It looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a world of concrete things
were to be gathered into the titular abstraction; or as if Kipling’s
rightness were presently to be proved remarkable in that it is all
wrong.
And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Chesterton--where is he, by the
way?--I mean precisely what I have set down: Rudyard Kipling’s
remarkable rightness. Right, because time has sustained him against
scoffers; remarkable, because no one originally expected that
particular kind of rightness from him.
This is not to be a discursive or an exhaustive discussion of Kipling’s
utterances on planetary or even racial questions. I have not annotated
his complete works with his “rightness” in mind. Indeed, to treat him
exhaustively would be a very difficult task; for the sum of his wisdom
is made up, not of a few big “works,” but of an infinite number of
significant brevities. My only excuse for dealing with him at all is
that I have lived a long time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and
that my knowledge of him has reached what Henry James called the point
of saturation. I will not pretend that I have read every word he has
ever printed in the Allahabad _Pioneer_ or even in the London
_Times_; but I know him very well. I belong to the generation that
took its Kipling hard. My friends who are five years older or five
years younger never took him quite so hard as that. They knew other
gods.
Rudyard Kipling, in his later life, has suffered under two great
disadvantages: his insistence on a political point of view which was
unpopular, and the gradual diminishing of his flow of masterpieces.
The dullest people will tell you smartly that he is “written out”; the
cleverest will tell you that he was precocious, but always cheap, if
not vulgar. Perhaps someone will fling “The Female of the Species” at
you. This paper is not to be a catalogue of Kipling’s virtues, nor yet
of his achievements. But I should like you to consider with me for a
few moments that little volume of verse, _The Five Nations_. I
take _The Five Nations_ purposely, for it is the Kipling of _The
Five Nations_ that I mean. Not the better known Kipling of the
_Barrack-Room Ballads_ or _The Seven Seas_. But supremely the
Kipling I refer to.
Two things changed the Kipling we first knew: renewed residence in
England, and the Boer War. Of course, he was always an imperialist; he
always loved Lord Roberts--as long ago as the _Plain Tales_, when
Kipling was at once younger and cleverer than anyone else. But he saw
these things, then, from the angle of India; he was an imperialist only
in embryo. He cared more for the British army--in red--than for the
British navy; and Anzacs were not within his vision.
Then--by devious paths--he returned to England; and England held him as
it held the man and the woman in “An Habitation Enforced.” The Boer War
came; and _The Five Nations_ tells how he reacted. He has gone on
very consistently from that day, developing, but never swerving from
the path of his conviction. England did not listen to him: the Liberals
of the first decade of the twentieth-century did not propose to listen
to anyone who wrote short stories for the sake of the plot, and verse
for the sake of a Tory idea. They were much too serious in Great
Britain, in those days, to hearken to Rudyard Kipling. And, so far as I
know, neither Lord Roberts nor Kipling ever said, “I told you so.”
Yet listen to “The Lesson”:
It was our fault, and our very great fault--and now we must turn it
to use;
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!
How one has heard that rough-and-ready poem reviled--in the early
nineteen-hundreds! Even now one recalls abusive editorials in American
newspapers about the poem which mentioned
... the flannelled fools at the wicket ... the muddied oafs at the
goals.
“Oblige me by referring to the files.” I remember those taunting
comments very well. Not an editor but was so sane that he could make
his little mock of Kipling as an extremist. But if you will get out
_The Five Nations_ and read “The Islanders” through soberly, you
will curse those editors for fools. “Preparedness” is so familiar
to us all now, not only as a word but even as an idea, that we can
hardly believe intelligent people were calling a man names fifteen
years ago for stating axioms. We are always thinking the days of
Galileo are over. But they are not; they never will be; the human race
instinctively and always has it in for Galileo. Kipling could get an
audience for tales and ballads and jungle-books; but the moment he
tried to speak nationally, he could not get an audience. Even now, they
would rather read H. G. Wells.
Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?
For the low red glare to southward when the raided coast towns burn?
“(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)”
“Yes, thanks,” came the sarcastic answer from all the wise British
millions; “we jolly well _do_ wait.” And they “jolly well” did;
and a dozen years later it all came true, and their sarcasm was put
where it belonged. That is, if they had the sense to see it.
Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back
from your shore?
Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more?
Well: it very nearly came to that. But I suggest that you re-read “The
Islanders.” I cannot quote any more. Every word of “The Islanders”
is true to make one weep; and it was the storm-centre of _The Five
Nations_. How many thousands of people felt that, in writing “The
Islanders,” Kipling had destroyed his own reputation! Doubtless
the Germans would have felt the same way about “The Parting of the
Columns”; though, if they had read it and had taken the trouble to
believe it, it would have saved them a good many millions spent in
propaganda. But the Germans were quite as stupid as the British public.
There has been more than one reason, as I have said, for the waning of
Kipling’s popularity. In the first place, he does not give us so many
good stories as once, in the full flush of his genius, he did. That
is a perfectly legitimate reason. Then, too, he has had an unlucky
trick of seeing ahead. When “The Edge of the Evening” was first
published (in 1913), it passed for hysteria. Only “fools” believed
in German spies--in 1913. But there are other causes more insidious
and more potent. He stands, not only politically for the highest type
of Toryism--at least, one fancies he does--but for a lot of other
outdated things: pious attachment to the soil; romantic love, enduring,
clean outside and in; the beauty of childhood and the bitterer beauty
of parenthood; patriotism unshrinking and unashamed; loathing of the
mob and the mob’s madness and meanness; the continuity of the English
political tradition, from Magna Charta down; religious toleration;
scrupulous perception of differences between race and race, type and
type; the White Man’s Burden. And I doubt if, even now, he is an ardent
believer in Woman Suffrage.
Almost any one of these attitudes would have been enough to damn him
with the British democracy. One quite understands that _The Five
Nations_ would not have been Mr. Lloyd George’s _vade mecum_.
One perfectly sees why Mr. Asquith, following the usual tradition,
passed Kipling over for the Laureateship in favor of a gentleman whom
few people had heard of and no one could read. (“The Widow at Windsor”
probably shocked Balliol as much as it shocked Queen Victoria.) No
Kipling-lover, for that matter, particularly wanted Kipling to be
Laureate. One even realizes--though this time with amusement--why he
is _persona non grata_ to the “brittle intellectuals who crack
beneath a strain.” The intellectuals say that he is good at times for
children, and often for the vulgar, and take their refuge in not taking
him seriously. The intellectuals have been Russianizing themselves, in
these last years; and Kipling’s laughter at that phenomenon must have
been unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel him remarkably right,
it would prove them so remarkably wrong.
As I say, one quite understands why the gorged and flattered
workingman, the demagogue, and the “brittle intellectual” have not read
him or listened to him; but it is none the less a mystery that some one
should not have listened to him and seen that he was eminently sane on
many vital points. There is, after all, no one living in England who
writes so well, who is so nearly master of the English language. But
one has to conclude that his audience has made up its mind only to be
amused during a train-journey.
There was a merry little international correspondence in 1914 or 1915
over “The Truce of the Bear.” What did Mr. Kipling say _now_? It
was all a great joke on him. People also raked up “The Man Who Was.”
I believe Mr. Kipling never replied to his humorous questioners, or,
if he did, it was to the effect that a man, like a government, might
change his foreign policy with changing conditions. Still, everybody
was very much amused, and for some reason (it can have been only his
unpopularity) very much pleased. Perhaps they had not forgiven some of
the other poems in _The Five Nations_, and looked to discredit
Kipling by pitching on “The Truce of the Bear” as they had once pitched
on “The Islanders.” With Russia driving back the Teutons on the eastern
front, I do not see that Kipling, as a patriot, could proceed to defend
his ancient position very loudly. But I do not remember--here I speak
under correction, for his war-poems are very elusive--that even since
1914 he has written of Russia as he has written of France. And I have
often wondered if, in the last months, he has not taken a very private
comfort in his own refrain of years ago:
Make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man.
