Rudyard Kipling

gigatos | February 13, 2022

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Summary

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (born December 30, 1865 in Bombay, died January 18, 1936 in London) – English novelist and poet. Kipling gained worldwide popularity with his poems about British soldiers serving in the colonies and his adventure stories, which are considered a classic of youth literature. He was regarded as an apologist of imperialism, but he recognized the cultural values of the conquered peoples. He presented colonialism as the mission of the white race, whose duty it is to promote the principles of European civilization. He spent his youth mainly in India, which is the exotic background of his most famous works: the novel Kim and the fantasy stories The Jungle Book. In numerous articles and occasional speeches he commented on the most important political events in the world. His extremely widely read works evoked extremely different evaluations from critics. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his perspicacity, original imagination, daring ideas, and outstanding narrative talent.

Rudyard Kipling was born on December 30, 1865 in Bombay, British India. His parents were Alice Kipling (née MacDonald) and John Lockwood Kipling. His father, a sculptor and draughtsman who would go on to illustrate his son”s works more than once in the future, took up a lecturing position at the Bombay School of Fine Arts, founded by the English. Alice Kipling (1837-1910) was one of four Victorian sisters who married famous men: the husband of Kipling”s aunt Georgiana was the painter Edward Burne-Jones, the second aunt, Agnes – the painter Edward Poynter, the third, Louisa – the conservative politician and railroad engineer Alfred Baldwin. Kipling”s name comes from Rudyard Lake in the English county of Staffordshire, where his parents stayed while they were still pre-married. The writer already as a child became familiar with the Hindustani language, learning the tales told to him by servants.

When Rudyard was six years old, in keeping with tradition in British India, he was sent to England. He was accompanied by his three-year-old sister Alice called Trix (1868-1948) in the family. They settled in Southsea, where they were taken care of by Mr. and Mrs. Holloway, who took in the offspring of Anglo-Indians, as the British living permanently in India were called. The siblings stayed in their home for nearly six years. In his autobiography, the writer recalled this time with reluctance, ironically considering whether the combination of cruelty and neglect he experienced at the hands of Sarah Holloway could have accelerated his literary talent. In January 1878, Kipling entered the United Services College at Westward Ho! This school, known for its Spartan conditions, was founded to prepare boys for military academies or administrative work in the colonies. Rudyard”s systematic education ended at the age of 16, as his parents did not have enough funds to finance his further education at a prestigious university, he was unable to obtain a scholarship, and his visual impairment excluded him from the ranks of the army. Lockwood Kipling sought employment for his son in Lahaur, where he was a museum curator. Starting in 1882, Rudyard began working as an assistant publisher of a small magazine, the Civil & Military Gazette, where he remained until 1887.

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Indian Stories

“Civil and Military Gazette” was published throughout the year, six days a week. Over time, the publisher allowed Kipling a great deal of creative freedom and commissioned him to write stories. In the summer of 1883, Rudyard visited for the first time Simla, the summer capital of British India, where the Viceroy and members of the government moved for half a year. This city became the setting for many of the stories he wrote for the Gazette (A Germ Destroyer, On the Strength of a Likeness, Wressley of the Foreign Office). About 39 of Kipling”s short stories were published in this magazine between 1886 and 1887. Most of them were later collected in Storytelling from Below the Himalayas. In 1887 the writer was transferred to a much larger sister paper, The Pioneer, in Allahabad, for which he worked until 1889. Readers quickly appreciated his lively style, sense of observation, and ironic commentary. He worked extensively and over the next year published a total of 41 texts in the pamphlet series “The Library of the Indian Iron Railway”, ranging from novellas of a few pages to full-length short stories, collected in six volumes (Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw and Wee Willie Winkie), which could be bought from station newsagents.

In his stories Kipling describes Indians with kindness and interest, although he considers them to be a race inferior in every way to Europeans and capable of living only under the harsh rule of the white man. India is for him a picturesque background against which he depicted with satirical flair the familiar world of officers, officials, and colonial dignitaries. It is clear from his writings that he was a firm believer in the caste system, both among Indians and among the British themselves. Although he was aware of the stereotypes circulating about India (“As everyone knows, it is a country equally divided between jungles, tigers, cobras, cholera and sipayas”), he himself was generally content with rather superficial observations in his texts. Only some of his early stories stood out for their originality. In Lispeth (1888), the heroine is an Indian woman taken in by a missionary couple, who, having rescued an injured Englishman, decides to become his wife. The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows (1888) is a first-person narrative depiction of the degeneration of an opium addict who drags his wife into the habit and, after years of addiction, waits for his own death in a tavern. The City of Dreadful Night, 1885, with its titular reference to James Thomson”s poem, is an unabashedly ironic tale of Indians in Calcutta who, in charge of a municipal government, are unable to bring order anywhere and stop at idle politicking.

Kipling was also one of the first to describe ordinary soldiers who, because of their origins in the social lowlands, were often considered derelicts in the empire. Without avoiding glorification, he emphasized their nobility, sensitive feelings, spontaneous humor, and capacity for heroic sacrifices. Witty depictions of the everyday lives of privateers were the subject of Soldiers Three, a series inspired by several scenes from William Shakespeare”s Henry V. As in the play, the contrasting characters converse with each other in their native dialects (London, Scottish and Irish), revealing in the process how British people differ in habits and mentality. Kipling still treated only child characters with equal empathy and without his typical sneering humor. In The Black Lamb (Baa baa, Black Sheep, 1888) he processed his own experiences, describing a boy who was sent back from India to England, grew up with a fanatical nanny, experienced gradual loss of sight, and was irreparably maimed emotionally. Highly praised in particular was his short story The Drums of the Fore and Aft (The Drums of the Fore and Aft, 1888), portraying the bravery of two fourteen-year-olds who were the only ones in the regiment who did not retreat from a ravine surrounded by Afghan tribesmen and died a heroic death.

