A DAY WITH RUDYARD KIPLING.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 11128, 21 January 1899, Page 6

A DAY WITH RUDYARD KIPLING.

k' THE STOBY OP HIS CABEEE. %■- Mr Rudyard Kipling's objection ;|,to being interviewed is known to all jthe world. It was but a few months |ago that we were all amused by a f Whole .column in a daily- paper enytetled ' An iuterview^mth Kipling,' and detailing how tjj^j^terviewer in ■question failed tonlfefi^iew his shy l.snbject. But the rule; which Mr if.Kipling has laid down for himself ? with regard to the Anglo-Saxon world \ teems to be relaxed when duo apt'proaehes are made by foreigners. jPerhaps Mr Kipling is. of the wellrvknown view that foreign opinion is a ■;Bort of contemporary posterity. At >- any rate he has been interviewed by Sj-Dr Leon Kellner, who ia on a pro-p-longed visit to England to collect C materials for his proposed ' History £?of English Literature" ' in the ? Victorian Era,' onwhicE^e has been for the last ten years. Dr £ Kellner naturally desired to learn IfiJcfmething about the most prominent figure in. English literatnre at the y tod of the era — his aims; 'his method | df work, and the factorswhich have J':' jgdhe to create so remarkable a 5; phenomenon — and witßf Teutonic : Sireetneis he applied to the disX- iibguished author himself. " The £- Jeßult was an interview," which, api;i: feared a few days ago as a f euileton •ii'm^a Viennese journal— doubtless | '-mth Mr Kipling's permission— of £■- which the folio wing precis appears in h- ,the London ' Daily News.' V ' HAPPINESS FACE TO PACK. ""■• ' What appears to have struck Dr ':.- Kellner most in the personality of t his subject was the air of happiness 'i which surrounded him 'All that r . f a te — Kipling would /call it " the .- good God" — has to bestow of rea J worth has been granted to thil V wonderful child of fortune; loves ';• domesticity, independence, fame,, }: and power, in the vigor of youth (he ; isonly32) and sound health, and, ftbove all, the capacity for enjoying ; .his" good fortune. Me has known : jhow by wise economy to obtain full ; '.independence; he has for many ."'years been placed in such a position '■'''that he can withstand all the of publishers and 3 'editors, and in his creative work * iieed only respond to the inner call fluMMhis literary conscience. Literary -' -creation is, for him, the highest joy, ■'•■■'. and the calling of a writer the ./ noblest pursuit. Nor is that all; i Kipling has the happiest fortune . 'which can happen to a man when ;' . te has attained his highest aims, 1 lis father and mother are still aliye, '-. and ,he can and does Bay with ■ * proudest modesty, "All that I am I % : owe to them." Kipling's father was an artist holding an official position ■"■'.' in India, and liveenow in retirement ■•£- in the neighbournood of his son, for, ' with such a globe-trotter, "Wiltshire - fr regarded pa quite.- near Sussex. -y^Ssppy father and happy son. Of : .A-ias mother he naturally does not : epeat to strangers, but it is sufficient . to hear a man say "my mother," to ;' understand the relations that exist i' between them.' ;. f ■ Xhe impression of all this happiness was so strong nnon Dr Kellner that after his interview he said to ;\ to himself. 'To-day I have seen :. ; happiness face to face.' ■ • HOW E3PHNG WOEKS. ■ The first impression produced by \ Mr Kipling on the interviewer was Btrilring in its diversity. ' Whenever Mr Kipling speaks and turns his face ■> full upon you you.'wpuld think you had before you a very wideawake, lively, and, harmless child child, but the profile' shows a strong man who has not, grown up in the - atanoßphere ofttaggtndy,' 'I have wjdom,' adds the -ifltemewer, 'receiV6d'two such different impressions f from one and the s?me face. The work-room is of surprising simplicity, the north wall is covered with books half its height, orer the door hangs a . portrait of Burne-Jones (Mr Kipling's uncle), to the righj; near the ■window stands a plain, table -not a . -writing-table— on whjjih he a couple of pages containing-V.erses. No •works of art, no-'^ceDrenjescss, no nick-nack, the nnaf rned room simple and earnest lilF? a Puritan ©hapel.' , •I much fear,' began the interviewer, ' that I have come too early, and that I have disturbed you in your work.' ' No, no,' interrupted Kipling, ' I have done my daily task. 'IJooked astonished at him. The late lamented Trollctoe), came to my mind, who under all circumstances • wrote his 20 pages every day ; but Trollope and Kipling ! He guessed at once what bad astonished me. I •do my daily task continuously, but Dot all that I write is*prlnted ; most ' of it gnes there.' The waste-paper ■basket under the table here received a vigorous kick, and a moss of torn papers rolled on the ground. £Ip--ling's movements are quick and lively, and, perhaps;' Bomewhat nervous— a thoroughly southern temperament.' THE OEIGINS 01" KIPIiTNO.The interviewer despair of giving any verbal account of the interview, which lasted for some five hours, but gives for his German readers a sort of analytic account of Mr Kipling, ; after a manner of Tame, but evidently baßfld on information supplied by %„. novelist liimeelf. :Three different 'nationalities have gone to make up his complicated nature. On the mother's side Scotland and Ireland, on the father's -England, though 40Q[yeftrs ago the Kiplings came from Holland. There 1 is likewise a mixture of two different temperaments