Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Rudyard Kipling, by John Palmer
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Title: Rudyard Kipling
Author: John Palmer

Release Date: March 24, 2006 [eBook #18045]
Language: English
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RUDYARD KIPLING
by
JOHN PALMER

[Frontispiece: Rudyard Kipling]

New York Henry Holt and Company First Published in 1915

CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION II. SIMLA III. THE SAHIB IV. NATIVE INDIA
V. SOLDIERS THREE VI. THE DAY'S WORK VII. THE FINER
GRAIN VIII. THE POEMS BIBLIOGRAPHY AMERICAN
BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

I
INTRODUCTION
There is a tale of Mr Kipling which relates how Eustace Cleever, a
celebrated novelist, came to the rooms of a young subaltern and his
companions who were giving an account of themselves. Eustace
Cleever was a literary man, and was greatly impressed when he learned
that one of the company, who was under twenty-five and was called the
Infant, had killed people somewhere in Burma. He was suddenly
caught by an immense enthusiasm for the active life--the sort of
enthusiasm which sedentary authors feel. Eustace Cleever ended the
night riotously with youngsters who had helped to govern and extend
the Empire; and he returned from their company incoherently uttering a

deep contempt for art and letters.
But Eustace Cleever was being observed by the First Person Singular
of Mr Kipling's tale. This receiver of confidences perceived what was
happening, and he has the last word of the story:
"Whereby I understood that Eustace Cleever, decorator and colourman
in words, was blaspheming his own Art and would be sorry for this in
the morning."
We have here an important clue to Mr Kipling and his work. Mr
Kipling writes of the heroic life. He writes of men who do visible and
measurable things. His theme has usually to do with the world's work.
He writes of the locomotive and the engineer; of the mill-wheel and the
miller; of the bolts, bars and planks of a ship and the men who sail it.
He writes, in short, of any creature which has work to do and does it
well. Nevertheless we must not be misled into thinking that because Mr
Kipling glorifies all that is concrete, practical, visible and active he is
therefore any the less purely and utterly a literary man. Mr Kipling
seems sometimes to write as an engineer, sometimes as a soldier. At
times we would wager that he had spent all his life as a Captain of
Marines, or as a Keeper of Woods and Forests, or as a Horse-Dealer.
He gives his readers the impression that he has lived a hundred lives,
mastered many crafts, and led the life, not of one, but of a dozen, active
and practical men of affairs. He has created about himself so complete
an illusion of adventure and enterprise that it seems almost the least
important thing about him that he should also be a writer of books. His
readers, indeed, are apt to forget the most important fact as to Mr
Kipling--the fact that he is a man of letters. He seems to belong rather
to the company of young subalterns than to the company of Eustace
Cleever.
Hence it is necessary to consider closely the moral of that excellent tale.
When Eustace Cleever blasphemed against his art, Mr Kipling
predicted he would be sorry for it. Mr Kipling recorded that prediction
because he had the best of reasons to know how Eustace Cleever would
feel upon the morning after his debauch of enthusiasm for the heroic
life. Let each man keep to his work, and know how good it is to do that

work as well as it can be done. Eustace Cleever's work was to live the
life of imagination and to handle English words--work as difficult to do
and normally as useful as the job of the Infant. Though for one heady
night Eustace Cleever yearned after a strange career, Mr Kipling knew
that he would return without misgiving to the thing he was born to do.
Mr Kipling, like Eustace Cleever, knows that though nothing is more
pleasant than to talk with young subalterns, yet the born author remains
always an author. He knows, too, that even the deeds he admires in the
men who make history are, for him, no more than raw stuff to be taken
in hand or