New topics

In Kipling”s later stories, elements of the fantastic and the uncanny appeared as often as moral plots in exotic settings. The Phantom Rickshaw (1888) is a story about a rejected woman who haunts her unfaithful lover from beyond the grave, in The Lost Legion (1893) during a night expedition the fallen soldiers mix with the living in the place of an old massacre, and in A Madonna of the Trenches (1926) the reason for a mysterious suicide turns out to be a ghost. In turn, The Finest Story in the World (1891) proves the writer”s interest in the concept of wandering of souls and extrasensory perception. A particularly successful combination of realism and horror was the story They (One, 1904), in which a pragmatic car salesman begins to believe that he is accompanied by the ghosts of dead children in an Elizabethan mansion.

Critics believe that at least two of Kipling”s texts – With the Night Mail (With the Night Mail, 1905) and Simple as D.R.U.T. (As Easy as A.B.C., 1912) – can be considered precursors to narrative techniques that did not begin to be used in science fiction literature until the 1930s and 1940s. In Kipling”s sympathetic portrayal of the world of the year 2000, society is watched over by an organization that oversees modern forms of transportation and telecommunications, and bloodlessly suppresses any signs of rebellion with light and sound weapons. In order to make the imaginary reality more plausible, the writer introduced numerous neologisms into the technical terminology, showed surprising props in passing, and stylized the language in the characters” conversations, taking their point of view on many issues. In this way he created a futuristic context that the reader takes for granted, perceives intuitively and requires no additional explanation. This way of presenting future worlds would become common only thanks to the works of Robert A. Heinlein.

Kipling also mentioned freemasonic ideals in several works. In the story The Man Who Would Be King (1888), describing two adventurers self-appointed to rule in inaccessible lands, he evoked Masonic symbolism, which had also previously appeared in his poem The Mother-Lodge (1886). The writer had already become a freemason in 1885, joining a brotherhood in Lahaur whose members were to be equal regardless of caste and color. In the mid-1980s, he was a member of a fraternity in Lahaur, where he came into contact with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and representatives of reform movements, which he later recalled with great fondness. Clear references to Freemasonry also appear in some of the stories from the volume Debits and Credits (In the Interest of the Brethren, The Janeites, A Friend of the Family).

In 1889, Kipling left India and began traveling the world. As a correspondent, he wrote reports and articles for The Pioneer, which were collected in the volume From Sea to Sea. He first ventured to Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. He traversed the United States, from San Francisco through Portland to Seattle. Later he visited Victoria and Vancouver, Canada. Again in the United States, he traveled through Yellowstone National Park, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Chicago to Niagara, Toronto, Washington, D.C., New York and Boston. He then crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Liverpool in 1889. He soon made his debut in the literary world of London, where his Indian novellas were already known and appreciated.

Kipling tried early on to tackle the larger narrative form. The contents of his first, unfinished and lost novel Mother Maturin (Mother Maturin, 1885-1886) are still the subject of speculation today. His next attempt was The Light That Went Out (1890), a dramatic story about a blind painter and his unrequited affection for an ambitious but talentless girl eager for artistic success. Her cold reactions were starkly contrasted with the warm male friendship that is a constant theme in many of Kipling”s works. After the first edition of this novel, an abridged version was also printed in the press. However, the tragic death of the painter and the unmoved attitude of his chosen one were too depressing in the opinion of the newspaper owner, so the writer introduced an optimistic ending with the marriage of the protagonists. It was not until the next book edition (1891) that he restored the original ending. It is sometimes believed that the protagonist was Kipling”s early love, Violet Garrard called Flo (1856-1938), who spurned his advances. A chance meeting with her years later, in 1890, cost the writer his nervous breakdown. The novel clearly demonstrates the author”s strong misogyny, which is also present in the short story collections The Story of the Gadsbys and Under the Deodars, whose plot revolves around unsentimental depictions of romance, gossip, and marital intrigue.

Not long after his emotional crisis, Kipling met a publishing sales representative, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he wrote an adventure novel, The Royal Jewel (1892). Its protagonist was an American engineer, traversing the Wild West and India in search of a valuable necklace. The novel”s original title, The Naulahka, is a misspelling of the word naulakha, literally meaning ”nine lakhi” (900,000 rupees), as the legendary ornament once worn by Indian rulers was called. While working together, Balestier primarily prepared the passages set in America, while Kipling authored the Indian portion. Soon the bond between the two men became so intimate that some biographers, analyzing this acquaintance, have found in Kipling repressed homosexual tendencies. After finishing the book, the overworked writer, on the advice of his doctors, set out on another trip, visiting the Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand. However, when he received news that Balestier had died suddenly of typhoid fever, he immediately returned to London. He soon asked for the hand of a friend”s sister, Caroline Balestier (1862-1939), whom he had met the year before. The proposal was accepted. The wedding ceremony took place in 1892, and the bride was led down the aisle by writer Henry James. The newlyweds began their honeymoon with a trip to the United States and then traveled to Japan. When they arrived in Yokohama, they learned that their bank had gone bankrupt. They then returned to the States and in Vermont bought several acres of land from Caroline”s brother, Beatty Balestier. They built a house there, which Kipling named “Naulakha” in honor of Wolcott and their partnership, without repeating the spelling mistake from the book”s cover. The marriage produced three children, Josephine (1892-1899), Elsie (1896-1976), and John (1897-1915).

