Ik- says i" Bagheera: "We do nut desire what men desire" we shall imt kill one another for wealth, the root of all evil. In Mowgli, thai is. we mee1 once more the "alien critic" tradition. Like Hiddigeigei and Riquet, he criticises man from the animal's point of view. "They have no manners, these men folk.'* he saw. when in Ti>/ prose levels; there is no change in lone so greal a-> the shifts t'l-oin pathos to hitter satire in the earlier stories. Ii is rather thai Kipling pauses aow and then to insert a bit of explanation or instruction, betraying an anxiety to improve as well as to entertain an audience of children. Yet, as we have seen, this is a fixed habit of Kipling's. Although he is will- ing at times in be so technical as to be unintelligible, he insists. at others, in explaining where no explanation is necessary; in the Jungli Hooks, the personal note is less insistent in these explanations. In general, in evident carefulness of workman- ship, in restraint, in unity of tone and style, in delicacy, in freedom from mannerism, the Jungle stories show a distinct advance over all the work that preceded them. Although, so far as Moral Interpretation is concerned, there is something of the old cynical realism in the unflattering com- parison of man with the beasts, yet it is always mainly on the more agreeable side that the emphasis falls, on the ideal quali- ties, that is, with which the beasts are endowed. If, in the earlier stories, he emphasizes to a certain extent those qualities which men share with the lower animals, in these stories he emphasizes in the lower animals the presence of qualities which are ordinarily supposed to be the peculiar possession of men. In a word, in his treatment of animal heroes, he is not animal- istic. The stories reveal not so much "hunger, thirst, lust, cruelty, vanity, sloth, predacity, greed," as wisdom, loyalty. courage, courtesy, good temper, fixity of purpose (as contrasP ,1 IRE TRANSITIONAL TECHNIQUE 157 with the Bandar-log), obedience to law. To the law of the jungle, that is; in only one story is the law of man involved, in Her Majesty's Servants; who, it is said, "obey as men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant," and so on, up to the brigadier, "who obeys his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress," as in the creed outlined in The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin. The rhyme at the beginning of the Second Jungle Book seems to be Kip- ling's summary of the principal moral to be drawn from the work as a whole : Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is — Obey! c^>The general tendencies of the second or transition period may be summed up as a general drift away from realism and from adherence to fact, in the direction of romance and of the freer play of the imagination! It is significant, for example, that In the Rukh, the first Jungle story, reveals Mowgli in his relations with the Anglo-Indian world; whereas the stories of the Jungle Books detach him complete!}' from that world and reveal him in his relations with his friends the animals, under conditions which are, of necessity, wholly imaginary. Thus in place of the real and prosaic India, we have the mysterious and romantic heart of the Jungle, in place of the Anglo-Indians, Baloo and Bagheera and Kaa and the wolf-pack. The world of the White Seal and the world of Quiquern, the Esquimau, are further imaginative creations of places and dramatis personac. Kipling is disposed, moreover, to insist less and less on the real or natural 158 EIPL1 VG I III 8T0BI W BITER qualities of his characters, to idealize them more and more, so thai here also imagination has free play. He descends, so to speak, still lower than the beasts, finds romance in machinery, and begins the personification of ships. A«rain, he now departs from his own time, and ventures upon an imaginative reconstruc- tion of the past, in the extremely significant Finest Story in tin World. There is evidence, too, in addition to this freer play of the imagination of a new interest in matters of form. There arc twO novelties in this way: allegory, in Tin Children of ih< Zodiac, and m'drcln », the tale of the marvelous told for children, marked by a new effort to hit and to hold a certain level of style or manner. And in general, with the slower movement of the Jungle tales, goes greater artistry, a greater restraint, a far less obvious persona] note, a greater refinement and delicacy of treatment. Realism, then, the insistence on the observed fact, and Inten- sity, the intervention of the author in Ins own person, diminish, and permit a corresponding growth in Imagination and Sense of Form. • 1 PART THREE THE ENGLISH PERIOD Kipling with his family spent the winter of 1897-1898 in South Africa. Returning to England in the spring of 1898, he took a house at Rottingdean, near Brighton, with the inten- tion of making it his permanent home. In January, 1899, he sailed with his family to America. In New York he was attacked by a cold which developed into pneumonia. It was feared that he might not recover. Meantime his two daughters had fallen ill with the same disease, which for the elder, aged six, terminated fatally. The family returned to England in June. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the most distinguished work in the field of idealistic tendency." He continues to live at Rottingdean. During this period he has published The Day's Work (1891-1898), Stalky and Com- pany (1897-1900), Just So Stories (1897-1903), Traffics and Discoveries (1901-1904), Puck of Pook's Hill (1905-1906), Actions and Reactions (1909), and Rewards and Fairies (1910). CIIAI'TKK VI THE SETTINGS •^•Jii tin- third period, which for the present closes naturally with 1910 Kipling's forty-fifth year developmenl still con- tinues. Yi t it is to be regarded primarily as a time of final achievement, when the tendencies and characteristics which we have been studying reach a kind of culmination. Only half a dozen of the seventy-four stories of this period hark hack to India. In another half dozen Kipling extends his empire td the sea; in a third six. to South Africa. Only three, I think, have America as background, ^fhe scene of all. or nearly all, of the others, is laid in England. So far. thru, as geography is concerned, the discover}- of England is the dis- tinguishing mark of Kipling's latest work.] - It is all based on observation.! His imagination does not again carry him outside his own field of vision, as it did in Quiquem and Thi Whitt Seal of the .Jmu/h Hooks. [lis descrip- tions have all the old vividness. An American may test their accuracy by examining those which deal with landscape familiar to him: "Yon must go down by the brook that feeds the clicking, bubbling water-ram; up through the sugar bush, where the young maple undergrowth closes round yon like a shallow sea; next follow the faint line of an old county-road running pasl two green hollows fringed with wild rose that mark the cellars of two ruined houses; then by Lost Orchard, where nobody ever THE SETT IS GS 161 comes except in cider-time ; then across another brook, and so into the Back Pasture. Half of it is pine and hemlock and spruce, with sumach and little juniper bushes, and the other half is grey rock and boulder and moss, with green streaks of brake and swamp." And you know where that Back Pasture is; for with absolute sureness of imaginative selection, Kipling has seized upon the characteristic details of the New England landscape. Again : " It 's a kindly, softly country there, back of Philadelphia among the German towns, Lancaster way. Little houses and bursting big barns, . . . and all as peaceful as Heaven." There, of an autumn morning, "you roll out o' your blanket and find every leaf left green overnight turned red and yellow, not by trees at a time, but hundreds and hundreds of miles of 'em, like sunsets splattered upside down, . . . the maples . . . flaming scarlet and gold, . . . the sumach bushes . . . redder." What strikes one at once as new in these descriptive passages is the insistence upon beauty ; and, in the second one, at least, where Brother Square Toes speaks, sense of beauty mingled with passionate regret for a happy and care-free youth spent in those scenes. It is not, of course, wholly new. You may find the same note, or something like it, in some of the earlier Indian stories, but with a vast difference in tone that admirably illustrates the contrast between Kipling at twenty- five and at forty-five : "Summer evenings in the country, — stained-glass window, — light going out, and you and she jamming your heads together over one hymn-book," said Mottram. "Yes, and a fat old cockchafer hitting you in the eye when you walked home. Smell of hay, and a moon as big as a bandbox sitting on the top of a haycock; bats, — roses, — milk and midges," said Lowndes.i i At the End of the Passage. L62 KIPL1 \ G I HE STOBI 117.7/ /• /,' It is in description of just this English Landscape thai sense of beauty, that sentiment, have Ereesl play in the final period. The young subaltern, hack from India, finds thai "there's n<> place like England when you've dune yum- work.'' "Not a thing changed," tie sighed contentedly, when the three of them sat down to dinner in the late sunlight, while the rabbits crept out u] the lawn below the cedars, and the big trout in the ponds by the borne paddock rose for their evening meal. ".. .Beyond were "the round-bosomed woods ... where the white pheasant boxes were ranged; and the golden air was full of a hundred sacred scents and Bounds. Again, in My Sunday at Home, Kipling gives direct expression to his own persona] feeling; It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English May-day. The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature was setting its face with the shadows of the horse chestnuts towards the peace of the coming night. But there were hours yet I knew — long, long hours of the eternal English twilight — to the ending of the day. I was well content to be alive — to abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate, ... and to love my country with the devotion that three thousand miles of intervening sea In inn to fullest flower. Ami what a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, ami washes land! A man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and security than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford. Ami the joy was that it was all mine [ in |alienaldy — groomd hedgrow, spotless road, decent greystone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree. A light puff of wind — it scattered flakes of may over the gleaming rails — gave me a faint whiff as it might have been of fresh cocoanut, and I knew that the golden gorse was in bloom somewhere out of sight. Here, as in the earlier descriptions of India, power of observa- tion, of seizing upon what is characteristic, is largely the result of sense of differences. It is the three thousand miles of inter- vening sea that hrin, I II I ST0B1 n l:l I EB in narrative terms. Elizabeth, Green tells us, was an accom- plished scholar : speaking Eor herself in Kipling's pages she says: "Norgem village loyally entertains her with... a Latin oration spoken by the parson, for whose false quantities, if I'd made 'em in my girlhood, L should have been whipped. . . . She stomachs the affront to her scholarship." "A graceful dancer," says Green; she would ■■dance a coranto that the French am- bassador, hidden dextrously behind ;i curtain, mighl report her sprightliness to Ids master.