Kim and the Apolitical Man
BY CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS IHAVE recently been rereading Kim, and what a good story—or perhaps one should rather say, what a good panorama—it is. Its two faults are obvious enough, and one of them at any rate must have been obvious to Kipling and deliberately incurred. In the first place we today have had more experience of underground security organisations than Kipling, or anybody else then living, had had at the time of Kim. It is difficult for us to see 'the Game' as a purely romantic one or to believe that all who played it are bold, single-minded, humorous and chivalrous. We all of us know today from bitter experience how underground and security organisations have a habit of sometimes attracting to themselves the most appalling bores, what a large share of their mumbo-jumbo is purely bogus and what a part the cross and double-cross and petty jealousy inevitably play in their lives. All this, possibly, Kipling did not know at the time of the writing of Kim, for that was still the time of the Stevensonian image with its 'Are we never to shed blood again?' Kipling's taste for Masonry led him to exaggerate the virtues of a secret society, drawing its members to a higher purpose, from all classes, creeds and races, and to overlook its dangers.
Of the second fault Kipling must have been much better aware than we. Kim is a boy whose habits of life have been wholly formed by native influences. He is depicted to us as a wild boy, always getting into trouble but at the same time wholly likeable. His transgressions are such as never to make him unattractive. But Indian habits are notoriously such that Indian boys do in their teens a number of things which may weigh heavily or may weigh lightly against them at the Judgement Day, but which do not make them attractive in European eyes and which would be considered as serious blemishes on a European character. Kipling, who obviously knew this a thousand times better than any of the rest of us, lets drop a few passing sentences about the premature maturity of the Oriental. Mahbub Ali, the old grizzled horse- dealer, is allowed to grumble, in criticism of keeping Kim still under discipline at the age of sixteen, that at that age he himself had 'killed his man and begotten his man,' and it is not to be believed that, however heavily in general good may have outweighed evil in his character, a high-spirited anarchical youth like Kim would not have had some similar experiences among his early adventures. Kipling, writing for a western public. prefers to say nothing about them. The reason obviously is that, if he dwelt upon them, it would be impossible to make Kim seem attractive to the western reader. But in fact, no doubt, in the very different atmosphere of the East, boys who are still truly likeable may nevertheless have done things that appear horrible to western eyes.
Yet these are small points. What is the secret of the attraction of Kim? It is not in the story, which is after all fairly simple- minded and not very convincing, nor in the philosophy of the lama, which is not especially coherent. Kipling was a wonder- fully keen observer of the external world, but he had no great understanding of the life of contemplation. The attraction of Kim is in the extraordinarily vivid pictures of Indian scenes and Indian types. In the painting of such pictures Kipling was, as far as I can remember, not only champion but unique among all the writers of the British Raj. It is not that he did it better than others but that nobody else did it at all. His uniqueness is indeed a striking proof of the unbelievable philistinism of the British in India—of their quite extra- ordinary lack of interest in the life around them.
I can only think of one other English writer who has given a picture of Indian life in a novel that can lay any claim to greatness, and that is Mr. E. M. Forster in A Passage to India. But Mr. Forster's portraits of Indians, interesting as they are. are greatly inferior to Kipling's. Mr. Forster does not attempt to deny that it is with the Europeans and the problems of the Europeans that he is primarily concerned. How ought the Europeans to treat the Indians? Never for one second do we get the illusion, which Kipling alone can give us, that we are seeing the world through Asian eyes. But beyond that Mr. Forster is concerned throughout with a debate and a political problem. So—inevitably—have been all recent writers about India. Indeed, no one was to become more of a political writer, whether about India or about other subjects, than Kipling in his later years. But the whole attraction of Kim is that in it Kipling is able to write about India as if it were a stable society. He is able to take the arrangement of society for granted and to describe men as he saw them. Whether he was justified in doing so, whether the forces that were even then beginning to transform that society were stronger than he guessed, whether the society was already a society in tran- sition, is ,another question. I am concerned for the moment with a problem of literature and not of politics. That is how he saw it. The British Raj was established and taken for granted. Subversive movements and foreign intrigues on the frontier might be introduced in order to make the plot of a story more exciting. But there was no question of such move- ments succeeding or changing the nature of society.
Now it was in such societies that most of the world's great descriptive literature was produced. It was in such a society that Chaucer wrote and that Shakespeare wrote. Chaucer did not foresee the Reformation and Shakespeare did not fore- see the Civil War and the Commonwealth. They may be to blame as political thinkers for not doing so, but, if so, at any rate their lack of foresight was to their advantage as artists. Kipling, in Kim, was of the company of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The later Kipling—the Kipling who wrote
For all we have and are, For all our children's fate, Stand up and meet the war,
The Hun is at the gate, was of a different calibre. He is not to be blamed for writing differently in a different world. If the world had changed, how could he help but change too? But Kipling's literary career is a most important example a the immense impoverishment which our modern life has suffered through its utter domina- tion by politics. Just as in earlier centuries both art and life were impoverished by the utter domination of theological debate, so in our time art and life are impoverished by the predominance of political debate. In a healthy society politics have made their honourable role, but
The proper study of mankind is Man, and if the writer and the artist can never talk about man as they see him, but must be always talking about man as a problem, man as a voter, about the vote that man will give for the rearranging of society, art is killed. Art cannot flourish as a mere department of politics. In the end politics themselves perish from this mere surfeit of politics for, if Man is never allowed to stand still and to enjoy anything, a time soon comes when it is a matter of accidie and indifference, whether we have one political arrangement or another. The condition of all art and of all politics is that we should from time to time be able to say How good is Man's life—the mere living—
How fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses For ever in joy.
—even if it is not quite tree.
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