Everybody who is older than a schoolboy remembers how Mr. Rudyard
Kipling was once a modern. He might, indeed, have been described at the
time as a Post-Imperialist. Raucous and young, he had left behind him
the ornate Imperialism of Disraeli, on the one hand, and the cultured
Imperialism of Tennyson, on the other. He sang of Imperialism as it was,
or was about to be--vulgar and canting and bloody--and a world that was
preparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting and
bloody bade him welcome. In one breath he would give you an invocation
to Jehovah. In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be getting
round the roguish side of you with the assurance that:--
If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg behind the keeper's back,
If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line,
If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack,
You will understand this little song o' mine.
This jumble--which seems so curious nowadays--of delight in piety and
delight in twopence-coloured mischiefs came as a glorious novelty and
respite to the oppressed race of Victorians. Hitherto they had been
building up an Empire decently and in order; no doubt, many
reprehensible things were being done, but they were being done quietly:
outwardly, so far as was possible, a respectable front was preserved. It
was Mr. Kipling's distinction to tear off the mask of Imperialism as a
needless and irritating encumbrance; he had too much sense of
reality--too much humour, indeed--to want to portray Empire-builders as
a company of plaster saints. Like an _enfant terrible_, he was ready to
proclaim aloud a host of things which had, until then, been kept as
decorously in the dark as the skeleton in the family cupboard. The
thousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty and
brutality and drunkenness--all of those things to which builders of
Empire, like many other human beings, are at times prone--he never
dreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed,
to be regretted. He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day's
work; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness with
which he referred to them. Simple old clergymen, with a sentimental
vision of an Imperialism that meant a chain of mission-stations (painted
red) encircling the earth, suddenly found themselves called upon to sing
a new psalm:--
Ow, the loot!
Bloomin' loot!
That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot!
It's the same with dogs an' men,
If you'd make 'em come again.
Clap 'em forward with a Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot!
Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Loot! Loot!
Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain. It might
have frightened the clergymen away. Unfortunately, no sooner had the
old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than
he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp,
and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty. "Take
up," he would sing--
Take up the White Man's burden,
Send forth the best ye breed,
Go, bind your sons to exile,
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of
self-sacrifice. No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to
the new music--music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the
harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its
revivalistic purpose.
At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in
his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods
that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men. They loved him for
his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a
leading article in verse. His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talk
of the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once more
real and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual of
their homes. He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more
exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath he
loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for
his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in
literature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very
young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in _The Ballad
of "The Bolivar_," which runs--
Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell--rig the winches aft!
Not that anybody knew, or cared, what "rigging the winches aft" meant.
It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to give
literature a new: horizon. Similarly, it was the eternal flames in the
background that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, the
water-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys. With what
delight they would quote the verse:--
So I'll meet 'im later on,
At the place where 'e is gone--
Where it's always double drill and no canteen;
'E'll be squattin' on the coals,
Givin' drink to poor damned souls.
An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the place
whither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and the
courteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight in
hell and damnation. Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste.
Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree,
Damned from here to eternity,
began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination. Those "seven men
from out of Hell" who went
Rolling down the Ratcliff Road,
Drunk, and raising Cain,
were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands. One even
wrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to picture
oneself as
Cursed with the curse of Reuben,
Seared with the brand of Cain,
though so far one's most desperate adventure into reality had been the
consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a
back-street public-house. Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence and
wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at
least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long
previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion
against conventions and orthodoxies.
It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr.
Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may
be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the
language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite
true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he
talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was
exceptionally greedy for both. He, more than any other writer of his
time, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would not
stay at home--the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least a
thousand miles away from the home of his fathers. He excited the
imagination of youth with deft questions such as--
Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade--
Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?
If you did not know all about the sago-dealers and the fish and the wet
bamboo, Mr. Kipling had a way of making you feel unpardonably ignorant;
and the moral of your ignorance always was that you must "go--go--go
away from here." Hence an immense increase in the number of passages
booked to the colonies. Mr. Kipling, in his verse, simply acted as a
gorgeous poster-artist of Empire. And even those who resisted his call
to adventure were hypnotized by his easy and lavish manner of talking
"shop." He could talk the "shop" of the army, the sea, the engine-room,
the art-school, the charwoman; he was a perfect young Bacon of
omniscience. How we thrilled at the unintelligible jingle of the _Anchor
Song_, with its cunning blend of "shop" and adventure:--
Heh! Tally on. Aft and walk away with her!
Handsome to the cathead, now! O tally on the fall!
Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy.
Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!
Well, ah, fare you well for the Channel wind's took hold of us,
Choking down our voices as we snatch the gaskets free,
And its blowing up for night.
And she's dropping light on light,
And she's snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea.
The worst of Mr. Kipling is that, in verse like this, he is not only
omniscient; he is knowing. He mistakes knowingness for knowledge. He
even mistakes it for wisdom at times, as when he writes, not of ships,
but of women. His knowing attitude to women makes some of his
verse--not very much, to be quite fair--absolutely detestable. _The
Ladies_ seems to me the vulgarest poem written by a man of genius in our
time. As one reads it, one feels how right Oscar Wilde was when he said
that Mr. Kipling had seen many strange things through keyholes. Mr.
Kipling's defenders may reply that, in poems like this, he is merely
dramatizing the point of view of the barrack-room. But it is unfair to
saddle the barrack-room with responsibility for the view of women which
appears here and elsewhere in the author's verse. One is conscious of a
kind of malign cynicism in Mr. Kipling's own attitude, as one reads _The
Young British Soldier_, with a verse like--
If your wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loth
To shoot when you catch 'em--you'll swing, on my oath!--
Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er; that's hell for them both,
And you're shut o' the curse of a soldier.
That seems to me fairly to represent the level of Mr. Kipling's poetic
wisdom in regard to the relations between the sexes. It is the logical
result of the keyhole view of life. And, similarly, his Imperialism is a
mean and miserable thing because it is the result of a keyhole view of
humanity. Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands of
miles and thousands of places through keyholes. In him, wide wanderings
have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing
as the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser's
shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise the
flag of his country without a shrill note of malice:--
Winds of the world, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro--
And what should they know of England who only England know?
The poor little street-bred people, that vapour, and fume, and brag,
They are lifting their heads in the stillness, to yelp at the English flag!
Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping.
The truth is, Mr. Kipling has put the worst of his genius into his
poetry. His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something of
the music of travel; but they are too illiberal, too snappish, too
knowing, to afford deep or permanent pleasure to the human spirit.