*' And Kipling: "'She took off her cloak slowlv, and stood forth in dove-colored satin, worked over with pearls that trembled like running water in the running shadows of the trees. ... She swam into a majestical dance of the stateliest balancings, the haughtiesl wheelings and turnings aside, the mosl dignified sinkings, the gravest risings, all joined together by the elaboratest interlacine; steps and circles." Thus one mighl go through Green's exposition, matching each gen- eralization with an illustration from Kipling. Gloriana, of course, cannot reveal the whole of her many-sided character to Dan and l*na : yel it is marvelous how many of her traits she does contrive to express. Some of the obscurer persons who may or may not be his- torical, are still more interesting; for in their evocation the author works with a freer hand: Hal o' the Draft, an architect of Henry Vll*s day; Kadmiel, the Spanish .lew, who dictated one of the laws and forced the signing of Magna Charta : Parnesius, the centurian'; the "^od" Tyr, who, to protect Ids people's sheep from the wolves, gave his right eye for the first knife seen on the Downs, and so won his godhead; Tobias Hirte, the famous Seneca Oil man, a kindly Philadelphian of Wash- ington's time. In the stories of Hugh the Saxon and Richard CHABACTEBS AND PSYCHOLOGY L7.3 the Norman, Kipling enters Scott's chosen field. I delight in Scott, but these four tales seem to me to surpass Ivanhoc in just those qualities to which it owes its charm : in vividness and fullness of picturesque detail, in complete realization of scene and character, in knightly emulation and chivalric sentiment and loyalty. And of the two writers it is Kipling who carries his archaeological and historical lore (whether accurate or not does not signify in either case) the more lightly, who succeeds in infusing more life and humanity into the events of by-gone days, and who is the more successful in seeing eleventh-century life from the eleventh-century point of view. "He was yellow —not from sickness, but by nature. Yellow as honey, and his eyes stood endwise in his head. . . . We thought he was a devil." So Sir Kichard saw a Chinaman. "But here is another marvel. The Yellow Man had with him a brown box. In the box was a blue bowl with red marks upon the rim, and within the bowl, hanging from a fine thread, was a piece of iron. ... In this iron, said Witta, abode an Evil Spirit which the Yellow Man had brought by Art Magic out of his own country that lay three years' journey southward. The Evil Spirit strove day and night to return to his country, and therefore, look you, the iron needle pointed continually toward the South." Down on the African coast they "saw a great Devil come out of the forest. He shaded his brows with his hand, and moistened his pink tongue between his lips. . . . Taller than a man, covered "with reddish hair. When he had well regarded our ship, he beat on his breast with his fist till it sounded like rolling drums, and came to the bank swinging all his body between his long arms and gnashed his teeth at us." Dan, of course, is not slow to recognize mariner's compass and gorilla. 176 K1VL1SH Till: STOi;i WHITER Of a very differenl age, and not the Least engaging of these minor figures of the past is little Philadelphia Bucksteed, the sixteen-year-old girl of a hundred years ;i-n. «lm t<*lls Una of an episode of her own Life, with a child's ignorance of its sig- nificance: "Her clinks were pair excepl for two pretty pink patches in the middle, and she talked with Little gasps at the • ■lid of her sentences, as though she had been running.''... Ber "stupid cough," she says, "is better than it was last winter. It will disappear in London air." Dr. Break is in Love with her, and so is Kent' Laennec, a French prisoner on parole, inventor of the stethoscope. But she does not know, and over- hears them quarreling without understanding that she is the subject. Nor does she understand Laennec *s saying to Dr. Break: 'If yon were not the ignorant which yon are, you would have known long ago that the subject of your remarks is not for any living man." She ^oes on to tell Ina how she presided at her father's table, and of her great triumph after dinner, when she sang a new song from London — "1 have given my heart to a flower" —"not very difficult fingering, but r-r-ravishing sentiment." Philadelphia coughed and cleared her throat. "I've a deep voice for my age and size," she explained. "Contralto, yon know, but it ought to be stronger," and she began, her face all dark against the last of the soft pink sunset: — 'I have given my heart to a flower, Though I know it is fading away ; Though I know it will live but an hour And leave me to mourn its decay ! ' "Isn't that touchingly sAveet? Then the last vers< — I wish I had my harp, dear — goes as low as my register will reach." She drew in her chin and took a deep breath: CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 111 ' Ye desolate whirlwinds that rave I charge you be good to my dear! She is all — she is all that I have, And the time of our parting is near! ' "Beautiful!" said Una. "And did they like it?" "Like it? They were overwhelmed — accables, as Bene says. My dear, if I hadn't seen it, I shouldn't have believed that I could have drawn tears, genuine tears, to the eyes of four grown men. But I did! Bene simply couldn 't endure it ! He 's all French sensibility. He hid his face and said, 'Asses Mademoiselle .' C'est plus fort que moi! Assez!' While Dad sat with the tears simply running down his cheeks. ' ' "And what did Dr. Break do?" "He got up and pretended to look out of the window, but I saw his little fat shoulders jerk as if he had the hiccoughs. That was a triumph. I never suspected him of sensibility." It is because we interpret these expressions of emotion not as "sensibility" but as genuine grief, because we see more in the story than the' child who tells it, that it has for us a peculiar and special charm. It is the method of His Majesty the Kmg, again, of Kidnapped, and To be Filed for Reference, the essen- tially short-story technique of suggestion. Philadelphia, herself wholly unconscious of the true pathos of the situation, charms us by her youth and beauty, her buoyancy, her vigor of person- ality, her cleverness and audacity. The heroine, as it happens, of a sentimental tale, she is herself anything but sentimental. In the very climax of the sentimental scene in her own story she saw Dr. Break's "little fat shoulders jerk as if he had the hiccoughs. ' ' She is a true daughter of Kipling ; and Kipling can no more be consistently sentimental in his last period than he could in his first — recall the grotesque touches in Thrown Away, and the grotesque incident at the close of Only a Sub- altern. L78 KIPLING THE sun;) »i i;i i /■;/.* All the more interesting, then, is this experimenl in senti- tnentalism for Kipling dors here induce and delighl in emotion for its own sake this momentary reconstruction of a sentimental age, the age when tuberculosis was fashionable and interesting, the age of thai American Ode to Consumption- beginning, "There is a beauty in woman's decay" — of Irving's The Wife and Tin Broken Heart, of Nodier's La Fillcuh du Seigneur. This story was written in 1806, when Rem'' Laennec was twenty- five years old. perhaps at the moment when he was a prisoner in England, weeping over Philadelphia's song;. Philadelphia, then, and Suzanne, Nodier's heroine who was also of the senti- mental age, sixteen were contemporaries. Bu1 Suzanne is of an utterly different type. Her eyes haggard, her cheeks red and burning, she lies passive upon her bed. "There was not much that was pleasing in her features; one saw there only the touching and impassioned expression which has the power to embellish all." She is as typically a creature of Nodier and the year 1806, as is Philadelphia of Kipling and the year 1910. These, then, are some of the additions of the third period to Kipling's dramatis pasonac. From these instances it is already clear that they have the power of revealing themselves in the dramatic way, they require no author's explanation. Yet as of old, Kipling feels the necessity of comment, and in Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, permits Puck to put in a word here and there for the benefit of the children. There is no great extension of the psychological field; the motives and emotions of the third period are for the most part as simple and as elemental as those of the first. Kipling has lost none of his old power of tempering his own mind to enter another's soul. He is aware of a god's passionate regret for CHABACTEBS AND PSYCHOLOGY 179 lost human love and friendship, joy and sorrow. Yet here, as is usual with him, the main interest of the story is not psycho- logical, as it is in Maupassant's Le Bapteme, which is comparable with Kipling- 's The Knife and the Naked Chalk in so far as both deal with men isolated from their kind by their divine calling. In a few of these late stories, however, and these are among the best, there is a subtlety and complexity unusual with Kipling. In "Th< y" as in His Majesty the King we are invited to follow the line of emotion of one who does not understand the events in which he plays a part. But in "They" he is a mature man confronted by a situation which is intricate and elusive even for the reader; in His Majesty the King he is a child, with the simple reactions of a child upon a completely obvious situation. It is in An Habitation Enforced, however, that one finds the greatest variety of emotions, the subtlest and yet firmest treat- ment of them, as well as the most delicate humor and most com- pelling sentiment. Nowhere else is the contrast of the