Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1269 page)

The independence that was a “glorious privilege” in Robert Burns’s day is now more difficult to achieve than when one had merely to overcome a few material obstacles and the rest followed almost automatically. Nowadays, to own oneself in any decent measure, one has to run counter to a gospel, and to fight against its atmosphere; and an atmosphere, so long as it can be kept up, is rather cloying. Even so, there is no need for the individual who intends to own himself to be too pessimistic. Let us, as our forefathers used, count our blessings. You, my constituents, enjoy three special ones. First, thanks to the continuity of self-denial on the part of your own forbears, the bulk of you will enter professions and callings in which you will be free men — free to be paid what your work is worth in the open market, irrespective of your alleged merits or your needs. Free, moreover, to work without physical molestation of yourself or your family as long and as closely as you please; free to exploit your own powers and your own health to the uttermost for your own ends.

Your second blessing is that you carry in your land’s history and in your hearts the strongest instinct of inherited continuity, which expresses itself in your passionate interest in your own folk, your own race, and all its values. History shows that, from remote ages, the Scots would descend from their heather and associate together on the flat for predatory purposes, which now take the form of raiding the world in all departments of life — and governments. But at intervals your race, more than others, feels the necessity for owning itself. Therefore, it returns in groups to its heather, where, under camouflage of “games” and “gatherings”, it fortifies itself with the rites, passwords, raiment, dances, food, and drink of its ancestors and reinitiates itself into its primal individualism. These ceremonies, as the Southern races know to their cost, give its members fresh strength for renewed forays.

And that same strength is your third and chief blessing. I have already touched on the privilege of being broken by birth, custom, precept, and example to “doing without things”. There is where the sons of the small houses, who have borne the yoke in their youth, hold a cumulative advantage over those who have been accustomed to life with broad margins. Such men can, and do, accommodate themselves to straitened circumstances at a pinch and for an object; but they are as aware of their efforts afterward as an untrained man is aware of his muscles on the second morning of a walking-tour; and when they have won through what they consider hardship they are apt to waste good time and place by subconsciously approving, or even remembering, their own efforts. On the other hand, the man who has been used to shaving, let us say, in cold water at seven o’clock the year round, takes what one may call the minor damnabilities of life in his stride without either making a song about them or writing home about them. And that is the chief reason why the untrained man always has to pay more for the privilege of owning himself than the man trained to the little things. It is the little things, in microbes or morale, that make us, as it is the little things that break us.

Also, men in any walk of life who have been taught not to waste or muddle material under their hand are less given to muddle or mishandle moral, intellectual, and emotional issues than men whose wastage has never been checked, or who look to have their wastage made good by others. The proof is plain. Among the generations that have preceded you at this University were men of your own blood — many, and many — who did their work on the traditional sack of peasemeal or oatmeal behind the door — weighed out and measured with their own hands against the cravings of their natural appetites. These were men who intended to own themselves, in obedience to some dream, teaching, or word which had come to them. They knew that it would be a hard and long task, so they set about it with their own iron rations on their own backs: and they walked along the sands here to pick up driftwood to keep the fire going in their lodgings.

Now what, in this world or the next, can the world, or any Tribe in it, do with or to people of this temper? Bribe them by good dinners to take larger views on life? They would probably see their hosts under the table first and argue their heads off afterward. Offer ‘em money to shed a conviction or two? A man doesn’t lightly sell what he has paid for with his hide. Stampede them or coax them or threaten them into countenancing the issue of false weights and measures? It is a little hard to liberalise persons who have done their own weighing and measuring with broken teacups by the light of tallow candles. No! Those thrifty souls must have been a narrow and an anfractuous breed to handle; but, by their God, in Whose Word they walked, they owned themselves! And their ownership was based upon the truth that if you have not your own rations you must feed out of your Tribe’s hands: with all that that implies.

