RUDYARD KIPLING
MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S death occurred too late for mention in last week's Spectator, and today it is inevitably overshadowed for the nation by a greater bereavement. But even now some estimate of the man entitled to be regarded as the doyen of English letters is due. Mr. Kipling was not the oldest living author of distinction (Mr. Shaw is nine years older), but the longest effectively before the public. Plain Tales from the Hills, that first book of short stories which carried his name at once throughout the English- speaking world, was published before he was 23 ; and the major part of his output, both for quantity and quality, fell within the ensuing eleven years before his grave illness in 1899. Had that illness proved fatal, as for ninny anxious .days seemed likely, his name, as a dazzling and immeasurable " might-,have- been," would have stood altogether higher in our literature than it will now.
In estimating the higher flight of his genius one must estimate the character of the age which fostered it. The Imperialism of the 'nineties was compounded of a few simple elements in the England which lay immediately behind it. One was that forthright form of Evangelicalism—" fundamentaliSt " we might call it today—which ruled mid-Victorian England and caused people in all ranks of society to live with one eye fixed perpetually on the Last Judgement. What- ever be thought of this creed on the intellectual side, its efficiency value was incontestable. It caused 'Englishmen for two generations to display in industry, in world-enterprise, in exploration, and in such a task as the ruling and defence of India, qualities that the men of no other contemporary nation equalled. Kipling, who had the creed in his bones, was intensely conscious of its results ; and for him Englishmen were the Lord's people, and foreigners " lesser breeds without the law," even at a time when the decay of faith was in truth sapping all his assumptions. Secondly, there was the undoubted fact that in colonising and exploring, in administering coloured peoples and in replacing their lawlessness by law, the mid-Victorian English had led the world. The Kiplingite deduction, that this had come about by nature, not accident, and was due to inherent superiorities in the English race, is hardly borne out by the world's subsequent developments ; but it was more plausible at the time, and its pride in service (the " white man's burden ") was no mean pride. Last, and very closely interwoven with the rest, was the idea that the Englishman had a permanent lead in the development and use of machines ; a lead attributable to the Evangelical honesty and vigilance (" They do not teach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose ") which could alone match machinery's austere requirements. To this main idea Kipling has given in prose and verse more memorable expression than any other author ; and though the nationalist British twists which he put on it seem today obvious anachronisms, they were not so unplausible at the time.
But he had grave limitations. The new idealism of the twentieth century found in him nothing but an uncomprehending foe. With the social reforming current which rejuvenated British society he could make no useful contacts at all. It was not merely that, while he knew so much about fighting lawless- ness in India, he knew so little about the desperate wars against slumdom and drink, sweating and disease and destitution at home ; it was that the whole this- worldly character of these modern betterments did not square with his other-worldly Last-Judgement outlook. And so be fell . back on the safe minor themes of literature on. praising his adopted Sussex, his home sights, his dog, his garden ; on archaeologising and boating ; on reading the ancients and writing attractive fancies in prose and verse about the Romans and Greeks. It is no disparage- ment of these pieces, glorified as many of them are by the alembic of style, to say that in com- parison with his promise they arc but a notable aftermath.
A permanent place in literature is assured to him, but what place remains still uncertain. It is possible that his poetry will outlast his prose ; already they date less. Nearly forty years ago a great man of letters characterised his early tale William the Conqueror as the " almost perfect short story " ; few would do so now. On the other hand his poems, while reaching the popular ear better than any other poet's, have yet perhaps to receive full justice from literary critics. An early poem. "like " The First Chantey " is really astonishing in the originality of its conception and the clean fineness of its execution ; and even in late books so obviously on his more modest level as Puck of Pook's Hill you may find a ,port piece as wonderful and as deeply felt as the Roman soldier's prayer to Mithra. Before the whole future of poetry and poetic appreciation in England there stands at present a formidable question-mark ; but if it ever comes to count again, as it used to counts in the lives of the young intelligentsia, there is a substantial corpus of Kipling's verse that can scarcely be forgotten.
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