Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (988 page)

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As it is, I am well content with the multitude of beautiful things found by chance in small local museums, in neglected churches, in villages beneath unadvertised chateaux which do not as yet sell postcards. There is richer treasure of this sort in France than with us — perhaps because their rulers in the past, when they felt religious or angry, merely slew men. Ours, more respectable, contented themselves with murdering the irreplaceable work of artists. I went, several times, in search of plunder of the eye, with a friend whose passion was thirteenth-century glass of a blue which is now restricted to the Angels. We discovered one very small, very accessible window in a decayed little church which we thought might be exchanged for something really modern and artistic from Limoges, or even Thiers. But it appears that these trifles are known and recorded — probably by the Church: certainly by the Police. So all the glass I possess now is one of those rings which the
poilus
used to make out of material that fell into their hands at Rheims.

And, because I said that the brick bulk of Albi Cathedral, seen against the moon, hit the soul like a hammer, my friend showed me vast cold Byzantine cathedrals where no one seemed to enter except, at its hour, which is worth waiting for, the single sun-shaft through the bull’s-eye that fumbles round the empty dome and withdraws.

Once at Chartres, when the big organ was being repaired, we got leave to go out on the roof and look at the reverse of the windows. We found that every square millimetre of the glass had been microscopically etched by the years: inlaid here with fine lines of dirt blown up from the street; roughened in places to a tooth-like rough drawing-paper or rubbed down to the silky softness of uncut diamond; studded with minute iridescent efflorescences and conchoidal pittings, and everywhere worked into a thousand varying planes to sift and glorify the light. So we saw that it is not Man that makes perfection but the weather which his works must endure. Those were good journeys.

Years later, I came across another side of inexhaustible France. It was after the return of Alsace, when the Head Quarters of the Administration (what in English we should call “Government House”) had been purged of Boche memories and refurnished in detail with tapestries, mirrors, carpets, porcelain, and the rest. It was of the best; of one period; superbly and officially French, and impressing itself on humanity as though it had been in place since Attila. (
Emprise morale
again!)

I asked a friend, an Alsatian General, whence the flood of material had come. “From Marianne”, was the reply. “She has all sorts of things like these in her stocking — when she needs them. You have seen the Élysée?” “One sees nothing at the Élysée”, I retorted, “except the backs of large Generals. Where has all this been stored? Who issues it? Above all, who has arranged it here?” “Not my business”, said the General. “Ask Marianne.”

My relations with that lady had been strained because I had “doubled” on some temporary bridge in the devastated area, and she, through her agents, had talked to me as though I would overthrow the Republic. But she is an unequalled housekeeper. Think what it must have been in the old days when Rome lavished the best she had on her first external possession — her beloved Provincia!

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Since the first need of the unrepentant sinner is to make “a face for himself”, the first German manœuvre for position in the real war was to uproot the idea of Boche responsibility for the not-wholly-successful preliminary campaign. This they achieved in their own country by furious outcries and legislative enactments. It is, I believe, now a criminal offence for a Boche to breathe a doubt of his country’s innocence. (Read “La Guerre” for “L’Amour m’a refait une virginité”, and it is Frau Marion Delorme who declaims now.) But their technique with the foreigner filled me with professional jealousy as a purveyor of fiction vastly inferior. Many of our people conformed to this pressure, for England alone had lost more than eight hundred thousand dead of physique and conviction, and a large number of living who had been crippled or laid aside. Their places were taken in the public eye and ear by defaitists, intellectualists, Socialists, Communists, women enfranchised, and those whom four years of repressed and contagious fear had tried too severely. To these the thesis of the relativity of war-guilt offered a door for escape from themselves. If the war had been a cosmic dog-fight into which the nations had been drawn by cosmic hysteria, then all who had assisted to weaken, distract, delay, and confuse their own country and to encourage the enemy were, indeed, the martyr-souls and prophets they had believed themselves to be. They could sleep at last with approving consciences, and wake to demand for what the war had been fought. (It was, of course, that their species might survive to achieve office, honour, and influence.)

