The story was told in 1933 by the writer and critic Alexander Woolcott.
"Five years ago, all that was mortal of Thomas Hardy was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey... Stanley Baldwin, Ramsey MacDonald, J M Barrie, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Rudyard Kipling - these were among the pall bearers. Curiously enough, Shaw and Kipling had never met until that day when Gosse introduced them. Or rather tried to. Kipling, so runs the legend, still had so much of war-time bitterness left in his heart that he would not acknowledge the introduction , and Shaw, impishly amused by this reminder of the Junkers' incurable resentment against him, chuckled in his beard all through the funeral." (1)
In fact, more than being "among the pall bearers", Kipling and Shaw were paired with each other, which Shaw complained about because of their difference in height. Shaw’s secretary, Blanche Patch, wrote that Kipling shook hands "hurriedly, and turned away as if from the Evil One". (2)
It was wet and cold. Perhaps Kipling's mood was not helped by the London weather. He and his wife, Caroline, had only recently returned from a long-ish stay on the continent. Caroline recorded in her diary: "To the Abbey for Mr Thomas Hardy's funeral. Rud pall-bearer. I near the grave for the ashes - not a very impressive ceremony. Home after tea. Bad weather and mud on the roads." (3)
It all sounds rather ill-tempered, but it wouldn't have surprised the others present. These two Nobel Laureates had very little in common.
The outbreak of the First World War epitomises their opposing standpoints. While Kipling (then aged 47) was in tune with the national mood of fervent patriotism, and producing propaganda that repeated typical stories of German brutishness, Shaw (aged 58) produced his tract 'Common Sense About the War', which argued that Britain was just as much in the wrong as Germany. (In a kind of mirror image of this pose, in 1945 he disapproved of the postwar trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness, saying "We are all potential criminals".)
By contrast, Kipling stood with his countrymen in proudly claiming the moral high ground. In a 1915 speech, he said, "There was no crime, no cruelty, no abomination that the mind of men can conceive of which the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on.... Today, there are only two divisions in the world... human beings and Germans."
Their politics were about as far apart as one can imagine: on the one hand, the Irish Fabian and on the other the great pillar of the establishment and the Empire, who described Ramsey MacDonald's Labour government as "Bolshevism without bullets" and, according to Mary O’Toole's analysis in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, may have had "enormous sympathy for the lower classes … yet distrusted all forms of democratic government".
And yet, peculiarly, they were both admirers of Mussolini when he came to power in 1922, with Shaw calling him "the right kind of tyrant".
Mussolini would certainly have been a subject of conversation at the famous weekend house parties given by Nancy Astor, the first woman MP to take her seat, at Cliveden. Everybody who was anybody seems to have been invited there at some point between the wars. She must have revelled in hearing the contrasting views of Shaw and Kipling, who were both visitors, but it seems unlikely she would have tested her genius as a hostess by inviting them simultaneously. Shaw described her as "a volcano". She persuaded him to join her on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1931, which included a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom Shaw described as "a Georgian gentlemen". (4)
Kipling's star was waning in the years after Hardy's funeral, while Shaw travelled the world growing more famous as a playright. When Kipling died in 1936, his ashes were interred next to Hardy's in the Abbey. Shaw did not attend the service. (5)
Notes
1. Long, Long Ago, Chapter Vii, February 1933, by Alexander Woolcott
3. http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/members/car_28.pdf
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliveden
5. http://www.kiplingjournal.com/acrobat/KJ037.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment