Kipling’s Conflicted Reputation

chromolithograph “Et tu, Brute!” by J.S. Pughe, published on the cover of Puck (Jan. 29, 1902), depicting Kipling prodding the British lion with criticism

     Among authors who have found a place in the literary canon, Rudyard Kipling is among the most popular with the general public.  Virtually all English speakers (and a great many others around the world) are familiar with his children’s books, the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book and these are scarcely his only works that appeal to the young.  I recall having been enchanted by "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" at the age of eight or nine and by Captains Courageous not long after..  Some two dozen movies have been made from his fiction, not to mention television shows and a musical (Just So).  Not so long ago, a poll of the British public chose Kipling’s “If –” as the most popular English poem of all time [1]. 

     Unlike some best-selling writers, Kipling also gained a considerable reputation among literature’s cognoscenti.  When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, the presenter called him “the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that [Great Britain] has produced in our times” [2].  Randall Jarrell approvingly quotes William James’ assertion that he was “more of a Shakespeare than anyone yet in this generation of ours” [3].  In the introduction to the Penguin edition of his short stories Andrew Rutherford calls him “beyond question the finest short- story writer in the English language.” [4]  For Angus Wilson his work is “a great East Window that shines and glints and darkens and dazzles as nothing else in any literature” [5]. 

     This catalogue of praise could be indefinitely extended, yet, from the start, many critics reacted with ambivalence or worse.  Even the Nobel speech is carefully qualified, delicately noting that “Kipling may not be eminent essentially for the profundity of his thought or for the surpassing wisdom of his meditations.”  Jarrell’s essay cited above, had, along with the comparison to Shakespeare, also included the line, only partly ironic, “Kipling is someone people used to think wonderful.  Now we know better” and concluded “Kipling’s account is still unsettled.”  William James did indeed compare Kipling to Shakespeare, but he also felt sheepish about his approval, saying in a letter to his brother Henry, “I have been ashamed to write of that infant phenomenon, not knowing, with your exquisitely refined taste, how you might be affected by him, and fearing to jar.” [6] 

     The inimitable Max Beerbohn felt such a passionate dislike for Kipling that he ornamented his own copy of Barrack Room Ballads, altering the portrait frontispiece by adding bloody hands and calling the author in a marginal note in his copy of A Diversity of Creatures an “Apocalypic [sic] Bounder who can do such fine things but mostly prefers to stand ( on tip-toe and stridently) for all that is cheap and nasty.” [7] 

     That may have been the result of a personal antipathy, but by the twenty-first century a professor felt he might say “As a rule, the literati of the moment pay little attention to Kipling.” [8]  Kipling has suffered the fate of prima facie criticism on grounds of both content and form.  He is commonly identified as a jingoist, chauvinist, racist, and imperialist, positions which, however popular they may be for less thoughtful citizens and the politicians who cater to them, find less favor with the intelligentsia.  Such condemnation on political grounds is wholly fallacious as the views of an author’s characters or, indeed, of the author, have nothing whatever to do with the value of the work [9]. 

     Even apart from that fundamental theoretical point, reference to Kipling’s texts throw the character of his commitment to imperialism itself into question.  Kipling is so regularly identified as a partisan of the Raj that challenging that association may seem surprising, but the fact is that Kipling virtually never expresses support for the colonialist administrators or racist views of India’s inhabitants, nor does he on the other hand express protest or condemnation of Britain’s rule.  He and his characters simply accept the circumstances in which they find themselves as given. 

     While true that the Englishmen who administer Indian affairs often in his pages refer to the locals as “niggers” [10] (or as “naygurs,” if the speaker is Irish), yet, offensive as the term is today, they use it without derogation.  Kipling is quite sincere when he declares that Gunga Din is "a better man than I am."  Though “blackfaced,” and a “heathen,” though the speaker says he “belted” and “flayed” the water carrier like a slave, he cannot help but admire him, in part because “’e didn’t seem to know the use o’ fear.”  Another such front-line fighter calls the Sudanese opponent in “Fuzzy Wuzzy” “a first-class fighting man.,” in spite of the belittling epithet of the title.  Contrary to blind chauvinism, this Englishman acknowledges that these “’eathens” had “knocked us ‘oller.”

