rudyard kipling, “prophet of blood and vulgarity, prince of ephemerals and idol of the unelect”— as a chicago critic chortles — is dead. it is true. he is dead, dead and buried. and a fluttering, chirping host of men, little men and unseeing men, have heaped him over with the uncut leaves of kim, wrapped him in stalky & co., for winding sheet, and for headstone reared his unconventional lines, the lesson. it was very easy. the simplest thing in the world. and the fluttering, chirping gentlemen are rubbing their hands in amaze and wondering why they did not do it long ago, it was so very, very simple.
but the centuries to come, of which the fluttering, chirping gentlemen are prone to talk largely, will have something to say in the matter. and when they, the future centuries, quest back to the nineteenth century to find what manner of century it was — to find, not what the people of the nineteenth century thought they thought, but what they really thought, not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really did do, then a certain man, kipling, will be read — and read with understanding. “they thought they read him with understanding, those people of the nineteenth century,” the future centuries will say; “and then they thought there was no understanding in him, and after that they did not know what they thought.”
but this is over-severe. it applies only to that class which serves a function somewhat similar to that served by the populace of old time in rome. this is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence, ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again; which puts a democratic administration into office one election, and a republican the next; which discovers and lifts up a prophet to-day that it may stone him to-morrow; which clamours for the book everybody else is reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else is reading it. this is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and vogue, the unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the “monkey-folk,” if you please, of these latter days. now it may be reading the eternal city. yesterday it was reading the master christian, and some several days before that it was reading kipling. yes, almost to his shame be it, these folk were reading him. but it was not his fault. if he depended upon them he well deserves to be dead and buried and never to rise again. but to them, let us be thankful, he never lived. they thought he lived, but he was as dead then as he is now and as he always will be.
he could not help it because he became the vogue, and it is easily understood. when he lay ill, fighting with close grapples with death, those who knew him were grieved. they were many, and in many voices, to the rim of the seven seas, they spoke their grief. whereupon, and with celerity, the mob-minded mass began to inquire as to this man whom so many mourned. if everybody else mourned, it were fit that they mourn too. so a vast wail went up. each was a spur to the other’s grief, and each began privately to read this man they had never read and publicly to proclaim this man they had always read. and straightaway next day they drowned their grief in a sea of historical romance and forgot all about him. the reaction was inevitable. emerging from the sea into which they had plunged, they became aware that they had so soon forgotten him, and would have been ashamed, had not the fluttering, chirping men said, “come, let us bury him.” and they put him in a hole, quickly, out of their sight.
and when they have crept into their own little holes, and smugly laid themselves down in their last long sleep, the future centuries will roll the stone away and he will come forth again. for be it known: that man of us is imperishable who makes his century imperishable. that man of us who seizes upon the salient facts of our life, who tells what we thought, what we were, and for what we stood — that man shall be the mouthpiece to the centuries, and so long as they listen he shall endure.
we remember the caveman. we remember him because he made his century imperishable. but, unhappily, we remember him dimly, in a collective sort of way, because he memorialized his century dimly, in a collective sort of way. he had no written speech, so he left us rude scratchings of beasts and things, cracked marrow-bones, and weapons of stone. it was the best expression of which he was capable. had he scratched his own particular name with the scratchings of beasts and things, stamped his cracked marrowbones with his own particular seal, trade-marked his weapons of stone with his own particular device, that particular man would we remember. but he did the best he could, and we remember him as best we may.
homer takes his place with achilles and the greek and trojan heroes. because he remembered them, we remember him. whether he be one or a dozen men, or a dozen generations of men, we remember him. and so long as the name of greece is known on the lips of men, so long will the name of homer be known. there are many such names, linked with their times, which have come down to us, many more which will yet go down; and to them, in token that we have lived, must we add some few of our own.
dealing only with the artist, be it understood, only those artists will go down who have spoken true of us. their truth must be the deepest and most significant, their voices clear and strong, definite and coherent. half-truths and partial-truths will not do, nor will thin piping voices and quavering lays. there must be the cosmic quality in what they sing. they must seize upon and press into enduring art-forms the vital facts of our existence. they must tell why we have lived, for without any reason for living, depend upon it, in the time to come, it will be as though we had never lived. nor are the things that were true of the people a thousand years or so ago true of us to-day. the romance of homer’s greece is the romance of homer’s greece. that is undeniable. it is not our romance. and he who in our time sings the romance of homer’s greece cannot expect to sing it so well as homer did, nor will he be singing about us or our romance at all. a machine age is something quite different from an heroic age. what is true of rapid-fire guns, stock-exchanges, and electric motors, cannot possibly be true of hand-flung javelins and whirring chariot wheels. kipling knows this. he has been telling it to us all his life, living it all his life in the work he has done.
