Defender of the Empire and Civilization
Unofficial Poet Laureate of the English Speaking Peoples
Youngest Nobel Laureate for Literature
Born December 30th, 1865 - Died January 18th, 1936
A medley of Kipling related material from this blog and elsewhere...
141 Years Old and Still Looking Good
From a long-time reader. Rudyard Kipling's house at Shimla.
That was Henry James assessment of Kipling. It is not, as you can imagine, our view or that of Roger Kimball:
How different it once was. Around the turn of the last century, at the apogee of Kipling’s fame, Mark Twain wrote that he was “the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark, the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable.” In Kipling, the zeitgeist briefly found its impresario. For a time, his authority was as much political as literary. Kipling gave speeches advocating British supremacy in India and South Africa. He opposed the suffragettes and home rule for Ireland. He could be downright strident. It was Kipling, one of his biographers speculates, who popularized the metonymy “Huns” (actually, he insisted on “huns” with a small “h”) for “Germans,” a subject on which he grew increasingly ferocious. By 1915, Kipling was insisting that there were “only two divisions in the world … human beings and Germans.” Kipling consistently refused state honors (a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the post of poet laureate) but by the late 1890s he was the undisputed if unofficial laureate—but also, which is sometimes forgotten, the Jeremiah—of Imperial Britain.
But then he fell, fast and hard. In the span of a few years he went from acclaimed genius, the youngest literary nobel laureate then or since, to being the very personification of camp and bigotry. It was not, as I've noted in this space before, for Kipling's faults that he was, and still is, despised. He is hated for his virtues.
Imperialism became an epithet in the early twentieth century because, according to Lenin, it was the highest form of capitalism. Apologists of empire were, therefore, running dog lackeys of the bourgeoisie, slowing down historical inevitability. Capitalism and imperialism are not necessary corollaries, the latter predates the former by millennia. So far as the early European empires had any ideological rationale, it came from mercantilism, not the laissez-faire capitalism that replaced it. In the 1860s, at the very height of classical liberalism's influence on British policy, there were serious discussions about simply getting rid of the Empire, including Canada. Capitalism leading to imperialism was pure myth, but a Leninist myth that gained wide currency among communists, their fellow travellers, and a long train of useful idiots.
Kipling was one of communism's first intellectual victims in the West. But the hatred of Kipling was more than political, it was visceral. The Left of the middle decades of the last century hated his politics, but it was his sense of life that they found truly repulsive. He was not a good intellectual, because he did not celebrate the educated elite, and their struggles with middle class morality. The engineer, the businessman, the solider, and the ordinary, practically minded man in the street, were feted by Kipling. They were his people. The doers and makers, however humble. He could find the grandest nobility in a water bearer. Very little among the aesthetes.
Such common nobility was an affront to modern intellectuals. Ordinary people were suppose to be weak and foolish, needing to be ruled over. The intellectuals were to be the rulers and guiders. There can be only one noble class in a nation, and Kipling found his in the barrack rooms, not the salons.
He committed three unpardonable sins. First, he was an imperialist at the wrong moment in history, second he despised intellectuals (not as a type, but as a class) and third because he was so competent. Being told you don't matter is one thing, being told you don't matter by a master of the language is something else. Kipling rhythms and scans. It is poetry as most would have recognized it before the twentieth century. It was definitely not modern. Kimball quotes, a mostly well intentioned review, of Kipling by T.S. Elliot. The modern master criticizes the author of If and The Gods of the Copybook Headings for having “excessive lucidity.” A problem which does not, in anyway, afflict either modern poets or intellectuals.
As has become an annual rite, we mark the birthdate of Rudyard Kipling, born December 30th, 1865. He was born in Bombay, which Hindu nationalists renamed Mumbai. We continue to call it Bombay. Because that is what my ancestors called it - Bom Baia, Good Bay - when they handled it over to the British, as dowry for Catherine of Braganza. It is the name the world knows it as, and as Kipling knew it. A century ago Rudyard Kipling was the most famous writer in the world. His poetry mattered, at that last moment in English speaking history when poetry itself still matter, before it lost rhyme and meter and became the purview of obscure minded academics.
Kipling wrote of merchants, mystics, engineers, statesmen and common foot soldiers. His identity was Anglo-Indian, as his parents and their generation of British derived residents described themselves. A century before Kipling's birth the adventurer Robert Clive, a youthful Shropshire hoodlum, achieved the conquest of much of the northeast of the continent. A large foothold that over the next half century was consolidated until either the British Crown, or the East India Company, controlled virtually the whole of the subcontinent.
Clive was the sort of fellow that could easily have fallen out of the pages of a Kipling story. By sheer will and guile he conquered a high civilization much older than his own. India a far larger place than Britain. Perhaps a hundred thousand 'Anglo-Indians' ruled over some three hundred million Indians in Kipling's time. The world they created was a bizarre, and fascinating, synthesis of the European and native cultures. The languages mixed and created a network of slang. An architecture both grand and obscene. Kipling was a foreigner, an Englishman, thoroughly immersed in this alien and brilliant culture. His most famous novel, Kim, the story of an Irish soldier's orphan wandering through India with his Lama mentor, had as its backdrop the Great Game.
