And clearly, for all its loud-mouthed, even knockabout qualities, the writing in Stalky & Co is on a very different level from that of other school stories (as it could hardly fail to be, coming from Kipling’s hand). Edmund Wilson called it ‘from the artistic point of view, certainly the worst of Kipling’s books: crude in writing, trashy in feeling, implausible in a series of contrivances that resemble moving-picture “gags” ’.11 But his dislike of it made Wilson blind to some of Kipling’s finest descriptions of natural scenery (the sea, above all) and a fluent, intensely observant style that is anything but crude in its use of detail and of certain aspects of boy behaviour, seen not exactly from boy-level but with a persuasive understanding of boy nature.
Of course Stalky & Co was selective, as public school itself was selective in taking boys out of their natural surroundings and subjecting them to one of the most artificial disciplines and rule-ridden systems ever devised as a training of the young. It took, as school took, only certain parts of a boy’s nature, spirit, and personality. The domestic, the familial, the feminine, the humdrum, everyday, uncompetitive aspects of his being were all discarded and life was lived in dramatic, highly charged, competitive circumstances where keeping one’s end up mattered supremely and the lonely, uncomfortable eminence, the responsbilities and urgencies and decisions that would be part of an administrative or military life in the empire (or indeed anywhere else in the world, away from home) were all foreshadowed. School was like that, in Kipling’s day, and Stalky & Co reflected the reality. Self-respect, a proud reserve, a decent degree of loyalty, keeping one’s mouth shut when necessary: these counted. ‘If’ put it all (and rather more, morally speaking) into phrases that have been hated (because seized upon by the wrong people) or loved (when they have no such barnacles of feeling attached to them). The selectiveness of Stalky & Co, like the moral selectiveness of ‘If’, was a direct result of the age—its taboos, its restrictions, even its schools—but because Kipling’s gifts always took him, sometimes despite himself, beyond these restrictions, his pin-hole view of the world from Stalky & Co opened out on to an immense panorama of life and experience beyond school: asking questions, giving answers. ‘ “Prove it,” said the Infant. And I have!’ These are the book’s last words, Kipling’s truculent, triumphant boast that he had made his point, that what he called rather oddly his ‘tracts’ and ‘parables’ (the words have religious overtones, of course) indeed proved all kinds of things about the nature of his society, even the future world as it was going to be.
* * * * *
Stalky himself is interesting as a period piece, though not attractive to modern readers; or rather, as heroic material, unacceptable today. It took an empire not just to contain him but to provide scope for his energy and qualities. When he first appeared, many people refused to accept the idea of such a man (for one has always to think of him as an adult, at least in importance and intention) being not merely useful but indispensible to the Empire. Hence some at least of the outcry. ‘The Stalky ethos was raw, practical, and unsentimental,’ Janet Adam Smith writes, ‘and it shocked a good many patriots and loyal Old Boys.’ Newbolt, she says, ‘celebrates the solitary hero, honourable and brave … Kipling celebrates the ingenious and crafty hero, working with others in a vividly realised situation—to do his job. Newbolt’s poetical heroes tend to die, nobly; Kipling’s prose ones to survive, craftily. Kipling’s were more use to the Empire.’12
Fictional or factual, Stalky also needed the imperial world to survive in, its ideas and attitudes to uphold his behaviour. The very adjective ‘imperial’ applies to him because to function at all such a man needs devoted followers, childlike admirers to whom he seems godlike, unquestionably right. At school, the study-sharers provide (as a rule, and on the whole) this ungrudging approval and obedience. Later, his Sikhs do the same: to them, he is ‘an invulnerable Guru’. Now a guru is oracular and mysterious, a numinous presence with almost miraculous powers; he is not a power-sharer, a consulter of others. In other words—though the words are too modern for the context—he is in no way a democrat. Devious, circuitous, cunning Stalky may be, but he never really gives way. Impossible to imagine him in committee, with give and take, discussion, bargaining. Disliking authority, he is a sharp adversary to those above him, as well as an autocrat, kindly but immoveable, to those below. His nature is suited to war, or the occupation of a hostile country, or guerilla tactics; not to everyday life, peace, domesticity, the prosy, law-abiding present.
