MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S TRAVEL SKETCHES.*

IN the two volumes before us Mr. Kipling has collected the bulk of the special correspondence and occasional articles written by him for the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer between 1887-89. The date of these letters is worthy of note. The year 1887 was that in which the Plain Tales from the Hills was published, while by 1889 Soldiers Three, Under the Deodars, In Black and White, and other sketches had seen the light. They are, therefore, earlier than the Barrack Room Ballads and the Jungle Books, and were all written before Mr. Kipling was five-and-twenty. As regards the circumstances of their republication, Mr. Kipling explains that it was forced on him by the action of various publishers who were "not only content with disinterring old newspaper

From Sea to Sea, and other Sketches : Letters of Travel. Bs Rudyard Kipling. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. 112a.]

work from the decent seclusion of the office files," but in several instances saw fit "to embellish it with additions and interpolations." As the victim of such piratical enterprise Mr. Kipling is entitled t3 all sympathy, but that sympathy is tempered in the present instance with the satisfaction that springs from the gift of an authentic collection of papers of far more than ephemeral interest.

The "Letters of Marque," which occupy nearly half of the first volume, were the outcome of a holiday trip in Rajputana, and like the series of papers entitled "From Sea to Sea," are differentiated from ordinary hack journal- ism, not merely by the peculiar insight which marks all Mr. Kipling's work, but also by the fact that they are essentially holiday work, written on the move, without any conscious intent to instruct or edify,—in a word, emanci- pated from the routine of office traditions and convention- alities. This note of irresponsibility is struck at once in the picture of the Taj which Mr. Kipling saw from the train at dawn on a November morning, and found that distance lent such enchantment to the view that he vowed never to go nearer the spot for fear of breaking the charm of the "un- earthly pavilions " which seemed " the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy, and all things unhappy." His first objective was Jeypore, where he pays fitting homage to the memory of the famous astronomer-Prince, and eulogises the splendid services of Colonel Jacob and other working Englishmen in the native States, engineers, doctors, and missionaries,—all alike in their disinclination to advertise their achievements. At 17daipur there is a vivid picture of the sincere enthusiasm of the arm-vendors, and the startling simplicity of the present Maharaja's life. The great problem of Rajputana, however, the ancient "cockpit of India," is summed up in one of those acute observations which redeem these chapters from the superficiality attaching to most impressions de voyage

- "For how long can the vitality of a people whose life was arms be suspended? Men in the North say that, by the favour of the Government which buys peace, the Sikh Sirdars are rotting on their lands ; and the Rajput Thakurs say of themselves that they are growing rusty. The old, old problem forces itself on the most unreflective mind at every turn in the gay streets of trdaipur. A Frenchman might write : Behold there the horse of the Rajput—foaming, panting, caracoling, but always fettered, with his head so majestic, upon his bosom so amply tilled with a generous heart. He rages but he does not advance. See there the destiny of the Rajput who bestrides him, and upon whose left flank bounds the sabre useless—the haberdashery of the iron- monger only ! Pity the horse in reason, for that life there is his raison d'être. Pity ten thousand times more the Raj put, for he has no raison d'être. He is an anachronism in a blue turban.' The Gaul might be wrong, but Tod wrote things which seem to support this view, in the days when he wished to make `buffer- States' of tfae land he loved so well."

The mention of Tod reminds us that Mr. Kipling, great word-painter and narrator though he is, always recognises when some one else has said the last or the sovereign word before him. Thus in his fine and suggestive pages on the "monstrous gloom" of the rock fortress of Chitor, he quotes as "the best that was to be said" the words of the chaplain of the English Mission to Jehangir written three hundred years ago :—" Chitor an ancient great kingdom, the chief city so called which standeth on a mighty high hill, flat on the top, walled about at the least ten English miles. There appear to this day above a hundred churches ruined and divers fair palaces which are lodged in like manner among their ruins, as many Englishmen by the observation have guessed. Its chief inhabitants to-day are Znm and Ohim, birds and wild beasts, but the stately ruins thereof give a shadow of its beauty while it flourished in its pfide." As for Tod, Mr. Kipling's advice is—" Read Tod, who is far too good to be chipped or sampled," a remark which applies to the account of the writer's visit to the Tower of Victory and the Gau-Alukh at Chitor, places of " years and blood " so laden with moral etok -damp as to make a man frightened of the dark in broad daylight. Mr. Kipling followed up his noontide visit to Chitor by another in the moonlight, and by way of emphasising his good fortune and propitiating Nemesis declared that he " will never try to describe what he has seen, but will keep it as a love-letter, a thing for one pair of eyes only." Very delightful reading is furnished by the paper on Jodhpur, the "city of Honyhnhnms," where the cult of horseflesh reigns supreme as the cult of arms reigns in Udaipur. "No horses," he tells us, "are shot in the

