SOME MEN SEEM TO BE TOUGH AND AGGRESSIVE FROM BIRTH. They take naturally to a life of rough play and muscular, adventurous living. Other men seem nearly the opposite. They find their rowdier friends tiresome and prefer more refined, delicate ways.
There are also men who have every reason to live prim, restricted lives given their body types, the nature of their gifts, perhaps their deformities, and even, in some cases, the injustices done to them. Yet some men in this latter category have such inner toughness, possess such a manliness of soul, and are captured by such a brilliant vision of heroic manhood that they are able to defy their bodies and their conditioning in order to reach for a masculine life by sheer force of will.
This was Rudyard Kipling, and, though study of his life and writings has fallen out of fashion today, he was a manly man who knew what genuine manhood was and used his skill with words to define it for his generation. Today it is virtually impossible to discuss manly ways without referring to his magnificent poem, “If—.” It is the defining poetic statement of the manly virtues.
Yet this brilliant articulation of vital manhood came from the pen of a small, unathletic, bespectacled, bookish, bullied, insecure man whom friends expected would become almost anything other than the prophet of manhood for his time. How we need men like him today—men who refuse to let biology define their destiny and who live inspired by a fiery inner vision of the masculine life.
The truth is that Rudyard Kipling’s body of work may have slowed the decline of western manhood, keeping it from falling into the dust decades before its recent troubled season. His writings—poems, essays, and fiction for both adults and children—filled the last decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth with chest-thumping bravado, unabashed patriotism, full-throated praise of valor, and the glorification of manly adventure. Men the world over heard his words as a trumpet call. It is a call that echoes even now, nearly eight decades after the poet laureate of manly men passed from this life.
His grandfathers on both sides were Wesleyan ministers. He was born in Bombay, the son of a British teacher and his exceptionally gifted wife. His first five years of life in that boisterous city stirred Kipling’s imagination and inspired him to speak of his mother with affection all his days. Everything changed for him in 1871, though—the year his parents followed the custom of the day and left him in England with his sister to attend school. For the six years that followed, brother and sister were brutalized in the harsh, legalistic, unsympathetic care of a woman named Holloway who lived in the south of England. As we might expect, Kipling tells the story best:
Then came a new small house smelling of aridity and emptiness, and a parting in the dawn with Father and Mother, who said that I must learn quickly to read and write so that they might send me letters and books.
I lived in that house for close on six years. It belonged to a woman who took in children whose parents were in India. She was married to an old Navy Captain . . . Then the old Captain died, and I was sorry, for he was the only person in that house as far as I can remember who ever threw me a kind word.
It was an establishment run with the full vigour of the Evangelical as revealed to the Woman. I had never heard of Hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors . . . Myself I was regularly beaten. The Woman had an only son of twelve or thirteen as religious as she. I was a real joy to him, for when his mother had finished with me for the day he (we slept in the same room) took me on and roasted the other side.
If you cross-examine a child of seven or eight on his day’s doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep) he will contradict himself very satisfactorily.
If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.37
Mrs. Kipling returned to England in 1877 and removed the children from Holloway’s care. Later, she learned of her son’s brutal treatment and wondered why he never asked for help. As he explained in the years after, “Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.”38
In 1878, Rudyard entered the United Services College at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school designed to prepare British boys for the army. Again, he suffered under the hostile rule of bullies. His poor eyesight, slight frame, lack of athletic skill, and inherent bookishness made him an obvious target.
My first year and a half was not pleasant. The most persistent bullying came not less from the bigger boys, who merely kick and pass on, than from the young devils of fourteen acting in concert against one butt. . . . I played footer [rugby] but here again my sight hampered me. I was not even in the Second Fifteen.
After my strength came suddenly to me about my fourteenth year, there was no more bullying; and either my natural sloth or past experience did not tempt me to bully in my turn.39
Graduation in 1882 moved him to take honest stock of his life. He determined he did not have the academic strength to attend Oxford University and he had long accepted he would never have a successful military career. He decided to accept a job his father secured for him: assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, India (now Pakistan).
