| Without haste without rest—The world’s hardest worker—A man of many houses—“You must get things right”—A genius with no redeeming vices—Kipling and the butcher—“You must buy Empire lamb”—“It’s their guts they think about.” |
None of these things happened. We have read in one of O. Henry’s books of a citizen of a South American republic, where everybody was “grafting” day and night, who determined to make himself conspicuous by being honest. Greta Garbo, one of the world’s great film stars, got pages of publicity by refusing to be interviewed. Shakespeare himself seems to have dodged the publicity man to such an extent that even now there is some doubt whether he wrote all his own works, or whether they were done by somebody else of the same name. Kipling was remarkable in that his life was so very unremarkable.
He hated publicity as his Satanic Majesty is supposed to hate holy water; and in private life he was just a hard-working, commonsense, level-headed man, without any redeeming vices that I could discover. A pity too, perhaps; for there is nothing so interesting as scandals about great geniuses. Though he was a very rich man, I found him living in an unpretentious house at Rottingdean, Brighton. The only thing that marked it as the lair of a literary lion was the crowd of tourists (mostly Americans) who hung about from daylight till dark trying to look over the wall, or waiting to intercept his two little children when they went out for a walk. By having his car brought into the garden and getting into it from his own doorstep, Kipling was able to dash out through the ranks of autograph hunters even as a tiger dashes out when surrounded by savages.
His wife, a charming and cultivated American lady, was in her own way just as big a disappointment as was Kipling. She did not seek to be a society star, nor to swagger about covered with rubies and emeralds.
“In the States,” she said, “when people push their money in your face, we always wonder how they got it.”
Kipling’s house was a home. And it was a home of hard work, for he allowed nothing to interfere with his two or three hours of work a day. The rest of the time he roved round getting material.
“I must buy a house in Australia some day,” he said. “I’ve a house here, and in New York, and in Capetown; but I’d like to live in Australia for a while. I’ve been there, but I only went through it like the devil went through Athlone, in standing jumps. You can’t learn anything about a country that way. You have to live there and then you can get things right. You people in Australia haven’t grown up yet. You think the Melbourne Cup is the most important thing in the world.”
Motoring in those days was just in the stage when the betting was about even whether the car would get its passengers home or whether the wife would sit and knit by the roadside while the husband lay on his back under the car and had his clothes smothered in dust and oil.
Kipling, it appeared, had a new car coming on trial, and our first excursion was to be a run in this new car. One of the newly-invented Lanchester cars arrived, driven by a man in overalls, who looked like a superior sort of mechanic. He said that his name was Laurence. When he heard that I came from Australia, he asked me whether I knew his brother in Sydney. It so happened that I did know his brother; thereafter things went swimmingly. “I have another brother,” he said, “a high court judge here. When I take these cars round for a trial I generally drag in something about my brother, the high court judge, for fear they’ll send me round to the kitchen. Sometimes,” he added, “I would prefer to go to the kitchen.”
Kipling and I piled into the back of the car, with the great man as excited as a child with a new toy. Out we went, scattering tourists right and left, and away over the Sussex downs. We were climbing a hill of about one in five with nothing much below us but the English Channel, when Kipling, possibly with a view to getting some accurate copy about motoring, said:
“What would happen if she stopped here, Laurence?”
“I’ll show you,” said Laurence. He stopped the engine and let the car, with its illustrious passenger, run back towards that awful drop. I had a look over my shoulder and was preparing to jump when Laurence dropped a sprag and pulled her up all standing. Then he threw in the engine and away we went. I said to Kipling:
“Weren’t you frightened? I was nearly jumping out.”
“Yes,” he said, “I was frightened. But I thought what a bad advertisement it would be for the Lanchester company if they killed me, so I sat tight.”
Away we went through the beautiful English lanes, where the leaves swirled after the car, and one expected to see Puck of Pook’s Hill peering out from behind a tree. We passed military barracks, where Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd, with their swagger canes, were just setting out for a walk. We saw the stolid English farm labourers putting in the oak bridge that would last for generations. We saw a sailing-ship ploughing her way down the Channel, and noted “the shudder, the stumble, the roll as the star-stabbing bowsprit emerges.” It was like looking at a series of paintings—and here at my side was the painter.