Perhaps T. E. Lawrence was the last full-scale Stalky, and to him as to other Stalkies retirement from violent action and leadership proved a pathetic anti-climax. Others, more obscure, were thrown up by the Second World War, and peacetime cramped, even crippled their spirits after it. Today such men have no place, no devoted followers or blind admirers, certainly no simple Other Ranks to idolize them. Just as the schoolboy hero declined from the attractive, merry, unintellectual Tom Brown to the thick-headed louts of the later school stories, who actively hated intellectual pursuits and debagged the aesthete or the artist whenever they had a chance to; so the exuberant Stalky characters of fiction declined into the ugly right-wing toughs who were Sapper’s heroes, and in real life today’s Stalkies have dwindled into the pathetic mercenaries who turn to dubious causes for adventure and gain. The century which began with so dashing a future for them, so broad a world in which they could operate, has no place for them now.
With Stalky, M’Turk and the others, Kipling-Beetle was at school over a hundred years ago. Clearly one cannot apply today’s attitudes to ideas and behaviour of the eighteen-eighties, and because Stalky’s attitudes may seem to foreshadow those of today’s right, as those of his headmaster, Kipling’s beloved ‘Uncle Crom’, foreshadowed those of the left (this should not be forgotten), it does not mean that either can be judged by modern criteria. Kipling was conjuring a world where many of our ideas had little place, and the qualities that world nurtured may seem largely irrelevant to ours. Yet in his day they seemed self-evidently valuable and desirable, and he put them forward without self-consciousness in ‘If’. Light-heartedly though seriously, Stalky & Co put them forward as well, in a rather more indirect form, and festooned with a few others less admirable, more high-spirited (gloating, rough justice, and revenge). Steven Marcus has described well the modern reader’s dilemma when faced with such a world, and such apparently superseded qualities:
The point to be grasped [he writes] is that among and alongside all these bad attitudes which seem calculated to outrage the values that most educated people today affirm—values which can be roughly summed up in the term liberal democracy—there exist other attitudes and values whose absence from contemporary life we all feel and are probably the worse for. The values are described by obsolete words like honor, truthfulness, loyalty, manliness, pride, straightforwardness, courage, self-sacrifice, and heroism. That these virtues exist as active and credible possibilities in the world of Stalky & Co, and that they seem not to in ours—or, if they do, appear almost solely in corrupted forms—must give us pause. Such a fact may serve to remind us that the moral benefits, conveniences, and superiorities of modern domestic societies have not been acquired without cost. Part of this cost seems pretty clearly to have been paid by a diminution in the older masculine virtues … In the moral life of history there are apparently no gains without losses. Few books urge us to confront this contradiction more barely and boldly than Stalky & Co.13
1 Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1942), p. 959.
2 See Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London, 1971), pp. 306–7, 318; A Choice of Kipling’s Prose (London, 1952), p. vi.
3 See Kipling: The Critical Heritage, pp. 244–5.
4 See Kipling’s Mind and Art, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Edinburgh and London, 1964), p. 21 (from ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’ in The Wound and the Bow, 1941).
5 Schooldays with Kipling (London, 1936), p. 202.
6 Rober
t Buchanan. See Kipling: The Critical Heritage, p. 245.
7 Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, 3rd edn., 1978, p. 63.
8 Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, p. 74.
9 Kipling’s Mind and Art, p. 183.
10 Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow and The Fire (London, 1975), p. 310.
11 Kipling’s Mind and Art, p. 23.
12 See her essay ‘Boy of Letters’, Rudyard Kipling: the Man, his Work and his World, ed. John Gross (London, 1972), pp. 16–17.
13 Introduction to Stalky & Co (New York, 1962), reprinted in Kipling and the Critics, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert (New York, 1965), p. 152.
