Kipling and Yeats at 150: Retrospectives/Perspectives 9781138343900, 9780429283857

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Notes on contributors
Introduction: ‘When two strong men stand face to face’: locating Kipling with Yeats
Part I Influences and legacies
1 Yeats and Kipling: parallels, divergences, and convergences
2 Mowgli, the Law of the Jungle, and the Panchatantra
3 The ungendered self: Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ in the light of Indian philosophy
4 Songs of the Wandering Aengus: echoes of the political Yeats in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s The Habit of Fear
Part II Self and society
5 Yeats, Kipling, and The Haven-Finding Art
6 Transgressed margins: reading the ‘Other’ Kipling
7 ‘Turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask’: Yeats’s search for his Daimon in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’
8 Kim’s modern education: Rudyard Kipling the zealot
Part III Craft, medium, politics
9 The chameleon and the peacock: Kipling and Yeats as creative readers of Shakespeare
10 ‘The writer is indebted to the Pioneer and Civil and Military Gazette’: Kipling, newspapers, and poetry
11 Politics, drama, and poetry: the political vision of W.B. Yeats as reflected in select plays and poems
12 Redefining the body of censorship: reading Rudyard Kipling’s Indian short stories (1888–1902)
13 Rudyard Kipling and the networks of empire: writing imperial infrastructure in The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous
Part IV Masculinity and/as empire
14 ‘The passionless passion of slaughter’: heroism and the aesthetics of violence
15 ‘I am not a Sahib’: boys and masculinity in Kipling’s Indian fiction
16 Does Kipling’s ‘If’ appropriate the Gita? Correlating Empire, Muscular Christianity, and Sthitaprajna
17 Chaps: Kipling, Yeats, and the empire of men
Index

Citation preview

KIPLING AND YEATS AT 150

This book evaluates the parallels, divergences, and convergences in the literary legacies of Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats. Coming 150 years after their birth, the volume sheds light on the conversational undercurrents that pull together the often diametrically polar worldviews of these two seminal figures of the English literary canon. Contextualizing their texts to the larger milieu that Kipling and Yeats lived in and contributed to, the book investigates a range of aesthetic and perceptual similarities – from cultures of violence to notions of masculinity, from creative debts to Shakespeare to responses to British imperialism and industrial modernity – to establish the perceptible consonance of their works. Kipling and Yeats are known to have never corresponded, but the chapters collected here show evidence of the influence that their acute awareness of each other’s work and thought may have had. Offering fresh perspectives which make Kipling’s and Yeats’s diverse texts, contexts, and legacies contemporarily relevant, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, critical theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature. Promodini Varma is Director (Admissions & Evaluations) at South Asian University, New Delhi, India. She was Principal at Bharati College, University of Delhi, until May 2015 and was part of the Department of English since the college’s inception. She has edited six textbooks for undergraduate students at the University of Delhi as well as translated some of Samuel Beckett’s plays into Hindi. Her research interests include South Asian literature, modern drama, and English Language Teaching. Anubhav Pradhan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, India, and works on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India. Simultaneously, he is also engaged in questions of affect, heritage, land, and identity with close reference to Delhi. He has served Primus Books as its Senior Marketing Editor and Bharati College, University of Delhi, as an Assistant Professor.

KIPLING AND YEATS AT 150 Retrospectives/Perspectives

Edited by Promodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection, Introduction, and editorial matter, Promodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Promodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan to be identified as the authors of the Introduction and editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Varma, Promodini, editor. | Pradhan, Anubhav, editor. Title: Kipling and Yeats at 150 : retrospectives/perspectives / edited by Promodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019003183 | ISBN 9781138343900 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429283857 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936—Criticism and interpretation. | Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PR4857 .K47 2019 | DDC 828/.809—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003183 ISBN: 978-1-138-34390-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28385-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Dedicated to R.W. Desai and Jyoti Bajaj-Desai for their unstinted help and co-operation

CONTENTS

Notes on contributorsx



Introduction: ‘When two strong men stand face to face’: locating Kipling with Yeats

1

PROMODINI VARMA AND ANUBHAV PRADHAN

PART I

Influences and legacies

17

  1 Yeats and Kipling: parallels, divergences, and convergences

19

R.W. DESAI

  2 Mowgli, the Law of the Jungle, and the Panchatantra31 MYTHILI KAUL

  3 The ungendered self: Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ in the light of Indian philosophy

45

RUTH VANITA

  4 Songs of the Wandering Aengus: echoes of the political Yeats in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s The Habit of Fear61 PETER SCHULMAN

vii

C ontents

PART II

Self and society

73

  5 Yeats, Kipling, and The Haven-Finding Art75 MALABIKA SARKAR

  6 Transgressed margins: reading the ‘Other’ Kipling

87

MADHU GROVER

  7 ‘Turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask’: Yeats’s search for his Daimon in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’

103

AMIYA BHUSHAN SHARMA

  8 Kim’s modern education: Rudyard Kipling the zealot

118

K.B.S. KRISHNA

PART III

Craft, medium, politics

135

  9 The chameleon and the peacock: Kipling and Yeats as creative readers of Shakespeare

137

ROBERT S. WHITE

10 ‘The writer is indebted to the Pioneer and Civil and Military Gazette’: Kipling, newspapers, and poetry

152

JOHN LEE

11 Politics, drama, and poetry: the political vision of W.B. Yeats as reflected in select plays and poems

164

PRASHANT K. SINHA

12 Redefining the body of censorship: reading Rudyard Kipling’s Indian short stories (1888–1902) INDRANI DAS GUPTA

viii

179

C ontents

13 Rudyard Kipling and the networks of empire: writing imperial infrastructure in The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous192 DOMINIC DAVIES

PART IV

Masculinity and/as empire

211

14 ‘The passionless passion of slaughter’: heroism and the aesthetics of violence

213

ALEXANDER BUBB

15 ‘I am not a Sahib’: boys and masculinity in Kipling’s Indian fiction

227

USHA MUDIGANTI

16 Does Kipling’s ‘If’ appropriate the Gita? Correlating Empire, Muscular Christianity, and Sthitaprajna242 NANDITHA RAJARAM SHASTRY

17 Chaps: Kipling, Yeats, and the empire of men

256

ANUBHAV PRADHAN

Index270

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Alexander Bubb is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Roehampton in London, UK. His publications include Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle, which won the University English Book Prize in 2017. Dominic Davies is Lecturer in English at City, University of London, UK. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930, and has published widely on colonial and postcolonial literature and history. R.W. Desai was formerly Head and Professor of English at the University of Delhi, India. He was the editor and co-founder of Hamlet Studies, from 1979 to 2004. His publications include Shakespeare the Man: New Decipherings and Yeats’s Shakespeare. Madhu Grover is Associate Professor at the Department of English, Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, India. She wrote her doctoral thesis on Rudyard Kipling. Her areas of interest are Indian writing in English, colonial studies, and eighteenth-century studies. Indrani Das Gupta is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature from Jamia Millia Islamia, India. Her areas of interest include popular culture, Victorian, modern British, and postmodern literature. Mythili Kaul is former Head and Professor of English, University of Delhi, India, and the editor of Othello: New Essays for Black Writers. Her work on Shakespeare has appeared in Shakespeare the Man: New Decipherings and journals such as Shakespeare Yearbook. K.B.S. Krishna teaches at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh, India. His latest publication, Elephants on the Mind (2019), is a collection of short stories. His research interests include detective fiction, postmodernism, and Empire studies. x

C ontributors

John Lee is Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK. His interests are split between literature of the English Renaissance and Kipling. His publications include A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies. Usha Mudiganti is Assistant Professor in the School of Letters, Ambedkar University Delhi, India. Her interests include gender stereotypes in India, constructions of childhood in literature, childhood in post-colonial literature, and the changing norms of childhood post-globalisation. Anubhav Pradhan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, India. He works primarily on questions of affect, heritage, land, and identity with close reference to Delhi. Malabika Sarkar, FEA (UK), is Principal Advisor (Academic), Ashoka University, India. She is also Member of the International Advisory Board, European Romantic Review. Her publications include Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost. Peter Schulman teaches in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Old Dominion University, USA. He has worked extensively on French cinema, and is presently working on a book on the French filmmaker Alain Resnais. Amiya Bhushan Sharma retired as Professor of English from the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. He has been interested in inter-disciplinary studies, and worked on Samuel Johnson’s economic ideas for his doctorate. Nanditha Rajaram Shastry is pursuing a PhD at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh, India, on the ‘Evolution of the Indian Dream’ as depicted in Indian English Fiction. She previously taught at Sacred Heart School, Dharamshala. Prashant K. Sinha retired as Professor of English from the University of Pune, India. His publications include the long introduction to Look Back in Anger and Vintage Shakespeare, an edited book. Ruth Vanita is Professor, University of Montana, USA, and formerly Reader, Delhi University, India. She has written several books and over 50 articles, and has translated many works from Hindi and Urdu. Her latest book is Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema. Robert S. White is Winthrop Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions 1100–1800. xi

INTRODUCTION ‘When two strong men stand face to face’: locating Kipling with Yeats Promodini Varma and Anubhav Pradhan

