revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their actions are
most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several
contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel
that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as
it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any
rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they
were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at a low
technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which
had arms would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish
Fascist friends, and the western democracies and the Russians didn't give
arms to those who should have been their friends. So the Spanish Republic
perished, having' gained what no republic missed'.
Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly
did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win
is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I
believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to
fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on
the grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed
yet. The ragged, weaponless armies of the Republic held out for two and a
half years, which was undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But
whether that dislocated the Fascist timetable, or whether, on the other
hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the Nazis extra time to
get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.
7
I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my
mind. One is of the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of
the wounded militiamen singing some song with a refrain that ended--
UNA RESOLUCION,
LUCHAR HAST' AL FIN!
Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of
the war the Republican armies must have been fighting almost without
cigarettes, and with precious little food. Even when I left Spain in the
middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and
sugar almost unobtainable.
The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the
guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the
beginning of my book on the Spanish war [Homage to Catalonia], and do not
want to repeat what I said there. When I remember--oh, how vividly!--his
shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues
of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate
no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and
journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of
people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their
birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man's probable
end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin
Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the
peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed
by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U. But that does not
affect the long-term issues. This man's face, which I saw only for a
minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the
war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European
working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who
fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune
of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism,
one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme
which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman,
Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan
March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold
Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti
all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all
people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical
society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings.
Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about 'godless' Russia and the
'materialism' of the working class lies the simple intention of those
with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a
partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social
reconstruction not accompanied by a 'change of heart'. The pious ones,
from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the' change of
heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in
the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the common
one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant's or
working-man's life would contain compared with P�tain's own. The damned
impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what-not
who lecture the working-class socialist for his 'materialism'! All that
the working man demands is what these others would consider the
indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all.
Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the
knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day,
clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough
working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not
one of those who preach against 'materialism' would consider life livable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we
chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard
of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater
undertaking than the war we have just fought. I don't claim, and I don't
know who does, that that wouldn't solve anything in itself. It is merely
that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real
problems of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the
decay of the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with
while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering
in fear of the secret police. How right the working classes are in their
'materialism'! How right they are to realize that the belly comes before
the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand
that, and the long horror that we are enduring becomes at least
intelligible. All the considerations are likely to make one falter--the
siren voices of a P�tain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in
order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position
of Britain, with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the
sinister development of Soviet Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing
politics--all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the
gradually awakening common people against the lords of
property and their
hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people
like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life
which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? Shall the common man
be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps
on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or
later, but I want it to be sooner and not later--some time within the
next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand
years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war,
and perhaps of other wars yet to come.
I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name.
It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later,
when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory:
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman's!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold--Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
RUDYARD KIPLING (1942)
It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the
long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry,
but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about
Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets
of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar
position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary
generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of
that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and
Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily
explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge
that Kipling is a 'Fascist', he falls into the opposite error of
defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that
Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by
any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when
Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning
rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter
and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the
slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that
kind of conduct--on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism
in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to
have. 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.
And yet the 'Fascist' charge has to be answered, because the first clue
to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that
he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane
or the most 'progressive' person is able to be nowadays. An interesting
instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without
any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the
line from 'Recessional', 'Lesser breeds without the Law'. This line is
always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a
matter of course that the 'lesser breeds' are 'natives', and a mental
picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a
coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite
of this. The phrase 'lesser breeds' refers almost certainly to the
Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are 'without the Law'
in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The
whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a
denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas
are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law--Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word--Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Much of Kipling's phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in
the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: 'Except the
lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord
keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.' It is not a text that
makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time,
believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes
that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is
no 'Law', there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true
belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually
hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or
power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up
with the age they are living in. Kipling's outlook is pre-fascist. He
still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish
HUBRIS. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and
the secret police, or their psychological results.
But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling's
jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the
nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook
are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period
1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows
little
sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer
War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase
(even more than his poems, his solitary novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED,
gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian
of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its
shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang
out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.
Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was
political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for
this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest
victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before,
and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out
of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected,
the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand
what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic
forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not
seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial
administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.
Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a
Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the
Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not
foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into
existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for
example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber
estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to
the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the
nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both
attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move
forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that
after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who
despises the 'box-wallah' and often lives a lifetime without realizing
that the 'box-wallah' calls the tune.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does
possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and
that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for
this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing
parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham,
because they make it their business to fight against something which they
do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at
the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which
those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and
those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought
to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our
'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian
is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the
central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be
difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words
than in the phrase, 'making mock of uniforms that guard you while you
sleep'. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect
of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see
that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be
exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but
even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very
sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other
men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators,
soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is
sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a