KIPLING’S “RECESSIONAL” IN RETROSPECT

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25248, 29 July 1947, Page 6

KIPLING’S “RECESSIONAL” IN RETROSPECT

EMPIRE

[A leading article from "The Times" of July 171

It is fifty years to-day since Kipling's famous poem “Recessional” appeared on this page, as “the captains and the kings” were departing from the scene of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. To-day it has been informally adopted into the liturgy of patriotic dedication; what is more remarkable in retrospect is the instantaneous acclamation with which the nation received it on its first appearance. It has become the fashion to look back upon the Diamond Jubilee as a supreme manifestation of jingoism, of vainglory, of the crude and vulgar rejoicing by a materialistic generation in mere wealth and mere physical power over less fortunate races. To all such sentiments the austere anaf devout lines of “Recessional” are a rebuke. That the sentimerits had been expressed at the Jubilee is undeniable, or it would not have been necessary to rebuke them, but the immediate recognition of the truth and greatness of the poem is equally good evidence that it corresponded to a feeling in the heart of the people that was no less characteristic of their mood, though less loudly expressed, than the exaltation they had been proclaiming.

The response suggests that “Recessional” made articulate the impression remaining in the minds of the public as they looked back upon the Jubilee itself. They had been engaged in giving thinks for the unexampled power and prosperity that 60 years of the Queen’s reign had brought to their, country, and naturally they gave thanks with joy. But as the immediate excitement faded they were left to think over the lesson they had been taught, and substantially they agreed with Kipling that to render thanks for power in the sight of God is above all to acknowledge that power means responsibility, and its exercise is a divine vocation. That is the doctrine that “Recessional” crystallised. The Times” on the same day attempted to express it in prose:— To be humble in our strength, to avoid the excesses of an over-confident vanity, to be as regardful of the rights of others as if we were neither powerful nor wealthy, to shun "Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the La W ”_these are the conditions upon which our dominion by sea and land is based even more than on fleets and armies.

If the men of 1897 were asked to give a name to this reverent attitude to the responsibilities of power, they could have proffered no other than "imperialism.” The great conception of Empire has been ignorantly traduced as if the word were synonymous with alien domination imposed by force, and it is well to be reminded of what it meant to the men who first proclaimed it with the fervour of a gospel. In the earlier part of Queen Victoria’s reign it had been fashionable to regard the colonies as encumbrances, destined in the very near future to drop away naturally to the economic advantage of the Mother Country. It was against this pusillanimity. as they thought it. not against the sort of megalomania that may or mav not have seized the nation at the time of the Diamond Jubilee, that the great teachers of imperialism —men like Seeley, Chamberlain, Dilke, Milner—reacted. They told their countrymen that dominion over palm and pine was a trust not to be laid down until its service was accomplished. England must indeed liberate her colonies. Liberation, however, did not mean turning them adrift in a hostile world, but guiding them over a long period in the practice of the arts of freedom that her own people had worked out through centuries. There was no contradiction between Empire and liberty; Empire was the medium through which the idea of liberty was to be diffused, and the means of protection while its practice was learnt. So the great acts of emancipation which followed so quickly upon the Diamond Jubilee, the federation of Australia In the last year of the century, the union of South Africa within a few years of the military defeat of the Boer republics, were not repudiations of imperialist thought, but its fulfilment. And so too the still greater act which is to take place next month, when two Indian dominions take upon themselves the responsibility for which two centuries of the British Raj have been the preparation, does not mean that a repentant Britain, has forsworn some imagined ambition of despotism that she set before herself in the Victorian era. This long- £ repared’ release is British imperialsm continuous and consistent with itself, and proceeding now to a consummation which Macaulay, more than a century ago. explicitly foresaw as the proudest moment in the history of the Empire.