At first sight it does seem that Kipling and Yeats have been by violence yoked together in this volume, for what else, besides the fact that they were both born in the same year, would prompt us to put them together in the same frame? Do indeed new perspectives open up when we place them in proximity rather than viewing them separately, as has been done so far? The many essays in this volume attempt to answer just this question. Indeed, a closer look reveals not only the great divergences between them, with which we are all too familiar, but also the numerous convergences in their lives and careers as well as their art and politics. Both belonged to two different cultures neither of which they could wholly accept or reject. Both needed to create ideal worlds, Yeats in his cosmology and Kipling in his jungle world, though neither could believe fully in the worlds they created. Burdened with the passivity of a creative life, both escaped it by creating images of heroism that espoused an idealised, ever-elusive, masculinity full of anxiety because it was full of contradictions. Both were deeply impacted by India, Kipling in more obvious ways but also Yeats, as his advocacy of Mohini Chatterjee, Purohit Swami, and Rabindranath Tagore attests. Though both are seen to occupy polar positions in the canons of English literature and the popular, public politics of the British Empire, more connects the two than just the accidental coincidence of birth. Two of the most widely acclaimed litterateurs of their time, Kipling and Yeats have had a deep impact on writing and criticism in English. They became emblematic of some of the key aesthetic stances which constituted modernity – and reactions to it – in English verse and prose

1

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and achieved cult status within their lifetimes, as much for their work as for the politics which they espoused. Much of what they wrote continues to be read and studied today, and their thoughts still echo pertinently off contemporary concerns on race, nationality, individuality, and art. This enduring relevance is an inevitable corollary of their centrality to the functional heritage of English language and literature. That Kipling and Yeats continue to be public figures almost a century after their time, and that their ideas and art continue to feature in public as well as academic discourse is no accidental coincidence. Kipling and Yeats were both born in 1865. Their fathers, John Lockwood and John Butler, happened to also share depths of artistic talent along with their first names. Both Kipling and Yeats acknowledged that their fathers had formative influences on their art and personality. Lockwood and his wife Alice came of Methodist stock, with Alice’s father George Browne MacDonald being one of Wesley’s principle disciples.1 Husband and wife sustained a deep and abiding interest in arts and crafts, and Lockwood rose to become the Empire’s foremost expert on subcontinental handicrafts. On the other hand, John and his wife Susan Pollexfen were mismatched in more ways than one: he, the scion of an old landowning family debased by debt and mortgage; she, the eldest daughter of a nouveau riche set of shipping magnates. They shared little in common except a brief spark of love, and John’s early decision to leave the Dublin Bar for the life of art strained their marriage with unending want and lack. Eldest sons of these two artistic fathers, both Kipling and Yeats spent their early years outside the normative reach of institutional schooling. Kipling, like most British children in Victorian India, was sent to England by his parents to be tutored in the basics of bourgeois etiquette and language. The first six years of his life he had spent amongst servants and ayahs in India, amidst sights and sensations he would never fail to recall with much fondness. On arrival in Southsea he was found to be dull and obdurate, a boy barely able to spell and write. The torments of abandonment and insult he suffered for the next three crucial years in Lorne Lodge were to remain with him all through his life. So also were the acute feelings of inadequacy and ineptitude which Yeats experienced as a boy, for he managed to slowly master the alphabet only around the advanced age of ten. Alternating erratically between Sligo and London, Yeats’s childhood was of extremes of joy and despair. He thoroughly enjoyed the attention and respect he commanded in Sligo as the eldest of William Pollexfen’s grandchildren, and the free play which the town and its rugged countryside gave to his boyish imagination. Yet, his difficulties with grammar and 2

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punctuation were always made apparent by his aunts. Yeats may or may not have been dyslexic, but this was to be a lifelong affliction, a symbol as potent as Godolphin School later became of the horrors of modern education. These early troubles gave way to success, much sooner for Kipling than for Yeats. Returning to Lahore in 1882, after many edifying years in the United Services College, Kipling drew assiduously from his intimate experience of British society in India during the high noon of the Raj to become, within less than a decade, its most representative chronicler. Departmental Ditties came out in 1886, followed shortly by Plain Tales From the Hills and Soldiers Three in 1888, and Barrack Room Ballads in 1892. By comparison, Yeats in the mid-1890s, in the middle of the so-called Kipling Boom, was still struggling to find his place in the literary life of Ireland. Journalism to him had not been as rewarding as it had proved to Kipling, and though he had work and had received favourable reviews for The Rose and The Celtic Twilight, both of which came out in 1893, he had been unhappy in love and was far from becoming the popularly acclaimed and financially comfortable writer Kipling already was.2 However, even as they went on widely divergent paths and came to be associated with diametrically polar kinds of writing – Kipling with a bullish imperialism, Yeats with a visionary selfhood – both drew richly from the deep wellspring of their early and close experience of what we loosely and commonly term as ‘the other’. Kipling’s subjects and locations, as has often been noted, were hardly English. The quixotic quotidian of Britain’s sweeping empire, upheld by vigour and war, animated his pages, and it was not until Puck of Pook’s Hill – two exact decades after Departmental Ditties – that he wrote of old England. Yeats, encouraged as much by his own proclivities for folklore as by the metropolitan taste for Celtic romance, was for long conscious of the trickiness of reconciling Irish legends and histories to the English language. Kipling and Yeats were instrumental in enlarging the scope of English literature as well as English language, making both more malleable given the exigencies of populist democracy, militarist imperialism, and total war. Some measure of this may well be due to their shared interest in the psychic and the occult. Fin-de-siècle backlash to the hardnosed material pragmatism of the Victorians took many forms, including an explosive interest in the hidden depths and talents of the mind and of the spirit’s many forms and lives. Kipling, ever the man amongst men, was not immune to these influences. His sister Trix, he believed, was one of the many good minds wrecked by psychic experiences, and he 3

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himself gave evidence, albeit guarded, of being strangely strung by the deep powers of the unconscious.3 Yeats, of course, was from a very early age keenly sensitive to this warrant of the unseen and otherworldly over what appears as life lived ordinarily. He formed the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885, joined the Theosophical Society soon after, and went on to the even more esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890. For more than a decade he nursed passionate dreams of creating a new mystical order which would put upon beauty and legend the mask of holy symbolism. The experience of possession during his first séance in 1886 stayed with him for many long years, and the experiments in automatic writing by his wife Georgie proved to be a source of much provocation and inspiration in later life. Curiously, even in their politics Kipling and Yeats were not too dissimilar even though the former was bitterly opposed to Home Rule – much less independence – and the latter was to serve as a Senator in the Irish Free State. At heart both men were deeply conservative, and disdainfully dismissive of the merits of democracy. From ‘The Mother Hive’ (1908) to ‘The Storm Cone’ (1932), Kipling warned his considerable readership of the moral, cultural, and racial rot emergent from popular politics. This decay, he belligerently argued, threatened to undermine the extraordinary achievements of their fathers in securing for Britain the leadership of the civilised world. Likewise, Yeats found himself constantly turning away from what he regarded as the misinformed politics of the mob, the kind of rabble-rousing for which Maud Gonne had a particular genius. As he confessed, he worked always for a ‘small fanatical sect’ (Yeats 430), a coterie of a select few endowed by the ancestry of blood with the instinctive capacity to lead and guide the Irish people beyond the pettiness of the politicians. This intense dislike of politicians and of electoral politics may well have stemmed from Kipling’s and Yeats’s notions of masculinity. Neither was particularly athletic in childhood. Kipling, short-sighted, was ‘Giggers’ through school, while Yeats, with abundant stores of nervous sensitiveness, often needed to be shielded from school bullies.4 Unsurprisingly, they grew to admire a certain virile kind of masculinity, the kind of men who could lead and command by dint of innate personality. This force of character drew its strength from deep reserves of race and class – English for Kipling, Irish for Yeats – and in many significant ways lay at the core of their notion of manhood and its role in cleansing civilisation through violence. Glorious male figures like Stalky and Robert Gregory thickly populate their respective oeuvres, aristocratic men with the mandate to rule and rejuvenate the common masses by example of their selfless courage and sacrifice 4

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in pursuit of a higher duty. Born as much from a shared imperial, conservative context as from a shared lack of bodily virility, this world view caused both men to locate the evils and depredations of their time in the command mistakenly placed before low, common men of mean genius. Though through their long life and career both Kipling and Yeats went on to experience radical destabilisations in these ideals of masculinity, they still retained at heart visions of an ordered, just society run essentially by great and good men.

Towards a comparative framework These, generally, are some of the coincidental points of similarity in thought and deed which seem to make a comparative study of Kipling and Yeats viable. Comparisons of such kind have been in vogue for some time now, but our aim is to not be limited to this indulgence for simply its own enjoyable sake. Given Kipling’s and Yeats’s varying legacies, divergent yet overlapping, we intend to understand their contemporaneity not just historically, as a function of influences and concerns shared as a factor of context, but also in light of the effect and affect which their work continues to exercise owing to the theory, politics, and praxis of literature in our times. England’s place in the world, and that of English literature, is now vastly different from what it was in the twilight of the 1930s. Thirty years later, by the time of Kipling’s and Yeats’s centenaries in 1965, the measure of popularity – even notoriety – which both had consistently enjoyed through their lives had swerved definitively into Yeats’s favour. Yeats was ensconced firmly within the modernist canon, consolidated zealously by a steadily burgeoning English literary academia. As W.H. Auden prophesied, his death was most scrupulously kept from his poems, and he became one of the pre-eminent literary lights of not just modern Ireland but also the English language. Kipling, meanwhile, floundered in a dim bourgeois wilderness. Though he remained a popularly read figure, his popularity with critics had been declining constantly since the Boer War.5 Reviewing The Years Between in 1920, T.S. Eliot could not help regard Kipling as a neglected celebrity, while George Orwell, years later, found cause to see him as insensitive and disgusting. Yet, today, the scales seem to have tipped towards Kipling. Kipling’s bullish, often cantankerous voice seems to excite more attention and comment in our times than Yeats’s impassioned explorations of the self. Even as Yeats’s position within the canon – and syllabi – appears as safe as firm, Kipling’s work has seen radically fresh appraisals, given 5

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the critical impetus generated by postcolonial theory, feminism, and queer theory, and the wide sweep of cultural materialism in practice. The gyres turn, and chaos and anarchy have again quartered the world into camps riven by the politics of place, space, and self. What meanings, then, can we hope to glean by setting Kipling’s work with Yeats’s in such a milieu? Does a reappraisal of their oeuvres and legacies provide inventive entry points into the inner workings of imperialism, racism, and war? Living as we still do in the broken shadows of the great and terrible dreams of modernity, how do comparative readings of Kipling and Yeats unsettle our received wisdom on art and an artist’s role in society? These are some of the questions with which this volume of essays is concerned. The idea for this project, brewing since late 2013, took tangible shape first in early 2015 as a series of conferences in Delhi, Rajkot, and Shimla, bringing together recent scholarship on Kipling and Yeats on the occasion of their sesquicentennial birth anniversaries. Conscious of the need to revise as well as widen the scope of this corpus, we invited and shortlisted external contributions as well. Notwithstanding many a proverbial slip ‘twixt cup and lip’, this book as it stands today is the result of these years of concerted effort to bring to fruition a unique and uncommon coupling of two of these primary influences on modern verse and poetry in the English language. Our aim being to facilitate and encourage conjoined readings of Kipling and Yeats, we have structured this volume into four thematic sections premised on distinct yet overlapping aspects of the authors’ literary lives and careers. Not all essays consider Kipling and Yeats together, but by clustering those with shared motifs we hope the reader will be able to move seamlessly from one argument to the other without losing sight of the propositions which cogently bind them to each other.

Influences and legacies The first section, ‘Influences and legacies’, sets the tone for the volume with an astutely argued essay by R.W. Desai. Tracing the political and aesthetic principles emergent from Kipling’s and Yeats’s literary careers, Desai sees divergences balanced by convergences. He finds an undercurrent of sympathy between the two, particularly in their responses to and treatment of Indian philosophy and aesthetics in their work. Through a careful appraisal of their lives and literary careers and a measured reading of their work, he identifies various moments at which each showed awareness of the other. Yeats, particularly, was more forthcoming about Kipling’s popularity, craftsmanship, 6

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and politics, and on more than one occasion publicly evaluated his standing amongst his peers. Kipling, on the other hand, was famously reticent about influences on his art, going on to even state that he hardly ever read anything by his contemporaries. Yet, in his treatment of Indian themes and contexts in his early writing as well as in the cautious poignancy of some of his later work, he appears to be guided by aesthetic conventions and emotive interests – including the PreRaphaelite tradition and the occult – which mirror Yeats’s preoccupations. Detecting these strains of commonality allows for a layered comparative comment on formative influences on the craftsmanship of both writers. Significantly, both Kipling and Yeats drew upon an eclectic and esoteric corpus of folk traditions and legends for their work. Mythili Kaul’s essay speculates on Kipling’s possible debt to the Panchtantra, the ancient South Asian compilation of parables on governance, conduct, and statecraft. Closely reading The Jungle Books and the laws of the jungle enshrined therein in light of the precepts and homilies in the Panchtantra, Kaul proposes that it is likely Kipling drew upon some of the ideas and ideals expounded in the tales of the Panchtantra in creating the regulations and hierarchies guiding the lives of the Seonee Wolf-Pack and other jungle folk. Her argument is premised upon Kipling’s close acquaintance with the Jatakas and with his father Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India. With Kipling himself acknowledging a plenitude of sources as inspiration for The Jungle Books, it is likely that he may have been familiar with the stories of the Panchtantra even if he never accessed them in book form. The easy dialogue between prose and verse in The Jungle Books also appears to Kaul as an influence of texts such as the Panchtantra and the Jataka tales. It remains difficult to ascertain the extent to which these acted as models, but the essay reiterates an important line of enquiry into Kipling’s work. The influence of Indian philosophy in framing Yeats’s creative praxis is dealt provokingly by Ruth Vanita in her essay on ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’. One of Yeats’s most iconic poems, read widely as a poignant outpouring of an anxious father, ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ was published in 1921 as part of Michael Robartes and the Dancer. A quarter of a century older than his wife, Yeats became a father well past his physical prime. The poem, completed in the summer of 1919, speaks of beauty, courtesy, and peace against a background of war and insurrection in Europe as much as Ireland. Vanita offers an intriguing reading of the notion of selfhood emergent from this poem, arguing that the sense of self Yeats conjures here is individual 7

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as well as transcendentally universal – a sense which he later went on to more fully develop in translating the ten Upanishads with Purohit Swami. Banking upon Yeats’s intimate engagement with South Asian philosophical and spiritual traditions, Vanita identifies cross-cultural tropes – such as ‘prayer’, ‘tree’, and ‘bird’ – at work in the poem: Upanishadic meanings of these work in tandem with Irish and English ones to lend the symbolism in this prayer a multidimensional, crosscivilisational value. The legacy of this complex and variegated set of symbols and imagery is in turn taken up by Peter Schulman in his essay on Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s The Habit of Fear (1987). Rightly observing that Yeats seems to be largely absent from contemporary fiction even though he continues to be admired and discussed in contemporary criticism, Schulman identifies Davis’s novel as a rare text wherein Yeats’s legacy is potently discernible in informing the plot and politics of the story. Tracing the journey of a female journalist of Irish origin from New York to Ireland in quest of her nationalist father, The Habit of Fear invokes the looming spectre of Yeats on Irish public life and letters. The rich intertextuality between this novel and much of Yeats’s poetry is taken by Schulman as evidence of the formative role played by Yeatsian aesthetics, symbolism, and politics in giving voice to Irish subjectivities and selfhoods. Art, history, and individuality appear inextricably linked to each other in the milieus which The Habit of Fear evokes, and in highlighting these connections Schulman suggests that Ireland becomes a place of collective memory through Yeats’s poetic presence which still lingers in its national, social, and cultural topos.

Self and society The underlying theme of the self in and by society is discussed directly in our next section, ‘Self and society’. It begins with an essay by Malabika Sarkar on Yeats and Kipling, a broad comment on the metaphors of voyage and sanctuary in their writings. Both as activity and as idea, voyaging is deeply embedded in Western societies’ cultural selfhoods. From the Early Modern moment to the closure of the long nineteenth century, this baptism by sea served as a vital civilisational link in the creation and consolidation of industrial imperialism. Focussing on the two Byzantium poems, Sarkar argues that the sublime haven of undying serenity which Yeats quests for is achieved through a lasting commitment to the measured song of creativity. In an important sense, creativity here is a corollary of the motility of the spirit accompanied 8

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by the intellect – a vein of craftsmanship also apparent in Kipling, albeit much less symbolically. Selfhood in Kipling, Sarkar finds, is premised largely on travel and a deep awareness of other cultures as this allows one’s own identity to be created by comparison. However, unlike Yeats, the emotive voyages of Kipling result in a politics of ambivalence and hybridity. This hybridity is seen as the source and site of subversion by Madhu Grover in her essay on Kipling’s early Indian fiction. Seeing Kipling as a divided writer, Grover undertakes a postcolonial reading of this corpus – including Plain Tales From the Hills, Under the Deodars, Life’s Handicap, Kim, and the like – to highlight the transgressive potential written into the many types of English characters who populate these texts. These characters are shown to indulge repeatedly in wilful and often joyous boundary crossing and they emblematically articulate ambivalences which renege on prevailing cultural and social norms of British as well as Indian life in the subcontinent. These norms are premised as much on considerations of class as of race. In repeatedly violating them, Kipling’s characters often move beyond sympathy to affective positions incompatible with hegemonic notions of imperial hierarchies. This, Grover argues, is a factor as much of content as of form, i.e., the narrative techniques and tones which Kipling adopts in his early Indian fiction allows for his work to be read against the grain of racialised imperialism. The ambivalences which constitute the self in a milieu marked by conflict, doubt, and ambition is what concerns Amiya Bhushan Sharma in his essay on ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, one of Yeats’s more introspective dialogue poems. Published in 1917 in The Wild Swans at Coole, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ articulates the tension between self and anti-self in search of the appropriate creative mask, or symbol. The Daimon for Yeats was both protective and corrosive.6 To turn to the Daimon for occult revelation and poetic inspiration was to radically reorient the self to a visionary topos. Sharma finds that the exchange between Ille and Hic in this poem reflects Yeats’s larger search for a visionary aesthetics, a quest which necessarily unsettles received wisdom on the form and meaning of creative merit and talent. While Dante appears to be a man of uncertain temperament derided by the object of his adoration, Keats seems to be a schoolboy longing for the actual experience of luxury, comfort, and beauty: their talent, substantial, is now a limitation which Yeats’s poetic self needs to overcome to discover a truly transcendental self. The self’s moorings, though, are myriad, lying as much with the material as with the spiritual. This materiality of selfhood, emergent 9

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from the dialectic between personal and public, is the primary interest of K.B.S. Krishna’s essay on Kim. Locating Kim, the novel’s eponymous hero, in his Anglo-Indian context,7 Krishna reads his evolving self-awareness through the course of the novel in light of debates on schooling and education in Victorian society. Arguing that nineteenthcentury England can be seen as an Age of Reform, Krishna proposes that John Ruskin’s injunctions on education are brought to fruition by Kipling in the manner in which Kim attains inner maturity. Accompanied by the Lama in his travels, Kim learns natural history, politics, and religion even as he furthers British interests in the Great Game. Education here is not simply the learning of facts or the acquiring of information; it is an experiential process of becoming a better version of one’s own self. Accordingly, Krishna suggests that for Kipling strength of character came through an immersive engagement with the world in all its vagaries and not simply through the motions of deskbound pedagogy.

Craft, medium, politics The question of learning was also intimately tied to the question of craftsmanship for both Kipling and Yeats. Our next section, ‘Craft, medium, politics’, reflects on these concerns as apparent in their work. We begin with an essay by Robert S. White on Kipling’s and Yeats’s shared and abiding interest in Shakespeare, a recurring influence on their notions of art and artistry. Taking on Keatsian metaphors of poetic personalities being either chameleons or peacocks, White makes a case for considering Kipling as the former and Yeats as the latter. Kipling’s ‘multi-vocal temperament’, White argues, emerged from his admiration of Shakespeare and what he learned of variety from him. On the other hand, Yeats’s inspirations emerged for the most from within, from introspective explorations of his own soul and spirit. His self seems akin to the egoistical sublime which assertively bends and blends the influence of Shakespeare to his own style. Understood through these general metaphors as chameleon and peacock, both writers cogently appear as part of a broader tradition of literary craftsmanship in the English language. Kipling’s polyvalent literary talent hinted at by White is explored in greater detail by John Lee in his essay on the tensions between and creative impetus emergent from verse and journalistic prose. Focussing on Departmental Ditties, Kipling’s first book of verse, Lee proposes that working for the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) and the Pioneer gave Kipling a spatially disparate audience of the British attuned 10

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closely to the conditions – social as well as lingual – of imperial rule. The three years from the publication of ‘A New Departure’, his first poem, in the CMG in 1883 to that of Departmental Ditties in 1886 saw 35 poems appear in journalistic print. The experience of writing these and their reception by the reading public gave Kipling the opportunity to hone his acutely observant talent for representatively conjuring the inner life of imperial functionaries like himself. The topical publicness of much of Kipling’s poetry, Lee argues, may be traced to these early experiments which birthed Departmental Ditties. Kipling wrote about and for an imperial tribe, and his verse shows abundant awareness of this position and the role of the poet in society. This positioning of the poet in the political life of society is the concern of Prashant K. Sinha’s essay on Yeats. Premised upon a careful selection of Yeats’s poems and plays, Sinha suggests that Yeats’s political vision as apparent in his drama needs sustained analysis. To this end, he takes up The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Purgatory – four of Yeats’s most political plays – and reads them along with political poems such as ‘At Galway Races’, ‘September 1913’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’, and ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ to come to a holistic understanding of Yeats’s views on class hierarchies, civil war, insurgency, and selfhood. Sinha finds that Yeats’s poetry is much more vocally indicative of his political beliefs than his drama, and speculates that external factors – such as censorship and audience response – as much as internal ones – such as Yeats’s dualistic mode of thinking – could have contributed to the muted politics of his theatre in comparison to his poetry. The vexed question of censorship, both institutionalised as a state apparatus and internalised as a state of being, is further explored by Indrani Das Gupta in her essay on Kipling’s Indian short stories. Conceptualising censorship as a ‘fabricated border’, Das Gupta argues that Kipling’s boundary crossing in much of his early, Indian writing may be fruitfully read as signifying an ambivalence born of a polyvalent hybridity of being and self. Foregrounding the divided nature of Kipling’s loyalties between England and India, amongst the politics and affect of these divergent notions of home, she finds in short stories such as ‘Tod’s Amendment’, ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’, ‘They’, ‘The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows’, and ‘The Mark of the Beast’ ample hints of Kipling’s struggle with the colonial strictures on what cannot be seen and said. The authority of the imperial state is at best limited and fragile in the interstitial spaces of these stories’ transgressive worlds, and Kipling’s recurring violation of socio-cultural borders 11

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serves to highlight as well as undermine the censorship operating in British India at the time. But if Das Gupta is concerned with the circuitry of selfhood emergent from the social and political background of Kipling’s early Indian short stories, Dominic Davies broadens the dialogue between self and society onto a global scale as apparent in Kipling’s first two novels, The Light that Failed (1891) and Captain Courageous (1896). In many ways a so-called globetrotter by this stage of his career, Kipling wrote here of the pressures and anxieties of becoming part of a rapidly globalising world. Davies takes the locomotive and communications infrastructure of this new world order, primarily but not exclusively imperial British, as a guiding force in Kipling’s attempt to create a ‘worlded novel’, a new kind of literary text which would be able to reconcile the form of the novel as a genre to the emerging realities of a global order and imagination. That this attempt did not quite work out underscores the limitations of this global infrastructure in this early phase of its creation and therefore allows for a more nuanced understanding of the destabilising slippage constantly undercutting Kipling’s earnest projection and perpetuation of an imperial British identity over the world.

Masculinity and/as empire Overall, though, empire’s structuring of masculine identities is a recurring preoccupation for both Kipling and Yeats. As an entity born of and upheld by violence, by war absolute as well as real, the British Empire was a discursive composite of ideas and ideals which formatively influenced the creation of masculine selfhoods across its disparate yet connected constituents. Our concluding section, ‘Masculinity and/as empire’ begins with an essay on heroism and the aesthetics of violence in Kipling and Yeats by Alexander Bubb. Finely argued, Bubb’s essay is an eloquent testament to the rewards of reading Kipling with Yeats.8 His thesis on the similarities of imperialist and nationalist discourses in the fin-de-siècle suggests that both men delighted in action for its own sake, that their poetic creed rested in some shared measure upon a baptism of manly strife. The aesthetics of violence which hence emerges in their work makes them each other’s contemporary in ways poetic as much as politic. Thinking of men, it is important to also think of boys, and Usha Mudiganti, in her essay on Kim and the Great Game, does precisely this. Taking forward Krishna’s thesis on Kim’s education, Mudiganti points out that paragons of boyhood as delineated in Kim and other 12

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Kipling stories are either Indian or Anglo-Indian and their cultural hybridity as colonials is what endows them the virile strength to serve and maintain the honour of the Empire. Mudiganti’s argument usefully locates boy characters such as Kim, Mowgli, Adam, and Tod against Kipling’s own boyhood experiences in Bombay, Southsea, and Westward Ho! His delight in male companionship and the camaraderie between strong and determined men appears vitally to be a factor of the realities of empire and the necessities of imperial service. These conditions are palpable forces in much of Kipling’s Indian fiction, which also directly inspired Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts movement. Accordingly, boyhood in Kipling’s Indian corpus may well be read as the site and source of an alternate masculinity both rivalling and complementing concurrent British ideals of youth, duty, and service. The ideals of masculinity and duty, emergent from and attributed to Kipling, frame Nanditha Rajaram Shastry’s essay on ‘If’. Boldly attempting a comparative reading of ‘If’, Shastry reads the poem along with the Gita to correlate notions of Muscular Christianity, then in popular currency, with the concept of sthitaprajna, the ideal man of lasting wisdom. Enunciated in discourses on nishkama karma yoga, this is an ideal of selfless devotion to duty as an exemplar of manly behaviour. Such adherence to one’s given tasks in this world is what brings an individual closer to the ultimate divine. Conjecturing that Kipling’s awareness of various subcontinental religions and spiritual traditions may well have acquainted him with this archetype of masculine excellence, Shastry reasons that ‘If’ mirrors the Gita’s key teaching of service free of attachment to worldly considerations. Seen in this light, ‘If’ appears to reflect not just the central tenets of Muscular Christianity but also the ideal of sthitaprajna and may thus be read as an embodiment of masculine values cherished across diverse cultures. This thematic preoccupation with masculinity and imperialism brings the volume to its closure with Anubhav Pradhan’s comparative essay on Kipling’s and Yeats’s shared conceptions of manliness, selfhood, and duty. Reading select texts from the corpus of both writers, Pradhan detects strong parallels between their ideals of manhood: outgoing, decisive men whose talent for command is as inborn as it is refined by the dint of appropriate training. Simultaneously, however, the anxiety of creating – and being – men such as these is also apparent in their work, and the strong men they delight and revel in are also tortured and troubled men, men lost in a crucial sense to the pressures of being manly. Femininity, too, recurs in their work as a significant trope, with Kipling sublimating it as an inner dreamscape and 13

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Yeats engaging with it more substantively as a two-sided creative and destructive force. Though antithetical in their politics and divergent in their art, in the final analysis both Kipling and Yeats emerge as ‘chaps’ of a similar mould from Pradhan’s reading.

Kipling and Yeats: proximate strangers The aim of this book is to bridge the distance, creative and critical, between two of the greatest authors of the Anglophone world. For long read and taught as disparate members of distinctly different canons, Kipling and Yeats can now be seen as connected in a complex contemporaneity which not only shaped their personalities and attitudes in similar moulds but also lent hues of mutuality to their substantial corpus. A century and a half after their birth, seeing them linked by more than just this banal coincidence affords scholars of literature, empire, and gender key insights into the aesthetics and appeal of some of the most powerful and enduring pieces of art in the English language. We hope as much will be possible from this book, curated as it is to give readers a sense of the directions in which such comparative work on Kipling and Yeats can take. We hope the essays presented herein will provide healthy impetus to more such exciting and innovative work, particularly in areas we have been unable to cover here. India and the empire, by no means underrepresented in this volume, may still provide pertinent grounds for further correlating the two – in terms, for example, of their poetics. Similarly, their journalistic work and training – formative to a large degree – merits serious appraisal with specific reference to its impact on their aesthetics. The influence of the classics, English as much as Graeco-Roman, may also be fruitfully explored. Shakespeare is dealt with in our book, but focus on others in the pantheon may well reveal fresh insights. Another interesting direction would be the decoding of their own apotheosis as classics within their lifetimes, the manner in which both men attempted to guide and control the publicity they received from admirers as well as detractors. Missing also from this book is a close, comparative comment on psychic elements in their thought and writing: both men were exposed, to varying degrees, to the same influences, and such a study is likely to be of lasting interest to students of modernity and the mind. These are some of the many conversations which a book like this can initiate. Both Kipling and Yeats were, in later phases of their lives, deeply concerned with the power of their words to incite and move generations. Both were convinced of their special role as public partisans of a nobler, higher life of beauty, duty, and truth. Fittingly, the breadth 14

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and depth of their oeuvres has been inexhaustible in the provocations they have offered to readers and critics alike over the past hundred years or so. Combined, considered in a mutual and reciprocal light, they are likely now to become a dynamic new subset of literary studies in the Anglophone world. Of course, the point of any sound comparison is not that it simply provides new material for research or is enjoyable qua itself; rather, a cogent comparative framework should enhance our understanding of the manifold ways in which the world of work gives form to the world of words. It should attune us to the sympathies which underlie even the most obvious of antipathies, the undercurrents of affinity and mutual inspiration which often mark the most palpable of differences. Casting just such a retrospective glance at Kipling and Yeats has been rewarding in precisely this manner. It has provided new perspectives on not just the contours of their contemporaneity, but also on their richly variegated legacies in literature, politics, and cultural selfhoods at an unprecedented global scale.

Notes 1 Her younger sisters Georgina, Agnes, and Louisa were also society figures in their own right, moving in Pre-Raphaelite circles and going on to marry artists and industrialists who would count amongst the most influential of their age. 2 ‘Until I was nearly fifty’, writes Yeats in Dramatis Personae, ‘my writing never brought me more than two hundred a year, and most often less, and I am not by nature economical’ (Yeats 409). By contrast, Kipling in 1888 could expect royalties nearing £300 a year from Plain Tales alone. 3 Kipling, like Yeats, had met Madam Blavatsky. He was also a Freemason from a young age. 4 Both were also fond of swimming, and Yeats is known to have won medals for the same in Godolphin. 5 A representative example of this critical lacuna in the Indian academy may well be Sumanyu Satpathy’s Re-viewing Reviewing, a survey of the reception of modernist poetry in The Times Literary Supplement from 1912–1932. Yeats occupies a place of prominence in Satpathy’s thesis, but Kipling is mentioned only peripherally as an ‘unmodern’ ‘modern’ poet. 6 Kipling too shared this notion of the creative daemon with Yeats: his ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’ is perhaps his most articulate depiction of the inner workings of this genius. 7 With the recent rise of Anglo-Indian Studies on the cultural histories of peoples of mixed English and Indian descent, it may perhaps be no longer possible to use the term ‘Anglo-Indian’ to loosely refer to the British resident in India. In this book, however, ‘Anglo-Indian’ is still used in this familiar sense. 8 We are happy to acknowledge our debt to Bubb, whose pioneering book Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (2016) established the terms of this debate.

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Works cited Alldritt, Keith. W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu. London: John Murray, 1997. Bloom, Harold. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970. Carrington, Charles. Kipling’s Horace. London: The Methuen Press, 1978. Desai, R.W. Yeats’s Shakespeare. Evanston: Northwestern U, 1971. Howes, Marjorie. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Kemp, Sandra. Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1988. Kemp, Sandra and Lisa Lewis, ed. Writings on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself, and Other Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Macrae, Alasdair D.F. W.B. Yeats: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1995. Mallet, Phillip. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Montefiore, Jan. Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2007. Moore-Gilbert, B.J. Kipling and “Orientalism”. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Orel, Harold ed. Kipling: Interviews and Recollections. Vol 1, London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1983. Randall, Don. Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Rosenthal, M.L. Sailing into the Unknown: Yeats, Pound, and Eliot. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Taneja, G.R., ed. W.B. Yeats: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. Delhi: Pencraft International, 1995. Yeats, W.B. Autobiographies, 1955. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980. ———. The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Ed. J. Richard Finneran. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Unterecker, John. A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats. London: Thames and Hudson, 1959.

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Part I INFLUENCES AND LEGACIES

1 YEATS AND KIPLING Parallels, divergences, and convergences R.W. Desai Richard Ellmann has remarked that poets seldom love their fellow poets (Ellmann, Eminent 97). Over the years Yeats’s assessment of Kipling’s poetic output began with scepticism, but gradually gave place to a reassessment of his achievement. Both poets attended W.E. Henley’s gettogethers on Sunday evenings, but around 30 years later Yeats wrote that ‘faces and names are vague to me . . . while faces that I met but once may rise clearly before me, a face met on many a Sunday has perhaps vanished. Kipling came sometimes, I think, but I never met him’ (Auto 78). However, that Yeats was aware of Kipling’s reputation is clear from the satisfaction he felt knowing that while Henley ‘often revised my lyrics, crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, I was comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling, then in the first flood of popularity’ (79). Many years later, in a letter to Margot Ruddock dated 25 February 1935, he wrote, ‘Kipling and I, though we have never met, wrote when very young men for a review edited by the poet W.E. Henley. He rewrote us both – I never complained and never heard that Kipling did’ (McHugh 36). Kipling’s recollection of his contact with Henley’s gatherings, also recorded many years later, makes no mention of Henley having changed his lines, the omission of this detail being open to several explanations depending upon the reader’s perspectives. Kipling does mention his having showed ‘some verses called Barrack Room Ballads’ to Henley, ‘who wanted more; and I became for a while one of the happy company who used to gather in a little restaurant off Leicester Square and regulate all literature till all hours of the morning’ (Pinney 49–50). John Kelly suggests that Henley’s poetics had been generally conservative, but that ‘his friendship with Rudyard Kipling . . . converted him into an Imperialist and an active supporter of the Conservative Party’ (492–93).

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Because of the success and the popularity of his Plain Tales From the Hills, not much attention has been paid to the striking similarity between the early poetry of Yeats and Kipling, a time when both poets wrote in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. Thus, Kipling’s poem ‘The Story of Paul Vaugel’, describing his befriending of a prostitute and caring for her up to her death, has lines like ‘And I plucked sea poppy and wind dried heather/And wove them into a wreath together/And I set the wreath on her brows as night/Came, and shut them out of my sight’ (Cornell 33–4). These lines could well have come straight out of Yeats’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889). However, the common ground upon which both poets stood was quickly abandoned by Kipling with his sevenyear experience of living and working as a journalist in India. Yeats, on the other hand, never really abandoned that ground: his symbols remain the same; his treatment of them changes (Ellmann, Identity 1–2). Accordingly, this paper falls into three sections: (i) Yeats’s attitudes towards Kipling; (ii) Kipling’s possible awareness of Yeats’s work; and (iii) the convergence of the two in the closing phases of their careers, each perhaps influencing the other. Viewed casually, the few shared features of Yeats and Kipling might seem to be simply that they were both born in 1865, though separated by 10,000 miles of sea and land – Yeats in Dublin, Kipling in Bombay. Both had an unhappy childhood; both were Nobel Prize winners, Kipling in 1907, Yeats in 1923; and both died shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Kipling in January 1936, Yeats in January 1939. The political philosophy of both men was widely divergent. ‘I am an Irish nationalist’, Yeats declared, in a speech given in January 1913 to the Parliamentary Home Rule Party, ‘because I have believed since I had my first thoughts about it, that no country can prosper unless the greater part of its intellect is occupied with itself’ (Michael Yeats 879). Kipling, on the other hand, has been seen as an avowed imperialist, a political stance seemingly assumed in his letter of 13 December to Lady Bathurst where he writes that the betrayal of the Empire is present ‘already in India where Allahabad encouraged by the profitable example of “The Free State of Ireland”, is setting the note for Calcutta and Benares, so that the whole of India is set for organized crime and assassination’ (quoted in Birkenhead 294). For his virulent imperialism, he was denounced by George Russell (AE), Yeats’s lifelong friend: ‘You had the ear of the world and you poisoned it with bigotry and prejudice. You had the power of song 20

