No More Learning

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
modem 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 prefascist. 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 modem gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to
the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftennath 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 Anny, 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 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 nonnal 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 bom 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
flagwaver, 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 modem 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 anny 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 anny 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 people 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
anny 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*, 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-tenn volunteer anny 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 anny, 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.


* 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*? 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 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.


* 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 have any genuine
popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts.
Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can
sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something
else. One can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses,
certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers
make up, including the words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a
civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort
of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at
playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself
an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same
audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance? Good bad
poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right
atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a
great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ in one of his broadcast speeches. I listened
to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and
I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But



not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better
than this.

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and probably still is
popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the
reading public, beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout singsongs, limp-leather
editions, pokerwork and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music halls.
Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worth while to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which
others share but are not always honest enough to mention. 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. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the
world is young, lad’ is that, 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. Such poems are a kind of rhyming
proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious.
One example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein, Slipping the spur from the booted heel; Tenderest
voices cry ‘Turn again! ’ Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel: Down to Gehenna or up to
the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a
thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels
the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting
for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested — his sense
of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it
happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party,



Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call
themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He
identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer
this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving
Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In
such and such circumstances, what would you DO? ’, whereas the opposition is not
obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and
pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.
Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be
justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as
Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not
financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling
class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he
gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and
responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’,
has no wish to EPATER LES BOURGEOIS. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we
live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less
shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as
Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND
SUPERMAN.

MARK TWAIN— THE LICENSED JESTER (1943)

Mark Twain has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library, but only with TOM
SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN, already fairly well known under the guise of
‘children’s books’ (which they are not). His best and most characteristic books,
ROUGHING IT, THE INNOCENTS AT HOME, and even LIFE ON THE
MISSISSIPPI, are little remembered in this country, though no doubt in America the
patriotism which is everywhere mixed up with literary judgement keeps them alive.

Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books, ranging from a namby-
pamby ‘life’ of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so obscene that it has never been publicly
printed, all that is best in his work centres about the Mississippi river and the wild mining



towns of the West. Bom in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough
to own one or perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in the golden
age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and
opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had
never been before and may not be again for centuries. LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and
the two other books that I have mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions
and social history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme which could
perhaps be put into these words: ‘This is how human beings behave when they are not
frightened of the sack. ’ In writing these books Mark Twain is not consciously writing a
hymn to liberty. Primarily he is interested in ‘character’, in the fantastic, almost lunatic
variations which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are
both removed from it. The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and bandits whom he
describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are as different from modern men,
and from one another, as the gargoyles of a medieval cathedral. They could develop their
strange and sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure.
The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices, and land
was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye
and moved further west; and moreover, money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in
circulation was worth a shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen, and they
were not especially courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be
terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put down. They were not even
free from class distinctions. The desperado who stalked through the streets of the mining
settlement, with a Derringer pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses to his
credit, was dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat, described himself firmly as a
‘gentleman’ and was meticulous about table manners. But at least it was NOT the case
that a man’s destiny was settled from his birth. The Tog cabin to White House’ myth was
true while the free land lasted. In a way, it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the
Bastille, and when one reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that
their effort was wasted.

However, Mark Twain aimed at being something more than a chronicler of the
Mississippi and the Gold Rush. In his own day he was famous all over the world as a
humorist and comic lecturer. In New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Melbourne and
Calcutta vast audiences rocked with laughter over jokes which have now, almost without



exception, ceased to be funny. (It is worth noticing that Mark Twain’s lectures were only
a success with Anglo-Saxon and German audiences. The relatively grown-up Latin
races — whose own humour, he complained, always centred round sex and politics —
never cared for them. ) But in addition, Mark Twain had some pretensions to being a
social critic, even a species of philosopher. He had in him an iconoclastic, even
revolutionary vein which he obviously wanted to follow up and yet somehow never did
follow up. He might have been a destroyer of humbugs and a prophet of democracy more
valuable than Whitman, because healthier and more humorous. Instead he became that
dubious thing a ‘public figure’, flattered by passport officials and entertained by royalty,
and his career reflects the deterioration in American life that set in after the Civil War.