The success of The Jungle Book

In Vermont, Kipling wrote a series of stories with a fast plot, known all over the world and originating from the tradition of Panchatantra – The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895). The protagonist of many of them was a boy living among wild animals, who, fed by a wolf pack, befriended various predators and only returned to the human settlement when he was an adolescent (Mowgli”s Brothers). The writer, without resorting to platitudes and moralising tone, has shown the whole spectrum of various attitudes to life and the harsh, though not unethical, law of the jungle. The originality of these stories also lay in the fact that Kipling, referring to the tradition of animal fairy tales, resigned from the conventional presentation of representatives of various species, which had practically not changed since the times of Aesop, Phaedrus and La Fontaine. Wolves are protective, the panther is gentle, and the wise bear is a guardian of the unwritten rules of coexistence in the community. The supporting characters – the independent python, the vengeful tiger, the philosophizing elephant, the cunning jackal, and the weeping musk rat – are also described in a way that is far from clichéd. The fairy tale as a literary genre serving as a satirical reflection of reality appeared only in the fragments depicting a herd of monkeys (Kaa”s Hunting). This collective portrait of a mindless horde was sometimes interpreted as a malicious allusion to the milieu of Hindu nationalists. Contrary to the title, not all the stories are set in the jungle. Kipling also added to the cycle a story from the polar seas (The White Seal), as well as several texts, the action of which takes place in the world of people. He presented the duties of a kornak in service to the sahib (Toomai of the Elephants), a brave ichneumon who saved a family of English colonists from cobras (Rikki-tikki-tavi), and a Hindu minister who suddenly abandoned a prestigious post and plunged into mystical, hermit-like contemplation (The Miracle of Purun Bhagat). The artistic descriptions of the lush natural world of the Ganges and the author”s extraordinary perceptiveness were with time appreciated by biologists. Kipling”s name was immortalized in the names of an extinct crocodilomorph (Goniopholis kiplingi) and a spider from the skakuna family (Bagheera kiplingi), in this case commemorating also the name of a black panther, which cared for the hero of the book.

In 1903, Kipling agreed to have some of the ideas from his stories used in the training program of a summer camp for boys whose camps were held at Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. He supported the activities of this camp throughout his life. Robert Baden-Powell also used many of the themes from The Jungle Book in creating the principles, nomenclature, and symbolism of the Scouting movement.

The French composer Charles Koechlin, fascinated by these stories, created on their basis an orchestral cycle Le livre de la jungle considered to be his most outstanding work. The cycle, which took nearly 40 years to complete, includes three songs with orchestra close to impressionism and four symphonic poems.

Initiation stories

Soon two events forced the Kiplings to leave Vermont. During this period, Britain and Venezuela were arguing over the boundaries of British Guiana. In 1895, the new U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney escalated the conflict, deciding that the United States should be the arbiter in the matter. Although the crisis eventually turned into consensual cooperation, the writer was troubled by anti-British sentiment in the American press. In addition, relations between Caroline and her brother Beatty Balestier had long been strained because of his alcoholism and debts. In 1896, Beatty began threatening Kipling on the street. The incident led to the arrest of the attacker, but the writer”s privacy suffered during a widely reported interrogation. That same year, a week before the start of another trial, the Kipling family moved to Britain.

During this period, Kipling focused mainly on writing works intended for young people. In them he praised above all the virtues on which the durability of the British empire depended. In this way he maintained the tradition of didactic literature with elements of military adventure and bildungsroman. He often portrayed adolescent boys in colourful, exotic surroundings and praised their resourcefulness combined with ingenuity and individuality. Because he also portrayed the hardening of character, critics sometimes referred to his texts as initiation stories, emphasizing that the protagonists transformed from carefree children into mature young men

The adventure novel Captains” Boys (1897), compared by some scholars to Robert Louis Stevenson”s Treasure Island, is the story of a spoiled sixteen-year-old son of an American multimillionaire who falls overboard during a voyage across the Atlantic and is rescued by the crew of a Newfoundland cutter. The dynamic action is varied by storms, dangerous icebergs and monsters from the deep, and the bravery of the sailors, who give the boy a lesson in diligence and perseverance during the fishing, is emphasized by the title itself, which is an allusion to the Elizabethan ballad about the brave Mary Ambree.

Stalky and Co. (1899), on the other hand, is an optimistic story about the pranks of three rascals, in which Kipling included memories from the times of his youthful stay at boarding school, presenting himself as a clumsy bespectacled boy and portraying the future general Lionel Dunsterville as the title character. He also endorsed the canon of English educational ideals: honesty, truthfulness, self-reliance, and especially full respect for social divisions and the state system. Funny stories from the lives of mischievous pupils were also an opportunity to describe the pedagogical methods of those times, according to which discipline and obedience were achieved mainly with rods. The writer also describes the teachers themselves, not hiding the fact that in addition to the authorities, there were also ruthless or intellectually limited people among them. According to contemporary critics, Kipling unintentionally showed the school as an authoritarian system with a hierarchical, almost military structure. This system, full of internal conflicts, was perceived by the outside world as a monolith, because the whole community accepted many sacrifices in order to protect the good name of the institution.

