The Adventure of Technology: Kipling, the Motorcar, and National Regeneration

Rudyard Kipling became a car enthusiast and a member of those "early, intrepid—some called them mad—automobilists" in the last years of the 1890s when motoring was still in its infancy.¹ The motorcar, a term coined by Frederick Simms after he bought the British rights to the Daimler patents in 1893, was prohibitively expensive and notoriously unreliable (Richardson, British Motor Industry, 14).² Its open top, hand operated cranks, explosive vibrations, constant breakdowns, and unprotected exposure to wind, dust, and rough roads made for a challenging driving experience. But the car also offered unprecedented mobility, fast speed, and individual control. Its roaring energy and "poetry o' Motion" promised to transcend spatial and temporal limits like "the Angel's Dream," fueling fantasies of exhilarating emancipation from human limitations.³ Kipling was enthralled with this new technology of personal transport, describing the car as "swifter than aught 'neath the sun," and outrun by only two things, "Death and a Woman who loved him."⁴ The thrill of driving this "thund'ring toy" is akin to sexual excitement, both involving a "blind," "fierce, uncontrouled descent" on "Love's fiery chariot."⁵

Kipling's interest in the car first started in 1897, the same year the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in London with 236 members.⁶ But it was a twenty-minute ride in October 1899 in the £800 Panhard-Levassor driven by Alfred Harmsworth of the Daily Mail that sealed his fate—"we returned white with dust and dizzy with noise," "but the poison worked from that hour."⁷ From then on he bought and experimented with a variety of models, and made constant motor tours all over Sussex and as far away as Scotland.⁸ From 1911 to 1935, less than a year before his death, Kipling and his family made as many as thirteen motor tours to France, "when motorists were as much pioneers of travel as are now airmen."⁹ The motorcar figures importantly in his work, particularly in the stories, poems, letters, and diaries of the fin de siècle years. It features in ten of his stories and is the subject of witty celebration in The Muse Among the Motors, his 1904 motoring column for Harmsworth's Daily Mail, where he parodies the best of the classic English poets to salute the fast speed of the car, the freedom of automobility, as well as the hardships and travails of early motoring.

As a "rhapsodist of motor-cars" and Britain's "poet motorate," Kipling is one of the earliest voices to champion the motoring movement.¹⁰ To Kipling, motoring is nothing less than what Gijs Mom calls an adventure of technology.¹¹ Driving the heavy, clumsy early car is a physical adventure involving hardships and a degree of danger that helps to breed courage, fortitude, and resilience. As a technology of speed, the car inculcates a no-nonsense efficiency, and "Law, Orrder, Duty an' Restraint, Obedience, Discipline" that Kipling has always celebrated in his machines.¹² But early motoring's tinkering culture, whereby the unreliable, eccentric engine and a scarcity of mechanics forced motorists to get down and dirty for constant repairs, turns motoring into an embodied struggle with technical dangers conducive to the cultivation of improvisation, resourcefulness, and specialist knowledge. The early motorcar thus connects to late Victorian discourses on mobility, technology, and degeneration, and particularly to Kipling's long-standing concerns for national regeneration. Kipling's imaginative relationship with the motorcar is thus importantly linked to his call for the cultivation of a toughened, resilient, and resourceful masculinity.¹³ He had long railed against the perceived national degeneration plaguing the imperial core, first in his 1880s encounters in London with the "effeminate," "long-haired" "Young Man of the Present day," and most bitterly in his disappointment with Britain's inept performance in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), a war which should have been "simple and pastoral" but ended up "having us on toast" and teaching Britain "no end of a lesson" (Letters, 3:9).¹⁴ He had always looked to the colonial fringes for sources of redemption, but in those fin de siècle years his dreams for a powerful Empire were increasingly frustrated.¹⁵ The motorcar came into his life at a time when his thoughts centered more and more on England, hoping to reinvigorate the nation from within and by recourse to older, more robust sources of localized energy. The car's fast speed and its transcendence of time and space seemed to offer a magical medium to tap and retrieve that tougher, harsher old England. In this sense, the adventure of motoring offers three combined routes of redemptive energy. The bruising nature of early motoring invigorates and toughens up the motorist, aligning him with a long list of paradigmatic men like the adventurer, the sailor, and the engineer. By mastering the technology of speed, the motorist is also elevated above mundane limits and surcharged with expansive, agentic powers. But most importantly, the car's function as a time machine and its free shuttling in time and space allows for an excavation and reawakening of the long-buried energies of England's ancient, raw past. These energies are then injected into the motorist with all their accumulated power, doubling his power of redemption.

When Kipling took up motoring in the late 1890s, the car was part of the technological inventions of communication and transportation characterizing the Second Industrial Revolution, along with the cinema, the radio, and the telegraph, some of which Kipling also wrote about.¹⁶ Of these inventions, he was most familiar with and personally involved with the motorcar, and his motor writings best capture the spirit of technology as adventure, both viscerally and symbolically. Motoring for Kipling is never just about thrilling speed or exhilarating expansion, but is also part of a wider project of imperial and national revitalization, or what Christopher Harvie sees as Kipling's "social-engineering" vision ("The Sons of Martha," 276). Early motorists may be a small, privileged cohort, but in their pioneering role they managed to sound, through the motor horn, what Kipling calls "the Note of the Age" and the clarion call of modernity.¹⁷ By teaching discipline and efficiency not only to the motorists but also to the public, "our officially dumb companions," motoring helps instill "the ingrained instinct of a highly organised civilisation" into the Englishman (Kipling, Letters, 3:151). By traversing time and tapping into older, more robust sources of energy, it brings the past to bear on the present in mutual illumination and enrichment. Motoring, in a word, speeds up and accelerates the passive, indolent national character. Imparting raw energy, resourcefulness, and virile power, it serves as "the most efficient temperance advocate," and "the only Education Act at present enforced, in Great Britain" (3:151).

