BOOKS OF THE DAY

Rudyard Kipling (Orlo Williams) .. .. 22 Renaissance Warfare (A. L. Rowse) .. .

. 23

The Working-Class Movement (W. T. Wells) .. .. 23 The Philosophical Base of Theism (Evelyn Underhill) .. 24 Leon Blum (Edouard Roditi) .. .. .. . . 26 Civilisation and Culture (Evelyn Waugh) ..

• 27 Florence Nightingale (C. E. Vulliamy) . .. 28 Pavlov and his School (C. P. Snow)

•

30

Charles Kingsley (E. E. Kellett) ..

3b

Fiction (Catherine. Carswell)..

.. 32

RUDYARD KIPLING

By ORLO WILLIAMS

IT was only natural that another craftsman of the pen- who is also Chairman of the Council of the Kipling Society should pay a tribute to the great poet and writer, -lately passed- away, whose works that society exists to enjoy and comment on. Sir George MacMunn, as he says, " greatly daring, but fired because I landed in India when Rudyard Kipling was electri- fying the English there and starting on his career," has tried his hand at an estimation of what Kipling means to him and countless others. He has been able to draw freely on the Journal of the Kipling Society, a fact which is perhaps responsible for some of the less valuable and purely expatiatory chapters—of the type of pat era read at congenial gatherings— on such subjects as" Kiprng and True Love," " Women of the East," and " Dogs and Beasts and Children." The merit of his book, apart from its agreeable, conversational tone and the true impression that it certainly gives of what Kipling has meant, not to the professed man of letters, but to a vast popula- tion of ordinary but intelligent men and women, lies in certain information which the author is able to give from his own experience or knowledge and which throws a light upon the origins of certain well-known works or characters. This information is to be found, above all, in the chapters entitled "-Some Kipling Origins," " Kipling's Soldiery and their Wars " and " Kipling and India."

It may be suggested, however, that Sir George MacMunn shows less than his usual sense of proportion when he expresses the hope that this book may be a guide to those who ask in ignorance : " but who was Kipling ? " in a generation " for whom he can be but a tradition." The fact, surely, is that Kipling has safely entered the ranks of the immortals and that his own works, no matter what fluctuations of opinion occur, will keep him there. Otherwise, if the maintenance of Kipling's memory depended on a chatty, eulogistic book of this kind, one would have to conclude that it could not long survive. It is a fairly safe prophecy, however, that his work, in all its power and variety, will long survive his own generation by its own intrinsic virtue : and the reason is given in two of Sir George's most pertinent pages, where he answers the ques- tion of what are the materials of which Rudyard Kipling's character as a writer was made up. He says truly : " the answer is, very nearly sheer personal unacquired genius with some help from the genes that went to make him," and he goes on' to catalogue particular virtues, the extraordinary gifts of observation, the intense desire to browse on all literature and tii'_suck the brains of other men, the quick sympathy With many (if not with all) types of men and women, and his Power of divining the whole from the part.

The genius is the thing, however—that inexplicable and abnormal power which places a man above his fellows and forces them to recognise it, whether they like the use to which lie puts it or no. Those who have read Kipling's last book, Something of Myself, will remember the mystical way in which he refers to the guidance of his Daemon, who apparently gave him infallible directions about the composition of his stories. It seemed to me that here the great man was over-indulg- ing in that mysticism of technique which always obsessed hint ; the perfect " doing " of a thing was to him as sacred an affair as it was to Henry James, only the latter confined his mysticitm Of technique to literature while Kipling applied it universally. Kipling's daemon was, in reality, much more than a supreme guide to the technique of narration : it was for him, as 'it is for all great artists, a deep well of energy, conviction and com- municative force. Whatever work of-his, as of Dickens, -for example, one takes up, and whether it appeals to one's.own taste

, -

Rudyard Craftsmaq; _By 1.t.-CTen. Sir .Creorge.,friac-

Munn, K.C.B., K.C.S.I., D.S.O. (Robert Hale. tos. 6d.) or not, one cannot avoid consciousness of these powers. Such men are not autonomous, and it is useless to criticise them as though they were ; the first function of criticism is to recognise the presence of these powers and, if possible, to divine their orientation, after which alone are discrimination, comparison and valuation securely based. -

Kipling, in one sense, was a unique phenomenon : and none have better expressed in what his uniqueness consisted than two Frenchmen, M. Andre Chevrillon in Three Studies in English Literature and M. Andre Maurois in Poets and Prophets. At the same time, he coexisted with other phenomena of a like order and with a flux of ideas among which he chose-what suited him and others chose what suited them ; moreover; he has his place in the historical sequence, both of genius and ideas, and to that extent is no longer isolated or unique. Leopardi, that supreme Italian poet, the centenary of whose death has just been celebrated, once wrote an ode to the victor in a game of pallone, which, in spite of an entirely different source of inspiration from anything that could have come to Kipling, has moments that are comparable to some of his. At the end, the poet says that the youth's fatherland is too miserably decadent to appreciate noble deeds of valour but urges him to aim his mind at the zenith for his own sake, for the only use of life is to be despised or to be forgotten in the hour of danger.:

" Ma per to stesso al polo ergi la mente. Nostra vita a the val ? solo a spregiarla Beata allor the ne' perigli avvolta,

• • •

This is not quite the same as The White Man's Burden, but it is a sentiment with which Kipling would have fully sympathised, for in his virile heart he must have longed himself to be a doer, and not a writer only, like the novelist Cleever, in A Conference of the Powers, who remarked that " few lips would be moved to song if they couldfind sufficiency, of kissing." • The point,

however, is that any genius's view of the world and society, the poet's-eye view, is not only quite different from the ordinary man's—how seldom do we remember this !—having far

brighter colours, far sharper contrasts, far stronger vibrations, but different from and usually incompatible with other poet's- eye views. To substantiate this I need look no further than M. Maurois' Poets and Prophets, which studies some of the phenomena contemporary with Kipling, notably Joseph

Conrad. Conrad's mystic of action is absolutely different from Kipling's in spite of superficial resemblances : the poet's-eye

view expressed in Youth and Typhoon may well have for many, as it has for me, a greater attraction and a sense of deeper penetration than Kipling shows in his apotheoses of youth and valour against long odds, but to give the reasons 'for- this involves a long, philosophic discussion. Other poet's-eye views, in consciousness of which Kipling will inevitably be

judged, are those of Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Those of us who cannot give but can only receive must submit to them all before we can worthily choose between them. Those who can give may be allowed to be a little arbitrary in their choice : we know what Chesterton thought of Thomas Hardy. And yet, I should like to have had Chesterton and Kipling in the

room and to have heard what they said after somebody hrd read aloud Hardy's In the Time of the ' Breaking of Nations.'

" Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and no3s

Half asleep as they walk.

- • • •

Yonder a maid-and her wight . Come whispering by : . . War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die."