THOSE ELUSIVE WHITE TIGERS

” Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…” he wrote. ” But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed nor Birth,/When two strong men stand face to face”. The famous phrase is often used in a sense opposite to that which Kipling intended.

It could be said that Rudyard Kipling was an expression of a phase of history. Similar to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, whose work could also not have been done quite as it was under any other circumstances. A celebrity in 1890, he was already an anachronism by 1930. The fact that his name still has the power to evoke strong emotions on either side of the love/hate teeter totter bears witness to some extent of his importance in social history as a barometer  of the white man’s burden measured against the fear of a black planet. He reflected the fears of a white elephant in a darkened room.

William Strang etching of Kipling. Kipling is shown in the midst of characters from his books; The Jungle Books, Captain's Courageous and the Just-So Stories

William Strang etching of Kipling. Kipling is shown in the midst of characters from his books; The Jungle Books, Captain's Courageous and the Just-So Stories

There was a period of thirty years when Kipling was the world’s best selling author, in an age when the ”fringe benefits” that authors now depend upon for a living did not exist. Between his first published work in 1886 and his death in 1936, he produced about two hundred and fifty short stories, a thousand pages of ballads and lyrics, three or four longer works which could be described as novels and some miscellaneous writings on history and travel.

Kipling is probably the most misquoted English author. A monster bearing his name has been created, to the despair of those who read Kipling’s work  and protest, vainly, that he did not hold the views or express the opinions that are commonly ascribed to him. In sum, the social and political opinions vulgarly associated with his Kipling’s name are altogether outmoded. He has long been a scapegoat and trash can for often judicious literary critics, who in his case, abandoned the trade of criticism to present a figure of Kipling which has almost no historic resemblance to the original.

''J.G. Riewald, a Beerbohm scholar, says 'the portrait has been worked on...and finally transmogrified into a cruel, bitterly satiric caricature full of loathing-"cleft chin, idiot sneer, and eyes jerking sideways as if in panic...' Max obviously had it in for Kipling as he altered the frontispiece of 'Barrack Room Ballads' into a portrait of the author, blood dripping from his reddened fingernails.''

''J.G. Riewald, a Beerbohm scholar, says 'the portrait has been worked on...and finally transmogrified into a cruel, bitterly satiric caricature full of loathing-"cleft chin, idiot sneer, and eyes jerking sideways as if in panic...' Max obviously had it in for Kipling as he altered the frontispiece of 'Barrack Room Ballads' into a portrait of the author, blood dripping from his reddened fingernails.''


It is necessary to clear away many misconceptions in order to arrive at what he actually put to paper. The Britiah Empire was a theme of only a small part of his work during only a short period of his life, and that much of what he wrote on the subject was critical. Also, critics have often selected a few sentiments expressed by characters in Kipling’s lesser juvenile pieces and assume that the whole tone and content of the author’s life work can be derived from them.

Part of the problem stemmed when he arrived in San Francisco in 1889 on his way to England from India, and laid a trail of indiscreet comments from the West Coast to the East. ”Most of the men wore frock coats and top hats… but they all spat” ”There was wealth, unlimited wealth in the streets, but not an accent that would have been dear at fifty cents”. At first he was not taken seriously, but when he became a celebrity, the American press began to react. He took London by storm that year with new works and reissues of his Indian ballads and stories. The sensation was tremendous; from the beginning, the audacious ÙKipling was the subject of controversy, although it rage more violently in America than in England.kipling3

There was no protection at the time for British literary property in the American copyright laws and his works were reprinted without the formality of recompensing the author.  This was the genesis of Kipling’s love hate relationship with the American system that began to take shape and hardened over time in his campaign against literary piracy.

It was not the glamour of the Orient that he described, but the tedium, the heat and the disease that afflicted the empire builders as they struggled with social problems which they could not solve. The stories are cynical, detached and knowing, ranging over many aspects of Indian life. The concentration of interest is on two groups of characters recurring in several stories; the idle and frivolous social circle of Mrs. Hauksbee and the listless, brutalized barracks life of British soldiers in the days when there was no refrigeration and no inoculation against tropical disease. The theme that emerged is that in spite of the social snobberies of the capital, the crudity of army life, and race prejudices, only individuals count , and must be judged by their performance of their allotted task. Kipling’s India has its heroes and they are the unnoticed and forgotten people who protect themselves  by immersion in their daily routine.


n%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D21%26um%3D1%26tbs%3Disch:1">Jungle Book. Birmingham Stage Company

Jungle Book. Birmingham Stage Company

The essence of Rudyard Kipling may be found in the two ”Jungle Books” which are known to every literate nursery in the world. As he admitted, they were written on two level, for children, especially in the Mowgli stories and for adults capable of finding a deeper meaning. The notion, borrowed from Emerson, of a man-child cast into the jungle and befriended by predatory beasts until,by accepting the law of the jungle, he learns to be its master, is a richer development of the lesson Kipling had learned in his unhappy early childhood. Mowgli , in the jungle, was exposed to a subtle temptation not unknown to young Kipling in London, the easy adulation of the monkey people, the Bandar-log, the chatterers in the treetops, who throwdirt at one another and who suppose that something has been achieved when it has been cleverly talked about.

