Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Novels and Stories + A Biography of the Author E-Book

Rudyard Kipling

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels and stories of Rudyard Kipling in the chronological order of their original publication.- Plain Tales from the Hills (a collection of 40 short stories)- Soldiers Three (a collection of 9 short stories)- The Story of the Gadsbys (a collection of 8 short stories)- In Black and White (a collection of 8 short stories)- Under the Deodars (a collection of 8 short stories)- The Phantom Rickshaw and other Tales (a collection of 4 short stories)- Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (a collection of 4 short stories)- Life's Handicap (a collection of 27 short stories)- The Light That Failed (a novel)- The Naulahka: A Story of West and East (a novel)- Many Inventions (a collection of 14 short stories)- The Jungle Book (a collection of 7 short stories)- The Second Jungle Book (a collection of 8 short stories)- Captains Courageous (a novel)- The Day's Work (a collection of 13 short stories)- Stalky & Co. (a collection of 9 short stories)- Kim (a novel)- Just So Stories for Little Children (a collection of 13 short stories)- Traffics and Discoveries (a collection of 11 short stories)- Puck of Pook's Hill (a collection of 10 short stories)- Actions and Reactions (a collection of 8 short stories)- Rewards and Fairies (a collection of 11 short stories)- A Diversity of Creatures (a collection of 14 short stories)- The Eyes of Asia (a collection of 4 short stories)

Leseprobe

Rudyard Kipling

THE COMPLETE NOVELS AND STORIES

2017 © Book House Publishing

[email protected]

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise,

without prior permission of

Book House.

Get your next Book House Publishing title for Kindle here

Table of Contents

Rudyard Kipling — An Extensive Biography

Plain Tales from the Hills

Soldiers Three

The Story of the Gadsbys

In Black and White

Under the Deodars

The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales

Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories

Life’s Handicap

The Light That Failed

The Naulahka: A Story of West and East

Many Inventions

The Jungle Book

The Second Jungle Book

Captains Courageous

The Day’s Work

Stalky & Co.

Kim

Just So Stories for Little Children

Traffics and Discoveries

Puck of Pook's Hill

Actions and Reactions

Rewards and Fairies

A Diversity of Creatures

The Eyes of Asia

Rudyard Kipling — An Extensive Biography

by Frederic Lawrence Knowles

Chapter 1 — Biographical

Chapter 2 — Kipling at School

Chapter 3 — Personality

Chapter 4 — Some Anecdotes

Chapter 5 — “The Brushwood Boy” and “They”

Chapter 6 — “From Sea to Sea”

Chapter 7 — “Kim”

Chapter 8 — The Charge of Brutality

Chapter 9 — Omar Khayyám and Kipling

Chapter 10 — Tales of Horror and Terror

Chapter 11 — Kipling’s Speeches

Chapter 12 — The Romance of Sea Life

Chapter 12 — “The Light That Failed”

Chapter 14 — Animal Stories

Chapter 15 — Poetry

Chapter 16 — Sussex

Chapter 17 — “Stalky and Co.”

Chapter 18 — Soldier Poems

Chapter 19 — Kipling’s Cultured Delight in Odour

Chapter 20 — The Cult of “Mandalay”

Chapter 1 — Biographical

Beforeentering upon this slight study, I think it necessary to recall certain biographical stages that are indispensable to a clear survey of Kipling’s literary development. Born at Bombay on December 30, 1865, of English parents, he spent the first few years of his life in that city, and this earliest environment must have stamped itself on the supersensitive child for life. The multitudinous, many-coloured East, filled his soul with a wonder that is still stirring mightily within the man of fifty.

In connexion with his strongly Oriental leanings, it is interesting to note that his father, John Lockwood Kipling, C.I.E., was a great authority on the mythological sculpture of the temples of the Central provinces of India, and the author of a powerful and lucid work on Indian animal life, “Beast and Man in India” (Macmillan and Co., 1891). Attention also must be called to a book of “Verses by a Mother and Daughter” (Elkin Mathews, 1902), which was written by Kipling’s mother and sister.

John Lockwood Kipling, one of the pioneers of art education under Government auspices in India, died in 1911, aged seventy-four. He was the eldest son of the Reverend Joseph Kipling of the Wesleyan ministry; and in 1865 he married Alice, daughter of the distinguished Wesleyan preacher — the late Rev. George B. Macdonald. He was appointed architectural sculptor at the Bombay School of Art in the year of his marriage, and also acted as the Bombay correspondent of the Pioneer of Allahabad. Upon the creation of the Mayo School of Art at Lahore in 1875, he was appointed Principal and Curator of the Central Museum, and filled both posts with singular success. He was created a C.I.E. in 1886, and retired from the service in 1893.

According to the testimony of Mr. Holker, a Lancashire cotton weaver, who had mills at Dharwal, near Lahore, Kipling’s father was a very great Oriental scholar. When he visited the Kiplings at Lahore, he was much impressed by the wonderful collection of curios and artistic wonders with which every room simply teemed. He wrote: “The Kipling family were delightful people, all clever and artistic in their tastes, and the kindest and most gracious family I have ever known.”

Three different nationalities have gone to make up Rudyard Kipling’s complicated nature. On the mother’s side, Scotland and Ireland; on the father’s, England; though four hundred years back the Kiplings came from Holland. As a child he learnt to speak Hindustani, and his immersion in the myths and creeds of a strange people accounted for his unquenchable love of the “ghostly style,” combined with an almost equal love of the “horrible” in literature.

In 1871 Kipling, with a younger sister, was in England under the care of an elderly relative in Southsea. During his stay at Southsea he is generally believed to have tasted of much bitterness, and it seems likely that he was not unmindful of his own case when he wrote the opening chapters of “The Light that Failed,” in which two Anglo-Indian children are more or less oppressed in spirit by the repressive creed of a Puritanical woman who is looking after them.

A few years later, after a visit to Paris with his father, he was entered at the United Service College at Westward Ho, North Devon (1878). In “Stalky and Co.” he has presented a lively and minute sketch of the vigorous life he spent at the College (187S-1882).

