Part 15
You may say that two facts these characters do often deal with: poverty and the sex instinct. Yes, they are sometimes poor, and have a hard time. But they have just as hard a time when they are not poor. Poverty is not the root of all evil, logically exposed as such, as it so often is in the work of George Gissing. Not one of this group of authors has ever achieved the cumulative, inevitable tragedy of _New Grub Street_, for example: a far better indictment of some of the ills of the social order than all this modern mouthing. Indeed, not one of them is able to make anything seem inevitable. If they would only let the indictment be pitiless and let it stand; let us draw our own conclusions! And as for poverty, have you noticed that even when these young men are as poor as the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy, they get over it? They never end in poverty. Yet their grievances are not disposed of when they become rich. By that time, they are worried about something else. They have the complaining habit. Rich or poor, married or unmarried, they are always, one foresees, going to complain. These authors convince one that their Utopia would be a hell on earth. They cannot reason; they cannot even dream convincingly. They are in a state of pitiful intellectual poverty--or, at least, penuriousness; for, if they have wealth, they certainly do not distribute it.
The sex instinct is, on the whole, their long suit. I do not think there is much more to be said about their treatment of it. They have not painted for us a nobler, or a more romantic, or a more passionate love between man and woman, than have some of their predecessors. I cannot see that these novelists give us anything new in the way of human information--except, perhaps, just one thing.
That one thing can best be described as a new theory--no, not a theory, a kind of Futurist presentment--of human types. There are just two possible things to do with the heroes and heroines of the new school; either to say that, as human beings, they do not exist; or to assume that they do exist and to lament the fact. The kinder, I believe, is to say that they do not exist. It is also the easier conclusion. For they are not consistent with themselves; they pass kaleidoscopically from one state of being to its opposite; as mortals, they are incalculable, and as literary creations they are unconvincing. “I don’t believe there’s any sich a person,” is the natural reply to their presented cases. The authors have not the power of assuring us of the real existence of their characters. Life is not in them. If it is not a fault of vision, then it is a fault of technique. I have spoken of the complete unreality of the Duchess of Wrexe; but she is no more unreal than Dick Lynneker, or the hero of Mr. Onions’s trilogy. You can believe in far viler and wickeder people, if you must; you can believe in Moll Flanders or Carker or Long John Silver. It is not moral but intellectual squeamishness that makes it difficult to accept them. Psychologically speaking, they are freaks in side-shows. Mr. Bennett presents us with a whole gallery of ignoble folk; but one is inclined to believe in some of them, at least. Indeed, one is inclined to believe, thanks to Mr. Bennett, that the Five Towns are almost entirely populated with such (which may be hard on the Five Towns, but that is Mr. Bennett’s look-out). The syndicate has not Mr. Bennett’s technique.
Yet this is just where the very fact of the syndicate gives one pause. Since there are so many novelists in England doing precisely the same kind of inconsistent, unconvincing, unlovable person, there may well be some genuine type that they are trying to describe. Almost never, it seems to me, do they “get it across”; but there must be people wandering about the English landscape who have given the syndicate the idea. We hardly believe that their portraits are accurate; for their portraits are not psychologically possible. But one comes to believe in prototypes. The syndicate would not all, at a given signal, have gone off their heads in exactly the same way. They must have some warrant in fact. If the prototypes of Jacob Stahl and of Dick Lynneker, of Rachel Beaminster and of the heroine of _Gray Youth_ exist, these books are, in a sense, a portent. The Five Towns might be responsible for Hilda Lessways, but the Five Towns are not responsible for the girl in _Gray Youth_. One does not feel that the syndicate gives one more than circumstantial evidence, but of that, there is an almost overwhelming amount. This is depressing. Perhaps, eventually, Mr. Compton Mackenzie will resign from the syndicate and really tell us something. At present he too is bound by their conventions. But in _Plashers Mead_, tiresome as it is with the reiterant egotism of half-fledged youth, he does “get it across.” Certain people whose opinion is worth much more than mine, tell me that Mr. Walpole has got it across in _The Dark Forest_. I must admit, in my own case, the strict limitations of western Europe: it will take more than Mr. Walpole to make Russians credible to me. He seems to me no more plausible than Dostoievsky, and far, far short of Turgenev. And, after all, I am not sure that Nijinsky is not a better expositor than either.
