Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1267 page)

That night has passed, but the memory of it remains in your mind; as the knowledge of it remains in the minds of all men who are concerned that, henceforward, communication between man and fellow-man shall be open, direct and uncoerced.

It is that knowledge which makes doubly precious the gifts you chose to bestow, since one receives them, as I do mine to-night, not merely from an ancient and world-renowned citadel of learning, but directly from the hands of those men who suffered and endured in its defence.

The Trees and the Wall

IN
thanking you for the warmth and good-will of your welcome to-night, I would point out that this is not even the second time that I have set foot in Alsace. The first was when I visited Thann in the autumn of ‘15. But then, for reasons now happily removed, it was difficult for me to advance more than half way up the main street of that beautiful town. The second occasion was when I came through Alsace, for too short a time, in April of this present year, and saw the first crops pushing through in the superbly cultivated fields.

I have been told recently, what I learned long ago from the books of your Erckmann-Chatrian, that it is his devotion to his native soil which he cultivates which gives the Alsatian his historical hardihood and independence of character. That may well be. The soil is the best and wisest of teachers. But we know also that when a people, free by instinct and origin, have been forced to act and suffer for their liberty as Alsace has been forced, their character is developed exactly as the strength and quality of a forest is developed by the very storms that seek to remove it.

Remember what your Jaures says about a certain forest. “You may build a wall through the heart of the forest if you please; but the roots of the trees will touch each other beneath it. The branches of the trees will meet and join overhead. The forest has only one soul.”

Alsace is that Forest, and that Wall, as we know, was built very cleverly and very strongly by a people whose ambition was, and is, to build a wall around all mankind. But the slow, irresistible strength of the trees undermined and upheaved it. The Forest defeated the Wall yet again, and for ever.

It is so with all forests. It is so with all races. Listen a little while I speak to you of my own race, for there are foolish people who would try to build a wall between France and England.

Your attachment to your land is because you have lived in it and suffered for it, as your fathers did before you. Your dead of your old wars are scattered all along its frontiers. They lie in all parts of France, and beyond. Have you forgotten where they lie? Wissembourg, Reichshoffen, Gravelotte, St. Privat? The mere names of their resting-places are to you part of your national, your individual life and history and pride. Come with me now to the west of your great country — to those giant bastions of our war that stretch, one after the other from Calais to Rheims. We English have left there, a larger army than Napoleon led into Russia — four hundred thousand of the bodies of our own sons, beside a multitude of whom no trace remains. They died with your sons. Have we forgotten where they died? Ask any man or woman in any English street or field. They will give you at once the name of some little demolished French village of which, perhaps, even you have never heard. They will tell you the very turn of the road to it, the very hedge beside the orchard where their man fell. They will tell you too of the hundreds of kindly, patient French villages behind the lines where your people were so good to our people, not for a little time, but devotedly and continuously, through all those terrible years when yours and ours suffered and toiled together. And more than that! Every square kilometre, indeed almost every square metre, of that France which we know so well, is to us, nationally and individually, a background lit with every human passion; represents to us some intense and burning focus of effort in the days when the English and French came to know the very fibre of each other’s souls.

Do we forget those experiences of the living — those memories of the dead? They have been burned into us for ever. So, you see, that living and dead, it must always be the same between our peoples. Our roots meet beneath the soil. Our branches join and touch each other overhead. The forest has only one soul.

All we have to do is to guard against the people who would try to build a wall across the heart of our forest. We must look to it that they do not find even the chance to make a preliminary reconnaissance for this work. They are very clever. They are utterly without scruple, since it is vital to their attack upon our civilisation that that wall should be made. And they will try to commence it in the name of Civilisation!

Waking From Dreams

I FIND
it difficult to thank you for the welcome that you have given me here, or for the kindness with which you have spoken of the very little that I have been fortunate enough to accomplish towards the ends which we have at heart.

We here all know that the ends of France and of England are in essence the same; even as our physical and intellectual frontiers against our enemies should be the same, not only for a term of years but as far as human prevision can extend. Our differences, serious as they may appear in our newspapers, are political and passing. Our necessities are immutable and identical; and on our unity henceforward depends the individual future of each country. And that, believe me, is being realised in England to-day. Wherever one looks or listens one feels this.

During the years that have passed since the war, we in England have dreamed many dreams — some good — some bad — many stupid. And a large part of the world has dreamed with us. Now we are waking. It may be that in England we sleep more heavily than you in France. Perhaps that is the effect of the climate; but in England also we are waking, and we find, after three years, that the mass of our people desires what the mass of the people has always desired — Security.

That is natural, because after one has dreamed one returns to the life of this world. With us it is even more natural because we have found out what this lack of security has already cost us in every relation of our national, imperial, and individual life. And this knowledge has been forced upon us by the instinctive logic of a multitude of simple people who frankly do not understand the fantasies which are offered to them in lieu of that security which they were promised as the just wage of their efforts during the war.

So it may be that we are arriving at a new orientation of men’s minds — none the less potent that it is, for the moment, inarticulate — as inarticulate as was the grief of these simple people for the loss of their sons who lie beside yours in French soil. But this new orientation, this awakening from dreams, is exerting and will, in the future, more and more exert, pressure on the side of reason and sanity, which as men know through all ages, make for security. And in that pressure, direct, human, elementary, towards a recognition of the facts of this life, I, a loyal lover of France, beg you always to believe and to trust.

