Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/159



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Kipling and the Children

bt Hgncd Deans-Cameron

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The world hath set its heavy yoke Upon the old white-bearded folk Who strive to please the King, God's mercy is upon the young, God's wisdom in the baby tongue Thai fears not anything.

— (The Parable of Chajju Bhagat.)

KIPLING has been considered in many aspects — as the Bard of Tommy Atkins, the expo- nent of An^lo-Indian life, the Laureate of the Empire, the Poet of Wheel and Axle, Lever and Screw, and a most compelling voice from the Jungle. Not with his soldiers, nor his animals nor his engines would we now deal, but with his children.

At the first blush, one would not think to discover in Kipling a fertile field for parental and pedagogical re- search, to find him bristling with max- ims for the training of the young. But send out a Town-Crier, a sort of Pied Piper of Hamelin searching for child- ren through the length and breadth of Kipling Land, and see the following he will get.

Of Kipling's long stories, ^'Stalky & Co." deals entirely with children ; "Cap- tains Courageous" is in intent the story of a boy ; so is "Kim ;" "The Light that Failed." in its first and best chapters, is a studv of child life ; while that won- drous thing, "The Jungle Book," stronger than Esop and with a witch- er>' all its own, what is it but a sustain- ed treatise on the claims of the com- monwealth and the development of the individual ?

And as the Piper pipes, out from "somewhere east of Suez" to answer to the roll-call comes crowding such a goodly company — food here for the stu- dent of child-life and for the lover of the children.

Let us stand aside and watch the pro- cession pass — Wee Willie Winkie and His Majesty the King; MuhammedDin, poor baby, from his garden of dust and dead leaves ; and Tod of the Amend- ment. Round the corner we stumble upon the little Japs splashing in their half-sunk barrel and trying to hide one behind the other "in a hundred poses of spankable chubbiness," with the "little American monstrosity," who when it has nothing else to do will an- swer to the name of Albert ; across the line of vision reel The Drums of the Fore and Aft, followed by Baa, Baa, Blacksheep, and Strickland, the Son of His Father; here comes William the Conqueror's long line of goats with the naked famine babies as running commentarv, while out of the shadows mysterious and fascinating of No Man's Land glides into our ken The Brushwood Bov: at his heels "under a man's helmet wid the chin-straps swingin' about her little stummick" Thansi McKenna staggers, the Child of the Regiment.

Are they all not very human and very lovable? The Pied Piper who called them forth turns to us and says, "Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own home little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying." (Munichandrad).

A writer's best stories are always in part autobiographical, and to this rule, "Kim" and "Stalky & Co." are no ex- ceptions. In