The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

FRANK [After a pause of stupefaction, raising the rifle.] Youll testify before the coroner that it's an accident, Viv. [He takes aim at the retreating figure of CROFTS. vrviE seizes the muzzle and pidls it round against her breast.]

VIVIE Fire now. You may.

FRANK [Dropping his end of the rifle hastily.] Stop! take care. [She lets go. It falls on the turf.] Oh, youve given your little boy such a turn. Suppose it had gone off! ugh! [He sinks on the garden seat, overcome.]

VTVIE Suppose it had: do you think it would not have been a relief to have some sharp physical pain tearing through me?

FRANK [Coaxingly.] Take it ever so easy, dear Viv. Remember; even if the rifle scared that fellow into telling the truth for the first time in his life, that only makes us the babes in the wood in earnest. [He holds out his arms to her.] Come and be covered up with leaves again.

VTVIE [With a cry of disgust. ] Ah, not that, not that. You make all my flesh

creep. FRANK Why, whats the matter? VIVIE Goodbye. [She makes for the gate.] FRANK [Jumping up.] Hallo! Stop! Viv! Viv! [She turns in the gateway.] Where

are you going to? Where shall we find you? VTVIE At Honoria Fraser's chambers, 67 Chancery Lane, for the rest of my life. [She goes off quickly in the opposite direction to that taken b)' CROFTS.] FRANK But I say�wait�dash it! [He runs after her. ]

Act 4

HONORIA FRASER'S chambers in Chancery Lane. An office at the top of New Stone Buildings, with a plate-glass window, distempered walls, electric light, and a patent stove. Saturday afternoon. The chimneys of Lincoln's Inn3 and the western sky be)'ond are seen through the window. There is a double writing table in the middle of the room, with a cigar box, ash pans, and a portable electric reading lamp almost snowed up in heaps of papers and books. This table has knee holes and chairs right and left and is very untidy. The clerk's desk, closed and tidy, with its high stool, is against the wall, near a door communicating with the inner rooms. In the opposite wall is the door leading to the public corridor. Its upper panel is of opaque glass, lettered in black on the outside, FRASER AND WARREN. A baize screen hides the corner between this door and the window.

FRANK, in a fashionable light-colored coaching suit, with his stick, gloves, and white hat in his hands, is pacing up and down the office. Somebody tries the door with a key.

FRANK [Calling.] Come in. It's not locked.

[VTVIE comes in, in her hat and jacket. She stops and stares at him.] VTVTE [Sternly.] What are you doing here? FRANK Waiting to see you. Ive been here for hours. Is this the way you attend

3. One of the four legal societies in London collectively known as the Inns of Court, which alone have the right to admit candidates to the English bar, thereby allowing them to practice law.

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1 178 0 / BERNARD SHAW

to your business? [He puts his hat and stick on the table, and perches himself with a vault on the clerk's stool, looking at her with every appearance of being in a specially restless, teasing flippant mood. ]

VTVIE Ive been away exactly twenty minutes for a cup of tea. [She takes off her hat and jacket and hangs them up behind the screen.] How did you get in?

FRANK The staff had not left when I arrived. He's gone to play cricket on

Primrose Hill.4 Why dont you employ a woman, and give your sex a chance? vrviE What have you come for? FRANK [Springing of f the stool and coming close to her.] Viv: lets go and enjoy

the Saturday half-holiday somewhere, like the staff. What do you say to

Richmond,5 and then a music hall, and a jolly supper? VIVIE Cant afford it. I shall put in another six hours work before I go to bed. FRANK Cant afford it, cant we? Aha! Look here. [He takes out a handful of

sovereigns and makes them chink.] Gold, Viv: gold! VTVIE Where did you get it? FRANK Gambling, Viv: gambling. Poker. VIVIE Pah! It's meaner6 than stealing it. No: I'm not coming. [She sits down

to work at the table, with her back to the glass door, and begins turning over the papers.] FRANK [Remonstrating piteously. ] But, my dear Viv, I want to talk to you ever so seriously.

VIVIE Very well: sit down in Honoria's chair and talk here. 1 like ten minutes chat after tea. [He murmurs.] No use groaning: I'm inexorable. [He takes the opposite seat disconsolately.] Pass that cigar box, will you?

FRANK [Pushing the cigar box across.] Nasty womanly habit. Nice men dont do it any longer.

VIVIE Yes: they object to the smell in the office; and weve had to take to cigarets. See! [She opens the box and takes out a cigaret, which she lights. She offers him one; but he shakes his head with a wry face. She settles herself comfortably in her chair, smoking.] Go ahead.

FRANK Well, I want to know what youve done�what arrangements youve made.

VTVIE Everything was settled twenty minutes after I arrived here. Honoria has found the business too much for her this year; and she was on the point of sending for me and proposing a partnership when I walked in and told her I hadnt a farthing7 in the world. So I installed myself and packcd her off for a fortnight's holiday. What happened at Haslemere when I left?

FRANK Nothing at all. I said youd gone to town on particular business. VTVIE Well? FRANK Well, either they were too flabbergasted to say anything, or else Crofts

had prepared your mother. Anyhow, she didnt say anything; and Crofts didnt say anything; and Praddy only stared. After tea they got up and went; and Ive not seen them since.

VIVIE [Nodding placidly with one eye on a wreath of smoke.] Thats all right. FRANK [Looking round disparagingly.] Do you intend to stick in this confounded place? VIVIE [Blowing the wreath decisively away, and sitting straight up. ] Yes. These

4. A park in northwest London. but Frank might be proposing a riverside walk. 5. A residential suburb in southwest London; 6. Lower, more degenerate. there were beautiful views from Richmond Hill, 7. A quarter of a penny.

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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION, ACT 1 / 1781

two days have given me back all my strength and self-possession. I will never take a holiday again as long as I live. FRANK [With a very wry face.] Mps! You look quite happy. And as hard as

nails. VIVIE [Grimly.] Well for me that I am! FRANK [Rising.] Look here, Viv: we must have an explanation. We parted the

other day under a complete misunderstanding. [He sits on the table, close to

her.] VIVIE [Putting away the cigaret.] Well: clear it up. FRANK YOU remember what Crofts said? VIVIE Yes. FRANK That revelation was supposed to bring about a complete change in

the nature of our feeling for one another. It placed us on the footing of

brother and sister. VIVIE Yes. FRANK Have you ever had a brother? VIVIE NO. FRANK Then you dont know what being brother and sister feels like? Now I

have lots of sisters; and the fraternal feeling is quite familiar to me. I assure you my feeling for you is not the least in the world like it. The girls will go their way; I will go mine; and we shant care if we never see one another again. Thats brother and sister. But as to you, I cant be easy if I have to pass a week without seeing you. Thats not brother and sister. It's exactly what I felt an hour before Crofts made his revelation. In short, dear Viv, it's love's young dream.

VIVIE [Bitingly.] The same feeling, Frank, that brought your father to my mother's feet. Is that it?

FRANK [SO revolted that he slips off the table for a moment.] I very strongly object, Viv, to have my feelings compared to any which the Reverend Samuel is capable of harboring; and I object still more to a comparison of you to your mother. [Resuming his perch.] Resides, I dont believe the story. I have taxed my father with it, and obtained from him what I consider tantamount to a denial.

VTVIE What did he say? FRANK He said he was sure there must be some mistake. VIVIE DO you believe him? FRANK I am prepared to take his word as against Crofts'. VIVIE Does it make any difference? I mean in your imagination or conscience;

for of course it makes no real difference. FRANK [Shaking his head.] None whatever to me. VTVIE Nor to me. FRANK [Staring.] But this is ever so surprising! [He goes back to his chair.] I

thought our whole relations were altered in your imagination and conscience, as you put it, the moment those words were out of the brute's muzzle.

VIVIE No: it was not that. I didnt believe him. I only wish I could. FRANK Eh? VIVIE I think brother and sister would be a very suitable relation for us. FRANK YOU really mean that? VIVIE Yes. It's the only relation I care for, even if we could afford any other.

I mean that.

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FRANK [Raising his eyebrows like one on whom a new light has dawned, and rising with quite an effusion of chivalrous sentiment.] My dear Viv: why didnt you say so before? I am ever so sorry for persecuting you. I understand, of course.

VIVIE [Puzzled.] Understand what? FRANK Oh, I'm not a fool in the ordinary sense: only in the Scriptural sense of doing all the things the wise man declared to be folly, after trying them himself on the most extensive scale.8 I see 1 am no longer Viwum's little boy. Dont be alarmed: I shall never call you Viwums again�at least unless you get tired of your new little boy, whoever he may be.

VIVIE My new little boy! FRANK [With conviction.] Must be a new little boy. Always happens that way. No other way, in fact. VIVIE None that you know of, fortunately for you.

[Someone knocks at the door.]

FRANK My curse upon yon caller, whoe'er he be! VTVIE It's Praed. He's going to Italy and wants to say goodbye. I asked him to call this afternoon. Go and let him in.

FRANK We can continue our conversation after his departure for Italy. I'll stay him out. [He goes to the door and opens it.] How are you, Praddy? Delighted to see you. Come in.

[PRAED, dressed for travelling, comes in, in high spirits.]

PRAED How do you do, Miss Warren? [She presses his hand cordially, though a certain sentimentality in his high spirits jars on her.] I start in an hour from Holborn Viaduct.9 I wish I could persuade you to try Italy.

VTVIE What for?

PRAED Why, to saturate yourself with beauty and romance, of course.

[VIVIE, with a shudder, turns her chair to the table, as if the work waiting for her were a support to her. PRAED sits opposite to her. FRANK places a chair near VTVIE, and drops lazily and carelessly into it, talking at her over his shoulder.]

FRANK No use, Praddy. Viv is a little Philistine.1 She is indifferent to my romance, and insensible to my beauty. VTVIE Mr Praed: once for all, there is no beauty and no romance in life for me. Life is what it is; and I am prepared to take it as it is.

PRAED [Enthusiastically.] You will not say that if you come with me to Verona and on to Venice. You will cry with delight at living in such a beautiful world.

FRANK This is most eloquent, Praddy. Keep it up.

PRAED Oh, I assure you I have cried�I shall cry again, I hope�at fifty! At your age, Miss Warren, you would not need to go so far as Verona. Your spirits would absolutely fly up at the mere sight of Ostend. You would be charmed with the gaiety, the vivacity, the happy air of Brussels.

VIVIE [Springing up with an exclamation of loathing.] Agh! PRAED [Rising. ] Whats the matter? FRANK[Risirag. ] Hallo, Viv!

8. Cf. Ecclesiastes 2.13: "Then I saw that wisdom and unenlightened middle classes; in his view their excelleth folly." opposition to the defenders of culture makes them 9. A railway station in the City of London. akin to the biblical tribe that fought against the 1. Matthew Arnold's term for a member of the dull people of Israel, "the people of light."

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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION, ACT 1 / 1783

VIVIE [To PRAED, with deep reproach.] Can you find no better example of your beauty and romance than Brussels to talk to me about? PRAED [Puzzled. ] Of course it's very different from Verona. I dont suggest for a moment that� VIVIE [Bitterly.] Probably the beauty and romance come to much the same in both places. PRAED [Completely sobered and much concerned.] My dear Miss Warren: I � [Looking inquiringly at FRANK.] Is anything the matter? FRANK She thinks your enthusiasm frivolous, Praddy. She's had ever such a

serious call. VIVIE [Sharply.] Hold your tongue, Frank. Dont be silly. FRANK [Sitting down.] Do you call this good manners, Praed? PRAED [Anxious and considerate.] Shall I take him away, Miss Warren? I feel

sure we have disturbed you at your work.

VTVIE Sit down: I'm not ready to go back to work yet. [PRAED sits.] You both think I have an attack of nerves. Not a bit of it. But there are two subjects I want dropped, if you dont mind. One of them [To FRANK.] is love's young dream in any shape or form: the other [To PRAED.] is the romance and beauty of life, especially Ostend and the gaiety of Brussels. You are welcome to any illusions you may have left on these subjects: I have none. If we three are to remain friends, I must be treated as a woman of business, permanently single [To FRANK.] and permanently unromantic.[To PRAED.]

FRANK I also shall remain permanently single until you change your mind. Praddy: change the subject. Be eloquent about something else.

PRAED [Diffidently.] I'm afraid theres nothing else in the world that I can talk about. The Gospel of Art is the only one I can preach. I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On; but we cant discuss that without hurting your feelings, Frank, since you are determined not to get on.

FRANK Oh, dont mind my feelings. Give me some improving advice by all means: it does me ever so much good. Have another try to make a successful man of me, Viv. Come; lets have it all: energy, thrift, foresight, self-respect, character. Dont you hate people who have no character, Viv?

VIVIE [Wincing.] Oh, stop, stop: let us have no more of that horrible cant. Mr Praed: if there are really only those two gospels in the world, we had better all kill ourselves; for the same taint is in both, through and through.

FRANK [Looking critically at her.] There is a touch of poetry about you today,

Viv, which has hitherto been lacking. PRAED [Remonstrating.] My dear Frank: arnt you a little unsympathetic? VTVIE [Merciless to herself] No: it's good for me. It keeps me from being

sentimental. FRANK [Bantering her. ] Checks your strong natural propensity that way, dont it?

VIVIE [Almost hysterically.] Oh yes; go on: dont spare me. I was sentimental for one moment in my life�beautifully sentimental�by moonlight; and now�

FRANK [Quickly.] I say, Viv: take care. Dont give yourself away.

VTVIE Oh, do you think Mr Praed does not know all about my mother? [Turning on PRAED.] You had better have told me that morning, Mr Praed. You are very old fashioned in your delicacies, after all.

PRAED Surely it is you who are a little old fashioned in your prejudices, Miss

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Warren, I feel bound to tell you, speaking as an artist, and believing that the most intimate human relationships are far beyond and above the scope of the law, that though I know that your mother is an unmarried woman, I do not respect her the less on that account. I respect her more.

FRANK [Airily.] Hear! Hear!

VTVIE [Staring at him.] Is that all you know?

PRAED Certainly that is all.

VIVIE Then you neither of you know anything. Your guesses are innocence

itself compared to the truth. PRAED [Rising, startled and indignant, and preserving his politeness with an

effort.] I hope not. [More emphatically.] I hope not, Miss Warren.

FRANK [Whistles.] Whew!

vrviE You are not making it easy for me to tell you, Mr Praed.

PRAED [His chivalry drooping before their conviction.] If there is anything worse�that is, anything else�are you sure you are right to tell us, Miss Warren?

VIVIE I am sure that if I had the courage I should spend the rest of my life in telling everybody�stamping and branding it into them until they all felt their part in its abomination as I feel mine. There is nothing I despise more than the wicked convention that protects these things by forbidding a woman to mention them. And yet I cant tell you. The two infamous words that describe what my mother is are ringing in my ears and struggling on my tongue; but I cant utter them: the shame of them is too horrible for me. [She buries her face in her hands. The two men, astonished, stare at one another and then at her. She raises her head again desperately and snatches a sheet of paper and a pen.] Here: let me draft you a prospectus. FRANK Oh, she's mad. Do you hear, Viv? mad. Come! pull yourself together.

vrviE You shall see. [She writes.] "Paid up capital: not less than .40,000 standing in the name of Sir George Crofts, Baronet, the chief shareholder. Premises at Brussels, Ostend, Vienna and Budapest. Managing director: Mrs Warren"; and now dont let us forget her qualifications: the two words. [She writes the words and pushes the paper to them.] There! Oh no: dont read it: dont! [She snatches it back and tears it to pieces; then seizes her head in her hands and hides her face on the table.] [FRANK, who has watched the writing over his shoidder, and opened his eyes very widely at it, takes a card from his pocket; scribbles the two words on it; and silently hands it to PRAED, who reads it with amazement, and hides it hastily in his pocket.] FRANK [Whispering tenderly.] Viv, dear: thats all right. I read what you wrote: so did Praddy. We understand. And we remain, as this leaves us at present, yours ever so devotedly. PRAED We do indeed, Miss Warren. I declare you are the most splendidly courageous woman I ever met. [This sentimental compliment braces VTVIE. She throws it away from her with an impatient shake, and forces herself to stand up, though not without some support from the table.] FRANK Dont stir, Viv, if you dont want to. Take it easy. VTVIE Thank you. You can always depend on me for two things: not to cry and not to faint. [She moves a few steps towards the door of the inner room, and stops close to PRAED to say.] I shall need much more courage than that when I tell my mother that we have come to the parting of the ways. Now

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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION, ACT 1 / 1785

I must go into the next room for a moment to make myself neat again, if you dont mind.

PRAED Shall we go away?