American with the English point of view so admirably drawn. George, for example, is too much of an American to be happy merely as a rich man's son; he feels that he must work, not to add to his four or five millions, but simply to retain the respect of his wife. Work is a "principle," an end in itself, it has no object; but as the — from the American point of view — idle owner of Friars Pardon, he finds himself working ten hours a day, putting in, as he says, half a million dollars' worth of his time to fulfil the claims which place and people make upon him. But it is~ work with a purpose, unselfish work, sane, quiet, wholesome, an effective remedy for the nervous prostration which had re- sulted from the American game. Time is no object : a new floor is contemplated for the drawing-room, and oak is put by to 180 KIPLING I III STOBI WR1TL 5 season for seven years; " Lord ! What \s a hundred years ! " says Whybarne, who lias seen Beventy-eighl of them; and the Lash- mar's unit to, "Wayte awhyle — Wayte awhyle," is the recurrenl refrain of the story. This national contrast, however, is a relatively obvious matter. More subtle is the appeal of Friars Pardon to the Chapmans and the way that it takes possession of them after they become its owners. At the very beginning they are sub- jected to an exquisite charm of house and landscape, of which the reader is no less aware than they. Old Iggulden's death al there is, as Sophie says, a Leading: they feel that the place net ds them. And when she discovers her mother's maiden name carved on blue flagstone in the floor of the Pardons' Pew, she '"shut her eyes against a burning that felt like tears." The reader is const rained to follow her example — just why. it would be difficult to say. All the emotions connected with the coming of the child — the father's and the mother's, the tenants'. Lady Conant's — are subtly modified and idealized through the influence of the place and its traditions. In the descriptions of these motives and states of mind there is no significant departure from the methods of the earlier stories. Like tin 1 characters, they reveal themselves mainly through action and spoken word. Perhap s the tendency to evoke the reader's sympathy by emphasis upon the expression of emotion has become somewhat more marked. The tears of Philadelphia's father and lovers are a case in point. for laughter, there is a passage in The Wrong Thmg where the King's knighting Hal, not for his beautiful design for the figurehead of a ship but for saving him thirty pounds by advis- ing him againsl its execution, excites uncontrollable mirth; or CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 181 Kipling's own, in My Sunday at Home, and in The Puzzler. This robust expression of emotion is a kind of guarantee of its reality. The shoulders of your sentimentalist never shake, whether with tears or with laughter. With the passion of love Kipling is concerned even less than in the earlier periods. It plays a part in William the Conqueror. It is incidental only in Young Men at the Manor as it is in Mark- lake Witches. The old cynicism has wholly, or almost wholly, disappeared; the seventh commandment passes unscathed. Love is treated ideally in the only love story of the period, the only one after Without Benefit of Clergy, in The Brushwood Boy, which is thus to be regarded as the culmination of Kipling's art in this way. It illustrates, as we have already seen, his new delight in the beauty and sacred associations of the English landscape with its sentiment of home; it illustrates his old de- light in the effective young English officer. Moreover, in its early portion at least, there are some characteristically charming glimpses of life from the child's point of view. The main impression made by The Brushwood Boy upon the student of technique is that it goes beyond the strict limits of the short-story. It attempts to cover a period of twenty or twenty-five years, not, like Rip Van Winkle or La Combe a I 'Homme Mort, the beginning and end of such a period, merely, but the whole of the time. Unlike Irving and Nodier, again, Kipling continually shifts the scene, from an unplaced nursery to Oxford-on-a-visit, from Oxford to a public school, to Sand- hurst, to India, to a steamer in the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay, to an English house and park, and to Bassett and the downs near by. For all these places there are special social groups : housekeeper, nurse and policeman ; actors at the panto- 182 KIPL1 \<: THE 8T0B1 WRU I R mime, the grown person who sal behind Georgie and bored liim wit 1 1 futile explanations until he asked in despair, "Why don'1 yon go to sleep in the afternoons, same as Provosl of Oriel?"; Georgie's school-fellows, the public who watched the cricket games, the wise and temperate head-master; Georgie's seniors at Sandhurst; Ins fellow officers in India; his men; the colonel's wife; Mrs. Corporal .Morrison; Mfs. Zuleika ; Georgie's father and mother; the coachman, the groom, and the under-keeper ; the men a1 liis father's club; Georgie's friends, the officers who lived in cheap lodgings; the young people who fell into the iront ponds, picnicked, and tennised; Miriam and her mother. Here are extent of time, breadth of scene, number of dramatis persona* suitable for the large canvas of a novel. Add to these the parallel-running years of dreams, the vague and vast geography of the dream-world; add "Them," and "It." and Policeman Day; add "AnnieonLouise," the princess of those dreams. For Miriam, as the little girl seen at the theatre, usurps the place of the fairy princess in Georgie's self-told tales and in the dreams that follow; she is the dream heroine of a mysterious land, approached through difficulty and peril; the descendant, therefore, like Ameera, of the fairies of lai and folk tale. Many of these personages are something more than human audits, types at least if nol individuals. Georgie's father and mother illustrate some of ihe characteristic differences between husband and wife the one blunderingly unconscious of the schemes of the other. Mrs. Znleika is own sister to Mrs. Hanks bee or Mrs. Mallowe. And Miriam, dimly seen as she is — she has not half the individuality of Miss Philadelphia Bucksteed CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 183 of Marklake Witches — Miriam herself has an equipment of pride and accomplishments sufficient for a dream heroine. Georgie himself is the usual subaltern hero, brother to Bobby Wick and the rest, a superlative person, with a character worth much fine gold; he combines the social charm of Chaucer's Aurelius — not his sentimentalism — with the practical effective- ness of Arveragus. Unlike Stalky and his friends, he is a great cricketer, a leader among his fellows, interested in the tone of his school. Like Bobby Wick he learns to know his men, and like Ouless wins their affection by way of boxing. This emphasis upon the practical, matter-of-fact quality of Georgie 's character, upon his physical and mental soundness, upon his lack of all self-consciousness, upon his preoccupation with the regiment, is organically necessary in the interests of verisimilitude and con- trast. The dreams of a mere dreamer would be less interesting and less significant. More than any other story of Kipling's The Brushwood Boy is, necessarily, concerned with the psychological history of the hero. It is characteristic, however, that this inner life should be a succession, not of mere moods or passions or motives, but of concrete events, full of horse-exercise and vigorous movement. The dream narrative is simply another story running alongside the real. Yet the dream psychology is sound : the inconsequence, the topsy-turvy nature, the melting and shifting outlines of persons and places, the taking up of suggestions from the real world, are all faithfully rendered. Inevitably, in the final scene, the love-making takes the familiar form of exchange of reminiscence, unusually impassioned, however, because of the strangeness of the earlier meetings. Just here one finds the char- acteristic short-comings of Kipling : he takes refuge in stating JS4 KIPLING I III. ST0B1 WBI1 I 5 thai Georgie "found himself with parched lips, 1 saying things thai up till then he believed existed only in printed works of fiction." One can'1 bu1 wish thai Miriam had no1 said "Good God," and that the jesl aboul the horses quickening their pace had been omitted. 2 Perhaps it is hypercritical to regard these as breaks in tune; one must remember Georgie's training, winch had taught him to distrust emotion and to wear the public-school mask. And the Love story as a whole does remain in the world of the ideal : this is the significant matter. There is no cynicism, no seamy side, nothing to indicate that (ieorgie and Miriam did not Live happily ever after. We have come a long way from Tht Gadsbys, The Hill of Illusion. H< i/ond tin Pale, and With- out I'x in fit of Cl< rgy. A plot involving such extended settings, so many characters, and such a complete account of the inner life, presents a difficult task for the narrative art. It will not he easy to translate this mass of material into terms of concrete speech and action. As a matter of fact, the task is an impossible one; inevitably most of tin- early part of the story consists of summary. Il is, once more, the summary of a genius with a keen sense of fact; it is always interesting; it is continually adorned by illustrative con- versation and incident ; it is never abstract, never concerned with general questions of any soil. Vet it is summary; and it is very lone. The account of the dreams docs, it must he ad- mitted, grow somewhat monotonous. There is a good deal of repetition, and one is driven to remember that rule of conduct i See also: "He was aware that his mouth was dry and unknown pulses were beating in the roof of it.'' Kipling remains so far true to the "natur- alistic" method as not to forget the purely physical reactions. 