Novelists From England

"But remember, please, the Law by which we live, We are not built to comprehend a lie, We can neither love nor pity nor forgive, If you make a slip in handling us you die! We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings— Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!— Our touch can alter all created things, We are everything on earth—except The Gods!"

"Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!"

"There rise her timeless capitals of Empires daily born, Whose plinths are laid at midnight, and whose streets are packed at morn; And here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin."

"Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone."

"More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies."

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!"

"For all we take we must pay, but the price is cruel high."

"When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, “It's pretty, but is it Art?”"

"We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart; But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: “It's clever, but is it Art?”"

"Bite on the bullet, old man, and don't let them think you're afraid."

"San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty."

"Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old."

"Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro— And what should they know of England who only England know?"

"“Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high “The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die— “The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!” And the naked soul of Tomlinson grew white as a rain-washed bone."

"“Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed—go back with an open eye, “And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die: “That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one— “And the God that you took from a printed book be with you, Tomlinson!”"

"If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine."

"Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down; And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.""

"Ever the wide world over, lass, Ever the trail held true, Over the world and under the world, And back at the last to you."

"When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors."

"We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low. Will you never let us go?"

"When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea; An' what he thought 'e might require, 'E went an' took—the same as me!"

"A Nation spoke to a Nation, A Queen sent word to a Throne: ‘Daughter am I in my mother's house, But mistress in my own. The gates are mine to open, As the gates are mine to close, And I set my house in order,' Said our Lady of the Snows."

"Take up the White Man's burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need."

"Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good."

"It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use. We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse."

"“True. True talk,” said Kim solemnly. “Fools speak of a cat when a woman is brought to bed, for instance. I have heard them.”"

"And what did ye look they should compass? Warcraft learned in a breath, Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death? So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize? How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice? But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.” And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes: And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride, Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride! Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals."

"Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end; Cleansed of servile panic, slow to dread or despise, Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice."

"God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove Belovèd over all."

"Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded— The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?"

"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges— Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"

"Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again! There's no discharge in the war!"

"That's the secret. 'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walk down a street."

"I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them."

"... scandals are only increased by hushing them up."

"... it's always best to tell the truth."

"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."

"His poems in their quantity, their limitation to one feeling at a time, have the air of brilliant tactical improvisations to overcome sudden unforeseen obstacles, as if, for Kipling, experience were not a seed to cultivate patiently and lovingly, but an unending stream of dangerous feelings to be immediately mastered as they appear."

"An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle."

"I can think of a number of poets who have written great poetry, only of a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless I am mistaken, Kipling's position in this class is not only high but unique."

"Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known."

"Mr. Rudyard Kipling is distinguished above all things for his imperialistic views. Altho he has literary qualifications of the highest merit, it is to be regretted that he has devoted them to the propagation of warlike ideas and exhibited a most barbarous spirit of chauvinism during the Boer War."

"I believe that the three writers of the nineteenth century who had the greatest natural talents were D'Annunzio, Kipling and Tolstoy - it's strange that all three had semi-fanatic ideas about religion or about patriotism."

"There are certain writers-Kipling is a very good case in point-he is an embarrassment partly because of his politics, but also partly because his greatest books are for children. Kim is a child's book. It is and it isn't. I read it first at ten, and I've read it ever since. But Kipling is not really a novelist, is he? He's a tale-teller, and he doesn't fit in the canon any more than Tolkien does, for different reasons. I think you might find other writers like that. Of course, Kipling's subjects are often exotic, they're not the ordinary subjects of literature, he personifies ships, his tales partake of fantasy and science fiction and all kinds of things. He didn't write within the realist canon. His stuff was odd. There are writers whom we don't think of as "paraliterary" writers, but who have suffered nearly as much from ignorance or neglect or our inability to know how to criticize them, which I think is one of the main problems..."

"Vladimir Nabokov-to me, his is not a good prose style...But then a writer like Kipling comes to mind, whose style is very idiosyncratic, rather strange, and, particularly in his finest things, in some of the children's books, is deliberately rather splendid and very rhythmical and totally oral. I love it."

"The social attitudes of an author writing about animals always emerge with exceptional clarity. Kipling's stories are imperialistic, his mongoose belongs to the white man, it is the Englishman's servant. Only a European with a highly developed sense of his own responsibility toward life, with a cautious and aroused conscience, could write animal stories in the style of Pergaud. The weasel, the crow, and the magpie are his heroes. They serve no one, instead they introduce us to the basic tenors and joys of existence."

"Mr. Kipling's world is a barrack full of oaths and clatter of sabres ; but his language is copious, rich, sonorous. One is tempted to say that none since the Elizabethans has written so copiously. Others have written more beautifully, but no one that I can call to mind at this moment has written so copiously. Shelley and Wordsworth, Landor and Pater, wrote with part of the language; but who else, except Whitman, has written with the whole language since the Elizabethans?"

"Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly."

"In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot."

"Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language."