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and you have always used it on the behalf of the strong against the weak’ (Boyle 17). Yet, the armour of nationalism and imperialism, respectively, both poets ostensibly flaunted had cracks. The credentials of Kipling the imperialist have been questioned time and again: for instance David Pierce describes him as ‘a tormented apologist of empire’ (4). To see the truth of this observation, we have only to think of poems like ‘The Ballad of East and West’ and ‘Gunga Din’, celebratory of a common humanity; of the fine sensitivity of a story like ‘The Miracle of Puran Bhagat’; or, of course, of Kim, concerning which Charles Carrington declares, ‘Surely no other Englishman has written of India with such loving interest!’ (425). Kipling’s divided self between his mother country, India, and his parental country, England, is well captured by Neil Philip in his observation, ‘It is perhaps useful to remember that Kipling’s first language was Hindustani’ (12); for T.S. Eliot, ‘Kipling is of India in a different way from any other Englishman who has written, and in a different way from that of any particular Indian, who has a race, a creed, a local habitation and, if a Hindu, a caste. He might almost be called the first citizen of India’ (24). A similar dichotomy of feeling is inherent in Yeats’s nationalism. After 250 years of colonial subjugation by England, we in India can understand what he experienced against the backdrop of 700 years of Ireland’s domination by Britain. His divided feelings towards England may be found in a passage he wrote in his last phase: No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive, there are moments when hatred poisons my life. . . . Then I remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake . . . I am like the Tibetan monk who dreams at his initiation that he is eaten by a wild beast and learns on waking that he himself is eater and eaten. (Essays 519) Influenced to some extent by his father’s opinions on poets and poetry, the early Yeats did not openly disagree with him in his pronouncement on Kipling as being ‘all tinsel and vulgarity’ (Henn 245). Somewhat guarded in his response, Yeats’s 1909 letter agrees with him as to ‘intimacy’ being ‘the mark of fine literature’, the opposite being ‘generalization’ which ‘creates rhetoric, wins immediate 21

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popularity, organizes the mass, gives political success, Kipling’s poetry, Macaulay’s essay, and so on’. He goes on to define ‘generalization’ as what one encounters ‘in music hall songs with their mechanical rhythm, or in thoughts taken from the newspapers’ (Wade 534). For Yeats, the opposite of the general was the particular as seen in ‘the folk mind’ which is close to the soil, what he was to celebrate many years later in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’: ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil, from that/Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong’. That these were the decades when Kipling was ‘only at the beginning of a rapidly enlarging career, with indefinite growth before him’ (Jarell 333), while Yeats was virtually unknown, undoubtedly played a part in making both father and son feel left behind. While the early Yeats was writing poems on fairies and legendary Irish heroes and heroines like ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, or ‘Cuchulain’s Fight With the Sea’, Kipling, as Neil Philip remarks, ‘addressed himself from the start to the widest possible audience, and not to any coterie. He looked to the world of action for his subject matter and his readership. His characters are soldiers, engineers, civil administrators, doctors’ (8). Nonetheless, the later Kipling, like the early Yeats, seeks to revive interest in England’s legendary past in poems like ‘The Run of the Downs’, ‘Sir Richard’s Song’, or ‘A British–Roman Song’ in which, as T.S. Eliot notes, ‘he is discovering and reclaiming a lost inheritance’ (33). The decades of the 1880s up to the beginning of the Great War was the period of the widest divergence between the two poets. For Yeats, as for many others, Kipling was the champion of imperialism, the poet of conquest as in poems like ‘Ave Imperatrix’ (1882) or ‘A Song of the English’ (1893), with lines like ‘For the Lord our God, Most High/ He hath made the deep as dry,/He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth’ which telescope the dominance of the Union Jack with Moses stretching ‘out his hand over the sea . . . and the waters were divided’ (Ex. 14:21). As Keith Aldritt notes, ‘The publication of [Kipling’s] enormously popular Barrack Room Ballads established him as the poet of the British Empire. The cocksure imperialism and the rabble-rousing tone of these poems were in strong contrast to the spirituality and aestheticism of the Rhymers’(101). Founded in 1891 by Yeats and Ernest Rhys, active members of the Rhymers’ Club included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and Arthur Symons, whose poetic philosophy, inspired by Walter Pater, was that ‘life should be a ritual’ (Hone 79), an outlook diametrically opposed to that espoused by Kipling of the 1890s and beyond. But at the same 22

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time, Yeats’s sense of being overshadowed by Kipling did not prevent him from noting how even Kipling’s early work had been eyed askance before achieving its present resounding success. In a letter dated 25 March 1895 to Katharine Tynan, who had been attacked by hostile critics for her favourable review of Yeats’s A Book of Irish Verse, Yeats argues that this should make her feel ‘rather glad than other-wise’. He goes on to point out that ‘at first a writer is the enthusiasm of a few. He is not yet important enough to be attacked. Then comes the day when the pioneer spirits think his fame assured . . . and the yet unconvinced may begin to carp and abuse’. Whimsically exposing the successive stages through which a writer’s reputation passes, he then reminds her ‘how Kipling got at that stage and stayed in it for a few months some years ago’ (Wade 253–4). From condescension, Yeats now seems to inch towards some limited degree of communion with his fellow poet. In 1925, Yeats was deep into occultism while unravelling the intricacies of the relation between human personality and historical change in the first draft of his A Vision, the result of the automatic writing of his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees who he had married eight years earlier. Joseph Hone, Yeats’s earliest biographer, records that when asked by Lennox Robinson whether he thought Kipling had ‘moments of poetic utterance as had Hardy, Yeats raised his hand episcopally: “That, no” ’ (371). To travel from the mysticism of A Vision to Kipling’s world of action and bustle was evidently intolerable for Yeats. Some years later, in 1936, the year Kipling died, Yeats wrote the powerful anti-imperialist poem ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’, each stanza of which concludes with ‘The ghost of Roger Casement/Is beating on the door’. Casement, a diplomat in the British Government, after retiring from consular service, actively supported Ireland’s struggle for freedom. He was arrested for treason and hanged. In the same year, Yeats wrote his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, in which his assessment of Kipling calls for close analysis: Victorianism had been defeated though two writers dominated the movement who had never heard of that defeat or did not believe in it, Rudyard Kipling and William Watson. Indian residence and association had isolated the first, he was full of opinions, of politics, of impurities – to use our word – and the word must have been right, for he interests a critical audience to-day by the grotesque tragedy of ‘Danny Deever’, the matter but not the form of old street ballads, and by songs traditional in matter and form like the ‘St. Helena Lullaby’. (xii) 23

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Studying this passage, I suspect that Yeats is now uneasy about his early negative appraisal of Kipling. Is Kipling to be condemned for his ignorance of ‘Victorianism’, which three pages earlier Yeats had described as the ‘irrelevant description of nature’, ‘the scientific and moral discursiveness of ‘In Memoriam’, ‘the political eloquence of Swinburne’, ‘the psychological curiosity of Browning’, ‘and the poetical diction of everybody’ (ix)? With a touch of irony, he goes on to say that ‘Poets said to one another over their black coffee. . . . “We must purify poetry of all that is not poetry” while holding up Catullus, Verlaine, and Baudelaire as examples to be followed’. Yeats himself had long ago left the kind of poetry these poets espouse, as seen in his early poems in ‘Crossways (1889)’, ‘The Rose (1891)’, and ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’ (1899). As we all know, from ‘In the Seven Woods’ (1904) onward, most particularly with ‘Easter 1916’ in the section ‘The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)’, his poetry is no longer that of wistful longing but addresses the hard realities of life. In a note written nearly 30 years later in Mythologies, he looks back at those early poems: ‘They were, as first published, written in that artificial, elaborate English so many of us played with in the ‘nineties, and I had come to hate them’ (1). My understanding of Yeats’s attitude towards Kipling is one of commendation for having eschewed ‘Victorianism’ with some reservation, as his aside on ‘Danny Deever’ seems to suggest. A year later, in a letter to Professor H.J.C. Grierson dated 21 February 1926, he compares and contrasts himself with Kipling. He writes, ‘My own verse has more and more adopted – seemingly without any will of mine – the syntax and vocabulary of common personal speech’, and goes on to write of the ‘natural momentum in the syntax’ difficult to achieve ‘unless he keep to the surface like Kipling’, or attempt to go deeper ‘like myself who seeks it with an intense unnatural labour that reduces composition to four or five lines a day’ (Wade 710). As early as 1902, he had grappled with the problem in ‘Adam’s Curse’ where he laments, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught’. Yeats was not alone in seeing merit in Kipling’s ‘syntax and vocabulary of common personal speech’: his father too seems to have got converted. In a letter to his son written in 1917, he insists that: poetry must have substance. What is this substance? I answer background. And what is background? It is something on which the verse and the imagery and the thoughts are all embroidered – and this something is found by certain poets through the accident of their birth. They come from India, 24

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like Tagore, or Anglo-India, like Kipling, or from the Scottish peasants, like Burns. (Finneran 343) That Yeats heeded this advice is evident from the direct utterance in the arresting opening lines of poems written after 1916: ‘There is grey in your hair,/Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath/When you are passing’ (1917); ‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still’ (1923); ‘That is no country for old men’ (1926); ‘I walk through the long school room questioning’ (1927). In 1937, two years before his death, he explains in ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, ‘I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech’ (Essays 521), perhaps a passing salute to Kipling. Significantly, in his last phase, Yeats returned to the writing of ballads – Kipling’s forte – while Kipling, perhaps returning the compliment, to the writing of poems and stories that had a mystical touch, a striking manifestation of an inverse reciprocity between the two authors. In 1923, on receiving the Nobel Prize medal from the King of Sweden, Yeats has an incisive and emotional remark on the paradox of the vigour of his last poems contrasting with the dreamy cadences of his early effusions: ‘The medal shows’, he observes, ‘a young man listening to a Muse, who stands young and beautiful with a great lyre in her hand, and I think as I examine it, “I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were; and now I am old and rheumatic, and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young” ’ (Auto 541). Similarly, the affinities in as much as the separations between the two authors seem to be well encapsulated in a curiously inverse convergence of mysticism that first appears in 1901 in the opening pages of Kipling’s Kim, where the Tibetan Lama descends from Mount Kailas in Tibet to the plains of Hindustan in search of The River of the Arrow. The opposite movement appeared three decades later in Yeats’s power packed sonnet ‘Meru’, where ‘Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest’ know that all civilisations come and go when their energies are spent, or in his essay ‘The Holy Mountain’, where Bhagwan Shri Hamsa sets out from the plains ‘to seek Turiya, the greater or conscious Samadhi at Mount Kailas, the legendary Meru’ (Essays 453). If the descent from the mountains to the plains of Kipling’s Lama is suggestive of Kipling’s own choice of action over contemplation, then the reverse movement of Yeats’s hermits from the plains to the mountains bespeaks an important aspect of Yeats’s thought – expressed so memorably in his Byazantium poems – of a withdrawal from the worldly to the otherworldly. 25