2 See also the Mrs. Zuleika incident; the treatment of Georgie's friends, etc.; the "creamy'' voice, for which Kipling himself apologizes. This is similar to Una's liking for "lacey" tunes that suggest to her "treacle on porridge," in Rewards and Fairies. CHABACTEBS AND PSYCHOLOGY 183 which includes the narration of one's dreams among the "things that no fellow can do." Yet this narrative has its organic function in the story : the threads of dream life are spun out at length in-order that the closing scenes may gather them up and weave them significantly into a complex web. All the details are used with telling effect. One does not remember any sit- uation in a short-story more distinctly or vividly than the scene of Georgie 's first recognition of Miriam — he outside in the moon- lit rose garden, she at the piano within, singing, Over the edge of the purple down, Where the single lamplight gleams, Know ye the road to the Merciful Toavu That is hard by the Sea of Dreams — Where the poor may lay their wrongs away, And the sick forget to weep? But we — pity us! Oh, pity us! We wakeful; ah pity us! — We must go back with Policeman Day — Back from the City of Sleep! Over the edge of the purple down, Ere the tender dreams begin, Look — we may look — at the Merciful Town, But we may not enter in! Outcasts all, from her guarded wall Back to our watch we creep: We — pity us! ah, pity us! We wakeful; oh pity us! — We that go back with Policeman Day — Back from the City of Sleep! Thus she reveals her acquaintance with Policeman Day and the City of Sleep, hard by the Sea of Dreams, and implies the twenty years of her supernatural connection with Georgie 's life. The L86 KIPLING THE STOBT WRITER scene or situation is brief, scarcely more than a page even with the song; its extreme effectiveness is due to the care with which it is foreshadowed. Its brevity, moreover, has a purpose: it must not reveal too much, it must no1 take from the interesl of tin- second recognition scene/ wherein .Miriam is to learn of Georgie's pari in her dream life, and both, that they have had. from the beginning, every dream experience in common. The manifest purpose of the Ion? summary of the events of the real world which precedes these scenes is to establish the char- acter of Georgie, to emphasize the long duration of Ins dream intimacy and Ins constancy to it; and to make the reader so thoroughly familiar with these matters that he feels at once the full force of the final scenes. Moral interpretation of character and action is not Lacking. For private morality, Georgie's excellence lies mainly in his avoiding "those things which no fellow can do," which is Less a matter of the development of independent moral judgment, than an incentive to right and respectable living. For nobl< sst dbligi is hereditary morality, and like hereditary wealth, says nothing as to the essential virtue of the possessor. Georgie's phrase is rather neatly ridiculed in Hcdda Gabler, where when Iledda kills herself someone exclaims, "But people don't do such things!" The old woman too, in The Wife of Bath's Tale, has something to say in criticism of the notion that gentilessi is a monopoly of the high-horn. Georgie has learned to keep his pores open and his mouth shut ; you cannot imagine him raising 3 Here again we are dealing with a variation of an ancient folk-lore motif, which is older than the Odyssey — the recognition winch follows the "wanderer's return." It occurs, for example, in the Romance of King Horn, the ballad of Hind Horn, in the ballad of Fair Annie, and in Lai U Frene. In these cases the hero knows, and like Odysseus, has only to disclose his identity. CEABACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 187 any question as to the morality of the Border campaign in which he plays such an effective role. For he is, above all else, part of The System. He wins respect by obedience to his superiors; he learns to know his men, not that they may profit as human beings, but that they too may be better soldiers, revolve more surely and powerfully as wheels in the machine. All this is in keeping with the moral notions of the earlier stories. Yet there is no more of the youthful protest against commonly accepted rules of conduct ; celebration of the virtues of the vicious has altogether ceased. As a child of six George Cottar was in the habit of telling himself stories as he lay in bed. "The princess of his tales was a^person of wonderful beauty (she came from the old illustrated edition of Grimm ...).... He gave her the two finest names he had ever heard in his life — Annie and Louise, pro- nounced 'Anniefl/* Louise. ' The night after he met the little girl in the theatre at Oxford-on-a- visit, "he made a new tale, from which he shamelessly removed the Rapunzel-Rapunzel-let- down-your-hair-princess, gold crown, Grimm edition, and all. and put a new Anniea?/ Louise in her place." Kipling obviously alludes to the story of the girl imprisoned by an enchantress in a tower which had neither stairs nor door, but only a little window at the top. Rapunzel's hair had to serve as a ladder. When the witch wished to enter she placed herself beneath the window and cried, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down thy hair! A king's son passing the tower heard a song which was so charm- ing that he stood still and listened. This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting her sweet voice resound. KIPLING l III- STORI WBITEB The prince, overhearing the formula and observing the method of entrance, gol to the top of the town 1 , won Rapunzel's Love, and carried her off. It is not surprising that in writing a fairy story of liis own Kipling should have had in mind one of the Household Tdhs. Vet it is not necessary to assume that he found in Rapunzel the hint for Tin Brushwood Boy. Another version of the fairy talc, however, may eoneeivably have served ;iv thr conecting link, the Rapunzel of William Morris, in Th< /)( f< no of Guenevere. There is the same recurrent refrain, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair." Morris's sig- nificant additions are the lovers" foreknowledge of one another and the words of the song which Rapunzel sings from her tower: Yea, often in that happy trance, Beside the blessed countenance Of golden Michael, on the spire Glowing all crimson in the fire Of sunset, I behold a face, Which sometime, if God give me grace, May kiss me in this very place. And the Prince recalls a song the dreamy harper sang of yore foretelling that he should one day find a maid clothed in her yellow rippled hair. The impulse, if it came to Kipling at all from this source, doubtless came subconsciously. For the resemblance is slight enough, and valuable mainly as pointing the contrast : where .Morris medievalized the story and laid the scene in France, Kip- ling modernized it and laid the scene in India and England. With Kipling, too, the story becomes not only more vivid and more real but more dramatic as well. It is enlightening to trace the development of the scene in which the hero overhears CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 189 the heroine's song, from the hint in the German tale, through the lyrical elaboration in Morris's version, to the dramatic climax — of JThe Brushwood Boy. There are other rough parallels to Kipling's story. He, like everyone else in the early nineties, doubtless read Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson. There, however, the dream life merely carries on an earlier relation. For the reversal of the order — the dream beginning and real life ending (Georgie's glimpse of Miriam as a child in the theatre at Oxford, can hardly count as the beginning of an acquaintance), for the relation started in the dream world, there is an analogue in Nodier's Neuvaine de la Chanel elcur.* The title means, it will be remembered, the nine days' fasting and prayer before Candlemas. As a result of proper austerity, youth or maiden may hope to see future wife or husband. Maxim, Nodier's hero, dreams of a girl in a peasant dress which he recognizes as that of a certain district of France. Through a friend he identifies his destined bride ; then he learns that his parents have already arranged a marriage for him, in the old-fashioned French way. He falls sick, and only after his recovery, learns that it is to the lady of the vision herself that he has been affianced. They meet but once, when it appears that she, too, has seen him in her dreams, and then, according to the habit of Nodier's heroines, she dies. If The Brushwood Boy attempts too many things for a short- story, the Neuvaine attempts not only too many, but unsuitable things. Nodier's story is essentially shorter; there is but the one dream meeting, and there is but one brief meeting in the real world. Yet the Neuvaine is half again as lone- as The * Another analogue is The Dream of Maxen Wledig in the Mabinogion. L90 KIPL1 VG I Hi sim;) n Ell I l: Brushwood Boy, owing its Length not to overplus of narrative, hut tu exposition. For Nodier begins with an essay which satirizes lit''' in the city, where, he says ironically, one has all imaginable amusements- -the opera, the bourse, associations of men of letters, homeopathy, phrenology, and representative government. The essay contrasts Life in the country and the conditions which, in provincial society, make for the frank and innocent friendship of hoys and girls. Nodier then introduces a group of young people who discuss the superstition of the chandeleur, thus Leading the way to the beginning of the story; by way of preparation for Cecile's death, Maxim has to listen to a sermon on blasted hopes, and by way of consolation, to hear another on the ways of God to man. Thus, unlike Kipling's, Nodier's purpose is only partly narrative; it is mainly didactic. As a result, the narrative suffers. There is, indeed, an admir- ahle approach to the climax, the meeting of the lovers, with all proper preparation and delay. But the climax itself has none of the dramatic quality of Kipling's, hecause one is not inter- ested in Maxim, a mere childish weakling and sentimentalist, or in Cecile, who has no positive qualities at all. The contrast makes very char Kipling's wisdom in the characterization of his hero. Or, perhaps one should say, the peculiar effectiveness of Kipling's realistic method for a story of this sort, a method which plants the hero, a real man, with both feet resting firmly upon solid earth, which endows him with capacity for activity of every sort, an activity that asserts itself even in the dream world. I have said that Georgie's dreams grow monotonous; but it is clear that Kipling has come nearer escaping inevitable failure here than any of his predecessors. Nodier, with his single vision, fails to make a sufficiently deep impression ; George CHARACTERS AND PSYCHOLOGY 191 du Maurier makes the dream life a commonplace, middle-aged, and domesticated affair, lacking movement and progression. On the whole, then, Kipling's technique can well stand the test of comparison. If The Brushwood Boy is not typical short-story, it approaches it far more closely than Le Neuvame de la Ckan- deleur. It is more highly unified, more vigorous, more dramatic ; it makes much more both of the realities and of the dreams, and as a story of pure romantic