     Just as Kipling expresses respect for non-white races, whether or not they oppose British rule, he has an utterly non-heroic view of the English.  His heroes serve the ruling administration, but they never are moved to justify the system.  They simply accept it.  His soldiers sometimes put down rebels, but Kipling never offers a rationale for the battle.  His rank-and-file characters obey orders and make the best of it, trying to cadge a snooze or a drink when possible and risking their lives without any expressed ideological motivation.  They are where they are because they are servants of the Queen.  Though they are tricksters, prone to hijinks, they may also be depended upon to do their duty when it counts, sometimes even then looking decidedly unheroic as when in “The Taking of Lungtungpen” they capture a town, but do it stark naked, rendering the warriors somewhat ridiculous.  They may even contemplate deserting as in “The Madness of Private Ortheris,” though the habit of following orders returns upon a second thought.  Far from idealized colonialists out to uplift the natives and magnify the glory of the homeland, they more closely resemble Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, representing the life of what an American might call in our own army the “average G. I.,” the “grunt.”

     Even those poems most often taken as evidence of imperialist attitudes are not as decisive at second glance.  “Recessional,” a poem for Victoria’s jubilee and thus by definition politically conformist, is in fact more a cautionary warning against arrogance than a spur to further conquest.  He reminds the reader than the great empires of the past have faded and there can be little doubt that the same fate is in store for his own country.  The most apparently offensive phrase “lesser breeds without the Law,” according to George Orwell, refers not to subject peoples, but to the unruly Germans [11].

     “The White Man’s Burden” is perhaps even more infamous and is, in fact, more accurately classified as colonialist apologia.  This potted version of imperialist ideology does indeed call those defeated by the British “sullen peoples,/ Half devil and half child.”  Stubbornly refusing to see the naked and rapacious greed motivating the profiteers behind the whole colonial project, Kipling says the invaders seek only to benefit their new subjects, “To seek another's profit,/ And work another's gain,” ending famine and illness, though their good works are sometimes frustrated by the “Sloth and heathen Folly” of those they rule.  For him in this poem at any rate subject countries are only improved by foreign intervention. 

 

The blame of those ye better,

    The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour

    (Ah slowly!) toward the light --

 

Quite implausibly, while the U. K. was extracting vast amounts of wealth from the subcontinent, Kipling portrays colonial rule as an unwanted responsibility, graciously assumed by his country for the good of all.  Utterly unrealistic as it is, this poem is rare in Kipling as an actual defense of the domination of others, even such an ancient, cultured, and learned society as they found in India.

     Non-specialists may  be surprised to know that Kipling wrote the poem, not in defense of British rule in South Asia, but as encouragement to the United States with reference to the  Philippine–American War (1899-1902) [12].  Wilfred Scawen Blunt, in a satiric response that hits its mark, wrote, “Their poets who write big of the ‘White Burden.’ Trash!/ The White Man’s Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash.” [13]

     Kipling is at times explicit about avoiding pollical judgements in his stories.  The narrator of “The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney” comments that “I do not think that my friends concerned themselves much with the social or political aspects of the East.”  Similarly, in “By Word of Mouth”: “I have lived long enough in this India to know that it is best to know nothing and . . . only write the story as it happened.”

