"The Long Recessional" by David Gilmour

The apostle of white civilization, for instance, was no racist. In fact, he was ecstatic on visiting Brazil to find that the mixture of "Red, Black and White" had "managed to knock out the Colour-Question altogether." The Great Imperialist had no illusions as to the superiority of the individual white man -- the Fuzzy-Wuzzy is "a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man," and the singer of "Gunga Din" knows who is the greater man in "Gawd's" eyes.

As it turns out, the man who immortalized the common British foot soldier wasn't very interested in war, or as G.K. Chesterton put it, "The fact is that what attracts Mr. Kipling to militarism is not the idea of courage, but the idea of discipline ... He sings the art of peace much more accurately than the art of war." C.S. Lewis saw Kipling not as a poet of war but as "a poet of work."

Happily, Gilmour allows Kipling his contradictions. He is no apologist for the man, whom he often finds personally disgusting, or much of the work, which he treats with a great deal less enthusiasm than many of Kipling's defenders. There's no high literary double talk used in defense of Kipling's propagandistic poetry; Gilmour even rejects T.S. Eliot's clever but unconvincing argument that Kipling wrote not poetry but "verse." Gilmour may not know poetry as well as Eliot, but he knows doggerel when he reads it.

Nor does Gilmour try to mount some convoluted defense of Kipling's imperialistic chauvinism -- on the whole, he seems to agree with the socialist Orwell's famous evaluation that "Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then try to find out why it is that he survives while those who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly." Kipling bequeathed many phrases to the English language, admits Gilmour, "But mercifully, they do not include his political terms," which included "Boschialist" and "Hunnomite," both words for socialists "with Hun leanings." And what is remarkable is how much Gilmour has found in Kipling that is worth saving.

There is, for instance, Kipling the fable-writer. In his greatest stories, Kipling often transcends his own literal meaning. For instance, "The Man Who Would Be King" is at once "an adventure in its own right worthy of Stevenson" and "an allegory of imperialism ... a warning that empires can be overthrown when the customs of subject peoples are too greatly violated." It's doubtful that Kipling would have seen the story as an allegory of anything; so many of his most sympathetic readers can see it as nothing else. (Borges thought that Kipling's works were "more complex than the ideas they are supposed to illustrate," and thus the reverse of Marxist art.

Gilmour also finds in Kipling a compassion and fairness lacking in most of his critics, possibly stemming from his membership in the Masons, where Kipling's "brethren" included Christians, Jews, Muslims and Sikhs. Of all writers of his era, T.E. Lawrence excepted, Kipling might have had the best things to say for Islam. "Where there are Muslims," he was known to say, "there is a comprehensible civilization." Oddly enough, considering Kipling's love for India, much of which he knew better than England, it was Hinduism that drew his scorn as an "infinity of trivialities." Given his admirable tolerance for regional beliefs and customs, his anger at Hindu treatment of women is both surprising and progressive.

Because Kipling's literary output declined after the Boer War, most accounts of his life and work leave off virtually everything after the Edwardian era. Yet, Kipling's role as the "Grand Old Man of Imperialism," the man sought after for comment on nearly every public issue, continued. But the role had changed. Though he prophesied the coming of both world wars, he was "no longer the apostle whom everyone wanted to hear," but was instead "consigned to the role of Cassandra, condemned to utter prophecies that no one would heed."

In point of fact, though, Kipling's prophecies were never much heeded, not in the days of Lord Kitchener and certainly not today. As Gilmour puts it, "At the age of 19 Kipling identified a truth which the next century largely failed to recognize: that, when all appropriate qualifications are made, minorities usually fare better with an imperial or multinational system than in nations dominated by the ethos and ethnicity of a majority." As we ponder our own future role in Afghanistan, we might consider Kipling's concept of the white man's burden a bit more sympathetically, and hope, at the very least, we show the same sense of responsibility toward the, shall we say, technologically challenged nations as this unapologetic Western supremacist. If we can keep our heads.

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