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Introduction To Kipling^s Indian Tales

^tpLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS” ^ and ‘‘The Courting of Dinah Shadd” — among the “Other Stories” being “Without Benefit of Clergy” — reached America early in the summer of 1890. I had never before read a line by Mr. Kipling or even heard his name, and I remember as if it were yesterday how those tales, some plain, others not so plain, brought the heat and dust and glare of India into the cool down-east summer. If the wonder had stopped with this attack on our geography and climate, it would still have been a wonder; but for very many Americans, and doubtless also for very many English people, the miracle was greater still. It was an attack on the geography of our minds and imagina* tions. During the rest of that summer Scott, Thackeray, Balzac, Tolstoi, and the rest, disappeared from view, or at least into the middle distance. Kipling, alone of all the writers of fiction, occupied the foreground. What none had done before, he had suddenly achieved. He had transmuted the Indian Empire into

INTRODUCTION literature. Whether true or false — and there are those who deny the truth of Mr. Kipling’s version — his India became and has remained the only India of hundreds of thousands of English-speaking readers.

Absolutely new then, relatively new now, Mr. Kipling imposes his exotic empire on ever arriving companies of subjects. He catches them young. And, to adapt Dr. Johnson’s wisdom concerning Scotchmen, much may be made of a reader if he be caught young.

So writes Charles T. Copeland, the wellknown literary authority of Harvard University to the publishers, on being informed of their plans for this edition.

In stating that Kipling transmitted the Indian Empire into literature Mr. Copeland succinctly proclaimed the universally accepted judgment of readers and critics who have familiarized themselves with the ‘Tndian Tales.”

The pervading atmosphere of oriental romance in these stories, which came with so deep an impression of freshness and realism to the Cambridge critic, would, with an equal sense of wonder, have struck the staid governors of the East India Company had they been read in Leaden Hall Street, whence for more

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INTRODUCTION than a hundred years these merchant princes governed the politics and trade of India. And how their faithful clerk, Charles Lamb, who from 1792 to 1825 pored over the countless invoices of spices, pepper, and dye stuffs, which freighted the returning ships of the great Company, would have rubbed his eyes as Kipling’s India unveiled itself to him. The author of the ‘‘Essays of Elia,” whose magnus opus, as he always said, consisted of the more than one hundred volumes of letter copy books containing his correspondence with India, would have brewed an even stronger punch than was his wont and “God blessed his soul” with more than usual fervor as he grasped the viewpoint from which Kipling’s wonderful imagination had looked out and visualized the beauty, the barbaric splendor, the subtle, thoughtful philosophy and the never-dying romance of India which for generations had dumbly passed in review before the denizens of India House as endless columns of prosaic figures.

The new India of romance, as we know it today was not to be unveiled by adventurous discoverers, merchant princes, triumphant soldiers, nor even by such men of letters as Lamb or Mackintosh. Like the fairy princess, she

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INTPO.JUCTION was to slumber in the imagination of the English-speaking world until her own prince should with his genius touch her lips and free the voice that ever since has thrilled and enchanted the hearts of the listener with the golden song and story of India.

Long she waited, but when at last Rudyard Kipling stood before her, those who had best fathomed her heart knew that her prince had come.

NORTON.

With a communication to the publishers by

CHARLES T. COPELAND,

of Harvard University.

Copyright, 1909 Edinburgh Society