BOOKS

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LETTERS OF TRAVEL.*

MR. KIPLING, when he is acting as special correspondent to the nation, to the Empire,-0r perhaps we should say to the English- speaking race, is always interesting and stimulating. An

increased significance is given to the present book from the fact that the first part, " From Tideway to Tideway," was written in 1892 ; the second, " Letters to the Family," in 1907 ; and the third, " Egypt of the Magicians," in 1913. Therefore we are not only able to compare the conditions prevailing in the various sections of the Empire touched on by the letters with the present time, but can also make an internal comparison.

As always in work of this kind by Mr. Kipling, what holds us most is his power of interpretation. He is essentially the man who makes us see things and understand things. Like John Bunyan, we are taken into the house of Mr. Interpreter and behold his heart-shaking parables not as in a cinema or a peepshow, but as in that spirit world where Plato must have envisaged the Den and, Er, the Pamphylian, saw with his natural eyes how

fared the Dead at the Brig of Doom. So long as Mr. Kipling has us in hand, we have expounded to us the heart of things. We see

the very pulse of the machine. We are bidden to know whence come the tears and laughter and the great impulses that stir men and women, and so this wild and tired world. Lastly, we are never allowed to forget that all things, even though they may seem material, have their mystic and their symbolic side, and mean far more than we see or can ever understand. Mr. Kipling, again, like Mr. Interpreter, is always a great deal more of a Platonist than an Aristotelian. He may seem to rejoice in the abrupt voice, the horny hand, the slap on the back, or even the blow between the eyes. Nevertheless, if the mystics and the materialists are at the Day of Judgment separated with a dividing spear, we may be quite sure than in the last five minutes Mr. Kipling will be seen leaping over the materialistic barrier and plunging into the mystic enclosure. No doubt as he vaults the rail be will observe that " he is not particularly partial to this crowd of blighters, but anyway, they are 17 per cent. better value than the raters in the Materialistic pen."

Though Letters of Travel is essentially a book to read rather than to read about, which means that the critic can be little better than a signpost, there are one or two incidental passages to which the special attention of our readers should be directed. The book, as a rule, is couched in a touch-and-go if not actually go-easy style, but every now and then the full Kipling tone comes out. Take for example the charming idealisation of Canada in the form of a Canadian woman :—

" Another man, to whom I did not talk, sticks in my memory. He had for years and years inspected trains at the head of a heavyish grade in the mountains, though not half so steep as the Hex (River Hex, South Africa), where all brakes are jammed home and the cars slither warily for ten miles. Tire-troubles there would be inconvenient, so he, as the best man, is given the heaviest job—monotony and responsibility combined. He did me the honour of wanting to speak to me, but first he inspected his train—on all fours with a hammer. By the time he was satisfied of the integrity of the underpinnings it was time for us to go, and all that I got was a friendly wave of the hand—a master craftsman's sign, you might call it. Canada seems full of this class of materialist. Which reminds me that the other day I saw the Lady herself in the shape of a tall woman of twenty-five or six, waiting for her tram on a street corner. She wore her almost flaxen-gold hair waved and parted low on the forehead, beneath a black astrachan toque, with a red enamel maple-leaf hatpin in one side of it. This was the one touch of colour except the flicker of a buckle on the shoe. The dark tailor-made dress had not trinkets or attachments, but fitted perfectly. She stood for perhaps a minute without any move- ment, both hands—right bare, left gloved—hanging naturally at her sides, the very fingers still, the weight of the superb body carried evenly on both feet, and the profile, which was that of Gudrun or Aslauga, thrown out against a dark stone column. What struck me most was her slow, unhurried breathing in the hurry about her. She was evidently a regular fare, for when her tram stopped she smiled at the lucky conductor ; and the last I saw of her was a flash of the sun on the red maple-leaf, the full face still lighted by that smile, and her hair very pale gold against the dead black fur. But the power of the mouth, the wisdom of the brow, the human comprehension of the eyes, and the outstriking vitality of the creature remained. That is how I would have my country drawn were I a Canadian, and hung in Ottawa Parliament House for the discouragement of the prevaricators."

Here is another picture suitable for a gallery of all the nations of the Empire which is well worth quoting. The picture this • Letters of Travel. By Rudyard Kipling. London : Macmillan. [ is. ad. net.]

time is of a young Englishman of the kind who have made, and who now administer, that most romantic of our recent acquisi- tions, the Sudan :—

" There was a man in our company, a young Englishman who had just been granted his heart's desire in the shape of some raw district south of everything southerly in the Sudan, where, on two-thirds of Parliament's wage, under conditions of life that would horrify a self-respecting operative, he will see perhaps some dozen white men in a year, and will certainly pick up two sorts of fever. He had been moved to work very hard for this billet by the representations of a friend in the same service, who said that it was a ' rather decent sort of service,' and he was all of a heat to reach Khartoum, report for duty, and fall to. If he is lucky, he may get a district where the people are so virtuous that they do not know how to wear any clothes at all, and so ignorant that they have never yet come across strong drink."