It has been much more difficult than I dreamed, to deal with these gentlemen at all. The work of one shifts and plays into the work of the other so maddeningly that it is hard, not only to treat of them individually, but to treat of them even as a group. You think you have a line on Mr. Walpole, and you find him melting into Mr. Beresford or Mr. Onions. Everyone knows what a miserable business a composite photograph is. No feature is really defined. These authors differentiate themselves just enough by detail of plot and setting and diction, to avoid a grand inclusive charge of plagiarism. You cannot say that one has filched a page from another, because there is no telling who began it. But I believe that, as far as style is concerned, if you inserted six consecutive pages written severally by the six of them, in any chapter of any book, no one would ever know the difference. Of course, you would have to allow for different names of characters, and some havoc might be played with continuity of plot--if there happened to be any plot in that chapter. But the style would, I am sure, stand the test. Mr. Mackenzie forces his vocabulary as the others do not (he prides himself, I fancy, particularly on the number of his metaphors for the moon); but apart from Mr. Mackenzie’s occasional exoticism, they write alike. They have the same rhythms, the same sentence-structure, the same syntactical habits. It is clever, nervous writing, but it is not the grand style. They are not memorable: they do not stand out, any one of them, or any one of their works, as a mental experience. The only adventure to be got from them is to read them all, and then, forgetting (as you inevitably do) who is who and which is which, analyze the effect of the group. It is a hazy and perplexing effect--as I fear I have too meticulously said.
For in the long run, one’s main feeling about the younger English writers is one of sheer disappointment. They have their reputation: people are always telling you that this one or that one is really important. I cannot believe that they are. As portrayers of life, they do not convince--a matter partly of muddle-headedness and partly of technique in the narrower sense. Moreover, they are dull. Mr. Bennett may not convince in the end, because in the end one becomes aware of his moral myopia; but he is not usually dull. He writes better than they do--that is what it comes to. If there were only one of them, we might put up with him; but how can we put up with six of him? There is not time. As for their attack on convention, whatever it may be, they will have to do it better to get any serious attention paid to them. You need seasoned troops to attack that fortress--or at least bigger guns. The only person who thinks that anything, no matter what, is better than the _status quo_, is the anarchist. Most of us are not anarchists; and while most of us are willing to have things improved, if necessary, at our own expense, we want some assurance that they will be improved. And if we must make blind experiments--as the reformers all want us to--let us at least know the object of the experiment. These writers do not seem to know what they would like to achieve if they could.
What they chiefly breed in one is hopelessness. If this is the best that England can do for us in the way of fiction, we must either encourage our native product, or eschew fiction and take to “serious” reading. These men are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I believe, for a few big picaresque novels: something in the mode of the _Satyricon_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Huckleberry Finn_. For I do not think that people will put up forever with being bored--especially as they are not boring us in the interests of virtue.
To be sure--though it is some time since I began this essay--I have still not read D. H. Lawrence.
THE REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF RUDYARD KIPLING
It looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a world of concrete things were to be gathered into the titular abstraction; or as if Kipling’s rightness were presently to be proved remarkable in that it is all wrong.
And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Chesterton--where is he, by the way?--I mean precisely what I have set down: Rudyard Kipling’s remarkable rightness. Right, because time has sustained him against scoffers; remarkable, because no one originally expected that particular kind of rightness from him.
This is not to be a discursive or an exhaustive discussion of Kipling’s utterances on planetary or even racial questions. I have not annotated his complete works with his “rightness” in mind. Indeed, to treat him exhaustively would be a very difficult task; for the sum of his wisdom is made up, not of a few big “works,” but of an infinite number of significant brevities. My only excuse for dealing with him at all is that I have lived a long time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and that my knowledge of him has reached what Henry James called the point of saturation. I will not pretend that I have read every word he has ever printed in the Allahabad _Pioneer_ or even in the London _Times_; but I know him very well. I belong to the generation that took its Kipling hard. My friends who are five years older or five years younger never took him quite so hard as that. They knew other gods.
Rudyard Kipling, in his later life, has suffered under two great disadvantages: his insistence on a political point of view which was unpopular, and the gradual diminishing of his flow of masterpieces. The dullest people will tell you smartly that he is “written out”; the cleverest will tell you that he was precocious, but always cheap, if not vulgar. Perhaps someone will fling “The Female of the Species” at you. This paper is not to be a catalogue of Kipling’s virtues, nor yet of his achievements. But I should like you to consider with me for a few moments that little volume of verse, _The Five Nations_. I take _The Five Nations_ purposely, for it is the Kipling of _The Five Nations_ that I mean. Not the better known Kipling of the _Barrack-Room Ballads_ or _The Seven Seas_. But supremely the Kipling I refer to.
