Rudyard Kipling

Roger Lancelyn Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136209208
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

1. Andrew Lang introduces Kipling’s First Book

1886

The earliest review in Great Britain so far discovered was contained in Andrew Lang's monthly causerie 'At the Sign of the Ship' in Longman's Magazine, Vol. VIII, pp. 675-6, October 1886. (Lang did not realize that the name in facsimile handwriting on the 'envelope' was that of the author. See pages 13-14 of Introduction.)

Andrew Lang (1844-1912), poet, scholar, folklorist and essayist, was the leading literary critic and reviewer of the last two decades of the century. He was among the first to recognize and encourage many writers of the period, notably Stevenson, Bridges, Kipling and De la Mare, besides the romance-writers from Haggard, Doyle and Weyman to A. E. W. Mason and John Buchan.

There is a special variety of English Vers de Société, namely the Anglo-Indian species. A quaint and amusing example of this literature has reached me, named Departmental Ditties. The modest author does not give his name. The little book is published in the shape of an official paper, 'No. 1. of 1886'. The envelope is the cover. No poem, and this is an excellent arrangement, occupies more than one of the long narrow pages. Would that all poems were as brief. The Radical should read Departmental Ditties and learn how gaily Johns et Cie govern India:

'Who shall doubt' the secret hid
Under Cheops' pyramid,
Was that the contractor 'did'
Cheops out of several millions?

Or that Joseph's sudden rise
To Comptroller of Supplies,
Was a fraud of monstrous size
On King Pharaoh's swart civilians?

Here we learn how Ahasuerus Jenkins, merely because he 'had a tenor voice of super Santley tone', became a power in the state.

Very curious is the tale of Jones, who left his newly-wedded bride, and went to the Hurrom Hills above the Afghan border, and whose heliographic messages home were intercepted and interpreted by General Bangs.

With damnatory dash and dot he'd heliographed his wife
Some interesting details of the General's private life.

On the whole, these are melancholy ditties. Jobs, and posts, and pensions, and the wives of their neighbours appear (if we trust the satirist) to be much coveted by her Majesty's Oriental civil servants. The story of Giffen, who was broken and disgraced, and saved a whole countryside at the expense of his own life, and who is now worshipped (by the natives) in Bengal, is worthy of Bret Harte.

The Indian poet has kept the best wine to the last, and I like his poem 'In Spring-time' so much that (supreme compliment!) I have copied it out here ... [the poem is quoted in full: see DV, p. 78].

2. Plain Tales from the Hills Reaches England

1888

Anonymous review of Plain Tales from the Hills (Thacker and Spink, London and Calcutta, 1888) in the Saturday Review, No. 1702, Vol. LXV, pp. 697-8 (9 June 1888) under the heading 'Novels and Stories', with seven other novels by various authors —none now remembered.

Probably by Walter Herries Pollock (1850-1926), the editor— author of minor verse, fiction, criticism, etc. C. F. Hooper (then a member of the firm of Thacker and Spink) recorded in an article 'Kipling's Younger Days'—Saturday Review, 7 March 1936, that he was trying to sell Plain Tales in London, but had no success until he persuaded the Editor of the Saturday Review to review it.

There is a good deal in a title. Could there be a much less attractive title than Plain Tales from the Hills? Residents in British India and subscribers to the Civil and Military Gazette may know what it means, and hasten to get hold of the book accordingly; but to the untravelled inhabitants of London and the United Kingdom generally it would seem almost as hopeful to undertake the perusal of a volume entitled Straight Talks from Beulah. We should suggest to Mr. Kipling to change the name of his book to The Other Man; and Other Stories, not because 'The Other Man' is his best plain tale, which it is not, but because it would look well on the bookstalls. There are forty plain tales, of which twenty-eight have appeared separately in a newspaper, and the other twelve are, in the modest words of the author, 'more or less new'. Each tale is extremely short, the average length being just under seven pages. Nevertheless, for the profitable disposal of odds and ends of time or for a cross-country journey in stopping trains on Sunday it would be hard to find better reading. Mr. Kipling knows and appreciates the English in India, and is a born story-teller and a man of humour into the bargain. He is also singularly versatile, and equally at home in humour and pathos. 'Thrown Away', a story of a commonplace youth who killed himself in despair merely for want of proper training, is little short of genuine tragedy, and is full of a grim humour which is decidedly telling. 'The Three Musketeers' and 'A Friend's Friend' are farce of a high order. Four of the stories—and four of the best—concern the British private in regiments stationed in India. An inimitable Irishman appears in each of them, and relates his experiences with a delightful freshness and good humour. The following extract occurs in an astonishing story of the taking of a town by Burmese Dacoits. The British detachment could not discover where the Dacoits abode; but

evenshually we puckarowed wan man. 'Trate him tinderly,' sez the Lift'nint. So I tuk him away into the jungle, wid the Burmese Interprut'r an' my clanin'-rod. Sez I to the man: 'My paceful squireen,' sez I, 'you shquot on your hunkers an' dimonstrate to my frind here, where your frinds are whan they're at home.' Wid that I introjuced him to the clanin'-rod, an' he comminst to jabber; the Interprut'r inturprutin' in betweens, an' me helpin' the Intelligince Departmint wid my clanin'-rod whan the man misremimbered.