That is no fancy picture, but one almost commonplace in its realism. These were the men, generally young soldiers, in whom Lord Cromer delighted. He was wont to say of them that one of their great qualities—and remember, it was a quality in

which he himself excelled—was that they at once identified themselves with the interests of the people they governed, and would fight for them like a tigress for her cubs. The present writer remembers Lord Cromer's telling him of some lieutenant of about twenty-two who, after he had been only six months in his district, inhabited by a semi-naked tribe of savages in the furthest regions of Darfur, wrote to his supervising depart- ment in Khartoum or Cairo a letter conceived in a glow of indignation. From the glorious independence and isolation of the Far Sahara he declared that what the department proposed for his tribe with an unpronounceable name was a violation of

their most ancient rights, that they had never been accustomed to treatment of the kind proposed, that he could not and would not carry out such an act of oppression, and that he would protest till—etc., etc. In a word, " Only across my dead body," was the tone in which he insisted that it was his duty to protect " his tribe " at all costs from the shameful tyranny of an ignorant department. It is this spirit of imperial particularism

which has made us what we are, and the Empire what it is. Taken as a whole, the English administrator really does want to do the fair thing by the people whom he governs, and the people at the top, no matter what may be the theoretical faults of bureaucracy, are really proud of this spirit, and as a rule do not attempt to crush it. They may cuff his head, but they love the cub that growls over the bone they have given him. That is why frontier districts as a rule get better rule than the more settled and more highly administrated provinces at the centre.

The young gentleman from twenty to twenty-eight is a bit of a savage himself, or at any rate thoroughly appreciates the savage point of view. Though he has to put them in their places, he has a sneaking sympathy for the native's genuine love of a row and scrimmage for its own sake. Though he may have to be officially hard upon an errant sheik, the said hoary sinner somehow divines that the man who gives him an official " ragging " understands and sympathizes with his, the sheik's, inability

to resist the temptation to raid the cattle of a weak, cowardly, rich and thoroughly contemptible neighbour. Much the same sort of thing used to happen at school, and the head of

the district is too near school days to have forgotten the spirit. Again, the untamed savage feels much freer with a man who, while he is firm and authoritative, is also a bit disorderly and

happy-go-lucky in his ways. What so many natives cannot stand, what both frightens and repels them, is the perfectly cold, hard, inexorable decision which works like fate. The door which shuts with a spring and is never accidentally left ajar even for a single moment is a terror. The present writer, if he may be again reminiscent for a moment, recalls a talk on board a P. & 0.

with a young Englishman fresh from the Sudan coming home for a little leave owing to fever. The said young man described how he had got orders to produce a bridge across a creek on a par- ticular day, orders which the great man who gave them did not realize could not be carried out with the means at the disposal

of the subaltern in question. There was no material available out of which to make a bridge. To the question, " How did you manage to do it ? " (for the bridge was built) came the amazing

answer : " Oh, I gave old sheik , the old demon, a fiver.

It was the only one I had. He managed to get the timber somehow. I never asked him any questions, but of course he stole it. He was an old ruffian, but an awful good old chap all the same, and we always get on very well." That has always struck the present writer as a particularly delightful story. It shows how the human belief in the virtues of a fiver draws together the sheik and the subaltern, and prove the touch of nature that makes the whole Sahara kin. What is puzzling is how the sheik, who of course could speak no word of any known tongue, who had been a bloody-minded Dervish until a year or two before, and who generally was the kind of person depicted in the old maps as dancing with a huge spear in his hand on the edge of an impossible lake, came to understand the nature of a fiver ! However, the fact remains that he did. There is also the Moslem savage— Ut vidi ut perii—who, in spite of his being totally illiterate, will take on the more thoughtful type of Cambridge- bred subaltern at chess and beat him. Again, there is the sheik who will learn to play donkey polo, a sport which every- body, including the donkeys of the Sahara, used to be said to enjoy, and to which the only drawback was the length of the donkey's ears. " They are apt to get in the way of the sticks and even to obscure the sight of the ball," is said to have been part of an official report on the condition of a very, very distant district in the Sudan. With all these men—brown, black, moderately black, and very black—the subaltern gets on uncommonly well. Each thinks the other " slightly mad," but what does that matter when you are only a few hundred miles from the Equator ?