Rudyard Kipling: A Reappraisal

“He loved of life the myraid sides,
Pain, prayer, and pleasure, act and sleep
As wallowing narwhals love the deep.”
– Rudyard Kipling

I think it is high time we made a reappraisal of Rudyard Kipling who died several years ago. With his sad demise a great figure in English literature passed away: a great figure as well as a controversial figure. I am not suggesting that he towered over everyone of his fellows. That, palpably, he did not. There was, for instance, George Meredith who was alive when Kipling was at the zenith of his fame; and I still recall A. G. Gardiner’s righteous indignation at Kipling’s being awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature when the creator of Richard Feveral was still alive. I remember his bursting out that, no matter who received the Nobel Prize, Meredith was the uncrowned King of English Letters.

In that estimate I wholeheartedly agree with him: nor am I, let me urge, making a virtue of necessity, because I have for long been a worshipper in the same shrine as that eminent essayist and editor. Then there was Thomas Hardy. Kipling wrote nothing that can even be remotely compared with Hardy’s Return of the Native or the Woodlanders. And, among the living then, was that “fiery particle”, otherwise known as George Bernard Shaw, who was writing away for all that he was worth.

But, barring these three, Kipling’s was the mightiest pen, in his time, that was engaged in the domain of English literature. His fame would have been secure if he had written nothing but Kim and The Plain Tales from the Hills, and Soldiers Three, and The Jungle Books. (I should like to add a favourite of my own, A Book of Words, which is a selection from his speeches and addresses delivered between 1906 and 1927.)

This is the place for me to confess that I came to Kipling’s work rather late in my reading. I had heard of him, of course, long before I was intimate with his books. But, then, as an Indian, I had imbibed a deep-rooted prejudice against him for his notorious “Imperialism” – an “Imperialism” that was, if I may say so, naked and unashamed; for his equally, enthusiastic glorifying of the god of battles; for his “drum-and-trumpet history”, as some­one has called it; for his superior attitude towards those whom he has, in his own characteristic fashion, described as “the lesser breeds without the law”; for his, in short, incessant celebration of the “White Man” and what is supposed to be his “Burden.”

Naturally, I avoided him as long as possible. But when, side by side with these prejudices, I got wind also that, as a prose-writer, he was among the Chosen of the Lord, I could not hold out any longer; and I could not hold out at an once I began reading him–especially as the very first book of his that I elected to read was Kim, his masterpiece. His opening paragraph, wherein we are introduced to the Zam-zammah, was a little terrifying, no doubt, with his superabundance of unnecessary detail but, afterwards, it was a regular treat to go on with it to the very end.

I have mentioned that, opening paragraph. Well, Kipling had that embarrassing trick. He was one, all along, to whom a “fact” never came amiss. I may put it that he made a corner in “facts”: and the more of them the merrier: and, If they were technical to boot and if they referred, moreover, to boilers and engine-rooms and the bloody paraphernalia of warfare, he was in his element, indeed, and one could see him, with the mind’s eye, frisking and gambolling for all the world as if he had dis­covered the Philosopher’s Stone and had the wealth of the Indies at his feet. 

Even his metaphors and similes were largely drawn from them; For my purpose I need quote only this sentence (a fine one, and from a book that I like). It occurs in his address to the Royal Literary Society on “Fiction”, and is included in his A Book of Words:

“And in both ages (Elizabethan and the present) you can see writers raking the dumps of the English language for words that shall range further, hit harder, and explode over a wider area than the service pattern words in common”. (My italics) Here, surely, is the “ruling passion” strong even in literature.

But let us not brood too much over these failings. Kipling’s beauties far outweigh his horrors. Coming to my point, though as regards my subject I started with deep prejudice, more intimate acquaintance with it dispelled it; and, after reading Kim, I read everyone of his prose-works and some of his poems. What abides with me is a sense of the unchallengeable greataess ofthe writer.

One may divide his books into three categories: his books of prose in which his brother-in-law, Wolcott Balesteier, collaborat­ed. His books ofprose may, further, be divided into novels proper and books of short stories. Now it would be wise to forget that Kipling, even when writing prose, was far from abandoning verse. It was his habit to begin every story, or even every chapter of a novel, with a poem, or a series of poems, of his own: thus reminding us of Sir Walter Scott–though, in the case of the older writer, the poem, usually, was not his own but a quotation from an earlier poet.

