• Actions and Reactions in 1909.
• Scribner’s Edition, Vol. XXIV.
• The Sussex Edition, Vol. VIII, Page 291.
• The Burwash Edition, Vol VIII.

Perhaps Kipling did not know when he came to ‘Bateman’s’ in 1902 that the old order was about to change and that he was taking part in the very end of a great tradition. Possibly realising something of this subconsciously, he caught the whole spirit of that tradition in three stories, "An Habitation Enforced", "My Son’s Wife", and "Friendly Brook", and enshrined in them some of the most perfect pictures in our literature of that lost world. This he did as of a world in full flowering, with no trace of a nostalgia for something that was about to pass: and this increases the authenticity as well as the moving quality of his pictures

Sophie Chapin was New England. I’m not sure about her spouse but I have a notion he was Yale – not Harvard. Anyhow he did his work in New York where the nerves come from and if they wanted to go to Baltimore it was probably on account of the climate for Sophie’s confinement.
See the Notes on the Text [Page 43, line 10]

Finally, in addition to the themes of sense of place, and the sense of belonging where one’s ancestors lived, one may note that of duty and responsibility. In our days, to talk publicly about such is not fashionable, but Kipling returns to this theme in many of his tales.

Another way of looking at the facts and their consequences would be to say that his first maturity began when he left India to discover the world and his second when he came home from the world to discover England.

... A little later he moved to Burwash which even today is reasonably quiet and remote. But events prevented him from settling there in peace until the new century. Then he began to discover England there.

I have already said that India is a parish and that Kipling, when he left India was in some danger of becoming parochial. But the world is a parish too. The cosmopolitan with no true roots in any one country tends to become as narrow as the man who never moves out of the village where he was born. Kipling (or rather his mother) asked: “What do they know of England who only England know?” But he came to realise that the Englishman who wants to know the world must know his own country as well. When he first returned from India, however, he seemed hardly to know that it existed. There is something significant in his confession that during those early days in London:

I was so ignorant, I never guessed when the great fogs fell that trains could take me to light and sunshine a few miles outside London. Once I face the reflection of my own face in the jet-black mirror of the window-panes for five days.
[Something of Myself]

It was not ignorance, of course. It was indifference. Even the years in Devonshire had left behind them no affection for English fields and hedgerows. That was to grow later.

I think, too, that he tried to express the meaning of the change that had occurred to him when he became conscious of it by placing the poem I am about to quote immediately before a group of some of the best pieces he wrote about England.

If England was what England seems,
And not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass an’ paint,
‘Ow quick we’d chuck ‘er! But she ain’t!

Some critics have picked on [these] lines as proof that his loudly expressed patriotism is only superficial or at best selfish. I cannot see any ground for the charge. One loves one’s country for what she is, not as an abstraction. But in any case Kipling was now on his way to discover an England which was not all putty, brass and paint.

He himself has described the process of his “recall”. The story called “An Habitation Enforced” can be profitably compared with another, “An Error in the Fourth Dimension”. In “An Error in the Fourth Dimension" (first published eleven years earlier, in 1894), Wilton Sargent, a young American millionaire, sets out 'with the versatility of his race … to be just a little more English than the English'. To this end he does a number of things, which are described in a slightly patronising manner (it is one of Kipling’s less amiable stories) ... and the end of the imbroglio is that he flees back to America, with every intention of staying there. It is perhaps a little trivial to seek an implication in what is after all only a gay and trivial piece of farce. But if there is an implication to be found, it is that Americans should not try to turn themselves into Englishmen.

...George Chapin, in “An Habitation Enforced”, comes from the same world as Wilton Sargent – the world of American big business. But he has worked there until his nerves have given way. He and his wife drift, bored and aimless, about Europe, hating the life they are leading, but not daring, for fear of George’s life and sanity, to return to their own country. At last they meet a wise woman who sends them to stay at Rocketts, 'the farm of one Cloke, in the southern counties – where she assured them, they would meet the genuine England of folklore and song.'

On their first morning, George wants to know where the nearest telegraph office is and they are given a line across country.

