Fifty Orwell Essays

young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine

  surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic

  led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The

  nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his

  idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that

  they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is

  instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of

  India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have

  achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a

  single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say,

  E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling's is the only

  literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and

  he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to

  exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did

  not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private

  sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling's contemporaries

  did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew

  nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of

  view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with 'the

  wrong' people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly

  suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is

  traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early.

  With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist

  or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he

  was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is

  true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After

  his early days, if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says

  that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views in a

  popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that 'unpopular' means

  unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling's

  'message' was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has

  never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were

  anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic.

  Kipling's official admirers are and were the 'service' middle class, the

  people who read BLACKWOOD'S. In the stupid early years of this century,

  the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet

  and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his

  more sententious poems, such as 'If', were given almost biblical status.

  But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention,

  any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could

  not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the

  inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a

  rule it is the British working class that he is attacking, but not

  always. That phrase about 'the flannelled fools at the wicket and the

  muddied oafs at the goal' sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is

  aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of

  the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so

  far as their subject-matter goes. 'Stellenbosch', which must have been

  written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was

  saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.

  Kipling's romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have

  mattered if he could have held them without having the class-prejudices

  which at that time went with them. If one examines his best and most

  representative work, his soldier poems, especially BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS,

  one notices that what more than anything else spoils them is an

  underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the army officer,

  especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the

  private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is

  always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but

  with all the aitches and final "g's" carefully omitted. Very often the

  result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social.

  And this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve

  Kipling's poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply

  going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard

  speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly

  lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the

  other about a wedding):

  So it's knock out your pipes and follow me!

  And it's finish up your swipes and follow me!

  Oh, hark to the big drum calling,

  Follow me--follow me home!

  and again:

  Cheer for the Sergeant's wedding--Give them one cheer more!

  Grey gun-horses in the lando,

  And a rogue is married to a whore!

  Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known

  better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines of the first of

  these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought to have overriden

  his impulse to make fun of a working-man's accent. In the ancient ballads

  the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible to

  Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a

  piece of poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled--for 'follow me

  'ome' is much uglier than 'follow me home'. But even where it makes no

  difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is

  irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the

  printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary

  alterations when they quote him.

  Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading

  BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for

  him? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier capable of reading a book of

  verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost unconscious of the

  class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only

  that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic,

  feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the

  Queen. Of course that is partly true, or battles could not be fought, but

  'What have I done for thee, England, my England?' is essentially a

  middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately

  with 'What has England done for me?' In so far as Kipling grasps this, he

  simply sets it down to 'the intense selfishness of the lower classes'

  (his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of 'loyal'

  Indians he carries the 'Salaam, sahib' motif to sometimes disgusting

  lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common

  soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the

  'liberals' of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected,

  meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the pe
ople whose incomes

  he safeguards. 'I came to realize', he says in his posthumous memoirs,

  'the bare horrors of the private's life, and the unnecessary torments he

  endured'. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but

  not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football

  match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had

  never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that

  bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary

  soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in

  his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other

  troops, frequently run away:

  I 'eard the knives be'ind me, but I dursn't face my man,

  Nor I don't know where I went to, 'cause I didn't stop to see,

  Till I 'eard a beggar squealin' out for quarter as 'e ran,

  An' I thought I knew the voice an'--it was me!

  Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the

  debunking war books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:

  An' now the hugly bullets come peckin' through the dust,

  An' no one wants to face 'em, but every beggar must;

  So, like a man in irons, which isn't glad to go,

  They moves 'em off by companies uncommon stiff an' slow.

  Compare this with:

  Forward the Light Brigade!

  Was there a man dismayed?

  No! though the soldier knew

  Someone had blundered.

  If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were

  hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic

  strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least he knows that men

  ordered to attack impossible objectives ARE dismayed, and also that

  fourpence a day is not a generous pension.

  How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the

  long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must say

  of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India,

  that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we

  have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that one could

  otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable regimental

  histories. Perhaps his picture of army life seems fuller and more

  accurate than it is because any middle-class English person is likely to

  know enough to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on

  Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to

  publish [Note, below], I was struck by the number of things that are

  boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American.