To T.P.’s Weekly we owe the following story of his schooldays:

Lovers of “Stalky and Co.” will remember the description of the school at Westward Ho, with its background of “rabbit woods” and glorious vista of seascape. It was the writer’s fortune recently to spend a delightful fortnight at Bideford, some three miles distant from the school, and in many a walk to travel over the scenes immortalized in that book. A favouring planet brought me into conversation with an old rural postman, now pensioned off. Questioned as to the Westward Ho school, he was at once agog with memories. Yes, many a time had he met the boys coming along the cliff-walk from Appledore on their way to the renowned tuck shop on “Bidevoor promenade,” and he had enjoyed, and suffered from, many of their pranks, with a description of which he favoured his listener. When a suitable occasion offered, I questioned him more definitely about Kipling, and at once he gave me an account of an incident so entirely in keeping with one’s idea of the author that it was impossible to doubt it for a minute. It appears that Beckwith, the aquatic expert, came to Westward Ho to give an exhibition from the pier, which was crowded with the usual summer sightseers and a fair sprinkling of boys from the school. After some evolutions in the water the swimmer commenced a series of diving performances, and it was after a sensational dive from the top of the pier that the spectators were amazed to see a chubby, “stocky” boy run to the edge of the pier and repeat the dive with all the mannerisms of the expert. Inquiry elicited the fact that the boy was named Kipling, and it is by this incident more than any other that the Bideford people remember the now famous author. It may interest many people to know that the school buildings still stand as before, although they are now used as a hotel and boarding-house. One hopes, however, that all traces of the dead cat placed under the floor of the superciliously refined dormitory have been expunged.

An interesting observation that Rudyard Kipling derived his first name from Rudyard Lake, not far from Stoke, in Staffordshire, has been spread broadcast in English and American papers. And in a sketch of Kipling’s life, written by Professor Charles Eliot Norton and published in the Windsor Magazine for December 1899, it is stated that Kipling’s parents “named their firstborn child after the pretty lake on the borders of which their acquaintance had begun.” This biographical sketch was written for a popular American edition of Kipling’s works, and it is rather curious that this statement should be allowed by Kipling in this case to stand, and yet be categorically denied by him a few years later.

Kipling’s disclaimer came as a surprise, the original story being so circumstantial. But in a letter to a provincial journal he stated that it was all a beautiful dream and not a “pretty whim” of his aunt, Lady Burne-Jones, who, when her sister, Mrs. Lockwood Kipling, wrote from India announcing the birth of a son, asked that he might be called Rudyard. This repudiation of the story by the famous author was a heavy blow to a society which proposed to develop the lake as a holiday resort for Kipling pilgrims. Once again one is constrained to ask, “How do these pretty legends gain such prominence in the papers?”

At the age of seventeen Kipling returned to India, and through the influence of his father took up a post on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. When he was in his twenty-second year he became assistant editor of the Pioneer at Allahabad, and remained in this post from 1887 to 1889. Thus it will be noticed that many of his best short stories were written when he was in his teens, and certain characters in them have since become world famous, notably Mulvancy, Ortheris, and Learoyd.

The King’s Dragoon Guards and many other famous regiments then quartered at Rawal Pindi must have passed the headquarters of the Civil and Military Gazette on their way to the Delhi manoeuvres of 1885, and no doubt young Kipling, with his perpetual interest in the spectacle of life, seized upon many ideas for stories and poems from these surroundings. His clear vision, and the energy massed in a torrent sweeping all before it, is manifested in “Plain Tales from the Hills,” published in Calcutta, 1888. Of these forty short stories, twenty-eight made their first appearance in the Civil and MilitaryGazette. As early as 1886 his name was well known in India.

Mr. E. K. Robinson, who was formerly Kipling’s editor at Lahore, contributed to McClure’s Magazine (July 1896) an interesting paper giving his reminiscences of his famous assistant. The friendship dated back for ten years, and when lie first met Kipling lie was not particularly impressed by his appearance, but lie draws attention to the fact that he was even then a brilliant conversationalist. Mr. Robinson says that he conversed in a somewhat jerky manner, and his movements were rather sudden and eccentric; this, added to a stoop acquired through much bending over the office desk, did not give one a very favourable impression. But those who worked with him had noticed his sterling traits, and were impressed by a light which flashed behind the spectacles. It was a light that was suggestive of a good deal of power and sterling character. He was an untiring worker, and slaved industriously at the drudgery of the newspaper work without protest.

There was one peculiarity of Kipling’s work which I really must mention, namely, the amount of ink he used to throw about. In the heat of summer, white cotton trousers and a thin vest constituted his office attire, and by the day’s end he was spotted all over like a Dalmatian dog. He had a habit of dipping his pen frequently and deep into the inkpot, and as all his movements were abrupt, almost jerky, the ink used to fly. When he darted into my room, as he used to do about one thing or another in connexion with the contents of the paper a dozen times in the morning, I had to shout to him to “stand off”; otherwise, as I knew by experience, the abrupt halt he would make and the flourish with which he placed the proof in his hand before me, would send the penful of ink — he always had a full pen in his hand — flying over me. Driving, or sometimes walking, home to breakfast in his light attire plentifully besprinkled with ink, his spectacled face peeping out under an enormous mushroom-shaped pith hat, Kipling was a quaint-looking object.

In 1889 Kipling was sent to England by the Pioneer, to which he promised to contribute his impressions of travel. He touched Japan, San Francisco, and New York on his way to the mother-country, and his experience may be read in “Letters of Marque” and “From Sea to Sea.” In the autumn of this your we find him established in London, where he published “Barrack Room Ballads” a year or so later, of which the Times remarked: “Unmistakable genius rings in every line.”

Robert Barr, writing in the Idler for May 1909, gives a sidelight on Rudyard Kipling, the young journalist, fighting for position in the London crowd.

Kipling then lived in three rooms on the second floor, at the corner of Villiers Street and the Thames Embankment; and here it was to him that Robert Barr divulged his plans for a new magazine. The young author took to the idea at once, and with that prompt energy which characterized him, he produced pens and paper and started to sketch out a cover for the magazine. We know that Kipling can produce very creditable black and white sketches when he likes. Readers of “Just So Stories” do not need to be told that he is an artist of quite an uncommon order. Although his father was an art master by profession, he is said to be quite without any training in this work. “He liked doing things his own way,” writes one who knew him at school, “and if he wanted to make a hill square, and cover it with vermilion grass, he would do it.” A sketch of “A Tiger’s Head,” by Kipling, published in the Strand Magazine, shows that he could at times observe convention and nature at the same time.