...It is to an abandoned house that, when they have been thus prepared, their walk leads them. The old shepherd who invites them to walk over it says proudly of the staircase, 'Plenty room here for your coffin to come down. Seven foot and three men at each end wouldn’t brish the paint.' By an exquisite stroke of invention it is Sophie Chapin’s discovery of this old man peacefully dead in the old farm at the back and her watching beside him which make the purchase of the house seem right to her. When George suggests that her experience may have put her against the plan, she exclaims, 'No! What happened this morning seemed to be more of a – of a leading than anything else.'

Now I am not concerned here to praise this lovely story in detail, nor have I cited it by way of proof that Kipling contradicts the implications of “An Error in the Fourth Dimension”. He is hardly to be taken as preaching that all Americans should buy properties in England and turn themselves into Englishmen again. The real point of the story is that it is as personal as a lyric, that it is a sincere and beautiful projection in the form of the short story of the author’s own emotions.

Kipling was not an American or a millionaire, he was not gathered in in just this way by the magic of the English countryside. But it is substantially true to say that until the beginning of the century England was not his home. He had no roots here. This is reflected in the consciousness one cannot escape after reading “An Habitation Enforced” that English landscapes have been exceedingly rare in his earlier work. There are some incidental schoolboy memories in Stalky & Co. There is a marvellous bravura piece of impressionism in “My Sunday at Home” [from The Day’s Work]. In “The Brushwood Boy” [also from The Day’s Work] there are softer landscapes which, as we learn to expect from Kipling, seem to reach forward to his work in the next decade, and here perhaps we can best see the beginning of the fascination which was to grow until it became unescapable.

But “An Habitation Enforced” is the hymn of praise of the man who knows that he has come home and who knows also, in some mystical manner, that his return has been accepted and approved. Kipling at this time was in a peculiarly sensitive condition. On the private side of his life he had not long since suffered a grievous loss in the death of a dearly loved child. On the public side of his life he had received a grievous blow, not in the destruction of his political ideals but in a weakening of his confidence that they could be realised. England gave him not merely consolation but a new extension of life. Whereas on his departure from India he had sought this extension in space, he now found it in time.

In his manner (and this is a trick of his on which comment has not often been made) he attached to “An Habitation Enforced” a poem in which, in different terms and the different medium of verse, he says the same thing over again. This, though it is one of the best things he ever wrote, even considered in the company of what he did in his best period as a poet, does not excel its companion story in poignancy. But it must be quoted, if only for one phrase:

I am the land of their fathers.
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days.

Under their feet in the grasses
My clinging magic runs.
They shall return as strangers.
They shall remain as sons.

Over their heads in the branches
Of their new-bought, ancient trees,
I weave an incantation
And draw them to my knees.

Scent of smoke in the evening,
Smell of rain in the night –
The hours, the days and the seasons
Order their souls aright,
Till I make plain the meaning
Of all my thousand years –
Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,
While I fill their hearts with tears.

'All my thousand years'! It is to this feeling of the past that Kipling returns again and again throughout the work of his golden years. The English may make mistakes at home and abroad, the affairs of the Empire may go awry, but England is a country which has been built up by the work of generation after generation. She is not merely putty brass and paint.

The theme of healing is not, like that of revenge, one of Kipling’s original themes. It emerges strongly in what I have called the halcyon period of his art, the tales that are collected in Actions and Reactions and Rewards and Fairies, and continues to act as a powerful focus of his imagination until in Limits and Renewals half the tales are in one way and another, concerned with it.

... It is significant that Actions and Reactions begins an ends with a tale of healing. It is the new theme. In the collections of his middle and later life, Kipling seems to have intedned the first and last tales to serve as the pillars of an archway, corresponding to each other in some part of their meaning , and framing the section of life we see between them.

... In the first tale of Actions and Reactions, “An Habitation Enforced”, the healing is already at all levels, physical, intellectual and spiritual. George Chapin, broken by the pace and strain of the American financial world, and his wife Sophie find health and satisfaction in the ancient, composed, fruitful life of the English countryside. When Kipling made his first acquaintance with country life in Vermont, ten years before, he wrote in “From Tideway to Tideway” that there the visitor “is set down to listen to the normal beat of his own heart – a sound that very few men have ever heard”.

