Aspects Of Kipling S Art

Contents

PREFACE vii

i THE REVELATION OF MIRTH i

n THE BROKEN SPRING: 'THE PROPHET AND

Preface

IT NEED hardly be said that this book does not pretend to cover all aspects of Kipling's art. It deals with some facets of his work that have seemed to me of particular interest, most of which to my knowledge have not been dealt with at any length before. My starting point was an attempt to interpret a number of his more enigmatic stories. In its turn this led to the chapter in which I have tried to analyse the technique of what is usually called his late manner.

No doubt some readers will find this chapter heavy going, but I believe such a general survey of narrative and stylistic devices may nevertheless be of some use. The technique of the stories in question is of no little interest in itself It was invented by Kipling and has no precedent in English prose that I know of. Contemporary criticism wholly failed to see what it was meant to convey, and even today it is calculated to baffle the general reader. The fame that Kipling dreamed of gaining from his late work must be posthumous. It is my hope that the present book may contribute to a better understanding of its very remarkable and sometimes startling qualities.

While the meaning, or rather the meanings, of the five stories I have tried to interpret is practically guaranteed to elude any reader who does not make a close study of them, most of the other tales in his late manner are less ' resistant to interpretation, though they often do contain cryptic elements. They therefore do not call for a point-for-point analysis, but only for an explanation of esoteric

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PREFACE

themes and passages, and this is one of the things I have endeavoured to do in Chapter VI.

The interpretations of the five tales afford a clearer picture of Kipling's technique than it is possible to give in a general analysis. Four of them are therefore printed after the relevant chapter by way of illustration. The analysis of The Comprehension of Private Copper has no reference to the preceding chapter. It is printed as an example of something that must have a wider application: the way in which a piece of literature may become incomprehensible with the passing of time because it cannot be understood without a knowledge of some idea or catchword that was familiar at the time of writing, but has since been forgotten.

The dates given for the stories and poems are those of publication, not of composition. Kipling is reported to have kept a list of the dates when they were begun and finished, but this list has not been accessible to me.

The critic who lives with the works of a writer for a long time often gets to know the tracks along which the latter's thoughts move, to the point where he can say with some confidence: this is what X is likely to mean, or conversely: this is not the sort of thing one would expect from X. This is useful for the critic, and often gives him an advantage over the casual reader. But it has drawbacks too: for one thing he may be completely assured of something that he cannot demonstrate, and that his readers therefore refuse to accept, even if he is right. And for another, he may actually be led astray by his knowledge of the way the author's mind usually works, because the latter may have wanted to do something unusual in the passage in question.

I have tried to keep this piece of copybook-heading viii

PREFACE

wisdom in mind. Yet I am well aware that some of the devices by which I believe Kipling suggests esoteric meanings may strike some readers as so odd as to arouse their scepticism. This is another reason for the chapter about his technique: it is meant to supplement the analyses and to support the latter by showing that these devices are not confined to one particular story, but are something that Kipling made a habit of, and that is to be found in other tales as well.

The book was written concurrently with another and more comprehensive one, to be published in Danish, but as yet unfinished.

Of the five interpretations those of Mrs Bathurst and The Prophet and the Country have been published, in a somewhat shorter version, in the January 1962 number of the Danish periodical Orbis Litterarum, while The Comprehension of Private Copper has appeared in English Studies, November 1961. My thanks are due to the editors of these journals for allowing me to reprint them.

I wish to make acknowledgment to Mrs George Bambridge and to Macmillan and Co., London, for permission to quote from Kipling's work in my book, and also to Methuen and Co., London, for permission to quote the verses from The Last Rhyme of True Thomas.

I have read and profited from the work of Charles Carrington, Bonamy Dobree, Robert Escarpit, Hilton Brown, Francis Leaud, C. S. Lewis, Edward Shanks, and Edmund Wilson, though more for the general background than for the specific aspects of Kipling dealt with in the present book. These have hitherto on the whole received little attention except for Dr J. M. S. Tompkins' brilliant study, The Art ofRudyard Kipling. To the latter

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PREFACE

book I am indebted, both as an incentive and for a number of specific points. I also want to thank Dr Tompkins for giving me many opportunities to discuss with her the interpretations of Mrs Bathurst, The Prophet and the Country, TheBull That Thoughtznd ' Teem 9 . And finally I must thank my wife for much acute criticism and a good many ideas.

Copenhagen, 1963.

