Foreign News: Loud Kipling

One afternoon last week, Cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the New York World thumbtacked a fresh sheet of paper and set about sketching two figures. One was a tall figure, one a short. They faced each other, the small one standing with his knees slightly bent, his shoulders hunched, his left thumb insultingly applied to his buttonish nose. In his right hand was a little wooden sword. On his head appeared a crested toy helmet, bravely capped by a toy British flag. Behind his twiddling fingers, the small creature’s mouth was opened in scolding anger; his scrubby mustache and beetling eyebrows bristled. His spectacles added to the effect of impotent, scrawny anger, which the tall figure, in familiar top hat and long coattails, surveyed with quizzical geniality, hands in pockets.

Cartoonist Kirby’s many admirers wish that he would not label his characters. Seldom necessary, it was particularly unnecessary in this instance. The title told all. It said: “Why, Rudyard!”

Other cartoonists concurrently represented Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a testy little man pounding a big bass drum with a broken stick; as a nasty little boy making faces at the lady who has just given him a piece of pie; as a nasty little boy embarrassing his parents by vulgar remarks in front of company. One and all were reproving Mr. Kipling for an inept and unmelodious bit of prevarication included in his new book* of stories and verses, published simultaneously last week in England and the U. S.:

The Vineyard

At the eleventh hour he came. But his wages were the same As ours who all day long had trod The winepress of the Wrath of God.

When he shouldered through the lines Of our cropped and mangled vines, His unjaded eye could scan How each hour had marked its man.

(Children of the morningtide With the hosts of noon had died; And our noon contingents lay Dead with twilight’s spent array.)

Since his back had felt no load, Virtue still in him abode; So he swiftly made his own Those last spoils we had not won.

We went home, delivered thence, Grudging him no recompense Till he portioned praise or blame To our works before he came.

Till he showed us for our good— Deaf to mirth and blind to scorn— How we might have best withstood Burdens that he has not borne!

Now few Britishers have a good word left for Woodrow Wilson, and the U. S. debt-collection policy is “notoriously extortionate.” But, when Britons saw what Mr. Kipling had written, and learned of the wide notice taken of his lines in the U. S., particularly the phrase

. . . . swiftly made his own

Those last spoils we had not won there was a general feeling that Mr. Kipling had been guilty of stupidity and bad manners, that he should have kept his facts in mind, in the first place, and in the second place, should have appreciated the real relations of Britain and the U. S.

Said the London Evening Standard: “So long as we persist in thinking that there is some sort of link between them [the two countries], so long will some of us persist in using that language of frank and familiar rebuke which (however mistakenly) is supposed to be proper between relatives. If we could bring ourselves to think of America as a great foreign power with which we are on friendly terms, but which expects to be treated and will treat us just like another foreign power, then these troubles might be avoided.”

Comment in the U. S. ranged from marked irritation in the New York Times to hardy philosophizing by the Chicago Tribune, which sensibly interpreted the Kipling lines as an aid to international understanding. “What America needs for its protection in foreign affairs is an antidote to the sentimentalism to which we as a people are curiously inclined and which is conspicuously expressed by citizens whose education, position and worldly means give them an influence out of proportion to their deserts.” George Washington’s Farewell Message was recalled, with its well-known warning to avoid indulging habitual hatred or habitual fondness toward any nation. Hate no man, love no man, and no man can hurt your feelings.

By comparison to the way many Englishmen feel and talk about the U. S., the Kipling “rebuke” by allegory and innuendo actually was “frank and familiar.” But Englishmen who feel and talk otherwise took comfort from the fact that, though loud, Mr. Kipling is not laureate. In his heyday he was most useful, hymning England’s dominion over palm and pine, glossing British exploitation by soul-stirring references to the White Man’s Burden, making Empire-Building a very real, brutal, glorious thing for schoolboys to dream about. As late as last spring, during the coal strike, his first cousin, Premier Stanley Baldwin,* thought it worth while to rehearse softie of the oldtime Kipling duty-booming in the Government’s emergency newssheet (TIME, May 17).

But more than the unofficial laureate of the Army he could never have been. At Laureate Tennyson’s death in 1892, Mr. Kipling was a crusty young gazetteer from Lahore, just beginning to capture a world-wide audience of greater enthusiasm than discrimination. And when a successor to harmless old Alfred Austin was needed in 1913, Poet Kipling was already an anachronism. Moreover, the one sorry “bloomer” that Laureate Austin had committed—a headlong paean to celebrate the Jameson Raid in South Africa (1896)—was directly traceable to the Kipling virus.

Britain’s official laureate is a retiring gentleman who will be 82 next month, Poet Robert Bridges,† with four university degrees after his name and not the, faintest inclination to exhort and extol his own nation overmuch, or to vilify others. Where Poet Kipling has filled the language with catch-phrases and quotations,** Poet Bridges, once a physician, has spent his years spinning out theories of prosody, steeping himself in the mellifluity of the ancients, writing critiques of John Milton and John Keats. He published a volume†† of new verses only a few weeks ago but there were no ‘excited cable dispatches over the event. After the War, as became his station, he did deliver himself of an heroic ode, Brittannia Victrix, but a delicate bit called “Cheddar Pinks” in his new book is more characteristic. Indeed, so lost in pure artistry is Laureate Bridges that he quite forgot himself in a satiric bit addressed “To Catullus,” referring to his immediate predecessors, Laureates Tennyson and Austin, as “those two pretty Laertes of Eng-land.”

* DEBITS AND CREDITS—Rudyard Kipling—Doubleday, Page ($2). For a review of the volume, see BOOKS, p. 39.

* Their mothers were two of the beautiful, gifted, famed MacDonald sisters. The other two MacDonalds married Painters Sir Edward Poynter and Sir Edmund Burne-Jones. Rudyard Kipling derived his Christian name from the lake in Staffordshire where his father and mother met for the first time, at a picnic.

† Not to be confused with Editor Robert Bridges of Scribner’s Magazine.

** “The thin red line,” ” ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” “Sun comes up like Thunder,” “Rag and a bone and a hank o’ hair,” “Oh East is East, etc.,” “The tumult and the shouting dies,” “Lest we forget,” “The flanneled fools at the wicket, or the muddied oafs at the goals,” “Who dies if England Live?” “Sisters under their skins,” “The ‘eathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,” “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” and many another.

†† NEW VERSE —Robert Bridges — Oxford llniyersitji Press ($2).