love, more than holds its own. < HAPTEB VIM PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE Eere again the old methods persist, unchanged, or modified, or augmented by new ones. The quality of personal intensity remains a general characteristic of the narrative. Although Kipling has given up the habit of appearing in person, unex- pectedly, at the end of the story, one feels nevertheless liis presence beside the actors. Or if this is impossible one is sure at least that lie is telling the tale, as in the Just So Stories; or he appeal's disguised sometimes as Puck, sometimes as Dan, in Puck of Pook's Hill and Ei wards and Fairies. Half the remain- ing stories are told in the first person; Kipling, that is. appears as interested and sympathetic listener, or takes a more or less active part in the events of the story itself. It is, as before, Kipling himself — or Kipling's idea of Kipling — not a dramatic personality created for the occasion. He is now a trifle less eager, however, to paint a flattering self-portrait. There is even a certain humility in his account of an early literary ven- ture in Bn ad upon tin Wat/ rs. McPhee, his friend the engineer, approved, be says, "of my writings to the extent of one pamph- let of twenty-four pages that 1 wrote for Hoi dock, Steiner and Chase, owners of the line. . . . Holdock invited me to bis bouse. and gave me dinner with the governess when the others had finished, and placed the plans and specifications in my hand, and I wrote the pamphlet that same afternoon. It was called PLOTS AND THE IB SIGNIFICANCE 193 'Comfort in the Cabin,' and brought me seven pound ten, cash down — an important sum of money in those days ; and the gov- erness, who was teaching Master John Holdock his scales, told me that Mrs. Holdock had told her to keep ah eye on me, in case I went away with coats from the hat-rack." Kipling appears again as author in An Error in the Fourth, Dimension : "observation, after all, is my trade," he says. And in The House Surgeon there is an interesting glimpse of his literary methods. Engaged in a piece of amateur detective work it becomes necessary for him to cultivate the acquaintance of a certain Mr. Baxter : "It appeared that he golfed. Therefore, I was an enthusiastic beginner, anxious to learn. Twice I invaded his office with a bag full of the spelicans needed in this detestable game, and a vocabulary to match." A bit of auto- biography, one imagines. For Kipling "got up" many voca- bularies in his time. In this same story, too, is an interesting bit of self-description : "I am less calculated to make a Sherlock Holmes than any man I know, for I lack both method and patience, yet the idea of following up the trouble to its source fascinated me." There is another glimpse of the author in Their Lawful Occasions. He "told me," says Pyecroft of Kipling, "he was official correspondent for the Times; and I know he's littery by the way 'e tries to talk Navy-talk." Again the vocabulary ! In all these, and in other stories where Kipling is present, whether as passive auditor, as interviewer, or play- ing a minor part, he has all his old sympathy with the action : our interest in the narrative is due in part to the contagion of his interest in what is going on. This characteristic quality of Kipling's work reaches its culmination in the greatest story of the period, the best indeed L94 KIPL1 VG THE 8T0BY WBITEE of all Kipling's short-stories, in "They." The short-story is sometimes compared to the lyric; the comparison in 1 his case is eminently fitting; for "They" is intimately and sacredly per- sonal, a cry from the heart, ool of Kipling the author or journalist or special correspondent, bul of Kipling the man. It is nut a self-portrait, yet a piece of sincere self-expression; not self-conscious, yet subjective. It is from this point of view that it must be studied. To understand it, one must remember that in 1899, four or five years before it was published, Kipling, during his own severe illness, lost by death his eldest daughter tlen in her sixth year. And one must read the v«rses at the beginning : The Beturx op the Children - Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged races — Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome; Plucking the radiant robes of the passers by, and with pitiful faces Begging what Princes and Powers refused: — 'Ah, please will you let us go home?' Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother, Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along to the gateway — Yea the all-iron unbribable Door which Peter must guard and none other. Straightway She took the keys from his keeping, and opened and freed them straightway. So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand, Looking neither to left nor right when the breathless Heavens stood still; And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the Command: 'Shall I that have suffered the children to come to me hold them against their will ? ' PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 195 By virtue, then, of this Miracle of Our Lady the children have turned again home. Yet we do not see or hear them; we do not know what their state is or where they are; only a few fortunate beings have this knowledge and with them the story is concerned. This story, as I have said, is in my opinion Kipling's best; it is even one of the best in the English language. It fulfils all the requirements of short-story technique, and, more than this, it has real human interest and significance. It marks the cul- mination of many lines of Kipling's work. In it intensity of emotion fuses imagination with sense of fact and of form, so that every element of the narrative is exquisitely elaborated, not for its own sake but with reference to its function in the story as a whole. "We delight, as never before, in the pure beauty of English landscape, in its exquisite finish, in the lovely old age of that house of lichened and weather-worn stone with its mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile. It is inaccessible, mysterious, hidden deep in the forest, where you find it by chance, or rather because of some supernatural leading or guidance, like the palaces of fairy tale and lai. When you leave it, it disappears mysteriously behind the interlacing of the crumpled hills, just as the ravine leading to the scene of the ghostly bowling party disappears in Rip Van Winkle. The approach to the scene of the story has indeed the more careful and the steadier move- ment of an Irving or a Poe : ' ' During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, lit.; Kin ING I III ST0B1 R HI I ll: within view of the melancholy Souse of Usher." It is because intense and persistenl emotion stimulates qoI merely imagination inn s.'Msr nf form as well, thai Kipling comes back here i<> a manner which maj seem artificial, but which is. as a matter of fact, as inevitable ami righl ami sincere as the perfection of a Bonnet. Aa tin- melancholy of autumn is the fitting prelude to Poe'a Btory, even so tin- joyful promise of spring and the rich fulfill- menl of summer properly accompany the pure charm of the firs] visit ami the deepening mystery of the second, to the House Beautiful in the Forest. More subtle still in its sympathy, sym- bolic evu of the dear understanding at last, the fleeting joy of meeting, followed by the poignant grief of a parting that was like that of the spirit from the flesh, is the change from the brilliant wind-swept hills, from the blue to the dingy pewter of the sea, and the heavy inland fog with the smell of autumn in the air, which shadows forth the third and final visit. The time that elapses between these visils. the month or so between the first and second, the "two months and four days" between second and third, does nol concern the story at all and is appropriately left unfilled: we are not bidden to follow and admire the intervening activities of Kipling as we follow those of Georgie Cottar in Tin Brushwood Boy. Xor are we concerned with the outside world of men. We know that it is there, as it is right that wo should : it is the starting point for the journey into the world of dreams; and the headlong Might of the motor car in the search for the nurse gives us agreeable assurance that it still exists. But it is the real world that is shadowy, except just those members of it, who. mainly for contrast, come somewhat into the story — the doctor, PLOTS AND THEIE SIGNIFICANCE 197 the trembling nun, Turpin the tenant-farmer, the poor cottagers, and Jenny, who is to show us that even for her child there is a place beside the lawful born who come back to the House in the Forest. And 'They,' shadows within the shadow as they are, they are not mere shades ; they are children ; their very elusiveness is in part childish shyness. One heard a laugh among the yew- peacocks, the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief, voices that might be the doves, the tread of small cautious feet stealing across dead leaves; a child that seemed to cling to her skirt swerved into the leafage as she drew nearer ; as one entered a room one felt that the children had only just hurried away, one saw their low chairs and tables, their toy guns and dolls flung hastily upon the floor. They inspired fear only to such as Turpin, the grossly material, who having no children could not understand. To the childless blind woman, who could hear and touch them, they came — she knew not how many — they came because she loved them so, because she needed them, made them come. For her as well as for the children Our Lady had wrought her miracle. With the infinite pathos of expectation, she had toys ready for them, the garden door always open, the fire always burning, "in case anyone comes in with cold toes, you see"; and no impassable iron on or near the broad brick hearth. They came to her perhaps because she could not see them: for only those who had borne or lost might "walk in the wood" as the phrase ran — Jenny, Madden the butler and his wife, Kipling himself. He did not at first understand that it was for him that the little thing in the window waved a friendly hand, that the little maid looked tremendously interested ; he did not under- stand that his being there was a matter not of favor but of L98 KIPLING I III 8T0EI w I.I I I 5 right; nor why, in the failing Light, n door creaked cautiously, and he heard the patter of feet— quick feel through ;i room beyond; nor <»t' whom Mrs. Madden Bpoke when she s;ii'<, when sir Richard Dalyngridge appears and tells them of his eleventh- century voyage of discovery southward along the coast of Africa. Unlike Chaucer's framework, Kipling's, characteristic- ally, has little progressive quality, Little of the element of plot. It is not, itself, a story. Ami Kipling, again characteristically. does not reveal Chaucer's interest in character: for Dan ami Una, EEobden, ami even Puck, lack the vitality or reality of Knight or Miller, Prioress or Wife of Path. The narrators, of course, stand out clearly enough in their autobiographical tales: hut they are nol parts of the framework. Kipling on the other hand lays far greater emphasis ihaii Chaucer on the settings. For, as we have seen. Kipling's \>-vy purpose is to emphasize the historicity of English places, to revive the past within the PLOTS AND THEIE SIGNIFICANCE 207 present, to reveal the beauty of the English landscape. Dan and Una acted the fairy part of the Midsummer Night's Dream three times running, on midsummer eve, in the middle of a ring, and as Puck says, "under — right under one of my oldest hills in Old England. " As a result Puck himself appeared. They went through the ceremony of taking "seizin" or possession. " 'Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,' began Puck in a sing-song voice. 