King of English

Mr. Kipling reveals life by flashes of vulgarity--Oscar Wilde.

I don't think the reading of Kipling ever changed anybody's life very much-- George Bernard Shaw.

Then there was Rudyard Kipling, with the gorgeous East and the British Empire rattling like loose change in his trouser pockets.--E. F. Benson.

IF is probably the most popular poem now in the world--John Masefield.

It isn't what you write but where, and when, and how.

How all too high we hold

The noise which men call fame,

The dross that men call gold! --Rudyard Kipling.

In Sussex the trim butler of a manor house surrounded by a moat enclosing one of England's fairest gardens, announced to Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling that the car was at the door. The baldheaded, sturdy little Master stood up in his square-toed boots. His brown eyes, weak but keen, twinkled behind the enormous lenses he had worn since precocious childhood. Into their waiting Rolls-Royce got Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling and were driven up to London, to Brown's Hotel.

At Brown's in aristocratic dinginess are wont to stop exiled Kings. In a sense Rudyard Kipling registered at Brown's as an exiled King of English--exiled by a raw post-War generation for which his English no longer .has the power and magic, the humility and pride and inspiration it still has for riper men. Some of these oldsters hold that the copy of If they keep under the glass top of their desks has profoundly changed their lives. Some believe that reading the works of Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw or Poet Laureate John Masefield has never changed anybody's life very much. Their devotion to their King of English is as undying and as unquestioning as devotion to the King of England. It was tremendous, throat-tightening news last week that suddenly oxygen should be hissing from tanks to aid the breathing of Rudyard Kipling and of George Windsor who were born the same year (see p. 22).

Mr. Kipling was stricken most abruptly at Brown's. He had just celebrated his 70th birthday in Sussex, seemingly in full vigor for a man of his years, and he was off to the French Riviera to escape England's noxious winter. At Brown's the head porter is H. Nice, of whom some years ago Rudyard Kipling said: "If that admirable man who is head porter at Brown's Hotel had been in charge of European diplomacy in 1914 there would have been no War." H. Nice proffered a copy of The Absent Minded Beggar and Author Kipling signed it readily with a jest: "You take that home and lock it away until I am dead. It will be worth a lot of money then."

Few hours later a pain like the end of the world struck Mr. Kipling in the midriff. Frantic Mrs. Kipling had him rushed to huge Middlesex Hospital. There an operation for perforated gastric ulcer was performed by Dr. Alfred Edward Webb-Johnson. When the patient faltered, both Mrs. Kipling and Daughter Elsie (Mrs. George Bambridge) offered their blood for a transfusion, but Dr. Webb-Johnson chose a professional blood donor. Mother & Daughter took up an exhausting vigil of 48 hours, with Mrs. Kipling often on her knees praying at the bedside. At two minutes past midnight Dr. Webb-Johnson warned them softly that Rudyard Kipling was in extremis. His wife clutched his hand; he stirred faintly. Then for eight long minutes he lived, until Dr. Webb-Johnson with a silent, sympathetic nod signified Death.

Although George V had made frequent inquiries from his bed at Sandringham as to Kipling, His Majesty's condition was so grave that from him was kept the news of Kipling's death. Read a telegram to Mrs. Kipling: THE KING AND I WERE GRIEVED TO HEAR OF THE DEATH THIS MORNING OF MR KIPLING WE SHALL MOURN HIM NOT ONLY AS A GREAT NATIONAL POET BUT AS A PERSONAL FRIEND OF MANY YEARS PLEASE ACCEPT OUR HEARTFELT SYMPATHY MARY R.

"Cynic DeviL" In today's best critical opinion, British Imperialism, of which Rudyard Kipling was the greatest poet, can be considered a transitory phase and his immortal fame is likely to rest on such children's classics as the Just So Stories and the Jungle Books. A realization that this may be so saddened and embittered Rudyard Kipling. He was further embittered by the death of his son John in the Irish Guards while gallantly fighting Germans who, to Father Kipling, were forevermore savage and unspeakable "Boches." For no particular reason books by him had usually borne the imprint of a swastika. The moment Adolf Hitler came to power Mr. Kipling ordered the swastika removed from all his volumes. As recently as August 1935, he wrote: "The Boche has learned nothing from the last War, and he has suffered comparatively little from it." This hate of Germany arched like a searing blowtorch rainbow over Kipling's last years.

Of the U. S. from which he had received $1,750,000 in royalties, honest Rudyard expressed this conviction: "The Americans have got the gold of the world but we have saved our souls!" Also in a forthright verse on the average U. S. citizen he flayed:

The cynic devil in his blood

That bids him mock his hurrying

soul;

That bids him flout the Law he makes, That bids him make the Law he

flouts!

At the death of Rudyard Kipling over 100,000 of his books per year were being bought by U. S. citizens and he was the sole King of English whose latest poem was sure to be cabled in full across the Atlantic, with U. S. news services gladly paying the charges. Syndicated in 1935 from Florida to Alaska was what is probably Kipling's worst poem, The King and the Sea, composed in labored exaltation of the Silver Jubilee of George V (TIME, July 29). Thirty-eight years previously, upon the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, honest Rudyard seized the occasion to rebuke British Imperialism, which then seemed to him too exuberant. Begged his Recessional:

For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

In his great honesty Rudyard Kipling set to stirring lines what is today the situation most vexing to Benito Mussolini:

Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor For 'alf o' Creation she owns! We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword an' the flame And we've salted it down with our bones (Poor beggars!--It's blue with our bones!).

Road to Mandalay. Both grandfathers of Rudyard Kipling were uncompromising Wesleyan ministers, monoliths of character and force. In the grandson their virile strains appeared to converge and explode with a vehemence scarcely to be expected in the son of useful, but far from remarkable, Mr. John Lockwood Kipling, Professor of Architectural Sculp ture and for many years a museum curator in Bombay.

