that turned up in the prose, and so you were led to trust yourself to
invitation to understand all this-it suggested first that the secret
the Barrack Room Ballads at a time when you would trust no other
was being kept not only from onself but from everyone else and
poetry. That gnomic quality of Kipling's, that knowing allusiveness
then it suggested that the secret was not so much being kept as rewhich later came to seem merely vulgar, was, when first experivealed, if one but guessed hard enough. And this elaborate manner enced, a delightful thing. By understanding Kipling's ellipses and
was an invitation to be "in" not only on life but on literature; to
allusions, you partook of what was Kipling's own special delight,
follow its hints with a sense of success was to become an initiate of
the joy of being "in." Max Beerbohm has satirized Kipling's yearnliterature, a Past Master, a snob of the esoteric Mystery of the Word.
ing to be admitted to any professional arcanum, his fawning admira
"Craft" and "craftily" were words that Kipling loved (no doubt
tion of the man in uniform, the man with the know-how and the
they were connected with his deep Masonic attachment), and when
technical slang. It is the emotion of a boy-he lusts for the exclusive
he used them he intended all their several meanings at oncecircle, for the sect with the password, and he profoundly admires shrewdness, a special technique, a special secret technique communithe technical, secret-laden adults who run the world, the overalled cated by some master of it, and the bond that one user of the techpeople, majestic in their occupation, superb in their preoccupation, nique would naturally have with another. This feeling about the
the dour engineer and the thoughtful plumber. To this emotion, de
Craft, the Mystery, grew on Kipling and colored his politics and
veloped not much beyond a boy's, Kipling was addicted all his life,
.
even his cosmological ideas quite for the worse, but to a boy it sugand eventually it made him silly and a bore. But a boy readrng gested the virtue of disinterested professional commitment. If one
Kipling was bound to find all this sense of arcanum very perti�en�;
ever fell in love with the cult of art, it was not because one had been
as, for example, it expressed itself in Plain Tales from the Hills, it
proselytized by some intelligent Frenchman, but because one had
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absorbed Kipling's creedal utterances about the virtues of craft and
State, and yet also make himself the son of the Lama, the very priest
had read The Light That Failed literally to pieces.
of contemplation and peace.
These things we must be sure to put into the balance when we
And then a boy in a large New York high school could find a
make up our account with Kipling-these and a few more. To a
blessed release from the school's offensive pieties about "service"
middle-class boy he gave a literary sanction for the admiration of the
and "character" in the scornful individualism of Stalky & Co. But it
illiterate and shiftless parts of humanity. He was the first to sugwas with Stalky & Co. that the spell was broken, and significantly gest what may be called the anthropological view, the perception
enough by H. G. Wells. In his Outline of History Wells connected
that another man's idea of virtue and honor may be different from
the doings of Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle with British imperialism,
one's own but quite to be respected. We must remember this when
and he characterized both in a way that made one see how much
we condemn his mindless imperialism. Indians naturally have no
callousness, arrogance, and brutality one had been willing to accept.
patience whatever with Kipling and they condemn even his best
From then on the disenchantment grew. Exactly because Kipling
book, Kim, saying that even here, where his devotion tc the Indian
was so involved with one's boyhood, one was quick to give him up
life is most fully expressed, he falsely represents the Indians. Perin one's adolescence. The Wellsian liberalism took hold, and Shaw haps this is so, yet the dominant emotions of Kim are love and reoffered a new romance of wit and intellect. The new movements in spect for the aspects of Indian life that the ethos of the West does not
literature came in to make Kipling seem inconsequential and pueusually regard even with leniency. Kim established the value of rile, to require that he be dismissed as official and, as one used to
things a boy was not likely to find approved anywhere else-the
say, intending something aesthetic and emotional rather than politirank, greasy, over-rich things, the life that was valuable outside the cal, "bourgeois." He ceased to be the hero of life and literature and
notions of orderliness, success, and gentility. It suggested not only a
became the villain, although even then a natural gratitude kept
multitude of different ways of life, but even different modes of
green the memory of the pleasure he had given.
thought. Thus, whatever one might come to feel personally about
But t�e world has changed a great deal since the days when that
religion, a reading of Kim could not fail to establish religion's fac
�ntag�msm between Kipling and enlightenment was at its early
tual reality, not as a piety, which was the apparent extent of its exrntens1ty, and many intellectual and political things have shifted istence in the West, but as something at the very root of life; in Kim
from their old assigned places. The liberalism of Wells and Shaw
one saw the myth in the making before one's very eyes and underlong ago lost its ascendency, and indeed in its later developments it stood how and why it was made, and this, when later one had the
showed what could never in the early days have been foreseen, an
intellectual good luck to remember it, had more to say about history
act�al affinity with certain elements of Kipling's own constellation
and culture than anything in one's mere experience. Kim, like The
of ideas. And now when, in the essay which serves as the introduc
fungle Book, is full of wonderful fathers, all dedicated men in their
tion to his selection of Kipling's verse, Mr. Eliot speaks of "the
.