This was in the New England winter, and the conditions and his own sensitiveness exaggerated the rarity of the discovery. “An Habitation Enforced” is soaked in summer air, and the heart-beat that steadies the Chapins is the pulse of nature, of rural society and, to quote Mr. [T.S.] Eliot, of the past in the present. Sophie, delighted and growing daily into closer comradeship with her husband, thrusts her roots at once into the good soil; George, more uncertain of himself and suspicious of his surroundings, takes longer to yield to acclimatisation, but the birth of his son and the restoration of the derelict estate he buys in the Weald combine to fix him.

I am the land of their fathers.
In me the virtue stays.
I will bring back my children,
After certain days.

Let us consider something of their sustained power to irritate through the medium of the short story. “An Habitation Enforced” will make a good beginning. [He then summarises the story, and also that of “My Son’s Wife”]

Both these stories require a certain radical sympathy in the reader if they are not to appear bullying performances. They are emphatic statements of persuasions which can readily present themselves as prejudices: we may feel that we are being faced with arguments in which one side is allowed to have its own way. Yet they do faithfully reflect elemental facts of human life and they touch us at the depths of our own nature where the “clinging magic” does run. [“clinging magic” is a quote from Verse 2, line 2, of The Recall, the poem which follows “An Habitation Enforced”.]

Life at Bateman’s provided the motive force for the most positive stories in the next two collections. “An Habitation Enforced” deal(s) with an American couple settling cosily into the life of village and county in (a) house very like Kiplings. The minor landed gentry theme predominated, for although Rudyard wrote respectfully of the skills of the labouring men of Sussex – hedgers, tree-surgeons, water-diviners and well-sinkers – he did not mix with them as easily as he had done with the Indians and soldiers of the Punjab. He made no friends in Burwash apart from Colonel Feilden, who owned a smart William and Mary house.

...well-written, observant, thoughtful and too emphatic, the work of a man putting his roots down by will-power.

The same could be said of the story, “An Habitation Enforced”, in which an American couple settle among English country-folk. The latter are too wise and understanding and unchanged and selfless by half. Nobody shows the strangers any hostility, suspicion or even indifference. Some scenes could even form the basis of a heart-warming American film starring Robert Taylor and Sylvia Sidney. To put the matter more colourfully, the tone and content of the story are Anglophile, something which a real Englishman cannot be”.

Kipling was constantly trying, as he thought, to strengthen his work with realistic detail, technical exactitude. It was not his inborn inaccuracy in relation to detail alone, I think, that makes him so often inexact. It was that he was not a realist at all. His forte was the creation of his own world out of his impressions of the real world. The facts – accurate or inaccurate of the real world – are only important in so far as they impress the reader with the truth of the created world.

...These strengths were to the fore in two Sussex tales of these years in which he directly put forward relationship to the country, relationship to inherited roots of habitation, as balm to cure the terrible tensions of the age.

There are key sentences that suggest the country’s healing powers: ‘It’s the proportions’ [of the house] … ‘people don’t seem to matter in this country compared to the place they live in’ … the foreknowledge of deliciously empty hours to follow … ‘climate, all climate’ (This last is a peculiarly insincere attribution, for the Kipling’s were to escape English winters all their lives, save for the years of the war.)

Now, with all its excellencies of scene and background characters, “An Habitation Enforced” does not convince. The healing of Mr. and Mrs. Chapin seems improbable, their discontented return to Brown’s Hotel after a few days much more likely. It is an improbable scheme, but Kipling has made a hundred far more improbable situations convincing. It is the pressure of outside urgencies that mars the story. A weary Londoner, yes, but Americans are not needed to make the point. I suspect that the story is addressed to his wife, is a fantasy that welcomes her to the English land he had brought her to, and tells her that she is its true spiritual heir. If so, it is a touching mark of his love for her, and his realisation of her isolation, but it is an inartistic sentimentalism.

… but there is also “An Habitation Enforced”, a double-length story, one of the fuller exercises in “Hobdenism” and the ways of English Country folk.”

...Two other stories are about healing, though not about doctors of medicine, Both centre on men who are sick at heart or in spirit. One is an American millionaire, struck down in the middle of a deal by a complete mental and nervous collapse, something that doctors recognise … [the other tale is “My Son’s Wife] … Both men are healed by becoming absorbed in the life of the English countryside, Gorge Chapin and his wife by the shades of meaning and emphasis in English country behaviour, by the things said and as often left unsaid by an established way of society centuries old; their conversation sometimes hovers on the brink of sentimental.