Kipling’s sketch for Robert Barr’s magazine represented a statue, the real face of which wore a tragic expression, while the mask which the statue held up grinned humorously at the public. Kipling at that time had been burning the midnight oil and generally overworking himself. On his table he had graved the words: “Oft was I weary when I toiled at thee” — the motto which the galley-slave carved on his oar. He told Mr. Barr that as he “worked late, a phantom of himself had formed the disquieting habit of sitting down opposite him at the desk of weariness,” and this he “regarded as a sign to knock off.” Kipling refused the editorship of the Idler, but he contributed the following articles and stories to their journal: “My First Hook,” “My Sunday at Home,” “Primum Tempus,” “The Legs of Sister Ursula,” “The Ship that Found Herself,” and “The Story of Ung.”

Robert Harr had a Kipling sea-story in view when he started the series of “Tales of our Coast.” They were to start off with Clark Russell and end up with Kipling. Harold Frederic contributed a most striking Irish sea sketch, and “There is Sorrow on the Sea” came from Parker’s pen. Eric Mackay wrote a poem to introduce the series which was illustrated by Frank Brangwyn. The third story, “The Roll Call of the Reef,” was by “Q.” Kipling’s story did not arrive in time, but it appeared during the same year, and was illustrated by T. Walter Wilson. Kipling’s connexion with this most cosmopolitan magazine must have been a very valuable experience, for a galaxy of budding talent had gathered around its ideal editor, Jerome K. Jerome. In the Idler such writers as W. W. Jacobs, Anthony Hope, Zangwill, and W. L. Alden, the great American humorist, received welcome admission long before the other journals looked upon their work as “valuable copy.”

A long voyage to South Africa, Australia, Ceylon, and New Zealand took up most of his time in 1S91, and when he returned he met Wolcott Balestier, a young American author belonging to a family well known in the literary circles of New York. At the same time he became acquainted with Balestier’s sister, Caroline, whom he married in 1892. During the years 1892-1896 the young couple made their home at Bratleboro, Vt., U.S.A., which gave Kipling the chance to gather the information about the New England fishermen, which he uses in “Captains Courageous.” “Many Inventions,” the “Jungle Books,” and certain poems in “The Seven Seas” were also written or planned there.

In 1896 Kipling again came to England, and he settled at Rottingdean in 1898. He went on a cruise with the navy in the home waters in 1897, and again in 1898, giving his notes on the trips in “A Fleet in Being,” which appeared in the Morning Post. In 1900 he was with his beloved troops in South Africa, and was present with Bennet Burleigh on March 29, during the fight at Karree Siding. lie also acted as an associate editor of the Friend, a Bloemfontein journal edited by the war correspondents with Lord Roberts’ troops. He wrote for this paper “King Log and King Stork” (March 24, 1900), “The Elephant and the Lark’s Nest” (March 26, 1900), “The Persuasive Pom-Pom,” “Vain Horses,” and other items. “A Song of the White Man,” which Julian Ralph states in “War’s Brighter Side” was written to be read at a dinner in Canada, appeared in the issue of April 2, 1900.

Of the later incidents of Kipling’s career there is little need to write; they have been brought before the notice of the public by the Press of England and America with unfailing regularity.

Chapter 2 — Kipling at School

No part of a famous man’s career has quite the same fascination as the days of his youth and obscurity, when he is groping blindly towards the brilliant future which, although he probably does not dream of it, awaits him; and, in the ease of Rudyard Kipling, this period of eclipse is all the more interesting as he has presented part of it to the public in his vividly boyish series of stories, “Stalky and Co.”

A perusal of this volume leaves no doubt in the mind of the reader that Master Gigadibs, the sportive Beetle, with his gig-lamps and a craving to write a “simply lovely poem,” is a picture of the author during his days at the now famous West Country school. A writer’s best stories are always in part autobiographical. In “The Light that Failed” we cannot help assuming that Dick Heldar is reconstructed from Kipling’s inner consciousness, and in “Stalky and Co.” and “Kim” we find the texture of the author’s mind and the labyrinth of his heart manifested with the exactness of an analyst. Beetle, the Bard in “Stalky and Co.,” with his bright, clean touch and the clever schoolboy’s wit, is always and ever Rudyard Kipling, the Bard of Empire.

How much of this book is autobiography, and how much is drawn from the limpid springs of the writer’s imagination, give rise to a somewhat perplexing question. Some light on this matter is to be gained from the columns of the United Services’ College Magazine, which was issued during the years that the Three Incomprehensibles waged war with the “Ancients of the College,” which was from 1878 to 1882. A set of this immature little magazine realized the sum of £130 at a London auction-room some years ago. And I am told that this set and another one in the library of the College — which now has been transplanted to Harpenden, in Hertfordshire — are the only two known. However, much that is disguised in “Stalky and Co.”, may be cleared up by examining the pages of the College Magazine. In the first place, it is not as difficult to keep company with Stalky and his boy companions after a perusal of the little volumes, for although we all admire Kipling’s story in a measure it is rather hard to agree with some of the proceedings of Stalky, Beetle, and McTurk. It must be admitted that these youths followed a code of ethics not always consistent with the honour of self-respecting English schoolboys, and that they were not specially inspired by any of that esprit de corps, and sense of responsibility, which is such a dominant note in most of Kipling’s work. But impressions produced by the brutality and heartlessness of Stalky and his friends, are somewhat toned down by the more refined and happy atmosphere of the author’s Alma Mater, as reflected in the school journal. In the book, Master Gigadibs seems to be only happy when baiting his master, or acting as lampooner for his Uncle Stalky. But we find many snatches of verse from his pen in the pages of the magazine which are surcharged with humour and bonhomie. In the book we read of the wild antics in a pantomime played by Stalky and other boys; in the magazine, we find that the performance was really quite a creditable rendering of The Rivals, in which Kipling acted the part of Sir Anthony. Beetle seems to waste a good deal of time in retreat in his lair in the furze bushes, waiting for the cat that walked once too often by himself, to twine like a giddy honeysuckle above the heads of those who had incurred the wrath of the heroic trio.