VIVIE No; I shall be back presently. Only for a moment. [Sfoe goes into the other room, PRAED opening the door for her.] PRAED What an amazing revelation! I'm extremely disappointed in Crofts: I am indeed. FRANK I'm not in the least. I feel he's perfectly accounted for at last. But what a facer for me, Praddy! I cant marry her now. PRAED [Sternly.] Frank! [The two look at one another, FRANK unruffled, PFIAED deeply indignant.] Let me tell you, Gardner, that if you desert her now you will behave very despicably. FRANK Good old Praddy! Ever chivalrous! But you mistake: it's not the moral aspect of the case: it's the money aspect. I really cant bring myself to touch the old woman's money now. PRAED And was that what you were going to marry on? FRANK What else? I havnt any money, nor the smallest turn for making it. If I married Viv now she would have to support me; and I should cost her more than I am worth. PRAED But surely a clever bright fellow like you can make something by your own brains. FRANK Oh yes, a little. [He takes out his money again.] I made all that yesterday in an hour and a half. But I made it in a highly speculative business. No, dear Praddy: even if Bessie and Georgina marry millionaires and the governor dies after cutting them off with a shilling, I shall have only four hundred a year. And he wont die until he's three score and ten: he hasnt originality enough. I shall be on short allowance for the next twenty years. No short allowance for Viv, if I can help it. I withdraw gracefully and leave the field to the gilded youth of England. So thats settled. I shant worry her about it: I'll just send her a little note after we're gone. She'll understand. PRAED [Grasping his hand.] Good fellow, Frank! I heartily beg your pardon. But must you never see her again? FRANK Never see her again! Hang it all, be reasonable. I shall come along as often as possible, and be her brother. I cannot understand the absurd consequences you romantic people expect from the most ordinary transactions. [A knock at the door.] I wonder who this is. Would you mind opening the door? If it's a client it will look more respectable than if I appeared. PRAED Certainly. [He goes to the door and opens it. FRANK sits down in VWIE'S chair to scrihhle a note.] My dear Kitty: come in: come in. [MRS WARREN comes in, looking apprehensively round for VTVIE. She has done her hest to make herself matronly and dignified. The brilliant hat is replaced by a sober bonnet, and the gay blouse covered by a costly black silk mantle. She is pitiably anxious and ill at ease: evidently panic- stricken.] MRS WARREN [To FRANK.] What! Your e here, are you? FRANK [Turning in his chair from his writing, but not rising.] Here, and charmed to see you. You come like a breath of spring. MRS WARREN Oh, get out with your nonsense. [In a low voice.] Wheres Vivie? [FRANK points expressively to the door of the inner room, but says nothing.]

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1 1786 / BERNARD SHAW

MRS WARREN [Sitting down suddenly and almost beginning to cry.] Praddy:

wont she see me, dont you think? PRAED My dear Kitty: dont distress yourself. Why should she not? MRS WARREN Oh, you never can see why not: youre too innocent. Mr Frank:

did she say anything to you? FRANK [Folding his note.] She must see you, if [very expressively] you wait til she comes in.

MRS WARREN [Frightened.] Why shouldnt I wait? [FRANK looks quizzically at her; puts his note carefidly on the inkbottle, so that VTVIE cannot fail to find it when next she dips her pen; then rises and devotes his attention entirely to her.]

FRANK My dear Mrs Warren: suppose you were a sparrow�ever so tiny and pretty a sparrow hopping in the roadway�and you saw a steam roller coming in your direction, would you wait for it?

MRS WARREN Oh, dont bother me with your sparrows. What did she run away

from Haslemere like that for? FRANK I'm afraid she'll tell you if you rashly await her return. MRS WARREN Do you want me to go away? FRANK No: I always want you to stay. But I advise you to go away. MRS WARREN What! and never see her again! FRANK Precisely. MRS WARREN [Crying again.] Praddy: dont let him be cruel to me. [She hastily

checks her tears and wipes her eyes.] She'll be so angry if she sees Ive been crying.

FRANK [With a touch of real compassion in his airy tenderness.] You know that Praddy is the soul of kindness, Mrs Warren. Praddy: what do you say? Go or stay?

PRAED [To MRS WARREN.] I really should be very sorry to cause you unnecessary pain; but I think perhaps you had better not wait. The fact is�[VIVIE

is heard at the inner door. ]

FRANK Sh! Too late. She's coming.

MRS WARREN Dont tell her I was crying, [VIVIE comes in. She stops gravely on seeing MRS WARREN, who greets her with hysterical cheerfulness.] Well, dearie. So here you are at last.

VTVIE I am glad you have come: I want to speak to you. You said you were going, Frank, I think.

FRANK Yes. Will you come with me, Mrs Warren? What do you say to a trip to Richmond, and the theatre in the evening? There is safety in Richmond. No steam roller there.

VIVIE Nonsense, Frank. My mother will stay here. MRS WARREN [Scared.] I dont know: perhaps I'd better go. We're disturbing you at your work. VTVIE [With quiet decision.] Mr. Praed: please take Frank away. Sit down,

mother, [MRS WARREN obeys helplessly.] PRAED Come, Frank. Goodbye, Miss Vivie. VIVIE [Shaking hands.] Goodbye. A pleasant trip. PRAED Thank you: thank you. I hope so. FRANK [To MRS WARREN.] Goodbye: youd ever so much better have taken my

advice. [He shakes hands with her. Then airily to VTVIE] Byebye, Viv. VTVIE Goodbye. [He goes out gaily without shaking hands with her.] PRAED [Sadly.] Goodbye, Kitty.

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MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION, ACT 1 / 1787

MRS WARREN [Sniveling.] �oobye! [PRAED goes, VTVIE, composed and extremely grave, sits down in Honoria's chair, and waits for her mother to speak. MRS WARREN, dreading a pause, loses no time in beginning.]

MRS WARREN Well, Vivie, what did you go away like that for without saying a word to me? How could you do such a thing! And what have you done to poor George? I wanted him to come with me; but he shuffled out of it. I could see that he was quite afraid of you. Only fancy: he wanted me not to come. As if [Trembling.] I should be afraid of you, dearie, [VIVIE'S gravity deepens.] But of course I told him it was all settled and comfortable between us, and that we were on the best of terms. [She breaks dcnvn.] Vivie: whats the meaning of this? [She produces a commercial envelope, and fumbles at the enclosure with trembling fingers.] I got it from the bank this morning.

VIVIE It is my month's allowance. They sent it to me as usual the other day. I simply sent it back to be placed to your credit, and asked them to send you the lodgment receipt.2 In future I shall support myself. MRS WARREN [Not daring to understand. ] Wasnt it enough? Why didnt you tell me? [With a cunning gleam in her eye.] I'll double it: I was intending to double it. Only let me know how much you want.

VTVIE You know very well that that has nothing to do with it. From this time I go my own way in my own business and among my own friends. And you will go yours. [She rises.] Goodbye.

MRS WARREN [Rising, appalled.] Goodbye? vrviE Yes: Goodbye. Come: dont let us make a useless scene: you understand perfectly well. Sir George Crofts has told me the whole business. MRS WARREN [Angrily.] Silly old�[She swallows an epithet, and turns white at the narrowness of her escape from uttering it.]

VTVIE Just so.

MRS WARREN He ought to have his tongue cut out. But I thought it was ended: you said you didnt mind. VTVIE [Steadfastly. | Excuse me: I d o mind. MRS WARREN But I explained� VTVIE You explained how it came about. You did not tell me that it is still

going on. [She sits.] [MRS WARREN, silenced for a moment, looks forlornly at VTVIE, who waits, secretly hoping that the combat is over. But the cunning expression comes back into MRS WARREN'S face; and she bends across the table, sly and urgent, half whispering.]

MRS WARREN Vivie: do you know how rich I am?

VTVIE I have no doubt you are very rich.

MRS WARREN But you dont know all that that means: youre too young. It means a new dress every day; it means theatres and balls every night; it means having the pick of all the gentlemen in Europe at your feet; it means a lovely house and plenty of servants; it means the choicest of eating and drinking; it means everything you like, everything you want, everything you can think of. And what are you here? A mere drudge, toiling and moiling3 early and late for your bare living and two cheap dresses a year. Think over it. [Soothingly.] Youre shocked, I know. I can enter into your feelings; and I think they do you credit; but trust me, nobody will blame you: you may

2. Deposit slip. 3. Drudging.

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take my word for that. I know what young girls are; and I know youll think better of it when youve turned it over in your mind.

VIVIE So thats how it's done, is it? You must have said all that to many a woman, mother, to have it so pat.

MRS WARREN [Passionately.] What harm am I asking you to do? [VIVIE turns away contemptuously, MRS WARREN continues desperately.] Vivie: listen to me: you dont understand: youve been taught wrong on purpose: you dont know what the world is really like.

VIVIE [Arrested.] Taught wrong on purpose! What do you mean? MRS WARREN I mean that youre throwing away all your chances for nothing. You think that people are what they pretend to be: that the way you were taught at school and college to think right and proper is the way things really are. But it's not: it's all only a pretence, to keep the cowardly slavish common run of people quiet. Do you want to find that out, like other women, at forty, when youve thrown yourself away and lost your chances; or wont you take it in good time now from your own mother, that loves you and swears to you that it's truth: gospel truth? [Urgently] Vivie: the big people, the clever people, the managing people, all know it. They do as I do, and think what 1 think. I know plenty of them. I know them to speak to, to introduce you to, to make friends of for you. I dont mean anything wrong; thats what you dont understand: your head is full of ignorant ideas about me. What do the people that taught you know about life or about people like me? When did they ever meet me, or speak to me, or let anyone tell them about me? the fools! Would they ever have done anything for you if I hadnt paid them? Havnt I told you that I want you to be respectable? Havnt 1 brought you up to be respectable? And how can you keep it up without my money and my influence and Lizzie's friends? Cant you see that youre cutting your own throat as well as breaking my heart in turning your back on me? VIVIE I recognize the Crofts philosophy of life, mother. I heard it all from him that day at the Gardners'. MRS WARREN You think I want to force that played-out old sot on you! I dont, Vivie: on my oath 1 dont. VIVIE It would not matter if you did: you would not succeed, [MRS WARREN winces, deeply hurt In the implied indifference towards her affectionate intention. VIVIE, neither understanding this nor concerning herself about it, goes on calmly.] Mother: you dont at all know the sort of person I am. I dont object to Crofts more than to any other coarsely built man of his class. To tell you the truth, I rather admire him for being strong-minded enough to enjoy himself in his own way and make plenty of money instead of living the usual shooting, hunting, dining-out, tailoring, loafing life of his set merely because all the rest do it. And I'm perfectly aware that if I'd been in the same circumstances as my aunt Liz, I'd have done exactly what she did. I dont think I'm more prejudiced or straitlaced than you: I think I'm less. I'm certain I'm less sentimental. I know very well that fashionable morality is all a pretence, and that if I took your money and devoted the rest of my life to spending it fashionably, I might be as worthless and vicious as the silliest woman could possibly want to be without having a word said to me about it. But I dont want to be worthless. I shouldnt enjoy trotting about the park to advertize my dressmaker and carriage builder, or being bored at the opera to shew off a shopwindowful of diamonds. MRS WARREN [Bewildered.] But�

.

MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION, ACT 1 / 1789

VIVIE Wait a moment: Ive not done. Tell me why you continue your business now that you are independent of it. Your sister, you told me, has left all that behind her. Why dont you do the same? MRS WARREN Oh, it's all very easy for Liz: she likes good society, and has the air of being a lady. Imagine me in a cathedral town! Why, the very rooks in the trees would find me out even if I could stand the dulness of it. I must have work and excitement, or I should go melancholy mad. And what else is there for me to do? The life suits me: I'm fit for it and not for anything else. If I didnt do it somebody else would; so I dont do any real harm by it. And then it brings in money; and I like making money. No; it's no use: I cant give it up�not for anybody. But what need you know about it? I'll never mention it. I'll keep Crofts away. I'll not trouble you much: you see I have to be constantly running about from one place to another. Youll be quit of me altogether when I die.

VIVIE No: I am my mother's daughter. I am like you: I must have work, and must make more money than I spend. But my work is not your work, and my way not your way. We must part. It will not make much difference to us: instead of meeting one another for perhaps a few months in twenty years we shall never meet: thats all. MRS WARREN [Her voice stifled in tears.] Vivie: I meant to have been more with you: I did indeed. VIVIE It's no use, mother: I am not to be changed by a few cheap tears and entreaties any more than you are, I daresay. MRS WARREN [Wildly.] Oh, you call a mother's tears cheap. VIVIE They cost you nothing; and you ask me to give you the peace and quietness of my whole life in exchange for them. What use would my company be to you if you could get it? What have we two in common that could make either of us happy together? MRS WARREN [Lapsing recklessly into her dialect. ] We're mother and daughter. I want my daughter. Ive a right to you. Who is to care for me when I'm old? Plenty of girls have taken to me like daughters and cried at leaving me; but I let them all go because I had you to look forward to. I kept myself lonely for you. Youve no right to turn on me now and refuse to do your duty as a daughter. VTVIE [Jarred and antagonized by the echo of the slums in her mother's voice.] My duty as a daughter! I thought we should come to that presently. Now once for all, mother, you want a daughter and Frank wants a wife. I dont want a mother; and I dont want a husband. I have spared neither Frank nor myself in sending him about his business. Do you think I will spare you ? MRS WARREN [Violently.] Oh, I know the sort you are: no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know. My experience has done that for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her. Well, keep yourself to yourself: I dont want you. But listen to this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again? aye, as sure as there's a Heaven above us. VTVIE Strangle me, perhaps. MRS WARREN NO: I'd bring you up to be a real daughter to me, and not what you are now, with your pride and your prejudices and the college education you stole from me: yes, stole: deny it if you can: what was it but stealing? I'd bring you up in my own house, I would. VTVIE [Quietly.] In one of your own houses.

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179 0 / MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE

MRS WARREN [Screaming.] Listen to her! listen to how she spits on her mother's grey hairs! Oh, may you live to have your own daughter tear and trample on you as you have trampled on me. And you will: you will. No woman ever had luck with a mother's curse on her.

vrviE I wish you wouldnt rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to. Dont spoil it all now. MRS WARREN Yes, Heaven forgive me, it's true; and you are the only one that ever turned on me. Oh, the injustice of it! the injustice! the injustice! I always wanted to be a good woman. I tried honest work; and I was slave- driven until I cursed the day I ever heard of honest work. I was a good mother; and because I made my daughter a good woman she turns me out as if I was a leper. Oh, if I only had my life to live over again! I'd talk to that lying clergyman in the school. From this time forth, so help me Heaven in my last hour, I'll do wrong and nothing but wrong. And I'll prosper on it.

vrviE Yes: it's better to choose your line and go through with it. If I had been you, mother, I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am bidding you goodbye now. I am right, am I not? MRS WARREN [Taken aback.] Right to throw away all my money?

VIVIE No: right to get rid of you? I should be a fool not to! Isnt that so? MRS WARREN [Sulkily.] Oh well, yes, if you come to that, I suppose you are. But Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing! And now I'd better go than stay where I'm not wanted. [She turns to the door.] VIVIE [Kindly.] Wont you shake hands? MRS WARREN [After looking at her fiercely for a moment with a savage impulse to strike her.] No, thank you. Goodbye. vrviE [Matter-of-factly.] Goodbye, [MRS WARREN goes out, slamming the door behind her. The strain on VIVIE 'S face relaxes; her grave expression breaks up into one of joyous content; her breath goes out in a half sob, half laugh of intense relief. She goes buoyantly to her place at the writing-table; pushes the electric lamp out of the way; pulls over a great sheaf of papers; and is in the act of dipping her pen in the ink when she finds FRANKS note. She opens it unconcernedly and reads it quickly, giving a little laugh at some quaint turn of expression in it.] And goodbye, Frank. [She tears the note up and tosses the pieces into the wastepaper basket without a second thought. Then she goes at her work with a plunge, and soon becomes absorbed in its figures.]

1893 1898

MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE 1861-1907

The great-great-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, once wrote: "I have no fairy god-mother, but lay claim to a fairy great-great uncle, which is perhaps the reason that I am condemned to wander restlessly around the Gates of Fairyland, although I have never yet passed them." Born in London to a literary and musical family that regularly entertained guests such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and

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THE OTHER SIDE OF A MIRROR / 1791

Robert Browning, Coleridge lived her whole life at home with her parents and one sister. She was unusually well educated, under the supervision of a tutor, William Cory, a scholar and poet, who had been forced by scandal to leave his teaching position at Eton. Coleridge thus received an education usually reserved for boys. She knew six languages, including Greek, and studied philosophy. In the 1890s she began giving lessons in English literature to working girls; in 1895 she started to teach at the Working Woman's College, an activity she continued for the rest of her life. She died suddenly of appendicitis at the age of forty-six.

Coleridge's tutor, Cory, encouraged her to write poetry and short stories. When Henry Newbolt, a poet and family friend, joined her reading group (then composed of five women), the Quintette, he urged her to publish her first two novels. She later published three more, in addition to a number of stories and essays. Although she wrote poetry continuously, she published little of it during her life. When a manuscript of her poems was given to Robert Bridges, a family friend who was also close to Gerard Manley Hopkins and was responsible for the posthumous publication of Hopkins's poetry, Bridges recognized her talent. He made suggestions for revisions and encouraged her to publish a volume. She allowed two small volumes to be privately printed in the nineties, under the pseudonym Anodos, or "The Wanderer"; most of her poetry was published after her death.

Although Coleridge did not participate in the feminist debates of her time, her poems contain a subversive sense of anarchic female energy. She believed women had a spiritual identity distinct from men's; she wrote, "I don't think we are separate only in body and in mind, I think we are separate in soul too." Some of her poems rewTite earlier texts. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have speculated that "The Other Side of a Mirror" (1896) portrays the mad Bertha Mason from Charlotte te's Jane Eyre (1847); Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds have argued that "The Witch" (1907) reimagines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's visionary poem Christabel (1816). Both of these poems demonstrate another characteristic of her writing� presentation of a luminous narrative fragment with little sense of surrounding context. The effect, in the words of Newbolt, her friend, is one of "very deep shadows filled with strange shapes."

The Other Side of a Mirror

I sat before my glass one day, And conjured up a vision bare, Unlike the aspects glad and gay, That erst� were found reflected there� formerly 5 The vision of a woman, wild With more than womanly despair.

