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Updated: May 16, 2025
I suppose when the hero of Kipling's poem found out that she was only 'a rag and a bone and a hank of hair, he kept on loving the rag, even while he felt like gnawing the bone and pulling the hair." He knew he had said an ugly thing. It wasn't like him. He flushed as he saw Mrs. Lenox glance sharply at him. "Dick, Dick, that is heresy," she exclaimed gaily.
We listened to him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us with his cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in a mysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with the barrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives of generals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's trick.
They were taken seriously by a startled nation as a true picture of the empire and the universe. The English people made haste to abandon England in favour of Mr. Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they made haste to abandon Christianity in favour of Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of Judaism.
Kipling's school advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat.
M. Bourget, who by that time read and spoke English fluently, complained of Mr. Kipling's technicalities, and declared that he could not make head or tail of McAndrew's Hymn. Whereupon Mr. James took up the book and, standing by the fire, fronting his hosts, there and then put McAndrew's Hymn into vigorous idiomatic French an extraordinary feat, as it seemed to M. Bourget.
Kipling's 'Plain Tales from the Hills, we find the last dying speech and confession of a certain McIntosh who had been a scholar and a gentleman in days gone by, and who had sunk into irredeemable degradation in India. When his hour came, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly, "Not guilty, my Lord!" Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died.
For example, Stevenson's "Long John Silver," Kipling's "Kim," and Rider Haggard's "Alan Quatermain."
Carnehan tells the story, but Dravot is the energizing character. Captain James Cook, the discoverer of the Sandwich Islands, is plainly the original of Dravot. Read the thirtieth chapter of the second volume of Mark Twain's "Roughing It" and you will find Kipling's story clearly outlined. One cannot withhold a measure of admiration for this type of uncontrolled audacity.
In "Journey's End," however, it must be confessed that he has written a memorable sea story that is certainly equal at least to the better stories in Mr. Kipling's latest volume. I suppose that this story is to be regarded as a sketch rather than a short story, but in any case it is a vividly rendered picture of war's effects portrayed with subtle irony and quiet art.
I always want to stay up around, too, and repeat that little verse of Kipling's. You know 'When the cabin portholes are dark and green, Because of the seas outside, When the ship goes wop with a wiggle between, And the cook falls into the soup tureen, And the trunks begin to slide Doesn't that just describe it, though that 'wop with a wiggle between'?"
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