But we rend nothing in the book about the time he spent whilst forming the College Literary and Debating Society. The Beetle was its founder and also the first secretary. I should add that the Natural History Society, which was treated with such contempt by Stalky and Co., and referred to as “The Bughunters,” received the liberal assistance of the magazine during the years 1881-2, which covers the period of Kipling’s editorship. The “old rag,” or the Swillingford Patriot as Stalky had christened it, received but scant attention in the book. It is mentioned in the last chapter, in which Beetle goes to Randall’s printing office accompanied by his confreres to correct proofs. The printing office of the magazine can still be seen under the name of Wilson and Sons in Mill Street, and Mr. Raven Hill, who made a special study of the local colour of the district, devoted a full-page drawing to Beetle at work on the proofs in the little loft behind the shop. Beneath this drawing were quoted the words: “He saw himself already controlling the Times.” Raven Hill’s illustrations to “Stalky and Co.” in the Windsor Magazine in 1899 should be in the hands of all true Kiplingites; to cut them out of the story in book form was a great mistake, and it is to be hoped that in a future edition they will be reproduced.

It is, of course, the fact, that Kipling edited six numbers of the school magazine that has given them their fancy price. The first effort from his pen made its appearance in the issue of June 30, 1881, under the title of “A Devonshire Legend,” and I make no doubt that two other articles came from the same pen, “Life in the Corridor” and “Concerning Swaggers.” It will be recalled that the college corridor is mentioned several times in “Stalky and Co.”

Some of the efforts are headed “By Rxxxxt Bxxxxxxg,” and it will be noticed that Kipling has closely modelled several of his early poems on Browning, but as Mr. Adrian Margaux remarked in an article in the Captain “the subjects would hardly have commended themselves to the Browning Society.” I must not fail, however, to draw attention to “The Jampot,” which is delightfully droll. It tells of a fight by two boys for a pot of jam, which was smashed to shivers during the contest:

But neither of us shared

The dainty — That’s your flea?

Well, neither of us cared,

I answer... Let me see

How have your trousers fared?

The young Kipling thus delivered himself on a college edict prohibiting the use of stoves for cooking in the studies:

The cup is devoid of its coffee,

The spoon of its sugary load,

The tablecloth guiltless of toffee,

And sorrow has seized our abode.

Our tasks they are as dry as the sea-sands,

Our throats they are drier than these,

No cocoa has moistened our weasands,

We taste not of Teas.

On the occasion of the last attempt on the life of Queen Victoria, Kipling contributed a poem entitled “Ave Imperatrix” to the magazine (March 1882). This is the first example of that end-of-the-nineteenth- century Imperialism to which he has given full and final expression:

Such greeting as should come from those

Whose fathers faced the Sepoy hordes,

Or served you in the Russian snows,

And, dying, left their sons their swords.

And all are bred to do your will

By land and sea — wherever flies

The flag, to fight and follow still

And work your Empire’s destinies.

There are some interesting notes on the “Literary Society” which was founded in 1881 by Kipling in the college chronicle. They throw many sidelights on the school life. The first meeting was called to consider the proposition: “that a classical is superior to a mathematical education.” Kipling spoke in the negative. The next time that his name is mentioned we read that he was in favour of a resolution which affirmed the “Advance of the Russians in Central Asia to be hostile to the British Power.” Another notice records that Kipling moved a vote of censure against Mr. Gladstone’s Government. This “vote” was carried by a sweeping majority, but it is rather astonishing to find that Beresford — the veritable “Uncle Stalky” of the Stalky Book — was one of the opposing speakers. We can imagine Beetle’s glance of cold scorn when he met the eye of the “Stalky one” who, no doubt, took up that attitude to annoy “Master Gigadibs.” Kipling’s last speech was in support of a resolution “that total abstinence is better than the moderate use of alcohol.” But the teetotalers were defeated in the end.

I do not think that Kipling is a total abstainer, and certainly his writings have not commended temperance, but after seeing two young men drug two girls with drink at an American concert hall, and lead them reeling home, he became converted to Prohibition. Of this painful scene he has written:

Then, recanting previous opinions, I became a Prohibitionist. Better it is that a man should go without his beer in public places, and content himself with swearing at the narrow-mindedness of the majority; better it is to poison the inside with very vile temperance drinks, and to buy lager furtively at back doors, than to bring temptation to the lips of young fools such as the four I had seen. I understand now why the preachers rage against drink. I have said, “There is no harm in it taken moderately”; and yet my own demand for beer helped directly to send these two girls reeling down the dark street to — God alone knows what end. If liquor is worth drinking, it is worth taking a little trouble to come at — such trouble as a man will undergo to compass his own desires. It is not good that we should let it lie before the eyes of children, and I have been a fool in writing to the contrary.

The quality of that fine fooling in “Stalky and Co.” is not shown in Kipling’s early taste in reading. He read Tennyson’s “Defence of Lucknow” before the Society on one occasion, and later on in the term it is recorded he contributed to a meeting a recital of Bret Harte’s “Concepcion de Arguello.” At this time one must remember that our hero was but sixteen, and the choice of the latter poem to read before a school society, throws a very interesting sidelight on the boy that is not to be gained in “Stalky and Co.” It will be recalled that Harte’s poem tells of a Spanish girl who waited forty years for a foreign lover only to learn, in the end, that he had been killed on a journey to Russia a few weeks after the betrothal.

The only honour which Kipling received at Westward Ho was the first prize for English literature. There is reason to suppose that he substituted Browning, Dumas, and Scott, for the more learned men who prepared books for the sole purpose of confounding boys; from the fact that he did not distinguish himself in scholarship. Stevenson’s essay, “A Defence of Idlers,” shows how no time is actually lost, not even that which is idled away with a book. But this is a point that is very hard to explain to ambitious parents. However, Kipling’s contributions to the college chronicle plainly showed that he meant to pass a hawser to literature, and take it in tow.

It was about this time that some of his verses appeared in a local paper, and no doubt he felt like Stevenson when he sold his first essay, “one of the most popular and successful writers in Great Britain.”

Kipling did not shine in the athletic field, and it is certain that he used to bank on his physical weakness when cricket was to be evaded. Only once does his name appear in the athletic competitions, and that is an entry for a quarter of a mile flat race, and in this lie was one of the last “home.” Of course his shortsightedness was a great handicap to him in all out of door sports, but eye-trouble did not prevent him becoming one of the best swimmers in the college, which was somewhat of an achievement at Westward Ho, where all the boys were keen swimmers.