Earnest in everything that he touched, he pulled the car up outside a butcher’s shop to do a little Empire propaganda. Pointing at the carcass of a lamb hanging in the window, he asked me to guess its weight. Not being altogether inexperienced in the weight of lambs, I had a guess, and he said:
“I’ll go in and buy that lamb, and we’ll see if you’re right; and we’ll see where this butcher is getting his mutton.”
It turned out that I was within two pounds of the lamb’s weight. This seemed to astonish Kipling very much, and he said to the butcher:
“This gentleman comes from Australia, where they do nothing but weigh lambs all day long. You must buy all the Australian lamb you can get, and keep the money in the Empire.”
The butcher, not knowing in the least who he was, said:
“The Empire. Ha! My customers don’t bother about the Empire, sir. It’s their guts they think about!”
This unedifying incident of the butcher may be some sort of guide as to what Kipling’s English contemporaries thought of him. Frankly, they looked upon him as one of these infernal know-all fellows, who wanted to do all sorts of queer things. What right had anyone to come along and suggest that some day there would be a big war, and that England should be prepared for it? Fancy advocating that we should give more time to drill, and less time to sports! The flannelled fools at the wickets, forsooth, and the muddied oafs at the goals—when everybody knew that all battles were won on the playing-fields of Eton and Rugby!
Kipling, out of his own pocket, bought enough land for a rifle-range, and paid the wages of a retired sergeant-major to teach the yokels drill and musketry, Was he applauded by his neighbours? Not that you would notice it. A local magnate, stodgy as a bale of hay, looked in for afternoon-tea and confided to me that Kipling was undoubtedly a clever man but too unconventional.
“All this business about drilling men,” he said, “is just putting wrong ideas into their heads. I wouldn’t let my men go.”
Later on, in the Great War, he was to know more about it. Kipling himself lost his only son in the Great War, and was asked to write an epitaph to be put on a tablet in the centre of the thousands of war graves. He wrote: “Had our fathers not lied to us, so many of us would not be here.” And who shall blame him? Needless to say, they did not use it.
So Kipling stalked through the land of little men, as Gulliver stalked through the land of the Lilliputians. He would never have made a political leader, for he was less of a quack, less of a showman, and less of a time-server than any public man I ever met. Had he been a spectacular person like Gabriel d’Annunzio he might have led a great Imperialist movement. But he had no gift of speech, and his nature abhorred anything in the way of theatricalism. He wrote of things as he saw them, bearing in his own way the white man’s burden and expecting no fee or reward.
Kipling carried his earnestness into his work, for he must have everything right. Smoking one evening, he picked up some manuscript, and said:
“Here’s something I am working on, and it brings in your country. Just see if it’s right, will you?”
The verse in his hand was: “The scent of the wattle at Lichtenberg, riding in the rain.” And the lines that troubled him were:
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My fruit-farm on Hunter’s River With the new vines joining hands. |
For some reason or another he was worried as to whether these lines were right.
I said that in Australia we would speak of an orchard, not of a fruit-farm; and that we called it Hunter River, and not Hunter’s River. But why worry! He wasn’t writing a geography or a gardener’s guide. Even old Ouida, who was a best-seller in her day, once made one of her guardsman heroes, weighing thirteen stone, ride the same horse to victory in the Derby two years running—and nobody murdered her.
“They should have murdered her,” said Kipling. “Writing things wrong is like singing out of tune. You don’t sing, do you?”
“No. But how could you tell?”
“Nobody that has the ear for rhythm ever has the ear for music. When I sing, the dog gets up and goes out of the room.”
This insistence on photographic accuracy, so unusual in a poet, may have been the one loose bearing in the otherwise perfect machinery of his mind; or it may have been that his training as a sub-editor had bitten so deeply into his system that he looked upon inaccuracy as the cardinal sin. There was no satisfaction for him in a majestic march of words if any of the words were out of step.
I said to him:
“You ought to be satisfied. You seem to get things pretty right, anyway. How did you come to get that little touch about the Australian trooper riding into Lichtenberg when the rain brought out the scent of the wattles? Inspiration?”
