If it still needs to be proved that Kipling’s realism was highly intermittent, those lines from his last years should do the job. His correspondence was sure to reach biographers and editors in the end. He could hamper, but not stop them. Ever since the launch of the Kipling rocket more than forty years earlier he had been far too famous for his letters to have been thrown away. At 24 he had not been six months in London before the Times had devoted a leader to his work. In that year, 1890, Henry James had termed him ‘the star of the hour’; R.L. Stevenson had pronounced him ‘too clever to live’; and Tennyson had judged him ‘the only one
These two volumes which end in 1899 contain 459 letters of the 1333 available for the period. The hampering process is evident throughout. Kipling is believed to have destroyed his correspondence with his parents and with Burne-Jones, and most of his inward mail. His letters to his wife and to her mother have disappeared, almost certainly by his wife’s hand; and his daughter, Mrs Bambridge, ordered the destruction of her mother’s diaries. His wife and daughter were, however, custodians in their own fashion. They strove to eliminate the traces of his private life – but the Kipling collection in the University of Sussex results largely from their work. The late C.E. Carrington was allowed to make extracts from Caroline Kipling’s diaries for his biography. Moreover, although the letters to Mrs Edmonia Hill were bought and destroyed, they had been copied, however inaccurately. These copies have survived and are invaluable for Kipling’s last two years in India. All this destruction did not prevent views of Kipling being obtainable from his private writings. It merely ensured that the views obtained would be subject to some distortion.
Professor Pinney’s exemplary editing reduces distortion to a minimum. His prodigious learning, never flaunted, embraces every source, with a few exceptions such as the Balliol College Register and one or two Latin texts. His selection is judicious. ‘I have regarded,’ he writes, ‘any letter that discusses a question of Kipling’s art’ as having ‘a special claim to inclusion
Kipling was driven by contrasting aptitudes. His journalistic training pushed him one way, the example of his artistic father another; and, for a grandson of Wesleyan ministers, a third pressure – one towards preaching – became at times the strongest of the three. In the outcome, his literary methods did not accord with his aims as an imperialist. These letters suggest, more interestingly perhaps than any autobiography, how far he was in his early days from recognising, still more from eliminating, this basic inconsistency in his life and work. In March 1890 he wrote from London that his business was ‘to get into touch with the common folk here, to find out what they desire, hope, or fear’. By the early months of 1891 he had formed the notion, as he wrote in Something of Myself, ‘of trying to tell to the English something of the world outside England – not directly but by implication
Kipling declined on principle to control his writing. ‘When your Daemon is in charge,’ he wrote in Something of Myself, ‘do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.’ ‘Good work,’ Dick Heldar tells Maisie in The Light that Failed, ‘has nothing to do with
Kipling made up for the gaps in his knowledge by his amazing speed in acquiring the background material for each story. He was not dependent on a large stock of factual information, ‘On Greenhow Hill’ and ‘William the Conqueror’ would appear in any list of his best stories: yet the Yorkshire background from the first came largely from talks with his father, while the scenes in the famine area for the second were derived from his one and only rail journey through South India.
Kipling’s American friends recognised in his writing the defects of his qualities. They did not suppose that abilities as spontaneous and exuberant as his could be kept unfailingly under tight control. John Hay commented from New Hampshire, after Kipling had paid him a three-day visit in 1895: ‘How a man can keep up so intense an intellectual life without going to Bedlam is amazing. He rattled off the framework of about forty stories while he was with us.’ ‘It is not strange,’ Charles Eliot Norton pronounced in the Atlantic Monthly., ‘that the insistence of his various and vigorous talents should often, during youth, when the exercise of talents is so delightful and so delusive, have interfered with his perfect obedience to the higher law of his inward being.’ In response, Kipling confessed to Norton: ‘I love the fun and riot of writing (I am daily and nightly perplexed with my own private responsibilities before God) and there are times when it is just a comfort and a delight to let out with the pen and ink – so long as it doesn’t do anyone any moral harm.’
A 25-year-old author with his way to make could hardly allow his imperial mission to determine his style in either his writings or his way of life. Where and how Kipling lived from 1892 to 1896 was determined, not by his zeal for the Empire, but by his marriage to an American and by the accident of their bank’s failure during their honeymoon tour. He needed quiet and privacy. Much of his travelling, even in the Empire, was undertaken in search of health. His extensive reading during this period reflected the interests of a literary man rather than those of an imperialist. While he spoke for the men of the new professions, he followed the older models. In literary terms, Kipling was not the ‘man from nowhere’ of Barrie’s phrase. He was steeped in Browning and Tennyson, admired Emerson and Matthew Arnold, and studied Sidney Lanier on metre.