If the testimony of “Foxy,” the old drill-sergeant, can be relied upon, it seems that Kipling was not a favourite with the other boys. This ex-soldier was in the service of the college up to a few years ago, and he described Kipling, Beresford, and Dunsterville (the “terrible three” of “Stalky and Co.”) in most vivid terms. He was the victim of many pranks which are recorded in the book, and it is said that he was not very gratified with his position in English literature. If Kipling did not find himself popular with his schoolfellows, it is only natural to find that he entered into an alliance with Stalky and McTurk. The other two boys in the Triple Alliance were officers’ sons, and now hold commissions themselves.

The last visit paid by Kipling to his old school was in 1894. On July 25 of that year he journeyed to Westward Ho, in order to take part in a farewell presentation to Mr. Price, on his resignation after twenty years’ headmastership. He made a short speech on this occasion, from which he evidently built up the poetical dedication to “Stalky and Co.” which was published five years after this visit. It is said that “Stalky and Co.” was written with the idea of giving the college a “leg up”; however, a few years after Kipling’s visit it was transferred to the neighbourhood of London. The school-building still remains, and has been converted into an hotel. So when you walk along the cliffs, you need not trouble to look for college boys making their way from Appledore to invade the famous tuck-shop on “Bidevoor Promenade.”

In a letter which during Easter 1898 he wrote to the editors of a schoolboys’ paper, Kipling showed that there was still plenty of the fun and twaddle of the Westward Ho days left in him. It is so characteristic of Kipling, the precocious Indian child, and Kipling as he is now, that I quote it intact:

To the Editors, School Budget:

Gentlemen,

I am in receipt of your letter of no date, together with copy of School Budget, Feb. 14, and you seem to be in possession of all the cheek that is in the least likely to do you any good in this world or the next. And, furthermore, you have omitted to specify where your journal is printed and in what county of England Horsmonden is situated. But, on the other hand, and notwithstanding, I very much approve of your “Hints on Schoolboy Etiquette,” and have taken the liberty of sending you a few more as following:

1. If you have any doubts about a quantity, cough. In three cases out of five this will save you being asked to “say it again.”

2. The two most useful boys in a form are: (a) the master’s favourite pro tem.; (b) his pet aversion. With a little judicious management (a) can keep him talking through the first part of the construe, and (b) can take up the running for the rest of the time. N.B. — A syndicate should arrange to do (b’s) impots, in return for this service.

3. A confirmed guesser is worth his weight in gold on a Monday morning.

4. Never shirk a master out of bounds; pass him with an abstracted eye, and, at the same time, pull out a letter and study it earnestly. He may think it is a commission for some one else.

5. When pursued by the native farmer, always take to the nearest plough-land. Men stick in furrows that boys can run over.

6. If it is necessary to take other people’s apples, do it on a Sunday. You then put them inside your topper, which is better than trying to button them into a tight “Eton.”

You will find this advice worth enormous sums of money, but I shall be obliged with a cheque or postal order for sixpence at your convenience, if the contribution should be found to fill more than one page.

Faithfully yours,

Rudyard Kipling.

Capetown, Easter Monday, ‘98.

Chapter 3 — Personality

Thepersonality of Rudyard Kipling is a factor that counts for much. There are flaws in his finest works; there are certain defects in his genius. With all his display of power there are strange lapses and weaknesses. But such defects are not fatal, and the thirst of the true Kiplingite is never slaked. Considering how marvellously wide his range in verse and prose is, it is little short of a miracle that he has met with no serious reverses; he knows nothing of retreat or failure. The critics for the last few years seem to have been unanimous in denouncing him — which fact, of course, recommends him to us. Let the critics take courage, they may outwit oblivion yet, even though they do nothing but croak and catcall at some one who is hitching his wagon to a star. It is in this manner that immortals are made.

Nothing in all the range of Kipling’s work is so marked by fine feeling as “Barrack Room Ballads” — nothing deals with more tangible people. Here he has put forth his best, his very best; and the richness of his general information about Tommy and his ways, is constantly astonishing people. In the lore of the man-at-arms, Kipling is the wisest man of the day. Wisdom is the distilled essence of intuition, corroborated by experience. This is the secret of Kipling’s strength — he went to study the life of the Tommy, not because it offered money and a new field, but because it honestly interested him. For years he has helped the soldier to fight his battles, until at last he can take him by the hand as a comrade, not as a lay-figure.

Kipling has a sense of humour. Humour is a lifebuoy, and saves you from drowning when you jump off a cliff into a sea of sermons. An author (or poet) who cannot laugh, is apt to explode — he is very dangerous.

I am certain that Kipling is a man with a “very young laugh.” I can imagine him seated at his writing-table beneath that portrait of Burne-Jones, writing such a tale as “The Bonds of Discipline,” which tells of a succession of uproarious orgies culminating in a mock court-martial. I can hear that boyish laugh as he writes; I can hear him chuckle at his own witticisms or those of others.

The Vicomte d’Humières has told us of Kipling’s boyish laugh; he has also told us a little about his personal appearance, but this was about 1905. He speaks of the author’s frank and open expression; of his eyes full of sympathy and gaiety, eager to reflect life and all that it holds for tinker or king; of the hair cropped in the fashion of the Tommy. And his nose! It is the nose of the seeker after knowledge. It was Albrecht Durer who said of Erasmus: “With this nose he successfully hunted down everything but heresy.” To understand what Kipling has hunted down with his nose one must travel the world over. One thing is certain: Kipling does not attach himself to any particular creed or party. He evidently thinks that to belong to any party is to be owned by it. Kipling’s soul revolts at life in a groove. He dislikes typical men — their ways of life, their sophistry, their stupidity. He likes to be free of all party restrictions, so that he can study in his own sweet way — when at school he was distinguished from other boys by his independence.

At the little country printing works he learned his case, worked the ink-balls, and manipulated the cropper. He knows the craft of the book from the leaded type to the printed page. This has a distinct bearing on his literary style. His language is easy, fluid, suggestive. His paragraphs throw a purple shadow, and are pregnant with meaning beyond what the textbook supplies. This is one part genius and two parts experience.

