But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends
of the earth.
That is very taking; and in a sense it is true, thank Heaven. But I
fancy Kipling would want to modify it now. At least he would like to
write a foot-note containing a careful definition of the word “strong.”
It would not apply to the average German.
Kipling was called, for many years, by the pacifist-Liberals, a jingo.
All imperialists were, _ex officio_, jingoes. Some of these
people have got into their heads, by this time, the conception of a
“preparedness” that makes for peace, and realize the difference between
a real jingo and a man who wants to avert war in the only way possible
when a considerable portion of the world remains militaristic. We all
know by this time that, if England had been prepared in 1914, there
would have been no war in 1914; that, very probably, if Sir Edward Grey
had been empowered to say, at the proper instant, that England would
fight, there would have been no war in 1914. Had “The Army of a Dream”
been there, the mailed fist would not have been shaken at the world.
But that is ancient history. It is to be hoped that not every one who
preached preparedness in the old days is now stigmatized as a jingo. If
anyone still thinks of Kipling vaguely as a war-mad imperialist, let
him read “The Settler”:
Earth where we rode to slay or be slain,
Our love shall redeem unto life;
We will gather and lead to her lips again
The waters of ancient strife,
From the far and fiercely guarded streams
And the pools where we lay in wait,
Till the corn cover our evil dreams
And the young corn our hate.
That is not the accent of the dyed-in-the-wool jingo.
And here again--still out of _The Five Nations_--the “Half-Ballad
of Waterval”:
_They_’ll never know the shame that brands--
Black shame no livin’ down makes white,
The mockin’ from the sentry-stands,
The women’s laugh, the gaoler’s spite.
We are too bloomin’ much polite,
But that is ’ow I’d ’ave us be ...
Since I ’ave learned at Waterval
The meanin’ of captivity.
Written at least fifteen years ago--and still, I fancy, the core of
the matter. Certainly very different from imperialistic-militaristic
conceptions of the rights of prisoners as exemplified by--Wittenberg,
let us say.
All these later quotations go to show merely that Kipling need not
have been so slanged for _The Five Nations_, since in much of _The
Five Nations_ he has pretty well expressed fundamental British
feeling--as is now, day by day, being proved. And--let us face it
squarely--fundamental British feeling is on the whole the most decent
on earth. As Americans, we like to think that we share it. No one, to
be sure, paid much attention to the poems just cited: they took it out
in criticizing things like “The Lesson,” “The Islanders,” and “The Old
Men.” Now we find that in those much-execrated poems he told the simple
truth. Why not admit it? Admit, that is, ungrudgingly, not only that he
has been right since 1914, but that he was right much earlier, and that
it is the other people who have had to shift their point of view.
But policies--as well foreign as domestic--have, from of old, made
bitter enemies and excited acrimonious controversy. No one could have
said anything worse about Kipling than political folk in all the
serious English reviews were saying (before the war), all the time,
about their political opponents. You could never take up one of those
famous periodicals without feeling that vitriol had been spilled in
your very presence. If there is a special rhetoric of vituperation, the
English political article was its text-book. We milder Americans gasped.
No Southern gentleman, on the floor of the Senate, ever went quite so
far.
So we should expect Kipling to be called horrid names by those who
disagreed with him politically, because that is English political
manners. No one really minds, except as one has always resented the
doom of Cassandra. What one does mind, what one does resent, is the
judgment of the “intellectuals” on Kipling’s general human knowledge.
They seem to agree with Oscar Wilde that, in turning over the pages,
“one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by
superb flashes of vulgarity.... From the point of view of literature
Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.... He is our first
authority on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through
key-holes, and his backgrounds are real works of art.” Even Henry James
spoke of him tentatively, as a young man who had gone a long way before
breakfast. Politics always make people see red; but the human emotions
in general, people ought to be able to discuss amicably. And the
intellectuals have never been willing to discuss Kipling at all. When
he is dead, they will, of course. But at present they still consider
him negligible.
Now no one--unless Rudyard Kipling himself--is less tempted than I
to set Rudyard Kipling up as “saint and sage,” or to try to establish
a Kipling philosophy or a Kipling cult. You may take a man seriously
without taking him religiously, I should hope. But the intellectuals
take other people religiously, not to say seriously; and why Kipling
is to be forever relegated by our arbiters of taste to the ranks of
the frivolous or the hysterical or the vulgar, passes the normal
understanding.
