KIPLING’S DRUDGERY IN INDIA.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue X, 5 September 1896, Page 292

KIPLING’S DRUDGERY IN INDIA.

Mr Kay Robinson, one of Mr Kipling’s former colleagues on the Civil and Military Gazette at Lahore, gives in Pearson’s this month, a general idea of the prodigious genius of the author of ‘ The Jungle Book.’ The early struggles of the man who wrote ‘ Tommy ’ and the numberless gems in verse and prose are thus indicated. ‘ There are very few, if they had felt, as Kipling must even then have felt, the power to move men, who would, from modesty and a scrupulous sense of obligation, have been content to remain at Lahore in the distant northwest of India, doing the dreariest drudgery of ill-paid newspaper work. ‘ Whether he gained or lost thereby in the long run I do not know ; for, against the dullness of the work and the smallness of the pay, may be set the wholesome discipline for talents which threatened to be redundant, and still err occasionally on the side of exuberance ; but that I personally gained much is certain, for to Kipling’s refusal to leave India was due the fact that when I subsequently arrived at Lahore to take over the editorship of the Civil and Military Gazette, I found him still there as “assistant.” I also found a letter from the chief proprietor, in which he expressed the hope that I would be able to “ put some sparks into the paper.” ‘ When the staff of a journal consists of two men onlv, one of whom is Kipling, such an exhortation addressed to the other doubtless seems curious ; but, as I have said, above, Kipling had been discouraged from “sparkling.” There are men going about, apparently sane, who deny to Rudyard Kipling any literary merit whatever, “ unless,” as they say, “vulgarity can be called such,” and my predecessor in the editorship of the Civil and Military Gazette spoke of him, in his most favourable mood, as “ a clever young pup,” and as a general rule did his best to make a sound second-rate journalist out of Kipling, by keeping his nose at the grindstone of proofreading, scissors-and-paste work, and the boiling down of government blue-books into summaries for publication. * But Kipling had the buoyancy of a cork, and after his long office hours, still found spare energv to write those charming sketches and poems which in"“Soldiers Three,” etc., and the” Departmental Ditties,” gave him such fame as can be won in the narrow world of AngloIndia The privilege which he most valued at this time was the permission to send such things as his editor, my predecessor, refused for the Civil and Military Gazette, to other papers for publication. These papers used to publish and pay for them gladly, and the compliments and encouragement with which more sympathetic critics treated his work partly consoled him for the persistent efforts made by his own boss to suppress his exuberant literature, and his subsequent writings betrav no undue suppression of fancy or depression of spirits.’