Article by John Derbyshire |
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Nest of Burglars God
of our fathers, known of old, In 1897, Britain celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond
Jubilee — the 60th anniversary of her accession. Britain was then at the height of her power, ruling over huge
swathes of Africa, Asia, the Americas and the antipodes.
The Jubilee celebrations were suitably grand.
On June 22, chains of celebratory bonfires were lit all along the
nation’s shores, in a tradition going back to before the arrival of the
Romans. Rudyard Kipling, sitting in his house in Rottingdean on the
south coast, saw these bonfires on the downs nearby, and jotted down some
lines for a poem. A few days
later he went with his father to see the great naval review in the
Spithead channel: 165
warships drawn up in five lines spread across thirty miles of sea.
In the following days he finished his poem.
It was published in the London Times on July 17, alongside
the Queen’s letter of thanks to her people. The
tumult and the shouting dies; He named the poem “Recessional,” referring to the
hymn sung at the end of an Anglican service when the minister and choir
withdraw to the vestry. The
poem became famous at once. One
of Kipling’s biographers
says, in fact, that: “For
two, or even three, generations, this was one of the most famous, or
infamous, poems in the world.” It
had something for everyone. Imperialists
could thrill to the implicit message that the British Empire was God’s
will. The more skeptical
could nod with approval at the lines suggesting that the whole show might,
after all, be just a flash in the pan: Far-called,
our navies melt away; Even pacifists found something to like in it.
One of them, the socialist and anti-imperialist Jack Mackail, wrote
a letter thanking Kipling, in heartfelt terms, for having written the
poem. In a polite response,
Kipling denied any pacifistic intent:
“Thank you very much but all the same seeing what manner of armed
barbarians we are surrounded with, we’re about the only power with a
glimmer of civilisation in us. ....
This is no ideal world but a nest of burglars, alas, and we must
protect ourselves against being burgled.” If,
drunk with sight of power, we loose Those — and they were many, even in Kipling’s day
— who deplored any assumption of racial superiority, of course fixed
their attention on the phrase “lesser breeds without the law.”
What was most probably in the poet’s mind there, as George Orwell
pointed out in his fine essay on Kipling, was the Germans, about whose
ambitions Kipling was already beginning to obsess..
No-one who has read Kim can think that Kipling looked down
on dark-skinned peoples as inferior beings.
He had grown up among Indians;
the first words he knew were in Hindi, and the infant Rudyard had
to be reminded to speak English when he was presented to his parents in
the evenings. The attitude of
the imperial-era British to their native subjects is a deep and
complicated topic, about which large books have been written.
“Lesser breeds without the law” does not encapsulate it, nor
even begin to approach it. For
heathen heart that puts her trust Kipling’s
intent in “Recessional” was, as he himself plainly said many times, to
strike a note of moral responsibility among all the self-congratulatory
bombast. A deeply
superstitious man, he felt what he said in the poem:
that great power must be accompanied with great humility.
Human beings, and the nations they make, live out their lives under
the eye of a higher Authority, who is not pleased by displays of
arrogance. It is interesting
to note that Kipling took no payment for the poem, and in fact never made
a penny from it. He regarded
it as a public service, an act of duty. I
think that “Recessional” has something to tell us today. Of course, the circumstances of the United States in 2002 are
not those of Britain in 1897. We
are not an imperial power, and we have no wish to be.
We do not hold, and do not want to hold, “dominion over palm and
pine,” either under God’s hand or any other arrangement. We are a commercial republic of free citizens who, on the
whole, prefer to mind our own business. We
are, however, Top Dog among nations, just as Britain was Top Dog 105 years
ago. That state of affairs
brings with it certain inevitable consequences, and certain
responsibilities that cannot be shirked.
Those consequences, and those responsibilities, are much less
welcome to us than they were to Queen Victoria’s Britain, because we are
a different kind of country; but
to pretend they don’t exist — that we can mind our own business in
blithe disregard of what is happening elsewhere in the world — is
irresponsible folly. Hundreds
of millions of people all over the world admire us;
hundreds of millions more hate us.
We are the
Cargo nation; and
when the Cargo fails to arrive, it is surely we, through our cruel malice,
who must have withheld it. Hundreds
of millions would come to live here if they could; most of them to improve
their lives, some for other reasons. For
all the differences between our time and Kipling’s, and between our
nation and his, some things are still the same.
This world is still, as it was in 1897, “a nest of burglars.”
Civilization still needs defending — watchfully, ceaselessly —
against barbarism. Sometimes,
as we saw last year, barbarism will break through the defenses.
Sometimes, as we see so often in our universities, those defenses
crumble and decay because the ones who should guard them have, instead,
been assaulting them with picks and hammers from the inside, from sheer
joy of destruction and arrogance of intellect. And
the other thing is still true, too: that
when we speak, or act, in defense of our civilization, we should do so in
the awareness that we speak and act under the eye of a higher power —
that everything comes to judgment at last.
When I read my e-mails or survey the blogosphere, I see that there
are rather a lot of “wild tongues” out there in America; people who are seething with rage at the cruelty and audacity
of our enemies, and the feebleness of our own leaders. It’s not hard to understand that. I myself have often let loose with some “such boasting as
the Gentiles use,” wishing, and sometimes saying out loud, that we would
employ our most terrible weapons, without restraint, against those who
hate us. I am not a pacifist.
I want America to defend herself with major force and confident
strength, just as Kipling believed should be done***.
However, I also want, as he wanted, for us always, even in times of
the gravest crisis, to hold on to the core beliefs of our civilization: in
particular, the belief that “frantic boast and foolish word” are for
children and savages, not for civilized people. I
am going to celebrate my first Fourth of July as an American with pride
and patriotism, enjoying the sight of the flags, the fireworks, the
parades. Then I’m going to
go to my room, shut my door, go down on my knees, bow my head and close my
eyes, and ask for: “Thy
Mercy on Thy people, Lord!” ——————————————————————— * An Englishman of Kipling’s generation would have
pronounced “humble” with a silent “h.”
Hence “an,” not “a.” ** Kipling’s religion was extremely peculiar, and I
am not sure that anyone has got to the bottom of it. He seems to have believed, at least for a spell, that the
English were descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel. *** For a succinct outline of Kipling’s political views, Evelyn Waugh’s words have never been improved on: “He was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences 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.” |
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