HOWZAT

“Much I owe to the lands that grew — More to the lives that fed — But most to Allah who gave me two Separate sides to my head.”

When he first arrived in London, Kipling had been invited to join the Savile, the writers’ den: a significant honour, but he found it oppressive. He disliked velvet collars and long hair. He joined the Athenaeum, where, among the bishops and the politicians, he fell in with Cecil Rhodes, not a politician himself but an adventurer, a man who wanted to be king and thought he could manage it, and the other head of Kipling emerged — a writer who would write to order for Rhodes, who could thump a tub in support of the English in the Boer war, who wanted to sound alarums about the coming of a battle for empire.

This head of Kipling coined the phrase “the Hun” to describe the Germans. This head foresaw that the west would squabble over the spoils of empire and warned of a coming Armageddon. That he was right endeared him to nobody. He wanted arms and he wanted to fight.

“For all we have and are.

For all our children’s fate.

Stand up and take the war The Hun is at the gate.”

Where is the sensitive, imaginative observer in this sort of stuff? Kipling became a public “war-monger”. When the thinking classes confronted death on a vast scale, all the romance and notions of imperial “progress” became suspect. The buoyancy, the bounce of Kipling, the can-do, the up-and-at-’em, the resilience, the hope for a great adventure full of duty and blind service, all became a shallow dance. His voice was no longer wanted.

For heaven’s sake, it must have seemed so to him, too. He lost his only son. Following on the death of his beloved daughter from pneumonia in America, the pain of it was to drive the spirit out of him.

“‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’ Not this tide.

‘When do you think that he’ll come back?’ Not with this wind blowing and this tide.”

We have travelled a long way in 10 years from the optimistic certainties of If. The path through the woods that was once so easy to follow has been overgrown by trees. Kipling lost his way, and he seemed to recognise it. Of course, the empire continued. Thanks to Versailles it got even bigger, but clever people never saw empire as the solution to the world’s problems again. They had little time for Kipling’s defence of a lost paradise, his later support for Brigadier-General Dyer, who killed so many at Amritsar, or his continued consuming hatred of Germans. “Who reads Kipling now?” Indeed.

But if you doubt his qualities, if you are still blinded by his public, gorgon head, I urge you to read Kim. After finishing this sublimely written novel, Henry James wrote to Kipling, the Kipling who had just alienated the aesthetes with his jingoistic, full-blooded support of the Boer war. “Chuck public affairs,” he urged, “which are an ignoble scene, and stick to your canvas and your paintbox. There are as good colours in the tubes as ever were laid on, and there is only the truth. The rest is base humbug.”

Kipling’s tragedy is that he could not. The two sides of his head were always fighting over him. But his story is fascinating and his best work is brilliant. J’adore.

Griff Rhys Jones presents Kipling: A Remembrance Tale on BBC1, November 12