Some Musings on George Orwell’s Essay on Rudyard Kipling – and it’s Relevance to Georgette Heyer
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with
crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
That is, of course, an 1895 poem by the arch spokesman for the expansionist phase of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling.
The wisdom in it might astonish many – when I first read it, it astonished me – and that is one of the contradictions to be found in Kipling’s writing. It was written as advice to a future son, advocating macho Victorian stoicism.
It goes without saying that I think he should have addressed that poem to his surviving daughter, too: ‘Then you’ll be a woman, my daughter’…
It is tragic is that John Kipling died very young – too young to have yet been in the sort of situations Kipling describes, save, undoubtedly, where he met his death during the Battle of Loos in 1915 in World War 1. His poor eyesight had led to his being rejected from the navy and twice from the army, and he had only been recruited when his father had written to Lord Roberts requesting that he be accepted into the Irish Guards.
It might surprise readers of this blog to see me quoting an advocate of the zenith of British Imperialism, racism and macho ideology. Still, the fact that I don’t agree with any of Kipling’s ideas makes him no less a wonderful example of what George Orwell dubs a ‘good bad poet’ in my eyes, with a genius for concise expression and complete vulgarity.
Who else could have written, ‘An’ the dawn comes up like thunder’? That phrase is purely brilliant and wholly coarse.
Georges Orwell’s astute essay on Kipling can be found here
orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip
In it, he notes: –
‘Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.’
On Kipling’s defence of imperialism, Orwell observes:
‘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…’
Orwell, who, unlike many of Kipling’s most dismissive critics, had experienced such clubs and had read Kipling’s works, notes that, while furiously right wing, Kipling was not, in fact, as uncritical of authority and militarism as is sometimes assumed. While upholding the status quo and the glory of imperialist conquest, he also criticised it realistically:-
‘He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about.’
Owell notes that: –
‘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… 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.’
Orwell observes about enjoyment of the poems of Kipling something which can be applied to other famous writers who are as politically and aesthetically indefensible and as popular as he once was: –
‘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!’
This is highly astute.
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When I was re-reading this essay, it occurred to me that much of what George Orwell says of Kipling, arguably applies to Georgette Heyer, that creator of an artificial Golden Era from that most turbulent period of violent social change, the time of the Regency in the UK.
This writer, who along with Jeffrey Farnol, arguably created the ‘Regency Romance’ , is Kipling’s equal in reactionary and racist convictions. Her characters are equally cardboard cut-outs, and her working people are portrayed with a similar condescension. Her whole work is informed by snobbery and a hatred for democracy, to the point where she created a High Tory paradise out of the era of the French Revolutionary Wars.
Yet, it possesses just that ‘tawdry appeal’ that George Orwell notes in that of Kipling. Like him, and like P G Wodehouse, she has created a world that never existed, and reinterprets history from a highly static and consensus oriented perspective.
Yet, so addictive do many of her admirers of her works find them, that they will return to them again and again as comfort reading.
I would argue that many aspects of Georgette Heyer’s imaginary world are as morally insensitive and possibly, even as ‘aesthetically disgusting’ as much of Kipling, and the pleasure that can be obtained from her works is of much the same order – that ‘almost shameful pleasure’ which can be had from cheap sweets.
It may seem incongruous to compare the work of a writer of romances with this most unthinkingly macho of poets, and yet they have many similarities both in outlook, and in the nature of their appeal.
Theirs is the appeal of the security exuded by the socially conservative conformist who can write vivid prose. Both can write enticingly, gliding along the superficial surfaces of experience, and can also somehow pass off the preposterous as believable, and can make their visions into a sort of security blanket for those eager for escapism from the harsh facts of reality.
Back to that wonderfully analytical George Orwell (though, as a self consciously masculine writer, you may be sure that being forced to read Georgette Heyer would have featured as torment in his ultimate torture chamber, Room 101). Here he defines the appeal of Kipling’s verse. It may be my dyslexic brain, but it is easy for me to see how these arguments can be applied to Heyer’s prose: –
‘The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form — for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things — some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. ..however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’ sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before. ..’
That certainly explains why the poem ‘If’ appeals to me.
Why Georgette Heyer’s work has so little appeal to me- even detaching it, with infinite difficulty, from its highly conservative bias – is another question, and one to which I will be returning several times later in this blog.
