A Question Regarding Kipling’s “L’Envoi” and Various Uses of “Things as They Are”
“One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.” --attributed to Cezanne, cited in G by John Berger.
“Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.” --Harriet Beecher Stowe
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."-- Anais Nin (02/21/1903 – 01/14/1977) French-US diarist
L’Envoi
--Rudyard Kipling 1865- 1936 (from The Seven Seas, pub’d 1937)
When Earth’s last picture is painted, and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it-- lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall set us to work anew!
And those who were good shall be happy: they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair;
They shall find real saints to draw from--Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!
And 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!
It’s cheering that Kipling is undergoing a little reevaluation and that the low esteem in which much of his work was held for a several decades may be revised upwards. Lines from Kipling, who knew “the savage wars of peace,” and who knew the horrors of war, came readily to mind with the conflicts in Iraq. A review (about 2000) by Andrew Lycett in the Sunday Times of David Gilmour’s The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling notes that Kipling’s work was cited during the Afghanistan crisis. Apt lines or phrases from the work of this man of “intelligence, passion, and flair”(Lycett) sprang to many minds during the crises of the last ten years such as lines from his “Recessional.” In “Land of Our Birth,” Kipling beseeches his God with pleas for guidance:“O help thy children when they call;/ That they may build from age to age/ An undefiled heritage. . . Teach us . . . Forgiveness free of evil done,/ And love to all men ‘neath the sun.”
Along with millions in Great Britain, and in Russia and elsewhere, Kipling believed in the Imperial empire. But he wasn’t without good sense. He may have felt superior to the “primitive” people of the far reaches of the Empire, but he was staunchly insistent that all Brits set a very fine example of the best and most “civilized” behaviour. It is important to remember who the audience was that Kipling (and Conrad) wrote for-- builders of one sort of dominion or other. Kipling “is an English man” for better and for worse. But the criticism of his fellows, in sneers meant to sear, in “White Man’s Burden” and other poems, occasionally seems overlooked.
Kipling knew that to “Take up the White Man’s Burden--” was to
“ . . . reap his old reward:/
The blame of those ye better,/
The hate of those ye guard/
The cry of hosts ye humour/
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light . . . .
and he warned that those “silent, sullen peoples/ Shall weigh your Gods and you.” (Kipling seems to me very much against the assumption that White men know best and must carry the load for or lead and guide anyone else, and that that is readily apparent in his sarcasm in this poem and elsewhere, but I am aware his attitude has been hotly debated.) I do not believe as, among other far out readings of Kipling, Time magazine once wrote, when speaking of the “sad, self-pitying Whiffenpoof Song” [Gentlemen-Rankers] being based on “one of Kipling’s glamourizations of the white man’s burden.” Kipling bought into the Empire as a good thing, but he is often snide about British/ white acceptance of their superiority. Certainly it is impossible to miss that his tone is sarcastic or ironic in that poem.
His poem “L’Envoi” also concerns weighing our Gods, and it was a popular Kipling work, no doubt because it seems open to widely differing interpretations, but two interpretations found in old school textbooks seem misleading. An envoi is a short, concluding stanza of certain French verse forms, such as the ballade, originally serving as a postscript dedicating the poem to a patron and later as a pithy summation of the poem. The word “envoy,” from the French “envoier” -- “to send,” means “a sending away” or “conclusion.” In his poem’s title, Kipling uses the term with the definite article, so perhaps we may safely conclude Kipling is sending a message that is his wish for the phrase “things as they are “ to come to a conclusion. Given the interpretation, the commentary, and questions in the two dated high school English textbooks, it seems some readers did not quite get the message. This little sending deserves a little further study.
In Modern Literature for Schools (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1937, p.335), H. R. Leaver of Eastwood H.S., the editor, prefaced this poem with these remarks:
Kipling assumes that we are going to get another opportunity to work after the world’s work is over. When this chance comes, all the difficulties that meet us in the work of our earthly life will vanish. This is a new point of view, for most writers who tell about the next life deal with it as a period of rest. The Greeks and the Arabs thought of it this way. The old Vikings thought of it as a condition where wars would be fought without the accompanying evils. Our Indians spoke of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Kipling speaks of painting pictures, but you must understand that he means all kinds of work.