Two demands can respectably be made of a writer, in order that he
should be taken “seriously”: that he should be to some extent a master
of style, and that he should have sane and serious things to say about
life. To those who insist that Kipling is not a master of English
style, one has, really--now I come to think of it--nothing to say.
Especially as many of them will tell you, with straight faces, that
Galsworthy, or Arnold Bennett, or someone else, _is_ a master of
style. Chiefly, it means that they care so little about what he says
that they belittle his way of saying it. They persist in taking a
purely momentary point of view. Kipling, I fancy, can afford to await
the judgment of posterity. He is destined to become a great English
name.
There are probably several reasons for this critical scorn. One is that
he writes short stories, and short stories are not yet so dignified
as novels--unless the writer be Maupassant. Some of the critics
have never read anything but the earliest Kipling. Largely, it is
because they have not the faintest approximation to a Chaucerian or
Shakespearean sense of life--life, good and bad, high and low, grave
and gay--and they find no charm, no “distinction” in the blessed,
common, earthy Englishness of the English scene. Most of all, they
are uninterested in the very universality of the emotions and events
he deals with: patriotism, love, childhood and parenthood, duty,
and death. Nor have they much taste for laughter. As for tradition,
they are so busy scrapping it, that they are not concerned with
illustrations of its continuity and deathlessness.
I could get up a better brief for Kipling on the human score, if I were
not making it a point of honor to stick to _The Five Nations_. For
Kipling has gone on very much, even since then. _The Five Nations_
deals particularly with the Boer War and reactions after the Boer War.
His more explicitly “human” wisdom is not to be found there in greatest
measure. Yet in some ways _The Five Nations_ comes home to us just
now more than other things, when we are in the midst of the very war
which he therein prophesied.
Take the “Chant-Pagan.” When the war is over, there will be some
millions of Englishmen (to leave out the other Allies) who will
come home singing that chant--if not literally, then in spirit.
In fact, that is the most encouraging thing in all Kipling for the
reformers--except that I do not believe the returned soldier will care
much more for the English industrial paradise than for the “Squire an’
’is wife.” Even old-age pensions and the abolition of great estates,
and all the other articles of Lloyd George’s faith, are not going to
make him happy. He is going to know too much about real values. There
is just a chance that, after having saved England in the field, he may
save England at home. There will--God send!--be so many of him. No man
can prophesy; and yet already, in America, one hears people wondering
about our own boys, in the very sense of the “Chant-Pagan.”
Naturally, as I say, the more personal human relations are not dealt
with in _The Five Nations_. But there remains “The Second Voyage.”
I do not know that anything saner or wiser or more poignant has ever
been written about that love between man and woman which is the bulwark
of Occidental civilization. No one can deal more tenderly than Kipling
with the idyll between boy and girl--look at “The Brushwood Boy.” He
can even deal convincingly with the great illicit love (though it is
not a favorite theme of his)--witness “Without Benefit of Clergy” and
the great paragraph in “Love o’ Women.” But the love that he most
often treats is the love between husband and wife: the love that is
built on shared tears and laughter, on deep domestic sympathies and
clean sex-attraction, the love that many waters cannot quench. In “The
Second Voyage” he explicitly renounces all others; it expresses love,
if you like, more or less according to the prayer-book. He sacrifices
to the god of Romantic Marriage. If you choose to put it that way,
there ain’t a lady livin’ in the land as he’d change for ’is dear old
Dutch. Perhaps that is why they call him vulgar. Many of our “serious”
contemporaries appear to resent any account of human relations that
is both vitally human and essentially decent, because it leaves at
one side their two preferred groups: the very sophisticated, and the
criminal classes.
I suspect that one difficulty, for the more sincere, if still brittle,
intellectuals, lies in the unconventional verse-forms which Kipling
often affects. They can stand any amount of slang in prose, but they
cannot endure it in verse. At least, they do not believe that “high
seriousness” can wear such a garb. I dare say they would throw out even
“The Second Voyage” on the score of unconventionality. Well: let them.
I was going to quote some of it, but I am too out of temper with the
intellectuals. They may read it for themselves. And probably none of
the moderns would be able to endure the mention of “Custom, Reverence,
and Fear.” I give it up. But they need not think that Kipling’s own
education in the matter of sex-relations stopped with the Gadsbys.