So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalized Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. . . . There were yet three or four days’ rail to Lahore, where my people lived. After these, my English years fell away, nor ever, I think, came back in full strength.40
Typical of men who are destined for influence and power, his failures and setbacks served him well. His English education, his love of India, his talent for the written word, and his poetic sense all converged as he took a job with an obscure newspaper in British India. An Oxford education might have denuded his literary gifts, and a military life might have hardened him beyond repair. In later years he was grateful to have escaped both. Yet to be in India, writing, reclaiming the imagination of his youth, and observing the ways of men with a journalist’s eye—this was the making of poet and storyteller Rudyard Kipling.
He acquired a ruggedness of soul that began to reveal itself in his writing. He was courageous—but in print, seldom having stepped onto a contested battlefield. He was principled—but with a pen, not in his nation’s halls of power. He was fierce—but in the pursuit of a manly vision, not in the pursuit of the empire’s enemies. He wrote of the thrashing Indian frontier with love for the ways of men and devotion to the ideals of English manhood, but he was always the observer, seldom the participant.
Still, he played his role. He mastered an artillery of words he used to expose the foppish ways and low morals that had become fashionable among men of his time. He first wrote articles and a column for the Gazette. On the side, he experimented with short stories. In a display of the industriousness that would mark his career, in 1888 he published six collections of short stories, proving him a master of the art. It was an astonishing output for a beginning author. Soon after, he left India to tour America—where he met Mark Twain—and then returned to England in 1889.
He continued to write at an astonishing pace, but it became too much for him and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Doctors prescribed a journey by sea and this took him to Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand before allowing him to visit India once again. He married in 1892 and settled with his new wife in Vermont. He would live alternatively in the United States, in England, and, for brief seasons, in South Africa for the rest of his life.
Marriage settled him and made him a more deliberate, more thoughtful writer. The four decades from his wedding to his death, from 1892 to 1936, was a time of magnificent literary output that eventually earned him the Nobel Prize in literature. He wrote enduring classics like The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, Just So Stories, The Light That Failed, and Kim. His poetry, which dealt with themes of empire, heroism, and the conflict of cultures, included “Gunga Din,” “Recessional,” “The White Man’s Burden,” and, of course, the magnificent “If—.”
Kipling understood the necessity of brutal force in the service of righteousness, but he also understood the tragedy of war and the flaws of fallen men. His poetry captured both, and proved capable of touching his readers with the capacity of human virtue and also with the sadness of loss and decline.
His legacy was fashioned not only by his ability to sound the genuine tones of the human—and, more specifically, the masculine—experience, but also by his nearly inhuman capacity to work. A contemporary, William James Dawson, wrote in a work entitled The Making of Manhood, “Rudyard Kipling owes everything to work. He has led one of the hardest and most strenuous lives. Of course, he has genius, imaginative power, observation; but they have been trained and developed in the school of hard work . . . Depend upon it, behind all great achievement there lies great toil: nothing that is worth doing is done easily.”41
Kipling’s words transcended his time and helped to frame the meaning of manhood for the generations that followed him. Consider these two stanzas from “The Young British Soldier”:
If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Soldier of the Queen!
The words are typical of Kipling’s ideals, his vision of manhood and the nobility of the empire. Yet he could also pen sentences of stark realism and grief: “There be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood.”42
Always, there appeared in his writing a manly sense of honor for the gifts of the fathers. In his poem “The Old Issue” he wrote:
All we have of freedom
All we use or know
This our fathers bought for us
Long and long ago.
What Rudyard Kipling teaches us, among so much else, is that rugged, courageous manhood is not exclusively a matter of strength and speed, of physical skill and athletic prowess. It is first a condition of soul: a vision of what masculinity is and can be.
Knowing this frees us from a trite brand of manhood that is only about the life of the body and the physical world. Instead, it teaches us that genuine manhood grows from a man’s inner life. It is born of a sense of responsibility and oriented to virtues that have the power to distinguish the life of a man from every other kind of life on earth.
From this, every masculine duty and discipline grows, and no one put this into words like the rather unlikely figure of Rudyard Kipling. He gave us language for describing and encouraging the masculine life in ourselves, in our sons, in the men of our generation. In doing so he also painted the vision that has inspired men the world over toward genuine manhood. He was a small, bookish, bespectacled man whom no one thought of as physically masculine. Yet he proved to be one of the most masculine of men in the only way that is ultimately important: in the manliness of the vision that guided his life and set his message aflame.