When Kipling was assistant editor of the Pioneer (1887-1889), his intense interest in life and great curiosity, no doubt prompted him to ask his chief to send him forth into the world to acquire special knowledge for that paper. The chief volunteered him for a pilgrimage, no doubt in the same spirit as Artemus Ward volunteered all his wife’s relations for the purposes of war. And thus began the travels of Kipling, special correspondent to the whole bloomin’ British Empire. He, no doubt, looked back with just a little twitch of the heartstrings towards the strange little newspaper office where he had spent some arduous but profitable years. Then the particular corner of Empire where he “lay awake at nights, plotting and scheming to write something that should take with the British Public” faded from view. It was the happiest moment he had ever known. The world lay beyond. You will find many of the tales of these wanderings in the two volumes “From Sea to Sea.” Herein are to be read his fierce affections and his amazing dislikes. And so Kipling fared forth to fame and fortune.

An American critic, Arthur Bartlett Maurice, has summed up Kipling’s attitude to the wit, brains, folly, and brawn of the world in a few words:

A young genius looked out upon the world, beheld there laughter and tears, folly and wisdom, and considerable wickedness of a healthy sort. The wickedness roused no anger in him. There was no disposition to howl stale moralities, his mission was not that of a social regenerator, his work betrayed no maudlin indignation. When he wrote about the deception of a husband he treated all three parties in the affair with perfect and impartial good humour. His attitude was that of detachment, his métier to watch the comedy and tragedy of it all as one watches a play. And after having been very much amused and a little bored, he sat down to his writing-table with the conviction that

We are very slightly changed

From the semi-apes that ranged

India’s prehistoric clay.

There are times when he seems almost to resent the fact that human nature shows so little originality in its weaknesses. The world wags on merrily and busily, new forces are constantly springing up as if out of the ground, the hand of man is growing more cunning and his brain more active, only his heart can invent no new sin. “Jack” Barrett jobbed off to Quetta in September to die there, attempting two men’s work, Mrs. Barrett mourning him “five lively months at most”; Potiphar Gubbins, C.E., hoisting himself to social prominence and highly paid posts as the complaisant husband of an attractive wife — these are the oldest of pitiable human stories. Through the verses which tell of these people there rings a note of half-humorous protest at the monotonous sameness of life. For the purely narrative ditties he has more relish. A general officer, riding with his staff, takes down a heliograph message between husband and wife and finds himself alluded to as “that most immoral man.” A young lieutenant wishing to break an engagement in a gentlemanly manner develops appalling epileptic fits with the assistance of Pears’ Shaving Sticks. What an honest, wholesome love of fun! What animal spirits! He can see the amazement on the general’s “shaven gill,” and chuckle with Sleary over some especially artistic and alarming seizure. Above all he delights as

Tear by year in pious patience vengeful Mrs. Bofkin sits,

Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary’s fits.

One thinks of him as roaring with laughter whilst he writes of the astonishment and discomfiture of these people, as the “good Dumas” used to roar with laughter at the humorous observations of his characters.

In “Departmental Ditties” we have Kipling the entertainer; in his short stories of Indian life he is the necromancer, but in “Barrack Room Ballads” we have Kipling the familiar friend.

Kipling is not slow in taking what he wants; he frankly admits his indebtedness to the work of other men in “When ‘Omer Smote ‘is Bloomin’ Lyre.” He makes no apologies — but takes all that he needs as his divine right. And, of course, he justifies himself in taking what he needs, with the thought that he gives it all back to us with interest added.

Kipling shows a natural love of Biblical language, and it is worth while to observe how he repeatedly goes to Holy Writ for sonorous expressions. In his beautiful domestic poem on Sussex the phrase “The lot has fallen to me” recalls Psalm xvi, 7 (Prayer Book version): “The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground: yea, I have a goodly heritage.” Again in the same poem we find in Stanza I, “And see that it is good,” an echo, of course, from Genesis i, 31: “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Take the sixth stanza of “Pharaoh and the Sergeant,” and we read “‘Tween a cloud o’ dust and fire” — which can be compared with Exodus xiii, 21. The following references will show that Kipling was deeply indebted to the Authorized Version in “Recessional”:

“Then beware lest thou forget” (Deuteronomy vi, 12).

“The thunder of the captains, and the shouting” (Job xxxix, 25).

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise” (Psalm li, 17).

“For a thousand years in Thy sight are but yesterday” (Psalm xc, 4).

“The Gentiles, which have not the law” (Romans ii, 14).

In “The Nursing Sister” is another instance to this point. Kipling has written “Our little maids that have no breasts” — which is to be found in the Song of Songs, viii, 8: “We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts.”

It is, of course, an unnecessary and tedious labour to compare minutely Kipling’s work with the Bible, but one or two more comparisons may be interesting. “M’Andrew’s Hymn,” which I think reflects the author’s ideas on life more than any other poem, seems to have been written with a fine carelessness. Kipling writes as the fancy takes him, and it is difficult to imagine that he ever corrects or prunes his prodigal luxuriance. This poem contains much from the by-ways of the Bible:

“Better the sight of eyes that see than wanderin’ o’ desire” (see Ecclesiastes, vi, 9) and —

“The Mornin’ Stars” (Job, xxxviii, 7).

“When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”

Here is a weird scrap of burlesque published in the Pall Mall Gazette, which rather hints at Kipling’s fondness for biblical quotation. Dr. Parker had made a statement in the Idler declaring that “Kipling was related to his wife; though he did not know it”:

He knows the slang of Silver Street, the horrors of Lahore,

And how the man-seal breasts the waves that buffet Labrador...

He knows each fine gradation ‘twixt the General and the sub.,

The terms employed by Atkins when they fling him from a pub.,

He knows an Ekka pony’s points, the leper’s drear abode,

The seamy side of Simla, the flaring Mile End Road;

He knows the Devil’s tone to souls too pitiful to damn,

He knows the taste of every regimental mess in “cham”;

He knows enough to annotate the Bible verse by verse,

And how to draw the shekels from the British public’s purse —

In reading the “Ballad of the King’s Jest” it will be noticed that Kipling has imitated the cadences and mannerisms of Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie.” Perhaps, also, there is a hint of a debt to Ernest Seton-Thompson’s method of dealing with animal stories in his Jungle Books. In these cases, Kipling, of course, takes no more than a writer’s privilege: he borrows twenty-one shillings’-worth of silver, and pays us back with a bright golden guinea.