The questions Leavey poses for students following the poem also suggest his interpretation:
1. Why do people work? Would people work if all the necessities of life were provided for them?
2. What would be the motive for working hard in the after life that Kipling imagines?
3. Discuss praise, blame, money, fame, as motives for work.
4. What does he mean by “God of Things as They Are?”
The latter question is the one that indeed needs asking. In another high school textbook, Creative Living, Book V, (Toronto: W. J. Gage & Co., abt. 1955), used in Alberta high schools in the later 50s, the editor, E. W. Buxton, poses these questions about the poem:
For Discussion . . .
1. In this enchanting little picture of the artist’s heaven, Kipling is presenting his view of the true artist in a favorable environment. What does he consider to be the purpose of art? the qualities of the competent artistic critic? the difficulties faced by the artist?
2. To what extent do you agree with Kipling? In what ways do his ideas seem to resemble those of other writers in this section? (a section on the arts)
3. Certain critics suggest that Kipling wrote this little poem to ridicule the artist who excuses his lack of real accomplishment by saying that his tools are imperfect, his environment unsatisfactory, or his critics unfair. What is your opinion?
It is easy to see why the two text editors would find the poem appealing and include it in their anthologies. Its rhythm should be attractive to teenage students and the era of these two anthologies allowed the inclusion of works containing suggestions of God and Heaven. But this poem is not intended to be merely “an enchanting little picture of the artist’s heaven.” It might have served both editors well to note the historical content of the poem. The poem was written in 1919. Had the two editors read a little more Kipling, or even just his poem “ White Man’s Burden,” they would have been alert to Kipling’s often ironic tone. “L’Envoi” is ironic. And it is very much directed to the artists and critics of the time. It is indeed about painters, though it includes all artists and all of their critics. (The use of “We” and “us” suggest this inclusiveness.) Edmund Wilson believes Kipling saw all in tidy dichotomies, but this poem is a little mysterious and like “The White Man’s Burden,” not black and white. The poem is as deliberately vague as the phrase, by 1937 a cliché, in the title.
Had either of the two editors recalled a little history of modern art, they would have been aware of the fuss in the art world over “things as they are.” (This fuss was to continue for much of the twentieth century, as the quotations below suggest.) They might have been closer to the truth had they assumed the phrase referred to realism or naturalism--that it might be applied to the writing of Flaubert or Zola. But had they learned the phrase is ascribed to Cezanne, “the father of modern art,” they might have altered their interpretations. And had they been acquainted with Gertrude Stein’s writing and a little cubist painting, the phrase might have taken on considerably different meaning-- the more likely one intended by Kipling.
Kipling’s lack of enthusiasm for the phrase is understandable. The phrase was “in the air” in his era and made use of it by many people including Gertrude Stein and her painter friends. Since Stein’s novel Q. E. D., a work of 1903, which was not published until thirty years after it was written and in the intervening years was not seen by anyone but her brother, the novel certainly was not inspiration for Kipling’s poem. It’s not that the poem has any connection to Stein’s novel, a book Richard Bridgman notes had for its subject “a dangerous one in 1903-- three young women in a passionate stalemate.” (Gertrude Stein in Pieces, p 40), but, after Stein’s death, Toklas and Van Vechten, noting the second last sentence of Stein’s book is “Can’t she see things as they are and not as she would make them is she were strong enough as she plainly isn’t,” re-titled the novel Things as They Are. Stein also used the phrase near the beginning of The Making of Americans: “ . . . . now it had come to her, to see, clearly and freely things as they are and not as she wished them to be for her.” (33). Stein’s use of the phrase apparently has to do with not seeing the world through rose- coloured glasses. Bridgman says, “The sentence elevates clear vision over all else. Whatever reality is, that must be accepted.” (p 41) Given that Stein was writing a novel about Lesbians in a time in which any “queer” was up against public opinion, social mores and laws, and when the world had been reminded of this “deviant” behaviour only a decade before by the trial of Oscar Wilde, it is useful to think of the phrase as Stein used it.