     Kipling had seemed an outright imperialist to the Nobel Committee [14] and Orwell had no hesitation about labeling him a “jingo imperialist” whom “every enlightened person” despises.  Yet even Orwell renders a mixed verdict.  In spite of being “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting,” he concludes that Kipling had no idea that “an empire is primarily a money-making concern.”  Though Kipling is “almost unconscious of the class war,” he nonetheless may be called, for all his faults,  “a good bad poet.” [15] 

     More recently revolutionary Jonah Raskin, the literary critical representative of the radical ‘sixties youth counter-culture, made allowances for Kipling, agreeing that his imperialism is more a matter of acceptance than active advocacy.  For Raskin British colonialism in Kipling is ”simply a fact, part of the circumstances of life, not to be questioned by mortals.  Though he perceives contrasts of rich and poor, strong and weak, dark and light-skinned, these categories for him need not imply struggle; in Raskin’s words, “they do not precipitate dialectical conflicts.”  In his reading “The Ballad of East and West” accepts the categories of Occidental and Oriental as essential while maintaining their equality [16].  

     While even engagé critics like Orwell and Raskin give Kipling a certain respect, his political bedfellow T. S. Eliot (who notoriously called himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo‑catholic in religion”) [17], who might be expected to approve more whole-heartedly, was reserved in his evaluation.  The mere fact that Eliot edited a book of Kipling’s poetry is sufficient to indicate his confidence that Kipling had an enduring place in English literature, yet he resists even the author’s claim to the name poet, saying that he what writes is “verse,” a lesser genre due to privileging meaning over music.  And neither his meaning nor his music comes up to Eliot’s standards.  He says,   

 

We expect to have to defend a poet against a charge of obscurity: we have to defend Kipling against the charge of excess lucidity.  We expect a poet to be reproached for lack of respect for the intellect of the common man: . . . We have to defend Kipling against the charge of being a “journalist” appealing only to the commonest collective emotions.  We expect a poet to be ridiculed because his verse does not appear to scan: we must defend Kipling against the charge of writing jingles. [18]

 

And yet Eliot does take up Kipling’s defense, calling his achievement “not only high, but unique.”  Most more recent critics are similarly ambivalent.  For example, Harold Bloom says “It is as though Kipling had set out to refute the Sublime notion of literature, which is to make us forsake easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures.” [19]

     Such defensiveness is common among intellectuals who enjoy his work.  The same editor who praises his stories as the “finest” in the English language, then feels called upon to present a wholly irrelevant (and mistaken) defense of imperialism itself [20]. 

     The second motive for Kipling’s low status among scholars is his popularity with a mass audience, which is not simply a matter of the number of copies he sold, but, more essentially, the popular elements in his work.  Eliot notes that his meters might lead some to accuse him of “writing jingles.”  Most of the great English poets do indeed take a subtler approach to prosody.  Kipling’s poems, like the equally popular chestnuts by Poe, resemble not only advertising jingles (which are often very clever), but nursery rhymes as well or the inferior sort of pop songs.  Perhaps Kipling most closely resembles Robert Service; Vachel Lindsay was equally heavy-handed with his rhythms, but more experimental.  He can sometimes sound a bit like W. S. Gilbert; each can be ingenious indeed in rhyming, but such rhyming is a quality more respected on Broadway than in academia.. 

     His fiction likewise depends on popular elements.  To analyze the nature of thus appeal in  Kipling’s short stories, I read a volume innocent of editor, notes, or introduction featuring instead a gaily painted illustration on the jacket and on the title page the promise of “exciting Tales from the Master Story-Teller” [21].  Here one might expect to find a clear notion of Kipling’s appeal to a mass audience. 

     The depiction of the picturesque Indian scene is surely in part responsible for all the stories’ popularity.  And it remains always in Kipling “exotic” for all his familiarity with Hindu customs and language, just as his lower-class protagonists sport their disreputable air as though it is a necessary colorful component of working-class status and their dialect always has a bit of an absurd and comic tone.  So, rather than understanding India or the working class, Kipling’s reader is entertained by the country which seems sometimes a kind of vast side-show (as indeed it might to tourists) and infantrymen who may not be respectable, but that is not a quality to be expected from privates (by their betters, at any rate), any more than the reader would expect working-class soldiers to use of standard English.   

     Apart from the setting, the short stories typically strive for simple and repetitive effects based on three templates: one concerning children (with high points of pathos and cloying cuteness), one relating supernatural events (with satisfying thrills and chills), and one detailing the often ironic interactions of British and natives. 