“No,” he said. “Observation. I used to poke about among the troops and ask all the silly questions I could think of. I saw this Australian trooper pull down a wattle-bough and smell it. So I rode alongside and asked him where he came from. He told me about himself, and added: “I didn’t know they had our wattle over here. It smells like home.” That gave me the general idea for the verses; then all I had to do was to sketch in the background in as few strokes as possible. And when you’re only using a few strokes you must have ’em in the right place. That’s why I asked you whether it was right to talk about the fruit-farm and Hunter’s River.”
All very well, but being somewhat in the verse line myself, I knew that only a master could have written those few little verses. Possibly only one man that ever lived could have done it—Kipling himself.
He was sub-editor of a big Indian paper, and all the news of the world came through his hands to be trimmed up and cut down and put under headlines. The worst training in the world for a poet, one would think. Yet, it gave him his crisp, clear-cut style. He thought in essentials, and scorned padding, as a sub-editor should. “The Wake a Welt of Light,” “He looked like a lance in rest,” “Oak, Ash, and Thorn,” “The Joyous Venture.” These are all headlines—not a word wasted. Phil May had this gift of condensation in art, and Kipling has it in literature. Then, as to his gift of vivid description. Here are a couple of lines from the “Ballad of East and West”, describing the chase of an Indian raider by an officer on a troop horse:
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The dun he leaned against the bit and slugged his head above, But the red mare played with the snaffle-bars, as a maiden plays with a glove. |
I said: “How on earth did you manage to write that, you who say that you know nothing about horses? It’s just a picture of the way the horses would gallop. You can see the well-bred mare getting over the ground like a gazelle with the big, heavy-headed horse toiling after her.”
“Observation,” he said. “I suppose I must have noticed the action of horses without knowing that I noticed it.”
It must have been the same sort of observation that made him call the pompous heads of army departments “little tin gods on wheels.” The phrase was not new, but like Homer going down the road, he went and took it. Like all great artists, he was quite dissatisfied with his own work:
“If you can write a thing about half as well as it ought to be written,” he said, “then perhaps, after all, you may not have written it so badly.”
I asked him how he came to write Kim with its mass of material and its infinite (and no doubt accurate) detail.
“Oh,” he said, “the material was just lying about there in heaps. All I had to do was to take it and fit it together.”
And now the reader asks, hadn’t the man any hobbies? Did he garden or play cards or shoot or hunt or fish? Not a bit of it. He took a great deal of interest in small improvements to his property, such as you may read about in Puck of Pook’s Hill, but I think that was mainly on account of the enjoyment he got from watching the habits and customs of the English agricultural labourer, as set forth in the same book. His sight was too bad to allow him to race over raspers in the hunting-field or drop a dry fly over a rising trout: hence his nick-name of Beetle in Stalky & Co. His only hobby was work. And like Goethe’s hero he toiled without haste and without rest. Look at a collection of his works and you will get some idea of the urge that must have driven him to keep working. At the age of forty he had written more books than most men write in a lifetime, and not a line went into one of those books that he did not verify. True, he did once describe the Maribyrnong Plate as a steeplechase; but if he had had an Australian turf-guide at hand, he would have corrected the error. I have already quoted the Scotch engineer’s objection to Kipling’s description of the destroyers lying in wait for their prey in the swirl of the reefs—“and they drawing six feet forrard and nine feet aft.” But did not Shakespeare once locate a navy in Bohemia or some other inland country. Apart from his literary work, he felt that the white man’s burden was laid on him to advocate in every way this bringing of the British peoples under Empire council, with India as a sort of apprentice nation until it learnt to govern itself. In view of what has happened lately, he might have also questioned the ability of the white parts of the Empire to govern themselves; but he said that, when the Australians grew up, and when the young Africans forgot to be Dutch, there would be such an empire as the world never saw. By way of contribution to the debate, I suggested that the Australians would always put Australia first, and that the young Africans did not care a hoot about the Dutch—they were Afrikanders first, last, and all the time. But the only motherland he had known was that “grim stepmother,” India, and he could not conceive that South Africans or Australians would study the interests of their own territories when they might be partners in a great empire. One must concede it to him that he took a large view.
As to the Indians, he said that the Indian peasant could neither understand nor make any sensible use of self-government; and he wrote all sorts of nasty things about the British M.P.s who wandered over to “smoodge” to the Indians. He would cheerfully have seen them get their throats cut.