Kipling’s failure to learn about the British Empire, and about the British electorate on which its central direction depended, was not entirely attributable to circumstances outside his control. As the letters make plain, he could not break free, in his views on public affairs, from the Lahore Club. The Liberals and Fabians whom he encountered when he first arrived in London derided his ‘poor little Gods of the East’, as he recorded in Something of Myself Unwilling – and perhaps afraid – to enter into discussion with them, he was ready with pathological reasons for their deviance. In December 1889, when one of the Macmillan ladies told him at dinner that India was fit for self-government and that English Liberals were ‘very much in earnest about putting things right there’, he replied: ‘Oh, that’s not earnestness
During these years Kipling did not consort enough with leading British Conservatives to gain an insight into their minds. In his own country far more than in America, he remained an outsider. His British friends were not of the stature of Norton, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay and Henry Adams. ‘I mistrust politicians when they eat with literary men,’ he wrote in 1896, after dining under Arthur Balfour’s chairmanship. Though fascinated by power he was seldom at ease with the powerful. At 22 he had written that, although the Viceroy had been ‘awfully sweet’ when the Saturday Review praised Plain Tales from the Hills, ‘Simla always makes me savage.’ Perhaps the accusations there that his parents were social climbers had made him wary.
In the 1890s these defects did no great harm. He would have been mistaken to include moult detail in his poems about the Empire. Criticised for his poem on the Canadian preferential tariff of 1897, he replied: ‘When and if there is another edition of my verses, I will do my best to put in Newfoundland’s voice also, but the task is not a pleasant one. If I leave out all reference I am taxed with “injustice”. If I make a pointed reference, as I did in “Our Lady of the Snows”, I am
In 1889, when he was crossing the United States and reporting on his travels to his Indian papers, he took some liberties with his material. The characters ‘met on the road’, he told Mrs Hill, ‘weren’t very interesting; but I had to make ’em so
Moberly Bell had the qualities of judgment which Kipling lacked. Usually he was happy to print the latter’s verse in the Times. But he did not use the ‘Hymn Before Action’, Kipling’s melodramatic response to the Venezuela issue and to the Kaiser’s message to Kruger after the Jameson Raid; and in September 1898 he placed ‘The Truce of the Bear’ in Literature (the precursor of the TLS), and not in the Times itself. The ‘vulgarity’ and ‘swagger’ of some of Kipling’s writing brought critical complaints but do not seem to have worried most of his contemporaries. During the Fleet manoeuvres of September 1898 he recited some of his verses at a ship’s concert. The young men who then carried him shoulder high round the quarterdeck had little taste for nice discriminations. Fortunately their loud voices could sometimes be drowned by Indian echoes. The effects of the Lahore Club were not wholly had. There would have been no ‘Recessional’ but for its members’ insistence that white men should not boast.
Kipling’s most serious difficulty did not come to light during the years covered by these volumes. He depended on encountering the incidents which would one day bring his Daemon into play. Once these had been absorbed, they might lie ready but unused for years. Although Kim was not published until 1901, Kipling gave an outline of it in a letter written nine years earlier. Unfortunately, as the best material from his notebooks was used, it was not replaced by entries of equal merit. ‘I’m too respectable now’, he wrote in February 1889, ‘to mix among the lower-class natives as I used to do.’ By December 1897 there was no water in the spring which Hay had seen bubbling just over two years earlier. ‘Nothing has come to me,’ Kipling told Norton. ‘I am not bothering,’ he added. ‘Maybe South Africa will unlock something.’ A few days later Henry James gave one of the most perceptive of his many assessments of Kipling’s work. ‘His talent,’ James told Grace Norton, ‘I think quite diabolically great
Professor Pinney’s second volume ends in one of Kipling’s worst years. An ill-judged journey to New York in January 1899 brought the death of his daughter, Josephine, and gave him pneumonia which left his lungs permanently weakened. ‘I don’t think,’ he told Henry James in September, ‘I shall ever be quite strong again.’ He might have said the same of the imperialism he had cherished. Stalky and Co appeared in book form a week before the Boer War began. It ended with an invitation to the reader to ‘imagine Stalky let loose on the south side of Europe with a sufficiency of Sikhs and a reasonable prospect of loot’. The Boers put paid to nonsense of that kind in a few weeks. The imperialist heyday in the Nineties had the air of intoxication; and the remark about Kipling attributed to Stevenson applies with particular force to that decade. ‘All the good fairies came to his christening; and they were all drunk.’
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