Rudyard Kipling, "prophet of blood and vulgarity, prince of ephemerals
and idol of the unelect"--as a Chicago critic chortles--is dead. It is
true. He is dead, dead and buried. And a fluttering, chirping host of
men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut
leaves of _Kim_, wrapped him in _Stalky & Co._, for winding sheet, and
for headstone reared his unconventional lines, _The Lesson_. It was very
easy. The simplest thing in the world. And the fluttering, chirping
gentlemen are rubbing their hands in amaze and wondering why they did not
do it long ago, it was so very, very simple.
But the centuries to come, of which the fluttering, chirping gentlemen
are prone to talk largely, will have something to say in the matter. And
when they, the future centuries, quest back to the nineteenth century to
find what manner of century it was--to find, not what the people of the
nineteenth century thought they thought, but what they really thought,
not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really did do, then
a certain man, Kipling, will be read--and read with understanding. "They
thought they read him with understanding, those people of the nineteenth
century," the future centuries will say; "and then they thought there was
no understanding in him, and after that they did not know what they
thought."
But this is over-severe. It applies only to that class which serves a
function somewhat similar to that served by the populace of old time in
Rome. This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence,
ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again;
which puts a Democratic administration into office one election, and a
Republican the next; which discovers and lifts up a prophet to-day that
it may stone him to-morrow; which clamours for the book everybody else is
reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else is reading
it. This is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and vogue, the
unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the "monkey-folk," if
you please, of these latter days. Now it may be reading _The Eternal
City_. Yesterday it was reading _The Master Christian_, and some several
days before that it was reading Kipling. Yes, almost to his shame be it,
these folk were reading him. But it was not his fault. If he depended
upon them he well deserves to be dead and buried and never to rise again.
But to them, let us be thankful, he never lived. They thought he lived,
but he was as dead then as he is now and as he always will be.
He could not help it because he became the vogue, and it is easily
understood. When he lay ill, fighting with close grapples with death,
those who knew him were grieved. They were many, and in many voices, to
the rim of the Seven Seas, they spoke their grief. Whereupon, and with
celerity, the mob-minded mass began to inquire as to this man whom so
many mourned. If everybody else mourned, it were fit that they mourn
too. So a vast wail went up. Each was a spur to the other's grief, and
each began privately to read this man they had never read and publicly to
proclaim this man they had always read. And straightaway next day they
drowned their grief in a sea of historical romance and forgot all about
him. The reaction was inevitable. Emerging from the sea into which they
had plunged, they became aware that they had so soon forgotten him, and
would have been ashamed, had not the fluttering, chirping men said,
"Come, let us bury him." And they put him in a hole, quickly, out of
their sight.
And when they have crept into their own little holes, and smugly laid
themselves down in their last long sleep, the future centuries will roll
the stone away and he will come forth again. For be it known: _That man
of us is imperishable who makes his century imperishable_. That man of
us who seizes upon the salient facts of our life, who tells what we
thought, what we were, and for what we stood--that man shall be the
mouthpiece to the centuries, and so long as they listen he shall endure.
We remember the caveman. We remember him because he made his century
imperishable. But, unhappily, we remember him dimly, in a collective
sort of way, because he memorialized his century dimly, in a collective
sort of way. He had no written speech, so he left us rude scratchings of
beasts and things, cracked marrow-bones, and weapons of stone. It was
the best expression of which he was capable. Had he scratched his own
particular name with the scratchings of beasts and things, stamped his
cracked marrowbones with his own particular seal, trade-marked his
weapons of stone with his own particular device, that particular man
would we remember. But he did the best he could, and we remember him as
best we may.
Homer takes his place with Achilles and the Greek and Trojan heroes.
Because he remembered them, we remember him. Whether he be one or a
dozen men, or a dozen generations of men, we remember him. And so long
as the name of Greece is known on the lips of men, so long will the name
of Homer be known. There are many such names, linked with their times,
which have come down to us, many more which will yet go down; and to
them, in token that we have lived, must we add some few of our own.
Dealing only with the artist, be it understood, only those artists will
go down who have spoken true of us. Their truth must be the deepest and
most significant, their voices clear and strong, definite and coherent.
Half-truths and partial-truths will not do, nor will thin piping voices
and quavering lays. There must be the cosmic quality in what they sing.
