2 JUNE 1894, Page 11

31:R. RUDYARD KIPLING'S STUDIES OF ANIMAL LIFE.

MR. Rini-YARD KIPLING has, as every one knows, a singular genius for the delineation of human charac- ter. There we have at least some means of verifying what he tells us. We have all of us the germs, and some of us the fully developed germs, of the qualities and the passions

which he loves to paint,—the futile ambitions, the tenacious vanity, the inexhaustible remorse, the ill-regulated gnawing compassion, the cruel and vindictive selfishness, of which he gives us such vivid pictures. But we are not sure that his highly imaginative pictures of animal life are not even more remarkable, though there he is almost necessarily painting from imagination, or at least imagination stimulated only by the physical expression written on the external organisa- tion of animals, in the interpretation of which he has no clue at all to guide him except the clue afforded by his own active and audacious fancy. In his "Jungle Book," which Messrs. Macmillan have just published, he paints some most effective pictures of the characteristics that he chooses to impute to the various animals he has studied, which any writer since 2Esop has drawn, and we think we may safely say far bolder and stronger and more impressive pictures than those of 2Esop, because they follow the clue of superficial expression into far more elaborate detail. It is curious, too, to observe how Mr. Rudyard Kipling trans- forms the traditional characters of some of the inhabitants of the jungle. He is very fond of the wolves, in whose love for acting the foster-parent to human children he evidently be- lieves, and whom he idealises into the most loyal and devoted of friends and followers. He even reaches the full height of the sublime in his picture of the python, of whose chivalry and ghastly fascinations he draws one of the most splendid and lurid pictures which has ever been painted in English literature. Again, he is very hostile to the tiger, on whose meanness, greediness, and cowardice, he is much fonder of dilating, than on his strength and audacity. But the creature of which he is most fiercely contemptuous is the monkey :—

" 'Listen, man-cub,' said the Bear, and his voice rumbled like thunder on a hot night. I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle,—except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink ; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt ; we do not die where they die. Hart thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log till to-day?'—' No,' said Mowgli in a whisper, for the forest was very still now Baloo had finished.—' The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their mind. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle-People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads:—He had hardly spoken when a shower of nuts and twigs spattered down through the branches; and they could hear c,oughings and howlings and angry jumpings high up in the air among the thin branches.—' The Monkey-People are forbidden,' said Baloo, for- bidden to the Jungle-People. Remember.'—' Forbidden,' said Bagheera ; 'but I still think Baloo should have warned thee

against them.'—' ? How was I to guess he would play with such dirt. The Monkey-People ! Faugh !' "—(pp. 37-8.)

They are depicted as creatures remarkable for utter caprice ; they cannot remember their own purposes, but are diverted from them by the most trivial accidents. They are incapable of discipline, have no leaders and no capacity for either leading or being led. They are mere fantastic images of the foul and helpless dreams of the worst of men. Indeed, in his picture of the "Bandar-log," as Hindoos call the monkeys, Mr. Rudyard Kipling lavishes all his gift for the expression

of scorn, which is indeed a very remarkable gift. We suspect that he has indulged his disgust for certain tribes of monkeys without any wide experience of what other tribes of them are capable of, and has thereby misled his readers. But nothing is clearer than that both in his idealisations and in his depreciations of particular animals, Mr. Rudyard Kipling has interpreted them rather in the colours which his own vivid imagination has suggested to him, than in any strict keeping with wide and careful observation. Here, again, is an instantaneous photograph, as one may call it, of the timidity and depression of the musk-rat, from whom the rash and lively mongoose takes counsel before he attacks the formid able cobras of his master's bungalow :—

"In the dark he ran up against Chuchundra, the musk-rat, creeping round by the wall. Chuchundra is a broken-hearted little beast. He whimpers and cheeps all the night, trying to make up his mind to run into the middle of the room ; but he never gets there."