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Kim”s popularity

The novel Kim (1901), considered by many biographers to be the writer”s most outstanding work, enjoyed great popularity among readers. Some, because of the fast-paced narrative and changing scenery, associated it with the current of Picaresque literature, especially with the Lazio of Tormes, while others, noting the artful description of realities, believed that it turned out to be an achievement equal to The Road to India by Edward Morgan Forster. The protagonist of this work was an observant boy recruited to British intelligence, who traveled through India with an old lama. The journey of this unusual couple allowed the writer to reveal the social stratification of the country, present cultural diversity, and paint a witty and varied picture of Indian everyday life. For the critics, however, the journey described was a successful reference to the famous adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Cervantes” novel and Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller in Dickens” novel. Although the main character, as often in Kipling”s works, lived on the border of two separate cultures, the originality of the idea and surprising twists of the plot were determined this time by the spy plot set in the reality of the times of the “big game”. An additional attraction was the colourful language of all the characters, in which the writer included English archaisms, funny articulation errors, words deliberately used in the wrong sense and terms from various Indian dialects.

It is sometimes believed that with this novel Kipling was trying to fend off critics who claimed that his writing skills were limited to short prose forms. It turned out, however, that also Kim is in fact just a series of short stories in which the same characters appear. Some of them readers already knew from earlier texts (Lispeth), others were portraits of real people (Kipling presented his own father as a museum curator). This novel has also become a pretext for researchers to consider Kipling”s attitude to various religions. It is generally assumed that the writer referred contemptuously to Hinduism, which he associated with fatalism, apathy and escapist behaviour. Moreover, it was in Hinduism that he saw the cause of many of the social problems plaguing India. He was much kinder to Buddhism, far from any theological orthodoxy, in which he valued the practical application of ethical principles that could be reconciled even with scientific materialism and the theory of evolution. However, the picturesque panorama of the Indian Peninsula presented in Kima was often accused of lack of a deeper analysis of the raised issues, typical for example for the works of Joseph Conrad, whom Kipling held in high esteem.

Fairy tales and stories for children

Kipling”s return to the United States in 1899 ended in family misfortune. The writer and his daughter Josephine fell ill with pneumonia, which the girl did not survive. After the death of his daughter, shocked, Kipling began to work intensively on the collection of Such a Fairy Tale, which was published in 1902. These simple stories with a moral, counted among the classics of children”s literature, thanks to the thoughtful form and fine humour became a literary attraction also for adults. In this volume, the writer created a modern bestiary, thanks to which he was able to explain to the youngest readers with a wink of an eye why an elephant has a long trunk (The Elephant”s Child), How the Camel Got His Hump or How the Leopard Got His Spots, as well as describing The Cat That Walked by Himself and The Butterfly That Stamped.

Once again the writer turned to children in 1906 with the publication of Puck of Puck Hill. At that time he used themes from England”s past, wishing to arouse respect for national traditions in young people. This time gnomes and forest spirits appeared in the stories, which were mostly set in Sussex County. However, by introducing the title character of Puck, the author referred not only to A Midsummer Night”s Dream. He also showed visitors from ancient times: a Norman knight, a Roman centurion, a builder from the fifteenth century, and a Jew from the era of King John the Landless. Through them he portrayed the lives of ordinary people against the backdrop of important historical events, which included above all the Battle of Hastings, the Barons” Revolt, the battles at Hadrian”s Wall, and the signing of Magna Charta Libertatum. In his texts he avoided moralistic instructions and unequivocal precepts. The subsequent stories were to be a testimony from past eras, thanks to which children discovered various visions of the world. The collection Rewards and Fairies (1910) was maintained in a similar convention, with the same characters learning about past history. The characters from the past this time are a Neolithic shepherd, Queen Elizabeth I, King Henry VII, George Washington, and the inventor of the stethoscope, René Laennec. After the publication of this collection, critics once again emphasized that Kipling successfully imitates different historical varieties of English in individual episodes.

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Heroism and mockery

Kipling enriched most of his prose texts with verse fragments: mottos, quotations, songs or proverbs. Sometimes he also used a poetic piece as an introduction or afterword to a collection of stories (Actions and Reactions, Debits and Credits). Sometimes a poem provided a commentary to the main text or developed one of its side plots. In the two Jungle Books, on the other hand, it was always a separate piece created ostensibly by a character from the presented world (Hunting-Song of the Seeonee Pack, Parade-Song of the Camp Animals). Sometimes these poems gained considerable popularity and were quoted independently of the prose parts of the work. In the case of Puck of Pukka Mountain, the Harp Song of the Dane Women, The Runes on Weland”s Sword, and the hymnic ending of The Children”s Song were sometimes considered separate texts. Most of these pieces were later collected in the volume Songs from Books (1912).

