The best proof of the living reality of Holmes and Watson is that we enjoy most, on rereading the stories, not their plots—those we remember vividly—but their small and homely details of life at 221B Baker Street (a false address, as I discovered to my dismay the first time I visited London). Holmes stretched out on the sofa with a migraine, Watson writing at the window. The fire flickering in the grate, when in comes Mrs. Hudson with a message. The gaunt figure of Holmes beside Watson’s bed, shielding the candle from the draft: “Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!”
Some of the plots are not worth remembering—even Conan Doyle nodded. But many stories are first rate. I like best the long, early tales: “A Study in Scarlet,” “The Sign of Four,” “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” and “The Valley of Fear.” Of these “A Study in Scarlet,” for its imaginative touches—Doyle was here creating his immortal characters—and “The Valley of Fear,” for its genuine sense of terror, seem to me superior to anything else Doyle ever wrote. But what am I saying? Can any story be scarier, the first time you read it, than “The Hound of the Baskervilles”?
“Footprints?”
“Footprints.”
“A man’s or a woman’s?”
Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:
“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
I remember to this day, though it happened many years ago, the shiver that ran down my back when I read those words. For months I could not walk outside in the country without constantly looking over my shoulder. What if I had seen a great hound bounding down the path after me, his muzzle outlined by a terrible ghastly light? I too would have dropped dead from fear, like poor Sir Charles Baskerville.
There are many more wonderful stories: “The Red-Headed League”; “The Five Orange Pips”; “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (another producer of nightmares); “The Crooked Man”; and “The Final Problem,” in which Doyle attempted to rid himself of Holmes, of whom it is said he had grown weary; but an enchanted public insisted that he resuscitate him, and so we have “The Adventure of the Empty House,” “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” and “His Last Bow”—fortunately, not really his last. And so on and so on. Our only regret is that there are not more.
In fact there is more. “The White Company,” the story of a soldier of fortune who actually existed and whose image is one of only two in the Duomo at Florence, and whose castle is just around the corner from Cortona, where I used to live, is a rousing tale and proof that Conan Doyle could write other kinds of stories, too. Alas, there is no Sherlock in it, nor Dr. Watson.
RUDYARD KIPLING
1865–1936
The Jungle Books
Rudyard Kipling was once the most popular living English author. Novels like The Light That Failed (1890) and Kim (1901), collections of light verse such as Departmental Ditties (1886) and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), and books of short stories like Stalky & Co. (1899) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) earned him a worldwide reputation among readers who knew English. Born in Bombay, India, in 1865, the son of a socially important Anglo-Indian family, he represented a type of Englishman most of the world admired before World War I. After the war his reputation flagged, as the world’s view of England and Englishness changed. Kipling’s books ceased to be widely read and widely bought. When he died in 1936, despite his Nobel Prize, he was an almost forgotten figure.
However, The Jungle Books (1894-95) remained as popular as ever, and indeed I hope they will never die. They first appeared as two separate volumes, but they have almost always been published as a single collection of stories about the animals of the jungle that are joined together by poems for young readers. The stories are themselves written for young people. They are far from being mere children’s stories, although in fact they were written for Kipling’s grandchild.
The hero of these tales of an India that, if it ever existed, certainly exists no more, is Mowgli, a white child abandoned by his kind and nurtured, brought up, and educated by a family of wolves. Mowgli’s foster parents are excellent teachers, although they do not teach him Latin and Greek, arithmetic and geometry, ancient history and geography. Instead, they teach him to survive in the jungle, which has perils not known to ordinary humans, and especially to speak and understand the languages of the jungle, which are the main tools of survival of this hairless cub, as his foster mother lovingly calls him. Mowgli is also sent to school to Ba-a, the great python, Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the black bear, who loves Mowgli with all his heart and is heartbroken because his clever little pupil does not seem to learn fast enough. But Mowgli does learn, although he likes to tease Baloo, and none too soon, for before Baloo thinks he is ready Mowgli is thrown into a series of adventures that test everything he knows.
The adventures are wonderful—at the water hole with the elephants, in the abandoned fortress now occupied by tribes of monkeys, in the pit full of vipers. But it is the education of Mowgli by his loving mentors—the wolf, the bear, the snake, and the great cat—that is the finest part of The Jungle Books, I think, and the part of the work that will ensure its fame. I have been reading The Jungle Books all my life, and I can close my eyes at this instant and see Bagheera stretched out in all his shining blackness along a limb of a tree, with Mowgli perched like a little naked doll between his paws, learning the language and the lingo of all the jungle cats; or see him curled up within the coils of the great python’s enormous glistening body, learning the language of all the snakes and lizards that so terrify other human beings. In fact, I don’t think there is any other account of an education that is so fascinating in all of literature, unless it is the education given to the young King Arthur by Merlyn in T.H. White’s Once and Future King—and in that case the teachers are animals, too, and not men or women.
Although The Jungle Books seem to me incomparably the best of Kipling, other works deserve to be read. Among the novels perhaps only Kim will be appreciated by modern American readers, but it is a good book. To balance the sentimental absurdities of poems like “Gunga-Din,” there is one great poem by Kipling, “Recessional,” written during the funeral of King Edward VII, when Kipling foresaw the disasters of the twentieth century with a peculiar clarity. And the Just-So Stories (1902) also remain popular, although most of them have become a bit creaky. One, however, retains its own vitality and is often reprinted separately. Called “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” this famous story tells how the first cat came to be a pet of mankind, but without giving up his soul and his liberty as did the first dog. It is a lovely story, and cat lovers will agree that it is profoundly true.