"Helas!"

RUDYARD KIPLING--Edward Shanks--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

A French critic, asked who was really France's greatest poet, answered: "Helas! C'est Victor Hugo." Mr. Shanks sadly admits that no recent English critic would have thought of including Rudyard Kipling among England's great, even tagged with an "Alas!" Mr. Shanks says briskly that this is a lot of nonsense: Kipling was not merely a great writer but a great political thinker, and got better & better as he went along. Less a critic than a partisan, Mr. Shanks thus arouses, in his own fainter way, echoes of the same violent feelings that Kipling himself once detonated right & left.

U. S. readers have long ago forgotten or decided to ignore Kipling's political creed for the sake of his storytelling, his motto-memorable verse: Mr. Shanks sternly reminds them that they had better not. Whether or not Kipling was a profound thinker, he was an effective preacher, and he never came down from the pulpit, even when he was conducting services ostensibly for the children (The Jungle Books, Just So Stories).

Kipling despised and hated democracy in all its forms. "Democracy," says Mr. Shanks, "meant to him simply a system under which incompetent people strove to take work out of the hands of people competent to do it." Kipling apparently imbibed this conviction with his mother's milk, and it was cud enough for him to chew all his life long. Even Partisan Shanks does not quite like the sound of some of Kipling's youthful regurgitations. Speaking of Kipling's early manner, Shanks deprecates his "cynical knowingness . . . drawling and cynical knowledge , . . not really an endearing quality." And of one of Kipling's more exuberant verses (praising the delights of looting) Shanks confesses: "This is wholly detestable, and it makes the commentator on Kipling turn red when he endeavors to explain it."

Against such blunders of taste and knowledge (Mr. Shanks's prime example: "When an American knows the innermost meaning of 'Don't press, slow back and keep your eye on'the ball,' he is, for practical purposes, denationalized")--against Kipling's asinine omniscience, bouncing vulgarity, almost sadistic smugness, Shanks balances such undeniable achievements as the wisdom of Kim, the humility of Recessional. He might also have added the popularity of If.

Mr. Shanks is not very convincing when he argues that Kipling's later years were his best, or that Kipling is altogether the great writer--or quite the sort of great writer--Mr. Shanks tries to make him out. Kipling's greatest legacy to letters Mr. Shanks dismisses in a brief paragraph: ". . . the enormous influence which he has exercised on the practice of journalism in all English-speaking countries." But that, as Kipling would say, is another story.

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