The remarkable thing with these poems is that, in my opinion many of them are far better than some of those to be found in his books of verse proper. I do not suggest that they are the quintessence of poetry. But, for that matter, no poem of Kipling’s belongs to that category. He was a versifier, rather, though of the very first order. It has been remarked of Alexander Pope that one may put him down either as the last of the first-rate poets, or as the first of the second-rate. On the same principle one may classify Kipling as the best of the modern versifiers. Kipling specialised in cockney English. It is true that Burns wrote in dialect and got away with it. In a serious vein he wrote in Life’s Handicap:‘

“The depth and dream of my desire,
The better paths wherein I stray,
Thou knowest who has made the Fire
Thou knowest who has made the Clay.

“One stone the more swings to her place
In the dread temple of Thy worth­
It is enough that through Thy grace
I saw naught common on Thy earth.

“Take not that vision from my ken;
Oh, whatever may spoil or speed
Help me to need no aid from men
That I may help such men at need!”

This poem reveals the fact that there is a deeper side to Kipling: the side that has somehow been hidden away from people’s ken. It is my purpose in this article to show to my readers that it exists and that those who regard him merely as a reveller in the sight of battle and of blood have caught hold of but half the truth.

In Kim and The Naulakha we find some verses where Kipling does homage to the East: the same East that he has denigrated in other places. The fact is that, in spite of himself, he loved the Orient very, very much, indeed. One proof that I can give of this is that his best work, both in prose and in verse, deals with it. Kim is his masterpiece: and it is as Indian as the sea is salt. Many critics have pointed to “Egdon Heath” as the hero of Hardy’s Return of the Native. Well, if this is so, I fail to see what is wrong in my saying that the “Grand Trunk Road” is the hero of Kipling’s Kim: except it be that there is no chapter apostraphising it as there is apostraphising Egdon Heath in the other novel.

To buttress my thesis that Kipling had a deeper side to him than most people think I should like to quote a passage from his Book of Words. He was addressing the students of McGill University, Montreal, on “Values in Life”:

“Now, I do not ask you to be carried away by the first rush of the great game of life. This is expecting you to be more than human. But I do ask you, after the first heat of the game, that you draw breath and watch your fellows for a while. Sooner or later, you will see some man to whom the idea of wealth as mere wealth does not appeal, whom the methods of amassing that wealth do not interest, and who will not accept money if you offer it to him at a certain price. At first, you will be inclined to laugh at this man and to think that he is not “smart” in his ideas. I suggest that you watch him closely, for he will presently demonstrate to you that money dominates everybody except the man who does not want money. You may meet that man on your farm, in your village, or in your legislature. But be sure that, whenever, or wherever, you meet him, as soon as it comes to a direct issue between you, his little finger will be thicker than your loins. You will go in fear of him: he will not go in fear of you. You will do what he wants; he will not do what you want. You will find that you have no weapon in your armoury with which you can attack him: no argument with which you can appeal to him. Whatever you gain, he will gain more. I would like you to study that man. I would like you to be that man, because from the lower point of view; it does not pay to be obsessed by the desire of wealth for wealth’s sake. If more wealth be necessary to you, for purposes of your own, use your left hand to acquire it, but keep your right for four proper work in life. If you employ both arms in that game, you will be in danger of stooping: in danger, also, of losing four soul.”

It is a long quotation. But is it not worth its weight in gold? Should it not be inscribed on everybody’s heart? I put it to you that there is a side to Kipling which it will pay us to study: a side far other than that which is commonly spoken of: a side that is essentially Eastern in depth and breadth.

If Kipling had too lofty a contempt for us at one stage in his illustrious career, let us remember that he outgrew it in the end and made ample amends for it. One misfortune was that fame came too early to him: unlike what happens to the majority of people, when, in Mathew Arnold’s words:

“...we are frozen up within and quite
The phantoms of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.”

As to whether Kipling was among the very first class of English authors, whether of prose or of verse, it is futile to assert that he was. But, then, literary criticism does not end there. As the late Mr. O. E. Montague observed:

“A range of mountains may not be the Alps,
and yet have a career.”

Second-class writers, like Kipling, also have their special niche in the temple of fame: let us give them their meed of praise, and pass on.