Motoring for Power

Kipling's claims may sound exaggerated, but they make better sense if contextualized alongside the pervasive euphoria entertained by early car enthusiasts.¹⁸ The early motorcar first appeared on the scene as a machine of adventure and athleticism, pursued by young aristocratic men for its "fever of mobility" and as a means of heroic exploits in sport and racing.¹⁹ Endurance races and trials were held over long distances and often across national borders, and records for faster speed were constantly beaten by intrepid motorists at considerable danger to personal safety.²⁰ The car followed on the heels of the mid-1890s bicycle fever, and inherited much of the bicycle's evocation of the outdoors, open space, invigorating exercise, and intrepid adventure—values which tapped into long held Victorian concerns about the tolls of civilization and sedentary urban living, and the use of sports and exercise as redemption and antidote.²¹ Early motorists celebrated the car's speed as a physically revitalizing cure for the ills of modern civilization like neurasthenia. Writing in 1902, one Dr. F. W. Hutchinson claimed that "the fact that motor-car driving exerts an extremely beneficial influence on the health of those engaged in it is one that is obvious to all who have any experience of the matter" (quoted in Flower and Jones, 100 Years of Motoring, 82). The doctor recommended "driving at speed" to all those suffering from phthisis, sleeplessness, liverishness, bad digestion, asthma, and cold in the head, malaises typical of a sedentary, urban lifestyle (82). The car enthusiast Lord Leopold Canning credited motoring with "strengthening one's frame and putting new life and vigour into one"; it "makes you a different man," "you come back feeling better and more fit," and by the next morning "you awake refreshed and strong as a young eagle."²²

Coming during the heyday of new imperialism and particularly at a time when the incompetent performance of the often unfit British soldiers in the Second Boer War further fueled anxieties of decline and degeneration, motoring as an outdoor sport certainly promised to invigorate the national physique. But the motorcar was also the latest technology of industrial modernity, and as such contributes to the discourse of imperial regeneration in another way. As a machine of speed, the car is part of the late nineteenth-century new technologies of communication and transport that are all premised on speed and transcendence of time and space. Technological innovations, as Daniel Headrick points out, have been "essential to the European conquests of the nineteenth century," and technologies of speed in particular have been the driving force of modern western military-industrial supremacy.²³ H. G. Wells, for instance, credited "the increased speed and certainty of transport and telegraphic communications" for the exponential growth of western colonial expansion, and posited that older, more ancient empires had declined because the various media they used failed to meet "the modern need for simple, swift, exact and lucid communications."²⁴

When the motorcar came on the scene in the fin de siècle years, its impact was still limited because very few people could afford it. But already Harmsworth, car enthusiast and owner of the Daily Mail, was vocally linking the car with the imperial cause, calling for, in particular, the support of British car manufacturing as the best means of trumping other imperial powers like France and Germany. From its very first issue in 1896, the Daily Mail used the car as a medium for whipping up national anxiety and a "concomitant patriotic zeal," criticizing Britain's lagging development of automobile technology and her threatened loss of imperial power (Shepherd, "The British Press," 382). Harmsworth got to know Kipling three years later in 1899 when Kipling agreed to write the poem "The Absent-Minded Beggar" for the Daily Mail's wildly successful public appeal for money to help British soldiers in the Boer War (Kipling, Something of Myself, 88). That campaign, raising a quarter of a million pounds, helped instill the iconic image of a wounded but defiant British soldier, portrayed in the illustration to Kipling's poem, as a symbol of the imperial cause. Harmsworth again joined his motoring enthusiasm with the imperial cause when, one year later in 1900, he organized the famous 1,000-mile motor race in England, covered it day after day in the Daily Mail, and used the race proceeds to help finance the Boer War (Mom, "Civilized Adventure," 168). When Kipling lent his voice to the motoring movement, and accepted Harmsworth's invitation for a motoring column in 1904, he was most interested in the symbolic and moral functions of motoring and its rejuvenation of the English character. His interest in technology, as Jan Montefiore points out, is "not … for profit" but for the "thrill of power, the reassurance of discipline, and the pleasure of knowledge."²⁵ In the case of the motorcar, it is particularly the speed of the car and its engendering of an accelerated, energized subject where Kipling sees the most potential.

Kipling had always advocated a machine-exacted efficiency and discipline in his machine eulogies and endowed these qualities with socially redemptive roles ("McAndrew's Hymn"). In this aspect, he joins forces with an increasing number of writers and commentators in the fin de siècle period, who called for "national efficiency" as a means of imperial regeneration. The Boer War had laid bare Britain's military and administrative ineptitude, and many felt the country's decline would be irreversible unless more urgent focus was shifted to expertise, science, and technology, for which Germany was cited as a model.²⁶ Using science and medical expertise as rationale to advocate the elimination of decay, waste, and weakness, politicians, writers, and doctors campaigned for the highest possible level of efficiency across all national life, so as to make the nation, as the social imperialist Lord Rosemary put it, "equal to the demands of our Empire—administrative, parliamentary, commercial, educational, physical, moral, naval, and military fitness."²⁷ Writers like Wells joined the call by underlining the importance of technology, calling the latter "adaptable, alert, intelligent, unprejudiced, and modest," and extolling its role in enforcing efficiency upon a new class of skilled "mechanics and engineers," "a great mass of educated and intelligent efficients" using "vast possibilities of mechanism" in all spheres of life.²⁸ Although Wells envisioned a future of such "efficients" more along a global rather than a specifically British nationalist line, the belief in a techno-aided efficiency and its socially redemptive role is a common one.

Kipling was sympathetic to this discourse. The Boer War had taught Britain an imperial "lesson," not just to "our mere astonied camps," but also "Council and Creed and College" and "all the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us" ("The Lesson"). After his own firsthand experience as a war journalist in the concluding part of the Boer War, he was increasingly adamant that a complete revamp of Britain's military, social, educational, and bureaucratic systems was necessary.²⁹ It is significant that this sentiment coincides with his burgeoning interest in motoring, as many of his complaints against the British military and other institutions could be interpreted as a complaint against slowness and lack of speed, for which motoring seems to offer a cure. In Traffics and Discoveries, published in 1904, the Boer War stories appear side by side with the motoring stories, each in their way concerned with speed, or the lack thereof. "The Army of a Dream," for instance, fantasizes about a future Britain with nationwide preparedness and speedy military mobilization, only to have the narrator wake up and find that the soldiers have long been dead in South Africa. Boer soldiers, known for their long-range, high velocity magazine rifles using smokeless cartridges—German-made Mausers for the most part—mock the British soldier for being "an ignorant diseased beast like the rest of your people" and "the laughing-stock of the Continent."³⁰ The slowness and inefficiency of the "woolly" Brits also extends to all levels of English life.³¹ In the motoring story "Steam Tactics" collected in this book, Kipling expresses his impatience with almost all institutions in England, because they are "based on conformable strata of absolutely impervious inaccuracy" (96). One incident at a road crossing gets a special mention in his motoring column The Muse Among the Motors, also published in 1904, where painting of road signs is done at a snail's pace: "Four blank letterless arms the virginal signpost extended"; "they are repainting the signs and have left the job in the middle," "and traffic may stop till they've done it."³² This is just an example of how "the England we boast of" is really "bland, white-bellied, obese, but utterly useless for business" ("The Bother," 718).

