THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING
 
 RELIGION OF 
 
 MR. KIPLING :: :: :: 
 
 W. B. PARKER 
 
 jj. F. MANSFIELD & A. WESSELS 
 EW YORK :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: 1899
 
 Reprinted from the 
 
 New World, December, 1898 
 
 Copyright 
 
 1898 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 The appearance of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's 
 Recessional Hymn may well be considered one 
 of the chief religious events of the past two 
 years. The hymn itself resounded through 
 England like a great organ note, awakening 
 distant echoes of Luther's hymn, of Milton's 
 sonnet, " On the Late Massacre in Piemont," 
 and the noble cadences of the Fifty-first Psalm. 
 The response of the people was not less impres- 
 sive. Throughout Great Britain and the colo- 
 nies there went a thrill of contrite and reverent 
 patriotism such as the English have seldom felt, 
 and such as no other nation, except it be our 
 own, is at all capable of. No one of Anglo- 
 Saxon race, no matter how widely separated 
 from the events which were the occasion of 
 the poem, can read it unmoved. 
 
 The majesty and restraint of these great 
 lines not only reassured our generation that the 
 splendid succession of English poets has not yet 
 fallen desolate, but also served to show anew 
 the essentially religious basis of Anglo-Saxon 
 character, and to confirm us in the faith that 
 great art is forever inseparable from religion. 
 
 204GS' 
 
 051 
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING cr
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 In thinking of Mr. Kipling as continuing the 
 tradition of Milton and Wordsworth, Tennyson 
 and Browning, it is pleasant to be reminded 
 that the note of piety in this latest of his poems 
 is not isolated, but is traceable as the ground- 
 note of his work. Many of Mr. Kipling's readers 
 will recall now the reverent lines which formed 
 part of the dedication to one of his earliest 
 books, "Soldiers Three," which appeared in 
 Allahabad, India, in 1888. 
 
 Lo, I have wrought in common clay 
 Rude figures of a rough-hewn race I 
 For Pearls strew not the market-place 
 In this my town of banishment, 
 Where with the shifting dust I play 
 And eat the bread of Discontent. 
 
 Yet is there life in that I make. 
 Oh, Thou who knowest, turn and see. 
 As Thou hast power over me, 
 So have I power over these 
 Because I wrought them for Thy sake 
 And breathed in them mine agonies. 
 
 Small mirth was in the making. Now 
 
 I lift the cloth that cloaks the clay, 
 
 And, wearied, at Thy feet I lay 
 
 My wares ere I go forth to sell. 
 
 The long bazar will praise but Thou 
 
 Heart of my heart, have I done well ?
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 Though there is between this personal prayer 
 and the great petition of the Recessional, with 
 its imperial outlook, a long stretch to tra- 
 verse, the dynamic emotion, which in both 
 cases is religious, is as apparent in the earlier 
 poem as in the later. So with the Envoi to 
 "Life's Handicap,"* which appeared in 1891, 
 three years later than the poem quoted above. 
 This is, if anything, more explicitly and entirely 
 prayerful than its predecessor. 
 
 By my own work before the night, 
 Great Overseer, I make my prayer. 
 
 If there be good in that I wrought, 
 Thy hand compelled it, Master, Thine: 
 Where I have failed to meet Thy thought, 
 I know, through Thee, the blame is mine. . . 
 
 The depth and dream of my desire, 
 The bitter paths wherein I stray, 
 Thou knowest Who hast made the Fire, 
 Thou knowest Who hast made the Clay. 
 
 One stone the more swings to her place 
 In that dread Temple of Thy Worth- 
 It is enough that through Thy grace 
 I saw naught common on Thy earth. 
 
 This should suffice to make plain the mood 
 in which Mr. Kipling has done his work, and to 
 reveal, underneath all the intolerant energy 
 