Chapter 4 — Some Anecdotes

Itis natural that there should have been a feeling of resentment on the part of some of the old school of literary men, when a young author like Kipling attracted so much attention. And when Kipling turned his back upon the reporter or interviewer, and refused to give them free material from which to serve up a paragraph or so of wishy-washy gossip, he was instantly branded as a peevish prig. This perverse view of Kipling was endorsed by the gossip of a section of the American Press at one time, and such remarks as the following, taken from the Papyrus, February 1911, are fairly frequent even now:

There was nothing to his (Kipling’s) talk — not a hint of the magic that lies across so many pages, or is condensed into so many of the aptest and most striking epithets in literature. Pompous, self-conceited, snobbish, self-conscious, priggish, banal, peevish and fractious, without a visible ray of the redeeming kindliness of genius, or even a hint of his thaumaturgic mental power — this is what they told me of the man who has taught us all so much about men and women — who may be said to have added a new chapter to the Book of the Heart.

Here also is a characteristic rhyme which was freely bandied about among a certain section of London literary men:

Will there never come a season

Which shall rid us from the curse

Of a prose which knows no reason

And an unmelodious verse;

When the world shall cease to wonder

At the genius of an Ass,

And a boy’s eccentric blunder

Shall not bring success to pass;

When mankind shall be delivered

From the clash of magazines,

And the inkstand shall be shivered

Into countless smithereens;

When there stands a muzzled stripling,

Mute, beside a muzzled bore;

When the Rudyards cease from Kipling

And the Haggards Ride no more?

Mr. S. S. McClure (founder of McClure’s Magazine) says that he always found Kipling courteous and cordial. He also relates how, when he met Kipling in London, the famous author reminded him that at a previous meeting in America he “had talked McClure’s Magazine to him for eight solid hours.” And Kipling suffered the “shop” of the enthusiastic publisher without protest! He only remarked “McClure, your business is dealing in brain futures.”

It is stated from a quarter which should be well informed, that Kipling is a tolerant, appreciative novel-reader, and has a great enthusiasm for “shilling shockers.” He has a large respect for Guy Boothby’s books, which cannot be placed far above the average pot-boiler. Kipling once asked McClure whether he had ever read “David Harum.” The publisher replied: “No. He’s dead.”

Kipling was tickled by the astute American’s outlook on literature, and said: “That’s right, McClure. The mark of genius is to eliminate the unnecessary.”

It is interesting to learn that Kipling received 25,000 dollars for the rights of “Kim” when it was serialized in McClure’s Magazine, although when the author stopped at New York on his way to England, a few years before, he was unable to find a publisher at any price.

He submitted all his wonderful range of early work to Harper Bros, of New York, who rejected the whole parcel. It is said that the young author was so indignant that he tried no other American publisher. After he returned to London, he wrote “The Light that Failed,” and Lippincotts paid him 800 dollars for this story, which was afterwards syndicated by McClure.

It is to be expected that Kipling should have American leanings; one of these is his craze for magazines. Magazine reading is a mania in the States. I am at this point reminded of the story of how Kipling raided Mr. J. M. Barrie’s stock of magazines at Waterloo Station. Mr. Barrie was hastening from the bookstall laden with papers; a good many sixpenny ones among them, he dolefully relates, when, in rushing round a corner, he fell into the arms of Kipling, equally in a tearing hurry. They turned on each other with scowling faces, then smiled in recognition, and asked each other whither he went. Then Kipling exclaiming, “Lucky beggar, you’ve got papers!” seized the bundle from Barrie, flung him some money and rushed away.

“But you did not stoop to pick up his dirty halfpence, did you?” queried one of Mr. Barrie’s hearers, amusedly.

“Didn’t I though!” returned Barrie; and added ruefully, “but he hadn’t flung me half enough.”

Stories about Rudyard Kipling are very numerous, but I fear that he has not even a bowing acquaintance with the anecdotes which pass the rounds of the newspapers. Certain of them can be run down to other well-known authors of the past twenty years, but it would be impossible to straighten out the tangle with any accuracy.

This Kipling story comes to us via a Pittsburg paper. It is to the effect that at some anti-suffrage dinner — time and place conveniently omitted! — he said, “Have not the women got enough? In addition to all their other privileges, why should they have the vote? I was talking to a suffragist the other day,” he continued, “and she said, ‘Why should a woman take a man’s name when she marries him?’ Why,” answered Kipling, “should she take everything else he’s got?”

I am indebted to the Bookfellow (Sydney) for the following very pleasing anecdote:

Ever hear Kipling tell his tiger yarn? It was at a small station on one of the Indian railways. There was a stationmaster there and a porter. The latter was told not to act without instructions from the former, or, failing that, from the head office. A man-eater broke away from the jungle, attacked the station, seized the stationmaster, and began to make mincemeat of him. The porter remembered orders. Going to the telegraph, he wired to headquarters: “Tiger on platform, eating station-master. Please wire instructions.”

The ready wit of Kipling is illustrated in the following. “Don’t you think it strange,” a lady is supposed to have said to him, “that sugar is the only word in the English language where an ‘s’ and a ‘u’ come together and are pronounced sh’?”

“Sure!” Kipling is alleged to have said.

Kipling’s genius, if not his tastes, was always admired by Mark Twain. His impressions of Kipling which are given in Paine’s Biography of the famous American writer clearly indicate this. It was Twain, it will be remembered, who paid a special tribute to Kipling at the Authors’ Club (London) in 1899. The anxiety and sympathy of the entire American nation had just followed Kipling through a most dangerous illness at New York City, which Mark Twain declared had done much to bring England and America close together. He told the members of the Authors’ Club that he had been engaged in the compiling of an epoch-making pun, and had brought it there to lay at their feet, “not to ask for their indulgence, but for their applause.” It was this:

Since England and America have been joined in Kipling, may they not be severed in Twain.

We are informed that hundreds of puns had been made on the author’s pen-name, but this was probably his first and only attempt. At the Savage Club, too, Twain recalled old times, and his first London visit twenty-seven years before:

In those days you could have carried Kipling around in a lunch-basket; now he fills the world. I was young and foolish then, now I am old and foolisher.

