MR. KIPLING'S ALLEGORIES.
IT falls to the lot of distinguished public men, year after year, to make rather undistinguished speeches at the Academy banquet. The limits imposed by the occasion no doubt hedge and hamper oratory. If the politician must not touch on controversial topics, he is robbed of his flint and steel, and finds the striking of sparks a difficult business. But if be is precluded from speaking of what must lie upper- most in his mind, and may not add anything considerable to the book of politics, for others there is not so disconcerting a limitation. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, at all events—who responded last Saturday to the toast of "Literature "—if he felt the restriction of the occasion, felt it only as a poet feels the ties of metre or of rhyme. If the task imposed upon him was one of extreme difficulty, the knowledge of the difficulty fascinated him. The result was a speech such as has very seldom been heard at Burlington House. Mr. Kipling began, on a note which has always attracted him, with a fable of primitive man. He contrasted the man of action with the man of words. There was a legend " that when a man first achieved a most notable deed he wished to explain to the tribe what he bad done. As soon as he began to speak, however, he was smitten with dumbness, he lacked words, and sat down. Then there arose—according to the story—a masterless man, one who had taken no part in the action of his fellow, who had no special virtues, but was afflicted—that is the phrase—with the magic of necessary words. He saw, he told, he described the merits of the notable deed in such a fashion, we are assured, that the words 'became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of all his hearers.' Thereupon the tribe, seeing that the words were certainly alive, and fearing lest the man with the words would hand down certain tales about them to their children, they took and killed him. But later they saw that the magic was in the words, not in the man." We had travelled, be said, some distance since those days, but there were still the same tendencies at work. "The old and terrible instinct which taught our ancestors to kill the original story-teller, warns us that we shall not be far wrong if we challenge any man who shows signs of being afflicted with the necessary words." It was a right instinct which taught us to value and preserve only what was essentially true. Our world " demands that the magic of every word shall be tried out to the uttermost by every means, fair and foul, that the mind of man can suggest. There is no room, and the world insists that there shall be no room, for pity, for mercy, for respect, for fear, or even for loyalty between man and his fellow-man when the record of the tribe comes to be written." The record must satisfy at all costs.
Mr. Kipling began with primitive man, and he ended with the native African,—he had just returned from South Africa. There was a tribe which wanted rain, and the rain-doctors set about getting it. But their efforts were not satisfactory. The rain was patchy; here and there a district was swamped by a waterspout, in other places the trickling showers were soon dried up by the sun. The tribe complained to the rain- doctors, who protested that they had been making their proper magic; what had the tribe been doing? "And the tribe said: Oh, our head men have been running about hunting jackals, and our little people have been running about chasing grasshoppers. What has that to do with your rain-making ? ' It has everything to do with it,' said the rain-doctors. 'Just as long as your head men run about hunting jackals, and just as long as your little people run about chasing grasshoppers, just so long will the rain fall in this manner." We wonder whether Mr. Kipling felt, when he sat down, that all his hearers had rightly taken his meaning. Has it been rightly taken by his critics ? Has the interpreter been rightly interpreted P His speech has been explained, for example, as exalting the man of action as greater than the man of words. Does it necessarily bear that meaning ? If the interpretation of the second " allegory " is that which lies on the surface, it is that "to him that bath shall be given," that only to the nation active in nobility and strenuousness of work comes the reward of power to work yet harder, to
achieve more. In other words, as indeed Mr. Kipling almost literally explained it, we only get our bare deserts. And the illustration, surely, was especially applied to the man of words ; to him who hopes, if he is a worker worthy the name, that it may be granted to him to write a true word about his tribe, which the tribe will not destroy. Where in either of the two allegories is the greater glorifica- tion of the man of action P Surely what the speaker has in his thought is the painful delight which the man of words feels in striving to tell the tale of what the man of action has done, with the knowledge always in, his mind that his fellow- men will be absolutely merciless judges of his work. If he tells untrue tales, if he in any single point misrepresents the truth, which they instinctively recognise, though they may not be able themselves to describe it, then they kill him. Not as their forefathers in the legend killed the first story- teller, with the knife or the bludgeon; but they look at his work, and the.work dies. The judgment is automatic; if they would, they could not keep it alive. But the man of words works on, knowing the power of the materials he has at his band. "A bare half-hundred words breathed upon by some man in his agony, or in his exaltation, or in his idleness, ten generations ago can still lead whole nations into and out of captivity, can open to us the doors of three worlds, or stir us so intolerably that we can scarcely abide to look at our own souls. It is a miracle,—one that happens very seldom. But secretly each one of the masterless men with the words has hope, or has had hope, that the miracle may be wrought again through him." In that last sentence, in the insistence on "the joy of the working," and not in the contrast between action and thought, lies the interpretation of the allegory.