Kipling”s first volume of poetry – the self-published humorous poems Departmental Ditties (1886) – met with such great interest that already the same year another edition was published. The readers of these texts were amused, above all, by the description of the absurdly elaborate administrative structure of colonial offices and the details of the vicious struggle for promotion and appanage. The writer strengthened his position with the collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), in which, using soldier jargon and sometimes ungrammatical English of simple people, he described various episodes from the period of colonial wars. Among these works, Gunga Din, a poem about an Indian servant who distributed water along the battle line and died while rescuing a wounded private, was particularly popular. Equally famous was the song Mandalay, a lyrical memoir evoking from a London perspective the beauty and uniqueness of the Burmese world. The complete absence of any patriotic sublimity may be considered a characteristic feature of these songs. Kipling, while invariably praising perseverance, valor, and barracks discipline, even indulged in criticism that would soon disappear entirely from his poems. In Tommy he emphatically emphasized that the despised soldier is well aware of the hypocrisy of the battle slogans. In turn, the characters of The Widow at Windsor (nicknamed by Queen Victoria), who wandered around the world with the army, describe with open sarcasm the dubious honor of service that fell to them. It is believed that it was because of this poem that Kipling was never elevated to the dignity of poet-laureate. Some of the lyrics in Barrack-Room Ballads were surprising in their far-from-conventional treatment of moral issues. In The Ladies Kipling openly praised the establishment of close relations with women of different races by soldiers stationed in foreign countries. Many poems from that period were later composed to music (Percy Grainger, Peter Bellamy), appreciated especially for their uncomplicated steady rhythm that made them resemble simple stanzas intended for choral singing during a march.

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Apologia of empire

After returning to England, Kipling, jokingly referred to as “the literary inspector general of the British Empire,” increasingly included political allusions in his works. He was entirely in favor of the policy of Joseph Chamberlain, minister of colonies in the Conservative government of Lord Salisbury, celebrating the victory of the Tories, depreciating the decentralist policy of the Liberals and advocating an increasingly strong connection of the overseas territories with the motherland. During this period he wrote The Seven Seas (1896), in which Kipling described the immensity of the British state, which had possessions on all continents. The most outstanding examples of his colonial patriotism and messianic view of the white race are two controversial poems originally published in The Times of London and later included in the volume The Five Nations (1903). The Hymn to Repentance (Recessional, 1897), written to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria”s reign, is a biblical, chorale rhythm poem that warns against the pride and self-praise of a chosen people entrusted by God to rule over other peoples. The White Man”s Burden (1899), on the other hand, seen by some as a faithful and natural praise of the rising power, was considered by others as a propaganda of militant imperialism and its accompanying racist views. The title burden, in Kipling”s view, was the difficult caring and educating mission of the British, who, supposedly not seeking their own gain, were merely fulfilling their civilizing duty. The poet played the role of mentor in these poems, mentioning the high moral demands on all whose mission was to promote Victorian values among the heathen. At the same time, he gave expression to a worldview derived from the Puritanism of Oliver Cromwell, the heroism of Thomas Carlyle, and the moral rigor of John Wesley.

Kipling also celebrated the power of empire in a number of poems from the volume The Five Nations, which talked about the new self-governing British communities in five parts of the world. The style of Kipling”s poems was so evocative that many of the terms they contained entered the vernacular. Among the most quoted is a passage from The Ballad of East and West (1889): “East is East and West is West and they will never meet.” This sentence, taken out of context, has changed its original meaning. In fact, the author”s intention was to emphasize that if two outstanding men from distant parts of the world meet, territorial boundaries and racial differences cease to exist.

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The Boer War

In early 1898, the writer and his family traveled to the Cape Colony for a winter vacation, beginning a tradition that lasted until 1908. There he was kindly received by a group of Britain”s most prominent politicians: Alfred Milner, Leander Starr Jameson and, above all, Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist and diamond magnate who famously came up with the later “Cape Town to Cairo” concept, envisaging the colonization of African lands from the Cape Province to Egypt. It was under his influence that Kipling supported the British military action in the war against the Boers, whose rebellion stood in stark contrast to the idea of absolute obedience of the Dominions to Britain. The poem Lichtenberg (1901), in particular, was very popular, commemorating, through the example of one veteran, the sacrifice of many Australians who volunteered to support the interests of the empire. The Boer Wars also appear in short stories, portraying the British as a nation adhering to a code of honor in contrast to self-interested Americans and perfidious local guerrillas (The Captive 1902, A Sahibs” War 1904). On a subsequent visit to southern Africa, the writer helped establish The Friend newspaper for the troops in Bloemfontein, the recently conquered capital of the Oranian Free State, where Frederick Roberts was in command. This journalistic work lasted only two weeks, but for the writer it was his first return to the editorial office after ten years and the beginning of his friendship with Perceval Landon and Howell Arthur Gwynne.

Among the poems separating the stories contained in the volume Rewards and Fairies (1910) was the oft-cited If- (If-, 1910), probably inspired by the character and deeds of Leander Starr Jameson, who famously participated in the Boer War. This work, considered a monumental example of Kipling”s mature work, was the quintessence of his beliefs and at the same time a code of exemplary conduct. The poet, using elevated language, promoted in it a life program of reliability, temperance and perseverance. This praise of self-control and stoicism, which are a guarantee of humanity, on which several generations of Britons were brought up, is still considered to be Kipling”s most famous poem. This is probably why, during the Young Angry Revolt, the poem itself, intended to support the vigor of English youth, became a symbol of mindless drift, servility, and ossified social divisions. In 1968 Lindsay Anderson followed up on the widely recognized title with If…, a film that won the Palme d”Or at Cannes. The director, identifying himself with rebellious peers, showed in an allegorical finale a group of students who shoot at school notables and representatives of the upper classes.

