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The man who would be king. Noble and insufferable, arrogant and generous, blimp and radical in one person - such is the ambiguous popular reputation of Kipling half a century after his death. By Jan Morris
Published 04 March 2002
The Long Recessional: the imperial life of Rudyard Kipling
David Gilmour John Murray, 351pp, £22.50
ISBN 0712665188
Imperialism was not always a dirty word among the British, but it did always have distasteful connotations. On the one hand, it stood for the honourable duty of advanced nations to help the less developed, and was an adjunct of the higher patriotism. On the other hand, it went with chauvinism, racism and exploitation, and with the crudest kind of jingo.
It was the singular fate of the genius Rudyard Kipling to be associated, in posterity's mind, with both interpretations. We remember the grace of some of his views alongside the crass awfulness of others: we marvel that the man who wrote Kim was the same man who remarked that the Lord Our God Most High "hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the Earth". Noble and insufferable, arrogant and generous, blimp and radical in one person - such is the ambiguous popular reputation of Kipling half a century after his death.
Innumerable critics and biographers have tried to grapple with these contradictions, but David Gilmour is apparently the first to make the writer's public persona the focus of a book. He deals, as he must, with Kipling's tangled upbringing, unenviable marriage and tragic fatherhood, but is primarily concerned with his attitudes to Britain and the empire, and his astonishing influence on his fellow citizens. Gilmour is certainly the right man for this exercise. His celebrated life of Curzon demonstrated his mastery of imperial nuance and esoteric character, and he brings to this book just the right combination of empathy, distaste and fastidious detachment. In hundreds of pages of dense narrative, there is never a flaccid line, and never a hasty judgement.
Kipling's original imperial commitment ended in about 1905, and Gilmour's conscientious marshalling of evidence seems to show that his brand of imperialism had been, on the whole, of the good kind. It was inspired by the spectacle of British India, where a minute band of British civil servants really did feel it their duty to improve the lot of the natives, by governing fairly, fostering public services, tackling poverty and famine, and putting down bandits - by doing, in fact, all the things that then seemed to most people the duty of the more fortunate nations, and which are now more often allotted to "the international community".
Kipling was not blind to the hypocrisies of the ideology, and he was not in the least interested in its economics. Perhaps his was originally an aesthetic response to empire. The officials he observed in India were often frightful bores, but there was beauty to the ascetic integrity that British upper-middle-class values demanded of them. Kipling was the product of a minor public school whose sole purpose was, he said, to "make men able to make and keep empires", and all his life he honoured its codes. When he told the American magnate Andrew Carnegie that he wanted to convert him to imperialism, he was using the word in its least tawdry senses.
Nor was Kipling ever a racist, though he sometimes sounded like one. He believed that Indians should be educated to be better Indians, not sham Englishmen, and the line so often quoted against him - "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" - was grandly capped: "But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,/When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth." "Lesser breeds without the Law", it has long been suggested, referred more to Germans and Americans than to black, brown and yellow people, and Gilmour even argues (less convincingly to my mind) that the "white" in "The White Man's Burden" refers not to pigmentation, but to character. Certainly, there is no trace of racism in his masterpiece, Kim, where even the Bengali Babu, not generally Kipling's favourite class of person, becomes a hero in the person of Hurree Babu.
British India was Kipling's seminal inspiration, with its frontiersmen and dam-builders, but it is surprising how quickly he grew out of it, and instead began to see the empire in more mystical terms. When he travelled the world more widely, his imperialism became altogether more vatic. He saw the empire then as being "in the shape of a semi-circle of buildings and temples projecting out into a sea - of dreams", infused with a touch of lyric melancholy: "Never the lotus closes, never the wild-fowl wake,/ But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for England's sake."
But as Gilmour demonstrates, the more visionary Kipling became about the empire, the more the empire lost its allure for the British. After the First World War, he tells us, Kipling was hardly at home in "a bruised and traumatised nation uneasy with greatness". He had been the undisputed laureate of the imperial pageantry and meaning, almost the empire in himself. Now some of the exuberant magic left his poetry, and emotions more introspective entered his prose. He became a bitter anachronism, projecting from his Sussex retreat criticisms and asperities on every aspect of contemporary Britain. Heroes such as Rhodes and Milner were dead and gone: now the nation was saddled with scoundrels and second-raters like Churchill and Lloyd George.
Yet Kipling was undeniably a genius still. Some of his greatest and most moving stories were written long after his loftiest imperial phase, and his prophecies of the future, expressed in scores of poems, letters and newspaper articles, turn out to have been eerily accurate. He was right in fearing that the settlement of the Boer war would be bad for the black Africans. He was right in foreseeing the evils of Soviet communism. He forecast the Second World War, and the "moral disorder" of the United States, and the degradation of the English countryside, and the corrosions of tourism, and the calamitous partitioning of India. He was certainly right in foretelling the final dissolution of the British empire. Was he right in distrusting the historical effects of democracy?
Gilmour is by no means sycophantic to Kipling's memory - he is as frank in detailing the crudities of the man as he is shrewd in analysing his subtleties. And we are conscious always, as we read this book, that we are meeting a man from another age, an Englishman born to the time when the name of England could send a chill of pride down a man's spine, when the very words "British soldier" possessed a kind of thrill, even far from Mandalay. There is pathos but no absurdity to his survival into an age of disillusioned and discredited convictions, in an irrevocably diminished state.
The book ends, indeed, on a note of gentle, proud reminder. When the second German war happened, as Kipling said it would, when the empire was on its way out and even patriotism was weakening, then the Kiplingesque ideals of stiff upper lip and never say die came once more into their own. They did not long survive, when victory was won, and they certainly did not save the empire, but as Gilmour says in the last lines of this fine, fair and generous work: "They kept their country alive."
Jan Morris's latest book is Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Faber and Faber)
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