 * Verses : Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1897.
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 and fierce intensity of his writing, the vein of 
 genuine religious feeling which has been its 
 chief stimulus. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's religion is neither new nor 
 complex. It shares with his heroes and his 
 words a simple and primal nature. There was 
 never, in fact, a religion with less scaffolding 
 of formal theology. Such theology as there is 
 to this faith is of the most uncompromising or- 
 thodoxy, but for the most part it is conspicu- 
 ously absent and the faith itself springs up 
 straight from the broad base of human feeling, 
 unexplained and undefended. In rare instances 
 there occurs the suggestion of a buttress. So 
 in "The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin " 
 occurs an argument for the existence of God, 
 half ironical, to be sure, and yet, I take it, re- 
 flecting very truly Mr. Kipling's earnest, worka- 
 day notion of the universe, along with his 
 thorough-going contempt for shallow unbelief. 
 Anent McGoggin's creed, which "only proved 
 that men had no souls, and there was no God 
 and no hereafter, and that you must worry 
 along somehow for the good of Humanity," 
 Mr. Kipling observes : " Life, in India, is not 
 long enough to waste in proving that there is 
 no one in particular at the head of affairs. For 
 
 8
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 this reason. The Deputy is above the Assistant, 
 the Commissioner above the Deputy, the Lieu- 
 tenant-Governor above the Commissioner, and 
 the Viceroy above all four, under the orders 
 of the Secretary of State, who is respon- 
 sible to the Empress. If the Empress be not 
 responsible to her Maker if there is no Maker 
 for her to be responsible to the entire system 
 of Our Administration must be wrong. Which 
 is manifestly impossible." Far more serious is 
 Mr. Kipling's tone in " McAndrews' Hymn," 
 in which, out of the mouth of the old Scotch 
 engineer, he suggests a belief in foreordina- 
 tion, 
 
 From coupler-flange to spindle-guide 
 
 I see Thy Hand, O God, 
 Predestination in the stride 
 
 O' yon connecting-rod. 
 
 and even more explicitly in his own words from 
 the Introduction to the new "Outward Bound" 
 edition of his works, closing it as follows: 
 "Remembering this one thing sure in all un- 
 certainties : as it is written, 
 
 Oh true believer, his destiny none can 
 
 escape ; 
 And safe are we against all that is n^t 
 
 predestined."
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 These are but shreds, unwoven and far 
 enough from any ordered texture whatever, 
 and though many such might be picked out 
 and gathered together, they would serve only to 
 make the simpleness of the religion of their 
 maker more plain. And its antiquity ; for as 
 little in religion as in state-craft or verse-forms 
 is Mr. Kipling an innovator. His is a healthy, 
 austere, old-fashioned faith, the faith of Eng- 
 land and the Old Testament. The two great 
 utterances that we have had of it, "The Reces- 
 sional " and the "Hymn Before Action," are 
 compound of the words of the Psalmist and 
 Milton and Cromwell. They are both such 
 hymns as David and Joshua and Nelson might 
 have used wrought of words to suit the mouths 
 of fighting men. They were as well suited to 
 them who went up against Jericho as to them 
 who went against Omdurman, and the armies 
 of the great Protector might have chanted them 
 along with their ancient battle-cries: "The 
 sword of the Lord and of Gideon"; "Let God 
 arise and let His enemies be scattered." Kip- 
 ling's " Hymn Before Action " especially weaves 
 itself upon all the battle music of the race, re- 
 calling the far-off echoes of "Chevy Chase." 
 and mingling them with the later choruses of 
 
 10
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 "Rule Britannia" and "The Charge of the 
 Light Brigade." More than all, it leads back 
 to the Hebrew songs of war from which so much 
 of the poetry of England has sprung. For this 
 new prophet's hymn * has the same homely 
 trust in God as have David's psalms, and 
 makes with Him like common cause against 
 England's enemies, as the song of Deborah 
 made with Jehovah against the enemies of 
 Israel. 
 
 Ere yet we loose the legions. 
 Ere yet we draw the blade, 
 Jehovah of the Thunders, 
 Lord God of Battles, aid. 
 
 E'en now their vanguard gathers, 
 E'en now we face the fray. 
 As Thou did'st help our fathers, 
 Help Thou our host to-day. 
 
 Here is nothing new or skeptical or scientific, 
 but the effective faith in which the saints mili- 
 tant have evermore gone up to battle or to 
 martyrdom. The religion of which these are 
 the utterance is no matter of philosophical pre- 
 suppositions or logical categories. It is a spon- 
 taneous and somewhat primitive response of 
 humanity to the immediate and awful universe. 
 * Verses: Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1897.
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 Here is no argument, no formal and ordered 
 religion of the head, but a religion of the heart 
 and viscera, out of the bowels of men in great 
 conflict and great conquest, with the sweat and 
 blood of grim primal struggle on their faces, 
 and the words of inevitable need and dire hon- 
 esty on their lips. 
 