     Six of the stories center on children and of these there are two varieties: the cutely ironic children who either inadvertently or by imitating their elders achieve a good result.  Thus the scruffy proletarian adolescents in “The Drums of the Fore and Aft” and the bourgeois child in “Wee Willie Winkie” are more valorous than the adults.  In “Tods Amendment” the young boy who socializes with the local people (as Kipling had done) knows better than the colonial administration the needs of the region.  The protagonist of “His Majesty the King” by accident reconciles his parents making everyone happy.  Very cute,

     The other sort of story of children is the pathetic.  “Muhammed Din” depends on pure sentiment, the sad and sudden passing of a child, while “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” a roughly autobiographical story, recounts the misery of an expatriate’s son sent to uncaring relatives and a harsh school in England and but in the end recovering his loving mother. 

     Ten of the stories concern the supernatural.  The focus ranges from  a simple description of the impression  of the otherworldly (and an explanation) in “My Own True Ghost Story” to tales of trickery (“The Sending of Dana Da,” “In the House of Suddhoo,” and “The Rout of the White Hussars”).  Some are poignant accounts of lost love (“The Solid Muldoon,” “The Phantom Rickshaw,” and “By Word of Mouth”), and two concern animals of greater than normal powers (“Bimi” and “Moti Guj – Mutineer”).  “The Finest Story in the World” has a clever conceptual plot in which an implausible story is accompanied by humor rather than fear.  It might have been written by H. G. Wells or perhaps Isaac Asimov.  Kipling uses the marvelous, in most cases enhanced by a variety of other thematic elements: telling of deceptions (which had been a major element if the picaresque), while mixing in evocations either of romantic sentiment or rampaging beasts. 

     The remaining group of twelve stories all concern army life in India.  Kipling readily conforms to the popular culture standard of not questioning received ideas, so colonialism itself is not at issue.   Instead of lords and generals, he elevates a wily trio of proletarians, Learoyd, Ortheris, and Mulvaney to the role of protagonists.  With this team of a Yorkshireman, a Cockney, and an Irishman), Kipling represents the army’s lower ranks made up of poor and working-class men driven to enlist by economic necessity.  In “The Drums of the Fore and Aft” the lower ranks are said to be “made up of drafts from an overpopulated manufacturing area,” and the force as a whole is “blackguards commanded by gentlemen.”  Kipling notes that such men have ”no inherited morals” and in fact are “hampered by the intense selfishness of the lower classes.”  Yet their ultimate loyalty makes them look more like lovable scamps than real miscreants.     

     For all their pranks in tales like “The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney,” “Private Learoyd’s Story,” or “The God from the Machine,” their allegiance is beyond question.  In “The Big Drink Draf’”, Mulvaney, like the children who know more than their elders, helps an inexperienced officer control the men on their way to go home even to the point of flouting regulations.  In “Namgay Doola” a remote hill chief of Irish ancestry, an unruly rogue like our heroes, becomes a fighter for the Raj once he is made head of the local forces.  Similarly rebellious on occasion, his boisterous British privates are scarcely proof of a “higher race,” destined to rule others, as the ambitious pair in “The Man Who Would Be King” find to their grief.  For the most part, the reader finds comedy rather than propaganda for empire in Kipling.