They must seize upon and press into enduring art-forms the vital facts of
our existence. They must tell why we have lived, for without any reason
for living, depend upon it, in the time to come, it will be as though we
had never lived. Nor are the things that were true of the people a
thousand years or so ago true of us to-day. The romance of Homer's
Greece is the romance of Homer's Greece. That is undeniable. It is not
our romance. And he who in our time sings the romance of Homer's Greece
cannot expect to sing it so well as Homer did, nor will he be singing
about us or our romance at all. A machine age is something quite
different from an heroic age. What is true of rapid-fire guns,
stock-exchanges, and electric motors, cannot possibly be true of
hand-flung javelins and whirring chariot wheels. Kipling knows this. He
has been telling it to us all his life, living it all his life in the
work he has done.
What the Anglo-Saxon has done, he has memorialized. And by Anglo-Saxon
is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the edge of
the Western Ocean. Anglo-Saxon stands for the English-speaking people of
all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions, are more
peculiarly and definitely English than anything else. This people
Kipling has sung. Their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives
of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive
of motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with
what underlies all the Anglo-Saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the
genius of the race. And this is the cosmic quality. Both that which is
true of the race for all time, and that which is true of the race for all
time applied to this particular time, he has caught up and pressed into
his art-forms. He has caught the dominant note of the Anglo-Saxon and
pressed it into wonderful rhythms which cannot be sung out in a day and
which will not be sung out in a day.
The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber. Underneath
his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan's time, in
Drake's time, in William's time, in Alfred's time. The blood and the
tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins. In battle he is subject
to the blood-lusts of the Berserkers of old. Plunder and booty fascinate
him immeasurably. The schoolboy of to-day dreams the dream of Clive and
Hastings. The Anglo-Saxon is strong of arm and heavy of hand, and he
possesses a primitive brutality all his own. There is a discontent in
his blood, an unsatisfaction that will not let him rest, but sends him
adventuring over the sea and among the lands in the midst of the sea. He
does not know when he is beaten, wherefore the term "bulldog" is attached
to him, so that all may know his unreasonableness. He has "some care as
to the purity of his ways, does not wish for strange gods, nor juggle
with intellectual phantasmagoria." He loves freedom, but is dictatorial
to others, is self-willed, has boundless energy, and does things for
himself. He is also a master of matter, an organizer of law, and an
administrator of justice.
And in the nineteenth century he has lived up to his reputation. Being
the nineteenth century and no other century, and in so far different from
all other centuries, he has expressed himself differently. But blood
will tell, and in the name of God, the Bible, and Democracy, he has gone
out over the earth, possessing himself of broad lands and fat revenues,
and conquering by virtue of his sheer pluck and enterprise and superior
machinery.
Now the future centuries, seeking to find out what the nineteenth century
Anglo-Saxon was and what were his works, will have small concern with
what he did not do and what he would have liked to do. These things he
did do, and for these things will he be remembered. His claim on
posterity will be that in the nineteenth century he mastered matter; his
twentieth-century claim will be, in the highest probability, that he
organized life--but that will be sung by the twentieth-century Kiplings
or the twenty-first-century Kiplings. Rudyard Kipling of the nineteenth
century has sung of "things as they are." He has seen life as it is,
"taken it up squarely," in both his hands, and looked upon it. What
better preachment upon the Anglo-Saxon and what he has done can be had
than _The Bridge Builders_? what better appraisement than _The White
Man's Burden_? As for faith and clean ideals--not of "children and gods,
but men in a world of men"--who has preached them better than he?
Primarily, Kipling has stood for the doer as opposed to the dreamer--the
doer, who lists not to idle songs of empty days, but who goes forth and
does things, with bended back and sweated brow and work-hardened hands.
The most characteristic thing about Kipling is his lover of actuality,
his intense practicality, his proper and necessary respect for the
hard-headed, hard-fisted fact. And, above all, he has preached the
gospel of work, and as potently as Carlyle ever preached. For he has
preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men,
to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and understand yet
stand agape at Carlyle's turgid utterance. Do the thing to your hand,
and do it with all your might. Never mind what the thing is; so long as
it is something. Do it. Do it and remember Tomlinson, sexless and
soulless Tomlinson, who was denied at Heaven's gate.
The blundering centuries have perseveringly pottered and groped through
the dark; but it remained for Kipling's century to roll in the sun, to
formulate, in other words, the reign of law. And of the artists in
Kipling's century, he of them all has driven the greater measure of law
in the more consummate speech:
Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience.
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap what he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.
--And so it runs, from McAndrew's _Law_, _Order_, _Duty_, _and
Restraint_, to his last least line, whether of _The Vampire_ or _The
Recessional_. And no prophet out of Israel has cried out more loudly the
sins of the people, nor called them more awfully to repent.
"But he is vulgar, he stirs the puddle of life," object the fluttering,
chirping gentlemen, the Tomlinsonian men. Well, and isn't life vulgar?
