"There ain't no such person as The People"

Kipling, Rudyard, English poet and novelist, Nobel laureate (1865-1936). Autograph letter signed ("Rudyard Kipling").

€ 15,000.00

To the Reverend Paul Williams Wyatt (1856-1935) of Bedford, England: a noteworthy letter on Kipling's process in writing the "Second Jungle Book", life during Vermont's harsh winter season, hopes of cultivating a garden in the spring, and ideas on religion. Significantly, the letter mentions his work on the "Second Jungle Book", published the same year as the letter was written, and his collection of verses, "The Seven Seas", which appeared in 1896: "Work goes on steadily with me (when I can refrain from playing with the baby). I’m doing a new set of Jungle tales to finally end the series and remove from me the temptation of keeping plugging the same target and I have much verse that I want to get into book form but one can't hurry metre. Then I am doing broad and base and farcical yarns by way of mental aperient and that makes me happy".

Kipling describes the weather in which he received Wyatt's communication: "Your letter came to us through an all-entrancing blizzard of 1600 miles radius (they don't do things by halves in this land) just when we had struggled to town through the drifts for the first time in a week. Can you imagine seven days of wind at some forty miles an hour; thermometer from zero to -20 or 28 and a fine sand-like snow eternally driving and swishing and whirling and wheeling?" He goes on to congratulate Wyatt on his chaplaincy, discussing radicalism and people he encountered in Vermont: "I live and move and eat and sleep among an absolutely undisciplined people - just raw naked, unbroken man scuffling round in the face of raw unabashed nature - who are rather more Radicals than your well balanced mind has ever dreamed of. They oppress one another; they steal, they lie, and they go under the bondage of their own fears and superstitions exactly as all our noble breed have done since the days of Adam. 'I do now let loose my opinion' - There is only one thing in the world to lay hold of and that is Obedience - restraint, continence of word and deed. Also (this may be heresy), there ain't no such person as The People [...] But when your time comes to take a bishopric and you go overseas to new peoples (South Africa is about as cheerfully godless as most places) tell 'em that they are men under authority and rise to great power [...]". In the remainder of the letter, Kipling talks cheerfully about his plans of growing flowers in the garden once spring arrives.