British conflicts

When in the reign of Edward VII the Conservatives were removed from power, Kipling”s influence and popularity began to wane, although he himself never joined a party, held any political office, and even refused to accept the title of nobility. Public opinion, however, was no longer preoccupied with the question of the colonies, but with the tumultuous changes in the House of Lords, and the writer, contrary to general trends, supported all measures against the Liberal government. Despite the growing resentment of those around him, he continued to be an unquestioned authority in right-wing circles. He was even asked by Max Aitken to speak during the Canadian election of 1911, when he published an appeal in which he opposed the mutual agreement with the United States, believing that after its signing Canada would have to submit to American values and legal rules. For the next week Kipling”s appeal was reprinted by most English-language newspapers in Canada.

When groups calling for at least partial independence in Ireland began to be more and more successful, Kipling strongly sided with the Unionists, who rejected any separatist aspirations. At that time he kept in touch with Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists, who was responsible for training local volunteer troops and organized a huge demonstration in Belfast against independent Irish rule. In his poem Ulster (1912), Kipling commemorated the signing by nearly 500,000 people of a resolution opposing attempts to secede Northern Ireland from the Crown.

Kipling”s conservative worldview also concerned issues related to gender equality. The writer was hostile to all emancipation movements, and in 1911 he unequivocally spoke against giving women the right to vote. He expressed his dislike of suffragettes forcefully in his poem The Female of the Species (1911). He was also a strong anti-communist, which strengthened his friendship with the popular writer and enemy of Bolshevism Henry Rider Haggard.

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The fight against barbarism

At the beginning of World War I, Kipling wrote pamphlets and poems that encouraged armed resistance and supported efforts to recapture German-occupied Belgium. In these widely read works, he glorified British soldiers, emphasizing that the army was a place for heroes and derided those who tried to avoid military service (For All We Have and Are, 1914). Although he was aware of the atrocities committed by the invaders against civilians, he mainly emphasized the aspect of survival and triumph. He reacted with violent protest to the news of the torpedoing of the passenger ship “Lusitania” in 1915. He regarded the war as a civilizing crusade against the barbarians, stating bluntly that there were two categories of beings in the world: humans and Germans. He was critical of the way in which military action was conducted, already in 1914 expressing indignation that Germany had not yet been defeated. For this reason, he accused the entire pre-war generation of British politicians of ineptitude, who, he believed, had not learned the lessons of the Boer Wars. Among his most ambiguous writings from this period is the short story Mary Postgate (1915). In it he described the motives of an Englishwoman who found a wounded German pilot in her garden and did not help him, watching his death with satisfaction.

In Kipling”s view, the expansion of the home fleet was particularly important. Already before the war he postulated taking decisive steps in response to the development of the German navy under the command of Alfred von Tirpitz. As an expert on this subject, he was even officially invited to the great naval maneuvers in 1897 and commented on the strategic moves of the British admiralty. The strengthening of the fleet was the main theme of a series of vehement articles printed in The Times and The Morning Post, which he later published under the joint title A Fleet in Being (1898). This issue remained close to his mind even after the outbreak of war. In The Fringes of the Fleet (1915) he included several naval poems, for which Edward Elgar composed the music, and in subsequent articles written for the Ministry of Information (Sea Warfare, 1916) he continued to describe with enthusiasm the importance of the navy, of which the British people in general were unaware.

Death of a son

Kipling took it for granted that his son should participate in the war. Eighteen-year-old John tried twice to enlist, but was rejected due to advanced myopia. His father then took advantage of his long-standing friendship with Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British army, and John was accepted into the Irish Guards despite the medical board”s ruling. Immediately after his enlistment he was sent to the front and in September 1915 he took part in the fighting for Loos-en-Gohelle. He was last seen on the battlefield. One soldier claimed that John had suffered an extensive gunshot wound to the face, but as there was no clear evidence of death, he was officially presumed missing. Kipling spent nearly two years hoping that his son had been taken prisoner. At the writer”s request British planes dropped leaflets on the German side of the front with an appeal for help in the search. John”s body was not identified, though without absolute certainty, until 1992. Kipling indirectly alluded to this death with a two-line poem: “When they ask why death already rules us,

After this tragedy, the writer joined the British Empire War Graves Commission, an organization founded by Fabian Ware to look after British cemeteries wherever Commonwealth soldiers died. It was Kipling who chose the biblical verse “Their name lives on in generations” (Wisdom of Sirach 44:14), which was placed on memorial plaques at the graves of the fallen. Kipling, too, arranged the inscription “Known to God” on the graves of unknown soldiers and came up with the inscription “Dead in Glory” on the London cenotaph. To memorialize his son, he also wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards (1923), including frontline memoirs and excerpts from soldiers” letters and diaries. Kipling”s Mourning has sometimes been linked to the poem My Boy Jack (My Son Jack, 1916), although this work accompanied a description of the Jutland battle and appears to speak of a death at sea. The poem The King”s Pilgrimage (The King”s Pilgrimage, 1922), which describes George V”s wandering through the memorials created by the Commission, was also a direct reference to personal experience. Readers were greatly impressed by the short story The Gardener (1925), in which an unmarried woman is accompanied to her son”s grave by an enigmatic figure reminiscent of Christ.

