Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

‘Will they kill thee?’

‘Oah, thatt is nothing. I am good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know. But – but they may beat me.’

p319 in my old Macmillan edition, which has, incidentally wonderful illustrations by Kipling’s father. And yes, I have the spelling correct in that passage.

And then comes this on the next page:

‘It was process of Evolution, I think, from Primal Necessity, but the fact remains in all its cui bono. I am, oh, awfully fearful!’

Interesting, to me at last, to see how strongly Darwin was in the air even in Edwardian times, just before it went out of favour. There’s something like this in The Water Babies but of course that’s much closer to the time. here’s the bit from the Water Babies:

You must not talk about “ain’t” or “can’t” when you speak of this great wonderful world mind you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roger Murchison, or Professor Owen, or Professor Sedgwick, or Professor Huxley, or Mr Darwin, or Professor faraday, or Mr Grove, or nay other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect…’ p53/4

‘…Wise men are afraid to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is contrary to mathematical truth; for as two and two cannot make five, and two straight join twice, and a part cannot be as great as a whole, and so on (at least, so it seems at present): but the wiser men are, the less they talk about “cannot’. P54

I have to say both these novels are among the most peculiar I’ve ever read. Mind you I’m also reading Selma Lagerlof’s The Saga of  Gosta Berling and that’s pretty odd too.

Here’s another quote from the Water Babies:

p56 ‘Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.’

‘Wise men know that their business is to examine what is, and not to settle what is not.’

And this amused me too:

‘Being quite comfortable is a very good thing; but it does not make people good. Indeed, it sometimes makes them naughty, as it has made the people in America.’ P157