BOOKS
Embarrassment of Empire
BY RONALD BRYDEN T is time we came to terms with Kipling. He is, I as the Home Secretary might say, the best writer on empire we have: still crouching, like a small, moustached dragon, over his monopoly of the richest single subject open to English writers. The Imperial century is over, and at last no one need argue for or against it—the ships, the slaves, the treks and tribal wars, the fur-trading, the tea-planting, the railway-building, the teeming bazaar-ports rising from the sea, the ponderous. statued capitols from dry plains, the garrison polo, cock-feathered levees, jubilees and durbars: the whole grand, merciless migration of nineteenth- century Europe. The time has come for us to sum it up, to take it into imagination and history, but something still inhibits our approach. The seedling nations write a little about themselves. We write, copiously and lovingly as ever, about us. But the whole, the evolution which shaped them and our- selves, enters' our art only in gingerly, distancing formulas : the faded .Hollywood adventure- stereotype of khaki-shirted heroes and topeed blondes, the uneasy parody of 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' and the Goon Shows ('Dr. Moriarty, I presume. Have a photograph of Queen Vic- toria?' No thanks, I'm trying to give them up!'). Between the, wars, Kipling's frontier became Korda's; today we make it Kenneth More's. In other words, we either accept the Kipling myth in shopworn reproduction, or recoil in hot embar- rassment rto satirise it. He made imaginative con- quest of the territory; we enter on his terms. To get our own hands on the Imperial matter of Britain, we need to settle Kipling first.
Miss Tompkins's study* embarks with an admirable plan of initial assault. Before we can 'place' Kipling, as she says, most of us need to learn more precisely what he said, and how and why. Evidence on the last question is imperfect : the authorised biography by Charles Carrington filled many gaps, but skirted abysses. Still, much of the work remains half-explored, and we have the advantage of longer historical perspective. We should be able now, for example, to accept more calmly Kipling's period mannerisms; the Biblical and Oriental echoes, the knightly archaisms, of a generation reared on Tennyson, Burton and Carlyle. Miss Tompkins, so reared herself, affirms that they never struck her as unreal; and we, who have begun to appreciate what Victorian architects achieved in exhumed idioms, may come around yet to the similar monuments—the Idylls, The Ring and the Book, the Rubaiyat and Esmond— erected by nineteenth-century writers. We can open• our minds more freely now, as well, to period emotions. Miss Tompkins has some inter- esting pages on Kipling's Great War stories, and the national moods from which they were written. 'Mary Postgate,' his repellent anecdote about a bereaved lady's-companion who watches with pleasure a German airman's death, has to be read in terms of the hysteria of 1915.
* THE ART OF RUDYARD K IPI ING. By J. M. S.
Tompkins. (Methuen, 25s.) Miss Tompkins's scheme of examining without comment the themes which run through late and early Kipling yields some real and rather surpris- ing results. Kipling emerges as a curiously Eliza- bethan mind, dominated by a primitive concep- tion of a harmonious natural order tuned by degree. Once disturbed, things lurch from violence to violence, until the disturbing element has been purged. This is the framework behind his tales of revenge—the 'wild,' elaborately mathematical justice of the Stalky stories and Mowgli's letting- in of the jungle—as well as those inexplicably brutal farces, 'My Sunday at Home' and The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat.' Violence, cold-blooded or humorous, may be the therapy for violence : Mary Postgate returns from her gloating death-watch drained of repressions, handsome and relaxed. But increasingly as he grew older, Kipling preferred gradual restorations of the natural order, the healing power of a Shake- spearean mercy. In 'An Habitation Enforced,' the medicine is timeless Sussex custom and bright Weald air; in 'The Janeites,' friendship, Masonic ritual and reading Emma. Either way, the dis- cord cannot last. Whatever its form—hatred, war, pestilence or intruding foreigners—the balance will swing back, the seasons return, the animals seek out their ancient pastures. Miss Tompkins notes this human conclusion with gentle approval. To be frank, we need not take , her self-imposed vow Of objectivity too seriously; long 'before the end, she shows her hand. She likes Kipling, and wants to show him as a writer who can be judged with others: not a freakish, Anglo-Indian class of one, but a dealer like his peers in the universal themes. To do this involves dwelling on his late work, the 'personal,' unimperial stories. She says she finds these superior as literature—polished and conipressed to the verge of poetry, free of the sensational strokes and rhetoric of his young work. She denies that Empire has ever embarrassed her, but at times she seems almost to class as sensational- ism the hot, strong, painted colours of India itself. Certainly, the total effect of her book is not to elucidate Kipling, the young comet from the East, but to discover a new writer : the brooding Sussex recluse painfully revolving the passing of legions. the diseases of time, the deaths of children.