Should any of you care to own yourselves on these lines your insurances ought to be effected in those first ten years of a young man’s life, when he is neither seen nor heard. This is the period — one mostly spends it in lodgings alone — which corresponds to the time when man in the making began to realise that he was himself and not another. The post-war world which discusses so fluently and frankly the universality and cogency of Sex as the dominant factor of life has adopted a reserved and modest attitude in its handling of the imperious and inevitable details of mere living and working. I will respect that attitude.

The initial payments on the policy of one’s independence, then, must be financed, by no means for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith towards oneself, primarily out of the drinks that one does not too continuously take; the maidens in whom one does not too extravagantly rejoice; the entertainments that one does not too systematically attend or conduct; the transportation one does not too magnificently employ; the bets one does not too generally place, and the objects of beauty and desire that one does not too generously buy. Secondarily, those revenues can be added to by extra work undertaken at hours before or after one’s regular work, when one would infinitely rather rest or play. That involves the question of how far you can drive yourself without breaking down, and if you do break down how soon you can recover and carry on again. This is for you to judge, and to act accordingly.

No one regrets — no one has regretted — more than I that these should be the terms of the policy. It would better suit the spirit of the age if personal independence could be guaranteed for all by some form of co-ordinated action combined with public assistance and so forth. Unfortunately, there are still a few things in this world that a man must manage for himself; his own independence is one of them; and the obscure, repeated shifts and contrivances and abstentions necessary to the manufacture of it are too personal and intimate to expose to the inspection of any Department, however sympathetic.

If you have a temperament that can accommodate itself to cramping your style while you are thus saving, you are lucky. But, any way, you will be more or less uncomfortable until it presently dawns on you that you have put enough by to give you food and housing for, say, one week ahead. It is both sedative and anti-spasmodic — it makes for calm in the individual and forbearance towards the Tribe — to know that you hold even seven days’ potential independence in reserve — and owed to no man. One is led on to stretch that painfully extorted time to one month if possible; and as one sees that this is possible, the possibilities grow. Bit by bit, one builds up and digs oneself into a base whence one can move in any direction, and fall back upon in any need. The need may be merely to sit still and consider, as did our first ancestors, what manner of animal we are; or it may be to cut loose at a minute’s notice from a situation which has become intolerable or unworthy; but, whatever it may be, it is one’s own need, and the opportunity of meeting it has been made by one’s own self.

After all, yourself is the only person you can by no possibility get away from in this life, and, may be, in another. It is worth a little pains and money to do good to him. For it is he, and not our derivatively educated minds or our induced emotions, who preserves in us the undefeated senior instinct of independence. You can test this by promising yourself not to do a thing, and noticing the scandalous amount of special pleading that you have to go through with yourself if you break your promise. A man does not always remember, or follow up, the great things that he has promised himself or his friends to do; but he rarely forgets or forgives when he had promised himself not to do even a little thing. This is because man has lived with himself as an individual vastly longer than he has lived with himself under Tribal conditions. Consequently, facts about his noble solitary self and his earliest achievements had time to get well fixed in his memory. He knew he was not altogether one with the beasts. His amazing experiences with his first lie had shown him that he was something of a magician, if not a miracle-worker; and his first impulse towards self-denial for ends not immediately in sight must have been a revelation of himself to himself as stupendous as a belief in a future life, which it was possibly intended to herald. It is only natural, then, that individuals who first practised this apparently insane and purposeless exercise came later to bulk in the legends of their tribe as demigods, who went forth and bearded the gods themselves for gifts — for fire, wisdom, or knowledge of the arts.

But one thing that stands outside exaggeration or belittlement, through all changes in shapes of things and the sounds of words, is the bidding, the guidance that drives a man to own himself and upholds him through his steps on that road. The bidding comes, direct as a beam of light, from that past when man had grown into his present shape, which past, could we question it, would probably refer us to a past immeasurably remoter still, whose creature, not yet man, felt within him that it was not well for him to jackal round another brute’s kill, even if he went hungry for a while. It is not such a far cry from that Creature, howling over his empty stomach in the dark, to the Heir of all the Ages counting over his coppers in front of a cookshop to see if they will run to a full meal — as some few here have had to do; and the principle is the same — ”At any price that I can pay, let me own myself”.