This impatience with English slowness made Kipling turn his thoughts to motoring, where he saw hopes of redemption in the car's speed. A few weeks after finishing the motoring story "They" in April 1904, Kipling wrote a long letter to fellow motorist Filson Young, whose acquaintance he had made on the liner Kinfauns Castle earlier in 1900. There he made the explicit links between motoring and national regeneration, urging that Britain adopt the no-nonsense, exacting, almost militaristic discipline demanded by motoring:

She [the car] demands of her driver a certain standard of education, the capacity of unflickering attention, and absolute sobriety. Failure to comply with her indent means death, mutilation, or fine in the shape of a heavy repair bill. There is no argument: there is no concession: above all, there are no carrots. She is a condition, not a theory. Think what her presence, in registered thousands, will mean to a nation which has been laboriously trained never to admit the existence of a condition if that condition conflicts or seems likely to conflict with any one of its theories!

(Letters, 3:151)

There is certainly a streak of cruelty in this celebration of the car's crushing disciplinary power.³³ Not just the driver but the pedestrians and animals are chastized and jolted up, as it were, by the punitive, almost repressive impact of mechanized speed. The letter exults over the sudden transformation of the roadside horses, which, "so sodden" before, now "keep one ear up the road," "leap from the bar," "run to their horses' heads," and "break" "the habit of ages"; a dog that "my car" "caught … on the shoulder" and "hoisted" "nearly as high as Sirius," can now "judge to a fraction the speed of every motor" and are "vastly" "changed … for the better" (Letters, 3:151–52). The walking public, denied the privilege of car ownership and at the receiving end of its destructive speed, are scared into "suddenly and accurately" being able to "distinguish between their left hand and their right," "automatically and almost as though it were the ingrained instinct of a highly organised civilisation" (3:151). "Accuracy, precision, restraint," and discipline are now hammered into men and beast by the car, at the peril of "death" or "mutilation," but obviously Kipling believes this a worthy price to pay in order to forcefully bring the public up to speed (3:151). "It is the Car, my dear Young," he goes on to write, "that we have to thank for the quickened intellect, the alerter eye, the more agile limbs, and the less unquenchable thirst of our fellow-citizens, as well as for the higher standard of decency" to be attained by the "dumb" Englishmen (3:151).

The motorist himself is similarly sped up and gains greater efficiency and specialist knowledge through interaction with and adjustment to ever more complex technology. Kipling's motorist is, of course, not Wells's lowly "mechanics and engineers" but highly privileged and elitist. Kipling was able to join this small community because of what Henry James called his "enviable popularity" as a bestselling author, a remark occasioned when Kipling visited James in his showy, brand-new, "magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car" (quoted in Ricketts, Rudyard Kipling, 280–81). But perhaps more than other modern technology, the early car also poses many problems and challenges that, in turn, toughen up the motorist. Early motoring was extremely hands-on and technically immersive, and a motorist was often his own mechanic, lying "prone upon his back, lost to public view, underneath a mass of costly French machinery, investigating for himself the cause of some stoppage in transit," according to a 1902 article in Town and Country.³⁴ One of the few lady motorists of the time wrote in 1905 that motoring "involves work both heavy and dirty"; "the mere male is willing to wade through oil, grease and many cog-wheels to his insecure seat" and was not averse to the "disagreeable task of crawling beneath the car to affect some adjustment," but this would be "fatal" to "any self-respecting woman."³⁵ This tinkering culture exposes middle-class folks to the man-machine encounter that had defined the lives of the working-class on the factory floor.³⁶ It also helps to instill a form of technical knowledge, work discipline, and speedy efficiency that to Kipling boasts of social and cultural importance.

In The Muse Among the Motors, Kipling features a motoring Falstaff character, who noisily grumbles over the ungainly masks, goggles, and heavy-duty leather cloaks motorists had to wear, "till I looked like a mushroomed dunghill" "to be smoked over burnt oils," "to be enseamed" with "intolerable greases," and "thus scented, thus habited, thus vizarded," to have to "leap out" whenever the car went out of control.³⁷ In his motoring story "Steam Tactics," the narrator motorist's steam ignition lights up in a ball of fire, sending the driver fly over the right rear wheel "in a column of rich yellow flame" and with "singed beard" and "singed forefinger" (92). When the water tank runs low, all the passengers have to get out and push the 1,200-pound car "under the hot sun," which "even on ball-bearings was a powerful sudorific" (94). Further accidents include a dropped-off screw, which they have to retrieve by walking back five miles along the road, and a leaked water pump that lands the whole party in "floods of tears" at the top of a wild, uninhabited ridge (100). Earlier in the story, in order to avoid a police trap and a hefty fine for exceeding what was then the legal limit of twenty miles per hour, the car swipes into a narrow lane that ends abruptly without warning—"there are two or three in Sussex like it"—and slides helplessly over "wet grass and bracken" down dense "early British woodland" into a boggy "babbling" stream (98). "Forty horse-power would never have rolled wet pneumatic tyres up that verdurous cliff we had descended" (98).

These literary hardships mirror the real-life travails Kipling endured. Kipling used a driver but was so immersed in the running and repairing of his cars that he vented his frustration in page after page of letters and diary entries, complaining how he was "reduced" "to the limits of fatigue and hysteria" by his cars (Something of Myself, 104). One car was called a "heart-breaking" "Holy Terror" because of its "eternal and continuous breakdown," and on one occasion Kipling and two friends had to "pump dolefully every few miles home" after it broke down (Letters, 3:60). On another, the Locomobile "dissolved into clouds of steam and oil and water" when running on a hill, forcing Kipling and his wife to "wearily [tramp] the roads till we found a cottage and a kind Irishman who fed us on chicken and ham sandwiches and beer and was an angel unto us" (Letters, 3:62). The petrol-powered Lanchester that he changed to in 1904 was still "most unsatisfactory," and Kipling nicknamed it Jane Cakebread, after the notorious Victorian woman who got 281 court convictions for disorderly intoxication (3:169n1). The car "smells like a fried fish shop and spits her condenser water, boiling, over our knees" (3:169n1). When Lanchester's sales demonstrator went down to the Kiplings' house for a test drive, Kipling and his wife came out "enveloped in long macintoshes with hoods pulled over their heads," so that later on when "a cascade of boiling water and steam burst out of the water tank amidships—all over the Kiplings," they were able to escape largely unscathed (Macdonald, "Lordly of Leather," 36).

