BOOKS 014 THE DAY
Kipling
Rudyard Kipling. A New Appreciation. By Hilton Brown. With a Foreword by Frank Swinnerton. (Hamish Hamilton. 10s. 6d.)
IT is a singular fact that Kipling has fared worse at the hands of his triends and admirers than of his enemies and detractors. Except for Mr. Edward Shanks' able book his professed appreciators have done him poor service. Mr. T. S. Eliot can scarcely conceal his dismay at having to admit that he had genius. The late John Palmer, who might have been expected to write the best book on him, wrote easily the worst. Mr. Hilton Brown's " appreciation " is little better. There are, indeed, admissions throughout his book that Kipling had genius, but they are perfunctory and grudging and heavily discounted by denigratory qualifications. The judgements of third-rate writers, such as Richard Le Gallienne, are cited with solemnity. One Francis Adams, an irascible ass of whom, by Goa's mercy, I had never heard until Mr. Brown mentioned his insignificant name, is cited with equal awe. There is even a citation from a periodical called The Passing Show! . .. Every time the views of Mr. Edmund Wilson are reported, Mr. Brown reverently removes his hat! . . . It appears that Kipling remained a small boy all his life. He had an in- fantile admiration of ingenius gadgets. But why is he to be de- nounced for this, when Mr. H. G. Wells is admired? Kipling, too, was guilty of bad taste. "Every one of us has writhed at one time or another! .. ." Has every one of us? Is bad taste, indeed, any- thing more than the offence which is caused to stale minds by fresh minds? Are not-vigorous men repellent to languid and lethargic people?
Kipling was cocky. Cockier than Mr. Bernard Shaw? He posed. More than Wilde? Words intoxicated him. His politics were ele- mentary. He had no conception of Progress. He was insincere, arranging facts to suit his purpose! Have not all prophets done this? "He betrayed, in fact, his own gospel: he painted not the Thing as he Saw it, but the Thing as he Thought It Should Have Been." What does this pretentious statement mean, and how does Mr. Brown know all this? My doubt of his sapience is increased when I find him asserting, as part of his argument, that Kipling never became adult, that if an undergraduate were to be placed " in an establishment which purveys motor cycles," his mind would be " unlikely to turn to the housing conditions of mechanics in Coventry." That, alas, is what the mind of the undergraduate too often does.
Nor are these all Kipling's faults. He had tricks, God bless our soul! His profession of intimacy with technical terms was fraudu- lent and false; he sometimes slipped up on one! . . . His India has no relation to reality. He drew soldiers who were imaginary—a state- ment which is disproved for me, by the discovery I made in 1916 that the N.C.O.s who trained me in 1916, had stepped, body, bones and blood, out of Kipling's pages. Kipling, it also seems, was feeble in dialect. Mulvaney's Irish is entirely different from Ross and Somer- ville's. So is Synge's. So is Mr. Shaw's. But, like the tribal lays, every- one of them is right. There is not one Irish accent or dialect any more than there is one English; and men in Cork are as unintelligible to men in Belfast as Devonians are to Northumbrians. Mulvaney, " unfortunately," called an Indian War Correspondent sor instead of sir. Is Mr. Brown suggesting that no Irishmen ever pronounce sir sor? Let him go to Ireland, then, and listen. Kipling's desire for privacy is treated as if it were pathological. He had signs prohibiting trespassers exhibited on his land: a politer ban, surely, than that commonly seen in America: Keep Out. This Means You. He did not explore industrial back areas. John Galsworthy was a humani- tarian. How many slums were explored by him? Did he prefer Hox- ton to Hampstead?
Kipling's relations receive a crack or two. His wife was foolish enough to be five years older than her husband. In addition to this criminal excess, she was a bossy snob. She cared for Kipling, protect- ing him from unwarranted intrusions. " One can only say of Caroline —basing the verdict upon his written work—that in spite of the fact that they were happily married for nearly half a century, she does
rot seem to have added greatly to his knowledge or contributed in narked degree to the sum of his experience." What pestilential
trash this is! The same might be said of every writer, with as much
-'11e1 as little justification. How does Mr. Brown know what Mrs. Kipling contributed to her husband's experience? Is half a century of happiness nothing? His book abounds in stuff as shallow as this. Attributing to Kipling's father an influence on the son which he neither proves nor shows, if it were a fact, to have been unfor- tunate, he remarks " Conceivably Lockwood Kipling would not have expressed himself in ;ust these words but that is what he probably believed, that is what he probably taught his son." Probably! Yet Mr. Brown has spent pages in telling his readers that the Kiplings were " unusual " in India and unpopular for that reason. Lockwood was a sahib-worshipper who habitually put up the sahibs' backs! . . .
It is apparent to the discerning reader that Mr. Brown, very crudely, supposes progress to be identical with improvement. Kipling was not " progressive " because he did not share the views of Fabians. He had an inflexible belief that there are " sahibs " and " natives " everywhere, and this shows how reactionary he was! It was a belief he shared with Aristotle and Plato. Mr. Wells is not innocent of it. Nor is Mr. Shaw.
One service Mr. Brown renders Kipling here is the explosion beyond all hope of re-assemblance of the legend that he was an Eurasian. But there, almost, his service ends. His criticism of the work is useless, since it consists timply of assertions and is made on the assumption that the reader is intimately familiar with everything Kipling wrote. What Mr. Brown fails to perceive is that his author's unpopularity with a small, but noisy, group of people was due, partly to envy, partly to shock. Kipling had com- mitted the unpardonable crime of success, and had committed this crime at the age of twenty-five. That was sufficient in itself to excite wrath against him. But, in addition, he had opposed the current intellectual fashion. He was a patriot in a time of dis- loyalty. He believed in the British Empire when the correct belief was in the International. He believed in skill when other people were addicted to intuitions. He loved good craftsmen, whatever their class or rank, and he had a deep and abiding regard for com- mon men who knew and did their job. It was private soldiers, not officers, whom he lovingly described ; fishermen, not shipowners, whose feats he celebrated. Such a man, convicted of success, must inevitably become the bane of intellectual duds. So they fell upon him and endeavoured to destroy him. But he was indestructible, and the more he was decried, the greater became his renown. This was a man of genius, and his genius has not diminished. Sneaky little poets who run away from their country when it is in trouble may denounce him, but who cares what they say? Their denunci- ation is a compliment ; their praise would be a humiliation.
ST. JOHN ERVINE.
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