The Press MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 1936. Rudyard Kipling

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21685, 20 January 1936, Page 10

The Press MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 1936. Rudyard Kipling

Mr Rudyard Kipling, whose death is announced in the calple news this morning, was predeceased by his public. That is because the political aspect of his writings has overshadowed their literary qualities and because

much of the work he did in the last 10 years was bad. For most Englishmen, and for most continental students of British history, Kipling is associated with a brand of imperialism which is now thoroughly unpopular. Between about 1830 and 1890 free trade, the pressure of population, and the urge to commercial expansion produced by the industrial revolution had created a second British Empire. Yet despite the propaganda work of colonial reformers of the Wakefield school, and despite the prescience of Disraeli, the great mass of Englishmen were hardly conscious of the new Empire and its possibilities. Indeed, the imperialism of Disraeli made them faintly uneasy; and when Gladstone evacuated Afghanistan and the Transvaal and refused to allow Gordon to embroil him in the Sudan, he was the instrument of a powerful anti-imperialist reaction. Kipling’s great accomplishment, in the political sphere, was to make middle-class Englishmen conscious of England overseas and to elevate the Empire from the status of a commercial undertaking to that of a moral crusade. “ Plain Tales from “ the Hills ” was published in 1887, the year of the first Jubilee, and by the time of the second Jubilee Kipling was perhaps the most popular writer in England. The shock of his impact on an introspective literary world dominated by the melancholy young men of the “Yellow “Book” school was tremendous; and naturally enough the critics received him coldly. Henry James noted him as “ a strangely clever youth “ who has stolen the formidable mask of matur- “ ity and rushes about making people jump “ with the deep sounds, the sportive exaggera- “ tions of tone, that issued from its painted “ lips.” At the turn, of the century a less discerning critic wrote; “We have struggled out “ of the slough of that school of literary triflers

“to whom the turn of a phrase was every- “ thing, the substance nothing. The robust “ romance of Rider Haggard ,and the elevating “ imperialism of Kipling have dissipated the “ vapours of this unhealthy and emasculated “school.” It is an ungrateful task, in an age which regards possessions overseas as an embarrassment and a stigma, to essay a defence of Kipling’s imperialism. Yet it must be insisted that his enthusiasm for the Empire and .the imperialist ideal was born of something rifbre than a boyish enthusiasm for pomp and

colour and outlandish names. The indifference of European nations and of the United States to the fate of many millions of backward peoples in India, Africa, and the Far East aroused in him a justifiable anger; and he was sincere in his belief that the imperialist system was the only means of raising the economic status of such peoples and saving them from exploitation. If that view seems naive, it can only be said that it has many supporters, including Mr Bernard Shaw, who are not usually regarded as political reactionaries. It must also be said that the reaction against Kipling and against imperialism has gone too far. Nations which acquire empires cannot undo the harm they may have done in the process merely by abandoning their overseas possessions. America, for instance, may in the past have inflicted wrongs on the Filipinos; but she is not redressing any of those wrongs by granting the Philippines an independence which cannot be maintained. There is still a “ White “Man’s burden”; the only difference is that it has become more burdensome. From the literary as opposed to the political attack Kipling is in no need of defence, unless it be against his own parodies of himself. Half-a-dozen of his novels and perhaps a, score of his short* stories have the quality of robustness that makes classics. At its best, his prose is magnificently direct and flexible; at its worst it is flamboyant and jerky. If he was never a master of modern English prose, he was certainly one of its makers.