Art isn't just pictures - Rudyard Kipling an introduction

How best to continue with this blog?

...........until I have the time or opportunity to write something new I have decided to 'reprint' a short article from issue one of the newsletter found here issue 1 in which I wrote a very brief outline introduction to Rudyard Kipling. Hope you enjoy....

Art is quite an all encompassing word and covers many different medium (is that the right word). Art is not just paintings or logos or photographs or illustrations, it is also books, poems and other written forms. The Masonic Art Exchange Group was created to mainly cover the ‘pictorial’ form of Art but I think it is important to include the other forms.

Some of the world’s greatest artists and authors have been members of this great craft and I am hoping that over the coming months someone out there would like to investigate some of them and put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and tell us a little bit about them.

I will leave it up to your imagination on how to define an artist as the definition is as varied and exciting as the definition of Art itself.

I will attempt to start the ball rolling with a very light introduction of just such an artist, and do not consider this attempt to be a definitive example because as I have pointed out at the beginning of this newsletter my strengths have never really been in the written word, and also as we are not printed newsletter we are not limited for space. Unlike the gentleman below.

Rudyard Kipling - An introduction to an artist of the written word

My awareness of Rudyard Kipling came probably first at about the age of 15 when I watched the movie, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ starring Sean Connery, and Michael Caine as the main characters and Christopher Plummer as Kipling himself, this lead me to read his short story of the same name I later realised this was also my first real encounter of the ‘world’ of fraternal societies, the mystery of Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan being able to rely upon a ‘brother’ so much as they did in the tale, and their encounter of the symbolism of the craft in that far away land of Kafiristan.

The man who wrote this story and many others that are familiar from our own youth and passing into adulthood such as; ‘The Jungle Book’ (how many read the book BEFORE seeing the movie?) and Gunga Din was born in Bombay, India on December 30th 1865 to Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and (John) Lockwood Kipling. Lockwood was a Freemason [3] and an artist himself and taught architectural sculpture at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art and Industry in Bombay. [1]

Kipling was soon joined by a younger sibling and as was the custom in British India, at the age of six he and his three-year-old sister, Alice ("Trix"), were taken to England to be schooled with a couple who took in children of British nationals living in India. The two children were live with the couple, Captain and Mrs. Holloway, at their house, Lorne Lodge, in Southsea (nr Portsmouth) for the next six years. Kipling wrote later in memoirs that he was treated appallingly whilst in their care [2], in the spring of 1877; Alice Kipling returned from India and removed the children from Lorne Lodge.

Kipling remembers,

".....often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it". [2]

In January 1878 Kipling was admitted to the United Services College, at Westward Ho!, Devon, a school founded a few years earlier to prepare boys for the armed forces. Towards the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship and his parents lacked the ability to finance him; consequently, Lockwood Kipling obtained a job for his son in Lahore (now in Pakistan), where Lockwood was now Principal of the Mayo College of Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. Kipling was to be assistant editor of a small local newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette. It is a similar scene where ‘Kipling’ first meets Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan as they are about to head out on their great adventure.

So with his new career ahead of him Kipling sailed for India on 20th September 1882 and arrived in Bombay almost a month later 18th October. He described his arrival years later:

"So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older,
and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them."[2]

In 1885 the Lodge of Hope and Perseverance #782 of the English Constitution was looking for a secretary[3] Kipling’s Father Lockwood was approached as the brethren had heard of young Kipling and with special dispensation at the age of twenty years and six months Rudyard Kipling became a Freemason and secretary of his Lodge .Kipling worked hard at the Civil & Military Gazette which was published six days a week and soon started to write his own prose and short stories in 1886 with the change of the editor Kipling was asked to contribute short stories to the publication. Then in the January of 1888 Plain Tales from the Hills, Kipling's first prose collection was published in Calcutta. His writing continued at a frenetic pace and during the following year, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie, containing a total of 41 stories, some quite long. By now he had also transferred to the sister of the Civil & Military Gazette in Allahabad.

In early 1889 after leaving The Pioneer after a dispute and selling rights to some of his work he used the money which included six months’ severance pay from The Pioneer to return to London which he and many others considered to be the literary centre of the world. On the 9th of March 1889 he set of on his travels after roving through much of the USA and meeting giants of the writing world such as Mark Twain he arrived at Liverpool Docks in October 1889. He was soon to take the London literary scene by storm.

Rudyard Kipling was in London and went from strength to strength in both his literary and Masonic career. Kipling died at the age of 70 and in his long life he played quite a big role. As far as freemasonry he also received his Mark Master Degree in a Lahore Lodge and affiliated a craft lodge in Allahabad.

In London he affiliated as an honorary member to Motherland Lodge number No. 3861, was a member of Authors Lodge No. 3856 and was also a founding member of Lodge Builders of the Silent Cities No. 4948. He also joined fellow mason Robbie Burns as one time poet laureate of Canongate Kilwinning Lodge No. 2 in Edinburgh. [3]

As I mentioned in the introduction this is just a very brief delve into the life of a man who in my humble opinion was a true artist and still continues today to delight many generations with the tales of a young boy raised in the Jungle and I personally thank him for an early introduction into a fellowship of men who I am now very happy to count myself part of.

For more articles on Masonic Art and Artists visit our website and have alook at the newsletters http://masonic-ae.com/news.html

I have put this together from a few sources some which I am unable to credit as there was no author given however the three main references were as follows for the life of Kipling:
[1]Gilmour, David. 2002. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.
[2] Kipling, Rudyard (1935/1990) Something of myself and other autobiographical writings. Cambridge University Press.
And for the information on his Masonic ‘career’:
[3] http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/kipling.html
I do recommend reading this paper if you get the chance.