Chapter I The Revelation Of Mirth

THE TITLE Kipling gave to one of his volumes of short stories, The Days Work, no doubt epitomized for contemporary readers his attitude to life. But even this title, with its apparent insistence on the practical side of existence, we now know had implications of quite another kind for himself: it was inspired by a motto that his father inscribed on the chimney-piece of his house in Vermont: the Night cometh when No Man can Work. 1

For the truth is that Kipling lived in two worlds. Behind the one where the day's work is done, with its machines and ships and soldiers and administrators, there lies another whose gates sometimes open for him. This is the night side of reality, and his principal symbol for it is the night. In Something of Myself (pp. 18-19) he describes the first time he crossed its boundaries. This was when he was staying with his mother in a London boarding-house; he was a small boy then, apparently eleven or twelve years old. I give the whole passage in order that the reader may judge for himself whether any details are as irrelevant as they may appear at first sight: is it fortuitous, for example, that the toad is named after the King of the Nether World?

Here, for the first time, it happened that the night got into my head. I rose up and wandered about that still house till daybreak, when I slipped out into the little brick-walled garden

1 Carrington: Rudyard Kipling, p. 207.

I and saw the dawn break. All would have been well but for Pluto, a pet toad brought back from Epping Forest, who lived mostly in one of my pockets. It struck me that he might be thirsty, and I stole into my Mother's room and would have given him a drink from a water-jug. But it slipped and broke and very much was said. The ex-butler could not understand why I had stayed awake all night. I did not know then that such night-wakings would be laid upon me through my life; or that my fortunate hour would be on the turn of sunrise, with a sou'- west breeze afoot.

He returns to the subject again in the chapter about his seven years in India: 'Often the night got into my head 1 as it had done in the boarding-house in the Brompton Road, and I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places. . . .' (p. 53).

Obviously these are experiences to which Kipling attached great weight, and what he tells us about them has the authority of an autobiography, but it is typical of his reticence that he does not tell us in what they consist. Indeed, the reason may well be that they are incommunicable, because they are private to himself and afford no common ground for the writer and the reader; and also because they belong to a hinterland of consciousness that language has no means of dealing with in direct terms.

These passages might mean nothing more extraordinary than that he sometimes could not sleep, and then sought relief in night-walking, were it not for the peculiar language in which he describes his experiences: the odd phrase that 'the night got into my head' and the cryptic

1 It is perhaps significant that this phrase also occurs in Cold Iron, which is an allegory on the role of the poet in the world.

passage about his 'fortunate hour'. As it is, he clearly refers to something very strange and of great importance to himself. 1

It is possible that The Brushwood Boy reflects his own feeling of having a double life, divided between a daylight and a nocturnal world, with this difference that the young officer in the story only finds his way to the secret country in dreams, while Kipling entered it awake. One notes that he placed this story at the end of The Day's Work. This is an indication that he attached particular importance to it: it is his parting word to the reader, and it sometimes has the effect of emphasizing the dominant note of the book. That he should have ended a volume called The Day's Work with a story about a life half of which is spent in a dream world is surely a very curious thing.

It looks as if it were meant to convey something to the watchful reader, or at least express something of importance to himself. Is it too far-fetched, one wonders, to see in this a veiled hint that the daylight world is not the only one, and that there is another kind of reality that may even invade the scene where the day's work is done? Kipling certainly thought so himself, and a great many of his stories, from The Phantom 'Rickshaw and At the End of the Passage to In the Same Boat and Fairy-Kist have as their theme such an invasion.

The dreams in The Brushwood Boy are poetical, but also

1 A comparison with Dickens suggests itself here. It is quite clear that Dickens's night walks served the deliberate purpose of exploring realms of consciousness, chiefly of sinister and frightening qualities in familiar scenes, that only revealed themselves to him in the dark. (Cf. e.g. Night Walks in The Uncommercial Traveller.} There is of course no question of influence: Kipling does not appear to have been interested in Dickens.

frightening. They read as if they had at least a foundation in actual experience and, as Dr Tompkins has pointed out, this is confirmed by a passage in Brazilian Sketches, where he mentions a dream of his own that is very like one of Cottar's in the story.

But while Cottar's adventures beyond the boundaries of tangible reality, in spite of the atmosphere of menace and fear that surrounds them, are worth seeking after, and afford an excitement absent from his workday existence, the dreams that occur elsewhere in Kipling's stories are wholly evil. This applies also to the only one ascribed to his own persona. It is recorded in The House Surgeon, in a passage whose cryptic wording somehow succeeds in suggesting a horror beyond the power of ordinary words to express:

I fell into the most terrible of all dreams that joyous one in which all past evil has not only been wiped out of our lives, but has never been committed; and in the very bliss of assured innocence, before our loves shriek and change countenance, we wake to the day we have earned.