Her hair stood back on either side A face bereft of loveliness. It had no envy now to hide io What once no man on earth could guess. It formed the thorny aureole0 halo Of hard unsanctified distress.

Her lips were open�not a sound Came through the parted lines of red. 15 Whate'er it was, the hideous wound In silence and in secret bled.

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179 2 / MAR Y ELIZABET H COLERIDG E No sigh relieved her speechless woe, She had no voice to speak her dread. 20And in her lurid eyes there shone The dying flame of life's desire, Made mad because its hope was gone, And kindled at the leaping fire Of jealousy, and fierce revenge, And strength that could not change nor tire. 2530 Shade of a shadow in the glass, O set the crystal surface free! Pass�as the fairer visions pass� Nor ever more return, to be The ghost of a distracted hour, That heard me whisper, "I am she!" 1882 1896 The Witch 51 have walked a great while over the snow, And I am not tall nor strong. My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set, And the way was hard and long. I have wandered over the fruitful earth, But I never came here before. Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! ioThe cutting wind is a cruel foe. I dare not stand in the blast, My hands are stone, and my voice a groan, And the worst of death is past. I am but a little maiden still, My little white feet are sore. Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! is20 Her voice was the voice that women have, Who plead for their heart's desire. She came�she came�and the quivering flame Sank and died in the fire. It never was lit again on my hearth Since I hurried across the floor, To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door. 1892 1907

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1793

RUDYARD KIPLING 1865-1936

Like many children born to upper- or middle-class Britons living in India in the Victorian era, Rudyard Kipling was sent to Great Britain at the age of six to begin his education. For the next six years in England, he was desperately unhappy; his parents had chosen to board him in a rigidly Calvinistic foster home, and he was treated with considerable cruelty. His parents finally removed him when he was twelve and sent him to a private school, where his experience was far better. His views in later life were deeply affected by the English schoolboy code of honor and duty, especially when it involved loyalty to a group or team. At seventeen he rejoined his parents in India, where his father taught sculpture at the Bombay School of Art. By the time he returned to England seven years later, the poems and stories he had written while working as a newspaper reporter in India had brought him early fame. In 1892 he married an American woman; they lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, until a fierce quarrel with his brother-in-law drove him back to England in 1896. Kipling settled on a country estate and purchased, at the turn of the century, an expensive early-model automobile. He seems to have been the first English author to own an automobile�an appropriate distinction, because he was intrigued by all kinds of machinery and feats of engineering. In this keen interest, as in many tastes, he differed markedly from his contemporaries in the nineties, the aesthetes. Kipling was also the first English author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907).

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, India was the most important colony of Britain's empire�the "Jewel in the Crown," as Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had dubbed it. The English were consequently curious about the world of India, a world that Kipling's stories and poems helped them envision. Indeed, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf's husband, wrote of his own experience in India in the early years of the twentieth century: "I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story." During his seven years in India in the 1880s, Kipling gained a rich experience of colonial life, which he presented in his stories and poems. His first volume of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), explores some of the psychological and moral problems of the Anglo- Indians and their relationship with the people they had colonized. In his two volumes of the Jungle Book (1894, 1895) he draws on the Indian scene to create a world of jungle animals. Capable, on occasion, of constructing offensive stereotypes, Kipling at other times demonstrates a remarkably detailed and intelligent interest in Indian culture, as in his complex novel Kim (1901): amid a welter of representations of different modes of existence, the contemplative and religious way of life of the Indian lama, or monk, is treated with no less respect and sympathy than the active and worldly way of life of the Victorian English governing classes.

In his poems Kipling also draws on the Indian scene, most commonly as it is viewed through the eyes of the men sent out from England to garrison the country and fight off invaders on the northwest frontiers. Kipling is usually thought of as the poet of British imperialism, as indeed he often was; but these poems about ordinary British soldiers in India contain little by way of flag-waving celebrations of the triumph of empire. The soldier who speaks in "The Widow at Windsor" (1892) is simply bewildered by the events in which he has taken part. As one of the soldiers of the queen (one of "Missis Victorier's sons"), he has done his duty, but he does not see the empire as a divine design to which he has contributed. Kipling develops a new subject in the working-class imperial soldier (a subject, we should note, who frequently gives voice to deeply racist attitudes), and thus a new way to portray modern social experience.

The common man's perspective, expressed in the accent of the London cockney, was one of the qualities that gained Kipling an immediate audience for his Barrack

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179 4 / RUDYARD KIPLING

Room Ballads (1890, 1892). For many years Kipling was extremely popular. What attracted his vast audience was not just the novelty of his subjects but also his mastery of swinging verse rhythms. To some degree Kipling's literary ancestry helps explain his success. In part he learned his craft as a poet from traditional sources. His own family had connections with the Pre-Raphaelites, and he was considerably influenced by such immediate literary predecessors as Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne. But two of the forces strongly influencing his style and rhythms were not traditional. One of these was the Protestant hymn. Both his parents were children of Methodist clergymen, and chapel singing, as well as preaching, affected him profoundly. "Three generations of Wesleyan ministers .. . lie behind me," he noted; the family tradition can be heard in such secular sermons as "If" (1910) and the elegiac hymn "Recessional" (1897). The second influence came from what seems an antithetical secular quarter: the songs of the music hall. As a teenager in London, Kipling had enjoyed music hall entertainments, which were to reach their peak of popularity in the 1890s. Like Tennyson, Kipling knew how to make poems that call to be set to music, verses such as "Mandalay" (1890) or "Gentlemen-Rankers" (1892), with its memorable refrain: "We're poor little lambs who've lost our way, / Baa! Baa! Baa!" Much of Kipling's poetry is best appreciated with the melodies and ambience of the music hall in mind.

In recent years Kipling's stories have received more attention than his poems. By portraying the British community in India and its relationship with the people it ruled, Kipling created a rich and various fictional world that reflects on England's imperialism as lived by the officers of the empire in all their peculiar social relationships. "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) presents an intriguing approach to the topic. The narrator, a newspaper editor, tells us of his dealings with a couple of "Loafers." Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot have no official positions in India but are quick to exploit any opportunities their European status may afford them; this pair of rogues heads out to the mountainous region of Kafiristan, intent on establishing their own dynasty. An action-packed tale of adventure in faraway places with strange-sounding names, the story also invites us to think critically about the general project of empire�about the assumptions it holds, the methods it employs, and the human cost of its endeavors.

After leaving India, Kipling gradually turned to English subjects in his fiction, but the cataclysm of World War I did much to diminish his output. As chair of the Imperial War Graves Commission, he played a difficult and important public role, responsible for (among other things) choosing the words to be inscribed on countless monuments and memorials across the globe. Kipling's task was all the more poignant because the body of his only son, who had died in the battle of Loos (1915), was never found. A deeply melancholy autobiography, Something of Myself, was published in 1937, the year after Kipling's death.

The Man Who Would Be King1

"Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy."2

The law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy to follow. I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances

1. Kipling based his story on the true-life exploits from the masons' guild in medieval Britain. By Vicof an American adventurer, Josiah Harlan, who torian times it had grown to a prominent national awarded himself the title of prince after occupying organization, whose members were bound to help a region in the Hindu Kush in the late 1830s. each other in times of distress. Kipling was a mem2. Meant to suggest the principles of Free-ber. masonry, a secret fraternal society that developed

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1795

which prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy. I have still to be brother to a Prince, though I once came near to kinship with what might have been a veritable King and was promised the reversion of' a Kingdom� army, law-courts, revenue and policy all complete. But, to-day, I greatly fear that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go and hunt it for myself.

The beginning of everything was in a railway train upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir.4 There had been a Deficit in the Budget, which necessitated traveling, not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First-class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer,5 which is amusing though intoxicated. Intermediates do not patronize refreshment-rooms. They carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from the native sweetmeat- sellers, and drink the roadside water. That is why in the hot weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all weathers are most properly looked down upon.

My particular Intermediate happened to be empty till I reached Nasirabad, when a huge gentleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed the time of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but with an educated taste for whiskey. He told tales of things he had seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into which he had penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his life for a few days' food. "If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more than the crows where they'd get their next day's rations, it isn't seventy millions of revenue the land would be paying�it's seven hundred millions," said he; and as I looked at his mouth and chin I was disposed to agree with him. We talked politics�the politics of Loaferdom that sees things from the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off6�and we talked postal arrangements because my friend wanted to send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir, which is the turning-off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel westward. My friend had no money beyond eight annas which he wanted7 for dinner, and I had no money at all, owing to the hitch in the Budget before mentioned. Further, I was going into a wilderness where, though I should resume touch with the Treasury, there were no telegraph offices. I was, therefore, unable to help him in any way.

"We might threaten a Station-master, and make him send a wire on tick,"8 said my friend, "but that'd mean inquiries for you and for me, and I've got my hands full these days. Did you say you are traveling back along this line within any days?"

"Within ten," I said.

"Can't you make it eight?" said he. "Mine is rather urgent business."

"I can send your telegram within ten days if that will serve you," I said.

"I couldn't trust the wire to fetch him now I think of it. It's this way. He leaves Delhi on the 23d for Bombay. That means he'll be running through Ajmir about the night of the 23d."

3. Right to inherit. 6. I.e., the unfinished side of a wall. 4. These, and the other places mentioned at the 7. Needed. "Annas": there are sixteen annas in a beginning of the story, are in northern India. rupee, the basic monetary unit of India. 5. A European in India with no official attachment 8. On credit. or position.

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179 6 / RUDYARD KIPLING

"But I'm going into the Indian Desert," I explained.

"Well and good," said he. "You'll be changing at Marwar Junction to get into Jodhpore territory�you must do that�and he'll be coming through Marwar Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that time? 'Twon't be inconveniencing you because I know that there's precious few pickings to be got out of these Central India States�even though you pretend to be correspondent of the Backwoodsman."9

"Have you ever tried that trick?" I asked.

"Again and again, but the Residents1 find you out, and then you get escorted to the Border before you've time to get your knife into them. But about my friend here. I must give him a word o' mouth to tell him what's come to me or else he won't know where to go. I would take it more than kind of you if you was to come out of Central India in time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and say to him:�'He has gone South for the week.' He'll know what that means. He's a big man with a red beard, and a great swell2 he is. You'll find him sleeping like a gentleman with all his luggage round him in a Second- class compartment. But don't you be afraid. Slip down the window, and say:� 'He has gone South for the week,' and he'll tumble.3 It's only cutting your time of stay in those parts by two days. I ask you as a stranger�going to the West,"4 he said, with emphasis.

"Where have you come from?" said I. "From the East," said he, "and I am hoping that you will give him the message on the Square5�for the sake of my Mother as well as your own."

Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers, but for certain reasons, which will be fully apparent, I saw fit to agree.

"It's more than a little matter," said he, "and that's why I ask you to do it� and now I know that I can depend on you doing it. A Second-class carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired mart asleep in it. You'll be sure to remember. I get out at the next station, and I must hold on there till he comes or sends me what I want."

"I'll give the message if I catch him," I said, "and for the sake of your Mother as well as mine I'll give you a word of advice. Don't try to run the Central India States just now as the correspondent of the Backwoodsman. There's a real one knocking about here, and it might lead to trouble."

"Thank you," said he, simply, "and when will the swine be gone? I can't

starve because he's ruining my work. I wanted to get hold of the Degumber

Rajah down here about his father's widow, and give him a jump."

"What did he do to his father's widow, then?"

"Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she hung from

a beam. I found that out myself, and I'm the only man that would dare going

into the State to get hush-money for it. They'll try to poison me, same as they

did in Chortumna when I went on the loot there. But you'll give the man at

Marwar Junction my message?"

He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard, more

than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers and bleeding

9. This fictitious newspaper appears to be based affairs at the courts of Indian rulers. on the Allahabad Pioneer, for which Kipling 2. Fashionable fellow. worked as a roving correspondent. "Central India 3. Catch on, understand. States": quasi-independent "Native States," as they 4. This phrase and the following one are from the were also known, presided over by Indian royalty. code of the Freemasons. 1. British political officers appointed to oversee 5. Honestly.

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1797

small Native States with threats of exposure, but 1 had never met any of the caste before. They lead a hard life, and generally die with great suddenness. The Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers, which may throw light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand barouches.6 They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the other. Native States were created by Providence in order to supply picturesque scenery, tigers, and tall-writing." They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-alRaschid. 8 When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politicals,9 drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made of a flapjack, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It was all in the day's work.

Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as I had promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar Junction, where a funny little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed railway runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short halt at Marwar. She arrived as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her platform and go down the carriages. There was only one Second-class on the train. I slipped the window, and looked down upon a flaming red beard, half covered by a railway rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in the light of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.

"Tickets again?" said he. "No," said I. "I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week. He is gone South for the week!"

The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes. "He has gone South for the week," he repeated. "Now that's just like his impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything?�'Cause I won't."

"He didn't," I said, and dropped away, and watched the red lights die out in the dark. It was horribly cold, because the wind was blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train�not an Intermediate Carriage this time�and went to sleep.

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it as a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of having done my duty was my only reward.

Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not do any good if they foregathered and personated correspondents of newspapers, and might, if they "stuck up"1 one of the little rat-trap states of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into serious difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to describe them as accurately as I could remember to people who would be interested in deporting them; and succeeded, so I was later informed, in having them headed back from Degumber borders.

6. Fashionable four-wheeled carriages. 9. I.e., Residents. 7. Tall tales. 1. Fraudulently extorted money from. "Foregath8. The caliph of Baghdad (763-809), who figures ered": met. in many tales of the Arabian Nights.

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179 8 / RUDYARD KIPLING

Then I became respectable, and returned to an Office where there were no Kings and no incidents except the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies2 arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back- slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for commands sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother missionary under special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah3-pulling machines, carriage couplings and unbreakable swords and axle-trees call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball- committees clamour to have the glories of their last dance more fully expounded; strange ladies rustle in and say:�"I want a hundred lady's cards printed at once, please," which is manifestly part of an Editor's duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road4 makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone- bell is ringing madly, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying�"You're another," and Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon the British Dominions,5 and the little black copy-boys are whining, "kaapi chay-ha-yeh" (copy wanted) like tired bees, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred's shield.6

But that is the amusing part of the year. There are other six months wherein none ever come to call, and the thermometer walks inch by inch up to the top of the glass, and the office is darkened to just above reading-light, and the press machines are red-hot of touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations7 or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women that you knew intimately, and the prickly-heat covers you as with a garment, and you sit down and write:�"A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Janta Khan8 District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret we record the death, etc."

Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less recording and reporting the better for the peace of the subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings continue to divert themselves as selfishly as before, and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really ought to come out once in twenty-four hours, and all the people at the Hill-stations in the middle of their amusements say:�"Good gracious! Why can't the paper be sparkling? I'm sure there's plenty going on up here."

2. Female missionaries doing work among Indian overseas expansion. "Brimstone": i.e., fire and women, who were customarily confined to a part brimstone, the supposed torments of hell. of the house called the Zenana. 6. In British legend the shield of King Arthur's 3. Large swinging fan, usually worked by hand. traitorous nephew was blank because he had done 4. Major road connecting Calcutta and Delhi. no deeds of valor. 5. Places under British control. William Ewart 7. Official outposts in the northern hills, to which Gladstone (1809-1898), leader of the Liberal many British people in India would retire during Party from 1868 to 1875 and 1880 to 1894, and the hottest months. four times prime minister; he strongly opposed 8. "God Knows Town"; i.e., Nowheresville.

.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1799

That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the advertisements say, "must be experienced to be appreciated."

It was in that season, and a remarkably evil season, that the paper began running the last issue of the week on Saturday night, which is to say, Sunday morning, after the custom of a London paper. This was a great convenience, for immediately after the paper was put to bed,9 the dawn would lower the thermometer from 96� to almost 84� for half an hour, and in that chill�you have no idea how cold is 84� on the grass until you begin to pray for it�a very tired man could set off to sleep ere the heat roused him.

One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone. A King or courtier or a courtesan or a community was going to die or get a new Constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram. It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I sat there, while the type clicked and clicked and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads and called for water. The thing that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the loo dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event. 1 drowsed, and wondered whether the telegraph was a blessing, and whether this dying man, or struggling people, was aware of the inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock hands crept up to three o'clock and the machines spun their fly-wheels two and three times to see that all was in order, before I said the word that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud.

Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the quiet into little bits. I rose to go away, but two men in white clothes stood in front of me. The first one said:�"It's him!" The second said:�"So it is!" And they both laughed almost as loudly as the machinery roared, and mopped their foreheads. "We see there was a light burning across the road and we were sleeping in that ditch there for coolness, and I said to my friend here, 'The office is open. Let's come along and speak to him as turned us back from the Degumber State,' " said the smaller of the two. He was the man I had met in the Mhow train, and his fellow was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. There was no mistaking the eyebrows of the one or the beard of the other.

I was not pleased, because I wished to go to sleep, not to squabble with loafers. "What do you want?" I asked.

"Half an hour's talk with you cool and comfortable, in the office," said the red-bearded man. "We'd like some drink�the Contrack doesn't begin yet, Peachey, so you needn't look�but what we really want is advice. We don't want money. We ask you as a favour, because you did us a bad turn about Degumber."

I led from the press-room to the stifling office with the maps on the walls, and the red-haired man rubbed his hands. "That's something like," said he.

9. The final preparations were made for printing the newspaper.

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180 0 / RUDYARD KIPLING

"This was the proper shop to come to. Now, Sir, let me introduce to you Brother1 Peachey Carnehan, that's him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the less said about our professions the better, for we have been most things in our time. Soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents of the Backwoodsman when we thought the paper wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. Look at us first and see that's sure. It will save you cutting into my talk. We'll take one of your cigars apiece, and you shall see us light."