what the anglo–saxon has done, he has memorialized. and by anglo–saxon is not meant merely the people of that tight little island on the edge of the western ocean. anglo–saxon stands for the english-speaking people of all the world, who, in forms and institutions and traditions, are more peculiarly and definitely english than anything else. this people kipling has sung. their sweat and blood and toil have been the motives of his songs; but underlying all the motives of his songs is the motive of motives, the sum of them all and something more, which is one with what underlies all the anglo–saxon sweat and blood and toil; namely, the genius of the race. and this is the cosmic quality. both that which is true of the race for all time, and that which is true of the race for all time applied to this particular time, he has caught up and pressed into his art-forms. he has caught the dominant note of the anglo–saxon and pressed it into wonderful rhythms which cannot be sung out in a day and which will not be sung out in a day.
the anglo–saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber. underneath his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in morgan’s time, in drake’s time, in william’s time, in alfred’s time. the blood and the tradition of hengist and horsa are in his veins. in battle he is subject to the blood-lusts of the berserkers of old. plunder and booty fascinate him immeasurably. the schoolboy of to-day dreams the dream of clive and hastings. the anglo–saxon is strong of arm and heavy of hand, and he possesses a primitive brutality all his own. there is a discontent in his blood, an unsatisfaction that will not let him rest, but sends him adventuring over the sea and among the lands in the midst of the sea. he does not know when he is beaten, wherefore the term “bulldog” is attached to him, so that all may know his unreasonableness. he has “some care as to the purity of his ways, does not wish for strange gods, nor juggle with intellectual phantasmagoria.” he loves freedom, but is dictatorial to others, is self-willed, has boundless energy, and does things for himself. he is also a master of matter, an organizer of law, and an administrator of justice.
and in the nineteenth century he has lived up to his reputation. being the nineteenth century and no other century, and in so far different from all other centuries, he has expressed himself differently. but blood will tell, and in the name of god, the bible, and democracy, he has gone out over the earth, possessing himself of broad lands and fat revenues, and conquering by virtue of his sheer pluck and enterprise and superior machinery.
now the future centuries, seeking to find out what the nineteenth century anglo–saxon was and what were his works, will have small concern with what he did not do and what he would have liked to do. these things he did do, and for these things will he be remembered. his claim on posterity will be that in the nineteenth century he mastered matter; his twentieth-century claim will be, in the highest probability, that he organized life — but that will be sung by the twentieth-century kiplings or the twenty-first-century kiplings. rudyard kipling of the nineteenth century has sung of “things as they are.” he has seen life as it is, “taken it up squarely,” in both his hands, and looked upon it. what better preachment upon the anglo–saxon and what he has done can be had than the bridge builders? what better appraisement than the white man’s burden? as for faith and clean ideals — not of “children and gods, but men in a world of men”— who has preached them better than he?
primarily, kipling has stood for the doer as opposed to the dreamer — the doer, who lists not to idle songs of empty days, but who goes forth and does things, with bended back and sweated brow and work-hardened hands. the most characteristic thing about kipling is his lover of actuality, his intense practicality, his proper and necessary respect for the hard-headed, hard-fisted fact. and, above all, he has preached the gospel of work, and as potently as carlyle ever preached. for he has preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men, to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and understand yet stand agape at carlyle’s turgid utterance. do the thing to your hand, and do it with all your might. never mind what the thing is; so long as it is something. do it. do it and remember tomlinson, sexless and soulless tomlinson, who was denied at heaven’s gate.
the blundering centuries have perseveringly pottered and groped through the dark; but it remained for kipling’s century to roll in the sun, to formulate, in other words, the reign of law. and of the artists in kipling’s century, he of them all has driven the greater measure of law in the more consummate speech:
keep ye the law — be swift in all obedience.
clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
make ye sure to each his own
that he reap what he hath sown;
by the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the lord.
— and so it runs, from mcandrew’s law, order, duty, and restraint, to his last least line, whether of the vampire or the recessional. and no prophet out of israel has cried out more loudly the sins of the people, nor called them more awfully to repent.
