VISION

This was Rudyard Kipling, and, though study of his life and writings has fallen out of fashion today, he was a manly man who knew what genuine manhood was and used his skill with words to define it for his generation.

“Yet this brilliant articulation of vital manhood came from the pen of a small, unathletic, bespectacled, bookish, bullied, insecure man whom friends expected would become almost anything other than the prophet of manhood for his time. ”

"I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.”

“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.”

Typical of men who are destined for influence and power, his failures and setbacks served him well.

He acquired a ruggedness of soul that began to reveal itself in his writing.

He continued to write at an astonishing pace, but it became too much for him and he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Marriage settled him and made him a more deliberate, more thoughtful writer.

He wrote enduring classics like The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, Just So Stories, The Light That Failed, and Kim. His poetry, which dealt with themes of empire, heroism, and the conflict of cultures, included “Gunga Din,” “Recessional,” “The White Man’s Burden,” and, of course, the magnificent “If—.”

What Rudyard Kipling teaches us, among so much else, is that rugged, courageous manhood is not exclusively a matter of strength and speed, of physical skill and athletic prowess. It is first a condition of soul: a vision of what masculinity is and can be.

Knowing this frees us from a trite brand of manhood that is only about the life of the body and the physical world. Instead, it teaches us that genuine manhood grows from a man’s inner life. It is born of a sense of responsibility and oriented to virtues that have the power to distinguish the life of a man from every other kind of life on earth.

He was a small, bookish, bespectacled man whom no one thought of as physically masculine. Yet he proved to be one of the most masculine of men in the only way that is ultimately important: in the manliness of the vision that guided his life and set his message aflame.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you 
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too; 
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; 
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; 
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same; 
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone, 
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, 
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, 
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, 
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!