He may at least feel that he was essentially right about Russia, if
incidentally wrong. If I am not mistaken, “The Truce of the Bear”
was written on the occasion of the invitation to the first Hague
Conference. We took it that it was the Tsar whom England was to
mistrust. Very likely. But I cannot help believing that Kipling had
a private suspicion that the Hague Conference was all tommy-rot.
Which, obviously, it was, pragmatically judged. The sheer decency and
competence of certain Russian generals did save the world in the first
year of the war: let us never forget it. There never was a Russian
steam-roller, but the Germans thought there was going to be one. Let
us, as I say, never forget it. But for the last year, the Russian
people has been behaving allegorically in the sense of the poem.
‘When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and near;
When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute guise....
When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer,
That is the time of peril--the time of the Truce of the Bear!’
Eyeless, noseless, and lipless, asking a dole at the door,
Matun, the old blind beggar, he tells it o’er and o’er;
Fumbling and feeling the rifles, warming his hands at the flame,
Hearing our careless white men talk of the morrow’s game;
Over and over the story, ending as he began:--
‘_There is no truce with Adam-zad--the bear that looks like a man!_’
I should be particularly sorry to say anything that German
propagandists would like to have said. It is perfectly impossible
for the average person to know what is the proper and what the
improper attitude to take to Russia at the moment. Even those in
high places might be forgiven for being perplexed. What the average
person perceives is that the Russians are behaving very much, and very
vividly, like “the bear that looks like a man.” Certainly they stood up
at Brest-Litovsk “in wavering, man-brute guise.”
The only point of all which is that the folk who made so merry, a few
years ago, over “The Truce of the Bear” had better find another joke.
One does not base the rightness of Kipling on his merely having been a
little less ridiculous, in a given instance, than his contemporaries
wanted to think him.
I wonder, too--still as I turn the pages of _The Five Nations_--if
there is not a tonic value to-day in the poem called “Sussex.”
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.
So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
Before Levuka’s trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground--in a fair ground--
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
So to the land our hearts we give
Till the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use, and Love make live
Us and our fields alike--
That deeper than our speech and thought,
Beyond our reason’s sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
Yearns to its fellow-clay.
The windy internationalism to which we are so often invited, nowadays,
to listen, would deny it--might even call it “_chauvinisme de
clocher_.” The reply is that people actually do feel as Kipling
says they do. He has always tended to serve (in his own phrase) the
God of Things as They Are. Granted, for the sake of argument, that it
would be good for you to love all men and all countries alike, the
fact remains that you do not. If that is your duty, most decent people
do not perform their duty; their fathers did not, and their children
will not. Even the most radical internationalists wish to substitute
class-consciousness for patriotism--on the whole, a less enlightened
chauvinism than the other. And, judging from the present war, they have
not been able to pull even that off.
As for saying that one has the same sense of personal insult in seeing
a foreign land invaded as in seeing one’s own, that is nonsense.
France has been the home of the spirit to many of us; the thought of
an invaded France is of a bitterness hardly to be borne. But though
one has lived in it and loved it, one is not so angry, in the very
depths of one, at Teuton occupation of France as one would be at Teuton
occupation of one’s own soil. I will not say what German invasion of
my own New England would be to me. “Ten generations of New England
ancestors” would rise up to curse the enemy. But even an invaded
Oshkosh (and Oshkosh is a mere name to me) would be to me, an American,
an even deadlier insult than an invaded Paris. I should take it more
personally, I know. And if that can be so for us, in our far-flung,
heterogeneous republic, what must be the case with the children of
homogeneous France? If I know that I should feel that way about
Oshkosh, what must the Kentish man feel about Kent, the Devonshire man
about Devon, the Englishman about England? Did not all sane Americans
between Bangor and San Diego react in precisely similar fashion to Herr
Zimmermann’s plans for Texas? I have never even been in Texas, but
Texas belongs to me and I belong to it.
No: say what you please, geography is the great human science; it is
more intimate than biology. And Kipling has had the sense to see it
because he really knows something about the _genus homo_. It was
a delightful phrase of the Frenchman’s that charmed our youth--“the
passion for the planet”; but are we not a little undeceived now? Do we
not at last realize that the only real “man without a country” is the
cosmopolite? If there be such a person.