To Kipling and other early motorists, such early mishaps in technology were not a weakness but a chance to build greater strength and endurance. The travails and hardships turn early motorists, in Kipling's eyes, into trailblazing, visionary heroes who sacrifice themselves and brave limitations to reach a new height. In the same letter to Young, Kipling wrote:

I like motoring because I have suffered for its sake. … My agonies, shames, delays, rages, chills, parboilings, road-walkings, water-drawings, burns, and starvations … all went to make your car to-day safe and comfortable. If there were no dogs there would be no vivisection, and people would still be treated on the lines of Galen and Avicenna. Any fool can invent anything, as any fool can wait to buy the invention when it is thoroughly perfected; but the men to reverence, to admire, to write odes and erect statues to, are those Prometheuses and Ixions (maniacs, you used to call us) who chase the inchoate idea to fixity up and down the King's Highway with their red right shoulders to the wheel. Yes, I love because I have suffered. Suffered, as I now see, in the cause of Humanity. … I can spend three hours in dark and cold with a leaky tube that needs attention every two hundred yards. (emphasis added)

(Letters, 3:149–150)

These heroic, Promethean qualities certainly put Kipling's motorist one caste above Wells's new priesthood of professionally trained technicians. By portraying them as paradigm and example in his motor writings, Kipling spells out "a liberal education" on how individual and national revitalization is to be achieved, through the active selfshaping and character-building offered by motoring's challenges.

Mastering that "Octopod"

Ultimately, such technical challenges are more than compensated for by the car's promise of exhilarating speed, which triggers overwhelming feelings of power and excitement, the second redemptive source that Kipling celebrates in motoring. This is the most fascinating appeal of motoring as an adventure of technology, despite the constant breakdowns in the early stage. As speed has been associated since ancient times with flying, a godly or angelic power beyond the confines of human life, motoring offers that thrilling fantasy of transcendence and godly heights of power.³⁸ Earlier machines of speed like the railway and the steamship promise a similar compression of time and space, but the car excels by rendering possible, for the first time, a more active, individualized control of mechanized speed. The motorist could manipulate speed and direction and accelerate and decelerate at will, restoring a sense of agency and compensatory freedom to the human subject, even if such freedom is mediated through the very product of mechanizing industrialization. Perennially moving and sweeping over vast swathes of a ceaselessly changing landscape, the car blesses the motorist with the "opulent nourishment" of new intensities of sensual and psychic alertness.³⁹ With his hands juggling gears and levers, eyes and ears processing fast-changing scenes and sounds, and "every nerve and muscle braced," the motorist undergoes "a wholly new experience" of feeling speed as a thrill and a physical sensation (Kipling, "Steam Tactics," 92).⁴⁰ Kipling had long enthused over the thrill of power brought by machines, but motoring engenders the further excitement of greater agency, a keener ability "to feel modernity in the bones" (Duffy, The Speed Handbook, 4). For Kipling, this almost sublime sense of freedom does not conflict with his touted discipline and respect for the machine. Freedom is aided and amplified by the individual control of speed promised by the motorcar, but it is also predicated upon the sufficient mastery of discipline, efficiency, and specialist knowledge.

Kipling's excitement over the empowering freedom brought by the car is palpable in the following lines:

Nowadays, my car helps me to live at a decent distance from any town without sacrificing what house-agents call the amenities. … if I visit, I do so as a free agent, making my own arrangements for coming and going. In all cross-country journeys I am from one to four hours quicker than the local train service. On main line routes I hold my own—in greater comfort than the railway can give me—up to forty miles. (emphasis added)

(Letters, 3:150)

The motoring story "They" (1904) begins with a mesmerizing account of the evanescent, mobile beauty of the Sussex Downs seen through the intoxicated eyes of the speeding motorist narrator:

One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels. The orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles.⁴¹

This exhilaration over speed and freedom is echoed in The Muse Among the Motors, where Kipling relishes the car's ability to "wend through straight streets strictly, trimly" or "after office, as fitteth thy fancy, / Faring with friends far among fields."⁴² "Lordly of leather, gaudily gilded," there is "none other equal in action" (Kipling, "The Advertisement," 709). In this collection of motor poems where he emulates classical poets to salute the motorcar, the tone may be parodic and half-sarcastic. But taken together with his letters of the same period, there is also an undeniable enthusiasm that positions the car as the iconic symbol of modernity, not undeserving of a crown made from the jewels of the past. "The Inventor" raises motoring's empowering freedom to a romantically rebellious height, one that defies the tyranny of time and space. "When Time and Space said Man might not, / Bravely he answered, 'Nay! I mote.'"⁴³ The motorist, accelerated by speed, is elevated into a god-defying "Prometheus," while the nation, similarly accelerated, bids goodbye to an era where "Time and Space decreed his lot," and "Men built altars to Distance / At every mile they passed" ("The Inventor," 719). A new era now beckons for a sped-up England, where "Time and Distance fell, / And Man went forth anew," and "my new Age came to birth!" ("The Inventor," 720, 719).

This celebratory stance sets Kipling apart from many of his contemporaries who, carrying on the venerable antimachine humanist tradition, associated the motorcar from the outset with the monstrous, maiming machine that stultifies lives and pollutes nature. In his 1910 novel Howards End, E. M. Forster links the "throbbing, stinking" car with "dust," stench, and the unfeeling killing of a cat by the wealthy, car-driving Wilcoxes on a trip from London.⁴⁴ To Margaret Schlegel, terribly upset by this trip, the car's "swift movement" is part of modernity's wider "craze for motion" that "withered her delicate imaginings," and "robbed [the English landscape] of half its magic" and the people their ability to interact with "the earth and its emotions" (Forster, Howards End, 180, 290, 63, 180, 183). Virginia Woolf also criticizes the motorcar in her earlier work for ruining the country road and posing lethal danger to unwary pedestrians. The English country road has lost "its old character … its quiet … its ancient and irregular charms" and becomes instead "black as cinders, smooth as oil cloth, shaven of wild flowers, straightened of corners, a mere racing-track for the convenience of a population seemingly in perpetual and frantic haste not to be late for dinner."⁴⁵