Can you divorce the facts of life? Much of good is there, and much of
ill; but who may draw aside his garment and say, "I am none of them"?
Can you say that the part is greater than the whole? that the whole is
more or less than the sum of the parts? As for the puddle of life, the
stench is offensive to you? Well, and what then? Do you not live in it?
Why do you not make it clean? Do you clamour for a filter to make clean
only your own particular portion? And, made clean, are you wroth because
Kipling has stirred it muddy again? At least he has stirred it
healthily, with steady vigour and good-will. He has not brought to the
surface merely its dregs, but its most significant values. He has told
the centuries to come of our lyings and our lusts, but he has also told
the centuries to come of the seriousness which is underneath our lyings
and our lusts. And he has told us, too, and always has he told us, to be
clean and strong and to walk upright and manlike.
"But he has no sympathy," the fluttering gentlemen chirp. "We admire his
art and intellectual brilliancy, we all admire his art and intellectual
brilliancy, his dazzling technique and rare rhythmical sense; but . . .
he is totally devoid of sympathy." Dear! Dear! What is to be
understood by this? Should he sprinkle his pages with sympathetic
adjectives, so many to the paragraph, as the country compositor sprinkles
commas? Surely not. The little gentlemen are not quite so infinitesimal
as that. There have been many tellers of jokes, and the greater of them,
it is recorded, never smiled at their own, not even in the crucial moment
when the audience wavered between laughter and tears.
And so with Kipling. Take _The Vampire_, for instance. It has been
complained that there is no touch of pity in it for the man and his ruin,
no sermon on the lesson of it, no compassion for the human weakness, no
indignation at the heartlessness. But are we kindergarten children that
the tale be told to us in words of one syllable? Or are we men and
women, able to read between the lines what Kipling intended we should
read between the lines? "For some of him lived, but the most of him
died." Is there not here all the excitation in the world for our sorrow,
our pity, our indignation? And what more is the function of art than to
excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed? The
colour of tragedy is red. Must the artist also paint in the watery tears
and wan-faced grief? "For some of him lived, but the most of him
died"--can the heartache of the situation be conveyed more achingly? Or
were it better that the young man, some of him alive but most of him
dead, should come out before the curtain and deliver a homily to the
weeping audience?
The nineteenth century, so far as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned, was
remarkable for two great developments: the mastery of matter and the
expansion of the race. Three great forces operated in it: nationalism,
commercialism, democracy--the marshalling of the races, the merciless,
remorseless _laissez faire_ of the dominant bourgeoisie, and the
practical, actual working government of men within a very limited
equality. The democracy of the nineteenth century is not the democracy
of which the eighteenth century dreamed. It is not the democracy of the
Declaration, but it is what we have practised and lived that reconciles
it to the fact of the "lesser breeds without the Law."
It is of these developments and forces of the nineteenth century that
Kipling has sung. And the romance of it he has sung, that which
underlies and transcends objective endeavour, which deals with race
impulses, race deeds, and race traditions. Even into the steam-laden
speech of his locomotives has he breathed our life, our spirit, our
significance. As he is our mouthpiece, so are they his mouthpieces. And
the romance of the nineteenth-century man as he has thus expressed
himself in the nineteenth century, in shaft and wheel, in steel and
steam, in far journeying and adventuring, Kipling has caught up in
wondrous songs for the future centuries to sing.
If the nineteenth century is the century of the Hooligan, then is Kipling
the voice of the Hooligan as surely as he is the voice of the nineteenth
century. Who is more representative? Is _David Harum_ more
representative of the nineteenth century? Is Mary Johnston, Charles
Major, or Winston Churchill? Is Bret Harte? William Dean Howells?
Gilbert Parker? Who of them all is as essentially representative of
nineteenth-century life? When Kipling is forgotten, will Robert Louis
Stevenson be remembered for his _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, his
_Kidnapped_ and his _David Balfour_? Not so. His _Treasure Island_ will
be a classic, to go down with _Robinson Crusoe_, _Through the
Looking-Glass_, and _The Jungle Books_. He will be remembered for his
essays, for his letters, for his philosophy of life, for himself. He
will be the well beloved, as he has been the well beloved. But his will
be another claim upon posterity than what we are considering. For each
epoch has its singer. As Scott sang the swan song of chivalry and
Dickens the burgher-fear of the rising merchant class, so Kipling, as no
one else, has sung the hymn of the dominant bourgeoisie, the war march of
the white man round the world, the triumphant paean of commercialism and
imperialism. For that will he be remembered.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
_October_ 1901.