GODS OF MODERN GRUB STREET

Evening Star, Issue 18333, 21 July 1923, Page 13

GODS OF MODERN GRUB STREET

[Written for tho ‘Evening Star’ by Mr A. St. John Adcock, Editor of ‘ Tho Bookman.’]

XL—RUDYARD KIPLING.

It is usual to write of the 1890’s us the days of tho dec;idonls, but I never soo them so labelled without being reminded of tho Hans Briotmann ballad i

Hans Briotmann gifo a barty j Whore is dot barty now? For, though Wilde and Beardsley remain, the rest of their heetic group 'nave either gone home or are going; and from this distance it is impossible to focus that decade and realise that its prevailing influences were Henley and Stevenson, and that the true glory of the nineties is that they were tho flowering time of Shaw, Barrie, Wells, and Kipling. Kipling, began his literary career in the eighties, and by tho end of tho niiiotioa was tho most popular and the most belauded and derided of living authors. After being sent homo to Westward Ho, in Devon, to bo educated at tho school ho has immortalised in ‘Stalky and Co.,’ he went back to India, where 1m was born in 1865, and served successively on the staffs of tho ‘Lahore Civil and'Military Gazette’ and the ‘Allahabad Pioneer ’ from 1883 to 1839. Tho satirical verses, sketches of native character, stories of Anglo-Indian life, with their intriguiugs and their shrewd undertakings of the shabbier side of human nature, lhat ho contributed to those papers between the ago of seventeen end twentyfive rather justified Barrie’s dictum that he was “born blase.” But when ihev were collected into his first eight or nine small books—‘ Departmental Ditties,’ ‘Plain Tales From tho Hills,’ ‘ln Black and White,’ ‘Soldiers Three,' ‘Under tho Deodars,’ and tho rest —-they capped an instant boom in India with an even more roaring success in England and America. The vogue of the shilling shocker was then in its lusty infancy, and Kipling’s insignificant-looking drab-covered booklets competed triumphantly with that showy ephemeral Action on our bookstalls _ for the suffrage of the railway traveller From the start, like Dickons, he was no pot of a select circle, bat appealed to the crowd. While his contemporaries, the daintier decadents, issued their more perishable precocities in limited editions elegantly bound, ho carelessly flung his pearls before swino, and the maligned swine recognised that they were pearls before the critics began to tell them so. And when lie came to England again, a youth of live-and-twenty, his fame nad come before him He settled down from 1589 to 1891, on an upper floor of a gkomy building squeezed between shops, at 19 Villiers street, Strand; and in that somewhat squalid London thoroughlare were written some of the best stones in ‘Life’s Handicap/ and two of his comparative failures—‘ The Record of Badalia liorodsfoot’ and his first novel, ‘The Light That Failed.’ Stevenson, in his letters about them, deplored his “copiousness and haste,” said: “He is all smart journalism and cleverness; it is all bright and shallow and limpid, like a business paper—a good one, s’entendu —but there’s no blot of heart’s blood and tno Old Aright ... I look on and admire, but in a kind of ambition wo all have for our tongue -and literature I am wounded." Bui, nat-iraily, Stevenson, conjuring fastidiously with' words, like a lapidary with jewels,‘felt that his literary ideals were outraged fcy this exuberant, amazing young man who, coming with a banjo for a lyre, took the sacred temple of the Muses by violence and disturbed it with raucous echoes of tiro music hall; who brought tho manners and speech of the canteen into the library, made free- ’ uso of slang and ugly colloquialisms with_ the most brilliant effectiveness, and in general strode roughshod over so many accepted artistic conventions. It was easy to say his verse was meretriciously catchy, but its clcvernessj the bite oi its irony and humor, were indisputable; that his AngloIndian stones wc.ro marred by vulgarities and crudities of characterisation; that tho riotous humors of Mulvancy and his soldier chums showed nothing but a boisterous sthoolboyish sense of fun • but there was no denying the originality of mind, the abounding genius that was nxporimcntly at work in, all these things. Hot only had Kipling broken new ground; ho had defied conventions and broken it in a now way of ins own, ana; through the following ten years he was justified of his daring by the maturer, more masterly poems and stories in 1 Barrack Room Ballads,’ “Ihe Seven Seas/ ‘Many Inventions,’ and two ‘Jungle Books,’ and above all by ‘ Kim ’Y-that wonderful story, steeped in tho magic of tho Orient, witli its rich gallery of characters, native and European, and its intimately pictured panorama of the strange, motley hie that flows along the Grand Trunk road.