Kipling's contemporaries tended to dismiss his enthusiasm for machines. A 1904 London Evening Standard review, for instance, calls him a "boy-poet" thrown into "a land of machinery," where "cranks, pistons, oscillating cylinders, driving wheels, fly wheels, all on a gigantic scale, [are] moving, clanging, vibrating, roaring, whispering," "till at last the poet-boy becomes persuaded that these things move the stars, and are more worth the singing than anything man has sung before."⁴⁶ But Kipling's stance toward the motorcar is more complicated. In some of his poems, Kipling also tries to be sensitive to the car's disruptions by warning motorists of reckless speeding—"o'ertaking at corners is Death in the end"—or sympathizing with rural nostalgia for the leisured peace of the pre-car days.⁴⁷ In "Contradictions," he opines that the car is "neither evil nor good," "Ormuzd" or "Ahriman," for it may be "a blast from the mouth of Hell" to the average villager but also "the beat of an angel's wing" to a sick child waiting for the doctor's car.⁴⁸ In other writings, particularly his motoring letters, he displays a motorist's cruel indifference to bloodied roadkill or pedestrians not quick enough to give way to the car. But the more noteworthy point is that, in his motoring stories, Kipling demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the complex, potentially positive dimensions of the man-machine encounter that does not emphasize stark polarization, as is the tradition in much modern literature. In the interaction between his motorist and the car, the sense of empowerment is not one-sided. The car conquers space and time limitations, but the motorist in turn conquers and controls the car with agility and agency. The adventure of technology offered by motoring and the wrestling with and eventual triumph over technology suggests a reciprocal process of mutual elevation. Motoring does not just exact discipline on the human subject, but the latter, in controlling the car, unleashes new skills of heroic improvisation that magnify, rather than stifle, his organic agency.

Commenting on the man-machine encounter in the nineteenth century, Nicholas Daly writes that what the working-class folks have experienced on the factory floor is revisited on the body of the middle class by the railway experience. The "rapid series of jolts" experienced by the railway passenger replicates the mechanical rhythm of the factory machine and leads to "railway spine" and ceaseless nervous shocks (Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 43, 42). If Daly sees a more positive potential in such encounters whereby a "retooled" and reenergized human subject is made possible who is better able to accommodate and adjust to the shocks of industrial modernity, then early motoring, promising greater agency than the more passive railway experience and higher improvisation and alertness than the stationery factory mechanism, should herald a more elevating man-machine encounter (5). In "Steam Tactics," this invigorating assemblage of human agency and prosthetic technology allows the motorist to fly like a "strong-winged albatross" all over the Sussex Downs (Kipling, "Steam Tactics," 103). It also breeds a particularly virile, resourceful, and resilient masculinity that offers an edifying example of how an individual and, by extension, a nation is empowered through adaptation to and mastery of technology.

In this story, Kipling uses his own steam Locomobile as the model for the steam car, while the "claret-coloured petrol car" driven by the character Sir Michael Gregory, which stops courteously and points out a place for fetching water to the steam car, is likely based on his Lanchester petrol car (94).⁴⁹ The narrator rides in his steam car with his two sailor friends, meets a plainclothes policeman who wants to fine them, unjustly, for speeding, and takes him along to the nearest magistrate to pay the fine. When they find out that the policeman is not carrying his warrant card, they decide to "kidnap" him and show him what the alleged speed of twenty-five miles is really like. When the steam car slides down a cliff in an attempt to avoid another police trap and breaks down completely, they are rescued by the narrator's friend Kysh, who drives a "big, black, black-dashed, tonneaued twenty-four horse Octopod" petrol car, "good for two hundred [miles] on one tank o' petrol" (Kipling, "Steam Tactics," 100, 102). Kysh has his engineer onboard but prefers to take the helm himself. Taking the whole party on a wild spin all over Sussex to tease the policeman and teach him a lesson, Kysh stuns his passengers with his juggling and improvising power, and revels in the thrill of conquering complicated machinery:

He improvised on the keys—the snapping levers and quivering accelerators—[with] marvellous variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a barndance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. … And she—oh! that I could do her justice!—she turned her broad black bows to the westering light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation-roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar.

(102–3)

Here both man and car metamorphosize into a living, mutually enhancing hybrid, the car enabling the man to fly, like the "Archangel of Twilight," the man manipulating the car and coaxing it into the best performance. The motorist is the improvising pianist, switching gears and levers like a pianist juggles with his keys. The motorcar in its turn becomes an animated being, throbbing and "quivering" with life and flinging up "her tail like a sounding whale" (104). Driving, then, is like artistic creation, with infinite variations and mesmerizing "barn-dance" movements produced from the symphony of man and car.

The story's comparison of motoring to piano playing is especially illuminating, as the piano, much perfected in the nineteenth century by new technologies like high quality piano wire for strings and precision casting for massive iron frames so that higher levels of tension, dynamic contrast, and emotional expression could be achieved, was often called the "musical steam engine" by the Victorians.⁵⁰ Playing this highly complicated machine of sound demands "near-automatic" technical skills, attained through strict discipline and repeated practice, but it also paradoxically facilitates a powerful expression of artistic creativity and individual passion (Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines, 148). The problem-ridden early motorcar requires similar skills of mechanical operation, but its very volatility entails perhaps even greater improvisation than piano playing. The early steam car, which had layers of piano wire wound outside its huge boiler to withstand a pressure of 250 pounds per square inch when steam was raised, required the driver to use his left hand to steer with a tiller and his right to operate the throttle and reverse gear.⁵¹ It would take five to twenty minutes to raise steam, depending on luck and skill, and the water level and steam pressure required constant watching (Young, The Complete Motorist, 137). The petrol car was even more difficult to steer, with its higher revving, explosive engine, complicated gears, and heavy hand crank (134). These very imperfections and eccentricities, which did not improve until the later years of the decade, lead to an unpredictability that galvanizes the motorist's attention, for he would need, as the sailor friend claims when driving the steam car in "Steam Tactics," "two hundred bloodshot eyes" in the "shinin' tail" of a "burnin' peacock" to keep on the job (Kipling, "Steam Tactics," 92). To master the early car, therefore, demands an active, whole-body engagement from the motorist and great improvisational skills. The motorist would have to listen keenly for the sound of the engine, judge the right fuel-air mix, and develop a quick sense of the right timing for ignition or gear change to avoid breakdown, detect problems, and adjust to challenging driving conditions (Clarsen, Eat My Dust, 9).

This unreliability seems to endow the early car with what early car enthusiast T. Chambers called a "soul" and an eccentricity that is very much like the human, which increases rather than reduces the attraction of early motoring.⁵² To get at the pulse of that technology, to wrestle with it, and finally to conquer it leads to an exhilarating sense of adventure and heroism. To Kipling this is perhaps no less empowering than the conquest of opposing enemies in his earlier works of colonial exploration. In "Steam Tactics," the sailor friend Pyecroft is stunned into admiration for the risk-taking bravado of the motorist Kysh. "I've took a few risks in my time," he exclaims, "but I'm a babe to this man" (Kipling, "Steam Tactics," 104). The Petty Officer sailor and his friend, "chief engineer o' the Djinn, 31-knot" Destroyer, may be "pure genius" naval "artificers" adroit in the machinery of naval engine rooms, but even they now play second fiddle to the expert motorist Kysh and his higher levels of agentic power (91). Motoring's alliance between the mechanical and the creative would be more than comparable to piano playing, which is often credited with an ability to unite human creativity with mechanical precision. Perhaps even more than the static piano, the speeding motorcar triggers greater "kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, haptic, spatial and visual sensibilities" and a more visceral, exhilarating form of control.⁵³ Motoring thus lends itself both to the perfection of mechanical skills after repeated practice, and also a powerful projection of the motorist's own self, as he improvises on the spot and asserts his will and passion.

