VIII THE POEMS
Only the briefest epilogue is necessary concerning Mr Kipling's poetry. We have concluded as to his prose stories that his best work is in the pure fancy of The Jungle Book, and that we descend thence through his English tales and his celebration of the work of the world to clever stories of India and Soldiers Three. Upon each of these levels we meet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once be said that at all times, except where the rule is proved by the exception, Mr Kipling's verse is less urgently inspired than his prose. The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of a quality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery the beat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm of sense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, at first, to contradict it. Pope's Essay on Man, for example, which at first seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, is really not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appears to be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there is a rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is being actually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-century philosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in the best of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifest reason why prose would not have served the author's purpose equally well.
Can we say this of Mr Kipling's poetry? Is Mr Kipling's poetry the result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?
A careful reading of Mr Kipling's verse, comparing it subject for subject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a more direct passionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariably more wrought and careful and elaborate. It does not suggest the poet driven into song. It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing the manner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet's tools, without any urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way. He has merely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed. Of his technical success there is seldom any doubt at all. For a craftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prose successfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his least abandoned moments, it is child's play to use the more obvious devices of the metrician to similar effect. So far as mere formal excellence is concerned, verse is a journeyman's matter as compared with prose; and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetry troubles Mr Kipling not at all. But we must look beyond the formality of verse to find a poet. Poetry flies higher than prose only when the poet's feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say. Mr Kipling is a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question. The question is, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author's feeling with the author's expression? And the answer to that will be, Not in the author's poems.
Take as an example the English motive:
"See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book."
Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose tale Below the Mill Dam, or with the passage it paraphrases in the story to which it stands as motto:
"The English are a bold people. His Saxons would laugh and jest with Hugh, and Hugh with them, and—this was marvellous to me—if even the meanest of them said such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor, then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might be near forsake everything else to debate the matter—I have seen them stop the mill with the corn half ground—and if the custom or usage were proven to be as it was said, why, that was the end of it, even though it were flat against Hugh, his wish and command."
It may be said of the verse that, possibly, it is more carefully considered than the prose, more deliberate and formally more excellent. But it is certainly more remote from the passion it conveys. There is more drive in a single fragment of An Habitation Enforced than in all the songs of Puck.
Similarly let us take another of Mr Kipling's themes—his delight in the world's work. Think first of The Bridge-Builders and of William the Conqueror and then turn to The Bell Buoy (Five Nations) or The White Man's Burden (Five Nations). In each case—and we repeat the result every time the experiment is made—we find that the author's motive, which lives in his prose, tends in his verse to expire. In The White Man's Burden it expires outright, so that reading it, it is difficult to realise that William the Conqueror has had the power so deeply to move us.
This is true even where Mr Kipling's subject, which in prose has not taken him to the top of his achievement, has in verse taken him as high as in verse he is able to go. Mr Kipling's best verse is contained in Barrack Room Ballads; but even these do not compare in merit with Soldiers Three. Barrack Room Ballads are the best of Mr Kipling's poetry, because in these poems rhyme and beat are essential to their inspiration. They are the exception which prove the rule that normally Mr Kipling has no right to his metre. Barrack Room Ballads are robust and vivid songs of the camp, choruses which require no music to enable them to serve the purpose of any gathering where the first idea is that there should be a cheerful noise. Complete success in this kind only required Mr Kipling to fill in the skeleton of a metre which brings the right words at the right moment to the tip of the galloping tongue, and this he has admirably done.
Where in Barrack Room Ballads Mr Kipling has attempted to do more than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. We have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point of view. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In Barrack Room Ballads it is more pronounced.
We may take three stanzas of Snarleyow as evidence that Mr Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass of his verse, really had to be metrical; also as evidence that, in so far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. The Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field:
"'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell
A little right the battery an' between the sections fell;
An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.
"Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain,
'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain.'
They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best,
So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest.
"The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt,
But 'e swung 'is 'orses 'andsome when it came to 'Action Front!'
An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head
'Twas juicier for the niggers when the case began to spread."
The brutality in this incident is forced in idea and expression beyond anything we find in Soldiers Three. It is this continuous forcing of idea and expression which persists in virtually all Mr Kipling's verse except where the jingle is all that matters. We have only to recall recitations from the platform or before the curtain of some of Mr Kipling's popular poetry to realise, sometimes a little painfully, that verse is for him not a threshold of the authentic Hall of Song, but, too often, a door out of reality into the sentimental and overwrought.
Comparing the soldier tales and the soldier songs it is often possible, however, to miss the author's flagging, because, as we have seen, the soldier songs are the best songs, whereas the soldier tales are not the best tales. The full extent of the inferiority of Mr Kipling's verse to Mr Kipling's prose cannot, however, be missed if we compare the finer grain of Mr Kipling's prose with the poems that deal with similar themes. Read first The Story of Ung (The Seven Seas) and afterwards the tale of the Flint Man found upon the Downs by Dan and Una (Rewards and Fairies). Or, to take an even more telling instance, recall the most perfect of all Mr Kipling's tales The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, and afterwards read the poem that is proudly set at the head of it:
"The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.
"And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!
"Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!"
—Dirge of the Langurs.
The poem is excellent cold craft, but leaves us precisely in the state of mind in which it found us. The story which follows it is rooted in the same idea; but, where the one is a literary exercise, the other is a supreme feat of imagination.
Here, with The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, the story itself and not the dirge of the Langurs, we may conveniently leave the reputation of our author. Critics of a future generation may need to apologise for including within the limits of a brief monograph a specific chapter upon Mr Kipling's verse. They will not need to apologise for its brevity.