The dreams suggest sinister powers somewhere at the back of normal life, that threaten to break through to the dreamer and deprive him of his reason or his life. Hummil in At the End of the Passage keeps a spur in his bed to prevent himself from falling asleep, because his dreams are more terrible than flesh and blood can stand. In the end he is found dead: the dreams have overtaken him. In In the Same Boat both Conroy and Miss Henschil are being driven out of their minds by a recurrent dream of great horror. John Marden in The Woman in His Life is a similar case.

But whatever similarity there may be between the dream themes in the stories and Kipling's nocturnal visitations, when 'night gets into his head', the latter are not frightening at all. On the contrary, as they appear in his stories, they are accompanied by a state of release and exaltation.

While his account of the night getting into his head in Something of Myself tells us nothing about the actual experiences involved, he uses what appears to be the same theme in some of his stories, and here he is much more explicit in describing his Fortunate Hour and the events which it heralds. It is true that the occurrences narrated in these tales are unmistakably fictitious, or at least completely disguised versions of things that may really have happened, but Kipling always describes them in a way that seems to indicate that their emotional colouring corresponds to something he has experienced himself. In some of the stories he gives almost identical accounts of the omens that announce his 'fortunate hour'.

There is a curious parallelism between Kipling's accounts of his Fortunate Hour and the moments of abysmal horror experienced by characters in some of the stories, as if the two were the same phenomenon with opposite signs. He describes the coming of his Fortunate Hour as 'a night of nights' or 'one of our nights' ('we' being himself and the 'demon' that conducts him through his adventures). In In the Same Boat Conroy and Miss Henschil refer to the time of their ordeal as 'my Night' and, corresponding to the omens that herald the Fortunate Hour, they both receive what they call 'Sentence' and 'Notice'. The unbearable depression described so realistically in The House Surgeon is also preceded by a warning of its coming: 'a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an

ASPECTS OF ZIPLING S ART

immense distance in the background of my brain.' 1 But in the case of his own Fortunate Hours he makes it quite clear that what these promise him is something inconceivably marvellous: a veil is drawn apart; reality assumes sharper outlines and brighter colours, and is experienced with an intensity beyond that of everyday life. All this is outside the scope of normal perception, and is therefore, strictly speaking, incommunicable; the writer must be content to get as near to it as the limitations of language, and of the art forms he chooses, permit. In the case of Kipling, the latter are poems and short stories, the poems being reflections on the general nature of the Revelation of Mirth, while the stories present the same subject in concrete terms by means of their action.

One of the many curious things about Kipling's treatment of this theme is that the vehicle he chooses in order to express a transcendental experience, which had for him the nature almost of a divine gift, is a type of story whose action is farcical. Farcical tales are common in Kipling, 2 they are found in nearly all the volumes of stories from every period of his life, but the great majority of them have no reference to his philosophy of mirth. Some of

1 The narrator says : *I never felt anything like it'. But no one could have described a fit of obsessive fear and despondency so convincingly who had not experienced something similar himself. Kipling puts on record in Something of Myself (p. 134) that in fact he had, viz. when he took a house at Torquay that caused 'a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart' in those who came under its roof.

2 Francis L&ud in his interesting study La Pofoique de Rudyard Kipling (p. 163) computes that no of Kipling's stories, i.e. more than a third of the total, and a similar proportion of his poems, are written in order to make the reader laugh. This should not be taken too literally: the borderline between seriousness and jest is notoriously vague, and a Frenchman will not draw it in the same place as an Englishman.

the Plain Tales from the Hills, for example The Rout of the White Hussars and His Wedded Wife, are merely accounts of somewhat primitive practical jokes. An example of a practical joke story from Jiis later work on quite another scale is afforded by The Bonds of Discipline (1903), which describes in great detail a fantastic hoax staged by the whole complement of a British man-of-war for the benefit of a French spy.

