Kipling's Women
Kipling's Women. By. Lieut-General Sir George MacMunn,
K.C.S.I., D.S.O. (Sampson Low. 7s. 6d.) THIS is Sir George MacMunn's best book. He has an abundant subject-matter, which crowds out his faults of repetition and carelessness. He still has his "King Charles's Head "- several, in fact ; worries too much about " Clapham " and Clapham's alleged narrow-mindedness, and "the unco' guid." But he knows his Kipling through and through, and cherishes it with a reverence that has grown, not abated, since those "first green-paper story books had set us all a-marvelling. . . . Among my friends and comrades are the sort of people he has written about, and sometimes even the artist models themselves." To which statement I would make two caveats : first, some suspect that it has been a bit hard on Kipling that so many have popped up, claiming that they were the originals of this or that character, Wee
Willie Winkle, Stalky, MeTurk and so on. We do not isms, -what-Mr.-Kipling-thitiks of these-elaims ;- but -"Anglo-India; is overswift to see itself exactly mirrored in any fiction aid makes a stir. Secondly, there is a ease—which some day our thesis-writers .and social historians Will take up--for thinking that Mr. Kipling to a great ekient created, rather thar painted, his world. No writer of the last forty years has 35 influenced a large and very influential class (which as a sie has few authors but reads these diligently). Some of n, half think he invented "the Empire," as we remember it in the days when it went singing into the South Africa War (that was to be over so soon, by the pressure of forty thousand horse and foot "). It is absurd how many men and (still more) women have modelled themselves on the racy, not too scrupulous but very jolly, self-approving 14 his stories have set in Simla and other high places. He has more to answer for than anyone else of his generation, and when he appears before Rhadamanthus . . . So, perhaps, "the sort of people he has written about" may have been projecting into themselves what they have read. The can can (and constantly does) follow the horse.
Sir George has great gifts as a writer. He has a lifetink of memories that are full of the fire of activity even in the recollection. He has had an exceptionally varied experience. He has generous understanding of hard cases. No one has a deeper sympathy for the unfortunate Eurasian class, which we have treated with a snobbishness and cruelty shabby beyond words. He knows this ; knows, too, how this race has again and again risen to heights of courage and selfless service. He has unique knowledge of the widely varying women of India and Burma, and of their interaction with our own men. His book brings out Kipling's own know. ledge here, a deeper and fuller thing than that which has taken most attention, his glorification of feminine "Simla." Mr. Kipling is a great writer ; and greatest, not in those passages which have been responsible for so much caddishness in his countrymen's record since they "fell for them," but in stories of almost unbearable pathos about lives warped into disaster by flaws in the scheme of things. To me, at any rate, Di'monds and Pearls, Georgie Porgie, Lispeth of the Mission, are worth fifty Brushwood Boys and Educations oj Otis Yeere. And what women Kipling has I The Woman of Shamlegh ! Dinah Shadd !. A Madonna -a the Trenches! Sir George MacMunn's enthusiasm carries him through a job which in almost any other hands would have been done heavily. A whole lifetime of yarns gleaned by camp-fire and in mess seeps into his pages. EDWARD .THOMPSON.
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