But the most interesting interpretation to be put on the speech is not the mere explanation of the words. It is the interpretation of Mr. Kipling himself. Look, in the first place, at the occasion on which the speech was made, and the medium which the speaker employed. He was speaking, no doubt, to an exceptionally cultivated audience, but it was on an " after-dinner " occasion, when most people are satisfied if they can say nothing in particular in a pleasant, easy style. But Mr. Kipling chose a style which was not easy. The meaning was not obscure, but the sentences were so closely interconnected, and the phrases so con- cise, that the speech must have compelled the most attentive listening for the hearer to be certain of its drift. Look, next, at the medium,—the allegory. Even when an allegory is explained, it needs to be repeated for its full significance to reach its hearers; but here there was not even an explanation. Did Mr. Kipling, then, assure himself that his meaning would not be mistaken P Probably not, for no speaker, however plain, can be confident that he will not be misinterpreted; but whether that be so or not, one thing is certain. Mr. Kipling could not speak baldly. He would feel unable to string together the commonplaces usual to such occasions; there would be none of the "joy of working" in planning a speech of platitudes. But even if the speech is in a sense "difficult," why, it may be asked, add to its difficulty by the allegory ? The answer to that is, we believe, simply this, that it is due to Mr. Kipling's exceptional use of the art of rejection. To make that suggestion clearer, look at the progress of his written work. He begins by telling plain tales. He is a wonderful story-teller, and his straightforward narrative of love and hate and work and fighting, lit with a sunlight new to Western eyes, went straight to the heart of "the tribe." But as he tells even the plainest of his stories, he is for ever selecting and rejecting right and wrong words and phrases, becoming, as he works on, less and less satisfied with the first phrase that jumps easily from the pen. The telling of the plain tale ceases to attract him; he finds that there is greater "joy in the working," a greater power of seeing and knowing, if he makes his men and women tell their own tales. You get, at that stage, the clear, brilliant depth of such stories as "The Man who would be King." At a later stage comes the rejection of the ready materials which any writer can use, and the consequent telling of tales like " .007 " or "The Bridge-builders," which involve the use of material that only a specialist could handle. Last, in the process of rejection of the obvious—or what seems obvious to the super-critic—comes the allegory, the meaning within meanings. The writer first looks at his characters through his own eyes; he is next attracted to lookino at them through their eyes; last, he comes to gazing at what another sees in what they say and do and are. It is in that search for the finer point of vision, in the subtle process of rejection of all but the most delicate material, that Mr. Kipling has become, to some of those who read his earlier work with easy enjoyment, a little too obscure for ready recognition. To others the gradual evolution of work in which the standard set becomes higher and higher is in itself a fascinating study. Will those who write and read fifty years hence think Mr. Kipling difficult ? Perhaps the aptest reflection, as to that, is that the charge of obscurity was, at first, frequently brought against Tennyson. It is only in the case of "true tales" that "the tribe" takes the trouble to insist on getting the true interpretation ; but it is interesting to remember that "the tribe" once found more than ordinary difficulty in under- standing "In Memoriam."
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