  But from the body of Kipling's early work there does seem to emerge a vivid

  and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army--the

  sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the

  pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the

  floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats

  and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the

  bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the

  cholera-stricken camps, the 'native' concubines, the ultimate death in

  the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic

  music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola's gorier

  passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea

  of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On about the same level they

  will be able to learn something of British India in the days when

  motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error to imagine

  that we might have had better books on these subjects if, for example,

  George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling's

  opportunities. That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was

  not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like

  WAR AND PEACE, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as

  Sebastopol or THE COSSACKS, not because the talent was necessarily

  lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such

  books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a

  great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man

  of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire

  was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers

  find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the

  centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of

  what one might call colonial literature. It took a very improbable

  combination of circumstances to produce Kipling's gaudy tableau, in which

  Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm

  trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was

  that Kipling himself was only half civilized.

  [Note: Published in a volume of Collected Essays, THE WOUND AND THE

  BOW. Author's footnote 1945]

  Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to

  the language. The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use

  without remembering their origin do not always come from writers we

  admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters

  referring to the Russian soldiers as 'robots', thus unconsciously

  borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if

  they could have laid hands on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined

  by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or

  overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name. It

  will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:

  East is East, and West is West.

  The white man's burden.

  What do they know of England who only England know?

  The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

  Somewhere East of Suez.

  Paying the Dane-geld.

  There are various others, including some that have outlived their context

  by many years. The phrase 'killing Kruger with your mouth', for instance,

  was current till very recently. It is also possible that it was Kipling

  who first let loose the use of the word 'Huns' for Germans; at any rate

  he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the

  phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them

  phrases which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be 'For I'm to be

  Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May'), but which one is

  bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could exceed the contempt

  of the NEW STATESMAN, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times

  during the Munich period did the NEW STATESMAN find itself quoting that

  phrase about paying the Dane-geld? [Note, below.] The fact is that Kipling,

  apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap

  picturesqueness into a few words ('palm and pine'--'east of Suez'--'the

  road to Mandalay'), is generally talking about things that are of urgent

  interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and

&nb
sp; decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence

  from him. 'White man's burden' instantly conjures up a real problem, even

  if one feels that it ought to be altered to 'black man's burden'. One may

  disagree to the middle of one's bones with the political attitude implied

  in 'The Islanders', but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude.

  Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This

  raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer.

  [Note: On the first page of his recent book, ADAM AND EVE, Mr. Middleton

  Murry quotes the well-known lines:

  There are nine and sixty ways

  Of constructing tribal lays,

  And every single one of them is right.

  He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known

  as a 'Freudian error.' A civilized person would prefer not to quote

  Kipling--i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had

  expressed his thought for him.

  (Author's footnote 1945.)]

  Mr. Eliot describes Kipling's metrical work as 'verse' and not 'poetry',

  but adds that it is 'GREAT verse', and further qualifies this by saying

  that a writer can only be described as a 'great verse-writer' if there is

  some of his work 'of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry'.

  Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which

  case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name.

  The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling's work

  seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able

  to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to

  start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling's

  verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one

  gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite 'The Pigtail

  of Wu Fang Fu' with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is

  much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what

  poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like 'Gunga

  Din' or 'Danny Deever', Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the

  taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life.

  But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced

  by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is

  merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares

  for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

  For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,

  'Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!'

  and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as 'Felix Randal' or

  'When icicles hang by the wall' are poetry. One can, perhaps, place

  Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words 'verse' and

  'poetry', if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet

  what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of

  work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to

  be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age

  we live in.

  There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should

  say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems--I am deliberately

  choosing diverse ones--are 'The Bridge of Sighs', 'When all the world is

  young, lad', 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', Bret Harte's 'Dickens in

  Camp', 'The Burial of Sir John Moore', 'Jenny Kissed Me', 'Keith of

  Ravelston', 'Casabianca'. All of these reek of sentimentality, and

  yet--not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are

  capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is

  wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad

  poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is

  usually too well known to be worth reprinting.

  It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, 'good' poetry can