Kipling also introduced a new theme to literature, the romance of machinery. Kipling had seen the engineer as a new type of man, a notion forshadowed by Wordsworth and Whitman but left to Kipling to develop. He became the poet of the steam engine as Dickens was the novelist of the stagecoach; each of them thus fixed for us a passing phase of social history. In Kipling,s world all depends on the man, and this man can best retain his sanity in the new mechanical age by serving the machine faithfully until his expert knowledge allows him to become its master. Kipling had an insatiable curiosity about mechanisms; he wanted to know what made things work, and to get beneath the skin of the man who did know, with the consequences that engineers and administrators, not great readers as a rule, read Kipling and quoted him to one another. In the phase into which the Western world was then passing, Kipling was the laureate of the worldmakers.

Jungle Book. Magik Theatre, San Antonio, Texas

Jungle Book. Magik Theatre, San Antonio, Texas

Kipling lived at the moment in history when the last secrets of the earth’s surface were revealed. The railway, stemship and telegraph cable for the first time had brought all the continents and all the islands of the seas into direct contact. The technological mastery of the world was a Western triumph; the aggressive and inventive ”White Men”. What Kipling did was to reveal to his generation the nature of this unprecedented revolution in human affairs, and then to warn them against the moral dangers that world empire would arouse.

At the turn of the century England and the United States were involved in colonial wars which today seem hard to justify, but are not dissimilar to our present situation. The Anglo-Boer war and Spanish-American war volunteers and supporters, supposed themselves to be on the side of enlightenment. The spirit of the age, was congenial to the developer, the pioneer, and the engineer, while it reacted strongly against the crabbed obscurantism of the old Spanish Empire or of the Afrikaners.kipling6

That it was desireable for the white man to develop South Africa he had no doubt, and that the British were better suited for the task than the Boers seemed to him no less evident. But, his ballads about the British Army in South Africa were fiercely critical and allowed some merit to the Boers for their simpe virtues, as men. At the end of he war he was the first to call fro reconciliation and a new union.  His great hymn of empire, ”The Recessional” , far from being a glorification was a solemn warning and in its plea against arrogance and for humility, it produced another of the gnomic sayings so often quoted in the opposite sense from that intended:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

The poem is a condemnation of imperial pride, and of those who boast when drunk with power. It is they, the unworthy empire builders, who are described as ”lesser breeds”, and the phrase cannot be construed as referring to the colonial peoples. He also published his address to the American people, in his poem ”White Man’s Burden”, which was an appeal to America to share in the task of developing the backward countries.

The loneliness of his protagonists, Like Mowgli and Kim and their necessity to adjust to an alarming world, remained the predicament of all his later characters whom he put under the microscope in his later stories. A recurrent theme is the ”breaking strain”, the intolerable burden of the twentieth century which demands of simple human beings more than they can bear.

But Kipling has always meant more than a superficial gaze at alienation. It is his response, both stated and implied vascilating between the ambiguous and suggestion of action that seem most disconcerting. On one hand, a certain bias toward the process of learning and the education of the Christian faith, and simultaneously a perversion and antithesis of same. In some respects similar to Nietsche, where Kipling is giving a dutiful reporting of eternal recurrence in all its descriptive glory.

The present reaction against the artificialities of civilisation in favour of the instinctive, the physical, the sensual and the mystical, has been foreshadowed for a very long time. The immediate predecessors of the present romantic sensualists were, in fact, the New Right that grew up, especially in Continental countries, towards the end o of the nineteenth century, and which openly proclaimed ‘thinking with the blood’. This New Right may have drawn inspiration from the myth of an uncorrupted past, but it vied with the Marxists in demanding a sweeping overhaul of national life. It was an attempt to escape from the frustrations of urban and industrial life to move to a more emotional and physical plane of existence, usually accompanied by intense nationalist feelings. It can be traced in writers such as Nietzsche, Kipling, d’Annunzio or D. H. Lawrence. It would be absurd to identify these men with the perversion of the gas chambers, even though the Nazi period is a warning of the direction in which these ideas can lead in unscrupulous or unsophisticated hands.” ( Samuel Brittan )

''1937: An Indian prince sits in meditation in a scene from 'Wee Willie Winkie' about a small girl becoming the mascot of a British regiment in India. The film was adapted from a story by Rudyard Kipling and directed by John Ford for 20th Century Fox. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)''

''1937: An Indian prince sits in meditation in a scene from 'Wee Willie Winkie' about a small girl becoming the mascot of a British regiment in India. The film was adapted from a story by Rudyard Kipling and directed by John Ford for 20th Century Fox. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)''

Kipling certainly took the artistic path of least resistance by falling back on default positions of  archetypal constructions with his eye on technology as window dressing to buffer his comfort zone. As clever, elaborate and articulate as it all was, it was poor art and leaden literature, and his unsung heroes, anonymous men in the service of ideals was a dangerous manipulation. It was with almost radical fervor that he promoted a technocratic dream of transforming society by means of science. The artificiality and convention of Kipling, complemented by a repressive respectability, produced in large part the tensions and anxieties he professed to be so concerned about.

”The perennial argument on the connection between Wagner’s music dramas and Nazism illustrates the essential point. It is because they appeal to basic emotions, instincts or archetypal patterns, that his works have their strange power and fascination – even for those who think that they are responding to the music only and ignoring the Nordic myths. These very deep-seated human drives are capable of producing both the worst and the best in the species – the sublimest love, the greatest heroism, and also the lowest depths of cruelty and lust for death.”

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