_
different ways, each representing a different possibility of existence;
fa�cmauon of exploring a mind so different from my own," we surand the charm of each is the greater because the boy need not compn�e ourselves�as pe _ :�aps Mr. Eliot intended that we should-by
mit himself to one alone but, like Kim himself, may follow Mahbub
seemg that the s1mdant1es between the two minds are no less striking
_
_
Ali into the shrewdness and sensuality of the bazaars, and be inititha� the differences. Time surely has done its usual but always draated by Colonel Creighton into the cold glamour of the Reason of matic work of eroding our clear notions of cultural antagonisms
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when Kipling can be thought of as in any way akin to Eliot. Yet as
and Scott are rejected because they are not Donne or Hopkins or
Mr. Eliot speaks of the public intention and the music-hall tradition
Mr. Eliot himself, or even poets of far less consequence than these;
of Kipling's verse, anyone who has heard a record of Mr. Eliot readand no doubt Chaucer would be depreciated on the same grounds, ing The Waste Land will be struck by how much that poem is
if we were at all aware of him these days. I should have welcomed
publicly intended, shaped less for the study than for the platform or
Mr. Eliot's speaking out in a general way in support of the admirthe pulpit, by how much the full dialect rendition of the cockney able, and, as I think, necessary, tradition of poetry of low intensity.
passages suggests that it was even shaped for the music hall, by how
But by making it different in kind from poetry of high intensity and
explicit the poet's use of his voice makes the music we are so likely
by giving it a particular name which can only be of invidious imto think of as internal and secretive. Then it is significant that port, he has cut us off still more sharply from its virtues.
among the dominant themes of both Kipling and Eliot are those of
Kipling, then, must be taken as a poet. Taken so, he will scarcely
despair and the fear of nameless psychological horror. Politically
rank very high, although much must be said in his praise. In two
they share an excessive reliance on administration and authority.
evenings, or even in a single very long one, you can read through
They have the same sense of being beset and betrayed by the ignoble
the bulky Inclusive Edition of his verse, on which Mr. Eliot's selecmob; Kipling invented and elaborated the image of the Pict, the tion is based, and be neither wearied, in part because you will not
dark little hating man, "too little to love or to hate," who, if left
have been involved, nor uninterested, because Kipling was a man of
alone, "can drag down the state"; and this figure plays its wellgreat gifts. You will have moments of admiration, sometimes of known part in Mr. Eliot's poetry, being for both poets the stimulus
unwilling admiration, and even wish that Mr. Eliot had included
to the pathos of xenophobia.
certain poems in his selection that he has left out. You will be fre
Mr. Eliot's literary apologia for Kipling consists of asking us to
quently irritated by the truculence and sometimes amused by its
judg� him not as a deficient writer of poetry but as an admirable
unconsciousness-who but Kipling would write a brag about English
writer of verse. Upon this there follow definitions of a certain inunderstatement? Carly le roaring the virtues of Silence is nothing to genuity, but the distinction between poetry and verse does not really
it-but when you have done you will be less inclined to condemn
advance beyond the old inadequate one-I believe that Mr. Eliot
than to pity: the constant iteration of the bravado will have been
himself has specifically rejected it-which Matthew Arnold put forilluminated by a few poems that touch on the fear and horror which ward in writing about Dryden and Pope. I cannot see the usefulness
Mr. Wilson speaks of at length and which Mr. Eliot refers to; you
of the distinction; I can even see critical danger in it; and when Mr.
feel that the walls of wrath and the ramparts of empire are being
Eliot says that Kipling's verse sometimes becomes poetry, it seems
erected against the mind's threat to itself. This is a real thing,
to me that verse, in Mr. Eliot's present sense, is merely a word used
whether we call it good or bad, and its force of reality seems to grow
to denote poetry of a particular kind, in which certain intensities are
rather than diminish in memory, seems to be greater after one's acrather low. Nowadays, it is true, we are not enough aware of the tual reading is behind one; the quality of this reality is that which
pleasures of poetry of low intensity, by which, in our modern way,
we assign to primitive and elemental things, and, judge it as we will,
we are likely to mean poetry in which the processes of thought are
we dare not be indifferent or superior to it.
