Kipling among the Early Critics

Abstract

In 1898 Dr Kellner, author of the History of English Literature in the Victorian Era,¹ described in the Neues Wiener Tageblatt a visit he paid to Kipling at Rottingdean. He summed up his impressions in the phrase, ‘Today I have seen happiness face to face.’ This is what he said about his visit: ‘The workroom is of surprising simplicity, the north wall is covered with books half its height, over the door hangs a portrait of Burne Jones, to the right, near the window, stands a plain table on which lie a couple of pages containing verses. No works of art, no conveniences, no knick-knacks, the unadorned room simple and earnest like a Puritan chapel. “I do my daily task conscientiously, but not all that I write is printed: most of it goes there.” The waste-paper basket here received a vigorous kick and a mass of torn-up papers rolled on the ground. The Puritanic strain in his nature came out the more strongly at the moment when others — like Burns, for example — have lost their hold on themselves in the hour of triumph. Kipling is never so distrustful and self-critical as when he has around him the cries of praise. “I am very distrustful against praise,” said he, “very distrustful against fame. You know the fate of eighteenth-century English literature, how many ‘immortal poets’ that prolific time brought forth, and yet how much of this ‘immortal’ poetry still lives in our time?

Kipling journal, viii (Apr 1941) 9–11.