I watched the test. The men were absolutely sober, so I gave them each a tepid peg.2

"Well and good," said Carnehan of the eyebrows, wiping the froth from his moustache. "Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler-fitters, engine-drivers, petty contractors, and all that, and we have decided that India isn't big enough for such as us."

They certainly were too big for the office. Dravot's beard seemed to fill half the room and Carnehan's shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued: "The country isn't half worked out because they that governs it won't let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can't lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that without all the Government saying�'Leave it alone and let us govern.' Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn't crowded and can come to his own. We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings."

"Kings in our own right," muttered Dravot. "Yes, of course," I said. "You've been tramping in the sun, and it's a very warm night, and hadn't you better sleep over the notion? Come to-morrow."

"Neither drunk nor sunstruck," said Dravot. "We have slept over the notion half a year, and require to see Books and Atlases, and we have decided that there is only one place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a-whack.3 They call it Kafiristan.4 By my reckoning it's the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Pesha-wur. They have two and thirty heathen idols there, and we'll be the thirty-third. It's a mountainous country, and the women of those parts are very beautiful."

"But that is provided against in the Contrack," said Carnehan. "Neither Women nor Liquor, Daniel."

"And that's all we know, except that no one has gone there, and they fight, and in any place where they fight, a man who knows how to drill men can always be a King. We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find� 'D'you want to vanquish your foes?' and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty."

"You'll be cut to pieces before you're fifty miles across the Border," I said. "You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that country. It's one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through

1. A title meant to recall the Freemason connec-helping the rajah of Sarawak, in Borneo, put down tion. a rebellion, succeeded him after his death and 2. A drink. established a dynasty. 3. A reference to Sir James Brooke (1803-1868), 4. A real place, in the Hindu Kush. "the White Rajah of Sarawak," who, in return for

.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1801

it. The people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn't do anything."

"That's more like," said Carnehan: "If you could think us a little more mad we would be more pleased. We have come to you to know about this country, to read a book about it, and to be shown maps. We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books." He turned to the bookcases.

"Are you at all in earnest?" I said.

"A little," said Dravot, sweetly. "As big a map as you have got, even if it's all blank where Kafiristan is, and any books you've got. We can read, though we aren't very educated."

I uncased the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map of India, and two smaller Frontier maps, hauled down volume INF-KAN of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the men consulted them.

"See here!" said Dravot, his thumb on the map. "Up to Jagdallak, Peachey and me know the road. We was there with Roberts's Army.5 We'll have to turn off to the right at Jagdallak through Laghmann territory. Then we get among the hills�fourteen thousand feet�fifteen thousand�it will be cold work there, but it don't look very far on the map."

I handed him Wood on the Sources of the Oxus.6 Carnehan was deep in the Encyclopaedia.

"They're a mixed lot," said Dravot, reflectively; "and it won't help us to know the names of their tribes. The more tribes the more they'll fight, and the better for us. From Jagdallak to Ashang. H'mm!"

"But all the information about the country is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be," I protested. "No one knows anything about it really. Here's the file of the United Services' Institute. Read what Bellew says."

"Blow Bellew!" said Carnehan. "Dan, they're an all-fired lot of heathens, but this book here says they think they're related to us English." I smoked while the men pored over Raverty, Wood, the maps, and the

Encyclopaedia.

"There is no use your waiting," said Dravot, politely. "It's about four o'clock now. We'll go before six o'clock if you want to sleep, and we won't steal any of the papers. Don't you sit up. We're two harmless lunatics and if you come, to-morrow evening, down to the Serai7 we'll say good-bye to you."

"You are two fools," I answered. "You'll be turned back at the Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot in Afghanistan. Do you want any money or a recommendation downcountry? I can help you to the chance of work next week."

"Next week we shall be hard at work ourselves, thank you," said Dravot. "It isn't so easy being a King as it looks. When we've got our Kingdom in going order we'll let you know, and you can come up and help us to govern it."

"Would two lunatics make a Contrack like that?" said Carnehan, with subdued pride, showing me a greasy half-sheet of note-paper on which was written the following. I copied it, then and there, as a curiosity:

This Contract between me and you persuing witnesseth in the name of God� Amen and so forth.

5. In the Second Afghan War (1878-80), a force 6. The Oxus is a river whose sources are in the under the command of General Frederick Roberts area. made a three-hundred-mile forced march through 7. Place or building for the accommodation of the area. travelers and their pack animals.

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1802 / RUDYARD KIPLING

(One) That me and you will settle this matter together: i. e., to he Kings of

Kafiristan.

(Tivo) That you and me will not, while this matter is heing settled, look at

any Liquor, nor any Woman, hlack, white or hrown, so as to get

mixed up with one or the other harmful. (Three) That we conduct ourselves with dignity and discretion and if one of us

gets into trouble the other will stay by him.

Signed by you and me this day.

Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan.

Daniel Dravot.

Both Gentlemen at Large.

"There was no need for the last article," said Carnehan, blushing modestly; "but it looks regular. Now you know the sort of men that loafers are�we are loafers, Dan, until we get out of India�and do you think that we would sign a Contrack like that unless we was in earnest? We have kept away from the two things that make life worth having."

"You won't enjoy your lives much longer if you are going to try this idiotic adventure. Don't set the office on fire," I said, "and go away before nine o'clock."

I left them still poring over the maps and making notes on the back of the "Contrack." "Be sure to come down to the Serai to-morrow," were their parting words.

The Kumharsen Serai is the great foursquare sink of humanity where the strings of camels and horses from the North load and unload. All the nationalities of Central Asia may be found there, and most of the folk of India proper. Balkh and Bokhara there meet Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye-teeth. You can buy ponies, turquoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep and musk in the Kumharsen Serai, and get many strange things for nothing. In the afternoon I went down there to see whether my friends intended to keep their word or were lying about drunk.

A priest attired in fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's paper whirligig.8 Behind was his servant bending under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks of laughter.

"The priest is mad," said a horse-dealer to me. "He is going up to Kabul to sell toys to the Amir.9 He will either be raised to honor or have his head cut off. He came in here this morning and has been behaving madly ever since."

"The witless are under the protection of God," stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg1 in broken Hindi. "They foretell future events."

"Would they could have foretold that my caravan would have been cut up by the Shinwaris almost within shadow of the Pass!"2 grunted the Eusufzai agent of a Rajputana trading-house whose goods had been feloniously diverted into the hands of other robbers just across the Border, and whose misfortunes were the laughing-stock of the bazar. "Ohe, priest, whence come you and whither do you go?"

"From Roum3 have I come," shouted the priest, waving his whirligig; "from

8. Pinwheel. three miles through the mountains. Then on the 9. The ruler of Afghanistan, based in the city of northwest frontier of British India, it now links Kabul. Afghanistan and Pakistan. 1. Person from Uzbekistan. 3. Turkey. 2. The Khyber or Khaiber Pass, running thirty

.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1803

Roum, blown by the breath of a hundred devils across the sea! O thieves, robbers, liars, the blessing of Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and perjurers! Who will take the Protected of God to the North to sell charms that are never still to the Amir? The camels shall not gall,4 the sons shall not fall sick, and the wives shall remain faithful while they are away, of the men who give me place in their caravan. Who wdll assist me to slipper the King of the BOGS'5 with a golden slipper with a silver heel? The protection of Pir Khan be upon his labors!" He spread out the skirts of his gaberdine and pirouetted between the lines of tethered horses.

"There starts a caravan from Peshawur to Kabul in twenty days, Huzrut,"6 said the Eusufzai trader. "My camels go therewith. Do thou also go and bring us good-luck."

"I will go even now!" shouted the priest. "I will depart upon my winged camels, and be at Peshawur in a day! Ho! Hazar7 Mir Khan," he yelled to his servant, "drive out the camels, but let me first mount my own."

He leaped on the back of his beast as it knelt, and, turning round to me, cried:�"Come thou also, Sahib, a little along the road, and I will sell thee a charm�an amulet that shall make thee King of Kafiristan."

Then the light broke upon me, and I followed the two camels out of the Serai till we reached open road and the priest halted.

"What d' you think o' that?" said he in English. "Carnehan can't talk their patter, so I've made him my servant. He makes a handsome servant. 'Tisn't for nothing that I've been knocking about the country for fourteen years. Didn't I do that talk neat? We'll hitch on to a caravan at Peshawur till we get to Jagdallak, and then we'll see if we can get donkeys for our camels, and strike into Kafiristan. Whirligigs for the Amir, O Lor! Put your hand under the camel- bags and tell me what you feel."

I felt the butt of a Martini,8 and another and another. "Twenty of 'em," said Dravot, placidly. "Twenty of 'em, and ammunition to correspond, under the whirligigs and the mud dolls." "Heaven help you if you are caught with those things!" I said. "A Martini is worth her weight in silver among the Pathans."9

"Fifteen hundred rupees of capital�every rupee we could beg, borrow, or steal�are invested on these two camels," said Dravot. "We won't get caught. We're going through the Khaiber with a regular caravan. Who'd touch a poor mad priest?"

"Have you got everything you want?" I asked, overcome with astonishment.

"Not yet, but we shall soon. Give us a memento of your kindness, Brother. You did me a service yesterday, and that time in Marwar. Half my Kingdom shall you have, as the saying is." I slipped a small charm compass from my watch-chain and handed it up to the priest.

"Good-bye," said Dravot, giving me hand cautiously. "It's the last time we'll shake hands with an Englishman these many days. Shake hands with him, Carnehan," he cried, as the second camel passed me.

Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. Then the camels passed away along the dusty road, and I was left alone to wonder. My eye could detect no failure in the disguises. The scene in Serai attested that they were complete

4. Become sore. 7. Get ready. 5. Czar of Russia. 8. Rifle issued to British infantry. 6. Presence (an honorary form of address). 9. The principal tribe in Afghanistan.

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180 4 / RUDYARD KIPLING

to the native mind. There was just the chance, therefore, that Carnehan and Dravot would be able to wander through Afghanistan without detection. But, beyond, they would find death, certain and awful death.

Ten days later a native friend of mine, giving me the news of the day from Peshawur, wound up his letter with:�"There has been much laughter here on account of a certain mad priest who is going in his estimation to sell petty gauds and insignificant trinkets which he ascribes as great charms to H. H.1 the Amir of Bokhara. He passed through Peshawur and associated himself to the Second Summer caravan that goes to Kabul. The merchants are pleased, because through superstition they imagine that such mad fellows bring good- fortune."

The two, then, were beyond the Border. I would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice.

The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again. Summer passed and winter thereafter, and came and passed again. The daily paper continued and I with it, and upon the third summer there fell a hot night, a night-issue, and a strained waiting for something to be telegraphed from the other side of the world, exactly as had happened before. A few great men had died in the past two years, the machines worked with more clatter, and some of the trees in the Office garden were a few feet taller. But that was all the difference.

I passed over to the press-room, and went through just such a scene as I have already described. The nervous tension was stronger than it had been two years before, and I felt the heat more acutely. At three o'clock I cried, "Print off," and turned to go, when there crept to my chair what was left of a man. He was bent into a circle, his head was sunk between his shoulders, and he moved his feet one over the other like a bear. I could hardly see whether he walked or crawled�this rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by name, crying that he was come back. "Can you give me a drink?" he whimpered. "For the Lord's sake, give me a drink!"

I went back to the office, the man following with groans of pain, and I turned up the lamp. "Don't you know me?" he gasped, dropping into a chair, and he turned his drawn face, surmounted by a shock of grey hair, to the light.

I looked at him intently. Once before had I seen eyebrows that met over the nose in an inch-broad black band, but for the life of me I could not tell where. "I don't know you," I said, handing him the whiskey. "What can I do for

youP He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and shivered in spite of the suffocating heat.

"I've come back," he repeated; "and I was the King of Kafiristan�me and Dravot�crowned Kings we was! In this office we settled it�you setting there and giving us the books. I am Peachey�Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan, and you've been setting here ever since�O Lord!"

I was more than a little astonished, and expressed my feelings accordingly.

"It's true," said Carnehan, with a dry cackle, nursing his feet, which were wrapped in rags. "True as gospel. Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads�me and Dravot�poor Dan�oh, poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice, not though I begged of him!"

1. His Highness.

.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1805

"Take the whiskey," I said, "and take your own time. Tell me all you can recollect of everything from beginning to end. You got across the border on your camels, Dravot dressed as a mad priest and you his servant. Do you remember that?"

"I ain't mad�yet, but I shall be that way soon. Of course I remember. Keep looking at me, or maybe my words will go all to pieces. Keep looking at me in my eyes and don't say anything."

I leaned forward and looked into his face as steadily as I could. He dropped one hand upon the table and I grasped it by the wrist. It was twisted like a bird's claw, and upon the back was a ragged, red, diamond-shaped scar.

"No, don't look there. Look at me," said Carnehan.

"That comes afterward, but for the Lord's sake don't distrack me. We left with that caravan, me and Dravot playing all sorts of antics to amuse the people we were with. Dravot used to make us laugh in the evenings when all the people was cooking their dinners�cooking their dinners, and . . . what did they do then? They lit little fires with sparks that went into Dravot's beard, and we all laughed�fit to die. Little red fires they was, going into Dravot's big red beard�so funny." His eyes left mine and he smiled foolishly.

"You went as far as Jagdallak with that caravan," I said, at a venture, "after you had lit those fires. To Jagdallak, where you turned off to try to get into Kafiristan."

"No, we didn't neither. What are you talking about? We turned off before Jagdallak, because we heard the roads was good. But they wasn't good enough for our two camels�mine and Dravot's. When we left the caravan, Dravot took off all his clothes and mine too, and said we would be heathen, because the Kafirs2 didn't allow Mohammedans to talk to them. So we dressed betwixt and between, and such a sight as Daniel Dravot I never saw yet nor expect to see again. He burned half his beard, and slung a sheep-skin over his shoulder, and shaved his head into patterns. He shaved mine, too, and made me wear outrageous things to look like a heathen. That was in a most mountaineous country, and our camels couldn't go along any more because of the mountains. They were tall and black, and coming home I saw them fight like wild goats� there are lots of goats in Kafiristan. And these mountains, they never keep still, no more than goats. Always fighting they are, and don't let you sleep at night."

"Take some more whiskey," I said, very slowly. "What did you and Daniel Dravot do when the camels could go no further because of the rough roads that led into Kafiristan?"

"What did which do? There was a party called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was with Dravot. Shall I tell you about him? He died out there in the cold. Slap from the bridge fell old Peachey, turning and twisting in the air like a penny whirligig that you can sell to the Amir�No; they was two for three ha'pence, those whirligigs, or I am much mistaken and woful sore. And then these camels were no use, and Peachey said to Dravot�'For the Lord's sake, let's get out of this before our heads are chopped off,' and with that they killed the camels all among the mountains, not having anything in particular to eat, but first they took off the boxes with the guns and the ammunition, till two men came along driving four mules. Dravot up and dances in front of them, singing,�'Sell me four mules.' Says the first man,�'IF you are rich enough to buy, you are rich enough to rob;' but before ever he could put his hand to his

2. Non-Muslims.

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180 6 / RUDYARD KIPLING

knife, Dravot breaks his neck over his knee, and the other party runs away. So Carnehan loaded the mules with the rifles that was taken off the camels, and together we starts forward into those bitter cold mountaineous parts, and never a road broader than the back of your hand."

He paused for a moment, while I asked him if he could remember the nature of the country through which he had journeyed.

"I am telling you as straight as I can, but my head isn't as good as it might be. They drove nails through it to make me hear better how Dravot died. The country was mountaineous and the mules were most contrary, and the inhabitants was dispersed and solitary. They went up and up, and down and down, and that other party, Carnehan, was imploring of Dravot not to sing and whistle so loud, for fear of bringing down the tremenjus avalanches. But Dravot says that if a King couldn't sing it wasn't worth being King, and whacked the mules over the rump, and never took no heed for ten cold days. We came to a big level valley all among the mountains, and the mules were near dead, so we killed them, not having anything in special for them or us to eat. We sat upon the boxes, and played odd and even3 with the cartridges that was jolted out.

"Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down that valley, chasing twenty men with bows and arrows, and the row was tremenjus. They was fair men� fairer than you or me�with yellow hair and remarkable well built.4 Says Dravot, unpacking the guns�'This is the beginning of the business. We'll fight for the ten men,' and with that he fires two rifles at the twenty men, and drops one of them at two hundred yards from the rock where we was sitting. The other men began to run, but Carnehan and Dravot sits on the boxes picking them off at all ranges, up and down the valley. Then we goes up to the ten men that had run across the snow too, and they fires a footy5 little arrow at us. Dravot he shoots above their heads and they all falls down flat. Then he walks over and kicks them, and then he lifts them up and shakes hands all round to make them friendly like. He calls them and gives them the boxes to carry, and waves his hand for all the world as though he was King already. They takes the boxes and him across the valley and up the hill into a pine wood on the top, where there was half a dozen big stone idols. Dravot he goes to the biggest�a fellow they call Imbra�and lays a rifle and a cartridge at his feet, rubbing his nose respectful with his own nose, patting him on the head, and saluting in front of it. He turns round to the men and nods his head, and says,�'That's all right. I'm in the know too, and all these old jim-jams6 are my friends.' Then he opens his mouth and points down it, and when the first man brings him food, he says�'No;' and when the second man brings him food, he says�'No;' but when one of the old priests and the boss of the village brings him food, he says�'Yes;' very haughty, and eats it slow. That was how we came to our first village, without any trouble, just as though we had tumbled from the skies. Rut we tumbled from one of those damned rope-bridges, you see, and you couldn't expect a man to laugh much after that."