in the genealogy. Both grandfathers were clergymen, but the father is an artist, and the mother has throughout her life told stories in verse and prose. Tho came complexity existed in the early environment of the future author, spent in the wonderful world of India, midut the primitive culture of the east, on one hand, and the most advanced civilisation of the West, on the other. The child could thus see one family content with four clay w«Us under a straw fchstcb, three earthern pots, and a handful of rice, earned by hard work, while close by he could find himself surrounded by all the conveniences which Europeans find necessary to make their stay in India bearable. As the child began ,to talk he began to call things by two different names, j Kipling apeaka 'Hindustani as j fluently as English.', Through the j Bervantß he came in tpucb with all i the religions of Asia; his Ayah was I Boman Catholic, and he knelt with her at the same altar. Other .servants took him into tho mosques ; others introduced him into the temples of the Hindu)* and Parsees. As soon as he reached the age of boyhood he was torn from thetie •marvels and placed in an English rfchool at Westward Ho. But he aid scarcely time to learn his new eurroundings before he again west to the Eaßt to earn his own bread at 'the age of 16. For seven years lie passed through the dangerous apprenticeship oE a journalist in India -r-dangeroue because lie remained 'throughout that time in the plains, even when all other Europeans had fled to the bills. Throughout tho |ieat and the rainy /Season lie Remained watching the military and livil organisations of England at No man, 1 -, , not even a sees bo much of life as a who has eyes to see, /.'JEpliDg : '-iweß and heare'with all his

senses, and retains all that he sees and hears in his marvellous memory for ever. BARRACK BOOM BALLADS. All theae experiences awoke the artistic spirit of his father in him, and he began to give artistic form to what he had seen, artistic beauty to what he had heard. Especially he had studied that poor devil, ' Tommy Atkins,' the common soldier of England, despised at home, doing all the hard and dirty work of the Empire in all the five quarters of the globe without ever receiving a word of thanks. Kipling was especially struck with the barrack room songs with their striking lilt, their power of expression, which said so much in so few words, and their rousing choruses. He removed the dust and dirt from the unpolished stones, and gave them a new setting after polishing each facet. Some of the • Barrack Boom Ballads ' are actually soldier songs, treated as Heine and Goethe treated the folk-poesy of their native land ; but most of them are composed merely in the spirit and to the tunes of old soldier songs. With the publication of the ' Barrack Soom Ballads ' and the ' Plain Tales from the hills,' Kipling had made his mark, and the time of ] journalistic apprenticeship was over. ' How did he meet his sudden fortune? The Puritanic strain in his nature came out the more strongly at the moment when others — like Burns, for example— hare lost their hold on themselres in the hour of triumph. Kipling is never so distrustful and self-critical as when he has around him the crieß of praise. ' I am very distrustful i against praise,' said he, ' very dis- | trustful against fame. You know the fate of eighteenth century English literature, how many 'immortal ' poets that prolific, time brought fourth, and yet how much of this ' immortal ' poetry still Kvea in our time ? To name only one, who reads Pope now-a-days ? I often run over these volumes there (here he pointed to the ' Edition de Luxe ' of his works published by Macraillan) ani think to myself how much of that which is printed on such beautiful paper ought never to have seen the light. How much was written for mere love of gain, how often has the knee been bowed 'in the House of Rimmon ? '" (a favourite expression of Kipling's). i HATE SEEN IT ALL. After his first great success, Kipling buried himself for four years in the most remote spots in North. America ; wintered where the snow stands for half the year six feet high ; passed some time among the French Canadians, whose popular poetry he cannot sufficiently recommend, then went to Alaska, then on to Japan, and through Asia back again to Europe. Since then where has he not been? "When one asks where this man has obtained the details which give his tales, taken from all the farthest quarters of the globe, the stamp of absolute truth, the answer is simple ; he has seen the things himself. Thus, when he was asked where he obtained, the materials for the story of the ' White Seal ' in one of the Jungle Books, he answered, ' I have seen it all with my own eyes. 1 Dr Kellner compares the mass of details contained in each short story of Kipling's to the advertisement of a London firm which recommends its beef extract by showing a whole ox in a teacup, and he draws therefrom the moral that the day is over of boulevard and restaurant writers who only describe the life around them. We want now the fullest material in the most perfect form. Kipling, the writer continues, though ha offers such an endless variety of material, lays the greatest stress upon form, He has, of course, created a school, and equally of course, the scholars imitate the weakest points of his youthful work — superabundance of material with sovereign contempt for form. This has much irritated