Two things changed the Kipling we first knew: renewed residence in England, and the Boer War. Of course, he was always an imperialist; he always loved Lord Roberts--as long ago as the _Plain Tales_, when Kipling was at once younger and cleverer than anyone else. But he saw these things, then, from the angle of India; he was an imperialist only in embryo. He cared more for the British army--in red--than for the British navy; and Anzacs were not within his vision.
Then--by devious paths--he returned to England; and England held him as it held the man and the woman in “An Habitation Enforced.” The Boer War came; and _The Five Nations_ tells how he reacted. He has gone on very consistently from that day, developing, but never swerving from the path of his conviction. England did not listen to him: the Liberals of the first decade of the twentieth-century did not propose to listen to anyone who wrote short stories for the sake of the plot, and verse for the sake of a Tory idea. They were much too serious in Great Britain, in those days, to hearken to Rudyard Kipling. And, so far as I know, neither Lord Roberts nor Kipling ever said, “I told you so.”
Yet listen to “The Lesson”:
It was our fault, and our very great fault--and now we must turn it to use; We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse!
How one has heard that rough-and-ready poem reviled--in the early nineteen-hundreds! Even now one recalls abusive editorials in American newspapers about the poem which mentioned
... the flannelled fools at the wicket ... the muddied oafs at the goals.
“Oblige me by referring to the files.” I remember those taunting comments very well. Not an editor but was so sane that he could make his little mock of Kipling as an extremist. But if you will get out _The Five Nations_ and read “The Islanders” through soberly, you will curse those editors for fools. “Preparedness” is so familiar to us all now, not only as a word but even as an idea, that we can hardly believe intelligent people were calling a man names fifteen years ago for stating axioms. We are always thinking the days of Galileo are over. But they are not; they never will be; the human race instinctively and always has it in for Galileo. Kipling could get an audience for tales and ballads and jungle-books; but the moment he tried to speak nationally, he could not get an audience. Even now, they would rather read H. G. Wells.
Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid? For the low red glare to southward when the raided coast towns burn? “(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)”
“Yes, thanks,” came the sarcastic answer from all the wise British millions; “we jolly well _do_ wait.” And they “jolly well” did; and a dozen years later it all came true, and their sarcasm was put where it belonged. That is, if they had the sense to see it.
Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back from your shore? Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more?
Well: it very nearly came to that. But I suggest that you re-read “The Islanders.” I cannot quote any more. Every word of “The Islanders” is true to make one weep; and it was the storm-centre of _The Five Nations_. How many thousands of people felt that, in writing “The Islanders,” Kipling had destroyed his own reputation! Doubtless the Germans would have felt the same way about “The Parting of the Columns”; though, if they had read it and had taken the trouble to believe it, it would have saved them a good many millions spent in propaganda. But the Germans were quite as stupid as the British public.
There has been more than one reason, as I have said, for the waning of Kipling’s popularity. In the first place, he does not give us so many good stories as once, in the full flush of his genius, he did. That is a perfectly legitimate reason. Then, too, he has had an unlucky trick of seeing ahead. When “The Edge of the Evening” was first published (in 1913), it passed for hysteria. Only “fools” believed in German spies--in 1913. But there are other causes more insidious and more potent. He stands, not only politically for the highest type of Toryism--at least, one fancies he does--but for a lot of other outdated things: pious attachment to the soil; romantic love, enduring, clean outside and in; the beauty of childhood and the bitterer beauty of parenthood; patriotism unshrinking and unashamed; loathing of the mob and the mob’s madness and meanness; the continuity of the English political tradition, from Magna Charta down; religious toleration; scrupulous perception of differences between race and race, type and type; the White Man’s Burden. And I doubt if, even now, he is an ardent believer in Woman Suffrage.
Almost any one of these attitudes would have been enough to damn him with the British democracy. One quite understands that _The Five Nations_ would not have been Mr. Lloyd George’s _vade mecum_. One perfectly sees why Mr. Asquith, following the usual tradition, passed Kipling over for the Laureateship in favor of a gentleman whom few people had heard of and no one could read. (“The Widow at Windsor” probably shocked Balliol as much as it shocked Queen Victoria.) No Kipling-lover, for that matter, particularly wanted Kipling to be Laureate. One even realizes--though this time with amusement--why he is _persona non grata_ to the “brittle intellectuals who crack beneath a strain.” The intellectuals say that he is good at times for children, and often for the vulgar, and take their refuge in not taking him seriously. The intellectuals have been Russianizing themselves, in these last years; and Kipling’s laughter at that phenomenon must have been unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel him remarkably right, it would prove them so remarkably wrong.