"Take some more whiskey and go on," I said. "That was the first village you came into. How did you get to be King?" "I wasn't King," said Carnehan. "Dravot he was the King, and a handsome

3. A game in which a player guesses the number tury B.C.E. of objects that another player is holding. 5. Paltry, insignificant. 4. There was a legend that Alexander the Great 6. Knickknacks. had left a Greek colony in the area in the 4th cen

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1807

man he looked with the gold crown on his head and all. Him and the other party stayed in that village, and every morning Dravot sat by the side of old Imbra, and the people came and worshipped. That was Dravot's order. Then a lot of men came into the valley, and Carnehan and Dravot picks them off with the rifles before they knew where they was, and runs down into the valley and up again the other side, and finds another village, same as the first one, and the people all falls down flat on their faces, and Dravot says,�'Now what is the trouble between you two villages?' and the people points to a woman, as fair as you or me, that was carried off, and Dravot takes her back to the first village and counts up the dead�eight there was. For each dead man Dravot pours a little milk on the ground and waves his arms like a whirligig and That's all right,' says he. Then he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each village by the arm and walks them down into the valley, and shows them how to scratch a line with a spear right down the valley, and gives each a sod of turf from both sides o' the line. Then all the people comes down and shouts like the devil and all, and Dravot says,�'Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and multiply,'7 which they did, though they didn't understand. Then we asks the names of things in their lingo�bread and water and fire and idols and such, and Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the idol, and says he must sit there and judge the people, and if anything goes wrong he is to be shot.

"Next week they was all turning up the land in the valley as quiet as bees and much prettier, and the priests heard all the complaints and told Dravot in dumb show what it was about. 'That's just the beginning,' says Dravot. They think we're Gods.' He and Carnehan picks out twenty good men and shows them how to click off a rifle, and form fours, and advance in line, and they was very pleased to do so, and clever to see the hang of it. Then he takes out his pipe and his baccy-pouch and leaves one at one village and one at the other, and off we two goes to see what was to be done in the next valley. That was all rock, and there was a little village there, and Carnehan says,�'Send 'em to the old valley to plant,' and takes 'em there and gives 'em some land that wasn't took before. They were a poor lot, and we blooded 'em with a kid8 before letting 'em into the new Kingdom. That was to impress the people, and then they settled down quiet, and Carnehan went back to Dravot, who had got into another valley, all snow and ice and most mountaineous. There was no people there, and the Army got afraid, so Dravot shoots one of them, and goes on till he finds some people in a village, and the Army explains that unless the people wants to be killed they had better not shoot their little matchlocks;9 for they had matchlocks. We makes friends with the priest and I stays there alone with two of the Army, teaching the men how to drill, and a thundering big Chief comes across the snow with kettle-drums and horns twanging, because he heard there was a new God kicking about. Carnehan sights for the brown1 of the men half a mile across the snow and wings one of them. Then he sends a message to the Chief that, unless he wished to be killed, he must come and shake hands with me and leave his arms behind. The Chief comes alone first, and Carnehan shakes hands with him and whirls his arms about, same as Dravot used, and very much surprised that Chief was, and strokes my

7. God's command to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1. A hunting term, meaning to fire into the middle 1.28). of a group of game birds rather than aiming at a 8. I.e., a kid goat, a fake religious ritual. particular one. 9. Primitive muskets.

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180 8 / RUDYARD KIPLING

eyebrows. Then Carnehan goes alone to the Chief, and asks him in dumb show if he had an enemy he hated. 'I have,' says the Chief. So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill, and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chief's men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy. So we took that village too, and I gives the Chief a rag from my coat and says, 'Occupy till I come;'2 which was scriptural. By way of a reminder, when me and the Army was eighteen hundred yards away, I drops a bullet near him standing on the snow, and all the people falls flat on their faces. Then I sends a letter to Dravot, wherever he be by land or by sea."

At the risk of throwing the creature out of train I interrupted,�"How could you write a letter up yonder?"

"The letter?�Oh!�The letter! Keep looking at me between the eyes, please. It was a string-talk letter, that we'd learned the way of it from a blind beggar in the Punjab."

I remember that there had once come to the office a blind man with a knotted twig and a piece of string which he wound round the twig according to some cipher of his own. He could, after the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds; and tried to teach me his method, but failed.

"I sent that letter to Dravot," said Carnehan; "and told him to come back because this Kingdom was growing too big for me to handle, and then I struck for the first valley, to see how the priests were working. They called the village we took along with the Chief, Bashkai, and the first village we took, Er-Heb. The priests at Er-Heb was doing all right, but they had a lot of pending cases about land to show me, and some men from another village had been firing arrows at night. I went out and looked for that village and fired four rounds at it from a thousand yards. That used all the cartridges I cared to spend, and I waited for Dravot, who had been away two or three months, and I kept my people quiet.

"One morning I heard the devil's own noise of drums and horns, and Dan Dravot marches down the hill with his Army and a tail of hundreds of men, and, which was the most amazing�a great gold crown on his head. 'My Gord, Carnehan,' says Daniel, 'this is a tremenjus business, and we've got the whole country as far as it's worth having. I am the son of Alexander by Queen Semiramis, 3 and you're my younger brother and a God too! It's the biggest thing we've ever seen. I've been marching and fighting for six weeks with the Army, and every footy4 little village for fifty miles has come in rejoiceful; and more than that, I've got the key of the whole show, as you'll see, and I've got a crown for you! I told 'em to make two of 'em at a place called Shu, where the gold lies in the rock like suet in mutton. Gold I've seen, and turquoise I've kicked out of the cliffs, and there's garnets in the sands of the river, and here's a chunk of amber that a man brought me. Call up all the priests and, here, take your crown.'

"One of the men opens a black hair bag and I slips the crown on. It was too small and too heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered gold it was�five pound weight, like a hoop of a barrel.

2. In Jesus' parable of the talents, a nobleman 3. Legendary Assyrian queen, gives each of his servants a coin to invest with 4. Worthless, those instructions (Luke 19.13).

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1809

" 'Peachey,' says Dravot, 'we don't want to fight no more. The Craft's5 the trick, so help me!' and he brings forward that same Chief that I left at Bashkai� Billy Fish we called him afterward, because he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan6 in the old days. 'Shake hands with him,' says Dravot, and I shook hands and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me the Grip.7 I said nothing, but tried him with the Fellow Craft Grip. He answers, all right, and I tried the Master's Grip, but that was a slip. 'A Fellow Craft he is!' I says to Dan. 'Does he know the word?' 'He does,' says Dan, 'and all the priests know. It's a miracle! The Chiefs and the priests can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that's very like ours, and they've cut the marks on the rocks, but they don't know the Third Degree, and they've come to find out. It's Gord's Truth. I've known these long years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A God and a Grand- Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we'll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the villages.'

" 'It's against all the law,' I says, 'holding a Lodge without warrant from any one; and we never held office in any Lodge.'

" 'It's a master-stroke of policy,' says Dravot. 'It means running the country as easy as a four-wheeled bogy8 on a down grade. We can't stop to inquire now, or they'll turn against us. I've forty Chiefs at my heel, and passed and raised according to their merit they shall be. Billet these men on the villages and see that we run up a Lodge of some kind. The temple of Imbra will do for the Lodge-room. The women must make aprons as you show them. I'll hold a levee9 of Chiefs to-night and Lodge to-morrow.'

"I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn't such a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us. I showed the priests' families how to make aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot's apron the blue border and marks was made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not cloth. We took a great square stone in the temple for the Master's chair, and little stones for the officers' chairs, and painted the black pavement with white squares, and did what we could to make things regular.

"At the levee which was held that night on the hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and me were Gods and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they was so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends. We gave them names according as they was like men we had known in India�Billy Fish, Holly Wilworth, Pikky Kergan that was Bazar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on and so on.

"The most amazing miracle was at Lodge next night. One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we'd have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn't know what the men knew. The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the Master's apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. 'It's all up now,' I says. 'That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!'

5. Freemasonry. 7. Freemason handshake. 6. The Bolan Pass, which was brought under Brit-8. Railway truck. ish control in 1879 during the Second Afghan War. 9. Gathering.

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18 10 / RUDYARD KIPLING

Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master's chair�which was to say the stone of Imbra. The priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and presently he shows all the other priests the Master's Mark, same as was on Dravot's apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of Imbra knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot's feet and kisses 'em. 'Luck again,' says Dravot, across the Lodge to me, 'they say it's the missing Mark that no one could understand the why of. We're more than safe now.' Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and says:�'By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o' the country, and King of Kafiristan equally with Peachey!' At that he puts on his crown and I puts on mine�I was doing Senior Warden�and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. It was a amazing miracle! The priests moved in Lodge through the first two degrees almost without telling, as if the memory was coming back to them. After that, Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy�high priests and Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I can tell you we scared the soul out of him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but it served our turn. We didn't raise more than ten of the biggest men, because we didn't want to make the Degree common. And they was clamoring to be raised.

" 'In another six months,' says Dravot, 'we'll hold another Communication1 and see how you are working.' Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the other and were fair sick and tired of it. And when they wasn't doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. 'You can fight those when they come into our country,' says Dravot. 'Tell off2 every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more so long as he does well, and I know that you won't cheat me because you're white people�sons of Alexander�and not like common, black Mohammedans. You are my people and by God,' says he, running off into English at the end�'I'll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I'll die in the making!'

"I can't tell all we did for the next six months because Dravot did a lot I couldn't see the hang off, and he learned their lingo in a way I never could. My work was to help the people plough, and now and again go out with some of the Army and see what the other villages were doing, and make 'em throw rope-bridges across the ravines which cut up the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, but when he walked up and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red beard of his with both fists I knew he was thinking plans I could not advise him about, and I just waited for orders.

"But Dravot never showed me disrespect before the people. They were afraid of me and the Army, but they loved Dan. He was the best of friends with the priests and the Chiefs; but any one could come across the hills with a complaint and Dravot would hear him out fair, and call four priests together and say what was to be done. He used to call in Billy Fish from Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from Shu, and an old Chief we called Kafuzelum�it was like enough to his real name�and hold councils with 'em when there was any fighting to

I. In Freemasonry an official Lodge meeting, in 2. Count off. which all members have a part.

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1811

be done in small villages. That was his Council of War, and the four priests of Bashkai, Shu, Khawak, and Madora was his Privy Council. Between the lot of 'em they sent me, with forty men and twenty rifles, and sixty men carrying turquoises, into the Ghorband country to buy those hand-made Martini rifles, that come out of the Amir's workshops at Kabul, from one of the Amir's Herati regiments that would have sold the very teeth out of their mouths for turquoises.

"I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the Governor there the pick of my baskets for hush-money, and bribed the Colonel of the regiment some more, and, between the two and the tribes-people, we got more than a hundred handmade Martinis, a hundred good Kohat Jezails3 that'll throw to six hundred yards, and forty man-loads of very bad ammunition for the rifles. I came back with what I had, and distributed 'em among the men that the Chiefs sent to me to drill. Dravot was too busy to attend to those things, but the old Army that we first made helped me, and we turned out five hundred men that could drill, and two hundred that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. Even those cork-screwed, hand-made guns was a miracle to them. Dravot talked big about powder-shops and factories, walking up and down in the pine wood when the winter was coming on.

" 'I won't make a Nation,' says he. 'I'll make an Empire! These men aren't niggers; they're English! Look at their eyes�look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit, on chairs in their own houses. They're the Lost Tribes,4 or something like it, and they've grown to be English. I'll take a census in the spring if the priests don't get frightened. There must be a fair two million of 'em in these hills. The villages are full o' little children. Two million people� two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men�and all English! They only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty thousand men, ready to cut in on Russia's right flank when she tries for India! Peachey, man,' he says, chewing his beard in great hunks, 'we shall be Emperors�Emperors of the Earth! Rajah Brooke will be a suckling to us. I'll treat with the Viceroy5 on equal terms. I'll ask him to send me twelve picked English�twelve that I know of�to help us govern a bit. There's Mackray, Sergeant-pensioner at Segowli� many's the good dinner he's given me, and his wife a pair of trousers. There's Donkin, the Warder of Tounghoo Jail; there's hundreds that I could lay my hand on if I was in India. The Viceroy shall do it for me. I'll send a man through in the spring for those men, and I'll write for a dispensation from the Grand- Lodge for what I've done as Grand-Master. That�and all the Sniders6 that'll be thrown out when the native troops in India take up the Martini. They'll be worn smooth, but they'll do for fighting in these hills. Twelve English, a hundred thousand Sniders run through the Amir's country in driblets�I'd be content with twenty thousand in one year�and we'd be an Empire. When everything was shipshape, I'd hand over the crown�this crown I'm wearing now�to Queen Victoria on my knees, and she'd say: "Rise up, Sir Daniel Dravot." Oh, it's big! It's big, I tell you! But there's so much to be done in every place�Bashkai, Khawak, Shu, and everywhere else.'

" What is it?' I says. 'There are no more men coming in to be drilled this

autumn. Look at those fat, black clouds. They're bringing the snow.'

3. Afghan muskets. 5. Head of the British administration in India. 4. Of the twelve original Hebrew tribes mentioned Rajah Brooke: see n. 3, p. 1 800. "Suckling": infant. in the Bible, ten were lost by assimilating with 6. Older rifles being replaced by Martinis. neighboring peoples.

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181 2 / RUDYARD KIPLING

" 'It isn't that,' says Daniel, putting his hand very hard on my shoulder; 'and I don't wish to say anything that's against you, for no other living man would have followed me and made me what I am as you have done. You're a first- class Commander-in-Chief, and the people know you; but�it's a big country, and somehow you can't help me, Peachey, in the way I want to be helped.'

" 'Go to your blasted priests, then!' I said, and I was sorry when I made that remark, but it did hurt me sore to find Daniel talking so superior when I'd drilled all the men, and done all he told me.

" 'Don't let's quarrel, Peachey,' says Daniel, without cursing. 'You're a King, too, and the half of this Kingdom is yours; but can't you see, Peachey, we want cleverer men than us now�three or four of 'em, that we can scatter about for our Deputies. It's a hugeous great State, and I can't always tell the right thing to do, and I haven't time for all I want to do, and here's the winter coming on and all.' He put half his beard into his mouth, and it was as red as the gold of his crown.

" 'I'm sorry, Daniel,' says I. 'I've done all I could. I've drilled the men and shown the people how to stack their oats better; and I've brought in those tinware rifles from Ghorband�but I know what you're driving at. I take it Kings always feel oppressed that way.'

" 'There's another thing too,' says Dravot, walking up and down. 'The winter's coming and these people won't be giving much trouble and if they do we can't move about. I want a wife.'

" 'For Gord's sake leave the women alone!' I says. 'We've both got all the work we can, though I am a fool. Remember the Contrack, and keep clear o' women.'

" 'The Contrack only lasted till such time as we was Kings; and Kings we have been these months past,' says Dravot, weighing his crown in his hand. 'You go get a wife too, Peachey�a nice, strappin', plump girl that'll keep you warm in the winter. They're prettier than English girls, and we can take the pick of 'em. Boil 'em once or twice in hot water, and they'll come as fair as chicken and ham.'

" 'Don't tempt me!' I says. 'I will not have any dealings with a woman not till we are a dam' side more settled than we are now. I've been doing the work o' two men, and you've been doing the work o' three. Let's lie off a bit, and see if we can get some better tobacco from Afghan country and run in some good liquor; but no women.'

" 'Who's talking o' women?' says Dravot. 'I said wife�a Queen to breed a King's son for the King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe, that'll make them your blood-brothers, and that'll lie by your side and tell you all the people thinks about you and their own affairs. That's what I want.'

" 'Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept at Mogul Serai when I was a plate-layer?'7 says I. 'A fat lot o' good she was to me. She taught me the lingo and one or two other things; but what happened? She ran away with the Station-master's servant and half my month's pay. Then she turned up at Dadur Junction in tow of a half-caste, and had the impidence to say I was her husband�all among the drivers in the running-shed!'

" 'We've done with that,' says Dravot. 'These women are whiter than you or me, and a Queen I will have for the winter months.' " 'For the last time o' asking, Dan, do not,' I says. 'It'll only bring us harm.

7. Layer of railway track.

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1813

The Bible says that Kings ain't to waste their strength on women,8 'specially when they've got a new raw Kingdom to work over.'

" 'For the last time of answering, I will,' said Dravot, and he went away through the pine-trees looking like a big red devil. The low sun hit his crown and beard on one side and the two blazed like hot coals.

"But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan thought. He put it before the Council, and there was no answer till Billy Fish said that he'd better ask the girls. Dravot damned them all round. 'What's wrong with me?' he shouts, standing by the idol Imbra. 'Am I a dog or am I not enough of a man for your wenches? Haven't I put the shadow of my hand over this country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?' It was me really, but Dravot was too angry to remember. 'Who brought your guns? Who repaired the bridges? Who's the Grand-Master of the sign cut in the stone?' and he thumped his hand on the block that he used to sit on in Lodge, and at Council, which opened like Lodge always. Billy Fish said nothing, and no more did the others. 'Keep your hair on, Dan,' said I; 'and ask the girls. That's how it's done at Home, and these people are quite English.'

" 'The marriage of the King is a matter of State,' says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he was going against his better mind. He walked out of the Council-room, and the others sat still, looking at the ground.

