Lest We Forget

by RICHARD E. DANIELSON

THE jacket of Rudyard Kipling¹ with greater accuracy than is habitual with jackets, describes this book as “a provocative study of a paradoxical man.”

The author — Hilton Brown — modestly states that his study is in no sense an official biography, but sufficient biographical data are supplied to illustrate and explain the impact of life and circumstance on Kipling as a writer — as an artist, if you will. Much that needed explanation — if the public were ever to understand and evaluate Kipling’s work — is here presented candidly and dispassionately, and yet with genuine understanding. It is a timely book. It had to be written before the generation which knew Kipling in the flesh, or which at least observed him as a contemporary phenomenon, passed away and his name became a memory.

How difficult it would be to reconstruct him in the future was illustrated by the paucity and inadequacy of the appraisals which emerged from literary and journalistic morgues at the time of his death in 1936. Mr. Kipling had, it seemed, outlived his time or his audience. The “genius,” hailed by the Victorians with uncritical enthusiasm, had become old hat. As Mr. Swinnerton says in his foreword: “Until Mr. T.

S. Eliot caused consternation among the genteel by analysing his virtues as a poet he was safely dismissed by them as a sort of literary bounder who was somehow responsible for the Boer War.” Truly, as Kipling observed somewhere, we Anglo-Saxons do not deserve our great men.

That Mr. Kipling was a strange man was always obvious. His childhood in India was a not abnormal Anglo-Indian childhood, but his experiences as an exiled child, — exiled to England for the best reasons in the world,—those tragic experiences detailed in

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” left an indelible impression on his spirit. His years at the unusual Services School of Westward Ho!, described in Stalky and Co., did little to heal this inward hurt. And, when he returned to India to begin — and to complete in a few years — his bewilderingly successful apprenticeship as a teller of tales, he masked his inward insecurity with a cockiness and self-confidence which seemed justified by the obvious brilliance of his talents.

Throughout his adult life he was forever taking refuge in a spiritual privacy which he defended fiercely, and at last with an almost pathological ferocity.

That privacy was cruelly violated by his American experience, an episode which left him lacerated, half ridiculous, half tragic. From that time on, he began to lose touch with the thinking and feeling of his age. Mr. Brown believes, as I do, that he continued to ripen as an artist; that his later work was, in many instances, richer in background and finer in texture than the flamboyant canvasses of his youthful period. But if he drew more deeply from the springs of life, he became less and less responsive to the currents of his times. This explains, perhaps, his fading away as a “popular” writer. His bitter attacks on all and sundry who failed to support the Empire as he thought it should be supported came at a period following the Boer War when imperialism was becoming less and less popular. Besides, he seemed to speak with a kind of “you be damned ” attitude to a world which at first would not let him alone and ended almost by ignoring him.

In his criticism of Kipling’s prose and poetry, Mr. Brown is wise, discerning, and sympathetic in his judgments. Few writers have been so overpraised and so harshly criticized as Kipling. His faults were so obvious that they leapt at you; his great virtues were too often improperly assessed or misunderstood. Mr. Brown gives due importance to Kipling’s controlling obsession, — obsession is perhaps too strong a word, — his short-cut philosophy of life: that a man’s work, his job, and how he does it are the most important things under the sun, but that the job and all that it entails are subject to “the Law,” a mysterious regulatory force that controls man’s efforts and judges them wise or foolish. In this he reads acutely the touch of the “womanly ” in Kipling which explains his prevailing interest in a world of men, his comparative failure, not to understand women, but to give them a proper importance. There is no “unconscious homosexuality” in this — as our modern critical faculty would assume. The job is the thing, and the job is done by men under “the Law”; women help or hinder; this is a man’s world.

There is one phase of Kipling’s life which Mr. Brown dismisses rather cavalierly. “All through his life he yearned, with a persistence that survived more than one disappointment, to join some sort of Society, to be Initiate, to be a Member. That he became a Freemason as early as possible goes without saying: he could not not have been a Mason. Yet it is worth noting that for all his constant parade of Masonry and his endless allusions to its ritual, he does not seem to have pursued the Craft into its higher stages: the fact of initiation, the knowing of the words, the sharing of the esoteric secrets — these, it would seem, contented and sufficed. He was ‘in the know.’”

I am not a Mason, and any speculations on my part as to the influence of Masonary on Kipling’s thinking and writing can only be purely conjectural. But I submit that his Masonic experience must have amounted to more than the mere satisfaction of a boyish or vulgar curiosity. Is it not possible that in Masonry he found the outline and precept of that “ Law” of which he was always — though vaguely — the prophet and proclaimer?

Mr. Brown gives due credit to the nice punctuality of his literary craftsmanship. “It is in the consummation of this essential art of balance, the precise arrangements of pieces, that the craftsman in Kipling rises so high above his rivals. Dixon Scott has pointed this out in his excellent and understanding essay; ‘Prise out a sentence,’ he writes, ‘and you feel it would fall with a clink, leaving a slot that would never close up. Replace it and it locks back like type in a forme.’ It is true; yet this brilliant patterning has its dangers; at all costs it must not show, it must not give itself away.” And Mr. Brown proceeds to point out that too often we can see the framework and hear the mechanism creaking. Kipling, he adds, “had a passion for the metaphors of the workshop; how often do we read of work ‘carven,’ ‘inlaid,’ ‘filed to a hairsbreadth’?”

Is it too fanciful to read into this constant preoccupation with the craftsmanship of his calling, together with his prevailing rule that all work must be done under and within “ the Law,” at least a memory of the lessons learned as a Mason? I do not recall seeing this question answered or even discussed in any critique of Kipling which I have read, and I present it with a suitable timidity. It is easy to see, running through the work of James Joyce, a savage nostalgia for the Catholicism he denied but could not escape. It is, perhaps, less easy to establish or estimate the importance of a continuing acquiescence to the lessons of a more secret order in the case of Kipling.

To return from such speculation to Mr. Brown’s careful and intelligent analysis he points out that Kipling’s feeling for things that “would cut and fit ” sometimes led to confusion or contriving in making human characters conform to pattern. He also puts a sure finger on Kipling’s chief weakness and want: the lack of a genuine sense of humor. Kipling could never have been a universal genius, because, with all his talents, he could not produce a Falstaff or a Wife of Bath. His laboriously humorous stories are the brayings of wild asses, loud but mirthless. At best they are fourth-formish, a kind of japery which leaves adults particularly cold. Nor, in fact, could anyone have swallowed early in youth, hook, line, and sinker, the pleasant myth of altruistic imperialism and retained all that tackle during his adult life, without regurgitation, if he had been troubled with a philosophical sense of humor. To his sincere exhortation “Take up the White Man’s burden,” Mr. Dooley responded simply, “And hand it to the coons” a reply before which argument withers and dies.

I have only praise for this sincere, modest, and persuasive interpretation of Kipling. Its unpretentious presentation does not obscure its oblique but searching criticism and its just appraisal of Kipling’s proper place as a great man of letters. Mr. Brown’s sympathy with his subject is evident but it never obscures his candor. His knowledge of India removes him, at the outset, from the ordinary run of Kipling’s critics. And his own talents as a writer become clearer to the reader with each chapter. He does not attempt to explain or define Kipling’s or anyone else’s genius; nobody can.