BOOKS.
STALKY AND CO.* Tins is in many ways one of the most striking and interest- ing books Mr. Kipling has yet written, though it will not, we expect, earn any very great popularity. The lazy and the impervious will say that they cannot understand it and that it bores them. The superfine will declare it to be coarse- fibred, harsh, and crude. The conventionally minded will condemn it as absurdly over-drawn and over-emphasised, while those who have what they call a high literary standard, and who think it their special duty to preserve the Queen's English from contamination, will pronounce the book an outrage on the decencies and civilities of the language. Lastly, those who believe that man is born a member of the Peace Society, and would remain in that blessed state if he were only allowed to do so, will denounce the work before us as likely to have a corrupting influence on schoolboys, and as calculated to turn them into brutal savages. But Mr. Kipling will have his reward in spite of the open dislike or hidden distrust of those whose hearts are naturally chill, or whose minds have been indurated by the dreary routine of business, or pleasure, or by that repetition of barren formulm which we are too apt to regard as culture and education. Whenever and wherever a true boy gets the book —under a gas-jet, by a study lamp, or by his bedroom candle, under the sunny side of a hedge, or on a rug by the side of the cricket field—Stalky and Co. will live, breathe, and
struggle. The story of how Rabbits-Eggs rocked the House Master and what were the other innumerable devilries of
Stalky, Beetle, and M`Tark will fire a hundred schoolboys, if not to imitation, at least to a kindly sympathy. But while the great triumvirate will call forth " the breathless rapture of a thousand hearts," those spirits will not be finely touched s' but to fine issues." There is nothing base or ignoble in Stalky and Co., nothing but what is honourable and of good report. They are not the ordinary type of boy, and they worry their masters and their schoolfellows with a hundred devilish tricks, but they do nothing mean or
cowardly, and they take their lickings like men. But though all boys will like Stalky and Co., it is by no means ex-
clusively a boy's book. Donne says somewhere : " All women shall adore us and some men." Stalky and his friends might declare as triumphantly, "All chaps shall adore us, and some paters." Men who have still something of the boy beating inside their waistcoats—and men who have not are worth very little, though they may be the majority—will turn with
pleasure to Stalky and Co.
We are not going to attempt to tell the story of the book before us. We should but spoil its good things in the process. There is, however, one episode in the book which lends itself to the art of the reviewer. It is the chapter called "The Flag of their Country." For sheer insight into the heart of the boy, for subtle psychological analysis, for conception and appreciation of a most delicate and difficult moral situation, we have seldom read anything approaching this fascinating study of the emotions of boyhood. Stalky and Co. are members of a school chiefly composed of eons of officers in the Army and Navy, and most of the boys are themselves destined for the Army. To the school comes a vulgar " M.P." who thinks love of his country is a thing to be " perorated " about, and gives the boys an address on patriotism of the most crude and coarse description, ending with the waving of a Union Jack. The effect wrought on the boys is such as might be produced on a body of wholesome, well-brought-up girls if a lecturer on "the duties and responsibilities of matrimony and maternity" were suddenly turned loose among them with a full-blooded torrent of Gampish rhetoric. But Mr. Kipling's own words describing the effect upon the boys produced by the patriot jabberer can alone do justice to the theme :—
"He plunged into his speech with a long-drawn, rasping ' Well, boys, that, though they were not conscious of it, set every young nerve ajar. He supposed they knew—hey ?—what he had come down for ? It was not often that he had an oppor- tunity to talk to boys. He supposed that boys were very much the same kind of persons—some people thought them rather funny persons—as they had been in his youth.= This man,' • Stalky and Co. By Rndyard Kipling. London : Macmillan and Co. [6s.]
said M'Turk, with conviction, 'is the Gadarene Swine—But they must remember that they would not always be boys. They
would grow up into men, because the boys of to-day Now thetthhee men of to-morrow, and upon the men of to-morrow the fair fame
of their glorious native land depended
reserve of a boy is tenfold deeper than the reserve of a maid, she being made for one end only by blind Nature, but man for several. With a large and healthy hand, he tore down these veils, and trampled them under the well-intentioned feet of eloquence. In a raucous voice he cried aloud little matters, like the hope of Honour and the dream of Glory, that boys dc not discuss even with their most intimate equals ; cheerfully assuming that, till he spoke, they had never considered these possibilities. He pointed them to shining goals, with fingers which smudged out all radiance on all horizons. He profaned the moat secret places of their souls with outcries and gesticula- tions. He bade them consider the deeds of their ancestors in such a fashion that they were flushed to their tingling ears. Some of them—the rending voice cut a frozen stillness—might have had relatives who perished in defence of their country. [They thought, not a few of them, of an old sword in a passage, or above a breakfast-room table, seen and fingered by stealth since they could walk.] He adjured them to emulate those illustrious examples ; and they looked all ways in their extreme discomfort. Their years forbade them even to shape their thoughts clearly to themselves. They felt savagely that they were being outraged by a fat man who considered marbles a game. And so he worked towards his peroration—which, by the way, he used later with overwhelming success at a meeting of electors—while they sat, flushed and uneasy, in sour disgust. After many many words, he reached for the cloth-wrapped stick and thrust one hand in his bosom. This—this was the concrete symbol of their land—worthy of all honour and reverence ! Let no boy look on this flag who did not purpose to worthily add tc. its imperishable lustre. Ho shook it before them—a large calico Union Jack, staring in all three colours, and waited for the thunder of applause that should crown his effort. They looked in silence. They had certainly seen the thing before— down at the coastguard station, or through a telescope, halt-mast high when a brig went ashore on Braunton sands ; above the roof of the Golf Club, and in Keyte's window, where a certain kind of striped sweetmeat bore it in paper on each box. But the College never displayed it ; it was no part of the scheme of their byes ; the Head had never alluded to it; their fathers had not declared it unto them. It was a matter shut up, sacred and apart. What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved that horror before their eyes ? Happy thought r Perhaps he was drunk. The Head saved the situation by rising swiftly to propose a vote of thanks, and at his first motion the school clapped furiously, from a sense of relief."
But wonderful as this is, even in quotation, it is still more wonderful in its context, for the climax is led up to with a skill and a certainty of touch that mark the incomparable artist that Mr. Kipling always shows himself when at his best. The story of the lecture is interwoven with that of the raising of the College Cadet Corps and with the simple., hearted inarticulate patriotism of the old soldier who keeps the boys' " tuck shop" and was at Sobraon. It is but a moment's touch that of the Troop Sergeant-Major and Sobraon, but Mr. Kipling realises well that substantives and verbs are in themselves centres of emotional force, and that it needs only a word, if it is the right word, to set the blood tingling in the cheek. By the time he has got us to the lecture his account of the boys at drill, of their childish recollections of barracks, and of the talk of the old veteran with the school drill-sergeant have exactly attuned us to feeling with the boys a kind of physical sickness at the rank patriotic conventionalities of the blatant " M.P." But we despair of giving our readers anything like a true conception of this wonderful study in patriotism. All we can do is to advise our readers to go to the book itself. "The Flag of their Country " cannot fail to move them, while in the rest of the book they will find abundant food for laughter. Of course, there are faults in the book—a certain metallic clash in the prose-rhythm is the chief—but take it as a whole, we deem it to be entirely worthy of Mr. Kipling's genius. We need not say more.
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