A certain amount of the same gas was liberated on the French front, but the national response was more feeble. The French were occupied with reconstruction, the gyrations of the franc, and, as in England, with strikes. Also they knew more than we did of the measures the Boche was taking to rehabilitate himself materially. He borrowed on all sides to recondition his untouched factories and his quite adequate railways. This interested the United States enormously. They are even more interested to-day, but not so polite. I am no financial expert, but a gentleman with a camion in charge of four enormous white sows with golden hair whom I overtook on the Digne-Grenoble road was good enough to explain the system. “Yes. He will borrow from all who will lend, and they will
all
go the same way. There is a fellow in our village doing the same thing. That is how he pays his debts. It is high finance. What you and I call civil banditry.” That perspicacious pig-breeder spoke sitting between his four ladies, who looked like the fat goddesses in
Orphée aux Enfers
. He was more accurate than any expert.

There is a belief that the French are narrow and vindictive. It may be true, but the same man who would consider a wireless cabinet a wicked waste, tunes in to all European wavelengths. England is like a ship moored off a mainland which we visit occasionally. We do not feel at Calais that the earth under foot vibrates sustainedly as far as Vladivostock, Dantzig, and the far South. It is, I think, his continentality of experience and intuition that gives the Frenchman his unshaken poise irrespective of circumstances or office at the moment; his power of useful words, his cynicism, and, above all, the quality of his humour.

After the stabilisation of the franc and the general reduction of personnel and salaries organised by Monsieur Poincaré, I wished to hear from him the human effect of the measure. “It has been as one would expect”, said he. “All the Préfets of all the Departments are running about telling their subordinates that, if the affair had rested with them, they would have increased all salaries. Then they say, ‘But it is that Poincaré! Do you know the old brute? No? Well, I
do
. He is impossible — him and his idea!’ And after all that is what I have been put here for.”

And, apropos to our English system of business by cheque which makes our taxation so disgustingly effective, he furnished an illustration. “Do you know what a litre jar is? Yes, it holds a litre; but it can also hold ten thousand francs in small paper. You fill one with your economies. Then you bury it. Then you begin to fill another. That is all. In the villages now, men say of their richer neighbours, ‘He must be at least a two- or three jar man.’ No! It is not so easy to collect taxes when the money is
there
!” And the square thumb was turned towards the carpet.

I love that imperturbable Lorrainer.

Towards the end of his life, Clemenceau, who had honoured me with his friendship, permitted me to report myself to him when I came through Paris. On the last occasion he was completing, I believe, some personal records, and the twilight into which he retired was alive and populous. He talked to himself as much as to me, ranging from Thiers and Gambetta and a picturesque duel of Rochefort’s, to the statesmen of the present. His trip to India had interested him greatly. He had caught malaria in Calcutta, and the doctors there administered medicines “out of bottles of the same pattern as my great-great-grandmother used. They said if I went North by train, I should die. I said, ‘Then I will go North, and if necessary I will die in your accursed trains’. But, you see, I lived.”

“That was because of the medicine in the bottles”, I ventured.

“It was not. It was because I was so angry with the bottles!” He threw himself back and laughed. (I should not have dared to dose The Tiger when he was enjoying a temperature.)

That made me bold to ask, “And, now, Master, how do you think of men as you have dealt with them and they with you in all these years?”

The answer came slowly. “Yes. I have known men? . . . Yes. I have known them. . . . They are not so bad. . . . After all these years? . . . They are not so bad after all.”

There was the English handshake and then the accolade, as it had been in the office of
L’Homme Enchaîné
a thousand years ago.

And these are some of the reasons why I love France.

BRAZILIAN SKETCHES

These articles were first published in
The
Morning Post
in 1927, and later gathered in this collection in
1940.  They tell of Kipling’s 1927 journey through Brazil, when he travelled from Sao Paulo to an up-country coffee estate.

Bateman’s, Kipling’s Sussex country house, where he wrote this and many other books.  Bateman’s has been open for visitors since 1939, offering a unique look into the great writer’s life.

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I

THE JOURNEY OUT

A Trip South

The Pursuit of the Beautiful  

introduction 

notes on the text 

The Friends

I HAD some friends — but I dreamed that they were dead —

Who used to dance with lanterns round a little boy in bed;

Green and white lanterns that waved to and fro:

But I haven’t seen a Firefly since ever so long ago!

I had some friends — their crowns were in the sky —

Who used to nod and whisper when a little boy went by,

As the nuts began to tumble and the breeze began to blow:

And I haven’t seen a Cocoa-palm since ever so long ago!

I had a friend — he came up from Cape Horn,