It's useful to make a few whistle stops at a few others use of the phrase, starting with the first literary use of it. Kipling’s use does connect in a sense to William Godwin’s use of the phrase in his novel titled Things As They Are (and subtitled: or The Adventures of Caleb Wiliams). Godwin’s Preface to his novel states his purpose:
The following narrative is intended to answer a purpose, more general and important than immediately appears upon the face of it. The question now afloat in the world respecting THINGS AS THEY ARE, is the most interesting that can be presented to the human mind. While one party pleads for reformation and change, the other extols, in the warmest terms, the existing constitution of society. It seemed as if something would be gained for the decision of his question, if that constitution were faithfully developed in its practical effects. What is not presented to the public, is no refined and abstract speculation; it is a study and delineation of things passing in the moral world. It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society. But this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to reach. Accordingly it was proposed, in the invention of the following work, to comprehend, as far as the progressive nature of a single story would allow, a general view of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man. If the author shall have taught a valuable lesson, without subtracting from the interest and passion, by which a performance of this sort ought to be characterized, he will have reason to congratulate himself upon the vehicle he has chosen. – May 12, `1794 [“This preface was withdrawn in the original edition, in compliance with the alarms of booksellers.” Godwin notes in his preface to the second edition].
Stein’s novel Q. E. D. is, claims Bridgman, governed by “Humour, compassion, objectivity.” ( p 40). It is not written not with a confessional tone, notes Bridgman, but with ironic objectivity. (Liveright, p. x) “Ironic objectivity” is part of the issue Kipling’s poem raises. George Grant, with prescience, once wrote that the central concept of the twentieth century would be that of subjectivity versus objectivity. Perhaps it is the central concept in this poem.
Stein’s brother, who began to collect Cezanne’s painting in 1904, a year after she wrote Q.E.D., had said of Cezanne’s apple, “That is an apple for the first time.” Yet Cezanne was an impressionist painter. Doesn’t that mean he offered us what he saw as he saw it? For Gertrude and Michael Stein, Cezanne had captured the “essence” of the apple. And Stein had shifted from her earlier efforts to be objective into a subjective approach and voice that she maintained all the rest of her career.
Several artists and writers commented on the need to see and portray the essence of things. Oscar Wilde, in his Preface to Dorian Gray, offers his manifesto for artists. The editors of The Oxford Anthology, Kermode et al, note that for Wilde, the “worshipper of artifice and elegance,” his manifesto “represents a dominant tendency in the artistic theory of that time and of some decades to come, derived in essence from, among other French Writers, Baudelaire and Flaubert, and perhaps ultimately from William Blake, or so he leads us to think in the last paragraph of De Profundis. . . :
“Time and space, succession and extension are merely accidental conditions of Thought. The Imagination can transcend them, and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things, also, are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. ‘Where others,’ says Blake, ‘see but the Dawn coming over the hill, I see the sons of God shouting for joy’. (A Vision of the Last Judgment. Wilde quotes from memory and approximately.)”(pp 1128-9).
Wallace Stevens too, at about the same time as Kipling’s poem, plays with the phrase. His poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (1936-7) is a meditation on Plato’s shadows, and on art as superior to religion, and on the reality of thought and imagination. He refers to the song the guitarist is playing as a serenade and as a rhapsody (perhaps an allusion to Gershwin’s “ Rhapsody in Blue”):
VI
. . . The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
XIV
. . .
A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are,
In a chiaroscuro where
One sits and plays the blue guitar.
XV
Is this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard
Of destructions,” a picture of ourselves,
Now, an image of society?
Things as they are have been destroyed. . . .