And the price is worth paying if you keep what you have bought. For the eternal question still is whether the profit of any concession that a man makes to his Tribe, against the light that is in him, outweighs or justifies his disregard of that light. A man may apply his independence to what is called worldly advantage, and discover too late that he laboriously has made himself dependent on a mass of external conditions for the maintenance of which he sacrificed himself. So he may be festooned with the whole haberdashery of success, and go to his grave a castaway. Some men hold that the risk is worth taking. Others do not. It is to these that I have spoken.

“And make the council of thy heart to stand; for there is none more faithful unto thee than it. For a man’s soul is sometime wont to bring him tidings; more than seven watchmen that sit on high on a watch-tower.”

The Classics and the Sciences

I HAVE
listened with very mixed emotions to Miss Strachan’s flattering estimate of me and what I have done. There was one moment when it seemed to me that Miss Strachan was disposed, with your assent, to count me as a blessing. In return — it comes from the bottom of my heart — I hope that each and every one of you will find one person in the world before you die who can live with you and count you a blessing. I find myself in an awkward position. But I am consoled by the thought that I am not the only person who has said one thing one day and another the next. My Rectorial Address dealt entirely with the advantage of independence as a possession necessary and desirable in itself. To-day I come before you, equally convinced of the necessity and desirability of interdependence combined with association and union. As is usual in such a dilemma, I defend myself by the time-honoured formula: “I have nothing to add, and nothing to retract”. Circumstances, as the doctor, the pure scientist, and the pure politician tell us, alter cases. The case of the University College of Dundee and the University of St. Andrews is this: The end to which men in both centres are working is towards the most complete association, the strongest sympathy between St. Andrews, with its long history and tradition, and this College worthily designed to meet the needs of to-day and to-morrow, growing up beside St. Andrews to heaped honour and high tradition of her own. The goal is that her sons shall look back with equal pride and affection on College and University alike and, in their day and time there, shall consciously rejoice in them both. I set aside the immediate value to any college of access to University degrees, for, outside of this very real advantage, one can perceive the immense possibilities that the future holds, in equal, intimate, intellectual union and comprehension between this College and the University. Their differences of outlook are, after all, merely complementary. You follow, for the most part, Natural Science and Medicine, which schools as you know, were first opened when Prometheus brought down fire from heaven and Epimetheus burnt his fingers in it. St. Andrews, through time and prescription, had leaned more towards the classics, which, though craftily hidden in the decent obscurity of dead tongues, are in essence somewhat more advanced than all the morning papers. Your professors demonstrate to you scientifically that in matter there is no new thing under the sun. St. Andrews proves the same fact philosophically in the region of the mind. These almost parallel views combined give, as it were, a stereoscopic view of life, showing it in full light and shade, with God’s atmosphere about it, instead of as mere pictures on paper. More and more is our world, fresh from the shadow of death, beginning to understand that it contains matters enough for all minds to explore, wonder, delight in, and to interpret with every gift of reason, daring, and reverence that they may possess. Only, since a man’s work, to be any use, takes the whole of him, men are subdued to what they work in, and become impatient of or uninterested in the effort and idea of others in other fields. That is why all we shoemakers think that there is nothing like leather — and leave our lasts to say so! But there has always been a middle way between the attitude of Swammerdam, half-crazed at the sight of the marvels his microscope showed him in a drop of water, shutting his notebook and vowing such revelations were not to be communicated to mankind; and of that other extreme of mind which rationalises over phenomena inexplicable, and because it has given them names would deliver judgement on the secret springs of life, death, and motive in men.