As I say, one quite understands why the gorged and flattered workingman, the demagogue, and the “brittle intellectual” have not read him or listened to him; but it is none the less a mystery that some one should not have listened to him and seen that he was eminently sane on many vital points. There is, after all, no one living in England who writes so well, who is so nearly master of the English language. But one has to conclude that his audience has made up its mind only to be amused during a train-journey.
There was a merry little international correspondence in 1914 or 1915 over “The Truce of the Bear.” What did Mr. Kipling say _now_? It was all a great joke on him. People also raked up “The Man Who Was.” I believe Mr. Kipling never replied to his humorous questioners, or, if he did, it was to the effect that a man, like a government, might change his foreign policy with changing conditions. Still, everybody was very much amused, and for some reason (it can have been only his unpopularity) very much pleased. Perhaps they had not forgiven some of the other poems in _The Five Nations_, and looked to discredit Kipling by pitching on “The Truce of the Bear” as they had once pitched on “The Islanders.” With Russia driving back the Teutons on the eastern front, I do not see that Kipling, as a patriot, could proceed to defend his ancient position very loudly. But I do not remember--here I speak under correction, for his war-poems are very elusive--that even since 1914 he has written of Russia as he has written of France. And I have often wondered if, in the last months, he has not taken a very private comfort in his own refrain of years ago:
Make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks like a man.
He may at least feel that he was essentially right about Russia, if incidentally wrong. If I am not mistaken, “The Truce of the Bear” was written on the occasion of the invitation to the first Hague Conference. We took it that it was the Tsar whom England was to mistrust. Very likely. But I cannot help believing that Kipling had a private suspicion that the Hague Conference was all tommy-rot. Which, obviously, it was, pragmatically judged. The sheer decency and competence of certain Russian generals did save the world in the first year of the war: let us never forget it. There never was a Russian steam-roller, but the Germans thought there was going to be one. Let us, as I say, never forget it. But for the last year, the Russian people has been behaving allegorically in the sense of the poem.
‘When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and near; When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute guise....
When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands in prayer, That is the time of peril--the time of the Truce of the Bear!’
Eyeless, noseless, and lipless, asking a dole at the door, Matun, the old blind beggar, he tells it o’er and o’er; Fumbling and feeling the rifles, warming his hands at the flame, Hearing our careless white men talk of the morrow’s game;
Over and over the story, ending as he began:-- ‘_There is no truce with Adam-zad--the bear that looks like a man!_’
I should be particularly sorry to say anything that German propagandists would like to have said. It is perfectly impossible for the average person to know what is the proper and what the improper attitude to take to Russia at the moment. Even those in high places might be forgiven for being perplexed. What the average person perceives is that the Russians are behaving very much, and very vividly, like “the bear that looks like a man.” Certainly they stood up at Brest-Litovsk “in wavering, man-brute guise.”
The only point of all which is that the folk who made so merry, a few years ago, over “The Truce of the Bear” had better find another joke. One does not base the rightness of Kipling on his merely having been a little less ridiculous, in a given instance, than his contemporaries wanted to think him.
I wonder, too--still as I turn the pages of _The Five Nations_--if there is not a tonic value to-day in the poem called “Sussex.”
God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove Beloved over all; That, as He watched Creation’s birth, So we, in godlike mood, May of our love create our earth And see that it is good.
So one shall Baltic pines content, As one some Surrey glade, Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament Before Levuka’s trade. Each to his choice, and I rejoice The lot has fallen to me In a fair ground--in a fair ground-- Yea, Sussex by the sea!
So to the land our hearts we give Till the sure magic strike, And Memory, Use, and Love make live Us and our fields alike-- That deeper than our speech and thought, Beyond our reason’s sway, Clay of the pit whence we were wrought Yearns to its fellow-clay.
The windy internationalism to which we are so often invited, nowadays, to listen, would deny it--might even call it “_chauvinisme de clocher_.” The reply is that people actually do feel as Kipling says they do. He has always tended to serve (in his own phrase) the God of Things as They Are. Granted, for the sake of argument, that it would be good for you to love all men and all countries alike, the fact remains that you do not. If that is your duty, most decent people do not perform their duty; their fathers did not, and their children will not. Even the most radical internationalists wish to substitute class-consciousness for patriotism--on the whole, a less enlightened chauvinism than the other. And, judging from the present war, they have not been able to pull even that off.