XXVIII
. . . .
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.
XX
What is there in life except one’s ideas?
. . . .
Of this poem, Stevens wrote:
In . . . Owl’s Clover, while the poems reflect what was then going on in the world, that reflection is merely for the purpose of seizing and stating what makes life intelligible and desirable in the midst of great change and great confusion. The effect of Owl’s Clover is to emphasize the opposition between things as they are and things imagined; in short, to isolate poetry. Since this is of significance, if we are entering a period in which poetry may be of first importance to the spirit, I have been making notes on the subject in the form of short poems . . . These short poems, some thirty of them, form. . . The Man With the Blue Guitar. . . This group deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined. Although the blue guitar is a symbol of the imagination, it is used most often simply as a reference to the individuality of the poet, meaning by the poet any man of imagination.
The phrase was not only a dictum with the cubists and other artists, it was also, slyly, a part of the Imagist poets’ Manifesto. They agreed they could all subscribe to poetry which was “hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite” and which presented an image adding, “We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.”
So what does it mean to paint or describe or see “things as they are”? Obviously to different people it means different things. Does it mean simply to see clearly, with “hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite” vision and/ or to see the essence of things? To Stein and Cezanne and to Picasso and Matisse and to a school or two of painters it had come to mean that things as they are have to do with a subjective reality.
We do seem to have come to understand, as notes the diarist Anias Nin: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
In what may or may not be a lucky accident, decades later, in her novel The Glassy Sea (Toronto: M & S, 1978), Marian Engel, in the two pages before the chapter entitled “Envoi,” writes:
You know, Philip , I thought being with Dr Stern might lead me to some big mystical experience. I guess I’d read too much Jung. But it didn’t; he was a logician. I don’t remember much of what he did, except let me cry a lot, but when he really got me working on myself, what he did was lay out reality like a deck of cards, so that instead of the mysterious id, I was contemplating what was; not what had been, not what should be, but what was.
And I guess that’s why I have to turn down your offer now, Philip. I was forty-two years old yesterday and I am just beginning to look at what is. I use the word “contemplate” to mean that, not as the expression of a mystical attempt to achieve oneness with God, or Buddha-hood or the Tao. Rosa Eglanteria a small, five-petal led pink rose, just that. The field is a field that a variety of plants grow in. A variety of birds nest in the plants and feed off the insects that live among the plants. The seacoast has an ecology of its own. The birds have names and functions, as do the gastropods and the cockles and the mussels. I want to live here where a paved road is a paved road, a heron is a heron. I want the bread on my table to be bread, not money, not something fattening, not the Body of Christ. I have been offered a unique experience: the freedom to see things as they are. [my italics] I can walk down this road to Mac Moan’s listening not to the Nazis whispering in underground streams, but to birds and telephone wires and my own crunching steps.
I do not, in other words, wish to see eternity. I wish, for once, to see the here-and-now. . . . I sidestepped truth in the arms of Asher,. . . When reality hit me in the face, I hid again.
Finally , I’ve acquired a taste for it. . . .
I don’t, like some philosophers, disapprove of mysticism. . . . But knowing I am imperfect, knowing also that I am part of the universe and entitled to be, I wish to spend this part of my life seeing what I can of the universe as it is, [my italics] rather than attempting the perfecting of my soul. That is a worldly aim, Philip, but I need to be worldly.
Once I hunted in the hearts of roses for what I was to be. I tried to be a rose. . . . Now I’m the crazy lady by the shore. That is what I want to be. . . leave me here, please, to dream my redemptive dream. (pp 143-4)
In reviewing the novel The Sportswriter by “dirty realist” Richard Ford, Time magazine said Ford has “an appreciation for things as they are.”