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The two poems of Kipling that Yeats included in his collection were selected by Dorothy Wellesley – ‘You chose those two Kipling poems’, he wrote to her (letter dated 23 December 1936, Raine 115–16). The poems were ‘A St. Helena Lullaby’ and ‘The Looking-Glass’, both of which question the driving force behind imperialism and the subjugation of the other for its waste of effort and ultimate futility. T.S. Eliot rightly saw through the façade of imperialism, describing it as ‘a view which expands and contracts at the same time. He [Kipling] had always been far from uncritical of the defects and wrongs of the British Empire, but held a firm belief in what it should and might be’ (27). Yeats concludes his Introduction with a statement tantamount to an apology to Kipling: ‘Rudyard Kipling and Ezra Pound, are inadequately represented because too expensive even for an anthologist with the ample means the Oxford University Press puts at his disposal’. Kipling died on 18 January 1936; in her letter to Yeats of 22 January of that year Dorothy Wellesley wrote, ‘Kipling goes to the Poet’s Corner, and George V beside Henry VIII’ (Raine 49), in Westminster Abbey. Then, a year later in March 1937, Yeats was invited by the BBC to give two lectures on modern poetry with George Barnes in charge of making arrangements. Alongside the lectures were planned recitations in various voices, accompanied by music created by percussion instruments. But the rehearsals were not a convincing success: as Joseph Hone points out, ‘Many of the poems which Yeats had chosen – a “Hardy”, a “Kipling” and an “Edith Sitwell” – were sternly rejected’, presumably by Clinton-Baddeley, one of the reciters (455). While tracing Yeats’s changing attitudes towards Kipling through various stages from an initial contempt to a final recognition of his poetic genius, an insistent and inevitable question that arises is: what was Kipling’s response to Yeats’s work? My investigations have not yielded any direct mention by Kipling of Yeats, but there is at least one clue that seems to suggest the possibility of his reaction to Yeats the poet during the last decade of the nineteenth century when the early Yeats was deeply interested in the otherworldly realms of Madame Blavatsky and the Hermetic society, A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism, and the philosophy of Mohini Chatterjee. Immersed as he was in the struggle within himself of symbolism versus reality, his publications during this period – The Celtic Twilight (1895), The Secret Rose (1897), and Rosa Alchemica (1897) – reflect this double, divided identity.

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Around this time, Kipling was in Simla where he may have met Madame Blavatsky. His father certainly did, describing her, in Kipling’s words, ‘as one of the most interesting and unscrupulous imposters’ (Pinney 35; Carrington 103–4) he had ever met. A.P. Sinnett too was there, editor of the Allahabad Newspaper, the Pioneer, for which Kipling worked as reporter and journalist during his stay in India. Kipling, however, both at this time and later in London, remained unimpressed by the Aesthetic movement which, as Lord Birkenhead notes, ‘was in violent contrast to all the values which Kipling had so far acquired, and, fresh from doing a man’s work in India, it is not surprising that he regarded it with derision and contempt’ (102). There is some evidence to suggest that Kipling was aware of Yeats’s involvement in the movement and wrote of it later during his second visit to Canada in 1907. He was greatly impressed by the progress the country had made since he was last there in 1892, and noted in his letters that the greatest threat to Canada was her vulnerability to a foreign foe on account of her wealth in natural resources and prosperity. ‘Canada’s weakness is lack of men’, he succinctly remarks. He praises the Sikh and Jat immigrants from the Punjab, pointing out that ‘such a land is good for an energetic man’, and that the best immigrants who would contribute to the building up of the country would be the English since ‘they have qualities of pluck, good humour, and a certain well-wearing virtue. . . . They will not hold aloof from the life of the land, nor pray in unknown tongues to Byzantine saints’ (Letters 2014). This sudden, unexpected, and quite out of place reference to ‘Byzantine saints’ could well be an ironic thrust at Yeats’s Rosa Alchemica, which was published in 1897 as a part of his esoteric hermetic book entitled The Secret Rose in which the character Michael Robartes, the man of action, comes to visit Yeats who has ‘just published Rosa Alchemica, a little work on the Alchemists, somewhat in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne’. He finds Yeats ‘sitting dreaming of what [he] had written’ in a room hung with ‘tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks. . . [which] shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace’. In this ethereal atmosphere sits Yeats surrounded by his books bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue-grey of his formal calm . . . look[ing] in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glittering in the light of the fire as though of

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Byzantine mosaic; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world. (267–9) For Kipling, unquestionably, Yeats’s exotic and sensuous surroundings evocative of the lure of Byzantium would be exceedingly distasteful, as would have been to him Yeats’s poems, yet to be written, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1926) and ‘Byzantium’ (1930). For Kipling, Yeats would certainly not be a welcome immigrant in Canada. We may well wonder whether Kipling made his peace with Yeats towards the end of his days, as Yeats did with Kipling. Perhaps Kipling did, but not as emphatically as Yeats did by including two of his poems in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935: after the death of his daughter Josephine aged six in 1899, Kipling’s writing resonates with a new dimension that surprised readers. His often anthologised story ‘They’ (1904) has a poignancy unknown in his earlier work. Are the dream children manifestations of the occult, or merely memories of what they once were when alive? But the protagonist had never been there before to have known them, making the mystery insoluble. Similarly, does Kipling’s poem ‘The way through the woods’ (1909) in which the ghosts of the long since dead lovers ‘go steadily cantering through/The misty solitudes’ owe something of its origin to Yeats’s brief verse-play Anashuya and Vijaya (1895), in which Vijaya’s dead mistress appears before him? After the death of his son John in 1915 in the Battle of Loos, Kipling wrote the mystical story ‘The Gardener’ (1925) which has elements in common with Yeats’s ‘All Souls’ Night’ (1920), where the poet summons the spirits of his dead friends to return from the undiscovered country. But whether Kipling knew or was influenced by Yeats’s work need not be a pressing issue. More important is his shifting interest from the world of the five senses, so apparent in his writings during his early and middle periods, towards the unknown – a realm that Yeats explored in his 1917 essay ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’ (Mythologies 317–66), a forerunner to his A Vision (1925). When ‘He disappeared in the dead of winter’ – Auden’s way of announcing Yeats’s death a month after the event in his elegy ‘In memory of W.B. Yeats’ – the invoking of the opening scene of Hamlet is unmistakable: in the play the ghost of the old king ‘faded on the crowing of the cock’ and, for Francesco, ‘‘Tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart’. Like the ghost’s shadowy presence behind each scene of the play thereafter, Yeats’s poems are now ‘scattered among a hundred cities’. ‘You were silly like us’, Auden

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cheekily informs the poet, but then softens the gibe by acknowledging his uniqueness: ‘your gift survived it all’, the gift of memorable language which, like Shakespeare’s ‘powerful rhyme’ (Sonnet 55), will remain timeless. Auden then brackets Kipling with Yeats: ‘Time that with this strange excuse/Pardoned Kipling and his views’. Bringing them together, despite their divergent outlooks, Auden recognises each one’s individual yet convergent genius as being defiant of Time.

Works cited Aldritt, Keith. W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu. London: John Murray, 1997. Birkenhead, Lord. Rudyard Kipling. New York: Random House, 1978. Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan, 1978. Cornell, Louis L. Kipling in India. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Eliot, T.S. A Choice of Kipling’s Verse Made by T.S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1941. Ellmann, Richard. Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. ———. The Identity of Yeats. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. Finneran, Richard J., George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy with the assistance of Alan B Miller ed. Letters to W.B. Yeats. Vol. II, London: Macmillan, 1977. Henn, T.R. The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1966. Hone, Joseph. W.B. Yeats 1865–1939. London: Macmillan, 1965. Jarell, Richard. Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935–1964. New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 1980. Kay, Boyle. “1922–1923.” Being Geniuses Together. Ed. Robert McAlmon. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968. Kelly, John, ed. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 1865–1895. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Kipling, Rudyard. Letters of Travel (1892–1913). London: Macmillan, 1920. McHugh, Roger. Ah, Sweet Dancer: W.B. Yeats Margot Ruddock, a Correspondence. London: Macmillan, 1970. Philip, Neil, ed. The Illustrated Kipling. London: Collins, 1987. Pierce, David. Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995. Pinney, Thomas, ed. Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Raine, Kathleen, ed. Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. London: Oxford UP, 1964.

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Ronsley, Joseph. Yeats’s Autobiography: Life as Symbolic Pattern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1968. Wade, Allan, ed. The Letters of W.B. Yeats. London: Rupert Hart- Davis, 1954. Yeats, Michael. “Yeats: The Public Man.” The Southern Review V(1969). Yeats, W.B. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1969. ———. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan, 1961. ———. Mythologies. New York: Macmillan, 1959. ———. “Letters to the Family, 1907.” Letters of Travel (1892-1913). London: Macmillan, 1920. 204.