The trouble is not that this Kipling never existed —sometimes he did. But on the very terms for which he's presented, he won't wash. As a per- sonal, philosophic writer, Kipling just isn't good enough to put forward in an age which contained James, Conrad, Forster, Mann and Gide. It's true that he shed in middle age the more annoying button-hole tricks, and put by his banjo for the lyre of George V's unofficial laureate. But it's • difficult to entertain claims for the classic dignity of such stories as 'Mrs. Bathurst,' in which two lovers are crisped by lightning into charcoal. As a thinker, he could perhaps most kindly be described as derivative. He seems at school to have patched together a home-made amalgam of Emerson. ( arlyle and Ruskin : a vague belief in the organic nature of things, a rather volubly • stoic creed of work, and a cloudy conviction (taken over from the Victorian idealists with per- suasive definitions intact and unnoticed) that Faith is better than Doubt and Service than Anarchy.
The fact is, that if you want to persuade the unconverted to Kipling, the most effective way is still to spring on them one of his bits of Indian description from the Railway Volumes or Kiln. Kipling was a reporter. Put him beside his con- temporaries, remember that life is short, and he is only as interesting to us as what he describes. And the thing he described best was British India. Hundreds of others have written and thought better about their dank childhoods, psychology and the hereafter. No one else has described the glittering, dusty clamour of a wedding party on the Grand Trunk Road; the sheeted sleepers on a dark Punjab morning in the echoing, girdered fortress of Lahore station; the tinkle of streams rushing down through deodar forests from the high silver line of the Himalayas.
He wrote best about India because it was the one subject he knew thoroughly. Noel Annan made an interesting attempt, some years back, to claim Kipling as a sociologist, on the ground that his understanding of India under the Raj was comprehensive, detached and analytic as any modern social scientist's. Believing wisdom to be the knowledge of how things hang together, Kipling was drawn life-long to functional systems —engines, regithents, mediteval cosmographies— in which each fragment plays a demonstrable part. During his family summers up at Simla, he gained by microcosm such knowledge of India : how the huge pattern of organisation rayed outward from Peterhoff, the rambling, cramped viceregal lodge where aides-de-camp slept in dressing-rooms or on verandahs; through the balls where govern- ment wives intrigued to get promotion for hus- bands or lovers; down into the steep rabbit- warren bazaar of saddlers, curio-sellers, rickshaw men, prostitutes and spies of native states; to the farthest stations in the Assam jungles or arid Deccan. Of course, his personal experience had limits. Brought up among the Moslems of the Punjab, he never really knew the Ganges provinces. Calcutta's smart, colour-conscious society intimidated him, he sneered at Bengalis, and made one of the few gross lapses in his master- piece by supposing Kim could dismiss Benares as 'filthy.' But no one else can offer a fraction as much. It is absurd to read Kipling for, what he shares with other writers. It is more absurd not to read him, for a store of experience totally unique.
His tragedy was that he never mastered another. He sailed home to extend his conquest to the larger system of which India was but part : the Empire itself, which could be called the modern world.. He found it a world grown suddenly in his absence too complex for any single man to grasp. He sailed from dominion to dominion, collecting names of streets in Montreal, hotels in Auckland, beaches at the Cape, and putting them knowingly into tales about naval japes or Cockney nostalgia. He decided he must master the new world of science, for it made the inner machinery of the Empire; and wrote fantasies about ships which grow souls, and wireless experiments in the course of which consumptive young chemists receive emanations from Keats. Finally he decided he must grasp the roots of them all,'and comprehend the Past; and produced Pink of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies. Perhaps the one thing he wrote which compares with the 'Indian stories was Captains Courageous, which sets out only to describe the antiquated, simple and specialised .cod-fishing industry of Gloucester, Massachusetts. As he reached out and out to ,.viond his empire, it seemed to resolve itself into smaller and smaller pieces of actual possession.
The main interest of his later work is the nemesis which catches up over-tidy minds. When everything has been organised into systems, what is there outside? Even in his youth, Kipling had nightmares about the Smash—the sudden irre- trievable disgrace, the pistol left on the club-room table, the total collapse of a career or marriage. Pip Gadsby muttering to Mrs. Herriott at a dinner that their affair is 'Mafeesh,' while the others smile and nod; Dick Heldar, going blind in The Light: that Failed; the Tertium Quid, in 'At the Pit's Mouth,' grinning frozenly at his beloved as the crumbling cliff-edge road past Simla cemetery slowly gives way underneath his horse. In the late stories, the abysses multiply and widen : ghosts, cancer, madness, shell-shock, new forms of death. The Kipling Miss Tompkins has discovered will not, I think, displace the Imperial one. But he is worth bearing in mind as we read the justifier of the Caucasians' burden : like that second, shadowy Milton, the lost Metaphysical, who looks over the divine apologist's shoulder at the pre- carious growth of his vast match-stick model of the best of possible worlds—knowing that at every step it might have been otherwise.
Previous page