The mongoose gets impatient with such faint-heartedness, and threatens him with a bite unless he gives him all the information he can of the cobras' movements :—

"Chuchundra sat down and cried till the tears rolled off his whiskers. ` I am a very poor man,' he sobbed. I never had spirit enough to run out into the middle of the room. H'sh ! I mustn't tell you anything. Can't you hear, Itikki-tikki ' "

No picture could be more vivid. Esop never came near it. But it is obvious that Mr. Rudyard Kipling is one of the romantics, and not predominantly a naturalist. He dwells on the images which the different creatures have made upon him, and elaborates these impressions till they fill his canvas, instead of collecting all the experience he can before he forms an image in his own mind. His pictures of the elephant are almost all idealised, and his pictures of the tiger and snakes, except only the python (which evidently gave him full scope for a grand imaginative picture, and was on that ground reserved for respectful treatment), are too hostile.

Mr. Kipling is a sort of Rembrandt to the animal world, and when he finds a promising subject for either admiring or indignant portraiture, he deepens all the lines and brings out a most impressive portrait, not of the creature itself, but of that which the creature suggested most forcibly to his vivid

imagination. Mr. Kipling can never deny himself a striking imaginative touch. In the remarkable story in which he narrates the rendezvous of the elephants, tame as well as

wild, for what they call the elephant-dance, Mr. Kipling does not miss a touch that lends a certain mystery and grandeur to the scenes which he describes. When Kala Nag slips from his fastenings, he "rolled out of his pickets as slowly and silently as a cloud rolls out of the mouth of a valley." Ruskin himself could not have painted a night landscape more im- pressively than this :—

" Toomai leaned forward and looked, and he felt that the forest was awake below him—awake and alive and crowded. A big brown fruit-eating bat brushed past his ear; a porcupine's quills rattled in the thicket, and in the darkness between the tree-stems he heard a hog-bear digging hard in the moist warm earth, and snuffing as it digged. Then the branches closed over his head again, and Kola Nag began to go down into the valley—not quietly this time, but as a runaway gun goes down a steep bank —in one rush. The huge limbs moved as steadily as pistons, eight feet to each stride, and the wrinkled skin of the elbow- points rustled. The undergrowth on either side of him ripped with a noise like torn canvas, and the saplings that he heaved away right and left with his shoulders sprang back again, and banged him on the flank, and great trails of creepers, all matted together, hung from his tusks as he threw his head from side to side and ploughed out his pathway."

But the singular power of graphic description which Mr. Kipling shows diminishes instead of increasing our confi- dence in his animal portraits. It is obvious that he paints rather for an effect than for scientific accuracy. He wishes

to show you what he saw and felt rather than what was actually there. The " man-cub " who is suckled by a wolf, and made free of the jungle, is a fine imaginative conception, steadily carried out ; but it is evident that the picture is a very free one, founded on hints rather than on anything like experience. Indeed, the " man-cub " is almost more of an ideal man set down in the world of wild animals, than an ordinary child would be. And the other pictures of animal life are equally romantic. Take, for instance, this splendid and ghastly picture of the fascination exerted by the mighty python over the cowering hosts of monkeys :—

"The moon was sinking behind the hills and the lines of trembling monkeys huddled together on the walls and battle- ments looked like ragged shaky fringes of things. Baloo [the bear] went down to the tank for a drink and Bagheera [the panther] began to put his fur in order, as Kan [the python] glided out into the centre of the terrace and brought his jaws together with a ringing snap that drew all the monkeys' eyes upon him. The moon sets,' he said. Is there yet light enough to see ?' From the walls came a moan like the wind in the tree-tops = We see, 0 Kan.'—' Good. Begins now the dance—the Dance of the Hunger of Kaa. Sit still and watch.' He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, and soft oozy triangles that melted into squares and five-sided figures, and coiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stop- ping his low humming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last th 3 dragging, shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales. Baloo and Bagheera stood still as stone, growling in their throat3, their neck-hair bristling, and Mowgli [the boy brought up by the wolves] watched and wondered. Bandar-log,' said the voice of Kaa at last, can ye stir foot or hand without my order ? Speak !'—' Without thy order we cannot stir foot or hand, 0 Kaa!'—' Good ! Come all one pace nearer to me.'—The lines of the monkeys swayed forward helplessly. and Baloo and Bagheera took one stiff step forward with them. Nearer,' hissed Kaa, and they all moved again. Mowgli laid his hands on Baloo and Bagheera to get them away, and the two great beasts started as though they had been waked from a dream.