It was in the summer of 1889 that the first meeting between Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling took place. At that time Kipling was only known to an Anglo-Indian public, and had just started on a world tour for the Pioneer, writing impressions of his travel home to that journal. He journeyed to Elmira especially to see Mark Twain. It seems that Twain was not at Quarry Farm when he called, but Mrs. Crane and Susy Clemens asked him in, and he took a seat on the veranda and talked with them some time — that talk which Mark Twain told us might be likened to footprints, so strong and definite was the impression left on the memory.

He spent a couple of hours with me, and at the end of that time I had surprised him as much as he had surprised me — and the honours were easy. I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before — though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would... He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.

Mark Twain also has remarked that Kipling has enjoyed a unique distinction, “that of being the only living person not head of a nation whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark; the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail, but always travels first class — by cable.”

It was not until a year after Kipling’s visit to Elmira that Twain identified him with the author of “Plain Tales,” through a copy of the London World which had a sketch of Kipling in it, and a mention that he had travelled in the United States.

Kipling has, of course, left an account of this visit in his “Letters of Travel.”

In a letter to Kipling which Twain wrote from Vancouver, when he was on his way around the world in 1895, he refers to their meeting at Elmira:

It is reported that you are about to visit India. This has moved me to journey to that far country in order that I may unload from my conscience a debt long due to you. Years ago you came from India to Elmira to visit me. It has always been my purpose to return that visit and that great compliment some day. I shall arrive next January, and you must be ready. I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons, and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild bungalows; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.

During the last South African War, Mark Twain’s sympathies were always with the Boers. He had explained that his head was with the British, but his heart must remain with the Boers, who were fighting for their homes. Twain saw that the only thing for him to do was to remain silent, in spite of a “voice” which urged him to enter his protest in the Press. But in spite of this, Mark Twain cherished no hostility against Kipling, who held very different opinions on the great question.

“I am not fond of all poetry,” Twain remarked, “but there’s something in Kipling that appeals to me. I guess he’s just about my level.” He also once declared when he was at Florence, that he hoped Fate would bring Kipling there: “I would rather see him than any other man.”

Kipling, too, held a very high opinion of Mark Twain’s genius, as the following extract from a letter written to the well-known American publisher, Mr. Frank Doubleday, clearly indicates:

I love to think of the great and godlike Clemens. He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a d— sight — Cervantes was a relation of his.

In a letter to Mr. Doubleday written almost the same time (1903), we learn that Mark Twain gloried in the riotous strength and superabundant vigour of Kipling’s verse. He read “The Bell Buoy” over and over again — “my custom with Kipling’s work” — and also remarked that a “bell buoy is a deeply impressive fellow being.” Many a night at sea he had heard him call, sometimes in his pathetic and melancholy way, and sometimes with his strenuous and urgent note until he got his meaning — now he had the words! He hoped some day “to hear the poem chanted or sung — with the bell buoy breaking out in the distance.”

We may not detail all the incidents regarding the linking up of Kipling and Twain; even this path leads to monotony in the end. We may only mention that on June 26, 1907, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and many other distinguished citizens assembled at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, to receive degrees. A perfect storm of applause greeted Mark Twain when he appeared clad in his robe of scarlet; and the Oxford undergraduates wanted to know where he had hidden the Ascot Cup. A reference, of course, to Mark Twain’s speech to the Pilgrims at the Savoy Hotel (June 25, 1907), in which he had mentioned how, on the day of his arrival in England, he had been pained by a newspaper placard which read: “Mark Twain Arrives: Ascot Cup Stolen.”

Rudyard Kipling was also a supreme favourite; but it was Twain who was singled out for most of the yells and cheering of the undergraduates. After the ceremony of conferring the degrees; Mark Twain, Lord Curzon, and Kipling, viewed the Oxford pageant from a box, and it was here that a folded slip of paper, on the outside of which “Not True” was written, was passed up to them. The paper opened read:

East is East and West is West,

And never the Twain shall meet.

Kipling is remembered by his old neighbours in the Punjab as a man who was brimful of boisterous spirits, who laughed and joked the lifelong day. He was fond of practical joking. On one occasion he amused himself the whole evening, by showing the natives of Dharwal all the grotesque monsters on a set of magic lantern slides, illustrating Jack the Giant Killer, as authentic portraits of the Russian people, whose activity beyond Herat was then causing considerable alarm in Anglo-Indian circles.

An American publisher who secured a story from Kipling, was a teetotaler to the verge of fanaticism, and looking through the story he was shocked to come upon a passage where the hero was served with a glass of sherry. He wrote to Kipling, pointing out the moral harm that might result from reading of such a depraved person, and requested him to substitute some non-intoxicating beverage for the harmful sherry.

“Oh, all right,” Kipling replied, “make it a glass of ‘Blank’s’ Baby Food. I see he advertises largely in your magazine.”

Of course he has no way of protecting himself from being forcibly made sponsor for anecdotes in the papers; and the reader is cautioned against accepting as authentic any of those which appear in this chapter. Here is “an uncopyrighted anecdote” which passed the rounds of the American Press at the time when one could not pick up a paper without reading some story regarding Kipling:

Once when Rudyard Kipling was a boy he ran out on the yard-arm of a ship. “Mr. Kipling,” called a scared sailor, “your boy is on the yard arm, and if he lets go he’ll drown.”

“Ah,” responded Mr. Kipling with a yawn, “but he won’t let go.”

This incident also happened to Jim Fiske, Horace Walpole, Napoleon, Dick Turpin, Julius Caesar and the poet Byron.

Every popular author has to face the autograph hunters, and during his last year of residence in America, Kipling was assailed on all sides by this particular breed of pesterer. He confided to Zangwill that he sent out two hundred circulars during this period, to the “admiring crew who ranked him before Shakespeare,” proposing that they should send him a donation for a charity in return for his signature. Kipling continued, “then the floodgates — not of heaven — were opened.” For weeks abuse rained in upon him, and “thief ” seems to have been the mildest rebuke he received.

At Vermont Kipling paid all his household bills by cheque. Many of these cheques were very small, and the shrewd Yankee tradesmen soon discovered that autograph hunters would pay much over face value for them, so quite a number did not turn up at the bank for payment.