Mark Twain has sometimes been compared with his contemporary, Anatole France. This
comparison is not so pointless as it may sound. Both men were the spiritual children of
Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by
gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs
mostly delusions. Both were bigoted atheists and convinced (in Mark Twain’s case this
was Darwin’s doing) of the unbearable cruelty of the universe. But there the resemblance
ends. Not only is the Frenchman enormously more learned, more civilized, more alive
aesthetically, but he is also more courageous. He does attack the things he disbelieves in;
he does not, like Mark swain, always take refuge behind the amiable mask of the ‘public
figure’ and the licensed jester. He is ready to risk the anger of the Church and to take the
unpopular side in a controversy — in the Dreyfus case, for example. Mark Twain, except
perhaps in one short essay ‘What is Man? ’, never attacks established beliefs in a way that
is likely to get him into trouble. Nor could he ever wean himself from the notion, which
is perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue are the same thing.

In LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI there is a queer little illustration of the central weakness
of Mark Twain’s character. In the earlier part of this mainly autobiographical book the
dates have been altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as
though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young
man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book describes his
exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain
started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then
changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable



in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough,
however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this
tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to believe that might must be right,
is apparent throughout his career. In ROUGHING IT there is an interesting account of a
bandit named Slade, who, among countless other outrages, had committed twenty-eight
murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting scoundrel. Slade
was successful; therefore he was admirable. This outlook, no less common today, is
summed up in the significant American expression ‘to MAKE GOOD’.

In the money-grubbing period that followed the Civil War it was hard for anyone of Mark
Twain’s temperament to refuse to be a success. The old, simple, stump-whittling,
tobacco-chewing democracy which Abraham Lincoln typified was perishing: it was now
the age of cheap immigrant labour and the growth of Big Business. Mark Twain mildly
satirized his contemporaries in The GILDED AGE, but he also gave himself up to the
prevailing fever, and made and lost vast sums of money. He even for a period of years
deserted writing for business; and he squandered his time on buffooneries, not merely
lecture tours and public banquets, but, for instance, the writing of a book like A
CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT, which is a deliberate
flattery of all that is worst and most vulgar in American life. The man who might have
been a kind of rustic Voltaire became the world’s leading after-dinner speaker, charming
alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen feel themselves public
benefactors.

It is usual to blame Mark Twain’s wife for his failure to write the books he ought to have
written, and it is evident that she did tyrannize over him pretty thoroughly. Each morning,
Mark Twain would show her what he had written the day before, and Mrs. Clemens
(Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens) would go over it with the blue pencil,
cutting out everything that she thought unsuitable. She seems to have been a drastic blue-
penciller even by nineteenth-century standards. There is an account in W. D. Howells’s
book MY MARK TWAIN of the fuss that occurred over a terrible expletive that had
crept into HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Mark Twain appealed to Howells, who admitted that
it was ‘just what Huck would have said’, but agreed with Mrs. Clemens that the word
could not possibly be printed. The word was ‘hell’. Nevertheless, no writer is really the
intellectual slave of his wife. Mrs. Clemens could not have stopped Mark Twain writing



any book he really wanted to write. She may have made his surrender to society easier,
but the surrender happened because of that flaw in his own nature, his inability to despise
success.

Several of Mark Twain’s books are bound to survive, because they contain invaluable
social history. His life covered the great period of American expansion. When he was a
child it was a normal day’s outing to go with a picnic lunch and watch the hanging of an
Abolitionist, and when he died the aeroplane was ceasing to be a novelty. This period in
America produced relatively little literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture of a
Mississippi paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains, would be much dimmer
than it is. But most people who have studied his work have come away with a feeling that
he might have done something more. He gives all the while a strange impression of being
about to say something and then funking it, so that LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI and the
rest of them seem to be haunted by the ghost of a greater and much more coherent book.
Significantly, he starts his autobiography by remarking that a man’s inner life is
indescribable. We do not know what he would have said — it is just possible that the
unprocurable pamphlet, 1601 , would supply a clue but we may guess that it would have
wrecked his reputation and reduced his income to reasonable proportions.