Both these stories are variation on the theme of “A Charm”:

Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch...

Lay that earth upon thy heart
And thy sickness shall depart.

We do not, I think, know for certain what the local gentry really thought of Kipling – the landowner rather than the author – between 1902 and the end of that particular civilisation they typifies, which came with the First World War.

But we do know that Kipling in two of his best stories captured for ever the whole ethos, outlook and sentiment of the old landed gentry, once and for all, absolutely and authentically, with such understanding and conviction that any survivor of that particular “Inner Ring” knowing nothing of him but these two stories would place him unhesitatingly as the scion of an ancient house with many centuries of ancestral background in the same spot and enough authentic quarterings to satisfy Mr. Pine himself [the editor of Burke’s Landed Gentry, among other similar books, and author of books on heraldry].

The two stories are “An Habitation Enforced” written in March 1905, published in the Century Magazine for August in the same year and collected in Actions and Reactions

To most readers the world which Kipling describes in these stories is as distant and as hard to recapture as the Simla of Plain Tales; to do so demands as much of a mental metempsychosis as the stories of Romans and Normans in Puck of Pook’s Hill. But many of us remember old people met in our youth who knew Kipling’s India as and when he knew it – soldiers, administrators, political residents, civil engineers, with their wives from 'the Colonel’s lady to Judy O’Grady' – who bore witness to the fidelity with which he had caught and preserved the background, and often the minutest details of the stories themselves.

In the same way, there is still time – but only just – to test the reliability of his grasp of the people and their outlook and way of life in rural England – in Sussex in particular – which he got to know so well between 1902 and 1914.

His approach to both India and England was surprisingly similar. He came to each as an outsider, studying a foreighn culture – and became part of it. “We discovered England, which we had never done before”, he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in November 1902 at the beginning of his adventure, “and went to live in it. England is a wonderful land. It is the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have ever been in. It is made up of trees and green fields and mud and the gentry and at last I’m one of the gentry”.

In both this story [“My Son’s Wife”] and “An Habitation Enforced” we are shown how “The Land” and “The House” grow upon their unwilling or unsuspecting captives [Midmore] and the Chapins, until they become part of it – return, in a sense, to the clay from which they were digged. It is in their discovery of the land and its people and their absorption into it that Kipling shows the depth of his own discovery of the inner meaning of what at first seems so incomprehensible.

[As George Chapin says (page 15, line 1); “I give it up. People don’t seem to matter in this country compared to the places they live in.”]

But as with the best of Kipling’s mature stories the whole closely packed accumulation of detail and insight is needed, and the only valid quotation is the story in its entirety. And that entirety in “An Habitation Enforced” and “My Son’s Wife” may be accepted as being accurate in every detail and character from the squire [Sir Walter Conant, in “An Habitation Enforced”] to the village idiot [Jimmy, in “My Son’s Wife] – as it could possibly be – bearing in mind that Kipling, however great a writer, was a writer first and always; and that he was compressing what he had learnt (as a journalist maybe, but a journalist of genius) into two short stories, each of which might have served a writer of different inspiration as the plot for a whole novel.

We all, according to our temperaments and backgrounds, have our own favourites among Kipling’s stories – not necessarily those we think his greatest, but those which touch us most nearly. Chance has made me able to feel in this way about the two stories in question and given me the touchstone that proves them to be pure gold. Although not fully a member of that lost world, for simple chronological reasons, I grew up on a small country estate – of no importance, but with a background of nearly nine centuries. It like others, tried to continue in 1919 as if the previous five years had never taken place – and of course failed utterly, but only when the approach of 1939 brought on the main phase of ‘the greatest change in recorded history’.

Others still living can remember the days before 1914, and can speak with greater authority, but I am enough of a dinosaur (as C.S. Lewis styled himself in a similar context) to ‘know in my bones’ the authentic ring of true metal in this case. It is all true; the loyalty to the estate and the family which puts ‘the places they live in’ before merely personal or temporal considerations – for we are no more than life tenants in a place that belongs not to us but to the family; the loyalty which binds the squire, the tenants and the labourers complete with their families into one greater family. Sophie (and Kipling) feel this at one remove: “It’s not our land, we’ve only paid for it. We belong to it, and it belongs to the people – our people they call ‘em”.