" 'Billy Fish,' says I to the Chief of Bashkai, 'what's the difficulty here? A straight answer to a true friend,' 'You know,' says Billy Fish. 'How should a man tell you who know everything? How can daughters of men marry Gods or Devils? It's not proper.'

"I remembered something like that in the Bible;9 but if, after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed we were Gods, it wasn't for me to undeceive them.

" 'A God can do anything,' says I. 'If the King is fond of a girl he'll not let her die.' 'She'll have to,' said Billy Fish. 'There are all sorts of Gods and Devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one of them and isn't seen any more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the Gods know that. We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.'

"I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.

" 'I'll have no nonsense of that kind,' says Dan. 'I don't want to interfere with your customs, but I'll take my own wife.' 'The girl's a little bit afraid,' says the priest. 'She thinks she's going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.'

" 'Hearten her very tender, then,' says Dravot, 'or I'll hearten you with the butt of a gun so that you'll never want to be heartened again.' He licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking about more than half the night, thinking of the wife that he was going to get in the morning. I wasn't any means comfortable, for I knew that dealings with a woman in foreign parts, though you

8. "Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy 9. "That the sons of God saw the daughters of men ways to that which destroyeth kings" (Proverbs that they were fair; and they took them wives of all 31.3). which they chose" (Genesis 6.2).

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181 4 / RUDYARD KIPLING

was a crowned King twenty times over, could not but be risky. I got up very early in the morning while Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests talking together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking together too, and they looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.

" 'What is up, Fish?' I says to the Bashkai man, who was wrapped up in his furs and looking splendid to behold.

" 'I can't rightly say,' says he; 'but if you can induce the King to drop all this nonsense about marriage, you'll be doing him and me and yourself a great service.'

" 'That 1 do believe,' says I. 'But sure, you know, Billy, as well as me, having fought against and for us, that the King and me are nothing more than two of the finest men that God Almighty ever made. Nothing more, I do assure you.'

" 'That may be,' says Billy Fish, 'and yet I should be sorry if it was.' He sinks his head upon his great fur cloak for a minute and thinks. 'King,' says he, 'be you man or God or Devil, I'll stick by you to-day. I have twenty of my men with me, and they will follow me. We'll go to Bashkai until the storm blows over.'

"A little snow had fallen in the night, and everything was white except the greasy fat clouds that blew down and down from the north. Dravot came out with his crown on his head, swinging his arms and stamping his feet, and looking more pleased than Punch.1

" 'For the last time, drop it, Dan,' says I, in a whisper. 'Billy Fish here says that there will be a row.'

" 'A row among my people!' says Dravot. 'Not much. Peachey, you're a fool not to get a wife too. Where's the girl?' says he, with a voice as loud as the braying of a jackass. 'Call up all the Chiefs and priests, and let the Emperor see if his wife suits him.'

"There was no need to call any one. They were all there leaning on their guns and spears round the clearing in the centre of the pine wood. A deputation of priests went down to the little temple to bring up the girl, and the horns blew up fit to wake the dead. Billy Fish saunters round and gets as close to Daniel as he could, and behind him stood his twenty men with matchlocks. Not a man of them under six feet. I was next to Dravot, and behind me was twenty men of the regular Army. Up comes the girl, and a strapping wench she was, covered with silver and turquoises, but white as death, and looking back every minute at the priests.

" 'She'll do,' said Dan, looking her over. 'What's to be afraid of, lass? Come and kiss me.' He puts his arm round her. She shuts her eyes, gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes her face in the side of Dan's flaming red beard.

" 'The slut's bitten me!' says he, clapping his hand to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand was red with blood. Billy Fish and two of his matchlock- men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and drags him into the Bashkai lot, while the priests howl in their lingo,�'Neither God nor Devil, but a man!' I was all taken aback, for a priest cut at me in front, and the Army behind began firing into the Bashkai men.

" 'God A-mighty!' says Dan. 'What is the meaning o' this?' " 'Come back! Come away!' says Billy Fish. 'Ruin and Mutiny is the matter. We'll break for Rashkai if we can.'

1. Common expression: the character in the Punch-and-Judy puppet show has a fixed grin and is delighted with his evil deeds.

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THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1815

"I tried to give some sort of orders to my men�the men o' the regular Army�but it was no use, so I fired into the brown of 'em with an English Martini and drilled three beggars in a line. The valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was shrieking, 'Not a God nor a Devil, but only a man!' The Bashkai troops stuck to Billy Fish all they were worth, but their matchlocks wasn't half as good as the Kabul breech-loaders, and four of them dropped. Dan was bellowing like a bull, for he was very wrathy; and Billy Fish had a hard job to prevent him running out at the crowd.

" 'We can't stand,' says Billy Fish. 'Make a run for it down the valley! The whole place is against us.' The matchlock-men ran, and we went down the valley in spite of Dravot's protestations. He was swearing horribly and crying out that he was a King. The priests rolled great stones on us, and the regular Army fired hard, and there wasn't more than six men, not counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that came down to the bottom of the valley alive.

"Then they stopped firing and the horns in the temple blew again. 'Come away�for Gord's sake come away!' says Billy Fish. 'They'll send runners out to all the villages before ever we get to Bashkai. I can protect you there, but I can't do anything now.'

"My own notion is that Dan began to go mad in his head from that hour. He stared up and down like a stuck pig. Then he was all for walking back alone and killing the priests with his bare hands; which he could have done. 'An Emperor am I,' says Daniel, 'and next year 1 shall be a Knight of the Queen.'

" 'All right, Dan,' says I; 'but come along now while there's time.'

" 'It's your fault,' says he, 'for not looking after your Army better. There was mutiny in the midst and you didn't know�you damned engine-driving, plate- laying, missionary's-pass-hunting hound!' He sat upon a rock and called me every foul name he could lay tongue to. I was too heart-sick to care, though it was all his foolishness that brought the smash.

" 'I'm sorry, Dan,' says I, 'but there's no accounting for natives. This business is our Fifty-Seven.2 Maybe we'll make something out of it yet, when we've got to Bashkai.'

" 'Let's get to Bashkai, then,' says Dan, 'and, by God, when I come back here again I'll sweep the valley so there isn't a bug in a blanket left!' "We walked all that day, and all that night Dan was stumping up and down on the snow, chewing his beard and muttering to himself.

" 'There's no hope o' getting clear,' said Billy Fish. 'The priests will have sent runners to the villages to say that you are only men. Why didn't you stick on as Gods till things was more settled? I'm a dead man,' says Billy Fish, and he throws himself down on the snow and begins to pray to his Gods.

"Next morning we was in a cruel bad country�all up and down, no level ground at all, and no food either. The six Bashkai men looked at Billy Fish hungry-wise as if they wanted to ask something, but they said never a word. At noon we came to the top of a flat mountain all covered with snow, and when we climbed up into it, behold, there was an Army in position waiting in the middle!

" 'The runners have been very quick,' says Billy Fish, with a little bit of a laugh. 'They are waiting for us.' "Three or four men began to fire from the enemy's side, and a chance shot

2. Mutiny of 1857, when regiments of the Bengal army rebelled against their British officers.

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181 6 / RUDYARD KIPLING

took Daniel in the calf of the leg. That brought him to his senses. He looks across the snow at the Army, and sees the rifles that we had brought into the country.

" 'We're done for,' says he. 'They are Englishmen, these people,�and it's my blasted nonsense that has brought you to this. Get back, Billy Fish, and take your men away; you've done what you could, and now cut for it. Carnehan,' says he, 'shake hands with me and go along with Billy. Maybe they won't kill you. I'll go and meet 'em alone. It's me that did it. Me, the King!'

" 'Go!' says I. 'Go to Hell, Dan. I'm with you here. Billy Fish, you clear out, and we two will meet those folk.'

" 'I'm a Chief,' says Billy Fish, quite quiet. 'I stay with you. My men can go.'

"The Bashkai fellows didn't wait for a second word, but ran off, and Dan and me and Billy Fish walked across to where the drums were drumming and the horns were horning. It was cold�awful cold. I've got that cold in the back of my head now. There's a lump of it there."

The punkah-coolies3 had gone to sleep. Two kerosene lamps were blazing in the office, and the perspiration poured down my face and splashed on the blotter as I leaned forward. Carnehan was shivering, and I feared that his mind might go. I wiped my face, took a fresh grip of the piteously mangled hands, and said: "What happened after that?"

The momentary shift of my eyes had broken the clear current.

"What was you pleased to say?" whined Carnehan. "They took them without any sound. Not a little whisper all along the snow, not though the King knocked down the first man that set hand on him�not though old Peachey fired his last cartridge into the brown of 'em. Not a single solitary sound did those swines make. They just closed up tight, and I tell you their furs stunk. There was a man called Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir, then and there, like a pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says:�'We've had a dashed fine run for our money. What's coming next?' But Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he didn't neither. The King lost his head, so he did, all along o' one of those cunning rope-bridges. Kindly let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted this way. They marched him a mile across that snow to a rope-bridge over a ravine with a river at the bottom. You may have seen such. They prodded him behind like an ox. 'Damn your eyes!' says the King. 'D'you suppose I can't die like a gentleman?' He turns to Peachey�Peachey that was crying like a child. 'I've brought you to this, Peachey,' says he. 'Brought you out of your happy life to be killed in Kafiristan, where you was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor's forces. Say you forgive me, Peachey.' 'I do,' says Peachey. 'Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.' 'Shake hands, Peachey,' says he. 'I'm going now. Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing ropes, 'Cut, you beggars,' he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.

"But do you know what they did to Peachey between two pine trees? They crucified him, Sir, as Peachey's hand will show. They used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet; and he didn't die. He hung there and screamed, and

3. Servants who operate punkahs, or fans.

.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING / 1817

they took him down next day, and said it was a miracle that he wasn't dead. They took him down�poor old Peachey that hadn't done them any harm� that hadn't done them any . . ."

He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning like a child for some ten minutes.

"They was cruel enough to feed him up in the temple, because they said he was more of a God than old Daniel that was a man. Then they turned him out on the snow, and told him to go home, and Peachey came home in about a year, begging along the roads quite safe; for Daniel Dravot he walked before and said:�'Come along, Peachey. It's a big thing we're doing.' The mountains they danced at night, and the mountains they tried to fall on Peachey's head, but Dan he held up his hand, and Peachey came along bent double. He never let go of Dan's hand, and he never let go of Dan's head. They gave it to him as a present in the temple, to remind him not to come again, and though the crown was pure gold, and Peachey was starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You knew Dravot, Sir! You knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look at him now!"

He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist; brought out a black horsehair bag embroidered with silver thread; and shook therefrom on to my table�the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot! The morning sun that had long been paling the lamps struck the red beard and blind, sunken eyes; struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold studded with raw turquoises, that Carnehan placed tenderly on the battered temples.

"You behold now," said Carnehan, "the Emperor in his habit as he lived4� the King of Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel that was a monarch once!"

I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements manifold, I recognized the head of the man of Marwar Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted to stop him. He was not fit to walk abroad. "Let me take away the whiskey, and give me a little money," he gasped. "I was a King once. I'll go to the Deputy Commissioner and ask to set in the Poorhouse till I get my health. No, thank you, I can't wait till you get a carriage for me. I've urgent private affairs�in the south�at Marwar."

He shambled out of the office and departed in the direction of the Deputy Commissioner's house. That day at noon I had occasion to go down the blinding hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawling along the white dust of the roadside, his hat in his hand, quavering dolorously after the fashion of street- singers at Home. There was not a soul in sight, and he was out of all possible earshot of the houses. And he sang through his nose, turning his head from right to left:

"The Son of Man goes forth to war, A golden crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams afar� Who follows in his train?"5

I waited to hear no more, but put the poor wretch into my carriage and drove him off to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the Asylum.

4. Allusion to Hamlet's description of his father's 1826), corrected in later editions to the actual ghost: "My father, in his habit as he lived" (Shake-words of the first line: "The Son of God goes forth speare, Hatnlet 3.4.126). to war." 5. A well-known hymn, by Reginald Heber (1783�

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181 8 / RUDYARD KIPLING

He repeated the hymn twice while he was with me, whom he did not in the least recognize, and I left him singing it to the missionary. Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the Superintendent of the Asylum.

"He was admitted suffering from sunstroke. He died early yesterday morning," said the Superintendent. "Is it true that he was half an hour bareheaded in the sun at midday?"

"Yes," said I, "but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him by

any chance when he died?" "Not to my knowledge," said the Superintendent. And there the matter rests.

1888

Danny Deever

"What are the bugles blowin' for?" said Files-on-Parade.1 "To turn you out, to turn you out," the Colour-Sergeant2 said. "What makes you look so white, so white?" said Files-on-Parade. "I'm dreadin' what I've got to watch," the Colour-Sergeant said.

For they're hangin' Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play, The regiment's in 'ollow square3�they're hangin' him today; They've taken of his buttons off an' cut his stripes4 away, An they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'.

"What makes the rear rank breathe so 'ard?" said Files-on-Parade. "It's bitter cold, it's bitter cold," the Colour-Sergeant said. "What makes that front-rank man fall down?" said Files-on-Parade. "A touch o' sun, a touch o' sun," the Colour-Sergeant said.

They are hangin' Danny Deever, they are marchin' of 'im round, They 'ave 'alted Danny Deever by 'is coffin on the ground; An' 'e'll swing in 'arf a minute for a sneakin' shootin' hound� O they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'!

" 'Is cot was right-'and cot to mine," said Files-on-Parade. " 'E's sleepin' out an' far tonight," the Colour-Sergeant said. "I've drunk 'is beer a score o' times," said Files-on-Parade. " 'E's drinkin bitter beer5 alone," the Colour-Sergeant said.

They are hangin' Danny Deever, you must mark 'im to 'is place, For 'e shot a comrade sleepin'�you must look 'im in the face; Nine 'undred of 'is county6 an' the Regiment's disgrace, While they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'.

"What's that so black agin the sun?" said Files-on-Parade. "It's Danny fightin' 'ard for life," the Colour-Sergeant said.

1. Army private. "Files" here should be spoken as 5. Or simply "bitter," a favorite variety of beer two syllables (fy-ulls). drunk in English pubs. The word bitter thus 2. High-ranking noncommissioned officer. becomes a grim pun. 3. Ceremonial formation: the troops line four 6. English regiments often bear the name of a par- sides of a parade square, facing inward. ticular county from which most of its members 4. Chevrons denoting rank, worn by corporals and have been recruited (e.g., the Lancashire Fusilsergeants on the sleeves of their tunics. iers).

.

THE WIDOW AT WINDSOR / 1819

"What's that that whimpers over'ead?" said Files-on-Parade. "It's Danny's soul that's passin' now," the Colour-Sergeant said. For they're done with Danny Deever, you can 'ear the quickstep play,

30 The regiment's in column, an' they're marchin' us away; Ho! the young recruits are shakin', an' they'll want their beer today, After hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'.

1890

The Widow at Windsor

'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor With a hairy1 gold crown on 'er 'ead? She 'as ships on the foam�she 'as millions at 'ome, An' she pays us poor beggars in red.2 5 (Ow, poor beggars in red!) There's 'er nick3 on the cavalry 'orses, There's 'er mark4 on the medical stores� An' 'er troopers0 you'll find with a fair wind be'ind troopships That takes us to various wars, io (Poor beggars!�barbarious wars!) Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor, An' 'ere's to the stores an' the guns, The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forces O' Missis Victorier's sons. 15 (Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!)

Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor, For 'alf o' Creation she owns: We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword an' the flame, An' we've salted it down with our bones. 20 (Poor beggars!�it's blue with our bones!) Hands off o' the sons o' the widow, Hands off o' the goods in 'er shop, For the kings must come down an' the emperors frown When the Widow at Windsor says "Stop!" 25 (Poor beggars!�we're sent to say "Stop!") Then 'ere's to the Lodge o' the Widow, From the Pole to the Tropics it runs� To the Lodge that we tile with the rank an' the file, An' open in form with the guns.5 30 (Poor beggars!�it's always they guns!)

1. Airy, lofty. London Cockney speech tradition-5. Here, as in "The Man Who Would Be King," ally drops the hs from words that start with this Kipling employs terms and concepts from Free- letter, and sometimes adds an li to the beginning masonry (see n. 2, p. 1794). Victoria's "Lodge" (her of words that start with a vowel. Masonic branch, or district) traverses the globe 2. British military uniforms were bright red. ("From the Pole to the Tropics"); the soldiers 3. A nick on one of their hoofs identified army patrol its perimeters (to "tile" is to guard the door horses as property of the Crown. of a Masonic lodge), and gunfire stands in for the 4. The queen's mark: "V.R.I." (Victoria Regitia et Masons' formal opening ceremonies. lmperatrix, "Victoria Queen and Empress").

.

182 0 / RUDYARD KIPLING

We 'ave 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor, It's safest to leave 'er alone: For 'er sentries we stand by the sea an' the land Wherever the bugles are blown.6 35 (Poor beggars!�an' don't we get blown!) Take 'old o' the Wings o' the Mornin',7 An' flop round the earth till you're dead; But you won't get away from the tune that they play To the bloomin' old rag� over'ead. i.e., the flag 40 (Poor beggars!�it's 'ot over'ead!) Then 'ere's to the sons o' the Widow, Wherever, 'owever they roam. 'Ere's all they desire, an' if they require A speedy return to their 'ome. 45 (Poor beggars!�they'll never see 'ome!) 1892

Recessional1

1897

God of our fathers, known of old� Lord of our far-flung battle-line� Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine� 5 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet Lest we forget�lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies� The Captains and the Kings depart� Still stands Thine ancient Sacrifice,

io An humble and a contrite heart.2 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget�lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away� On dune and headland sinks the fire3� I? Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!4 Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget�lest we forget!