That little Rudyard, the precocious child who soon read himself into near blindness, should be the genius who made Englishmen really see for the first time their great, fabulous and glowing Empire of India was a supreme quirk of Fate.

Little Rudyard, "The Beetle," was sent to be educated at Westward Ho! (a quiet English town). In Stalky & Co he has chronicled his teen-age mischief there. Major General Lionel Charles Dunsterville is today so proud of having been the original "Stalky" that he has called his two books of memoirs Stalky's Reminiscences and Stalky Settles Down.

Returning to India, the young Kipling, as he rhymed, "sold his heart to the old Black Art we call the daily press." To his last hour he remained the direct, incisive, fact-hunting and fact-recording journalist, whether in prose, poetry, verse or doggerel. He was estimated to have died with the greatest fortune ever made by an author, something like $3,750,000. In his last in terview in 1935 he said with utter candor: "You must bait your hook with gaudy words. I used to search for words in the British Museum. I read mad poets."

Departmental Ditties were dashed off in India and printed by Cub Reporter Kipling himself in spare moments, then sold by postcard solicitation to Pukka Sahibs with an ease which made Salesman Kipling scoff contemptuously in later years when fashionable publishers tried to cry into his ale about the "risks" they say they take. He took his own risks by striking out around the world, landing in California and being turned down by editors all the way across the U. S. and back to England. Then suddenly his work caught on and from a deep trunk crammed with Indian yarns he coined riches faster than he could squander them on journeys which sent him roaming, thrilling and writing all over the world. Having absolutely rejected Kim at any price, Mr. Samuel Sidney McClure suddenly thought himself lucky to secure the serial rights alone for $25,000.

Meanwhile famed and lionized Mr. Kipling had married very simply the sister of a literary friend. She was of Vermont, and her name was Caroline Starr Balestier. In Vermont, ignoring the advice of well-wishers who desired them to build "an ordinary mortgageable house" they erected what is still the wonder of the countryside and quite reprehensible from a mortgage company's point of view--a house so extraordinary that all its rooms are on the side having the best view, with hallways on the other side. In this house two of the Kipling children were born and for them their father wrote the Just So Stories and the Jungle Books.

Like the Lindberghs at Englewood, N. J., the Kiplings at Dummerston, Vt. finally had enough of prying folk and cleared out to spend the rest of their lives in England.

In 1899, Rudyard Kipling briefly revisited New York and nearly died there of pneumonia, both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Queen Victoria asking to be kept informed. His more spiteful enemies said that during this illness "the writer died although the man recovered." One critic yearned publicly for the time "when the rudyards cease from kipling." But it was not to come for 37 years. During the World War that which had been Imperial England was bled until there were such things as a Labor Cabinet, a British General Strike, a Depression and 11,000,000 British votes for the League of Nations, which signifies nothing if it does not signify the passing of Imperialism. When this has passed, what becomes of Gunga Din, of Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd and of the Road to Mandalay?

Even before his Sussex retirement Rudyard Kipling rebuked his Britannia:

For she thinks her Empire still is the Strand and Holborn Hill, And she didn't think of Sergeant Whats-isname.

Why not Sir? It has been generally believed that Queen Victoria was "not amused" by the Widow at Windsor and had her revenge by not appointing Rudyard Kipling to the post of Poet Laureate. In 1930, Mr. Kipling was in Bermuda when the death of Poet Laureate Robert Bridges occurred. Stanley Baldwin, Mr. Kipling's cousin, had presented him to King George at a levee; the King and Queen had once invited him to be their guest at Balmoral; and each year he received a crisp Buckingham Palace invitation to the Royal Garden Party. Therefore in Bermuda in 1930 the news that King George had appointed John Maseneld to be Poet Laureate smote hard. Exclaimed Rudyard Kipling: "Writing is an awful trade--I mean it!"

How is the Crown to answer on Judgment Day why there was never created Sir Rudyard Kipling or Lord Kipling? To his grave without a ribbon to stick in his coat or a peerage which would have died with him, the Empire sent last week a man whom an Empire poll even now would doubtless choose as the supreme poet of Empire.

Rudyard Kipling had his own explanation for why he was not made Poet Laureate and it had no reference to the Widow at Windsor. Some years ago an admirer involuntarily exclaimed, 'I always had thought you were Sir Rudyard!"

"Perhaps I would have been--who knows?" answered plain Mr. Kipling in one of the rare moments when he permitted himself to be caught off guard. "But one day long ago, in an exhilarated and irresponsible moment. I wrote a little song. Possibly you know it?"

This little song. The Bastard King of England, sturdy Kipling friends claim he never wrote and it is omitted from his Collected Works. A better reason and more probable for not making him Poet Laureate was that in such an official post it is safer for the United Kingdom to have someone who confines himself to "poetic themes" and does not lash out with infuriated honesty at Boches, the Yankees and the cinema.

De Mortuis. In saying nothing except good of dead Rudyard Kipling last week some slight difficulty was experienced by Poet Laureate John Maseneld. Said honest Mr. Maseneld: "To myself, who did not know Kipling's recent poetry, he is a Victorian poet, whose best poems are not yet as well known as they should be."

London Times: "One of the most forcible minds of our time has ceased its work."

New York Times: "A mighty energy has ceased."

London Daily Mail: "He taught England the meaning of Empire, and the Empire the meaning of England."

Mahatma Gandhi's secretary: "It is impossible for Mr. Gandhi to comment on the death of Mr. Kipling because two more of Mr. Gandhi's front teeth have just had to be extracted."

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