But among the farcical tales there is a group that is different from those mentioned above, for one thing because Kipling here puts much of his usual reticence aside and tells the reader more about his private feelings, hopes and disappointments than elsewhere; but chiefly because, in contrast to the run of his farces, their real point is not the sequence of fantastic happenings that constitutes the action, but a spiritual experience which they are an attempt to express, and which is akin to that for which he uses the phrase 'the night got into my head' in Something of Myself. The following are the stories in question in chronological order: 1

('Brugglesmith') (1891)

My Sunday at Home (1895)

The Puzzler (1906)

The Vortex (1914)

The Prophet and the Country (1924)

Aunt Ellen (1932)

1 'Brugglesmith' is in brackets because it is only halfway to belonging in the group. I have not included Steam Tactics (1902) because there is no resolution of the tension in laughter, and because, unlike the others, it is a revenge story. I have tried to show in the next chapter that The Prophet and the Country definitely belongs to the stories that deal with the Revelation of Mirth, though it differs from the rest in that the sequence of grotesque events is not experienced by the T, but constitutes a story told him by somebody else.

The list does not include The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat, Little Foxes and Beauty Spots, nor those Stalky tales which contain descriptions of serai-hysterical hilarity, because all these belong in a different category. In the first three the laughter is part of a revenge or retribution, and this also in some measure holds good of the Stalky stories. When that is the case, Kipling invariably avoids any reference to his creed of laughter as a cosmic revelation. Nor have I included the stories where laughter figures as a healing power. There are several of these, the most important being the very late story The Miracle of Saint Jubanus (1930). These too belong to a group by themselves, for one thing because the laughter has not the character of a 'revelation', and for another because they are not farces.

The relevant stories thus constitute a well-defined group of six. Beginning in 1891 and ending in 1932, they are spread fairly evenly over some forty years of Kipling's literary career, and the recurrence of their basic theme bears witness to his continued preoccupation with the transcendental experience they describe. All these (as also the late revenge stories, with the exception of Little Foxes) are told in the first person. The reader is left in no doubt that the T is Kipling himself, or rather the persona he consistently assumes whenever he makes an appearance in his own books. But with one exception, 'Brugglesmith 9 the first of them, and one in which he has not yet quite found the pattern characteristic of the rest he is not the principal character, and he is always represented as sufficiently detached from the events that he witnesses to enjoy them as a kind of observer, for whose benefit the whole fantastic show might have been staged. The actual events of these tales are clearly fictitious.

Indeed, they are so egregious that they could not very well have happened in real life. But one is left in no doubt that Kipling believes he has experienced the emotional quality that they embody, and the story has the appearance of being a vision of a perfection glimpsed in felicitous moments, or a wish dream to meet with something like it in reality.

These stories are highly 'private', in so far as they deal with emotions that most readers cannot be expected to know, whether from themselves or from literature, and into which they must find it difficult to enter. It is not easy to give a straightforward account of something that is told indirectly or symbolically. A simile will have to serve, and the reader is asked to forgive the following attempt to make 'a raid on the inarticulate', which may be likened to spattering a target with a shotgun because one knows one cannot hope to score a bull's-eye with a rifle. Lest he should think it too fanciful, I would refer to the poems on pages 17-20, of whose highly condensed language the following is a greatly amplified rendering. What happens, then, may be described as follows:

The familiar scene is exposed to a kind of shock which for a brief while makes it settle down into a pattern other than the accustomed one. The narrator suddenly finds ' himself in a universe governed by an internal logic other than that of his normal world, whose laws are earnestness, order and duty. 1 The cosmic powers have discarded their

1 Cf. The Playmate:

"Where all an earnest, baffled Earth Blunders and trips to make us mirth

Where, from the trivial flux of Things, Rise unconceived miscarryings Outrageous but immortal . . .

severe mask, and their inmost essence is shown, at least for the moment, to be comic. The menaces and the sinister forces so often sensed at the back of Kipling's world are banned on this transfigured stage, where embarrassments and mishaps are merely laughable, and one can abandon oneself blissfully to happenings that become more and more outrageous as the story moves along. And this abandonment is felt as a release, or at least a respite, from the burdens and stresses of life.

He who experiences this is vouchsafed a glimpse of a comic cosmos, and at the same time a revelation of hidden meanings that have escaped him in his more sober moments. The process takes place, of course, inside his own mind, which undergoes a kind of enlargement, enabling him to discover new and exciting qualities in things that used to appear prosaic; and it is implied that what he perceives in this way is a truth that otherwise eludes one. 1

The experiences these stories try to describe involve, as it were, a pause in the inexorable regularity of the world. They have the effect of a private Saturnalia that produces a catharsis by the suspension of rules and distinctions that one normally has to observe. That for Kipling, who otherwise regards order as the basic principle of the universe, this should be a symbol of bliss, is a remarkable evidence of the complexity of his character. It is a complete contradiction of his usual philosophy, according to which it is only by working, doing one's duty, and meeting the challenges of fate with courage and patience that one can lead a tolerable life and preserve

1 Cf. The Playmate:

She is not wisdom but, may be,

Wiser than all the Norns is She.