In "Steam Tactics," the motorist's adrenaline-packed interaction ultimately serves to reshape and expand the human body, as it instills in him a keener, alerter sense and new coordinated skills of eye, ear, hand, leg, and brain. Like piano playing, a medium for great emotional expression through mechanical prosthesis, motoring carries thrilling affective powers as well, and its volatility and unpredictability further adds to the potential for creative expression. As "we" "weave" "fairy rings" with the car and "rejoice with her," both Kysh and his passengers are spurred by feelings of intoxicating freedom and heroic transcendence, emotions aided and intensified by mechanical power. The two sailors stare in awe when they witness Kysh's improvisational skills: "Watch him! It's a liberal education, as Shakespeare says," one proclaims ("Steam Tactics," 104). Kysh's whole body gets into the act and takes on new capabilities, blending into and expanded by the mechanical energy while injecting his own creativity and passion into the car. With his hands busily juggling with the levers, he "flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch shell" (102). The sailor engineer shouts with sheer admiration: "He's steering with 'is little hind-legs"; "stand up and look at him, Robert. You'll never see such a sight again!" (102). The car in its turn is coaxed into the best performance—"she" could almost "talk poetry," marvels the sailor over the car's nimble dance (104). The symphony of man and car achieves a feat of creativity and emotional power just like a great performing pianist. The passengers are initially stunned into silence, then "stupefied" and "drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod," and finally explode into exhilarating passion (104). "Look! Look! It's sorcery!" cries the sailor Hinchcliffe (105). His "bright eyes" "glued on Kysh's hands juggling with levers," the sailor is mesmerized by the performance, and "volumes could not have touched it more exactly" (101). Far from simply mechanizing the driver, motoring expands the human subject with new skills and new emotions, located not simply in the natural body itself but as a result of fusion of the organic and the mechanical.

Accelerating the Past

This exhilarating expansion enabled by the motorist's mastery of the car's prosthetic speed constitutes a crucial part of the redemptive power that Kipling sees in motoring. But a third, more significant route lies beyond this man-machine dyad and introduces the further dimension of history. To Kipling, the agentic adventure of technology and the triumphant transcendence over time and space does not just lead to a race forward or toward faster speed but also makes possible a free shuttling in time backwards to retrieve and revive a lost past and remedy its relationship with the present. This is the most important part of Kipling's motoring vision, and in his story "They," the car's function as a time machine that reawakens a cherished past is a central theme.

Written five years after the death of his beloved daughter Josephine, the story is told by a motorist narrator, a "thinly veiled" Kipling, who takes three motor tours across the Sussex Downs where he comes across an isolated, haunted house.⁵⁴ Although the narrator is never able to locate the house in any maps or local gazettes, the car guides him there unfailingly each time, out of "her own volition" and seemingly blessed with a magical instinct. Even the car's small accident, "an internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that cut into a summer-silent hazel wood," is opportunely timed to lead the driver to the mysterious house (Kipling, "They," 157).

In this story, there is little hint of the jarring, obnoxious associations of the polluting, noisy car, linked with the monstrous machine and perceived as destructive of nature. Instead, it is very much in harmony with the pristine, rural landscape and with the simple undiluted pleasures of childhood. The house is haunted by the laughter and sudden stirrings made by children who can only be glimpsed, heard but not actually seen. Sometimes it is the face of a child that appears briefly in an upstairs window, or "the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief"; other times it is "the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet" on the staircase, or the "glint" of a child's "blue blouse" among the grass (154, 165, 155). The lady of the house, blind in sight but acute in hearing, could feel and hear the children, and so could the motorist narrator, to the apparent disbelief of other people who think this really mad. In the same way the lady keeps a fire in the house day and night and leaves toys around for the elusive children, the motorist lays out his car tools and repair kit in a "glittering" display, "a trap to catch all childhood," in an effort to entice the shy children out of their hiding place (157).

The car's flying wheels sweep the narrator onto a journey that seems to transcend the boundaries of reality and illusion, merging the present with an irretrievable past. The children are dead spirits haunting this isolated house, a liminal place of haunted rooms, glimpsed shadows, soft voices, and lingering laughter. The car brings him to a place where the deceased and the living could meet, and the dear lost child returns to the grieving adult for one more treasured moment. The motorist admits to "have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," though he would "very much" want to (155, 156). Dreams, traditionally a celebrated source for imaginative leaps and bounds, fail to take the narrator to his beloved dead. But where even human dreams fail, the motorcar triumphs and propels the motorist to this fantasy place, where he can hear the dead children, catch glimpses of their lovely faces, and even relish the delicious, fleeting feel of a gentle kiss on his palm. "I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. … The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm—as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close" (167, emphasis added). A gift indeed that kiss is, as Kipling, no doubt with memories of his dead daughter in mind, conveys that wistful yearning of the living to reunite with the dead, and "to see and touch his daughter again."⁵⁵ Though at the end of the story the narrator decides never to return again so as to turn away from this drowning sorrow, for that moment at least, the motorist, rising on the prosthetic wings of the speeding motorcar, triumphs over time, space, gravity, and even mortal death.

As the story develops, the narrator compensates for his own sad loss by trying to rescue the life of a sick child in the village. Although the child eventually dies, the motorist is able to take advantage of the car's fast speed to run up and down the narrow winding lanes of Sussex, find a doctor, fetch medicine, and bring a Sister from a nunnery to nurse the sick child, all within a short time. "A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away" (Kipling, "They," 161). "Within the halfhour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop," where the sick child lives (161). The old butler of the haunted house laments that his own child, who died years ago because his "tax cart" was too slow to get him to a doctor in time, might have been "saved" if he had the help of a motorcar (161). "Useful things cars," the butler muses aloud, "If I'd had one when mine took sick she wouldn't have died" (161). The motorcar's time-compressing speed, a product of technological modernity, is life-giving and regenerative, while slowness is equated with death, impotence, and loss.

