KIPLING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 21, 25 January 1936, Page 1 (Supplement)

KIPLING.

A GREAT WRITER PASSES. ACHIEVEMENT AND INFLUENCE (By CYBANO.) It is enough that, through Thy Grace I saw nought common on Thy Earth — Stevenson said of Budyard Kipling that the fairy godmother must have got drunk at his christening. Exactly what Stevenson meant I do not remember, and Kipling was a young writer when Stevenson died. But that there was an extraordinary mixture of gifts in Kipling's endowment has always been plain. It is not only that his genius illumined a very wide range of subjects, from coolies to kings, but that he alternated bad work with good and could pass quickly from vulgarity and materialism to beauty and spirituality. Like Wordsworth, he did a great deal of second-rate work, an<f, like Wordsworth, suffered in reputation for it. Moreover, just as Wordsworth has never been forgiven by. some for abandoning the rapturous liberation of his French devolution days, so Kipling has never been forgiven by many Eadicals and Liberals for being a,n Imperialist. Max Beerbohm caricatured him as a Cockney taking "Britannia, his girl" for a holiday on 'Ampstead 'Eatli, and the drum and trumpet were a little too loud at times —and are to-day to a generation sick of war and its consequences. The voice was sometimes too strident; the sense of values now and then false. The strength that he worshipped did not always exclude bullying. His language as well as his thoughts owed much to the Bible, but many of his admirers must have wished sometimes that he attached less importance to the Old Testament and more to the New. Politics apart, there is a streak of Kipling that repels. Perhaps I can best illustrate this by saying' that a friend of mine, who is very fond of many of Kipling's short stories and poems, has never felt the same towards him since "Stalky and Co." was published. Debit and Credit. Kipling, however, meets his critics by displaying just the opposites of the qualities for which they condemn him. Is be not a 'prancing Imperialist, waving the flag and beating the big drum? At tin most appropriate moment he writ's "Eqcessional" as a warning against "frantic boast and foolish word." Are not some of his short stories coarse and vulgar? He replies with "They" and "The Brushwood Boy." Do not "Barrackroom Ballads" smell a little too strongly? He writes "Sussex" and "The Flowers." Is he not out of sympathy with peoples subject to the Empire that he glorifies? He gives us "Kim," that marvellous study of teeming Indian life, the "wandering holy man in which is his most beautiful creation—and Gunga Din. Unfortunately, political feeling against him is so strong that the significance of these contra items is often overlooked. Yet we do not rule out Dr. Johnson because he was a resounding Tory, or Shelley because he was a militant Badical.

Budyard Kipling began to write when Englishmen were ready for a new romance. Beaction against the complacent mercantilism of the Victorian age took various forms. Kipling discovered the Empire and revived interest in oversea adventure. His rise coincided with the first jubilee of Queen Victoria, the beginning of the era of Imperialism that culminated in the South African War. It was an era that had its ugly aspects, but to condemn Imperialism without definition and reservation is like throwing bricks blindly. Kipling taught English people to think about their Imperial achievements, possessions and destiny; the size and difficulty of his task may be gauged by the amount of ignorance of and indifference to the Dominions that still exists even among the educated classes. But Kipling's interests were wider than the Empire. He was avid of life, intensely interested in every phase of it, and seeing romance in the inanimate and animate alike. Kipling was a journalist of genius, a magnificent reporter. For the good journalist must be interested in everything, and never lose his zest for men and things and ideas. Like Dickens, Kipling was supercharged with that passion. Concerned with Life. To him the world was "so full of a number of things" that the greatest happiness was to be achieved in explaining them. Not for him the cloistered dissection of motives and minute analysis of unimportant actions —what George Moore described as "ploughing fields with knitting needles." To quote Kipling in the coteries of Chelsea or Bloomsbury would be to proclaim oneself hopelessly suburban, but Kipling wrote of these groups in a story that deserves to live for its riddling satire and authentic beauty. They are apt to be concerned with art with a capital "A"; he -was concerned with life. "Eomance brought up the nine-fifteen," is one of his best-known lines, and with it may be coupled those from "The Song of the Banjo": I, the joy of life unquestioned—l, the Greek— I, the everlasting Wonder-song of Youth ! Kipling was always a youth filled with the wonder of the world. Soldiers and sailors, sealers and frontiersmen, kings and coolies, engine rooms and temples, ships, motor cars and flying machines, border thieves and heads of districts — he wrote of them all. His four bestknown characters are three rough soldiers and a boy from the streets. He "saw nought common on Thy Earth" in the sense that to him everything had some sort of a soul. Character drawing was not his strongest point; he excelled in description of action, the painting of scenes and the conveying of emotion.. In turn he is local and universal. At times he writes like a narrow Anglican touched with the doctrines of British-Israelism; then he gives us a note of world brotherhood: — My brother kneels, so saith Kabir, To stone and brass in heathen-wise. But in my brother's voice I hear My own unanswered agonits. His God is as the fates assign, His prayer is all the world's—and mine. As I Save said, Kipling's work was uneven. He lacked capacity for selfcriticism. His literary achievement, however, stands out large and clear from the mass of his writings. He gave new life to the English short story. The best of his short tales—"The Man Who Would be King," "The Man Who Was" and "Love o' Women," to mention only three —are among the best in the world. They are magnificently alive. "Kim"