The writers and painters mentioned above seem to define “things as they are” differently, but they are making a distinction between either reality and some sort of romanticizing things or between subjective and objective visions or realities. Kipling’s criteria might be to paint “the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!” It is possible Kipling wrote the poem in response to some particular negative criticism of his work, and it is difficult to guess whether the dictum of “things as they are” was a God Kipling wished to serve. In “Land of Our Birth,” Kipling does makes clear that only the judgment of one God ought to concern us:
Teach us to look in all our ends
On thee for Judge and not our friends;
That we, with thee, may walk uncowed
By fear or favour of the crowd.
Given his ironic approach to many subjects, and if it is true, that he was, as Kermode et al write: “one who steadfastly preferred action and machinery to the prevalent Art for Art’s Sake, (Oxford Anthology, p. 2039),” it is possible the entire poem, “L’Envoi,” is ironic, and that Kipling’s shift in the poem from “The Master” to “the God of things as they are” suggests a criticism of that aim. But it is clear that Kipling, a writer who criticized many of his country’s imperial policies (as in “White Man’s Burden”) and who understood the motivations for the best and worst of human behavior (as in “Mary Postgate” with Mary’s unthinking revenge) and the need for artists to churn out work for money or those who did so in a desire for fame, wished to “call ‘em as he sees ‘em.”
We can be sure that Kipling despised artists or anyone else whose God was money. Selected lines from a speech he gave to students at McGill, quoted by Edmund Wilson, honour a man who can’t be bought. Kipling also rejected honours so fame was not his God. (p 131 Wilson)
Wilson notes, in 1907, “the height of his popularity was passed.” Perhaps Kipling had been or was enduring criticism, as he did for his short story “Mary Postgate”(1915) of which noted George Moore (as noted by Edmund Wilson (The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, NY: Oxford U. Press, 1965) “complained that it was too systematic and too technical, making it Portugal laurels where another writer would have simply written shrubbery would do” ( p 146). Perhaps the poem is merely a reaction to criticism of his “vengeful“ stories, stories Wilson calls “hateful.” Possibly the God of things as they are, is simply Kipling’s feelings--nasty or not, the way things are. (“Mary Postgate” is very likely a wish- fulfilling story given that Kipling’s son was MIA in WWI in the year it was written.)
What did Stein and Picasso and D. H. Lawrence mean by this phrase? What does Paul Gray mean, more precisely, when he writes, “Successful art satisfies another human need than rationality -- the desire not to calculate but to know in the heart how things are.” I would need both to review a great deal of art history and do a thorough scholarly study of a good deal more of Kipling’s 35 volumes of collected works to make a case for whether this poem is meant to be taken seriously (that the God of things as they are is the God or goal an artist must seek to satisfy) or whether the entire poem is ironic. But I know the two high school texts do the poem a disservice.
Bierce’s remarks with overtones that may apply to Kipling’s work, more or less:
CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden. (From zed, z, and jag, an Icelandic word of unknown meaning.)
ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, as a domestic horse to the hitching-post, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination -- free, lawless, immune to bit and rein. Your novelist is a poor creature, as Carlyle might say -- a mere reporter. He may invent his characters and plot, but he must not imagine anything taking place that might not occur, albeit his entire narrative is candidly a lie. Why he imposes this hard condition on himself, and "drags at each remove a lengthening chain" of his own forging he can explain in ten thick volumes without illuminating by so much as a candle's ray the black profound of his own ignorance of the matter. There are great novels, for great writers have "laid waste their powers" to write them, but it remains true that far and away the most fascinating fiction that we have is "The Thousand and One Nights."
“Things as they are” may mean “things as they now stand” (implying acceptance of a nasty lot), or “things as we see them, not as we wish to see them,” or maybe Kipling’s interpretation of abstract art's leeway to represent feelings. It’s not hard to imagine Kipling sneering through a monocle at artists giving themselves an excuse to smear paint about with no rhyme or reason—and he hadn’t seen work by Jackson Pollock. But I am pretty sure Kipling’s poem is not about reaping one’s reward for one’s artistic work by earning a place in heaven—though it well may be about how grand it will be to work in heaven, with no critic but God.
---
4794 words
No comments:
Post a Comment