The Gods of the Copybook Headings
WITH the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.*
They denied that Wishes were Horses;* they denied that a Pig had Wings.*
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming,* They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know”.*
On the first Feminian Sandstones* we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death”.*
* That the moon is made of green (unripe, as opposed to mature) cheese was a proverbial hoax by the sixteenth century. “Ye fetch circumquaques” said John Heywood in his ‘Book of Proverbs’ (1546) “to make me beleeve, / Or thinke, that the moone is made of a greene cheese.” Kipling has in mind those Utopian politicians who ‘promise us the moon’ and more. Common sense not only queries whether the cheese we are being offered is fine English Stilton; it doubts whether it is even an everyday cheese from Holland. In ‘English Traits’ (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) declared that such scepticism was typical of the English, though his metaphor was muffins. “He must be treated with sincerity and reality; with muffins, and not the promise of muffins.”
* ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride’ is a seventeenth-century Scottish proverb warning against actions taken on the basis of wishful thinking rather than hard reality. Politicians offer us wish-horses, but the copybook proverbs warn us that we won’t be able to ride them.
* Sixteenth-century lexicographer John Withals recorded in his A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners (1556) the proverb “Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward”, a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder when credulity is being stretched too far. This has worn down today into ‘If pigs had wings, they could fly’ or more abruptly, ‘Pigs might fly!’. The maxims of our forebears warn that social and economic micromanagement has as much chance of working as a pig has of flying.
* A barb aimed at Welsh Prime Minister David Lloyd George (in office 1916-1922) and his advocacy of disarmament following the Great War, which was imposed severely on the German Empire by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The deal also committed the Allies to phased disarmament. Kipling’s suspicions were justified: the policy of Disarmament became such an idol that in the 1930s, in a desperate bid to avoid a repetition of the Great War, smaller European states were ‘sold and delivered bound’ to Germany and Italy, and Disarmament became Appeasement.
* Kipling expressed his negative views on a heathen faith in ‘reeking tube and iron shard’ clearly in ‘Recessional’ (1897); but if war-readiness is a ‘devil’, war-unreadiness is a worse because it suggests moral decay. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things” wrote philosopher J. S. Mill (1806-1873): “the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.”
* The ‘feminian’ era suggests the campaigns of such as Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891), founder of Girton College in Cambridge and of the Women’s Suffrage Committee in 1866, and Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), founder of the more aggressive Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. Kipling was not enamoured of suffragists in the Pankhurst mould, and his belittlement of them in a letter (December 4th, 1911) to Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal in America — he intimated that they either had no man in their lives, or had one they could or would not please — does him no credit; but in the present passage, his lament was for the weakening of marriage, the disintegration of family life, and selfishness in love, subjects which had been driving some of his most bleak, poignant and sympathetic storylines for thirty years.
* See Romans 6:3.
