KIPLING

Northern Advocate, 20 January 1936, Page 4

KIPLING

The death of Rudyard Kipling, which was announced ‘on Saturday, lias made the world poorer. A great figure in literature, whose real greatness will only be realised when his work is surveyed in the perspective of time, has passed away, and there has been removed one who, for the greater part of half-a-century, did more than any other writer has done to fan the flame of Empire and reveal the “ways of the English” in their Empire-building. The extent to which Kipling buttressed the efforts of Empire Builders, and, at the same time, urged that it is only righteousness that exalts a nation, cannot be stated in words. As a biographer said some ten years ago, Kipling deserved well of his country, firstly, for those, strong true tales which have] made India a real place to dwell-j cvs in Britain. This was in itself j an imperial conquest. Other nov-j elists had told Britishers that] there was such a land as India, i and had explained the working of 1

the Hindu mind and described ji Eastern beasts and birds, but itjl was Kipling who topk the soil of. \ India and moulded it into a thous- 1 and gleaming sentences; he was J the first to give the stay-at-home I a picture of the real India. And India, it must be remembered, has : been the scene of Britishers’ ' greatest achievements in Empire- 1 building. The work which a handful of British have done among the teeming millions of different castes and national!- ■ ties who make up the population of India passes understanding, j These men have built of bricks, which would otherwise be lying in scattered heaps today, a great I Indian Empire. But for their inherent administrative gifts and their, genius for making two blades of grass grow where previously there was only one blade, there would be no well-ordered and prosperous India such as Britain is ready to hand over to the control of the Indian people themselves. Who has laid bare as Rudyard Kipling has done the methods by which this miracle, was performed? And the same thing may be said of Egypt and the Sudan: the wonderful way

in which a few British soldiers and administrators have developed these countries and trained native troops has astonished the world. By these means they have delivered the lands and their peoples from the poverty and barbarity into which they bad been plunged, and set them on the high road to prosperity and the blessings of civilisation. Who, igain, has described this miracle as Kipling has done? It is well that Kipling should be remembered as the Empire builder today, for his literary genius, fortified by his acquired knowledge of Eastern life, philosophy and occultism will look after itself in the years to come: his poems, his stories and bis general writings will re-

tain for him a place amonq’ .m immortals in the world of literature. Columns, nay volumes, could, and will, be written about Kipling V work, but it may be said in passing that the achievements of the great Englishman who has gone to his rest provide an inspiration and an object lesson to all who feel the urge of writing. Admittedly ho was a genius. But genius has been not inappropriately described as the faculty of taking infinite pains. Kipling took infinite pains not only to acquire knowledge but to make himself a master of literary expression. It is recorded that the head of a firm which controlled the news-stands on the Indian railways, and who introduced him to the first publishers of his earliest books, _ came into close friendship with Kipling; then just out of his teens and, at the time, a, member of the literary staff of the “Pioneer” in Allahabad. Kipling, he says, was a rather shy young man, of, very retiring disposition, but he was full of absorbing yarns of a very out-of-the-way nature, and could—when he earOd to —give amazingly correct information regarding all manner of abtruse details connected with the lives and persons, the goods and chattels, and the polities and religions of Indians—.whether Hindu, Parsee, Jaina, Sikh, or Mohammedan. He was very young to have acquired such a stock of information, but he had made a practice of leaving home for days together, sometimes weeks at a time, and going about with such Indian people as interested him and picking up all that was worth knowing. In the same way the extraordinary knowledge of the ways and wiles of the British ‘ ‘ Tommy ’ * in India, as revealed in poem and story, was the result of going about with the

soldiers and making great friends of some of them —among whom many of them may have been the originals of Privates Orth oris, Learoyd and Mulvaney. It was in this way that Kipling filled the reservoir from which lie was to draw so prolifically during a long I writing life. But the secret of his success lay in the care with which he selected his words and built them into what is universally admitted to be classic literature. Whether as a great Englishman who symbolised the*spirit of Empire, or as a literary genius, Tvudyard Kipling’s name will endure when the names of those who have put self-seeking first have been long forgotten.