Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [156]
COMMENTARY
ANDREW LANG
At last there comes an Englishman with eyes, with a pen extraordinarily deft, an observation marvellously rapid and keen; and, by good luck, this Englishman has no official duties: he is neither a soldier, nor a judge; he is merely a man of letters. He has leisure to look around him, he has the power of making us see what he sees; and, when we have lost India, when some new power is ruling where we ruled, when our empire has followed that of the Moguls, future generations will learn from Mr. Kipling’s works what India was under English sway.
—from Essays in Little (1891)
HENRY JAMES
I cannot overlook the general, the importunate fact that, confidently as [Kipling] has caught the trick and habit of this sophisticated world, he has not been long of it. His extreme youth is indeed what I may call his window-bar-the support on which he somewhat rowdily leans while he looks down at the human scene with his pipe in his teeth; just as his other conditions (to mention only some of them), are his prodigious facility, which is only less remarkable than his stiff selection; his unabashed temperament, his flexible talent, his smoking-room manner, his familiar friendship with India—established so rapidly, and so completely under his control; his delight in battle, his “cheek” about women—and indeed about men and about everything; his determination not to be duped, his “imperial” fibre, his love of the inside view, the private soldier and the primitive man.
—from his introduction to Kipling’s
Mine Own People ( 1891 )
NEW YORK TIMES
According to Mr. Howells “Kim” should be strictly forbidden to the public libraries. It is a book to be owned, not borrowed, to “linger over and delay, to return to again and yet again,” for it is one of the few novels of these latter days that have enriched both literature and life.
—September 28, 1901
THE NATION
‘Kim’ is neither a novel nor a romance, but an imaginative tale of a kind long known and perpetually interesting. Its literary lineage has been clearly traced from the “boy and beggar” tales and plays of the fifteenth century, down through the Spanish picaresque (rogue) tales of the sixteenth, Le Sage’s ‘Gil Bias,‘ and a distinguished English ancestry, including the early Elizabethans, taking on a definite national expression in Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe.’ However widely these tales vary in scene, time, and treatment, they are essentially alike. They are tales of adventure on the high-road, the sea, at home, or in a foreign land, and the hero is a youthful vagabond, sometimes accompanied by an aged master or friend, and sometimes wandering alone in quest of fame, or fortune, always a vagrant born. It is to the vagrant instinct, never extinguished by civilization, that the tale of the rogue and the road for ever appeals, always recognized as old and always as good as new. All these tales, from the earliest to the latest, are realistic, for they rely on exact observation and report of actual events, and on literal description of the manners and appearance of the people encountered by the way; they avoid extravagance and exaggeration, and they closely reflect human nature—unfortunately its evil side more often than its good. Great frankness, even license, of speech is conspicuous in this vagabond literature.
‘Kim’ is a perfect example of vagabond literature, with the old tricks almost magically transformed by a master modern hand, with the old crude, hard, superficial views of humanity wonderfully softened and liberalized, yet never sentimentalized, and all performed with the subtlety and mysticism of the Orient.
—November 14, 1901