No one would envy Daniel Karlin, the editor of the new Oxford World’s Classics selection of Rudyard Kipling’s prose and verse. The glorious old Doubleday edition of the Works, in beautiful maroon cloth—the frontal design featuring the god Ganesha with a lotus flower in his trunk and a left-facing swastika was removed from later printings at the author’s insistence—runs to some 27 volumes. Kipling wrote too much and too well for any reasonably sized book to do anything like justice to the depth and breadth of his achievement. However judicious their efforts, all editors of Kipling anthologies attract faultfinding bores the way elephants attract flies.
I am afraid that I must be counted among the latter. For me the side of Kipling that is most interesting is not the brilliant chronicler of army life or the comic genius of "My Sunday at Home," but the religious pluralist with queerly ambivalent feelings about the occult, a figure who emerges from these pages somewhat obscured. This Kipling deserves a great deal of credit for introducing a metaphysical dimension to English fiction at a time when it was largely restricted to the four Ms—morals, manners, marriage, and money—that had been the stock and trade of scribblers in our language since Defoe. Kim, for instance, is the finest novel about espionage ever written, but it is also a brilliant exposition of the conflict outlined in Matthew’s Gospel between the Spirit and the kingdoms of this world, something that is all the more remarkable because the saintly figure at the book’s center is not a priest nor even a Christian but a royal Tibetan lama.
Kipling’s own faith—a hodgepodge of latitudinarian Anglicanism and Masonic mumbo-jumbo—is hard to pin down. One occasionally gets the sense that he is a deist who does not accept the Resurrection and the other Christian miracles, yet it is clear that he believed very firmly in ghosts and so presumably in life after death. Perhaps it is this nebulous quality that accounts for the remarkable facility with which he was able to write as if the claims of other religions were true. One of the best examples of his gift is "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," the most unfortunate of Karlin’s omissions here and for my money one of the 10 or so finest short stories in our language. Here a brilliant English-educated Brahmin abandons the kingdom of which he is prime minister in order to become an ascetic. He finds himself on a mountain pass "crowned with dense, dark forest—deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear" beside a statue of Kali where he lives among the monkeys and red deer. The inhabitants of the village below regard him with awe as a bhagat or holy man. After many years he dies one evening, having warned the villagers of a landslide. A temple is built on the site of his old hut:
They built the temple before a year was ended—a little stone-and-earth shrine— and they called the hill the Bhagat’s hill, and they worship there with lights and flowers and offerings to this day. But they do not know that the saint of their worship is the late Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once Prime Minister of the progressive and enlightened State of Mohiniwala, and honorary or corresponding member of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do any good in this world or the next.
When it comes to Kipling’s verse, my views are more in line with conventional wisdom, which is a polite way of saying that I find much of it excruciating. This is true not only because it is tawdry in sentiment but also because it is so often technically slapdash. I defy anyone to read aloud this stanza from "The Children" without stumbling:
At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,
And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts that they bared for us,
The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time prepared for us—
Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.
There are exceptions. One remarkable poem that does not appear in this collection is "En-Dor," which I can never read without shivering. For these cautionary verses about spiritualism—written after the loss of his son John at the Battle of Loos— Kipling takes as his starting point one of the few genuinely hair-raising passages in Holy Scripture, Saul’s visit to the titular witch, who sees "gods ascending out of the earth," in the First Book of Samuel:
Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark—
Hands—ah God!—that we knew!
Visions and voices—look and hark!—
Shall prove that the tale is true,
And that those who have passed to the further shore
May be hailed—at a price—on the road to En-dor.
I don’t want to be accused of protesting too much. No book that contains "The Man Who Would Be King," "Baa Baa, Black Sheep," and "They" can be casually tossed aside. Karlin’s notes and appendices, which together run to some 250 pages, are exhaustive and useful: the diagrams illustrating the engine of the Halitosis have added an entirely new dimension to my reading of "The Devil and the Deep Sea." The old Stories and Poems edited by C.S. Lewis’s eccentric friend Roger Lancelyn Green for the Everyman’s Library in 1970 may remain the best single-volume introduction to Kipling, but only a scold would suggest that the present collection is less than delightful.