Jodhpur stables [which then contained four hundred or more animals1, and when one dies—tbey have not lost more than 25 in six years—his funeral is an event. He is wrapped in a white sheet which is strewn with flowers, and, amid the weep- ing of the saises, is borne away to the burial ground." From the chapter on Boondi we cannot resist "chipping" a frag-

ment. Mr. Kipling had been shown over part of the wonderful palace and the aerial garden, or Rang Bilas :—

" The warden gathered up his keys, and, locking each door behind him as he passed, led the way down to earth. But before he had crossed the garden the Englishman heard, deep down in the bowels of the Palace, a woman's voice singing, and the voice rang as do voices in caves. All Palaces in India excepting dead ones, such as that of Amber, are full of eyes. In some, as has been said, the idea of being watched is stronger than in others. In Boondi Palace it was overpowering, —being far worse than in the green shuttered corridors of Jodhpur. There were trap-doors on the tops of terraces, and windows veiled in foliage, and bulls' eyes set low in unexpected walls, and many other peep holes and places of vantage. In the end, the Englishman looked devoutly at the floor, but when the voice of the woman came up from under his feet, he felt that there was nothing left for him but to go. Yet excepting only this voice, there was deep silence everywhere, and nothing could be seen."

For the glamour, the magic, the Orientalism of Rajputana Mr. Kipling has the keenest and most enthusiastic apprecia- tion; as regards the Native States' administration he writes : —"A year spent among Native States ought to send a man back to the Decencies and the Law Courts and the Rights of the Subject with a supreme contempt for those who rave about the oppressions of our brutal bureaucracy."

The letters "from sea to sea" were the outcome of a year's holi- day trip after seven years' assiduous quill-driving. Enamoured of idleness, Mr. Kipling fell in love with Burnish, " with the blind favouritism born of first impression," and inter alia made the discovery that the shape of the pagoda came originally from a bulging toddy-palm trunk. At Penang the inhuman, inscrutable faces of the Chinese frightened him, and by tilt time he had left the Straits Settlements for Hong-kong he was already smitten with home-sickness for India, born of contact with Chicago Jews and the American boy. Arrived in Hong-kong, Mr. Kipling soon came to the conclusion that " if we had control over as many Chinamen as we have natives of India, and had given them one tithe of the cosseting, the painful pushing forward, and studious, even nervous, regard for their interests and aspirations, that we have given to India, we should long ago have been expelled from, or have reaped the reward of, the richest land on the face of the earth." In Hong-kong Mr. Kipling had a glimpse of Inferno at close quarters, and realised how the Chinaman could work; Canton with its seething myriads explained why he set no value on life. Japan captivated him with its cleanliness, its children, and its cookery. Also he found it a soothing place for a small man,—even though his name was transmogrified into "Radjerd Kyshrig." But even the Japanese cannot make their railway stations lovely, though they do their beet. With his advent on American soil the charm of these letters materially diminishes. Prom the very first, Mr. Kipling confessed the invincible attraction of the American girl, but for the rest, his attitude ten years ago towards America and the Americans was hardly more sympathetic than that of Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. The American tripper inspired him with horror, Chicago repelled him, Salt Lake disgusted him, and the terrifying versatility of the American excited in him bewilderment rather than admiration. Still,

he enjoyed the exhilarating recklessness of San Francisco; he rejoiced to see Bret Harte's own country ; and, above all, he revelled in the priceless felicity of a two honors' talk with

Mark Twain. "Blessed is the man," writes Mr. Kipling, "who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with a revered writer. That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a twelve-pound salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal."

The miscellaneous papers which complete the second volume are of lesser significance, though the chapters "Among the Railway Folk" at Jamalpnr, the Crewe of

India, are interesting from the curious evidence which they afford of Mr. Kipling's personal interest in machinery. "Engines," he remarks on p. 286, "are the livest ' things made. They glare through their spectacle-plates, they tilt their noses contemptuously, and when their insides are gone

they adorn themselves with red lead, and leer like decayed beauties." When a new edition is called for, as it will certainly be, such misspellings as " Tarescon" should be corrected, and the quotation from Hamlet in Vol. L, p. 186, reduced to accordance with the accepted reading.