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A genius for empathy at arm's length

By Simon Caterson
July 20 2002
The Age

Rudyard Kipling

By David Gilmour
John Murray, $69.95

The historian E.P.Thompson famously spoke of "the enormous condescension of posterity" with which one generation is inclined to dismiss its forebears. Historians have subjected the British Empire to fierce criticism since at least 1918, when Lytton Strachey published his iconoclastic Eminent Victorians. One of the writers of the high imperial period most often attacked by post-colonial critics is Rudyard Kipling, the Empire's unofficial poet laureate. Was Kipling really as jingoistic and prejudiced as his latter-day detractors allege? Even if he is guilty as charged, can Kipling still be regarded as a great writer?

These are the sorts of issues addressed in this book. A lot has been written about Kipling's life and work, but David Gilmour claims that The Long Recessional is "the first volume to chronicle Kipling's political life, his early life as an apostle of Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline".

Gilmour suggests Kipling was nothing so much as a man of his time. He was an immensely popular writer simply because a huge number of people of his era responded positively to what he wrote. According to Gilmour, Kipling had an "extraordinary gift for persuading people that what they were reading was how they felt". Like Dickens and Shakespeare, Kipling had a genius for empathy that went much deeper than mere intellectual curiosity. At the same time, Gilmour is obliged to concede that Kipling did exhibit many of the period's characteristic attitudes and assumptions that are no longer generally accepted.

Kipling's abiding interest was the lives of ordinary people. He was suspicious of generals and politicians, and hated snobbery and the English class system. In his public life as a literary celebrity his attachment to causes tended to be instinctive and emotional, and he refused imperial honours. Moreover, his lack of formal education may have contributed to an antipathy towards intellectual pretension that would not have jarred with the bulk of his readers.

Kipling began his illustrious literary career in 1882 as a 16-year-old cub reporter writing "scraps" for a small Indian newspaper. His childhood in India and background in provincial journalism equipped him with the experience of and curiosity about the everyday in the exotic that is the bedrock of his work. Kipling's natural constituency included the Empire's foot soldiers and servants. In his time he was known as the champion of "Tommy Atkins", the archetypal British fighting man.

Though proud of the ideals of the British Empire, Kipling had little time for the imperial centre. He spoke of this to his friend Cecil Rhodes, another of the Empire's self-made men more comfortable in the colonies than in London. "England is a stuffy little place," Kipling told Rhodes, "mentally, morally, physically." According to Gilmour, it "was the idea of England rather than the reality, the sense of its capacity and potential, that attracted him". Countless subjects of the Empire shared this fantasy, or rather delusion. No doubt some monarchists in

Australia still do.

Kipling was much more at home in the Empire's farthest flung corners, especially when he was able to move among ordinary soldiers.

His first impression of Australia was that it seemed "second-hand American", but he subsequently praised Australian troops in the Boer War, declaring he had never come across a "cleaner, simpler, saner, more adequate gang of men".

Gilmour does not ignore his subject's quite extensive blind spots. The imperialist impulse that inspired much of his work also accounts for its shortcomings. The reasons why his writings were so popular then are now likely to make some of them seem dated, even unreadable. But no writer who could produce poems such as If and (my own favourite) The Conundrum of the Workshops, and fiction such as Plain Tales from the Hills and The Jungle Books, to name just a few, deserves to be condemned, whatever his personal limitations.

The Long Recessional is a valuable study of how popular writers shape and are shaped by the spirit of the times. Gilmour writes in a dry, understated manner that scarcely matches his subject's zeal.

While the book will not restore Kipling's reputation to its former glory, it serves as a salutary reminder of the truth of Thompson's dictum - future generations are likely to scoff at many books that today walk off booksellers' shelves.


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