Here, the car's triumph over human limitations, and particularly its almost magical ability to recall and conjure up a lost past, is often cited as a good example of Kipling's characteristic fusion of technology with the supernatural.⁵⁶ In his other stories of technology like "Mrs. Bathurst" (1904) and "Wireless" (1902), Kipling portrays what Nicholas Daly calls this "technological uncanny," and likewise the uncanny lies in the new communication technology's speedy retrieval of the absent or the past (Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 69). Mrs. Bathurst's mesmerizing image comes over so powerfully on the movie screen to her former lover thousands of miles away that he is compelled to desert his ship. In "Wireless," the new technology of wireless telegraphy traverses over a century of time to connect the modern-day chemist's assistant with the spirit of the Romantic poet Keats. The motorcar in "They" also shares this power to transcend time and space, but the prosthetic elevation is experienced on a much more visceral and agentic level. As the car churns up the muddy roads and sweeps through the Sussex Downs, the motorist revels in the tactile and psychic thrill of free movement while all the time in complete control of speed and direction, and by extension the imaginative power to recall the past. The resultant sense of empowerment is greatly enhanced.

For Kipling, motoring's ability to recall and restore a lost past expands beyond the personal into wider social levels, promising hopes of national redemption and regeneration. In 1902, two years before "They" was published, Kipling moved into Bateman's, a seventeenth-century house at Burwash, Sussex, which marks the beginning of a new interest away from Empire politics and towards the geography and history of England. He was fascinated by what Edmund Wilson calls "the rich grassiness of the English country, the dense fogginess of the English coast, the layers upon layers of tradition that cause the English character to seem to him deep-rooted, deep-colored, deep-meaning" ("The Kipling that Nobody Read," 54). This native English tradition, exuding from the land and its history, seems to Kipling to offer the untapped strengths of an older, more robust past that needs to be resurrected and called forth to invigorate modern England. To persuade the British to defend Empire, as David Gilmour points out, they have to be taught about their own country and what it means to be English.⁵⁷ Kipling had returned to England with a sense of scorn for the smug insularity of the English, having seen how big and varied the world was, and his "original notion" had been to try "to tell to the English something of the world outside England," "the whole sweep and meaning of things and effort and origins throughout the Empire" (Something of Myself, 54). But now Kipling wished, as he wrote about his intention for the Puck stories, to give children "a notion of the time sense which is at the bottom of all knowledge of history and history rightly understanded means love of one's fellow men and the lands one lives in" (Letters, 3:189).

This change of heart took place when he was increasingly preoccupied with motoring. Of course the fast car makes this discovery of the English countryside physically possible, but it is the car's function as a time machine that is especially meaningful in this excavation of the past. In his letters of these years, references to motoring and to this old England appear frequently and often side by side. In fact Kipling's very move to Bateman's in 1902 was made possible by the Locomobile. The place was isolated, "nearly four miles" from the station, and the previous owner confessed to have used up "two pair of horses on the hill here" (Kipling, Something of Myself, 104). When asked how he would overcome the isolation, Kipling replied that he would rely on his car, and indeed in three years after this purchase "the railway station had passed out of our lives" (105). It was on his motorcar that Kipling explored Sussex and really got to know England. Writing to Charles Norton on November 30 of the same year, Kipling revealed that it was through many such "transmigration[s]" across the Sussex Downs with Carrie that "then we discovered England which we had never done before" (Letters, 3:113). Calling England "a wonderful land" and "the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have ever been in," Kipling was not just able to revel with sensual abandon in the beauty of the English landscape, this "one renewed and unreasoned orgy of delight" (3:113).⁵⁸ More importantly, as the wheels speed over the land, crushing time and space and catapulting him to the past, motoring helps to ignite and accentuate his deepening sense of the rich history and latent energy of England, and of the need to retrieve and revive a deeply ingrained Englishness for national regeneration.

Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), conceived also in 1904, has Puck, "the oldest of all old things in old England," calling forth a list of characters from "old England" to tell to the children (Letters, 3:183).⁵⁹ These characters from England's ancient, medieval, and early modern past, including "a Roman legionary," "a young Norman baron," and "a mediaeval adventurer," among others, constitute an essential Englishness with its raw, down-to-earth spirit, respect for law and rules, and a work discipline in tune with a close-knit, almost Freemasonic society where "each person occupies a worthy place" (Letters, 3:173).⁶⁰ Such qualities of determination, dedication, and loyalty, long valorized in Kipling's earlier works of Empire, are now to be sought in a tougher, harsher, but more robust old England. As Carrington points out, these stories and their "dynamic myth" have been "more effective in moulding the thought of a generation" and strengthening the "nerves of many a young soldier" "when leaders fail to lead and statesmen study only their careers."⁶¹

If Puck uses magic to conjure up this more virile past of discipline and raw energy to teach and inculcate today's children, the motorist achieves the same purpose by rising on the prosthetic wings of his speeding car and exploiting to the full the car's function as a time machine. In his same letter to Young, written a few weeks after finishing "They," Kipling admits that this excavation of England's past has been the chief purpose of his motoring:

But the chief end of my car, so far as I am concerned, is the discovery of England. To me it is a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries; and a day in the car in an English county is a day in some fairy museum where all the exhibits are alive and real and yet none the less delightfully mixed up with books. For instance, in six hours, I can go from the land of the Ingoldsby Legends by way of the Norman Conquest and the Barons' War into Richard Jefferies' country, and so through the Regency, one of Arthur Young's less known tours, and Celia's Arbour, into Gilbert White's territory. Horses are only horses; but the car is a time-machine on which one can slide from one century to another at no more trouble than pushing forward of a lever … in England the dead, twelve coffin deep, catch hold of my wheels at every turn, till I sometimes wonder that the very road does not bleed. That is the real joy of motoring—the exploration of this amazing England. (emphasis added)

(Letters, 3:150)

The car, then, does not just offer discipline and power in its own motoring experience but also doubles as the best medium to call up that revered English past where such qualities were the order of the day. As the car speeds by, centuries of English history and ancient deeds of heroism are awakened and flipped open one by one like the pages of an animated book. Like the high modernist metaphor of walking, which allows the crowd-observing, street-rambling flâneur to savor the multiple flavors of the city and weave a penetrating vision of modern life, motoring for Kipling becomes the magical, symbolic medium by which the two forces of history and spatiality converge and come into life. Shuttling freely in time and space and intoxicated by the combined energies of the fast car and the reawakened land, the motorist exercises his active imagination to engage past and present in an act of mutual recognition and illumination. This view of history informs most of the Puck stories where the past is always "at the moving edge" of the present in a fluid pairing to shed light and wisdom (Ricketts, Rudyard Kipling, 289). Motoring thus takes on a magical dimension, as it links up the isolated spots into lines of energy and breathes life into an exemplary past, till hidden meanings are awakened and a nation is emboldened and refreshed.