A special experience connected with the war times was for Kipling the correspondence with a Frenchman Maurice Hammoneau whose life was saved by a copy of Kim hidden in the breast pocket of his uniform jacket. The soldier gave the writer the book in which the bullet was lodged and his War Cross, and Kipling agreed to be the godfather of his son in 1929.

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Between France and Germany

After the war, Kipling was skeptical of the League of Nations and Wilson”s Fourteen Points. He hoped that the United States would abandon its policy of isolationism and that an Anglo-French-American alliance would be formed. The writer called France and England the twin fortresses of European civilization. He constantly warned against revising the treaty of Versailles in favor of Germany, believing that any concessions could lead to another war. He supported President Raymond Poincaré, and in 1923 he was one of the few English intellectuals who, against their own government and public opinion, supported the French occupation of the Ruhr area. He also expressed his sympathy for France in ode France (France, 1913) and in his memoirs Souvenirs of France (1933).

Kipling declared himself an opponent of fascism, and considered Oswald Mosley a dangerous aristocrat. Already in 1933 he wrote that the Nazis were heading for a bloody conflict, and in 1935 he called Benito Mussolini a mad megalomaniac. Since on the covers of many of Kipling”s books a swastika was placed together with the image of Ganesi, the elephant-headed god, the writer was mistakenly considered a supporter of Nazism. Kipling”s right- and left-handed swastika, however, referred to the Indian meaning of this sign, which was a symbol of prosperity. Even before the National Socialists came to power Kipling ordered to remove it from the printing plates, so that he would not be accused of supporting a hostile ideology. In his poem The Storm Cone (1932), a year before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he reminded us that world peace is only a short period of illusory silence. He also gave a speech in 1935 warning of the threat of Nazi Germany.

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Global prestige

In 1907, at the age of just 42, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At a ceremony in Stockholm, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, Carl David af Wirsén, paid tribute to both the writer and three centuries of English literature. Kipling himself, however, declined to deliver the customary lecture. He also soon received honorary doctorates from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Montreal, and Paris. In 1926 the Royal Society of Literature awarded him a gold medal, and in 1933 he became a foreign member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (in 1937 his place was taken by Marcel Handelsman. Still during the writer”s lifetime, in 1927, the Kipling Society was established in England, which dealt with research and popularization of his works.

Kipling”s late work reflected his worship of craftsmanship, his appreciation of professional prowess, and his belief in technological progress. He expressed his beliefs in a popular poem alluding to the biblical parable of the sons of Martha, the workers, and the sons of Mary, the thinkers (The Sons of Martha, 1907), in which he referred with evident sympathy to people who lived by working with their own hands. It was to this poem that the writer referred in 1922 when Herbert Haultain, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto, asked him to write a solemn oath and prepare a graduation speech. Both were officially titled The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. Kipling, moreover, mentioned the power of technology more than once in various poems (McAndrew”s Hymn 1893), and in stories from the collection The Day”s Work he described with poignancy the elements of a steamboat and the functioning of a locomotive. He thus became one of the first writers to incorporate the mechanization of the industrialized world into fiction. On the other hand, in the plot of the story Mrs Bathurst (Mrs Bathurst, 1904) a cinema screening played a key role. Kipling was also eager to use all the innovations in his own life. As the popularity of automobiles grew, he began publishing automobile-related articles in the British press, writing enthusiastically about his travels around England, even though he usually drove with a chauffeur. In 1922 he also became honorary rector of the Scottish University of St Andrews. In his inaugural speech (Independence), addressing young Scots, he recalled the bravery of their ancestors and stressed that courage and self-reliance were the most important things in life.

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Recent years

Kipling continued to write until the 1930s, but much more slowly and without much success. Only a volume of his short stories Thy Servant a Dog (1930), showing various people through the eyes of their dogs, enjoyed great popularity. He took stock of his life and achievements in his unfinished autobiography Something of Myself. With time, he even abandoned commenting on political events. The writer”s death was prematurely reported by one of the newspapers, to which he immediately wrote: “I have just read that I have died. Do not forget, please, to remove me from the list of subscribers”. During the last period of his life, Kipling suffered from severe gastrointestinal complaints, which worsened after the death of his son. Doctors ruled out cancer, but suspected gastritis or inflammatory bowel disease. However, the recommended treatments, which included the removal of all teeth, proved to be ineffective. Kipling died as a result of hemorrhage after perforating a duodenal ulcer on the night of January 18, 1936, two days before his friend George V. The writer”s body was cremated and his ashes were buried on 22 January 1936 in Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.

After Kipling”s wife died in 1939, their 17th-century estate, Bateman”s, in Burwash, was donated to the National Trust, a heritage organization. Bateman”s now houses a museum dedicated to the writer. A collected edition of his works (Complete Works, 1937-1940) comprises 35 volumes. Kipling”s name was carried by a British destroyer during World War II. As of 2010, one of the craters on Mercury also bears his name. In Canada, at the height of Kipling”s popularity, a town in southeastern Saskatchewan was named in his honour.

Even during his lifetime Kipling”s works were subjected to extremely different evaluations depending on the political and social views of the researchers. A series of harassing press articles began as early as 1891, when he was accused of egotism, vanity and chauvinism. Unfavorable opinions accompanied the writer even in the period of his greatest fame, although some critics emphasized that racist comments in his works were uttered by fictional characters, and not by him, which allowed for more accurate characterization of the characters. Kipling was also reproached for never openly condemning the massacre of civilians in Amritsar (1919), even though he declared himself an opponent of the forcible resolution of conflicts within the empire. In the last years of his life he was ostracized by the circle of progressive intellectuals, who saw in him mainly a grotesque figure from Max Beerbohm”s caricatures.