6. Allusion to W. E. Henley's poem "Pro Rege refrain�"Lest we forget"�gained additional Nostro" (1892; see p. 1642). poignancy: it was employed as an epitaph on

7. Psalm 139.9. countless war memorials. 1. A hymn sung as the clergy and choir leave a 2. Cf. Psalm 51.17: "The sacrifices of God are a church in procession at the end of a service. Kip-broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God,

ling's hymn was written on the occasion of the thou wilt not despise."

Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniver-3. Bonfires were lit on high ground all over Britain

sary of Queen Victoria's reign, celebrations that on the night of the Jubilee.

had prompted a good deal of boasting in the press 4. Once capitals of great empires. The ruins of

about the greatness of her empire. "Recessional" Nineveh, in Assyria, were discovered buried in

was first published in the London Times, and Kip-desert sands by British archaeologists in the 1850s.

ling refused to accept any payment for its publi-Tyre, in Phoenicia, had dwindled into a small Leb

cation, then or later. After World War I the poem's anese town.

.

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN / 1821

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

20 Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe�

Such boasting as the Gentiles use

Or lesser breeds without the Law5�

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget�lest we forget!

25 For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube� and iron shard�6 cannon, rifle All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not Thee to guard� For frantic boast and foolish word, io Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

1897 1897,1899

The White Man's Burden1

Take up the White Man's burden� Send forth the best ye breed� Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; 5 To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild� Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden� io In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain, 15 To seek another's profit, And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden� The savage wars of peace� Fill full the mouth of Famine 20 And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch Sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hope to nought.

5. Cf. Romans 2.14: "For when the Gentiles, Jubilee in 1897, but Kipling abandoned it in favor which have not the law, do by nature the things of "Recessional." He returned to the poem when

contained in the law, these, having not the law, are disagreements between Spain and the United

a law unto themselves." States over Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and else

6. Cf. Psalms 20.7: "Some trust in chariots, and where sparked the Spanish-American War in some in horses, but we will remember the name of 1 898. In its revised form the poem reacts to resis

the Lord our God." tance in the Philippines to the United States'

1. This poem was conceived for Queen Victoria's assumption of colonial power.

.

1822 / RUDYARD KIPLING

25 Take up the White Man's burden� No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper2� The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, 30 The roads ye shall not tread, Go make them with your living, And mark them with your dead. Take up the White Man's burden� And reap his old reward: 35 The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard� The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:� 'Why brought ye us from bondage, 40 Our loved Egyptian night?'3 Take up the White Man's burden� Ye dare not stoop to less� Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; 45 By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you. Take up the White Man's burden� 50 Have done with childish days� The lightly proffered laurel,4 The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, 55 Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers! 1899

If�

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; 5 If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

2. Street sweeper, who in India would belong to slavery. the lowest caste. 4. A symbol of military distinction in the triumphs

3. Cf. Exodus 16.2�3. When the Israelites were celebrated by victorious Roman generals (later, suffering from hunger in the wilderness, they crit-Roman emperors wore a laurel crown as part of

icized Moses and Aaron for taking them from what their official regalia).

they saw as the relative comfort of Egyptian

.

ERNEST DOWSON / 1823

Or being hated don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream�and not make dreams your master; 10

If you can think�and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 15 Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,1 And lose, and start again at your beginnings 20 And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

25 If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings�nor� lose the common touch, and not If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute 30 With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And�which is more�you'll be a Man, my son!

1910

1. A game, played with coins, that combines skill (tossing a coin as close as possible to a fixed mark) and luck (flipping coins and keeping those that come up heads).

ERNEST DOWSON 1867-1900

Ernest Christopher Dowson spent much of his childhood traveling with his father on the Continent, mostly in France. His education was thus irregular and informal, but he acquired a thorough knowledge of French and of his favorite French writers� Gustave Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, and Paul Verlaine�and a good knowledge of Latin poetry, especially Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. Dowson went to Oxford in 1886, but he did not take to regular academic instruction and left after a year. Though nominally assisting his father to manage a dock in the London district of Limehouse, Dowson spent most of his time writing poetry, stories, and essays and talking with Lionel Johnson, W. B. Yeats, and other members of the Rhymers' Club, in which he played a prominent part. Between 1890 and 1894 Dowson, though leading the irregular life of so many of the nineties poets, produced his best work, and his volume Verses came out in 1896. Late nights and excessive drinking impaired a constitution already threatened by tuberculosis. He moved to France in 1894, making a living by

.

1824 / ERNEST DOWSON

translating from the French for an English publisher though his health was steadily worsening. After his return to England, he was discovered near death by a friend, who took the poet to his home and nursed Dowson until he died six weeks later.

Dowson was a member of what Yeats called "the tragic generation" of poets in the nineties who seemed to be driven by their own restless energies to dissipation and premature death. As a poet he was considerably influenced by Algernon Charles Swinburne (whose feverish emotional tone he often captures very skillfully). Dowson experimented with a variety of meters, and in "Cynara" (1891) he used the twelve- syllable alexandrine as the normal line of a six-line stanza in a manner more common in French than in English poetry. He was also especially interested in the work of the French symbolist poets and in their theories of verbal suggestiveness and of poetry as incantation: he believed (as he once wrote in a letter) that a finer poetry could sometimes be achieved by "mere sound and music, with just a suggestion of sense."

Cynara

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae'

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

5 Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,

Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;

Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

io But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, 15 Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

20 But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

1891,1896

1. I am not as I was under the reign of the good son, who seemed to drink so little and had so much Cynara (Latin; Horace, Odes 4.1.3�4). In this dignity and reserve, was breaking his heart for the poem the poet pleads with Venus to stop torment-daughter of the keeper of an Italian eating house, ing him with love, since he is growing old and is in dissipation and drink." Dowson's "Cynara" was, no longer what he was when under the sway of in fact, a Polish girl by the name of Adelaide Fol- Cynara (Sitt-ah-rah), the girl he used to love. Of tinowicz; he fell in love with her when she was Dowson's "Cynara" W. B. Yeats later wrote: "Dow-eleven and he was twenty-two years of age.

.

THE Y AR E NO T LON G / 182 5 They Are Not Long Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.' They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the gate. They are not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream. 1896

1. The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes (Latin; Horace, Odes 1.4.15).

.

Tke Twentietk Century an J Aft er

1914-18: World War! 1922: James Joyce's Ulysses; T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land 1929: Stock market crash; Great Depression begins 1939-45: World War II 1947: India and Pakistan become independent nations 1953: Premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot 1957�62: Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago

become independent nations 1958: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart 1991: Collapse of the Soviet Union 2001: Attacks destroy World Trade Center

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century. The aesthetic movement, with its insistence on "art for art's sake," assaulted middle-class assumptions about the nature and function of art. Rejecting Victorian notions of the artist's moral and educational duties, aestheticism helped widen the breach between writers and the general public, resulting in the "alienation" of the modern artist from society. This alienation is evident in the lives and work of the French symbolists and other late-nineteenth-century bohemians who repudiated conventional notions of respectability, and it underlies key works of modern literature, such as James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and T. S. Eliot's Waste Land.

The growth of public education in England as a result of the Education Act of 1870, which finally made elementary schooling compulsory and universal, led to the rapid emergence of a mass literate population, at whom a new mass- produced popular literature and new cheap journalism (the "yellow press") were directed. The audience for literature split up into "highbrows," "middlebrows," and "lowbrows," and the segmentation of the reading public, developing with unprecedented speed and to an unprecedented degree, helped widen the gap between popular art and art esteemed only by the sophisticated and the expert. This breach yawned ever wider with the twentieth-century emergence of modernist iconoclasm and avant-garde experiment in literature, music, and the visual arts.

Queen Victoria's contemporaries felt her Jubilee in 1887 and, even more, her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked the end of an era. The reaction against middle-class Victorian attitudes that is central to modernism was already under way in the two decades before the queen's death in 1901. Samuel Butler

1827

.

182 8 / THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER

savagely attacked the Victorian conceptions of the family, education, and religion in his novel Tlte Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884, posthumously published in 1903), the bitterest indictment in English literature of the Victorian way of life. And the high tide of anti-Victorianism was marked by the publication in 1918 of a classic of ironic debunking, Lytton Strachey's collection of biographical essays Eminent Victorians.

A pivotal figure between Victorianism and modernism, Thomas Hardy marked the end of the Victorian period and the dawn of the new age in "The Darkling Thrush," a poem originally titled "By the Century's Deathbed" and postdated December 31, 1900, the last day of the nineteenth century. The poem marks the demise of a century of relative conviction and optimism, and it intimates the beginnings of a new era in its skeptical irresolution, its bleak sense of the modern world as "hard and dry"�favorite adjectives of later writers such as Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme:

The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.

This poem and other works by Hardy, A. E. Housman, and Joseph Conrad exemplify the pessimism of imaginative writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. Stoicism�a stiff-upperlip determination to endure whatever fate may bring�also characterizes the literature written in the transitional period between the Victorian era and modernism, including the work of minor authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, traditional stabilities of society, religion, and culture seemed to have weakened, the pace of change to be accelerating. The unsettling force of modernity profoundly challenged traditional ways of structuring and making sense of human experience. Because of the rapid pace of social and technological change, because of the mass dislocation of populations by war, empire, and economic migration, because of the mixing in close quarters of cultures and classes in rapidly expanding cities, modernity disrupted the old order, upended ethical and social codes, cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world, and the divine.

Early-twentieth-century writers were keenly aware that powerful concepts and vocabularies were emerging in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and the visual arts that reimagined human identity in radically new ways. Sigmund Freud's seminal Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, and soon psychoanalysis was changing how people saw and described rationality, the self, and personal development. In his prose and poetry D. H. Lawrence adapted the Oedipus complex to interpret and present his relationships with his parents, though rejecting Freud's negative definition of the unconscious. By the time of his death in 1939, Freud had become, as W. H. Auden wrote in an elegy for him, "a whole climate of opinion / / under whom we conduct our different lives." Also in the early twentieth century, Sir James Frazer's

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Golden Bough (1890�1915) and other works of anthropology were altering basic conceptions of culture, religion, and myth. Eliot observed that Frazer's work "influenced our generation profoundly," and the critic Lionel Trilling suggested that "perhaps no book has had so decisive an effect upon modern literature as Frazer's." For both anthropologists and modern writers, Western religion was now decentered by being placed in a comparative context as one of numerous related mythologies, with Jesus Christ linked to "primitive" fertility gods thought to die and revive in concert with the seasons. Furthering this challenge to religious doctrine were the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher who declared the death of God, repudiated Christianity, and offered instead a harshly tragic conception of life: people look "deeply into the true nature of things" and realize "that no action of theirs can work any change," but they nevertheless laugh and stoically affirm their fate. W. B. Yeats, who remarks in a 1902 letter that his eyes are exhausted from reading "that strong enchanter," greets death and destruction in a Nietzschean spirit of tragic exultation.

These profound changes in modern intellectual history coincided with changes of a more mundane sort, for everyday life was also undergoing rapid transformation during the first years of the twentieth century. Electricity was spreading, cinema and radio were proliferating, and new pharmaceuticals such as aspirin were being developed. As labor was increasingly managed and rationalized, as more and more people crowded into cities, as communications and transportation globalized space and accelerated time, literature could not stand still, and modern writers sought to create new forms that could register these profound alterations in human experience. This was a period of scientific revolution, as exemplified in German physics by Max Planck's quantum theory (1900) and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (1905), and T. S. Eliot reflects the increasing dominance of science when he argues that the poet surrenders to tradition and thus extinguishes rather than expresses personality: "It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science," he claims, adding that "the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum" that catalyzes change but itself remains "inert, neutral, and unchanged" ("Tradition and the Individual Talent").

The early twentieth century also brought countless advances in technology: the first wireless communication across the Atlantic occurred in 1901, the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane in 1903, and Henry Ford introduced the first mass-produced car, the Model T or "Tin Lizzie," in 1913. Not that modern writers univocally embraced such changes. Although some were more sanguine, many modern writers were paradoxically repulsed by aspects of modernization. Mass-produced appliances and products, such as the "gramophone" and canned goods ("tins"), are objects of revulsion in Eliot's Waste Land, for example. Because scientific materialism and positivism, according to which empirical explanations could be found for everything, were weakening the influence of organized religion, many writers looked to literature as an alternative. His "simple-minded" Protestantism spoiled by science, Yeats says in his autobiography, he "made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition." Whether or not they welcomed the demise of tradition, habit, and certitude in favor of the new, modern writers articulated the effects of modern- ity's relentless change, loss, and destabilization. "Things fall apart," Yeats wrote, "the centre cannot hold." Eliot describes in Four Quartets his quest for the "still point of the turning world." The modernist drive to "make it new"�in

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Ezra Pound's famous slogan�thus arises in part out of an often ambivalent consciousness of the relentless mutations brought by modernization.

The position of women, too, was rapidly changing during this period. The Married Woman's Property Act of 1882 allowed married women to own property in their own right, and women were admitted to universities at different times during the latter part of the century. Since the days of Mary Wollstonecraft, women in Great Britain had been arguing and lobbying for the right to vote, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel encouraged suffragettes, as they were known, to take a more militant approach, which included boycotts, bombings, and hunger strikes. The long fight for women's suffrage was finally won in 1918 for women thirty and over, and in 1928 for women twenty-one and over. These shifts in attitudes toward women, in the roles women played in the national life, and in the relations between the sexes are reflected in a variety of ways in the literature of the period.

Britain's modern political history begins with the Anglo-Boer War (1899� 1902), fought by the British to establish political and economic control over the Boer republics (self-governing states) of South Africa. It was an imperial war against which many British intellectuals protested and one that the British in the end were slightly ashamed of having won. The war spanned the reign of Queen Victoria, who died in 1901, and Edward VII, who held the throne from 1901 to 1910. This latter decade is known as the Edwardian period, and the king stamped his extrovert and self-indulgent character upon it. The wealthy made it a vulgar age of conspicuous enjoyment, but most writers and artists kept well away from involvement in high society: in general this period had no equivalent to Queen Victoria's friendship with Tennyson. The alienation of artists and intellectuals from political rulers and middle-class society was proceeding apace. From 1910 (when George V came to the throne) until World War I broke out in August 1914, Britain achieved a temporary equilibrium between Victorian earnestness and Edwardian flashiness; in retrospect the Georgian period seems peculiarly golden, the last phase of assurance and stability before the old order throughout Europe broke up in violence. Yet even then, under the surface, there was restlessness and experimentation. The age of Rupert Brooke's idyllic sonnets on the English countryside was also the age of T. S. Eliot's first experiments in a radically new kind of poetry, James Joyce's and Virginia Woolf's in radically new forms of fiction.

Edwardian as a term applied to English cultural history suggests a period in which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age�country houses with numerous servants, a flourishing and confident middle class, a strict hierarchy of social classes�remained unimpaired, though on the level of ideas a sense of change and liberation existed. Georgian refers largely to the lull before the storm of World War I. That war, as the bitterly skeptical and antiheroic work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and other war poets makes clear, produced major shifts in attitude toward Western myths of progress and civilization. The postwar disillusion of the 1920s resulted, in part, from the sense of utter social and political collapse during a war in which unprecedented millions were killed.

By the beginning of World War I, nearly a quarter of the earth's surface and more than a quarter of the world's population were under British dominion, including the vast African territories acquired in the preceding hundred years. Some of the colonies in the empire were settler nations with large European

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populations, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and in 1907 the empire granted them the new status of dominions, recognizing their relative control over internal affairs. Over time these largely independent nations came to be known as the British Commonwealth, an association of self-governing countries. The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of internationally acclaimed literary voices from these dominions, from the early-century New Zealander Katherine Mansfield to the late-century Australian Les Murray and Canadians Alice Munro and Anne Carson. The rest of the colonies in the British Empire consisted primarily of indigenous populations that had little or no political power, but nationalist movements were gaining strength in the early years of the century�as when, in 1906, the Congress movement in India first demanded swaraj ("self-rule") soon to become the mantra of Indian nationalism. In Britain imperialist and anti-imperialist sentiments often met head on in Parliament and the press, the debate involving writers as far apart as Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster.

A steadily rising Irish nationalism resulted in increasingly violent protests against the cultural, economic, and political subordination of Ireland to the British Crown and government. During the Easter Rising of 1916, Irish rebels in Dublin staged a revolt against Rritish rule, and by executing fifteen Irish leaders, the Rritish inadvertently intensified the drive for independence, finally achieved in 1921�22 when the southern counties were declared the Irish Free State. (The six counties of Northern Ireland remained, however, part of Great Britain.) No one can fully understand Yeats or Joyce without some awareness of the Irish struggle for independence, and the way in which the Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (with Yeats at the forefront) reflected a determination to achieve a vigorous national life culturally even if the road seemed blocked politically.