'By right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year ; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. ' Technically this absence of Doubt and Fear is admirable preservation of the old tradition; like fairies in march t it and lai the figures from the past appear suddenly and as suddenly fade, leaving with Dan and Una no memory of their presence. These mysterious exits and entrances are skilfully managed ; the reader, at least, is astonished into interest and attention, and so captivated. 2 Beside these revivals of folk tales, fairy tales, and framed tales, certain other experiments in older forms must be at least enumerated. Most of these are didactic in purpose. A group of Fables preach the doctrine of the ' ' day "s work ' ' : the conver- sation of the horses in The Walking Delegate and The Maltese Cat, of the bees in The Mother Hive, of the parts of The Ship that Found Herself, of the locomotives in .007, emphasizes the necessity of cooperation, of every man performing his allotted 2 For single and independent framed tales, like those in Soldiers Three, see Mrs. Bathurst, A Deal in Cotton, Bonds of Discipline, and Slaves of the Lamp Part II in Stalky Sr Co., where as in Balzac's Grande Breteche, or in Browning's The Einp and the Bool', the story is constructed by contribu- tions from several narrators. 208 KIPLING Till: STORY WRITER task. It is simply the old doctrine of The System. The Bridge Builders, which turns into fable in the second part, and Below He Mill Dam reveal the inevitable onward march of modern progress. To set forth an ideal scheme of national defence Kip- ling makes use of the convention of the Dream, thus harking back to Addison and the eighteenth-century essay. There is similar reminiscence in a recurrence of the Alien Critic Tradi- tion in A Sahib's ]\'«r — a criticism by a native Indian officer of the English conduct of affairs in South Africa. It will be remembered that those stories of the first period which involve the relations of the two races imply a criticism of the white from the point of view of the black — Lispeth, for example, and Tht Judgment of Dungara. And in the transition period One View of the Question is a letter from an Indian gentleman in London to a friend at home, devoted wholly to a criticism of the English from the Indian point of view. A still older tradition, and one new to Kipling, is revived in the Cahte Devot — Exemplum of The Conversion of St. Wilfrid. St. Wilfrid, Eddi his chaplain, and Meon a pagan were wrecked on an island, and as it seemed were likely to perish of starvation and exposure. Meon would not renounce "Wot an and curry favor with the Christian God at the last moment, in the hope of being saved; and St. Wilfrid said that under the same circumstances he would not desert his God. Presently Padda, Meon's pet seal, came up out of the sea with fish in his mouth, then returned to the mainland and brought help, thus saving their lives. When they were rested and reclothed Meon offered himself to be baptized. Then he called all his fishers and ploughmen and herdsmen into his hall and said : ". . . Two days ago I asked our Bishop whether it was fair for a man to desert his fathers' Gods PLOTS AND THEIB SIGNIFICANCE 209 in a time of danger. Our Bishop said it was not fair. . . . You can tell your mates that even in that place, at that time, hang- ing on the wet weedy edge of death, our Bishop, a Christian, counselled me, a heathen, to stand by my father's Gods. I tell you now that a faith which takes care that every man shall keep faith, even though he may save his soul by breaking faith, is the faith for a man to believe in. So I believe in the Christian God, and in Wilfrid His Archbishop, and in the Church that Wilfrid rules. " There is a hint in this speech of the qualities which distinguish Kipling's didactic stories from all others, the complete incarna- tion of the idea, the dramatic intensity, the concreteness and vividness. For one feels throughout the vigorous yet kindly personality of the saint who tells the tale, and in this speech, that of the open-minded worshipper of Odin. The story teaches tolerance, but that word, I think, is not mentioned. St. Wil- frid's reply to Puck's statement that he had converted the South Saxons — "Yes. if the South Saxons did not convert me" — is the nearest approach to it. And even in that speech of Meon's, which is not at all descriptive in purpose, Kipling's visualizing power spontaneously asserts itself in the phrase, "hanging on the wet weedy edge of death." In one story only, The House Surgeon, Kipling has attempted to follow in the footsteps of Conan Doyle. Kipling is not alto- gether successful. "I was more bewildered," he admits, "than any Doctor Watson at the opening of a story." — "I am less calculated to make a Sherlock Holmes than any man I know, for I lack both method and patience. ' ' This is probably literal true. 3 literal]* / ?en story 3 One additional phase of external structure, connection between story and story, hardly deserves special mention. The revival of old characters 210 KIPL1 VG I II I STOBI H BI1 i i: In certain stories Kipling returns to the technical jargon of tin- first period. Tin shift Umi Found Herself and Tin Devil and tin Dap Sea are extreme examples. They are Largely unintelli- gible to the normal reader simply because he does not know what the words mean. For under some conditions the sug- gested short-story may be unintelligible. Tims "They," Ki|>- ling's most subtle application of this method, can mean little or nothing unless one keeps in mind certain biographical details and reads the verses at the beginning. The significance of the incidents of Marklakt Witches, on the other hand, is hidden, not from the reader, but only from the character who narrates them. Concerning Internal Structure there is, on the whole, noth- ing new to note. The stories which we have. for one reason or another, analyzed in some detail, Marklakt Witches, Th< Brush- wood Hoy, "They," reveal Kipling's architectural powers, in the way of careful preparation, foreshadowing, elaboration of great climactic scenes; powers which, however, he does not always choose to exercise. Many of the Puck and of the h'< wards stories are, for example, rather series of scattered reminiscences than highly organized and unified wholes. They thus reveal a ten- dency in the direction of the condensed long-story, manifest also, as we have seen, in Tin li rush wood Boy, a tendency which is especially apparent in those tales which carry on the same series of events from one to another. The Joyous Venture, though it constitutes but a single chapter in the lives of Hugh and Richard, has an almost epic breadth; and the three stories of Parnesius amount to biography of their hero, beginning with the charming has been discussed. A number of the Puck and Rewards stories carry on the same action. Pyeeroft and Hinchcliffe appear in Mrs. Bathurst, Bonds of Discipline, Their Lawful Occasions, and Steam Tactics; McPhee, the engineer, in Ifrur/ylrsmith and Bread Upon tin Waters. PLOTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 211 picture of his boyhood on the Isle of Wight and ending with the vivid account of the climax of his career on the Roman "Wall. On the other hand the tendency to fall short of short-story re- quirements, to write mere anecdote, or at least to publish it in book form, disappears with Life's Handicap at the end of the first period. Concrete detail holds its own. We have already seen with what wealth of imaginative realization Kipling re- creates Queen Elizabeth, and how completely he is able to visual- ize eleventh-century life as seen through the eyes of Hugh and Richard. He is no less at home with the Indians in the American woods : says Brother Square-Toes, ' ' How a great tall Indian a-horseback can carry his war-bonnet at a canter through thick timber without brushing a feather beats me! My silly head was banged often enough by low branches, but they slipped through like running elks. ' ' / One may find similar passages in every story; Kipling's power of imagining details, of vivifying them, putting them in action, is no less astonishing than his power of observing and assimilating them/ Many of his minor incidents, moreover, are admirably suggestive. Richard, for example, de- scribing the horrors of their "Joyous Venture," emphasizes the terrifying mystery of the African forest, and concludes, "I think it was the silence we feared." And Kipling adds, "He paused to listen to the comfortable home noises of the brook." In spite, however, of all this effective attention to detail, the old breaks in tone do now and then recur, as in The Brusliwood Boy; though many stories, such as An Habitation Enforced, are free from them. No more in his third period than in his first is Kipling a moral philosopher : he is not in the least concerned with abstract moral problems or with moral codes. But he is, as always, dis- 212 KIPL1NC THE STOh'Y WHITER posed to regard specific action as conduct: he is still disposed to preach; and his preaching has now become more conventional, more nearly in keeping with accepted English notions. We have already noted the tender, half-didactic purpose of the Just So Stories. Writing primarily for young people in Puck of Pooh's Hill and Reirarrfs and Fairies he conies again naturally to lay a special stress upon right action. He does not discover new duties; hut he celebrates the old ones in a stirring and salutary fashion, so