POETRY AND THE MICROPHONE (1943)

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary
programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse by
contemporary and near-contemporary English writers — for example, Eliot, Herbert Read,
Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund
Blunden, D. H. Lawrence. Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the
people who wrote them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote out-
flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need to explain here, but I
should add that the fact that we were broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our
technique to some extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed
at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by
anything that could be described as British propaganda. It was known in advance that we



could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an
excuse to be more “highbrow” than is generally possible on the air.

If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language but don’t share your
cultural background, a certain amount of comment and explanation is unavoidable, and
the formula we usually followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary
magazine. The editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their office, discussing what to
put into the next number. Somebody suggested one poem, someone else suggested
another, there was a short discussion and then came the poem itself, read in a different
voice, preferably the author’s own. This poem naturally called up another, and so the
programme continued, usually with at least half a minute of discussion between any two
items. For a half-hour programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A
programme of this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could be given a
certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a single central theme. For
example, one number of our imaginary magazine was devoted to the subject of war. It
included two poems by Edmund Blunden, Auden’s “September 1941 “, extracts from a
long poem by G. S. Fraser (“A Letter to Anne Ridler”), Byron’s “Isles of Greece” and an
extract from T. E. Lawrence’s REVOLT IN THE DESERT. These half-dozen items, with
the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered reasonably well the possible
attitudes towards war. The poems and the prose extract took about twenty minutes to
broadcast, the arguments about eight minutes.

This formula may seem slightly ridiculous and also rather patronising, but its advantage
is that the element of mere instruction, the textbook motif, which is quite unavoidable if
one is going to broadcast serious and sometimes “difficult” verse, becomes a lot less
forbidding when it appears as an informal discussion. The various speakers can
ostensibly say to one another what they are in reality saying to the audience. Also, by
such an approach you at least give a poem a context, which is just what poetry lacks from
the average man’s point of view. But of course there are other methods. One which we
frequently used was to set a poem in music. It is announced that in a few minutes’ time
such and such a poem will be broadcast; then the music plays for perhaps a minute, then
fades out into the poem, which follows without any title or announcement, then the music
is faded again and plays up for another minute or two — the whole thing taking perhaps
five minutes. It is necessary to choose appropriate music, but needless to say, the real



purpose of the music is to insulate the poem from the rest of the programme. By this
method you can have, say, a Shakespeare sonnet within three minutes of a news bulletin
without, at any rate to my ear, any gross incongruity.

These programmes that I have been speaking of were of no great value in themselves, but
I have mentioned them because of the ideas they aroused in myself and some others
about the possibilities of the radio as a means of popularising poetry. I was early struck
by the fact that the broadcasting of a poem by the person who wrote it does not merely
produce an effect upon the audience, if any, but also on the poet himself. One must
remember that extremely little in the way of broadcasting poetry has been done in
England, and that many people who write verse have never even considered the idea of
reading it aloud. By being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all
regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise
attainable in our time and country. It is a commonplace that in modem times — the last
two hundred years, say — poetry has come to have less and less connection either with
music or with the spoken word. It needs print in order to exist at all, and it is no more
expected that a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even to declaim than it is expected
that an architect will know how to plaster a ceiling. Lyrical and rhetorical poetry have
almost ceased to be written, and a hostility towards poetry on the part of the common
man has come to be taken for granted in any country where everyone can read. And
where such a breach exists it is always inclined to widen, because the concept of poetry
as primarily something printed, and something intelligible only to a minority, encourages
obscurity and “cleverness”. How many people do not feel quasi-instinctively that there
must be something wrong with any poem whose meaning can be taken in at a single
glance? It seems unlikely that these tendencies will be checked unless it again becomes
nonnal to read verse aloud, and it is difficult to see how this can be brought about except
by using the radio as a medium. But the special advantage of the radio, its power to select
the right audience, and to do away with stage-fright and embarrassment, ought here to be
noticed.