Surgeons and the Soul

IN
the memorable Hunterian oration to which we have listened this afternoon, Sir John Bland-Sutton touched on that noble verse in Ecclesiasticus: “Honour the Physician with the honour which is due to him for the uses which ye may have of him”. There is an alternative reading, which runs, “Honour a Physician before thou hast need of him”. It is also seemly to honour him after that event. And I have — not another justification, but an excuse, for speaking in such an assembly as this. I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag’s food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal’s antlers. Moreover, in the case of the human animal, that acquired tint, or taint, is transmissible. May I give you an instance? There is a legend which has been transmitted to us from the remotest ages. It has entered into many brains and coloured not a few creeds. It is this: Once upon a time, or rather, at the very birth of Time, when the Gods were so new that they had no names, and Man was still damp from the clay of the pit whence he had been digged, Man claimed that he, too, was in some sort a deity. The Gods were as just in those days as they are now. They weighed his evidence and decided that Man’s claim was good — that he was, in effect, a divinity, and, as such, entitled to be freed from the trammels of mere brute instinct, and to enjoy the consequence of his own acts. But the Gods sell everything at a price. Having conceded Man’s claim, the legend goes that they came by stealth and stole away this godhead, with intent to hide it where Man should never find it again. But that was none so easy. If they hid it anywhere on Earth, the Gods foresaw that Man, the inveterate hunter — the father, you might say, of all hunters — would leave no stone unturned nor wave unplumbed till he had recovered it. If they concealed it among themselves, they feared that Man might in the end batter his way up even to the skies. And, while they were all thus at a stand, the wisest of the Gods, who afterwards became the God Brahm, said, “
I
know. Give it to me!” And he closed his hand upon the tiny unstable light of Man’s stolen godhead, and when that great Hand opened again, the light was gone. “All is well,” said Brahm. “I have hidden it where Man will never dream of looking for it. I have hidden it inside Man himself.” “Yes, but whereabouts inside Man have you hidden it?” all the other Gods asked. “Ah,” said Brahm, “that is my secret, and always will be; unless and until Man discovers it for himself.”

Thus, then, gentlemen, does the case stand with Man up to the present. Consider, for a moment, the pathos of the poor brute’s position! You all know the common formula for him. “Born of Woman, on Woman designed to beget his like — the natural quarry of the Seven Deadly Sins,
but
the Altar of an inextinguishable Hope”. Or, more scientifically (I regret I am not a scientific person), he might be defined as “An imperfectly denatured animal intermittently subject to the unpredictable reactions of an unlocated spiritual area.”

And it is just this search for this unlocated spiritual area, whether it be a growth or a survival, which has preoccupied Man from that day to this. The Priest and the Lawgiver have probed and fished for it all through the ages; but, more than any other, through all the ages, the Leech, the Medicine-Man, the Healer, has been hottest on its track. He has searched wherever he dared — openly or furtively — in safety or at the risk of his life. In the early days the Astrologer-Physician, as he called himself, dreamed that the secret of Man’s eternal unrest was laid up in the sun, moon, and stars; and consequently, since all created things were one in essence, that an universal medicament for Man’s eternal woes could be discovered upon earth. So he searched the earth and the heavens for those twin secrets, and sacrificed himself in the search as a matter of course. Later, when the embargoes on the healing art were lifted, — when, at last, he was permitted to look openly into the bodies of mankind — the nature of his dreams changed for a while. He had found more wonders beneath his knife than earth or the planets had theretofore shown him. And that was barely ten generations ago! Once again, the Surgeon, as he had become, renewed his search, and once again sacrificed himself in the search as his passion drove him. There is no anaesthesia so complete as man’s absorption in his own job.

In the teeth of the outrageous, the absurd disabilities imposed on him, Man — the imperfectly denatured animal, who cannot trust the evidence of his own senses in the simplest matter of fact; whose evidence on the simplest matter is coloured by his own iniquities — Man, always the hunter, went up against the darkness that cloaked him and every act of his being, to find out what order of created being he might be. He called it scientific research. It was the old quest under a new name. But, this time, the seekers who headed it, unlike the Priest and the Lawyer, admitted that they knew very little. Experience had taught them to be humble. For that reason their knowledge was increased. They moved forward into areas of the body, which, till then, had denied themselves to man’s hand. They were turned back, without explanation, from other areas which, as yet, would tolerate no spying. They were bewildered by mysteries which some new marriage of observation upon accident, some predestined slip of the knife resolved into mysteries profounder still! Is it any wonder that the old dreams came back? The dream of the essential unity of all created things — the dream that some day that which men called Life might be led into matter which men called dead — the boldest dream of all, that eventually Man might surprise the ultimate secret of his being where Brahm had hidden it, in the body of Man. And, meanwhile, their days were filled, as yours are filled, with the piteous procession of men and women begging them, as men and women beg of you daily, for leave to be allowed to live a little longer, upon whatever terms.

Is it any wonder, gentlemen of the College of Surgeons, that your calling should exact the utmost that man can give — full knowledge, exquisite judgement, and skill in the highest, to be put forth, not at any self-chosen moment, but daily at the need of others? More than this. Your dread art demands that instant, impersonal vision which in one breath, one beat of the pulse, can automatically dismiss every preconceived idea and impression, and as automatically recognise, accept, and overcome whatever of new and unsuspected menace may have slid into the light beneath your steadfast hands.