 This is essentially a racial faith, a matter 
 of clan and family, of company and regiment, 
 and fellowship in great undertakings. And for 
 this it needs no apology. Such has been every 
 living religion among men. Never would Christ- 
 ianity have made conquest of the northern 
 heart except it had been preached as a doctrine 
 of divine knighthood and chivalry, with Christ 
 as its chief champion, mailed and mounted like a 
 northern knight, and helped by His twelve knight- 
 ly followers. In such warlike presentment as 
 this, the gentle Christ first won the homage of our 
 Germanic ancestors. So always the militant 
 aspect of the faith has been dear to the Anglo- 
 Saxon's heart, to be told in all sagas and sung 
 by all his singers from Casdmon to this latest 
 voice of his religion and his race. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's religion, then, is simple, with 
 but slight skeleton of theology and less organi- 
 zation of philosophy. It is old, of old English
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 fighters and older Hebrew prophets. Moreover, 
 it is essentially racial. It follows that the best 
 interpretation to be had of such a faith is through 
 the men who embody it, for it is at every point 
 human. . It could not be other, for Mr. Kipling's 
 world is a human world. He says explicitly 
 and as it seems with a touch of scorn, "We are 
 neither children nor gods, but men in a world 
 of men." In this world of men undiluted inno- 
 cence and divinity do not dwell. Even the six- 
 year-old paladin, Wee Willie Winkie, is, in his 
 daring and disobedience, three fourths a man, 
 and the only gods Mr. Kipling has ever drawn, 
 "The Children of the Zodiac," were unmistak- 
 ably flesh and blood. These robust people have 
 no affinity with abstractions: on forms and 
 sacraments they do not waste a thought ; of 
 churches, also, they are neglectful : they listen 
 to no sermons ; and even the hymns they chant 
 are not for organ music, but go to the bugle, the 
 banjo and the drum. The religion that these 
 people have is not for saints or martyrs, for 
 angels or children : it is not to dream about 
 or philosophize over, but for Tommy Atkins and 
 the crew of the Victoria to live and die by. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's religion is not only human, 
 but almost exclusively masculine. It does not 
 
 13
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 belong to saints, neither does it belong to 
 women, but to unchastened, faulty men, to 
 Dick Heldar, McAndrews, Sir Anthony Gloster 
 and Mulvaney. Masculine they are to the 
 core, like primitive heroes, with the wander- 
 fever in their blood, the venture-light in their 
 eyes, in their ears the roar of breakers and of 
 big guns, in their nostrils the odors of the mossy 
 Himalaya forests and the spices of Mandalay to 
 lure them out from comforts and shelter. 
 
 Among them all there is the freemasonry 
 of daring that looses the bonds and overleaps 
 the barriers of race. Fuzzy-Wuzzy and Tommy, 
 Gunga Din and Her Majesty's Jollies here find 
 a common relationship. Their freemasonry of 
 courage knows no frontiers : its members be- 
 long to the whole round earth : latitude and longi- 
 tude, and all the lines that keep men asunder, 
 they have broken in pieces. Then in the strength 
 of the bonds they have broken they make stronger 
 ones to bind together swarthy bearded Afghan 
 robbers and blonde English officers in the loyalty 
 of blood-brothers. For, as Mr. Kipling says, 
 
 There is neither East nor West, Border nor 
 
 Breed nor Birth ; 
 When two strong men stand face to face, tho' 
 
 they come from the ends of the earth. 
 
 14
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 Like Ulysses of old, these men are rovers 
 and adventurers. From the drummer boys of 
 the " Fore and Aft" to "The Man who would 
 be King," the lust of hardship and danger is 
 upon them all. Captain Gadsby leading the 
 charge at Amdheran, Mulvaney riding the mad 
 elephant through the streets of Cawnpore, 
 Strickland plunging into the mysterious perils 
 of native India, are only familiar examples. 
 These men seem to belong with Homer's heroes 
 to the childhood of the world, when men were 
 boys and creeds were brief. Yet in the hearts 
 of them and their fellows spring the faith and 
 the practice of Mr. Kipling's religion. 
 
