GREAT WRITER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 66, Issue 5595, 22 March 1943, Page 3

GREAT WRITER

MASCULINITY OF KIPLING APOSTLE OF EMPIRE (By R.K.) For a comparatively brief period toward the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries England became consciously imperialistic. The disastrous effects of free-trade, against which Disraeli had warned his generation, had not yet made their appearance.

The early start gained by English manufacturers and merchants in the exploitation of the markets in the world had not been overtaken by competing foreign enterprise. Secure in their island home, with revenue flowing in from almost every country of the world, vigorous in mind and body, with firm convictions about almost everything, the Farsytes and their prototypes in every class faced the world with an unexpressed but obvious sense of superiority—

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by.

With large appetites, large families, large points of view and large interests all over the globe, the Englishmen of this astonishing epoch idealised certain conceptions of life which, in spite of the changes of the years, have left an indelible imprint upon the national character. The exuberant imperialism of the period found its apotheosis in the masculinity of Rudyard. Kipling, who, with a zest and vidility which matched the times, immortalised in verse and prose the vigour and power of the men standing guard up on the forgotten outposts of Empire. The keynote of his writing is masculinity; not the crude, hard-fisted, uncultured type of manliness apparent in much modern writing, or the cruel barbarism of Teutonic ideology, but the cultured, consciously restrained strength exemplified for all time in—

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . . If you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or talk with kings—nor lose the common touch You’ll be a Man, my son! Width of Outlook

Kipling brought Within the range of the ordinary reader a swinging, lilting verse and a terse prose which asked no effort of understanding, but gave a sense of power and wideness of outlook which stirred the blood and fired the imagination. The sensation caused by the appearance of Plain Tales from the Hills and Many Inventions is hard to imagine after the lapse of half a century. They came straight from Kipling’s Anglo-Indian experience, and were presented briefly, briskly and pointedly. They brought before the minds of his contemporaries in England another distant, strange world which was conquered and held by courage and daring. This point of view is shown in The Ballad of East and West where the unwilling admiration of the border chieftain is won by the pluck of the colonel’s son— Kamel has gripped him by the hand and set him upon his feet. “No talk shall be of dogs,” said he, “when wolf and grey wolf meet.” The reason for this grudging regard is because—- .... there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth. Kiplfhg did not restrict his faith in masculinity to the officer class; he was unstinting in his praise of the ordinary British soldier— For it’s Tommy this and Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!” But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoqt. Nor did he restrict himself to soldier topics. As a short-story writer he developed control over an unlimited range of material, and, sometimes vivid and subtle, he drew upon a large canvas for an ever-increasing body of readers. Kipling was born in Bombay in 18G5 and lived in India as a child. Some of these early years are described in “Kim.” After his education at the United Services College, Westward Ho, England, which was later to become the scene of “Stalky and C 0.,” he returned to India at the age of 17, and became assistant editor of the Lahore “Civil and Military Gazette.” He Was 21 when he published “Departmental Ditties,” and then travelled for the next two years in India, China, Japan and America. Three years later he married an American, and lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, for several years. Patriotic Ideals

Returning to England, he found the door to society open to him. for, besides being a distinguished literary man, he was related through his mother to Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, and also to Stanley Baldwin. When in 1907, he received the Nobel Prize for literature, being the first Englishman to obtain this coveted honor, he had a vast output behind him—short

stories, novels, poems and children’s books. The wealth of his imagination, the stirring nature of his writing, the vitality that throbbed through every page, made him the best-known literary man of his day.

Twenty years after he had received the Nobel Prize the Kipling Society was founded a unique gesture to “do honor to, and to extend the influence of, the most patriotic, virile and imaginative of writers, who uphold the ideals of the English-speaking world.” In the same year that this society was •founded the manuscript of “The Smith Administration,” which had been published in 1891, was auctioned for 14,000 dollars, tjne highest price ever paid for the Work of a living author. Six years later Kipling became a foreign associate of the Academe des Sciences Morales and Politiques, the third person to be so signally honored, Cardinal Merpier and Albert King of the Belgians being the other two associates.

Kipling’s pride of Empire, began with a great love for England, which he saw not with the passionate devotion of Rupert Brooke, but with the clear conviction of one who judges from the distance. England to him was the work of many men—

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views, Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues. . . But the glory of the garden lies in more than meets the eye.

The range of Rudyard Kipling’s writing reached out to the multitudinous concerns of earth. Rarely has a more versatile writer kept so high a standard. His doctrine of manliness suffered something of an eclipse after the war, but there are indications that in the flux of ideals and the challenge to liberty to-day there is a renewed interest in the apostle of empire. The spirit and fire of Kipling are well shown in the sweep and power of The Explorer, a poem which describes the restless urge of adventure and the call of the unknown in never-to-be-forgotten verse. Why shouldn’t a man settle down? Because an urge within him will not let him. There is always the pull of something beyond the ranges. So he goes on and on, conscious all the time of some guiding presence, some power that would not let him rest. Visions, suffering, endurance, work and the realisation that other men would take

the credit, the realisation, too, that other men, whenever they come and whatever they build, will not see what he has seen nor build what he has dreamed—- . . . It’s God’s present to our nation. Anybody might have found it, but— His Whisper came to Me! An Iron Age This identification of human striving and human endurance with the divine unfolding and purpose has much to do with the liberation of the human spirit from the thrall of determinism. What Shaw did by a greater intellectual effort in freeing man’s soul from the bonds of an iron philosophic system which allowed no place for freedom and spirit, Kipling popularised and flung broadcast to the English-speaking world. The men cf the iron age for whom Kipling wrote were not without their faith, illogical and bigoted as that faith sometimes seemed to be. Beneath his appeal to manly virtue and his glorying in the old Roman pride of race and stoic endurance there was a deep trust in the living reality upon which all human greatness is built— All valiant dust that builds on dust, And, guarding, calls not Thee to guard. It is this that differentiates between ancient virtue and Christian grace, and Kipling strove to remind his generation that a truly great Empire needs and relies upon a truly great faith.