Dear Dr. Kerr,
Your Kipling allusion in the quote from H.G Wells comes from the piece
of verse 'The `Eathen', the chorus at the end of v. 1, repeated in a
slightly different form at the end of the piece.
I think Wells has it (partly) wrong when he says/implies that Kipling found
that an excuse for "a thousand overbearing actions ......". The piece of
verse is to the praise of army NCOs - "the backbone of the army is the
non-commissioned man", but the first two lines could be/were no doubt used
as such - "The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and stone; 'e
don't pbey no orders unless they are 'is own".
Interestingly enough, at the Society's meeting last night, Sir Colin
St.John-Wilson, talking about Kipling & Tradition, talked about
the"arrogance" of the imperial vision, illustrating it with a slide of an
illustration (drawn from where he didn't say) of a heroic British soldier
(circa 1900) rescuing an Indian comrade under fire from the beastly Pathans
lurking on the precipitous crags around. And Jan Morris, speaking earlier
this year, described an incident that she had witnessed in Egypt in the
1940s which illustrated that same point.
Without a doubt, the men (and to a lesser extent, perhaps, the women) who
read and liked Kipling's work did have an arrogance, a sense of
infallibility - no, personal certainty, which isn't quite the same thing -
which could lead to arrogance, intolerance, and (which is Kipling's point in
the two lines quoted by Wells) and unwillingness to accept second-best in
their work.
One could go on on that them for ages, but that's enough for the time being.
Yours,
Alastair Wilson
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr. D. Kerr" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 3:08 AM
Subject: a query
> I hope somebody can help me identify an allusion - actually two - in H. G.
> Wells' wartime novel MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH (1916).
>
> After a Zeppelin raid in which his elderly aunt has been fatally injured,
> Mr Britling is pondering the cruelty of war, and particularly of the
Germans.
>
> "These Germans were an unsubtle people, a people in the worst and best
> sense of the words, plain and honest; they were prone to moral
> indignation.... Surely, they had argued, God was not on the side of those
> who kept an untilled field. So they had butchered these old ladies and
> slaughtered these children just to show us the consequences:
> 'All along of dirtiness, all along of mess,
> All along of doing things rather more or less.'
> The very justification our English poet has found for a thousand
> overbearing actions in the East! 'Forget not order and the real,' that was
> the underlying message of bomb and gas and submarine. After all, what
right
> had we English NOT to have a gun or an aeroplane fit to bring down that
> Zeppelin ignominiously and conclusively? Had we not undertaken Empire?
Were
> we not the leaders of great nations? Had we indeed much right to complain
> if our imperial pose was flouted?"
> H. G. Wells, MR BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH (London: Hogarth Press,
1985) 295-6.
>
> Any help would be much appreciated. 'Forget not order and the real' has
> been bothering me for years.
>
> Douglas Kerr
> Hong Kong University
>
>
> ____________________
> Dr Douglas Kerr
> Associate Professor
> English Department
> University of Hong Kong
> Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
> tel (852) 2859 7938
> fax (852) 2559 7139
>