It has been explained just before that: 'Tis only a dah and a Snider that makes a dacoit. Widout thim he's a paceful cultivator, an' felony for to shoot.'

Another remarkable military story is 'The Madness of Private Ortheris', Ortheris goes out shooting with his friend Mulvaney and the author ... [26 lines, mainly quotations from the story, with synopsis] ... The military stories happen to have been dwelt on here, but there are many tales of civilians, and indeed of natives, that are really quite as good. The reader should not omit to peruse the headnotes of the stories, especially when they are in verse. It seems probable that a considerable proportion are Mr. Kipling's own. One advantage in the extreme shortness of the stories is that, as they are read in a few minutes, their incidents are easily forgotten, and they may be read again with fresh pleasure after a short interval. For this reason, and because it is small, the book is one to buy, and not merely to get from the library.

3. Sir William Hunter on Departmental Ditties

1888

Signed review in the Academy, No. 852, pp. 128-9 (1 September 1888).

Sir William Wilson Hunter (1840-1900) was a well-known Indian civilian, historian and publicist, author of several learned works on India, notably The Indian Empire: its Peoples, History and Products (1895), and a member of the Governor-General's Council 1881-7.

Charles Carrington calls this review 'the first analytical essay by a writer who knew Kipling's background, and knew India'.

Mr. Kipling's ditties have well earned the honours of a third edition. They possess the one quality which entitles vers de société to live. For they reflect with light gaiety the thoughts and feelings of actual men and women, and are true as well as clever. Neither wit nor sparkling epigram, nor the laboriously laughable rhyme, but this element of truth alone can save the poet of a set from oblivion.

As Pope admits us to a real belle's toilette in the reign of Queen Anne and allows us to look over her hand at ombre; or as Praed preserves alive the political coterie-life of half-a-century ago; or as Bret Harte, in his sadder way, places us down among the saloon-gamblers of the West with their stray gleams of compunction and tenderness— so Mr. Kipling achieves the feat of making Anglo-Indian society flirt and intrigue visibly before our eyes. It is not, as he discloses it, a very attractive society. Its flirtations will seem rather childish to a London coquette, its intrigues very small to a parliamentary wire-puller. But, if Mr. Kipling makes his little Simla folk rather silly, he also makes them very real. The Mayfair matron, accustomed to calmly play her musical pawns at her matinees, will indeed marvel that any woman should take the trouble which the Simla lady took to capture one singing subaltern. The 'Legend of the Indian Foreign Office' may seem to the diplomatic youth whose windows look out on Downing Street to be better suited to the civic parlour of some small pushing mayor. Although, however, Mr. Kipling's stage is a narrow one, his players are very much alive, and they go through their pranks in quite fresh dresses, and with all the accessories of true tears and ogles, audible sighs and laughter.

It is a curious little world to which he introduces us. The few English men of letters who have passed a portion of their lives in India, from Philip Francis to Macaulay, and the still rarer stray scholar from foreign parts, like Csoma de Koros, who has sojourned there, seem to have found Anglo-Indian society sometimes bizarre, and more often intolerably dull. It is this weariness of uncongenial social surroundings which gives to Sir Alfred Lyall's poems their note of peculiar pathos. In spite of the brilliance of his own career, India is ever to him the Land of Regrets. The merry little people who flirt through Mr. Kipling's ditties look out on the scene with altogether different eyes. They may detest the country and dislike the natives, but they find their own small lives vastly amusing. Their personal tastes and their code of public morals are equally simple. Their highest ideal of enjoyment would seem, according to Mr. Kipling, to be a stringed band and a smooth floor. Their most serious aim in life, we learn from the same observer, is 'an appointment'—signifying thereby not an opportunity for doing work, but a device for drawing pay. This great object of existence in the ditties is apparently best to be achieved by flirting, fibbing, and conjugal collusion. Thus Mr. Potiphar Gubbins, the hero of one poem, gets hoisted over the heads of his brother engineers by the fascinations of his wife—an attractive and a complaisant young person who, for reasons of her own, has married Potiphar, although 'coarse as a chimpanzee'. Another piece relates how Mr. Sleary, an impecunious subaltern secretly engaged to a lady in England, obtains an appointment by proposing to the daughter of an Indian official. Having secured the post, he frightens his fiancee Number Two out of the engagement by pretending to have epileptic fits, then nobly marries fiancee Number One, and lives with her happily ever after on the produce of his fraud. In the ditty of Delilah, a veteran Simla charmer wheedles a State secret out of an aged Councillor and betrays it to a younger admirer, who, in turn, promptly betrays it to the press. In the story of Uriah, an officer is despatched to Quetta and dies there, in order that his wife may more freely amuse herself at Simla with the senior who got him sent out of the way. A private secretaryship is the well-earned reward of a young gentleman who receives a kiss by mistake at a masked ball, and who has the extraordinary chivalry or prudence not to publish the lady's name. These little contes, with various duller, if more decorous, jobs like that of the Chatham colonel, may seem poor stuff for verse. But Mr. Kipling handles each situation with a light touch and a gay malice, which make it difficult to be quite sure whether he sincerely admires his pretty marionettes, or whether he is not inwardly chafing and raging at the people among whom he is condemned to live. He very calmly expounds the scheme of creation in his curious Anglo-India world:

[quotes first four stanzas of 'A General Summary': DV p. 4]

If this were Mr. Kipling's highest flight his poems would scarcely have reached a third edition. But in the midst of much flippancy and cynicism come notes of a pathetic loneliness and a not ignoble discontent with himself, which have something very like the ring of genius. Making verses, however clever, for the mess-room and the lawn tennis-club cannot be an altogether satisfying lifework. To Mr. Kipling, as to Sir Alfred Lyall in our own time, or to poor Leyden in the past, and, indeed, to every man of the true literary temperament who has had to spend his years in India, that country is still the 'sultry and sombre Noverca—the Land of Regrets'. There are many stanzas and not a few poems in this little volume which go straight to the heart of all who have suffered or are now suffering, the long pain of tropical exile. For besides the silly little world which disports itself throughout most of the ditties, there is another Anglo-Indian world which for high aims, and a certain steadfastness in effort after the personal interest in effort is well nigh dead, has never had an equal in history. Some day a writer will arise—perhaps this young poet is the destined man—who will make that nobler Anglo-Indian world known as it really is. It will then be seen by what a hard discipline of endurance our countrymen and countrywomen in India are trained to do England's greatest work on the earth. Heat, solitude, anxiety, ill-health, the never-ending pain of separation from wife and child, these are not the experiences which make men amusing in after-life. But these are the stern teachers who have schooled one generation of Anglo-Indian administrators after another to go on quietly and resolutely, if not hopefully, with their appointed task. Of this realistic side of Anglo-Indian life Mr. Kipling also gives glimpses. His serious poems seem to me the ones most full of promise. Taken as a whole, his book gives hope of a new literary star of no mean magnitude rising in the east. An almost virgin field of literary labour there awaits some man of genius. The hand which wrote 'The Last Department' in this little volume is surely reserved for higher work than breaking those poor pretty Simla butterflies on the wheel.

4. An Early Review of Soldiers Three

1889

Anonymous review from the Spectator, Vol. LXII, pp. 403-4, 23 March 1889; reprinted in the Kipling Journal, Vol. VII, No. 52, pp. 27-30, December 1939.

There is no evidence as to who wrote this review, but it may well have been by John St. Loe Strachey (1860-1927), at that time on the staff of the Spectator (of which he was editor and proprietor from 1898 to 1925), who was a family friend of the Lockwood Kiplings.