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of ONE. Millions may
be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or
ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is
reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone



who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably
sympathetic, the audience HAS NO POWER OVER YOU. It is just here that a broadcast
differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking
knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always
obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in
practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the
stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known
as “personality”. If you don’t do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid
embarrassment. That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will
always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who
can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same
difficulty — the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one — that makes it impossible
to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do
not exist. The poet FEELS that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something,
and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with
a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The
element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the
only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse
aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man:
also he has been led to think of his work as SOUND rather than as a pattern on paper. By
that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already
exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

However, what is happening at the other end cannot be disregarded. It will be seen that I
have been speaking as though the whole subject of poetry were embarrassing, almost
indecent, as though popularising poetry were essentially a strategic manoeuvre, like
getting a dose of medicine down a child’s throat or establishing tolerance for a persecuted
sect. But unfortunately that or something like it is the case. There can be no doubt that in
our civilisation poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in
which the average man refuses to discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly
exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word “poetry”
would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. And as I have pointed out, a breach of
this kind tends to widen simply because of its existence, the common man becoming
more and more anti-poetry, the poet more and more arrogant and unintelligible, until the



divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature,
although in fact it belongs only to our own time and to a comparatively small area of the
earth. We live in an age in which the average human being in the highly civilised
countries is aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. This state of affairs is generally
looked upon as being incurable by any CONSCIOUS act, and on the other hand is
expected to right itself of its own accord as soon as society takes a comelier shape. With
slight variations the Marxist, the Anarchist and the religious believer will all tell you this,
and in broad terms it is undoubtedly true. The ugliness amid which we live has spiritual
and economic causes and is not to be explained by the mere going-astray of tradition at
some point or other. But it does not follow that no improvement is possible within our
present framework, nor that an aesthetic improvement is not a necessary part of the
general redemption of society. It is worth stopping to wonder, therefore, whether it would
not be possible even now to rescue poetry from its special position as the most hated of
the arts and win for it at least the same degree of toleration as exists for music. But one
has to start by asking, in what way and to what extent is poetry unpopular?

On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as it could be. But on second
thoughts, this has to be qualified in a rather peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an
appreciable amount of folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc) which is universally known and
quoted and forms part of the background of everyone’s mind. There is also a handful of
ancient songs and ballads which have never gone out of favour. In addition there is the
popularity, or at least the toleration, of “good bad” poetry, generally of a patriotic or
sentimental kind. This might seem beside the point if it were not that “good bad” poetry
has all the characteristics which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike true poetry. It
is in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and unusual language — all this to a very
marked degree, for it is almost axiomatic that bad poetry is more “poetical” than good
poetry. Yet if not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just before writing
this I have been listening to a couple of BBC comedians doing their usual turn before the
9 o’clock news. In the last three minutes one of the two comedians suddenly announces
that he “wants to be serious for a moment” and proceeds to recite a piece of patriotic
balderdash entitled “A Fine Old English Gentleman”, in praise of His Majesty the King.
Now, what is the reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse into the worst sort of
rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently negative, or there would be a sufficient
volume of indignant letters to stop the BBC doing this kind of thing. One must conclude



that though the big public is hostile to POETRY, it is not strongly hostile to VERSE.
After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes, neither songs nor dirty
limericks could be popular. Poetry is disliked because it is associated with untelligibility,
intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name
creates in advance the same sort of bad impression as the word “God”, or a parson’s dog-
collar. To a certain extent, popularising poetry is a question of breaking down an acquired
inhibition. It is a question of getting people to listen instead of uttering a mechanical
raspberry. If true poetry could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it
seem NORMAL, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to presumably seemed
normal, then part of the prejudice against it might be overcome.

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularised again without some deliberate
effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge.
T. S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back
into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might
have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been
completely explored. “Sweeney Agonistes” was perhaps written with some such idea in
mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a
revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its
technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The reason why
such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is that few people are able to imagine
the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the
stuff that does actually dribble from the loud-speakers of the world, and conclude that it
is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed the very word “wireless” calls
up a picture either of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three
of our aircraft have failed to return. Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped
trousers. Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the
use it is actually put to.