is one of the greatest books written about the East, and the "Jungle Books" are supreme in their field. It appears, therefore, that his reputation as a prose writer will rest mainly on themes East of Suez. But his imaginative recreation of English history for children also entitles him to fame. And here and there in other work his love for England and its soil, its loveliness as well as its ardours and endurances, is expressed in language that our race will not forget. As a poet he sang to the lyre and strummed on the banjo, yet that banjo music of his must not be swept aside as negligible. Here and . there are phrases that strike right home. He made poetry popular, as Tennyson had done, but in a different way, and in some quarters to be popular is to be damned. Kipling's poetry is popular first because lie is a genuine poet, and also because he writes of what men and women experience in their daily lives. Beginning with a simple and to some perhaps a vulgar tune, he suddenly plucks at one's heart-strings. Take the "ChantPagan" of the soldier demobilised after the South African campaign and see how colloquialism and humour and flashes of poetry are mingled in a soliloquy of real insight. "Me that 'ave watched 'arf a world leave up all shiny with dew." " 'An the silence, the shine an' the size of the 'igh, inexpressible skies." As a moralist in verse he has left us much to think about. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same. If a man had written nothing but those two lines he might look back on his life with some satisfaction. Sussex And The World. A year or so ago a "Times" reviewer said that Kipling had given more to current speech and thought than any writer of his time. He meant that Kipling's characters and lives were in most frequent use, that we carried them in our minds, and recognised them when we saw them, and used them to garnish our written and spoken words. .The comment, I think, is justified and it is an impressive measure of his achievement. No poet of his age has brought poetry into such frequent contact with daily life. I have said that Kipling passes from the local to the universal, but sometimes he makes the local universal. I loved "Sussex" long before I ever saw that country, and there must be scores of thousands of colonials who feel as I did To-day, after reading and quoting it innumerable times, I cannot be sure of reading it without a somewhat embarrassing stir of emotion. Why? Sussex is not my county, nor England my country. The explanation is not wholly the admirable poetry working upon natural beauty and historical association. It is partly that the Sussex of the poem is that spot in any country which the reader loves beyond all others. The poc-ii touches to the quick that emotion which is rooted in the soil, that patriotism within patriotism which makes a shrine of hill and valley, stream and wood. * "Sussex" means an infinitude of places. It may be "my little homestead on Hunter Biver, and my new vines joining hands"; it may be a bay in North Auckland, with bush hills behind; it may be a Canterbury road "closed with shining Alps." One touch of understanding makes the whole world , kin. So Kipling, famous so long that he had become an institution, is gone, his work done, and we salute in admiration and affection a <?re?.t writer. But his works iemam for our delight.