Books: Restoration

A CHOICE OF KIPLING’S VERSE MADE BY T. S. ELIOT, WITH AN ESSAY ON RUDYARD KIPLING—Scribner ($2.50).

Ever since he started to publish rhymes (circa 1885), Rudyard Kipling has been one of the world’s most read and most neglected poets. Americans and Britons who would not be found dead with a book of poems in their pockets read Kipling—worse, they memorized whole stanzas. A graduating class in a U.S. college which did not name Kipling’s If— as its favorite poem might be presumed to have something wrong with it.

But the intellectuals demurred. The literary intellectuals said Kipling did not write poetry but a slick doggerel—a plausible argument. The political intellectuals said Kipling was an apologist for imperialism—a practically unanswerable argument.

Both these arguments are answered by No. 1U.S. Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (The Waste Land) in the brilliant critical introductory essay to his Choice of Kipling’s Verse.

This book is not only an unusual act of literary fraternity, it is a literary event. For Eliot’s authority as a critic is great, and by using it in Kipling’s behalf, he has done much to restore Kipling to his place as an important English poet.

Ballad Maker. Critic Eliot suggests that, before judging Kipling, it is well to make sure that you know what he was trying to do. “Kipling,” Eliot believes, “was not trying to write poetry at all.” He was a writer of verse which often, but always incidentally, came to life as poetry, as in ” ‘ark to the fifes a-crawlin’.” He was a ballad maker, using that most ancient form of art and journalism brilliantly to impart truth and emotion. He was devoted not to the poem as poem, the verse as verse, but always, and utterly, to his subject. At a great poet’s “greatest moments,” writes Eliot, “he is doing what Kipling is usually doing on a lower plane—writing transparently, so that our attention is directed to the object and not to the medium.”

Of balladry, Kipling was an unsurpassable modern master. Eliot points out “his singleness of intention in attempting to convey no more to the simple minded than can be taken in on one reading or hearing,” points out further his virtuosity at carrying out and varying this intention: “There is no poet who is less open to the charge of repeating himself.” In Danny Deever, as in dozens of other ballads, “there is no single word or phrase which calls too much attention to itself, or which is not there for the total effect.” Besides a talent for the ballad, Kipling had, to an unusual degree, the talent for occasional verse. “Good epigrams in English are very few; and the great hymn writer is very rare.” Eliot calls Kipling a great hymn writer on the strength of Recessional; and the best of the Epitaphs of the War are among the few epigrams in English which approach the serene finalities of the Greek Anthology:

The Coward

I could not look on Death, which being known,

Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.

Inscrutable Pattern. Kipling, says Eliot, “is one of the most inscrutable of authors.” But there is a pattern in his verse, “a unity of a very complicated kind.” For the tracing of it, his verse and his prose must be studied together. So must his biography. An Englishman born in India, Kipling was neither Englishman nor Indian, yet “he might almost be called the first citizen of India.” As such, he saw England and the world as might “a visitor from another planet.” But though he was one of the least subjective of poets, Kipling was by no means detached. His first all-absorbing aim was to preach Empire and the men who extended and sustained it. Later on “he is more concerned with the problem of the soundness of the core of empire.” At that same time “his vision takes a larger view, and he sees the Roman Empire and the place of England in it.”

Most important in Kipling’s later stories and poems is Kipling’s “vision of the people of the soil. It is not a Christian vision, but it is at least a pagan vision—a contradiction of the materialistic view: it is the insight into a harmony with nature which must be re-established if the truly Christian imagination is to be recovered by Christians. What he is trying to convey is … not a program of agrarian reform, but a point of view unintelligible to the industrialized mind.” And profoundly vitalizing that point of view are Kipling’s strange nerves of prophecy and mysticism:

Cities and Thrones and Powers Stand in Time’s eye,

Almost as long as flowers, Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth The Cities rise again.

The poems, notably the later ones, bear Eliot out. The man who wrote, for children:

Father in Heaven who lovest all,

Oh, help Thy children when they call;

That they may build from age to age

An undefilèd heritage

knew things to advise the world about which are at the roots of Christian civilization and beneath those roots.

The man who wrote:

Teach us to look in all our ends

On Thee for judge, and not our friends;

That we, with Thee, may walk uncowed

By fear or favour of the crowd

was bound, since he felt it far below the level of platitude, also to write the bitter

Holy State or Holy King —Or Holy People’s Will-

Have no truck with the senseless thing.

Order the guns and kill!

The man who wrote, of English earth:

Till I make plain the meaning Of all my thousand years—

Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,

While I fill their eyes with tears

was not likely to be deterred from knowing prophetically (in 1932):

This is the midnight— let no star

Delude us—dawn is very far.

This is the tempest long foretold—

Slow to make head but sure to hold.

Stand by! The lull ‘twixt blast and blast

Signals the storm is near, not past;

And worse than present jeopardy

May our forlorn tomorrow be.

Vulgarity and Sensibility. Eliot himself is an exile, a mystic, a religious and profoundly pessimistic mind, and, in senses of the term which (as he says) few men share today, a Tory. He skirts some of the issues he raises and does not get to some others which the poems reveal.

He says nothing of the astonishing vulgarity which braids itself inextricably with Kipling’s equally astonishing sensibility (“When ‘Omer Smote ‘is Bloomin’ Lyre”). He does not mention that genius for phrase-minting which puts Kipling in the company of Shaw, Pope and Shakespeare. Eliot is so absorbed in revealing virtues in Kipling which are not those of most poets in the contemporary tradition, that he curiously neglects to observe that at his best Kipling was a miraculous musician, giving the English language some of the rare, untouched luminousness of Greek. Eliot might as well be totally unaware of Edmund Wilson’s important psychological study of Kipling’s tortured, inverted worship of the power and authority he most dreaded and hated. He does not mention the foaming misanthropy of A Pict Song (“We are the Little Folk— we! Too little to love or to hate.”); the highly suggestive misogyny of The Ladies; the achingly bitter self-revelations of The Waster, nor the bottomless primordialism of The Law of the Jungle.

But if Poet Eliot had done no more than make a handy selection of the 120 revealing poems in this book, he would have done a great service to English writing and to the man who for himself made only the cryptic Appeal:

If I have given you delight

By aught that I have done,

Let me lie quiet in that night

Which shall be yours anon

And for the little, little, span

The dead are borne in mind,

Seek not to question other than

The books I leave behind.