 The religion of such men is short and swiftly 
 told. Mr. Kipling puts it all in one of the verses 
 to his friend and hero, Wolcott Balestier, "Who 
 had done his work and held his peace and had 
 no fear to die." A simple religion, as simple 
 as that of the primitive heroes of Ulysses, of 
 Sidney, and stout Sir Richard Grenville. Two 
 words would hold it all Courage and Toil; 
 courage, the merry daring that laughs the world 
 to scorn ; toil, the stedfast effort to make the 
 world do one's bidding. They who have forged 
 and kept this faith have surely had counsel of 
 the world's greater prophets of Joshua and
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 St. Paul: of Joshua for the first of it "Be 
 not afraid, neither be ye dismayed," and St. 
 Paul for the second " Endure hardness like a 
 good soldier," " Do your work and fear noth- 
 ing," this is the gospel Mr. Kipling has ever 
 preached, and he has preached it consistently. 
 Even that flinty-hearted young pagan, Dick 
 Heldar, in "The Light that Failed," preaches 
 work, and the only mission for which, in "The 
 Children of the Zodiac, ' ' the gods were brought to 
 earth was to preach, "Thou shalt not be afraid." 
 This religion needs no interpretation of words 
 and that is well, for they who hold it are not 
 men of speech. The tale of their faith is far 
 from their lips, as often the path of their faith is 
 far from their feet ; but at sea or ashore they 
 blazen the unspoken creed in unmistakable 
 deeds. Sometimes it is done in a revel of ad- 
 venture reckless enough to make a boy's blood 
 tingle. Then at midnight, and naked, they 
 swim rivers and take towns ; they go into battle 
 like devils possessed of devils ; they put out in 
 leaky hulks to " euchre God Almighty's storm 
 and bluff the Eternal Sea." Sometimes it is in 
 soberer mood. Then they show their devotion 
 to duty, as Bobby Wicks does in " Only a Sub- 
 altern, " and as Hummil does at "The End of 
 
 16
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 the Passage." Boy and man, you will remem- 
 ber, both die ; the one nursing an unamiable 
 private in a fever camp ; the other, solitary at 
 his post, which he keeps and refuses relief that 
 he may save a comrade from exposure. All 
 this in silence, for these men are mess-mates of 
 toil and death, and their religion is one of action, 
 not speech. 
 
 Yet because they have lived close comrades 
 to Death, and felt their own helplessness, they 
 have learned to believe, to believe as their 
 fathers did, in God and Heaven and Hell. In 
 Hell Mr. Kipling and his men have the most 
 implicit belief. Tommy Atkins, McAndrews 
 and Tomlinson all hold it as certain as sin, and 
 they show a disposition to treat it seriously. 
 They would feel the ballad of Gunga Din sadly 
 incomplete without the lines which the British 
 soldier sings so cheerily, and which give a sort 
 of dramatic completeness to the episode it nar- 
 rates. 
 
 "So I'll meet him later on, 
 At the place where he is gone 
 Where it's always double drill and no canteen ; 
 "E'll be squattin' on the coals 
 Givin' drink to poor damned souls, 
 An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din I " 
 
 I/
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 Such a hell is not merely a warm refuge for 
 the morally deficient and unfit ; as much as 
 heaven, it demands achievement as the price of 
 entrance, for in Kipling's theology not less than 
 in Browning's, "the unlit lamp and the ungirt 
 loin " represent the chief iniquity of men. All 
 this Mr. Kipling tells in his poem "Tomlin- 
 son."* Tomlinson died, and, being refused ad- 
 mission to heaven, came in time to the gates of 
 hell, where he would have entered, but the 
 Devil stopped him on the threshold, demanding 
 evidence of his right. At that Tomlinson racked 
 his memory for strong sins, but he could muster 
 only copied sins, weak counterfeits taken from 
 others and from books. These do not pass cur- 
 rent at the door of the pit, therefore the Devil 
 scorned him and hell spewed him out of her 
 mouth. " Go," said the Devil, 
 
 " Get ye back to the flesh again for the sake o' 
 man's repute. 
 
 But look that ye win to worthier sin ere ye 
 come back again." 
 
 This is a thoroughly earnest hell. The men 
 who believe in it believe also in an earnest heav- 
 en. That, too, is to be attained only by toil. 
 
 * Verses, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1897. 
 