not, by means of elliptical or tangential metaphor and an indirect
In speaking of Kipling's politics, Mr. Eliot contents himself with
syntax, advertised as being under high pressure; Crabbe, Cowper,
denying that Kipling was a fascist; a tory, he says, is a very different
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thing, a tory considers fascism the last debasement of democracy.
merely of government but of governing really are. And that is what
But this, I think, is not quite ingenuous of Mr. Eliot. A tory, to be
Kipling set out to do, but he so charged his demonstration with
sure, is not a fascist, and Kipling is not properly to be called a fascist,
hatred and contempt, with rancor and caste feeling, he so emptied
but neither is his political temperament to be adequately described
the honorable tory tradition of its intellectual content, that he simply
merely by reference to a tradition which is honored by Dr. Jo�nson,
could not be listened to or believed, he could only be reacted against.
Burke, and Walter Scott. Kipling is not like these men; he 1s not
His extravagance sprang from his hatred of the liberal intellectualgenerous, and, although he makes much to-do about manliness, he he was, we must remember, the aggressor in the quarrel-and the
is not manly; and he has none of the mind of the few great tories.
liberal intellectual responded by hating everying that Kipling loved,
His toryism often had in it a lower-middle-class snarl of defeated
even when it had its element of virtue and enlightenment.
gentility, and it is this, rather than his love �f autho
d force,
.
:it� an_
We must make no mistake about it-Kipling was an honest man
that might suggest an affinity with fascism. His 1mpenaltsm 1s repreand he loved the national virtues. But I suppose no man ever did hensible not because it is imperialism but because it is a puny and
more harm to the national virtues than Kipling did. He mixed them
mindless imperialism. In short, Kipling is unloved and unlovable not
up with a swagger and swank, with bullying, ruthlessness, and selfby reason of his beliefs but by reason of the temperament that gave righteousness, and he set them up as necessarily antagonistic to inthem literary expression.
tellect. He made them stink in the nostrils of youth. I remember that
I have said that the old antagonism between liberalism and Kipin my own undergraduate days we used specifically to exclude physiling is now abated by time and events, yet it is still worth saying, cal courage from among the virtues; we were exaggerating the point
and it is not extravagant to say, that Kipling was one of liberalism's
of a joke of Shaw's and reacting from Kipling. And up to the war
major intellectual misfortunes. John Stuart Mill, when he urged all
I had a yearly struggle
with undergraduates over Wordsworth's
liberals to study the conservative Coleridge, said that we should pray
poem, "The Character of the Happy Warrior," which is, I suppose,
to have enemies who.make us worthy of ourselves. Kipling was an
the respectable father of the profligate "If." 1 It seemed too moral and
enemy who had the opposite effect. He tempted liberals to be content
"manly," the students said, and once when I remarked that John
with easy victories of right feeling and with moral self-congratula
Wordsworth had apparently been just such a man as his brother had
tion. For example, the strength of toryism at its best lies in its descent
described, and told them about his dutiful and courageous death at
from a solid administrative tradition, while the weakness of liberalsea, they said flatly that they were not impressed. This was not what ism, arising from its history of reliance upon legislation, is likely to
most of them really thought, but the idea of courage and duty had
be a fogginess about administration ( or, when the fog clears away
been steeped for them in the Kipling vat and they rejected the idea
a little, a fancy and absolute notion of administration such as Wells
with the color. In England this response seems to have gone even
and Shaw gave way to). Kipling's sympathy was always with the
further.2 And when the war came, the interesting and touching pheadministrator and he is always suspicious of the legislator. This is nomenon of the cult of Richard Hillary, which Arthur Koestler has
foolish, but it is not the most reprehensible error in the world, and
described, was the effort of the English young men to find the na-
it is a prejudice which, in the hands of an intelligent man, say a man
like Walter Bagehot or like Fitzjames Stephen, might make clear to
1 The war over, the struggle is on again.
2 George Orwell's essay on Kipling in Dickens, Dali and Others deals bluntly and
the man of principled theory, to the liberal, what the difficulties not
fairly with the implications of easy "liberal" and "aesthetic" contempt for everything Kipling stood for.
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