He was a bom story-teller, and could interest you as keenly in ships, bridges, machinery, and mechanical objects as in tho human comedy and tragedy. He could take his tone with an equal mastery, as occasion served, from the smoko room, the bar, or tho street, and from the golden phrasing and flashing visions of the Biblical prophets. However much the critics might qualify and hesitate, tho larger world of readers, men aim women, cultured and uncultured, took him to their hearts ' without reserve. Never silica Dickens died had any author won so magical a hold on the admiration and affection of our people. In those days, at tho height of his fame, when he lay dangerously ill in New York, tho cables could not have flung more bulletins across tho world, nor the newspapers followed his hourly progress more excitedly, if it had been a ruling monarch in extremis. The Kaiser cable;! inquiries; all England and America stood in suspense, as it were, at the closed door of that sick chamber, as those who loved Goldsmith lingered' on his staircase, when he was near tho end, waiting for nows of him. Yet, curiously enough, in the personality of Kipling, so far as it has revealed itself to his readers, there is little of the gentleness arid lovableness of Goldsmith, nor of tho genial overflowing kindness that drew the multitude to Dickons. It was the sheer spell and brilliance of his work, I think, that drew them to Kipling morn than tho lure of any persona.! charm. During the Boer Mar he developed into the poet and apostle of Imperialism; became onr high priest of Empire, colonial, expansion, commercial supremacy, and material prosperity. You may see in some of his poems of that period ami in his recently-published ‘ Letters of Travel’ how he has failed to advance with tho times, fio-.v out of touch he is with the spirit of mortem democracy. A certain arrogance and cocksurencss had increased upon him; his god was the old Hebrew god of battles, ours (he chosen race ; and even amid tho magnificent contritions of the ‘Recessional’ Tic cannot forget that we arc superior to tho “lesser breeds' without the law.” He is no idealist, and has no sympathy with tho hopes of tho poor and lowly; there is soomfulness in his attitude towards those who do not shave his belief that tho present social order cannot be improved, who do not join him in worshiping “the God of things as they are,” but pay homage rather to tho God of things as they ought to bo. And yet I remember the beauty, the wisdom, and whimsical understanding there A in Lis stories for children. T remember that children’s livmn in ‘Tuck of Rook’s Hill’;

Teach us the strength that cannot seek, By deed or thought, to hurt the weak; That, under I'liec, we may possess Man’s strength to comfort man’s distress. I remember stray, poignant things in this book and that, especially in 1 The Years Between,’ and am ready to think I misjudge him when I lake his intolerant Imperialism too seriously, and that these rarerj kindlier moods, these larger-hearted emotions, are at least as characteristic oi him.

Soma day somebody will gather into one glorious volume 1 Tho Finest Story in the \Vorld/ ‘Without Benefit of Clergy,’ ‘At the End of the Passage/ “.The Alan Who Would Be King/ ‘ The Brushwood Boy/

‘Tn-oy,’ and a score or so of other short stories; and with ‘Kim’ and a book of such poems as ‘ isussox,’ ‘Tomlinson,’ 'To tho Into Romance-, ‘M'Androw’s Hymn,’ ‘The Last Chantey,’ Hose great ballads of ‘The Bolivar’ and 'The Diary Gloster,’ and half a hundred more, there will be enough and more than enough to give him rank with those whoso work shall endure ‘' while there’s a world, a people, and a year.” After all, most of his Imperialistic verse and his prose essays into political and economic problems were mainly topical, and are ahead, pretty much out of date; ho is rich i hough to lot them go and bo no.no the poorer. If his popularity has waned it is chiefly, as 1 have said, because he has not advanced with tho limes —lie has lost touch with the real spirit, of his age ; and if lie would only come out from Ins iicimitage at Burwash and mingle again in tho crowded ways of men, as ho did in the fullness of his powers, one feels ho has it in him vet to be “a bringer ot mew things” that shall add now lustre even to his own renown.