that there is in these two volumes an ex- ceedingly effective morality. Already expressed there in terms of action, it is simple, easily grasped, and very portable, likely therefore, to be spontaneously translated at need into the deeds of actual life. The stories of Richard and Hugh are typical in this way. They form the history of a splendid friendship. The Saxon youth and the Norman have been fellow-students in France. They meet again after Hastings, and, neither recogniz- ing the other, begin a combat. Hugh's foot slips and his sword Mies from his hand ; Richard forbears to strike. Then a clump of Saxons run out upon them and Hugh cries out that Richard is his prisoner and saves his life. And even when Richard is put in possession of Hugh's manor Hugh remains faithful, sleeping as a voluntary hostage among Richard's men-at-arms. When as old men they are exploring the coast of Africa, Hugh leaps ashore among the gorillas whom they take for devils. "I was afraid to my four bones' marrow," Richard tells the chil- dren, "lint for shame's sake 1 followed." Even so the faithful Wiglaf came to Beowulf's rescue in his fight with the dragon. For these ideals of loyalty in friendship and of emulation are of the best Germanic tradition; and the combat with the gorillas that follows suggests specifically Beowulf's several encounters PLOTS AND THE1E SIGNIFICANCE 213 with hostile monsters. Like the Anglo-Saxon hero in the fight with Grendel's mother, Sir Kichard is saved only by his mail- shirt. Hugh's sword, like those in the Beowulf, is Weland's work, marked with runes, and has a personality of its own ; and like the Sword of Vengeance in a Danish ballad it has power of speech or song. After the battle in which Richard and Hugh are crippled, Witta, to comfort them, shows them the gold which they had won, just as Wiglaf exhibits the treasure to the dying Beowulf. Thorkild's comment on the general anxiety during the homeward voyage — "Better be drowned out of hand than go tied to a deckload of yellow dust ' ' — suggests a bit of the Anglo- Saxon poet's moralizing. The parting with Witta might find a place in the Beowulf: "He made no promise; he swore no oath; he looked for no thanks ; but to Hugh, an armless man, and to me, an old cripple whom he could have flung into the sea, he passed over wedge upon wedge, packet upon packet of gold and dust of gold, and only ceased when we would take no more. As he stooped from the rail to bid us farewell he stripped off his right-arm bracelets and put them all on Hugh's left" — thus following the familiar custom of the Germanic chieftain or "ring-giver." Thorkild's song, finally, sounds like an echo of the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer: Hoe — all you gods that love brave men, Send us a three-reef gale again ! Send us a gale, and watch us come, With close-cropped canvas slashing home ! So Dan and Una enter into possession of their splendid heritage of Anglo-Saxon ideals of conduct. They learn of the significance of friends, of the moral value of sport, of the duties of gratitude, 214 KIPLING TIN-: STORI WRITER of courtesy, <>t' fidelity to one's given word, "It is knightly to keep faith, even after a thousand years." We have already noted the tolerance implied in Th( Con- version of St. Wilfrid, and the antisocialistic doctrine of the fables, which is simply a phase of the old plea for The System, The Team, The Machine in which every wheel dors its work. Beside this doctrine, however, there still persists the old boyish recalcitrance, the sympathy with those opposed to the existing order. Thus Dan and Una are in the secrets of Hobden's poach- ing and of the gipsies' thefts, and instinctively side with their friends. Steam Tactics and Their Lawful Occasions reveal the same attitude. They are stories of children of a larger growth. ( >ne of them reflects a healthy delight in the kidnapping of a rural policeman and in the defiance of speeddimit laws; the other, in the clever outwitting of half the English fleet by the gaily irresponsible crew of a discredited destroyer. And the methods set forth in the admirable Bread upon //" Waters are not precisely legal. The vein of satire still persists, though for the most part with- out the bitterness of the earlier stories. In An Error in tin Fourth Dimension, My Sunday at Home, and The Captive, one may learn Kipling's opinion of Americans; of the French, in Bonds of Discipline; of the British army in South Africa, in Privatt C!' patriotism and of national prejudices, the admission of women to a part in government. One fears that Kipling himself will find very little to his taste when lie is "re-enlarged" on this planet in the year 2000 under the condi- tions of his own imagining. It is not to be supposed that he believes these things; still less that he seriously advocates them. The significant thing for lis is the fact that he is thinking aboul them, that he is dreaming, even for a moment, of an ideal recon- struction of society as a whole, in place of an English army which shall include the whole male population of the island. CHAPTER IX CONCLUSION This third or English period of Kipling's work is, then, a time of achievement, of the culmination of the main tendencies of technique ; but it is as well a time of certain new characteristics. Geographically, he bids farewell to his own particular field, to India, and discovers the special charm of England, of the English landscape, with its ordered beauty, its sense of rest, of finality, its emotional associations. While his main concern is still with the present, he does in certain stories write of the past, bring- ing it forward however into the present, by virtue of an American or colonial sense of the historicity or historical associations of the English scene. A single story deals with the future. He still sees Society as a System ; in it even the lower animals must per- form their functions, just as the locomotives of a railway or the parts of a ship must work together for a common end. Delight in machinery is an easy acquisition for one who has habitually thought of men as the wheels of a machine. . Among the characters of this period certain old friends re- appear, sometimes under new names, sometimes under the old ones. New characters are added, from America, from France, and from the English past. These characters and their emotions reveal themselves dramatically, by word and gesture ; and so far as the emotions go, there is perhaps an increase in the tendency to evoke the reader's tears or laughter by an emphasis upon those 218 KIPLING Till: STOBI WEITEB of the persons of the story. On the whole, one carries away from the reading of these later stories the impression of a finer and more delicate sentiment than that of the earlier, nowhere more charming than in .1/; Habitation Enforced and Marklaki Witches. The Latter story reconstructs, as we have seen, a sen- timental age, deals with a sentimental character, yet does not itself pass over the boundary between sentiment ami sentimen- talism, as Nodier and Irving did, in dealing in that age itself with similar themes. Kipling's sense of humor gives no evidence of suffering loss. There are as many mirth-provoking tales in the last period as in the first, and there are some farces and prac- tical jokes among them. But the subtlety of* manner is increased ; we are further from the fabliau: there is less coarseness, more refinement of humor. There is the same increase in the delicacy of the treatment of the passion of love. The old cynicism lias wholly or almost wholly disappeared ; the seventh commandment is never in peril. Love stories are uncommon, however; indeed Tht Brushwood Boy is the only one which is concerned wholly with this theme. Like the more ideal of the earlier love-stories Tht Brushwood Boy has a definite quality of " other-worldi- ness, '' offers an escape from life, a contrast with the comic and realistic Tales as sharp, almost, as the medieval contrast of Im and fabliau. For Form, for External Structure, Kipling's narrative is still intensely personal, and this quality reaches its culmination in the lyrical short-story of "They," lends it its peculiar charm. This same persona] quality is manifest in the Just So Stories, which in their technique carry on the ancient tradition of the oral tale, with its special vocabulary, rhythmic repetitions, and light didactic touch. The most important achievement of the CONCLUSION 219 period in the way of external structure is, however, the frame- work of Puck of Pool's Hill and Re wards and Fairies, the most admirable device of its kind since the Canterbury Tales. Other special types or forms of the period are the fable or allegory, the dream, the alien critic, the exemplum-conte devot, the detective story, the technical, and the suggested story. For Internal Structure there is nothing new to note. There is abundant evidence of an architectural power, which is, how- ever, by no means always exercised. In spite of the presence of much careful preparation and foreshadowing and of some im- pressive and highly elaborated scenes, all suggestive of grasp of the whole, Kipling's art remains less Greek than Gothic, less careful of form in the larger sense, of dimensions, proportions, than of excellence of detail. Concreteness, vividness of char- acteristic detail remain his special virtues to the end. The old breaks in tone persist, like the grotesque gargoyles of a Gothic cathedral ; though a few of the stories are quite free from them. The anecdote has disappeared ; but there still persists the opposite tendency to overstep the natural, or at least, the academic, limits of the short-story, to write condensed long-story, necessitating summary with only occasional and illustrative action and dia- logue. Yet there are many true short-stories, of admirable architecture. "They," for example, could have been produced in this period alone. While Kipling no longer begins his story with a text, as in Plain Tales from the Hills, yet lie still remains loyal to his two grandfathers, the Wesleyan preachers : a goodly number of his stories are didactic. He holds forth on the old themes. Only With the Night Mail is exceptional, with its astonishing picture of a future society enjoying universal peace and universal suf- 220 KIPLING THE STORY WB1TEB frage! In the meantime his satire of things as they are, remains without (or almost without) bitterness, and pure comedy — farce or practical joke — holds its own. The tendencies, then, of the first period are still active in the third — the shift from observation to reminiscence is still going on, the delight in an escape from life still runs