THE NOVEL OF THE WEEK.*
Mn. KIPLIKG'S recent books have been keenly canvassed, and widely divergent estimates have been formed of them by his avowed admirers. It is pleasant to think that there can
• Kim. By Budyard Kipling. London : Macmillan and Co. PIO
be little or no dispute as to the quality of the entertainment set before us in Kim. Critics who have declared that Mr. Kipling- was paying forfeit for his precocity, that he could not write a long story, that he was unable to recapture the freshness of his earlier point of view in regard to India, that he was monopolised by militant Imperialism, and so forth, are one and all answered and silenced by this new and wonderful panorama of the inner and underground life of our many- peopled Empire in the East. Kimball O'Hara, or Kim, is the orphan son of an Irish soldier and an English servant girl who died soon after the child's birth, and lives with natives till he is thirteen or so. Inheriting from his father a genius for blague and an unconquerable love of " divarsion," he owes even more of his mental equipment to his Oriental environment and upbringing. A gamin of genius, steeped to the lips in the lore of the bazaar, intrepid yet accommodating, impudent yet grateful, forgetting nothing and observing everything, always more bent on the game than the stakes, Kim, "the friend of all the world," is as fascinating a type of de-Anglicised Englishman as it is possible to conceive. Given such a figure, it is easy to speculate how his fortunes might have been worked out by the commonplace or the exotic writer. To the former the grand climax of the narrative would, of course, have been the accidental encounter with . his father's old regiment, leading to his enlistment and _a V.C. The denationalised sentimentalist would have gone to the opposite extreme. But Mr. Kipling, taking a saner view of the conflict between heredity and environment presented by the case of Kim, has, with excellent judgment, chosen for his hero the career of an agent in the Secret Service of the British Government. Kim at the opening of the story has decided—merely out of the love of adventure and the open road—to accompany an old Lama from Tibet in the character of his disciple at the crucial moment when his friend Mahbub Ali, the Pathan horse-coper and Secret Service agent, is in need of a trusted messenger to convey a compromising document to Umballa. The old mystic, a pathetic and saintly figure, who is wandering on foot through India in search of a mysterious river of healing, readily adapts his route to suit the will of his new chela, and the pilgrimage of this strangely assorted pair is a fresh and important phase in Kim's long education in the art of playing the "Great Game " of the Secret Service. Later on, as the result of his identification by his father's comrades, he is sent for a while to the Roman Catholic College at Lucknow to learn mathematics and surveying. His holidays are spent in wild but instructive escapades on his own account, or in company with the horse-coping Pathan, but he never misses an opportunity to rejoin the old Lama, whose devotion has taken the practical form of paying for his education at Lucknow. Later on again he is sent to Simla, apprenticed to the mysterious Lurgan Sahib, curio collector, pearl doctor, and hypnotist, and schooled in the discipline of visual memory—a la Robert Houdin—in the art of disguises, in the lore of necromancy, incantations, and curses, until at last, after a final and rather gruesome initiation in certain rites designed to protect him against the powers of darkness, Kim, having successfully graduated in every branch of the cur- riculum, is formally enrolled in the Secret Service. Rich though the narrative is in incident and sensation, the romance of the Secret Service of India, which furnishes Mr. Kipling with the main outlines of his plot, is by no means the chief attraction of this wonderful book. That resides rather in the author's inti- mate appreciation of the magic and mystery of the Orient; and in his masterly characterisation of the various types that throng his vivid pages,—warriors and mystics, fakirs and cultivators, Babus, Afghans, and Eurasians. Mrs. Steel has never given us anything better than the portraits of the sharp-tongued, worldly, but kind-hearted old widow of the small hill Rajah, of the Amazonian woman of Shamleh, and of the terrible blind bazaar witch Huneefa. The charge, brought on insuf- ficient knowledge of Mr. Kipling's works, that his Anglo- Indians are only of the self-indulgent Simla type gains no support from these pages. Penetrated as the book is with a large and tolerant sympathy with the native, it renders full Justice to the intelligence, the alertness, and the patriotism of our civil and military administrators. To turn from the matter to the manner, if we except a rare but unnecessary inversion, and an occasional obscurity of phrase — obscure only to the home-keeping reader unfamiliar with the work-
ings of the Eastern mind—Mr. Kipling's style is admirable in its strength and picturesqueness. Here, to take a passage illustrative of his descriptive method, is a night scene on the Grand Trunk Road :—
"By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango trees ; the parakeets and doves were coming home in their hundreds ; the chattering, gray- backed Seven Sisters, talking over the day's adventures, walked back and forth in twos and threes almost under the feet of the travellers ; and shut:flings and scut:flings in the branches showed that the bats were ready to go out on the night-picket. Swiftly the light gathered itself together, painted for an instant the faces and the cart-wheels and the bullocks' horns as red as blood. Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood- smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes. The evening patrol hurried out of the police. station with important coughings and reiterated orders ; and a live charcoal hall in the cup of a wayside carter's hookah glowed red while Kim's eye mechanically watched the last flicker of the sun on the brass tweezers."
All novels are in part autobiographical, and Kim is prob-
ably no exception to the rule. Anyhow, we cannot help regarding Mr. Kipling's hero as a younger literary reincar- nation of himself in the early days of his Indian life. 'or Kim's methods, his unerring memory, his strange insight, and his devouring interest in every phase of native life, seem to afford a clue to the extraordinarily minute and illuminating knowledge which renders Mr. Kipling so unrivalled an inter- preter of the Indian standpoint.
It is not the first time that Mr. J. Lockwood Kipling has illustrated the work of his son,—a form of collaboration for which it would be difficult to find a paralleL But the designs which he has contributed to Kim are so original in conception and masterly in execution as to deserve a special word of praise. They are, we presume, photogravure reproductions of bas-reliefs in clay or gesso, and are remarkable for their spirit and truthfulness to the authentic type,—those of the ressaldar, the Jat with his sick child, and the woman of Shamleh being especially striking.
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