IO one's human dignity. Those who look for logic in such matters can perhaps find it in the explanation that this is after all only a Saturnalia, a few hours' holiday from the burden and the dust, and not applicable as a guide to ordinary conduct. It is, however, much more likely that the explanation must be sought in the contradictions of the writer's personality: a tautness, sometimes a crampedness, that is occasionally reflected in his style and in his sudden outbreaks of intolerant anger, caused him to make a cult of the only effective form of relaxation he knew, and to identify memories of a more carefree period of his life with remembered scenes of hilarity.

This motif, which is a spiritual experience that is quite intangible, and beyond the borderline of normal emotions, he undertakes to express in a story, whose external form is like that of other stories. It takes the shape of an account of some particular occasion, when the everyday scene suddenly explodes in a blaze of coloured fireworks. One bizarre event follows the other, working up towards the culmination, which manifests itself as an orgy of uncontrollable mirth. A tension is built up, to be resolved at the end of the story. Those involved in the events it describes find release in an ecstasy of laughter, so vehement as to be almost painful. It is always described in violently exaggerated terms, as if it were a fit of hysteria (a word that Kipling uses several times to describe it). The characters roll on the ground, gasp, shriek and groan, till they are on the point of suffocating:

As we passed the front-door it swung open, and showed Jimmy the artist sitting at the bottom of a newly-cleaned staircase. He waggled his hands at us, and when we entered we saw that the man was stricken speechless. His eyes grew red red like a ferret's and what little breath he had whistled shrilly.

II

At first we thought it was a fit, and then we saw that it was mirth. . . (The Puzzler).

We hurried after them, for they were running unsteadily, squeaking like rabbits as they ran. We overtook them in a little nut wood half a mile up the road, where they had turned aside, and were rolling. So we rolled with them, and ceased not till we had arrived at the extremity of exhaustion (The Puzzler).

Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from the station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step of the way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the flank of the good green hedge when I was too weak to stand (My Sunday at Home).

In a similar passage in The Vortex Kipling says: 1 prostrated myself before Allah in that mirth which is more truly labour than any prayer.' Actually, these descriptions of a tension resolving in orgiastic laughter have more than a little in common with scenes of religious enthusiasm known from accounts of Revivalist meetings in England in the eighteenth and America in the nineteenth century.

I have dwelt on these descriptions of uncontrollable mirth (which incidentally occur in several other stories besides those discussed here) because they are really a veryodd phenomenon, the odder the more one considers them. For otherwise Kipling is concerned to describe the refusal of Englishmen to give vocal expression to their feelings as one of the most impressive national qualities. (Compare the poem Et Dona Ferentes, and the poem accompanying The Puzzler, which has the same title as the story from which one of the above examples of hysterical laughter is taken, and which, paradoxically, is a homage to the English national habit of silence and reticence.) But when he deals with a comic experience he describes his characters, including himself, as displaying their emotions with a physical violence of which the gesticulations of Frenchmen and Italians, so despised by the Victorians, are only a pale reflection.

The action that precedes the release in laughter follows roughly the same scheme in all the stories in question. The characters are exposed to some comic accident, whose consequences deploy from one farcical scene to the next.

As an example one may take Aunt Ellen, the last of this kind of story Kipling wrote. The following is only a very brief synopsis, which leaves out many details. The narrator, who is clearly meant to be Kipling himself, has been on a visit to Cambridge and drives towards London in the evening. An old lady has given him a commission: a jar of jam and an eiderdown, which he ties on to his car. The bundle falls off and is run over by two undergraduates, who are on their way to a dance in London in a state of considerable elevation. Run over, the eiderdown soaked in red jam looks much like the victim of a traffic accident, and Kipling allows the undergraduate at the wheel to remain in the belief that it is in fact a mangled body. (This use of a macabre subject for comic effect probably owes something to R. L. Stevenson's The Wrong Box.} Both cars continue their way after the 'body' has been stowed into one of them. After a number of wayside adventures, they reach the outskirts of London in the early dawn. There they are stopped by a policeman. When he opens the bonnet of the car the down is blown out by the ventilator and sticks to the constable and one of the undergraduates, so that they look like two monstrous birds. Then follows the usual laughter motif.