The soldiers, statesmen and merchants that Kipling wrote about could look at a map of the neat and elongated triangle that is the Indian subcontinent. To its east and north lay the impenetrable Himalayas. To the North West lay the plains that stretch from modern Pakistan, up into the Hindu Kush, and finally reached Afghanistan. This strategically placed bit of nowhere lay to the south of the rapidly expanding Russian Empire. British colonial officials, with that bit of paranoid imagining which was their special gift, could see the Russian Bear storming down into the subcontinent, with only a few thousand redcoats and sepoys to stop them. They must be kept out. Afghanistan was the logical place. Three attempts were made to subdue the Afghan tribes to British rule. Two abysmal failures and one qualified success. The jostling of Russian and British agents for influence in Afghanistan acquired a moniker, the Great Game. It was the stuff of both Victorian Ian Fleming and Edwardian John le Carre. Its madness and seeming futility affected even Kipling, that keen though intelligent advocate of Empire.
In 1894 Her Majesty's Servants was published by Harper's Weekly. A short story it tells of Indian Army pack animals discussing the nature of war and life. It was a piece of Kiplingesque whimsy with a deeper point. The story revolves around a military review, marked for visit of an Afghan emir with the Viceroy of India. Though the Viceroy is never named, it is probably Lord Dufferin, who had earlier served as Governor-General of Canada. After the review is finished, one of the Amir's men questions an Indian Army officer:
Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘in what manner was this wonderful thing done?’
And the officer answered, ‘There was an order, and they obeyed.’
‘But are the beasts as wise as the men?’ said the chief.
‘They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.’
‘Would it were so in Afghanistan!’ said the chief; ‘for there we obey only our own wills.’
‘And for that reason,’ said the native officer, twirling his moustache, ‘your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.’
So now do modern Viceroys, and modern Amirs, try to rule Afghanistan. The problem is still the same: "we obey only our own wills." This would seem to be an individualist cry. So it is, albeit very primitive. An individualist who is unwilling to submit, or can grasp, the principle of contract, either social or personal. An "individualist" who functions at short-range, by whim and will. The British colonial army of Kipling's day was all volunteer. Men who had willing bound themselves to its harsh discipline.
The war Canadians are fighting in Helmand is not against the primitive religious fanatics who once ruled there, and would rule again should the NATO forces fail in their task. They are fighting a mindset within the Afghan people, who have not yet been able to grasp the concept of "nation." A nation, in part, is a society of obedience without force. Whatever government may rule over a nation, that group of people wish to live together.
One of the decisive advantages the Europeans had when they past the Cape of Good Hope was nationalism. Their ships were of better design, but not so much better. The Indians and Chinese had used gunpowder in war long before the Europeans. As Albuquerque and Clive made their way through the Byzantine world of Indian power politics, they could count on the loyalty and unity of the few men they had. It's a loyalty that Hamid Karzai has been unable to buy with all the wealth funnelled to him. It's a loyalty he sorely needs for today's Great Game.
The two men's pride and grief book-end the film and the 1997 play, both written by David Haig, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Kipling. The moral center of the play rests not Kipling's grief but his perceived guilt. The great poet is keen to see English manhood do its duty against the German menace, even his short-sighted, seventeen year old son. The boy's mother, played with matronly grace by the very unlikely Kim Cattrall, and sister are horrified at the prospect of young Jack in combat, both, at different points in the drama even call Kipling a murderer. The composed and courteous Haig / Kipling unhinges himself only twice in the film, when he receives the fateful telegram, and when the word murderer at last flies from his wife across the Tudor great room of Bateman's, the family's home. "I've considered the possibility" is his angry and weeping response. The film condenses time considerably, the Kiplings are shown frantically searching for their son, declared MIA at the Battle of Loos in 1915. They exhaustedly review photographs of captured Tommies from the Red Cross, Cattrall's Caroline snapping that her husband's influence had gotten the unfit boy into the army, his influence would find him now. Closure is given in the film, at least, to the Kiplings in the form of an inarticulate private's sobbing description of their son's last moments. Popular with his men, Lieutenant Kipling dies before a machine gun position, Radcliffe's flinching and contortions, as the bullets strike him, is interspersed with the private's story.
The guilt Kipling carries until his death in 1936, two days before that of George V, drives his later work in the Imperial War Graves Commission, something not mentioned in the film. It also flowed into his work. The Gardener, a short story Kipling wrote, recalls a mother's searching for her son's grave (the story is well analyzed in Stephen Cox's The New Testament and Literature, which highlights its latent Christian themes). Most famously, Kipling's grief is shown in the poem My Boy Jack, which closed both the play and film.
“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!
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