After Kipling”s death, discussions of his work were revived with subsequent revivals. T.S. Eliot counted him among writers of great talent, opposing opinions that he was only a journalist who flattered communal tastes. In the essay preceding the selection of his poems (Rudyard Kipling, 1941) he appreciated the thoughtful construction of some ballads (Danny Deever, 1892) and the mastery of epigrams, visible especially in the bitter Epitaphs of the War, a poetic chapter of the volume The Years Between (1919). He emphasized that he did not notice any manifestations of racial superiority in these works. George Orwell (Kipling, 1942) then came under unprecedented criticism, calling the writer a representative of the British ruling class, whose works are not only devoid of moral sensitivity, but also aesthetically repellent. He added that since Kipling himself considered himself a conservative, he must be counted among the racists whose works were a harbinger of fascist ideology. Herbert George Wells, in turn, criticized Stalky and Co. seeing in this work the author”s approval of the use of violence with the tacit consent of the authorities. James Joyce considered Kipling, along with Leo Tolstoy and Gabriel D”Annunzio, one of the greatest talents of nineteenth-century literature, although he admitted that all three shared almost fanatical views on religion or patriotism. His works were also praised by writers as diverse as Poul Anderson, Randall Jarrell, and Jorge Luis Borges, who particularly praised the short story The Church that was at Antioch (In Antioch, in the Church There, 1932).

In independent India, the writer was initially disliked because of the imperialist overtones of his writings, especially those from before the First World War. His books – with the exception of some children”s stories – were often omitted from English literature curricula in secondary schools and universities. Over time, the reception of this work became much more nuanced, and Kipling was widely read especially by those members of the Indian elite, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who received a European education. Any comparison with Kipling was strongly rejected by another Nobel Prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore, while Gandhi was rather forgiving in his assessments, claiming without giving specifics that the writer”s intentions were sometimes misunderstood. Salman Rushdie also had an ambivalent attitude towards Kipling”s works. While noting racist accents in his work, he also saw in it an undying fascination with India.

Of all Kipling”s works, individual stories from the Jungle Book collection have been transferred to the screen most frequently. The first adaptation, Kala Nag from 1937, directed by Robert J. Flaherty and Zoltan Korda, used an outline of the story described in Toomai of the Elephants. The film was considered a typical example of cinematic paternalism towards peoples considered primitive. It was considered that the compromise between Flaherty”s documentary style and Korda”s atelier manner produced only an average result. Korda returned to The Jungle Book in 1942, again enlisting Sabu Dastagir, an actor of Indian origin, for the lead role. However, it was the animated version from Walt Disney”s studio, directed by Wolfgang Reitherman (1967), that went down in cinema history. The film”s success was due to its expressive animal silhouettes, dynamic main character, and stylistically diverse melodies, from the jazz song of the monkey king to the hypnotic lullaby of the snake.

Kipling”s texts were often used by directors who specialized in full-blown epics, exotic melodramas or adventure films. His short story was first brought to the screen by James Young in 1921. In this drama of manners, entitled as the literary original Without Benefit of Clergy, the writer was not only responsible for the screenplay, but he was also listed as the author of the scenery. Nevertheless, he did not hide his disappointment with the final result. In 1937 Victor Fleming made a film based on Captains of the Sea Scouts with Spencer Tracy, who won an Oscar for his performance as the brave fisherman. That same year saw the release of The Rifleman of Bengal, an adaptation of the short story Little Willie Winkie (Wee Willie Winkie, 1888). The director, John Ford, decided to change the gender of the main character so that Shirley Temple, a child star of the time, could star in the film. William A. Wellman”s 1939 The Light That Went Out has clear melodrama characteristics, and Victor Saville brought Kim to the screen in 1950, casting Errol Flynn as the secret agent. John Huston”s The Man Who Wanted to Be King (1975), starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery as ex-soldiers who set out to conquer the savage tribes and with Christopher Plummer as Kipling himself, was very popular with critics and audiences alike.

The directors were inspired not only by Kipling”s prose works, but also by his poetic works. The writer, fascinated by a painting by Philip Burne-Jones, published a poem called The Vampire in 1897. Using the main theme of this text, Porter Emerson Browne wrote the scandalous play A Fool There Was, which was adapted for the screen by Frank Powell in 1915. This tale of a demonic temptress bringing doom upon the universally respected father of the family was commented on in the silent film by Kipling”s stanzas placed on the boards. The Polish avant-garde impression Buty / Shoes (1933), directed by Jerzy Gabryelski and with cinematography by Rudolf Maté, was based on the poem Boots (1903). George Stevens made a deft adventure film in 1939 starring popular actors (Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Joan Fontaine), using the plot of the ballad Gunga Din.

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Stories

In Poland many of Rudyard Kipling”s novellas and short stories were published in collections, the content of which was a compilation of various English editions:

Individual short stories have also been included in anthologies:

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Poetic works

No separate selection of Rudyard Kipling”s poetry has been published in Poland. His poems were translated by, among others: Józef Czechowicz, Andrzej Nowicki and Maciej Słomczyński. Some texts have been published in anthologies:

Reports, historical studies, memoirs

Sources