Kipling, and caused him to lay even extravagant stress upon the work of form. The artistic object of all details was declared by Mr Kipling to be so as to produce the same effect upon the reader, as these details themselves have produced upon the writer. An interesting example of this was given by Mr Kipling with regard to Shakespeare's ' Tempest.' When he visited the Bermudas he was surprised to find when landing on one part oE the coast how familiar it all seemed to him. Suddenly he came across a lofty cave and the riddle was solved. It was exactly the scene of Shakespeare's ' Tempest ' as he had always pictured it to himself. On investigating the source of Shakespeare's play it turned out that the great dramatist had in fact read a description of a voyage to the Bermudas, and had exactly reproducod the details. irpOUGH AS ABORTIVE SPEKCHT. But Kipling's formula iB not completed by regarding his work as full material in perfect form- That is the ideal of all writers of the first rank. He seeks, in addition, to find the soul of men in all he writes. Both in his work and in hia conversation hp shows himself a phychologist who even peaches by his own observation the same results as modern men of science, of whoso works and names he has never heard, 'All though, 1 he said for example, 'is abortive speech,' and thus summed up, without having heard of it, the theory of the late Profeßsor Strieker, which he had contended for in trying to explain the true nature of speech, When Dr Kellner complained to him of the difficulties he found in comparing the different value he found placed upon English poets in England itself and among foreign nations, Mr Kipling remarked, 'I perfectly understand the difference of taste, and therefore of judgement, on one and the same poet by two different people, I only wonder that now and then agreement does at all exist. You Germans may understand English as ' far as grammar and dictionary can convey it to you, but when you translate ' justice ' by ' Gerechtigkeit,' or ' virtue' by 'Tug(nd,' you by no means call up by these words the same id 6& which the Englishman thought of when he wrote down these words. We write it is true, in letters of the alphabet, but, psychologically regarded every printed page is a : picture book, every word, concrete or abstract, a picture. The picture itself may never come to the reader's consciousness, but deep down below in the unconscious realms the picture j works and influences us, and that is j where the difficulty lies. Every j nation has its own picture for every ] word, and this is passed on unconsciously from generation to generation. The German has quite auother kind of picture for ' Gerechtigkeit ' than the > nglishman for ' justice.' Now, every poem contains hundreds of such pictures. It is rather to be won ored at that any nation can at v I understand the poetry of another; and, still,' he added, reflectively, ' the t:me is rapidly approaching that the nations will understand one another. 1 It is perhaps surprising to hear such words from the Imperialist Kipling who has doi.e more than any living politician to spread Imperialism ; but it ia ono of the Continental misunderstandings of Imperialism to rcgaid it as identical with Jingo politics. Prom what the interviewer heard from Kipling, he was of opinion that the Friends of Peace will, find no difficulty ia

winning Mr Kipling as a member of their society. KIPMN& AND ItHOBES. 'The annexation of one white nation by another, 1 he said, ' I regard as the greatest crime that a politician can commit. Don't annex white men.' ' How about the blacks ? ' 'I am against slavery,' was the answer, ' if only for this reason, that the white man becomes demoralised by slavery.' He is an ardent admirer of Cecil Uhodes, whom he knows personally and whose work he is ■ able to judge ! of from his recent visit to Matabeleland. ' How did you get on with Rhodes ? What sort of man does he appear ? ' waa the question to which the answer came: 'Rhodes is greater than his work-.' The interviewer expressed his astonishment that Olive Schreiner has represented men in such dark colours, but Mr Kipling indignantly repudiated the reproaches of thiß writer as altogether unfounded, the sole harsh judgment heard by the interviewer throughout. BETWEEN TWO EPOCHS. Distrustful a ; he is about himself, he is without bounds in his recognition of others. He admires Stephenson warmly, delights in Henley's poetry. He expressed him- , self in high praise of the latest work of Leonard Merriek, 'The Actor Manager.' He interests himself in all the literary work of the day, and is at home in all the chief amusements and side currents in the spiritual life of England. "When discussing the ' Literary History of England,' which Dr Kellner has in hand, Mr Kipling said, ( I£ I had your book to write I would attempt in a final chapter to discover the path which may lead from the present chaotic condition of our literature to that of the 20th century, I would call the chapter "Between two Epochs." I feel that we are between ebb and flood. It is now just what sailors call ' slack tide ; " we are waiting for the great personality which will unite all the minor tendencies of the time and collect all the partial and petty forces into one power that will give a new and adequate expression to the new time.' The interviewer concludes his interesting lineß with the question, 'Is that man still to come, or is he already here ? '