Keep thy hand on my shoulder,' Bagheera whispered. 'Keep it there, or I must go back—must go back to Kaa. Aah ! It is only old Rita making circles on the dust,' said Mowgli; 'let us go;' and the three slipped off through a gap in the walls to the jungle.—' Whoof ! ' said Baloo, when he stood under the still trees again. 'Never more will I make an ally of Kaa,' and he shook himself all over.—' He knows more than we,' said Bagheera, trembling. • In a little time, had I stayed, I should have walked down his throat."—' Many will walk by that road before the moon rises again,' said Baloo. He will have good hunting—after his own fashion.'—' But what was the meaning of it all ? ' said Mowgli, who did not know anything of a python's powers of fascination. I saw no more than a big snake making foolish circles till the dark came. And his nose was all sore. Ho! Ho!

(pp. 60 2.) That exhibits Mr. Kipling's curious power at its full strength, but it is the power of a visionary imagination, not of a naturalist's keen insight. Indeed, this fascinating little book on the life of the Jungle, seems written to show that the life of the animal world is the true field for allegory, rather than the lib of men. Whatever is true of our human world, it is certainly not true that man ever represents the embodiment of a single principle, of one single vice or one single virtue. Man is a complex creature, who is always and at every turn exhibiting the great complexity of the nature of which his actions and feelings are the utterance; but we do not know this of the animal world, and it is almost certain that

whether or not allegory be also inapplicable to that world, it is at least less inapplicable than it is to the human world above

it. Animals are at least of simpler organisation, and are more like the incarnations of single principles than any human being. Moreover, even where we are wrong in

attributing to them a false simplicity of nature, we are so ignorant of the real state of the case that we suffer none of that shock from our mistake which allegory, in its elaborate Spenserian forms, always inflicts upon us. The truth is that the inner world of consciousness which we attribute to the wilder animals, is so much of a terra incognita, of a world of mystery, that we may fairly deal with it in any fashion which a man of powerful imagination like Mr. Rudyard Kipling can manage to make impressive,—and we can answer for it that in this "Jungle Book" he does manage to make his semi-allegorical treatment of the wild- beasts' nature in the highest degree impressive, and not un- frequently even mystically impressive. Take even the least

interesting study in the book,—the imaginary conversation between the horse, the camel, the mule, the elephant, and the ox, after the panic in an Indian camp caused by a stampede of the camels, which closes the book. It would be difficult to over-praise the skill with which the horse's deep personal trust in his own rider and dislike to independent action, the mule's frigid vanity in his complete independence of any human guides, the camel's stupid dismay at unaccustomed alarms, the elephant's nervous dislike to anything like shells, and the ox's apathetic plodding indifference to any sort of danger, so long as he can get his full allowance of food, are drawn out by the author. There we have a very prosaic allegorical representation of loyalty, conceit in mechanical sureness of foot, indefatigable but stupid industry, highly charged nervous susceptibility, and the slow docility of an embodied appetite; but in the other stories we have we know not how much happy invention of the bear's imaginary love of teaching and discipline, the wolf's tenderness of maternal instinct, the mystic magnanimity of an elephant's fatherly strength, and the overpowering fascinations of a mighty serpent's spell. Certainly, Mr. Rudyard Kipling is a master in allegory of a much higher kind than any which .sop ever produced.