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accusation that the Hun is deranged is a reflection of his own derangement. Kipling wasn’t a racist. Poor Kipling. He was a father driven mad with grief.
    *
From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches: Letters of Travel
, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1914).
    Harry Ricketts,
The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1999).
    Andrew Lycett,
Rudyard Kipling
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999).

Editor’s Preface
    W E need to think again about Kipling. He is our greatest short-story writer, but one whose achievement is more complex and surprising than even his admirers recognize. When the talkies arrived in Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin ruefully considered the future: ‘It would mean giving up my tramp character entirely. Some people suggested that the tramp might talk. This was unthinkable, for the first word he ever uttered would transform him into another person. Besides, the matrix out of which he was born was as mute as the rags he wore.’ There is no evidence that the patchily-read Chaplin ever glanced at Kipling. If he had, he might have realized that Kipling, in his different field, had already wired a silent world for sound. The centre of his achievement is that he made talkies out of the mute matrix he shares with Chaplin. He is our greatest practitioner of dialect and idiolect – a writer whose ear for inflection and accent is not just ebullient technique, a prose virtuosity, but the expression of a profoundly democratic artistry, however eccentric that claim may appear to those for whom his politics are repugnant and his transcriptions of demotic speech condescending.
    In his best work, Kipling extends the literary franchise to the inarticulate. The mute are given a say in things – and this generosity extends even to those machines which Henry James found so distressingly preponderant in Kipling’s later work. In
Ulysses
, Leopold Bloom meditates in the typesetting room of a newspaper: ‘Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forwards its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.’ In Kipling, too, everything speaks in its own way, not just people.
Kim
gives us ‘the sticky pull of slow-rending oilskin’ and ‘the well-known purr and fizzle of grains of incense’. In ‘Through the Fire’, there is the charcoal-burners’ fire: ‘the dying flames said
“whit, whit, whit”
as they fluttered and whispered over the white ashes.’
    Kipling’s eye was extraordinary right from the beginning. There is no shortage of brilliant local detail in his work. One has only toremember the corpse in ‘The Other Man’, ‘sitting in the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the awning-stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache’. One thinks of the water in ‘At Twenty-Two’ which floods a coalmine – ‘a sucking whirlpool, all yellow and yeasty’. Or of the unforgettable, bloated, two-day corpse of Hirman Singh, from ‘In Flood Time’, which the hero uses as an improvised life-jacket. Kipling’s ear, though, was initially less perfect – in particular the sometimes excruciating Irish of Mulvaney, which isn’t properly perfected until “‘Love-o’-Women’” in
Many Inventions.
This faultiness is detectable, too, in the narrator’s voice of
Plain Tales From the Hills
, where it is occasionally unclear whether Kipling endorses the tough moral pokerwork with which several stories begin. In ‘Beyond the Pale’, Kipling clearly uses the story to ironize the flat fiat of his opening sentence: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race, and breed.’ The tale illustrates the dangers, but the Kipling who interprets the object-letter of Bisesa so ably cannot possibly underwrite the statement that ‘no Englishman should be able to