 18
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 The test question asked at the gates of Mr 
 Kipling's heaven is also to be found in the poem 
 "Tomlinson." When the spirit of Tomlinson 
 appeared before St. Peter he made much of his 
 reading and his thoughts, at which 
 
 Peter twirled the jangling keys in weariness 
 
 and wrath. 
 " Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought," 
 
 he said, "and the tale is yet to run. 
 By the worth of the body that once ye had, 
 
 give answer what ha' ye done? " 
 
 This is the heaven of " The Last Chantey," 
 of the Envoi to "The Seven Seas," and of the 
 poem to Wolcott Balestier. I recall no other con- 
 ception in modern English writing at once so 
 splendid in its imagery and so strenuous in its 
 tone. The mark of the men who hold this heaven 
 that lies "Beyond the loom of the last lone star," 
 is that they have served God 's world, and they 
 who reach it shall still have room to do brave 
 work, of all imaginable joys the one in Mr. 
 Kipling's eyes most to be desired. Hence what 
 he calls elsewhere " the clear, clean joy of crea- 
 tion" is for him the supreme bliss of a heaven 
 which he has restored for many to a place among 
 live conceptions and invested with a new 
 glamour and glory. There, he says, 
 
 '9
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 "Ofttimes cometh our wise Lord God, master 
 
 of every trade, 
 
 And tells them tales of His daily toil, of 
 Edens newly made " ; 
 
 In which achievements such men as win to 
 heaven may also share, serving with Him in 
 high comradeship under His eye, as it is told in 
 the Envoi to the "Seven Seas," 
 
 Only the Master shall praise us and only the 
 
 Master shall blame, 
 And no one shall work for money, and no one 
 
 shall work for fame, 
 But each for the joy of the working, and each 
 
 in his separate star 
 Shall draw the Thing as he sees it for the God 
 
 of Things as They Are. 
 
 The God of Things as They Are is the sort 
 of god Mr. Kipling's men should worship the 
 god of duty and battle and storm. He is not a 
 god to be wheedled into pity or indulgence. 
 What should the crew of the Bolivar or they 
 who were at the taking of Lungtungpen do with 
 pity ? These men would say with Stevenson, 
 
 Our God is still the God of might, 
 In deeds, in deeds, is His delight. 
 
 And to deeds they make their only appeal. Even 
 20
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 McAndrews, when he comes to lay his case be- 
 fore the Lord, rests it here 
 
 " An' I ha' done what I ha' done judge Thou if 
 ill or well." 
 
 Yet, by Mulholland's account in the quaint song 
 of the sea, " Mulholland's Contract," this justice 
 is tempered with mercy, 
 
 "An" I spoke to God of our Contract, an' He 
 
 says to my prayer : 
 ' I never puts on My ministers no more than 
 
 they can bear.' " 
 
 There is an admixture of tenderness, too, which 
 McAndrews, who had a closer walk with God 
 than any other of Kipling's men, came to know. 
 Speaking of his bitter struggle, he says, 
 
 "Yet was Thy hand beneath my head, about 
 my feet Thy care." 
 
 For of course these rugged characters are 
 after all, not without reverence and piety. At 
 the inevitable moments when the stress of life 
 becomes too great for any stoicism, when the 
 tremor of battle is on their faces, and their 
 hearts are wrung within them, their humanity 
 shows plain, and they pray, as they do in their 
 " Hymn Before Action " 
 
 21
 
 THE RELIGION OF MR. KIPLING 
 
 Cloak Thou our undeserving, 
 
 Make firm the shuddering breath, 
 
 In silence and unswerving, 
 To taste Thy lesser death. 
 
 Here is disclosed again the reverent mood 
 which, though so often concealed, is unmistak- 
 ably dominant in Mr. Kipling's work. In his 
 most personal prayer of all, which we have al- 
 ready quoted, it appears most plainly, 
 
 The long bazar will praise, but Thou 
 Heart of my heart have I done well ? 
 
 So Mr. Kipling expresses the sense of innate 
 divinity which is the core of courage and the life 
 of all effective toil. The faith and daring of his 
 rough heroes spring from the same source as 
 all the religion of the world from the con- 
 sciousness that men are not alien to the Uni- 
 verse, but that the heart of the world and their 
 hearts beat to the same measure. This and 
 those other feelings which make up the body of 
 our faith Mr. Kipling has uttered afresh for us in 
 poems which, like the Recessional, have at once 
 voiced the prayers and solemn hopes of our gen- 
 eration and given their maker his chief title to 
 a place among the greater names of English 
 
 poetry, 
 
 W. B. PARKER. 
 BOSTON.
 
 DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000036129 5