    An elegant figurative representation of Kipling’s own face in a mirror appears in “To Be Filed for Reference,” a story not included in the popular edition I read: McIntosh Jellaludin, a onetime Oxford classicist has gone native and, dying of drink, gives his manuscript to the narrator.  It bears the title of Kipling’s first unpublished novel, making explicit the identification of writer and character.  This man, a variation of the “loafer,” an Englishman adrift in a strange land without the clear-cut structure and prescribed values of military or bureaucratic/governmental life, alienated like Childe Harold, neither wholly British nor Indian.  This is the dilemma Kipling presents which has complicated the evaluation of his work, most often by irrelevant political considerations, but also by the question of whether a work may be genuinely and thoroughly popular, with the characteristics of popular works: the acceptance of common opinion, the appeal to the more highly drawn effects of sentiment and pratfall comedy, and the lack of any deep psychological analysis or, for that matter, even detailed physical descriptions of his settings.  The all-too-regular meters of his verse, which strike many as suiting the nursery better than the study, are substituted by an unambitious prose style in the stories.  He relies in many on the transcription of his privates’ quite distinct accents, a sort of running joke that entertained his audience as Joel Chandler Harris had done with southern Black dialect, James Whitcomb Riley with his rural “Hoosier” poems, and Leo Rosten with Hyman Kaplan's Yiddish-accented English. 

     Can such entertainment compete with more assertively profound works?  Judged by the standards of elite high art, Kipling falls seriously short, yet in the ranks of popular writers, he is eminent indeed.  Sophisticated critics are generally capable of appreciating some popular works such as Dickens’ novels, Chaplin’s movies, or paintings by Horace Pippin, but some have difficulty in judging Kipling’s writing by the standards of its genre, not looking for subtlety where it would be jarring and inappropriate, and relishing the greatness he did achieve.  Shoddy popular works are forgotten in a generation.  Kipling looks to me like he will last a very long time.

 

 

1.  See The Nation’s Favourite Poems, 1996.  The  book followed a poll by the BBC’s Bookworm program.  “If –” received more than twice the votes of the runner-up, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”  More suprisingly, in the introduction to his selection of Kipling’s verse, no less a doyen of twentieth century poetry than T. S. Eliot declared “If –” to be his own favorite. 

2.  Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1907.  The speaker also quoted an unnamed “French critic” for whom Kipling was “undoubtedly the most noteworthy figure that has appeared within recent years in the domain of English literature.”

3.  Randall Jarrell, “On Preparing to Read Kipling,” Kipling, Auden and Co. Essays and Reviews 1935-1964, 1980.

4.  Kipling, Selected Stories, ed. Andrew Rutherford, 1987.

5.  Angus Wilson, “Kim and the Stories,” in Harold Bloom’s anthology of criticism Rudyard Kipling. 1987.

6.  Jarrell.

7.  See https://jot101.com/2021/03/max-beerbohm-and-the-age-of-improvement/.

8.  William B. Dillingham, “The Kipling Question,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 109, No. 3 (Summer, 2001).  

9.  In fact, as Kate Millet recognized in her Sexual Politics, it is often the most sexist author that reveal the most about sexism. 

10.  The reader wonders if they acquired this usage from the United States of America.

11.  George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” Collected Essays, 1942.

12.  The reference was specific enough that Kipling used the title phrase in corresponding about the Spanish-American War with  the American George Cram Cook who had served in Cuba.  Senator Benjamin Tillman quoted the poem in Congress, and Kipling sent a copy to Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, to use in convincing anti-imperialist Americans to support the acquisition of colonies.  For a good survey of Kipling’s political views, see Michael Brock, “Outside his Art,” Kipling Journal, March 1988.)

13. From Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery, 3991899.

14. In his speech af Wirsén had declared, “Kipling reveals himself as an imperialist,” but he went on to define an imperialist as “a citizen of a world-wide empire,” which sounds somewhat different with connotations closer to “cosmopolitan.”.

15.  Orwell.  In spite of these severe strictures, he insists that Kipling is no fascist.  He ridicules the “pansy left circles” that attack him on that basis.

16.  Jonah Raskin dedicated The Mythology of Imperialism (1970), which has two chapters on Kipling, to Ho Chi Minh and served as minister of education for the YippIes. 

17.  In his 1928 preface to For Lancelot Andrewes.

18.  ed. T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941).

19.  Harold Bloom, Rudyard Kipling, 1987

20.  Kipling Selected Stories, ed. Andrew Rutherford (1987).

21.  Kipling Stories: Twenty-Eight Exciting Tales by the Master Story Teller, Platt and Munk, 1960.