“but he is vulgar, he stirs the puddle of life,” object the fluttering, chirping gentlemen, the tomlinsonian men. well, and isn’t life vulgar? can you divorce the facts of life? much of good is there, and much of ill; but who may draw aside his garment and say, “i am none of them”? can you say that the part is greater than the whole? that the whole is more or less than the sum of the parts? as for the puddle of life, the stench is offensive to you? well, and what then? do you not live in it? why do you not make it clean? do you clamour for a filter to make clean only your own particular portion? and, made clean, are you wroth because kipling has stirred it muddy again? at least he has stirred it healthily, with steady vigour and good-will. he has not brought to the surface merely its dregs, but its most significant values. he has told the centuries to come of our lyings and our lusts, but he has also told the centuries to come of the seriousness which is underneath our lyings and our lusts. and he has told us, too, and always has he told us, to be clean and strong and to walk upright and manlike.
“but he has no sympathy,” the fluttering gentlemen chirp. “we admire his art and intellectual brilliancy, we all admire his art and intellectual brilliancy, his dazzling technique and rare rhythmical sense; but . . . he is totally devoid of sympathy.” dear! dear! what is to be understood by this? should he sprinkle his pages with sympathetic adjectives, so many to the paragraph, as the country compositor sprinkles commas? surely not. the little gentlemen are not quite so infinitesimal as that. there have been many tellers of jokes, and the greater of them, it is recorded, never smiled at their own, not even in the crucial moment when the audience wavered between laughter and tears.
and so with kipling. take the vampire, for instance. it has been complained that there is no touch of pity in it for the man and his ruin, no sermon on the lesson of it, no compassion for the human weakness, no indignation at the heartlessness. but are we kindergarten children that the tale be told to us in words of one syllable? or are we men and women, able to read between the lines what kipling intended we should read between the lines? “for some of him lived, but the most of him died.” is there not here all the excitation in the world for our sorrow, our pity, our indignation? and what more is the function of art than to excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed? the colour of tragedy is red. must the artist also paint in the watery tears and wan-faced grief? “for some of him lived, but the most of him died”— can the heartache of the situation be conveyed more achingly? or were it better that the young man, some of him alive but most of him dead, should come out before the curtain and deliver a homily to the weeping audience?
the nineteenth century, so far as the anglo–saxon is concerned, was remarkable for two great developments: the mastery of matter and the expansion of the race. three great forces operated in it: nationalism, commercialism, democracy — the marshalling of the races, the merciless, remorseless laissez faire of the dominant bourgeoisie, and the practical, actual working government of men within a very limited equality. the democracy of the nineteenth century is not the democracy of which the eighteenth century dreamed. it is not the democracy of the declaration, but it is what we have practised and lived that reconciles it to the fact of the “lesser breeds without the law.”
it is of these developments and forces of the nineteenth century that kipling has sung. and the romance of it he has sung, that which underlies and transcends objective endeavour, which deals with race impulses, race deeds, and race traditions. even into the steam-laden speech of his locomotives has he breathed our life, our spirit, our significance. as he is our mouthpiece, so are they his mouthpieces. and the romance of the nineteenth-century man as he has thus expressed himself in the nineteenth century, in shaft and wheel, in steel and steam, in far journeying and adventuring, kipling has caught up in wondrous songs for the future centuries to sing.
if the nineteenth century is the century of the hooligan, then is kipling the voice of the hooligan as surely as he is the voice of the nineteenth century. who is more representative? is david harum more representative of the nineteenth century? is mary johnston, charles major, or winston churchill? is bret harte? william dean howells? gilbert parker? who of them all is as essentially representative of nineteenth-century life? when kipling is forgotten, will robert louis stevenson be remembered for his dr. jekyll and mr. hyde, his kidnapped and his david balfour? not so. his treasure island will be a classic, to go down with robinson crusoe, through the looking–glass, and the jungle books. he will be remembered for his essays, for his letters, for his philosophy of life, for himself. he will be the well beloved, as he has been the well beloved. but his will be another claim upon posterity than what we are considering. for each epoch has its singer. as scott sang the swan song of chivalry and dickens the burgher-fear of the rising merchant class, so kipling, as no one else, has sung the hymn of the dominant bourgeoisie, the war march of the white man round the world, the triumphant paean of commercialism and imperialism. for that will he be remembered.
oakland, california.
october 1901.