alongside of delight in life itself. There is still further widening of sym- pathetic psychology; a continued increase in the subtlety of personal intervention, in general excellence and delicacy of the narrative art. The suggested story reaches its climax, as does the unintelligible story. Satire, at least of the bitter sort, has largely disappeared. While, then, the same formula holds: in- crease in Imagination and Sense of Form; decrease in self-asser- tion; escape from overpowering Sense of Fact; it is also true that the force of these tendencies has not been sufficient to effect a transformation. Kipling remains to the end what his training and his personality made him at the beginning of his career. His greatness still lies, not in his reasoning powers, not in his moral interpretation or criticism of life, not in his sense of form, but rather in his sense of fact, vivid, concrete, and humanly interest- ing; in a power of imagination closely related to this sense of fact ; in an emotional or even sensational appeal ; and in intensity, in vital energy. With the single exception of Chaucer, he is the most powerful personality of all those who have expressed them- selves in the short-storv. INDEX OF TITLES 221 INDEX OF TITLES The name of the collection in which each tale appears is given in parentheses; the number that follows indicates the position of the tale in the collection. Use has been made of The Works of Rudyard Kipling, New York, Doubleday and McClure Company, 1899, containing Plain Tales from Hie Hills, Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under tlie Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales, Wee Willie WinTcu and Other Stories, Life's Handicap, being Stories of Mine Own People, The Light tliat Failed, Many Inventions, The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, The Day's Work, From Sea to Sea. For the later stories the following editions, all published by Doubleday, Page and Com- pany, New- York, have been used: Stalky and Company, 1900; Kim, 1901; Just So Stories, 1903; Traffics and Discoveries, 1904; Puck of Pool's Hill, 1906; Actions and Reactions, 1909; Rewards and Fairies, 1910. At Howli Thana (In Black and White, 3). -43. At the End of the Passage (Life's Handicap, ?), 6f, 30, 31, 45, 81, 86, 96, 108, 122, 135, 140, 153, 161. . At the Pit's Mouth (Under the Deodars, 2). 27, 89, 96, 104. At Twenty-Two (In Black and White, 5). 85, 88. -Baa Baa, Black Sheep (Wee Willie Winkie, 2). 15, 45, 101, 102, 106, 112, 122, 171, 198, 201. Bank Fraud, A (Plain Tales, 24). 45, 70, 102. Bathurst, Mrs. (Traffics and Discoveries, 10). 210n. Below* the Mill Dam (Traffics and Discoveries, 11). 208. Bertran and Bimi (Life's Handicap, 13). 43, 87, 90, 96, 108. -Beyond the Pale (Plain Tales, 22). 28, 80, 82, 87, 96, 135, 184. Big Drunk Draf', The (Soldiers Three, 4). 40. Bisara of Pooree, The (Plain Tales, 32). 36. Black Jack (Soldiers Three, 4). 39, 85, 94. Bonds of Discipline, The (Traffics and Discoveries, 2). 172, 210n., 214. Bread Upon the Waters (The Day's Work, 9). 139, 192, 210n., 214. Bridge Builders, The (The Day's Work, 1). 169, 208. Broken-Link Handicap, The (Plain Tales, 24). 95. 3ronckhorst Divorce Case, The (Plain Tales, 30). 36, 103, 107. Brother Square-Toes (Rewards and Fairies, 6). 161, 172, 211. 222 6 //'/./ \<; THE 8T0R1 WRIT,ER "Brugglesmith" (Monti Inventions, 10). L39; 210n. /Brushwood Boy, The (Tin Dun's Work, 12). 102, L70, L81ff., L95, 200, 210, 211, 218. 1 GARM-A Hostage (Actions and Reactions, 2). 170. Gate of the Hundred Sorrows, The (Plain Talis, 84). 43. GLORIANA (Rewards and Fairies. 2). 173. God from the Machine* The (Soldiers Thru. ! ). 39f., 83f. Habitation Enforced, An (Actions and Reactions, I). 163, 172, L79f., 211, 218. Head of the District, The (Life's Handicap, 5). 10. Her Majesty's Servants (The Junyle Book, 7). 155, 157. Hill op Illusion, The (Under th< Deodars, i). 49, 50, 82. 91, 123, L36, 184. \ INDEX OF TITLES 223 His Chance in Life (Plain Tales, 10). 85, 103n. | His Majesty the King (Wee Willie Wirikie, 3). 15, 45, 66, .£7^.90, 136, 177, 179, 198. His Private Honour (Many Inventions, 6). 137. House Surgeon, The (Actions and Reactions, 8). 193. How Fear Came (The Second Jungle Book, 1). 142, 144, 155. How the First Letter Was Written (Just So Stories, 8). 205. / Incarnation or Krishna Mulvaney, The (Life's Handicap, 1). 5, 9, 40f., 50, 94, 135. In Error (Plain Tales, 23). 68, 103n. In Flood Time (In Black and White, 6). 43. In the House of Suddhoo (Plain Tales, 19). 35, 81, 85, 104. Jx the Matter of a Private (Soldiers Three, 8). 29, 31, 45. In the Pride of His Youth (Plain Talcs, 27). 29, 31, 69, 77, 102. In the Eukh (Many Inventions, 9). 139ff., 143, 144, 157. Judgment of Dungara, The (In Black and White. 2). 18, 45, 101, 208. Judson and the Empire (Many Inventions, 13). 139. Just So Stories. 203ff., 212, 218. Kaa's Hunting (The Jungle Book, 2). 142, 144, 155. Kidnapped (Plain Tales, 17). 9n., 87, 88, 136, 177. Kim. 1711., 112, 170. King's Ankus, The (Second Jungle Book, 5). 143, 144ff., 155. Knife and the Naked Chalk, The (Rewards and Fairies, 5). 179. Knights of the Joyous Venture, The (Puck of Poole's Hill, 3). 210, 211ff. Lang Men o' Larut, The (Life's Handicap, 12). 43, 54, 55, 58, 139n. Letting in the Jungle (Second Jungle Book, 3). 143, 155. Light That Failed, The. 14, 99. «/Lisfeth (Plain Tales, 1). 17f., 44, 45, 58f., 61, 101, 138, 208. Little Foxes (Actions and Reactions, 7). 125n., 214. Little Tobkah (Life's Handicap, 21). 55. Lost Legion, The (Many Inventions, 8). 137. Love-o '-Women (Many Inventions, 11). 137. Madness of Private Ortheris, The (Plain Tales, 35). 28f., 31, 37, 39, 44, 85, 86. Maltese Cat, The (The Bay's Work, 8). 207. Man Who Was, The (Life's Handicap, 4). 5, 29f., 31, 82, 85f., 90, 98f., 135. / Man Who Would be King, The (The Phantom 'Bickshatv, 4). 34, 52, 86, 90, 120, 135, 139. 224 KIPLING THE STORY 117,777:/,' Maki.akk Witches ( Rewards and Fairies, I). I76f., 181, 183, 12 1 o, 218. Mark of the Beast, The (Lift 's Handicap, 0). 21, 22, 36, it, 88, 96, L35. Mattes op Fact, A (Many Inventions, 7). 138. Miracle of Purun Bhaqat, The (Second Junglt Book, IB). L54, L55. Miss Yoi-ghal's Sais t Plain '/'<(/< .v, ■/>. li), 35, 102. Mother Hive, Tiif. (Actions and Reactions, 3). 207. Mori Guj— Mutineer (Life's Handicap, 22). 108, 138. Mmvci.i's Brothers ( The Jungle Book, 1). 142, 144, L55. My Lord the Elephant (Minn/ Inventions, 3). 138. My Sunday at Home (The Dan's Work, in. L62, 172, 181, 214. .007 (Th\ Bay's Work, 7). 168, 207. NAMGAY Doola (Lift's Handicap, 11). 44. Of Those Called (Soldiers Three, 2). 43. On Greenhgw Hill (Life's Handicap, 3). 40, 41, 52, 87, 93, 94, 135, 139. Ox the City Wall (In Black and White, 8). 9n., 27f'., 37, 51n., 84, 85, 89, 91, 104. On the Great Wall (Puck of Book's Hill, 6). 170f. Oxe View of the Question' (Main/ Inventions, 4). 138, 208. Oxly a Subaltern (Under the Deodars, 6). 12, 19, 90, 170, 177. Other Man, The (Plain Talcs, 12). 27, 36. Phantom Rickshaw, The (The Phantom Rickshaw, 1). 21f., 2(5, 50n., 198. Poor Dear Mamma (The Story of the Gadsbys, 1). 46, 48. Private Learoyd's Story (Soldiers Three, 3). 39. Puck of Pool's Hill. 206ff., 219. Puzzler, The (Actions and Reactions, 6). 181, 214. QuiQUERN (Second Junglt Book, 6). 153, 155, 160. Record of Badalia Herodspoot, The (Mann Inventions, 12}. 139. Red Dog (Second Jungle Book, 7). 143, 144, 155. Beingelder and the German Flag (Life's Handicap, 14). 43. Rescue op Pluffles, The (Plain Tales, ?). 13, 50. Return of Imray, The (Life's Handicap, 10). 21, 22, 36, 44, 90, 96, 135. Rewards axd Fairies. 206ff., 219. Rikki-Tikki-Tayi (The .1 angle Book, 5). 154, 155. Rout of the White Hussars, The (Plain Tales, 29). 36. SAHIB'S War, A (Traffics and Discoveries, 3). 138, 208. Second Rate Woman, A (Under the Deodars, 5). 82, 88, 92. Ship that Pound Herself, The (The Day's Work, S). 168, 207, 210. Solid MULDOON, The (Soldiers Three, 6). 40. Spring Running, The (Second Jungle Book). 143, 144, 155. INDEX OF TITLES 225 Stalky & Co. 112ff., 125n. Steam Tactics (Traffics and Discoveries, 6). 210n., 214. Story of Muhammad Din, The (Plain Tales, 6). 16, 44, 72, 198. Story of the Gadsbys, The. 24, 46ff., 102, 123, 184. Strange Eide of Marrowbie Jukes, The (The Pluintom 'Bickshaw, 3). 20, 86, 88f., 119. Swelling of Jordan, The (The Story of the Gadsbys, 8). 47. Taking of Lungtungpen, The (Plain Tales, 15). 39, 43, 98. Tents of Kedar, The (The Story of the Gadsbys, 3). 46, 48. Their Lawful Occasions (Traffics and Discoveries, 4). 193, 210n., 214. -"They "7 Traffics and Discoveries, 9). 134, 179, 194ff., 205n., 210, 218, 219. Three and — an Extra (Plain Tales, 2). 13, 35, 50, 103. Three Musketeers, The (Plain Tales, 9). 34n., 39. Thrown Away (Plain Tales, 3). 12, 19, 34, 36, 44, 80, 177. Tiger! Tiger! (The Jungle Boole, 3). 141, 142, 144, 148, 155. To be Filed for Eeference (Plain Tales, 40). 27f., 81, 87f., 136, 177. /Tods' Amendment (Plain Tales, 25). 15, 16, 108. Toomai of the Elephants (The Jungle Book, 6). 154, 155. Track of a Lie, The (The Phantom 'Bickshaw, 3). 34n. Undertakers, The (Second Jungle Book, 4). 155. Valley of the Shadow, The (The Story of the Gadsbys, 7). 47. Walking Delegate, A (The Day's Work, 2). 160f., 207. Watches of the Night (Plain Tales, 11). 45, 102. Wayside Comedy, A (Under the Deodars, 3). 31. Wee Willie Winkie (Wee Willie Winkie, 1). 15, 135, 1$8, Weland's Sword (Puck of Pook's Hill, 1). 165. White Seal, The (The Jungle Book, 4). 152, 153f., 155, 157, 160. William the Conqueror (The Day's Work, 6). 170, 181, 199. With Any Amazement (The Story of the Gadsbys, 4). 46. With the Main Guard (Soldiers Three, ?). 40, 51n. With the Night Mail (Actions and Reactions, 4). 169, 215f., 219. ithout Benefit of Clergy (Life's Handicap, 6). 5, 28, 66, 69ff., 86, 90, 91, 98, 108, 120, 125, 134, 135, 170, 184, 198, 200. . World Without, The (The Story of the Gadsbys, 2). 46, 48. Wreck of the Visigoth, The (Soldiers Three, 5). 43. Wressley of the Foreign Office. 25f., 35f., 44, 103n. Wrong Thing, The (Bernards and Fairies, 3). 180. ) Yoked with an Unbeliever (Plain Tales, 5). 27f. Young Men at the Manor (Puck of Pook's Hill, 2). 181. 42 1 8 >- I MV1RSITV OF ( U.IFOKNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles [ilia \«„,k is DUE on the last date stamped below. BM/RL 0C J g 2 f9Wf RECE LD- JR' L SEP IVED AM 7-4 RECD URL LD g. AUG 8 WW 'AUG 6 1966 ^ P 5S$2 5l9e7 BEC'O LD-UHD v i !4Uiy 69 APR 1 3 1974 Form L9- Series I I • 1965 9-1° fteco ld-urm MAY 5 1975 MAY 1 7 1975 . \ i UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS Ai'GELES TTWRARY UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FAC AA 000 378 244 i