Note on the Text
Isabel Quigly
The original publication dates of the stories in this volume were as follows:
‘Slaves of the Lamp, Part I’ Cosmopolis April 1897
‘Slaves of the Lamp, Part II’ Cosmopolis May 1897
‘In Ambush’ McClure’s Magazine Aug. 1898
‘Stalky’ The Windsor Magazine and McClure’s Dec. 1898
‘An Unsavoury Interlude’ The Windsor Magazine and McClure’s Jan. 1899
‘The Impressionists’ The Windsor Magazine and McClure’s Feb. 1899
‘The Moral Reformers’ The Windsor Magazine and McClure’s March 1899
‘A Little Prep.’ The Windsor Magazine and McClure’s April 1899
‘The Flag of their Country’ McClure’s Magazine May 1899
‘The Last Term’ The Windsor Magazine May 1899
‘Regulus’ Nash’s Magazine, Pall Mall, and Metropolitan Magazine April 1917
‘The United Idolators’ Nash’s Magazine, MacLean’s Magazine and Hearst’s International June 1924
‘The Propagation of Knowledge’ The Strand and McCall’s Magazine Jan. 1926
‘The Satisfaction of a Gentleman’ The London Magazine and McCall’s Magazine Sept. 1929
Stalky & Co first appeared in book form in 1899, published by Macmillan in Great Britain, and by Doubleday and McClure in the USA. The following stories appeared in it:
‘In Ambush’
‘Slaves of the Lamp, Part I’
‘An Unsavoury Interlude’
‘The Impressionists’
‘The Moral Reformers’
‘A Little Prep.’
‘The Flag of their Country’
‘The Last Term’
‘Slaves of the Lamp, Part II’
‘Stalky’ was collected in Land and Sea Tales (1923); ‘Regulus’ in A Diversity of Creatures (1917); ‘The United Idolators’ and ‘The Propagation of Knowledge’ in Debits and Credits (1926).
The Complete Stalky & Co appeared in 1929, and included the five stories which did not figure in the original Stalky & Co. The present edition follows the text and the arrangement of the stories in this volume.
Select Bibliography
The standard bibliography is J. McG. Stewart’s Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical Catalogue, ed. A. W. Yeats (1959). Reference may also be made to two earlier works: Flora V. Livingston’s Bibliography of the Works of Rudyard Kipling (1927) with its Supplement (1938), and Lloyd H. Chandler’s Summary of the Work of Rudyard Kipling, Including Items ascribed to Him (1930). We still await a bibliography which will take account of the findings of modern scholarship over the last quarter-century.
The official biography, authorized by Kipling’s daughter Elsie, is Charles Carrington’s Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (1955; 3rd edn., revised, 1978). Other full-scale biographies are Lord Birkenhead’s Rudyard Kipling (1978) and Angus Wilson’s The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling (1977). Briefer, copiously illustrated surveys are provided by Martin Fido’s Rudyard Kipling (1974) and Kingsley Amis’s Rudyard Kipling and his World (1975), which combine biography and criticism, as do the contributions to Rudyard Kipling: the man, his work and his world (also illustrated), ed. John Gross (1972). Information on particular periods of his life is also to be found in such works as A. W. Baldwin, The Macdonald Sisters (1960); Alice Macdonald Fleming (née Kipling), ‘Some Childhood Memories of Rudyard Kipling’ and ‘More Childhood Memories of Rudyard Kipling’, Chambers Journal, 8th series, vol. 8 (1939); L. C. Dunsterville, Stalky’s Reminiscences (1928); G. C. Beresford, Schooldays with Kipling (1936); E. Kay Robinson, ‘Kipling in India’, McClure’s Magazine, vol. 7 (1896); Edmonia Hill, ‘The Young Kipling’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 157 (1936); Kipling’s Japan, ed. Hugh Cortazzi and George Webb (1988); H. C. Rice, Rudyard Kipling in New England (1936); Frederic Van de Water, Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud (1937); Julian Ralph, War’s Brighter Side (1901); Angela Thirkell, Three Houses (1931); Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, ed. Morton Cohen (1965); and ‘O Beloved Kids’: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert (1983). Useful background on the India he knew is provided by ‘Philip Woodruff’ (Philip Mason) in The Men Who Ruled India (1954), and by Pat Barr and Ray Desmond in their illustrated Simla: A HUI Station in British India (1978). Kipling’s own autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), is idiosyncratic but indispensable.
