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by The Liberal Imagination (pdf)

  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,

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  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

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  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

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  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,

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  :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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