This view of technology and history differs from other, pro-technology modern writers like Wells, who believes in technology's progressive impact on eliminating old beliefs and ways. To Kipling, as Harvie points out, industrial modernity could only prosper by cultivating and reviving "old precepts" and traditional values ("The Sons of Martha," 277). But technology also imbues new life to the past. Kipling's view of the past, as demonstrated in many of the Puck stories with their looming sense of decay and decline of the Roman empire, is informed by an awareness of the need to keep on working, growing, and coming together. The robust power of a magical past is retrieved and reinstated to illuminate the present, but it, in its turn, needs to be accelerated by new technologies like the motorcar. This explains why his letter to Young compares the awakened dead to bloodied roadkill clutching at the car wheels. Kipling is not just displaying a characteristic thrill with "killing" and "the smell of blood," but is rather suggesting that the dead themselves want a share of the thrill and energy of the speeding car.⁶² The motorcar awakens the past, hitherto lying "twelve-coffin" deep and isolated from the present by linear time and space. Sprung to life by the speeding car, the dead are climbing out of their deep coffins of the past and clamoring, at whatever costs, to get onboard and join the journey. Kipling is saying that the car's time traveling and space-condensing speed brings past and present closer in mutual enrichment, so that both are accelerated, and the magic is doubled.

Conclusion

Motoring is thus empowering and restorative to Kipling both as a medium and in its essence, both on a personal level and for the nation. Such enthusiasm for motoring's paradigmatic role does not, however, last long. Most of Kipling's writings on the motorcar concentrated around 1904, and in the following years the motorcar made very few appearances in his work, until after 1910 when Kipling discovered the joy of motor touring in the Continent, particularly France. The loss of enthusiasm in these intermediate years coincides, interestingly, with the spike in popularity of the motorcar in Britain and America. Very possibly the motorist loses his appeal as pioneer and adventurist after the motorcar became easier to drive and more available to a wider public. Already at the time of Kipling's motor writings around 1904, the days of motoring as an adventure of technology were fast coming to an end. In 1904, two years after King Edward VII—a widely known car enthusiast who bought three Daimler cars in 1900—granted the Royal Warrant to the Daimler Company, more people from the fashionable circle joined in (Richardson, British Motor Industry, 29).These motorists were very different from the early pioneers, preferring luxuries like "sash windows with blinds of oiled silk, walnut veneers and fitted cabinets," and "seats of Morocco leather, West of England cloth or Bedford cord" (42). The cars catering to their needs soon adopted streamlined bodies and brightly colored paintwork and upholstery; they changed from machines of adventure to ones of comfort. Six or seven years into the new century, rapid technological improvements—including the use of the electric starter, the quiet propulsion system, streamlined and interchangeable parts, and the rise of a national maintenance and garage system—further helped to make the car much safer and easier to drive (Mom, "Civilized Adventure," 183). It came as no surprise that these later cars were banned from the annual London to Brighton run, which only allowed pre-1904 models to participate (Richardson, British Motor Industry, 42).

Kipling's misgiving over the loss of adventure and raw energy of those early years is obvious in his 1904 letter to Young, where he complains that people of today seem to have little knowledge that early pioneers like himself have suffered and sacrificed in order "to make your car to-day safe and comfortable" (Letters, 3:150). Even the car's celebrated ability to traverse into the past and retrieve a cherished tradition seems to be compromised once the field became overrun with mass-produced cars seeking comfort and pleasure. That the element of the elitist, courageous pioneer is indispensable to Kipling's motoring vision is also seen in his resurgence of interest as a touring motorist on the continent, where motor touring was still very rare and limited to a small cohort of wealthy Englishmen—a pastime that allowed him to again play the role of "pioneer" (Kipling, Souvenirs of France, 17).⁶³ The wide, straight, better maintained French roads, with no speed limits, proved to be the "mecca for motoring pilgrims" and offered Kipling "broad and unbridled" joy in limitless speed (Flower and Jones, 100 Years of Motoring, 82).⁶⁴ With "all France to play with, and our auto to convey us," Kipling wrote his own French road report for the touring department of the Royal Automobile Club to make up for the lack of reliable and updated maps (Souvenirs of France, 19; Letters, 4:27–30). It was in France that Kipling was first introduced to the "enormous 6-cylinder Rolls-Royce," lent to him by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, "the great motoring man," while in Avignon in March 1910 (Letters, 3:411). The smoothrunning "chariot of fire," which never broke down, worked such wonders on Kipling that he switched to Rolls-Royce after his return to England and never changed his loyalty throughout his life (3:420).

The change to Rolls-Royce may suggest that, as he got older, Kipling himself had to choose accident-free comfort over bruising hardship. But those early days of Promethean adventure, when motorists sweated and toiled "with their red right shoulders to the wheel," are not easily forgotten (Letters, 3:150). Years later, in "The Prophet and the Country," where the motorist narrator takes a motoring trip to the Midlands, a glimpse back to those early days again surfaces. When his car breaks down, the motorist is forced to spend the night in the open:

A rounded pile of woods ahead took one sudden star to its forehead and faded out … and a weak moon struggled up out of a mist-patch from a valley. Our lights painted the grass unearthly greens, and the treeboles bone-white. A church clock struck eleven, as I curled up in the front seat and awaited the progress of Time and Things, with some notion of picking up a tow towards morning. It was long since I had spent a night in the open, and the hour worked on me. Time was when such nights, and the winds that heralded their dawns, had been fortunate and blessed; but those Gates, I thought, were for ever shut.⁶⁵

Published in 1924, this story was written by an aging Kipling who could no longer repeat the agility of his earlier days as a motoring pioneer, nor even earlier years as a colonial adventurer in India, when he "railed and rode and drove and tramped and slept … under the stars themselves," "walked 'with death and morning on the silver horns,'" and "knew what it was to endure hunger and thirst" (Letters, 1:150). Those days were long gone, but in spirit and symbolism motoring still holds that appeal of maximum speed, bruising adventure, and masculine courage. If its power of physical and mental regeneration no longer works magic on an ailing Kipling, at least for a precious while in those early years, the motorcar provided him with a key metaphor for thinking about a more energized and revitalized England. Acting as the muse to aid and expand his "motor-driven aeronautics of imagination," the car also inspires Kipling with new levels of creative intensity, and "new rhythms, new colors and textures of words, for things that have not yet been brought into literature" (Wilson, "The Kipling that Nobody Read," 53).⁶⁶