The early reception of Kipling’s work is usefully documented in Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (1971). Richard Le Gallienne’s Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism (1900), Cyril Falls’s Rudyard Kipling: A Critical Study (1915), André Chevrillon’s Three Studies in English Literature (1923) and Rudyard Kipling (1936), Edward Shanks’s Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Literature and Political Ideas (1940), and Hilton Brown’s Rudyard Kipling: A New Appreciation (1945) were all serious, attempts at reassessment; while Ann M. Weygandt’s study of Kipling’s Reading and Its Influence on His Poetry (1939), and (in more old-fashioned vein) Ralph Durand’s Handbook to the Poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1914) remain useful pieces of scholarship.
T. S. Eliot’s introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941; see On Poetry and Poets, 1957) began a period of more sophisticated reappraisal. There are influential essays by Edmund Wilson (1941; see The Wound and the Bow), George Orwell (1942; see his Critical Essays, 1946), Lionel Trifling (1943; see The Liberal Imagination, 1951), W. H. Auden (1943; see New Republic, vol. 109), and C. S. Lewis (1948; see They Asked for a Paper, 1962). These were followed by a series of important book-length studies which include J. M. S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (1959); C. A. Bodelsen, Aspects of Kipling’s Art (1964); Roger Lancelyn Green, Kipling and the Children (1965); Louis L. Cornell, Kipling in India (1966); and Bonamy Dobrée, Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist (1967), which follows on from his earlier studies in The Lamp and the Lute (1929) and Rudyard Kipling (1951). There were also two major collections of critical essays: Kipling’s Mind and Art, ed. Andrew Rutherford (1964), with essays by W. L. Renwick, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, Lionel Trifling, Noel Annan, George Shepperson, Alan Sandison, the editor himself, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, J. H. Fenwick, and W. W. Robson; and Kipling and the Critics, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert (1965), with essays, parodies, etc. by Andrew Lang, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Robert Buchanan, Max Beerbohm, Bonamy Dobrée, Boris Ford, George Orwell, Lionel Trifling, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, J. M. S. Tompkins, Randall Jarrell, Steven Marcus, and the editor himself. Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s essay on Kim as ‘The Finest Story about India—in English’ (1957) is reprinted in John Gross’s collection (see above); and Andrew Rutherford’s lecture ‘Some Aspects of Kipling’s Verse’ (1965) appears in the Proceedings of the British Academy for that year.
Other recent studies devoted in whole or in part to Kipling include Richard Faber, The Vision and the Need: Late Victorian Imperialist Aims (1966); T. R. Henn, Kipling (1967); Alan Sandison, The Wheel of Empire (1967); Herbert L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (1968); P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971); Elliot L. Gilbert, The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story (1972); Jeffrey Meyers, Fiction and the Colonial Experience (1972); Shamsul Islam, Kipling’s ‘Law’ (1975); J. S. Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (1975); Philip Mason, Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow and The F
ire (1975); John Bayley, The Uses of Division (1976); M. Van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 (1978); Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy (1979); Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1980); J. A. McClure, Kipling and Conrad (1981); R. F. Moss, Rudyard Kipling and the Fiction of Adolescence (1982); S. S. Azfar Husain, The Indianness of Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Stylistics (1983); Norman Page, A Kipling Companion (1984); B. J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ (1986); Sandra Kemp, Kipling’s Hidden Narratives (1988); Norah Crook, Kipling’s Myths of Love and Death (1989); and Ann Parry, The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1992); while further collections of essays include Rudyard Kipling, ed. Harold Bloom (1987); Kipling Considered, ed. Philip Mallett (1989); and Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling, ed. Harold Orel (1989). Among the most important recent studies are Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1991); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (1992); Zorah T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (1993); and Peter Keating, Kipling the Poet (1994).
The Complete Stalky & Co Page 3