To the mind of the serious Kipling-lover, the thing that grows more
and more impressive is his universality. Perhaps it seems to some
an unimportant list of allegiances that I have mentioned: “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.” Many a man has had a tablet in Westminster Abbey
for a lesser creed. And almost no one has sought his wisdom and his
delight in so many places or so many classes of society. Engineers,
subalterns, ladies of the manor, cockney privates, Hindu bearers,
Boer farmers, half-caste Portuguese nursemaids, Gloucester fishermen,
bank clerks, reporters, young English children, German scientists,
law lords, public-school boys, lamas, pilots, children of the zodiac,
even the beast-folk of the jungle--what a Shakespearean welter,
and, humanly speaking, what a Shakespearean result! It is the “good
gigantic smile o’ the brown old earth.” And the far-flung adventure
has brought Kipling back to a very simple but not too easy code. At
least, one cannot say that he sticks by the most English of English
traditions because he has never seen anything else. He has had room
and chance to choose. He has ended by being very orthodox, not to say
conventional, about the fundamental human duties; and he reads history
with a canny eye. But I do not think anyone can accuse Kipling of
being a stick-in-the-mud. “With the Night Mail” does not look so Jules
Verne-ish now as it did when it was printed. Perhaps some day we shall
even have to give the benefit of the doubt to the later “flight of
fact” called “As Easy as A. B. C.” Though I admit that that is going
far.
Just there, I did leave _The Five Nations_ for the moment; but it
is impossible to mention “As Easy as A. B. C.” and not also quote some
of “MacDonough’s Song.”
Whether the People be led by the Lord,
Or lured by the loudest throat;
If it be quicker to die by the sword
Or cheaper to die by vote--
These are the things we have dealt with once,
(And they will not rise from their grave)
For Holy People, however it runs,
Endeth in wholly Slave.
Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King--
Or Holy People’s Will--
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!
_Saying--after--me_:--
‘Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once there was The People--it shall never be again!’
Easy enough to see why Kipling is not popular. Yet Kipling is by no
means the only person who is warning us that mob-rule may come and
sweep away our institutions. Most people who fear that event are
doing their best to ingratiate themselves with the mob before it
wholly loses its temper. I confess that--politics apart, and as a
mere matter of dignity--it is a comfort to hear some man speak in
another spirit and sense than that of craven conciliation. I have not
quoted from “MacDonough’s Song” because I think it is a great poem;
but because it is perhaps the most nakedly, blatantly “unpopular”
thing Kipling has ever written. There it is, openly admitted, in all
its offensiveness--his greatest crime. Damn him for it if you feel
inclined, but confess that to write as uncompromisingly as that is
better manners than to have loathing or fear in your heart and honey
on your lips. “We reason with them in Little Russia,” says Dragomiroff
in “As Easy as A. B. C.” Well, it looks as if, several generations
ahead, that might still be the method in Little Russia. The story was
written in 1912.
_The Five Nations_ ends with the “Recessional,” which preceded
the Boer War by three years. And there is nothing to add to the
“Recessional,” even now; except that Germany needs to read it, at
present, more than England does. All that I have meant to do is to
point out that Kipling was right about preparedness, right about the
Colonies, right about Germany, right about Russia, right about the
Boers, right about Kitchener, right about demagogues and “labor,” right
about the elderly politicians, right about the decent British code,
right about patriotism and the human heart--right about love; and that
for all those things (except the last) he was slanged as if he were
wrong. In political matters, “thought is free,” with us, at least. But
in the matter of literary criticism, it seems a pity not to realize the
worth and distinction of the few people we have who possess either. I
have been told that Kipling still sells better than any other author
in America. When I think of Harold Bell Wright, I hope, for the credit
of America, that it is true. Perhaps the attitude of the intellectuals
is mere snobbishness, which cannot consent to think a best-seller
literature. But, as I say, it is a pity that the greatest living master
of English style (for Conrad’s is a restricted field) should not be
confessed to as such by the few who still profess to care about style.
One would not mind so much if they did not commend such a lot of
third-rate stuff.
I am glad that Kipling himself has the vulgar consolation of royalties.
He has, to be sure--I repeat--the disadvantage of telling the truth
prematurely. If we have just about caught up with _The Five
Nations_--well, let us hope that the argument from analogy will
not work in this case: that we shall never have to catch up with “As
Easy as A. B. C.”; that that, at least, may not be an instance of
his remarkable rightness. For it does not make one happy about the
immediate future.