Depression and unemployment in the early 1930s, followed by the rise of Hitler and the shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe, with its threat of another war, deeply affected the emerging poets and novelists of the time. While Eliot, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats, Pound, and others of the older generation turned to the political right, the impotence of capitalist governments in the face of Fascism combined with economic dislocation to turn the majority of young intellectuals (and not only intellectuals) in the 1930s to the political left. The 1930s were the so-called red decade, because only the left seemed to offer any solution in various forms of socialism, communism, and left liberalism. The early poetry of W. H. Auden and his contemporaries cried out for "the death of the old gang" (in Auden's phrase) and a clean sweep politically and economically, while the right-wing army's rebellion against the left-wing republican government in Spain, which started in the summer of 1936 and soon led to full-scale civil war, was regarded as a rehearsal for an inevitable second world war and thus further emphasized the inadequacy of politicians. Yet though the younger writers of the period expressed the up-todate, radical political views of the left, they were less technically inventive than the first-generation modernists, such as Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939�following shortly on Hitler's pact with the Soviet Union, which so shocked and disillusioned many of the young left-wing writers that they subsequently moved politically to the center� marked the sudden end of the red decade. What was from the beginning expected to be a long and costly war brought inevitable exhaustion. The diminution of British political power, its secondary status in relation to the United

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States as a player in the Cold War, brought about a painful reappraisal of Brit- ain's place in the world, even as countries that had lost the war�West Germany and Japan�were, in economic terms, winning the peace that followed.

In winning a war, Great Britain lost an empire. The largest, most powerful, best organized of the modern European empires, it had expropriated enormous quantities of land, raw materials, and labor from its widely scattered overseas territories. India, long the jewel in the imperial Crown, won its independence in 1947, along with the newly formed Muslim state of Pakistan. The postwar wave of decolonization that began in South Asia spread to Africa and the Caribbean: in 1957 Ghana was the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to become independent, unleashing an unstoppable wave of liberation from British rule that freed Nigeria in 1960, Sierra Leone in 1961, Uganda in 1962, Kenya in 1963; in the Caribbean, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, Barbados and Guyana in 1966, and Saint Lucia in 1979. India and Pakistan elected to remain within a newly expanded and reconceived British Commonwealth, but other former colonies did not. The Irish Republic withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1949; the Republic of South Africa, in 1961. Postwar decolonization coincided with and encouraged the efflorescence of postcolonial writing that would bring about the most dramatic geographic shift in literature in English since its inception. Writers from Britain's former colonies published influential and innovative novels, plays, and poems, hybridizing their local traditions and varieties of English with those of the empire. The names of the Nobel Prize winners Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee were added to the annals of literature in English.

While Britain was decolonizing its empire, the former empire was colonizing Britain, as Louise Bennett wryly suggests in her poem "Colonization in Reverse." Encouraged by the postwar labor shortage in England and the scarcity of work at home, waves of Caribbean migrants journeyed to and settled in "the motherland," the first group on the Empire Windrush that sailed from Jamaica to Tilbury Docks in 1948. Migrants followed from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Africa, and other regions of the "New Commonwealth." Even as immigration laws became more restrictive in the 1960s, relatives of earlier migrants and refugees from these and other nations continued to arrive, transforming Britain into an increasingly multiracial society and infusing energy into British arts and literature. But people of Caribbean, African, and South Asian origin, who brought distinctive vernaculars and cultural traditions with them, painfully discovered that their official status as British subjects often did not translate into their being welcomed as full-fledged members of British society. The friction between color-blind and ethnically specific notions of Englishness prompted a large-scale and ongoing rethinking of national identity in Britain. Among the arrivals in England were many who journeyed there to study in the late 1940s and 1950s and eventually became prominent writers, such as Bennett, Soyinka, Kamau (then Edward) Brathwaite, and Chinua Achebe. In the 1970s and 1980s a younger generation of black and Asian British writers emerged�some born in the U.K., some in the ex-empire� including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, John Agard, and Caryl Phillips, and in the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, still younger writers including Jackie Kay and Zadie Smith.

London, as the capital of the empire, had long dominated the culture as

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well as the politics and the economy of the British Isles. London spoke for Britain in the impeccable southern English intonations of the radio announcers of the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (known as the BBC), but from the end of World War II this changed. Begional dialects and multicultural accents were admitted to the airwaves. Regional radio and television stations sprang up. In the 1940s and 1950s the BBC produced a weekly program called "Caribbean Voices," which proved an important stimulus to anglophone writing in the West Indies. The Arts Council, which had subsidized the nation's drama, literature, music, painting, and plastic arts from London, delegated much of its grant-giving responsibility to regional arts councils. This gave a new confidence to writers and artists outside London�the Beatles were launched from Liverpool�and has since contributed to a notable renaissance of regional literature.

From the 1960s London ceased to be essentially the sole cultural stage of the United Kingdom, and though its Parliament remained the sole political stage until 1999, successive governments came under increasing pressure from the regions and the wider world. After decades of predominantly Labour governments, Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives to power in the general election of 1979, becoming thereby the country's first woman to hold the office of prime minister, an office she was to hold for an unprecedented twelve years. Pursuing a vision of a "new," more productive Britain, she curbed the power of the unions and began to dismantle the "welfare state," privatizing nationalized industries and utilities in the interests of an aggressive free-market economy. Initially her policies seemed to have a bracing effect on a nation still sunk in postwar, postimperial torpor, but writers such as Ian McEwan and Caryl Churchill and filmmakers such as Derek Jarman protested that Conservative reforms widened the gap between rich and poor, black and white, north and south, and between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom.

Thatcher was deposed by her own party in 1990, and the Conservatives were routed in the election of 1997. The electorate's message was clear, and Tony Blair, the new Labour prime minister, moved to restore the rundown Health Service and system of state education. Honoring other of his campaign pledges, he offered Scotland its own parliament and Wales its own assembly, each with tax-raising powers and a substantial budget for the operation of its social services, and each holding its first elections in 1999. Though a commanding figure in British politics, Blair faced increasing skepticism over his justification for joining forces with the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

Meanwhile the Labour government made significant progress toward solving the bitter and bloody problems of Northern Ireland, where, since the late 1960s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had waged a violent campaign for a united Ireland and against British rule, met by violent suppression by the British Army and reprisals by Protestant Unionists, who sought to keep Northern Ireland a part of the United Kingdom. In the 1990s politics finally took precedence over armed struggle in the Bepublican movement. In 1998 the Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, led to elections to a Northern Ireland Assembly, which met for the first time in 1999, and the leaders of the main Boman Catholic and Protestant parties were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Although hope persisted that peaceful coexistence and substantial self-governance in Ulster could continue, disagree

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ments between the parties over IRA weapons and alleged spying led to the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive Committee in

2002.

POETRY

The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution. The imagist movement, influenced by the philosopher poet T. E. Hulme's insistence on hard, clear, precise images, arose in reaction to what it saw as Romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry. (Like other modernists, the imagists somewhat oversimplified the nineteenth-century aesthetic against which they defined their own artistic ideal, while scanting underlying continuities.) The movement developed initially in London, where the modernist American poet Ezra Pound was living, and quickly migrated across the Atlantic, and its early members included Hulme, Pound, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, and F. S. Flint. As Flint explained in an article in March 1913, partly dictated by Pound, imagists insisted on "direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective," on the avoidance of all words "that did not contribute to the presentation," and on a freer metrical movement than a strict adherence to the "sequence of a metronome" could allow. Inveighing in manifestos against Victorian discursiveness, the imagists wrote short, sharply etched, descriptive lyrics, but they lacked a technique for the production of longer and more complex poems.

Other new ideas about poetry helped provide this technique, many of them associated with another American in London, T. S. Eliot. Sir Herbert Grierson's 1912 edition of John Donne's poems both reflected and encouraged a new enthusiasm for seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry. The revived interest in Metaphysical "wit" brought with it a desire on the part of pioneering poets to introduce into their work a much higher degree of intellectual complexity than had been found among the Victorians or the Georgians. The full subtlety of French symbolist poetry also now came to be appreciated; it had been admired in the 1890s, but more for its dreamy suggestiveness than for its imagistic precision and complexity. At the same time modernist writers wanted to bring poetic language and rhythms closer to those of conversation, or at least to spice the formalities of poetic utterance with echoes of the colloquial and even the slangy. Irony, which made possible several levels of discourse simultaneously, and wit, with the use of puns (banished from serious poetry for more than two hundred years), helped achieve that union of thought and passion that Eliot, in his review of Grierson's anthology of Metaphysical poetry (1921), saw as characteristic of the Metaphysicals and wished to bring back into poetry. A new critical movement and a new creative movement in poetry went hand in hand, with Eliot the high priest of both. He extended the scope of imagism by bringing the English Metaphysicals and the French symbolists (as well as the English Jacobean dramatists) to the rescue, thus adding new criteria of complexity and allusiveness to the criteria of concreteness and precision stressed by the imagists. Eliot also introduced into modern English and American poetry the kind of irony achieved by shifting suddenly from the formal to the colloquial, or by oblique allusions to objects or ideas that contrasted sharply with the surface meaning of the poem. Nor were Eliot and the imagists alone in their efforts to reinvent poetry. From 1912 D. H. Lawrence began writing poems freer in form and emotion, wanting to unshackle verse

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from the constraints of the "gem-like" lyric and approach even the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." Thus between, say, 1911 (the first year covered by Edward Marsh's anthologies of Georgian poetry) and 1922 (the year of the publication of The Waste Land), a major revolution occurred in English�and for that matter American�poetic theory and practice, one that determined the way in which many poets now think about their art.

This modernist revolution was by no means an isolated literary phenomenon. Writers on both sides of the English Channel were influenced by the French impressionist, postimpressionist, and cubist painters' radical reexamination of the nature of reality. The influence of Italian futurism was likewise strong on the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, whose short-lived journal Blast was meant to be as shocking in its visual design as in its violent rhetoric. The poet Mina Loy shared the futurist fascination with modernity and speed, while repudiating its misogyny and jingoism, as evidenced by her "Feminist Manifesto." Pound wrote books about the French sculptor Henri Gaudier- Brzeska and the American composer George Antheil, and indeed the jagged rhythms and wrenching dissonances of modern music influenced a range of writers. Wilfred Owen wrote in 1918: "I suppose I am doing in poetry what the advanced composers are doing in music"; and Eliot, while writing The Waste Land three years later, was so impressed by a performance of the composer Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) that he stood up at the end and cheered.

The posthumous 1918 publication by Robert Bridges of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry encouraged experimentation in language and rhythms, as evidenced by the verse's influence on Eliot, Auden, and the Welshman Dylan Thomas. Hopkins combined precision of the individual image with a complex ordering of images and a new kind of metrical patterning he named "sprung rhythm," in which the stresses of a line could be more freely distributed.

Meanwhile Yeats's remarkable oeuvre, stretching across the whole modern period, reflected varying developments of the age yet maintained an unmistakably individual accent. Beginning with the ideas of the aesthetes, turning to a tougher and sparer ironic language without losing its characteristic verbal magic, working out its author's idiosyncratic notions of symbolism, developing in its full maturity into a rich symbolic and Metaphysical poetry with its own curiously haunting cadences and with imagery both shockingly realistic and movingly suggestive, Yeats's work encapsulates a history of English poetry between 1890 and 1939.

In his poem "Remembering the Thirties," Donald Davie declared: "A neutral tone is nowadays preferred." That tone�Auden's coolly clinical tone� dominated the poetry of the decade. The young poets of the early 1930s� Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice�were the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the first-generation modern poets. Hopkins's attention to sonorities, Hardy's experiments in stanzaic patterns, Yeats's ambivalent meditations on public themes, Eliot's satiric treatment of a mechanized and urbanized world, and Owen's pararhymed enactments of pity influenced Auden and the other poets in his circle. But these younger poets also had to distinguish themselves from the still-living eminences in poetry, and they did so by writing poems more low-pitched and ironic than Yeats's, for example, or more individually responsive to and active in the social world than Eliot's.

As World War II began, the neutral tone gave way to, as in Auden's work,

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an increasingly direct and humane voice and to the vehemence of what came to be known as the New Apocalypse. The poets of this movement, most notably Dylan Thomas, owed something of their imagistic audacity and rhetorical violence to the French surrealists, whose poetry was introduced to English readers in translations and in A Short Survey of Surrealism (1936) by David Gascoyne, one of the New Apocalypse poets. Many of the surrealists, such as Salvador Dali and Andre Breton, were both poets and painters, and in their verbal as well as their visual art they sought to express, often by free association, the operation of the unconscious mind.

With the coming of the 1950s, however, the pendulum swung back. A new generation of poets, including Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, and Philip Larkin, reacted against what seemed to them the verbal excesses and extravagances of Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell, as well as the arcane myths and knotty allusiveness of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. "The Movement," as this new group came to be called, aimed once again for a neutral tone, a purity of diction, in which to render an unpretentious fidelity to mundane experience. Larkin, its most notable exponent, rejected the intimidating gestures of an imported modernism in favor of a more civil and accessible "native" tradition that went back to Hardy, Housman, and the Georgian pastoralists of the 1910s.

Not everyone in England followed the lead of Larkin and the Movement, some rejecting the Movement's notion of a limited, rationalist, polished poetics. In the late 1950s and the 1960s Ted Hughes began to write poems in which predators and victims in the natural world suggest the violence and irrationality of modern history, including the carnage of World War I, in which his father had fought. Geoffrey Hill also saw a rationalist humanism as inadequate to the ethical and religious challenges of twentieth-century war, genocide, and atrocity, which he evoked in a strenuous language built on the traditions of high modernism and Metaphysical poetry.

Since the 1980s the spectrum of Britain's poets has become more diverse in class, ethnicity, gender, and region than ever before, bringing new voices into the English literary tradition. Born in the northern industrial city of Leeds, Tony Harrison brings the local vernacular, the oral energy and resonance of Yorkshire idiom and rhythms, into contact with traditional English and classical verse. Born in Scotland to an Irish mother in a left-wing, working-class Catholic family, Carol Ann Duffy grew up amid Irish, Scottish, and Standard varieties of English, and this youthful experience helped equip her to speak in different voices in her feminist monologues.

Post�World War II Ireland�both North and South�was among the most productive spaces for poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Born just two and a half weeks after Yeats died, Seamus Heaney, his most celebrated successor, responds to the horrors of sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland with subtlety and acute ethical sensitivity in poems that draw on both Irish genres and sonorities and the English literary tradition of Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Ted Hughes. Paul Muldoon, one of Heaney's former students in Belfast, also writes about the Troubles in Northern Ireland but through eerily distorted fixed forms and multiple screens of irony, combining experimental zaniness with formal reserve. Born in the Irish Bepublic, Eavan Boland has made a space within the largely male tradition of Irish verse�with its standard, mythical emblems of femininity�for Irish women's historical experiences of suffering and survival.

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The massive postwar change in the geographical contours of poetry written in English involved, in part, the emergence of new voices and styles from the "Old Commonwealth," or dominions, such as Canada and Australia. Self- conscious about being at the margins of the former empire, Les Murray fashions a brash, playful, overbrimming poetry that mines the British and classical traditions while remaking them in what he styles his "redneck" Australian manner. Anne Carson continues Canadian poetry's dialogue with its British literary origins, imaginatively transporting, for example, the Victorian writers Charlotte and Emily Bronte into a Canadian landscape, but she also illustrates a heightened interest in U.S. poetry and popular culture, bringing into the literary mix influences that range from ancient Greek poetry to Ezra Pound and Sylvia Plath, television and video.

From the former colonies of the British Empire in the so-called Third World came some of the most important innovations in the language and thematic reach of poetry in English. Born under British rule, students of colonial educations that repressed or denigrated native languages and traditions, these postcolonial poets grew up with an acute awareness of the riches of their own cultural inheritances, as well as a deep knowledge of the British literary canon. They expanded the range of possibilities in English-language poetry by hybridizing traditions of the British Isles with their indigenous images and speech rhythms, Creoles and genres. Some of these writers, such as the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the most eminent West Indian poet, have drawn largely on British, American, and classical European models, though Walcott creolizes the rhythms, diction, and sensibility of English-language poetry. "I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me," declares the mulatto hero of "The Schooner Flight, "and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." Other poets have emphasized even more strongly Afro-Caribbean inheritances in speech and culture. When colonial prejudices still branded West Indian English, or Creole, a backward language, a "corruption" of English, the Afro-Jamaican poets Claude McKay and Louise Bennett claimed its wit, vibrancy, and proverbial richness for poetry. In the late 1960s the Barbadian Kamau (then Edward) Brathwaite revalued the linguistic, musical, and mythic survivals of Africa in the Caribbean�resources long repressed because of colonial attitudes. In poetry as well as fiction, Nigeria was the most prolific anglophone African nation around the time of independence, said to be the "golden age" of letters in sub- Saharan Africa. Wole Soyinka, later the first black African to win the Nobel Prize, stretched English syntax and figurative language in poems dense with Yoruba-inspired wordplay and myth. At the same time poets from India were bringing its great variety of indigenous cultures into English-language poetry.

A. K. Bamanujan's sharply etched poems interfuse Anglo-modernist principles with the south Indian legacies of Tamil and Kannada poetry. All of these poets respond with emotional ambivalence and linguistic versatility to the experience of living after colonialism, between non-Western traditions and modernity, in a period of explosive change in the relation between Western and "native" cultures. A century that began with a springtime of poetic innovation drew to its close with the full flowering of older poets such as Walcott, Hill, and Heaney, and the twenty-first century opened with welcome signs of fresh growth in English- language poetry, including new books by Paul Muldoon, Anne Carson, and Carol Ann Duffy.

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FICTION

Novels�"loose baggy monsters," in Henry James's phrase�can be, can do, can include anything at all. The form defies prescriptions and limits. Yet its variety converges on persistent issues such as the construction of the self within society, the reproduction of the real world, and the temporality of human experience and of narrative. The novel's flexibility and porousness, its omnivorousness and multivoicedness have enabled writers to take advantage of modernity's global dislocation and mixture of peoples, while meeting the challenges to the imagination of mass death and world war, of the relentless and rapid mutations in modern cultures and societies, in evolving knowledge and belief.