Virility of Ideas
Roger Kimball’s essay in the latest edition of New Criterion is worth the read: “Rudyard Kipling unburdened.” Virility (now a subject pretty much confined to male-enhancement spam) was in sharp decline before Kipling’s death.
When he won the Nobel Prize in 1907—the first English-language laureate, and still the youngest—the citation mentioned not only his “power of observation” and “originality of imagination” but also his “virility of ideas.” By then, in the aftermath of the Boer War, the “virility” of Kipling’s ideas was already a stumbling block; by the time the First World War was over—a war that Kipling had foretold with uncanny accuracy and in which he lost his only son, John—the nation was in wholesale retreat from Kiplingesque virility. (Today, of course, it is unimaginable that a Nobel citation—or most any other, for that matter—would commend someone for his “virility of ideas.”)
Kimball chronicles the celebrity of Kipling, his politics, and the criticisms of his poetry by contemporaries such as T.S Eliot and Oscar Wilde:
Eliot notes that one is usually called upon to defend modern poetry from the charge of excessive obscurity: with Kipling the culprit is “excessive lucidity.”
Acknowledging Kipling as the unofficial laureate of Imperial Britain, Kimball concludes that Kipling was primarily a defender of civilization.
Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, “believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.”
We could use some of that excessive lucidity today, and virility, in defense of civilization. As Kimball notes, the folks of
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.
