Foreign News: King of English

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Mr. Kipling reveals life by flashes of vulgarity—Oscar Wilde.

I don't think the reading of Kipling ever changed anybody's life very much— George Bernard Shaw.

Then there was Rudyard Kipling, with the gorgeous East and the British Empire rattling like loose change in his trouser pockets.—E. F. Benson.

IF is probably the most popular poem now in the world—John Masefield.

It isn't what you write but where, and when, and how.

How all too high we hold

The noise which men call fame,

The dross that men call gold! —Rudyard Kipling.

In Sussex the trim butler of a manor house surrounded by a moat enclosing one of England's fairest gardens, announced to Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling that the car was at the door. The baldheaded, sturdy little Master stood up in his square-toed boots. His brown eyes, weak but keen, twinkled behind the enormous lenses he had worn since precocious childhood. Into their waiting Rolls-Royce got Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling and were driven up to London, to Brown's Hotel.

At Brown's in aristocratic dinginess are wont to stop exiled Kings. In a sense Rudyard Kipling registered at Brown's as an exiled King of English—exiled by a raw post-War generation for which his English no longer .has the power and magic, the humility and pride and inspiration it still has for riper men. Some of these oldsters hold that the copy of If they keep under the glass top of their desks has profoundly changed their lives. Some believe that reading the works of Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw or Poet Laureate John Masefield has never changed anybody's life very much. Their devotion to their King of English is as undying and as unquestioning as devotion to the King of England. It was tremendous, throat-tightening news last week that suddenly oxygen should be hissing from tanks to aid the breathing of Rudyard Kipling and of George Windsor who were born the same year (see p. 22).

Mr. Kipling was stricken most abruptly at Brown's. He had just celebrated his 70th birthday in Sussex, seemingly in full vigor for a man of his years, and he was off to the French Riviera to escape England's noxious winter. At Brown's the head porter is H. Nice, of whom some years ago Rudyard Kipling said: "If that admirable man who is head porter at Brown's Hotel had been in charge of European diplomacy in 1914 there would have been no War." H. Nice proffered a copy of The Absent Minded Beggar and Author Kipling signed it readily with a jest: "You take that home and lock it away until I am dead. It will be worth a lot of money then."