As a wholesome corrective to what may be called the oleographic style of depicting military life, now so much in vogue, Mr. Kipling's brilliant sketches of the barrack-room, realistic in the best sense of the word, deserve a hearty welcome. Here be no inanities of the officers' mess, no apotheosis of the gilded and tawny-moustachioed dragoon, no languid and lisping lancer, no child-sweethearts—none, in fact, of the sentimental paraphernalia familiar to readers of modern military fiction. Here, instead, we have Tommy Atkins as the central figure: and not Tommy on parade, but in those moods when the natural man finds freest expression—...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTE ON THE TEXT
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 ANDREW LANG introduces Kipling's first book Departmental Ditties in Longman's Magazine 1886
• 2 Notice of Plain Tales from the Hills in Saturday Review 1888
• 3 SIR WILLIAM HUNTER on Departmental Ditties in Academy 1888
• 4 Early review of Soldiers Three in Spectaaor 1889
• 5a ANDREW LANG on 'Mr. Kipling's Stories' 1889
• 5b ANDREW LANG welcomes 'An Indian Story-teller' 1889
• 6 Article in The Times 'Mr. Kipling's Writings' 1890
• 7 W. E. HENLEY on 'The New Writer' in Scots Observer 1890
• 8 CHARLES WHIBLEY on 'Good Stuff and Bad' in Scots Observer 1890
• 9 BARRY PAIN: 'The Sincerest Form of Flattery' in Cornhill Magazine 1890
• 10 Extracts from ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S Letters 1890-4
• 11 Extracts from Letters of HENRY JAMES 1890-9
• 12 ANDREW LANG on 'Mr. Kipling's Stories' 1891
• 13 J. K. STEPHEN: A Protest in Verse in Cambridge Review 1891
• 14 J. M. BARRIE on 'Mr. Kipling's Stories' in Contemporary Review 1891
• 15 Three reviews by LIONEL JOHNSON in Academy 1891-2
• 16 OSCAR WILDE: Two extracts 1891
• 17 EDMUND GOSSE: 'Rudyard Kipling' in Century Magazine 1891
• 18 Estimate 'Kipling' in Bookman 1891
• 19 MRS. OLIPHANT reviews Life's Handicap in Blackwood's Magazine 1891
• 20 FRANCIS ADAMS on 'Rudyard Kipling' in Fortnightly Review 1891
• 21 HENRY JAMES'S Introduction to Mine Own People 1891
• 22 GLEESON WHITE'S 'An Open Letter to Rudyard Kipling' from Letters to Eminent Hands 1892
• 23 Letters from LAFCADIO HEARN 1892-8
• 24 QUILLER-COUCH on Kipling's Verse in English Illustrated Magazine 1893
• 25 GEORGE SAINTSBURY on Many Inventions 1893
• 26 S. R. CROCKETT on 'Some Tales of Mr. Kipling's' in Bookman 1895
• 27 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON on 'The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling' in Atlantic Monthly 1897
• 28 W. D. HOWELLS on 'The Laureate of the Larger England' in McClure's Magazine 1897
• 29 J. H. MILLAR 'The Works of Mr. Kipling' in Blackwood's Magazine 1898
• 30 STEPHEN GWYNN on 'The Madness of Mr. Kipling' — article in Macmillan's Magazine 1898
• 31 NEIL MUNRO on 'Mr. Rudyard Kipling' in Good Words 1899
• 32 Two reviews of Stalky & Co. in Athenaeum and Academy 1899
• 33 ROBERT BUCHANAN: 'The Voice of the Hooligan' in Contemporary Review 1899
• 34 SIR WALTER BESANT: 'Is it the Voice of the Hooligan?' in Contemporary Review 1900
• 35 EDWARD DOWDEN on 'The Poetry of Mr. Kipling' in New Liberal Review 1901
• 36 J. H. MILLAR reviews Kim in Blackwood's Magazine 1901
• 37 A review of Just So Stories in Athenaeum 1902
• 38 G. K. CHESTERTON reviews Just So Stories in Bookman 1902
• 39 AGNES DEANS CAMERON on 'Kipling and the Children' in Anglo-American Magazine 1902
• 40 F. YORK POWELL on 'Rudyard Kipling' in English Illustrated Magazine 1903
• 41 GEORGE MOORE on 'Kipling and Loti' in Pall Mall Magazine 1904
• 42 G. K. CHESTERTON 'On Mr. Rudyard Kipling' in Heretics 1905
• 43 ALFRED NOYES on 'Kipling the Mystic' in Bookman 1906
• 44 CONAN DOYLE on 'Kipling's Best Story' from Through the Magic Door 1907
• 45 FORD MADOX HUEFFER: 'Critical Attitude' from The Critical Attitude 1911
• 46 H. G. WELLS on Kipling from (1) The New Machiavelli 1911 and (2) The Outline of History 1920
• 47 DIXON SCOTT on 'Rudyard Kipling' in Bookman 1912
• 48 IAN HAY on Stalky & Co. from The Lighter Side of School Life 1914
• 49 'A Diversity of Creatures'—review in Athenaeum 1917
• 50 T. S. ELIOT: 'Kipling Redivivus' in Athenaeum 1919
• 51 RICHARD LE GALLIENNE on 'Kipling's Place in Literature' in Munsey's Magazine 1919
• 52 EDMUND BLUNDEN: Review of The Irish Guards in Nations and Athenaeum 1923
• 53 CHRISTOPHER MORLEY on 'Horace, Book Five' in Saturday Review of Literature 1926
• 54 BRANDER MATTHEWS on 'Kipling s Deeper Note' in Literary Digest International Book Review 1926
• 55 BONAMY DOBRÉE: 'Rudyara Kipling' in Monthly Criterion 1927
• 56 R. ELLIS ROBERTS: 'Rudyard Kipling' in Empire Review 1928
• 57 GILBERT FRANKAU on 'Kipling' in London Magazine 1928
• 58 HARVEY DARTON on 'Kipling's Children's Books' from Children's Books in England 1932
• 59 'STALKY' on 'Kipling's India' in Kipling Journal 1933
• 60 ANDRÉ MAUROIS 'A French View of Kipling' in Kipling Journal 1934
• 61 Obituary article: 'Rudyard Kipling's Place in English Literature' in Times Literary Supplement 1936
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