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2 MOWGLI, THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE, AND THE PANCHATANTRA Mythili Kaul

I Kipling’s first child, his daughter Josephine, was born in Bliss Cottage, Brattleboro, Vermont, on 29 December 1892. At much the same time there was another birth in the same place, the birth, in Roger Lancelyn Green’s words, ‘of one of the most famous characters of fiction’, one of the three characters created in that period who became household names: ‘The other two were Sherlock Holmes and Peter Pan; Kipling’s contribution to the immortals was Mowgli’ (109), a name concocted by Kipling (‘Mow rhymes with cow’) which has no meaning in any language. The Jungle Books, written in the 1890s (Kipling’s American period so to speak), were – perhaps still are, together with Kim – the most popular of Kipling’s works. They speak of Mowgli, a human baby abandoned in the jungle by his parents terrified by the sudden advent of a tiger, who is reared by Father and Mother Wolf, mentored by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, and grows up to become Master of the Jungle. The Jungle Books are actually a collection of miscellaneous short stories with varied characters and settings, but Kipling thought of them as stories about Mowgli – who appears in eight of the 15 stories in the two volumes. In the first volume, the first three stories are about Mowgli; in the second volume, the first four stories are about Mowgli and it concludes with the last Mowgli story, ‘The Spring Running’, in which he finally leaves the Jungle and the creatures he knows and loves. Kipling wrote yet another Mowgli story, ‘In the Rukh’, where Mowgli is a grown man who takes service

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as a forest ranger. Actually it was the first Mowgli story he wrote.1 As Kipling himself states: This tale, first published in Many Inventions (D. Appleton & Co.), 1893, was the first written of the Mowgli stories, though it deals with the closing chapters of his career – namely, his introduction to white men, his marriage and civilization, all of which took place . . . some two or three years after he had finally broken away from his friends in the Jungle. (quoted in Green 111) Kipling, thus, worked backwards and later inserted references in ‘In the Rukh’ to tie it to the stories of Mowgli’s earlier years and his experiences in the Jungle, which constitute the main narrative with ‘In the Rukh’ providing the Epilogue or Afterword. The first Mowgli story, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, introduces us, to quote W.W. Robson, to ‘the whole world of the jungle’ (xxv), to the principal characters and issues, and points the direction Mowgli’s life and fortunes will take. The sudden appearance at their cave of the laughing, unafraid, ‘naked brown . . . soft and . . . dimpled’ man-cub not only interrupts Father and Mother Wolf’s routine but changes their lives forever (13).2 ‘How little! How naked, and – how bold!’ says Mother Wolf as the baby pushes his way to nestle against her and join the four cubs (Mowgli’s brothers of the title) in suckling her (14). The next moment Shere Khan the tiger arrives demanding his ‘quarry’ and is forced to retreat by a passionate and roused Mother Wolf who claims the baby as her own and predicts that in time Mowgli will hunt him down. In accordance with the Law of the Jungle, Mowgli and his brothers are brought before the Pack Council presided over by Akela, ‘the great grey Lone Wolf’; Shere Khan reiterates his demand that the man-cub be handed over to him but is thwarted by Baloo, who ‘speaks for’ Mowgli, and Bagheera, who offers a newly killed bull to the wolves in exchange for their acceptance of the baby. Mowgli thus enters the Seonee Wolf-Pack, learns to kill, is ‘taught . . . the meaning of things in the Jungle’ (21), and taught, above all, the Law of the Jungle, which he must obey and according to which he must live. When I first read The Jungle Books, my impression was that the main focus, the climax of the narrative, was the confrontation between Mowgli and Shere Khan. Far from it. Each of the eight Mowgli stories is complete in itself and yet part of a larger whole. In Robson’s words, they form a ‘coherent sequence’ – childhood and youth, adoption by wolves in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ to departure from the Jungle 32

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in ‘The Spring Running’ (xiv). There is what J.I.M. Stewart calls an ‘imaginative coherence’ between the stories (116), but each moves towards a climax, so that there are eight climaxes in The Jungle Books rather than one. The Mowgli–Shere Khan encounter takes place early on, in the first story of the second book, the chapter entitled ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ Mowgli on being cast out of the Jungle journeys to a village, is taken in by Messua and her husband (his real parents, although this is never stated), and put to work herding. From Gray Brother (the eldest of Mother Wolf’s cubs) he gets the news that Shere Khan plans to ambush him at the village gate and kill him. Assisted by Gray Brother and the experienced Akela, Mowgli gets the buffalo-herd to charge: Shere Khan, caught in the middle, is trampled to death and Mowgli, in fulfilment of his vow, skins the dead tiger and returns with his trophy to the Council Rock where he spreads out the hide for Akela to lie upon and regain his leadership position. Edmund Wilson observes that ‘the whole work of Kipling’s life is . . . shot through with hatred’ (21), and Philip Mason applies the remark to the Mowgli stories where he sees hatred as a strong operating force: hatred for Shere Khan, hatred for the villagers who cast Mowgli out, and hatred for the Wolf-Pack who reject him and the old grey wolf who had led them (34). But if there is hatred and revenge there is also a great deal else. There is love, the love of Father Wolf, Mother Wolf, Mowgli’s brothers, Bagheera, Baloo, Akela, for Mowgli and his for them; there is loyalty, the loyalty that binds the Pack and impels Mowgli to use all the means at his disposal, his cunning, his strength and energy, to defeat the dholes, the Red Dogs, and save the Seonee WolfPack. There is gratitude, Mowgli’s gratitude to Messua, the woman who sheltered him and was kind to him, and whose mistreatment gives rise to his revenge on the villagers. In short, the world of The Jungle Books, as Elizabeth Nesbitt puts it, is ‘an elemental world, and it deals with elemental and eternal things – love and hate, fear and courage, loyalty and treachery, honour and dishonour, honesty and deceit, struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest’ (312). Above all, it deals with the Law of the Jungle that links all jungle life together, directs it and ensures its continuity, and constitutes what Robson calls the ‘manifest theme’ of Kipling’s narrative (xxi).

II The Law of the Jungle is mentioned in the ‘Night-Song in the Jungle’ with which ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, the first story in The Jungle Book, opens: ‘Good hunting all/That keep the Jungle Law’ (9). Later, in the 33

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same story, Father Wolf angrily states that ‘By the Law of the Jungle’ Shere Khan has no ‘right’ to shift his hunting-grounds ‘without due warning’ (12). More importantly, in trying to kill Mowgli, he is violating one of the first commandments laid down by the Law: The Law of the Jungle which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man. . . . The real reason for this [being] that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns. . . . Then everybody in the Jungle suffers. (12–13) Later, as decreed by the Law, the cubs (including the man-cub) are shown to the Pack Council so that the other wolves may be able to identify them and Baloo teaches all the wolf-cubs the Law. Bagheera, who pays the price of a newly killed bull for Mowgli’s acceptance by the Pack, tells Mowgli that ‘for the sake of the bull’ that bought him he ‘must never kill or eat any cattle. . . . That is the Law of the Jungle. Mowgli obeyed faithfully’ (22). The Law of the Jungle, Baloo tells Mowgli, is ‘like the Giant Creeper, because it [drops] across every one’s back and no one [can] escape’ (67), the only exceptions being the Bandar-log who lack all law, are outcasts, and are anarchic. To sum up, there are many ‘Laws’ that make up the Law but ‘the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is – Obey!’ (89). The Law of the Jungle has been interpreted variously by various critics and has generated controversy. John A. McClure in Kipling and Conrad states that the message of the Mowgli stories is political and ‘The book functions, among other things, as a fable of imperial education and rule, with Mowgli behaving toward the beasts as the British do to the Indians’ (59). Mowgli learns the art of the colonial ruler, moves freely among the animals who represent the natives or subject people, calls them his ‘brothers’ but is not one of them. ‘Through his unique education. . . [he] becomes a fraternal despot’ and uses his eyes ‘not only to stare the animals into submission, but also to extract their knowledge’ (62–3). Along the same lines, Charles Allen in Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling observes that the Law of the Jungle is a ‘metaphor for British rule in India’. The British are the members of the Wolf Pack and the Indians the Bandar-log, shiftless and irresponsible. Kipling believed that what kept ‘fractured societies from falling apart was the rule of law firmly applied, as exemplified by the British in India and as summarised . . . in the poem “The Law of the Jungle” ’ (quoted in Allen 333).3 34

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The British are mentioned twice or thrice in The Jungle Books. In ‘Letting in the Jungle’, the ‘English’ are Messua’s only hope of safety and survival, because they are fair-minded and ‘do not suffer people to burn or beat each other’ (130). In ‘In the Rukh’, we meet an Englishman, Gisborne, and a German, Muller, who, in contrast to Buldeo and Abdul Gafur elsewhere in the book, are decent and humane. However, the superiority of the English is hardly touched on in the narrative and I agree with Elizabeth Nesbitt that ‘The blemish of imperialism . . . is unimportant in relation to the profound and universal morality which underlies [Kipling’s] writing’ (311–12). Here it is perhaps necessary to note, as his biographer Carrington points out, that Kipling, if he was an imperialist, was an imperialist with a difference: He never doubted the validity of western civilization, never lapsed into sentiment over the supposed virtues of savages; but it was the spread of law, literacy, communications, useful arts that he applauded, not the enlargement of frontiers. The Flag of England stood for service and sacrifice, not for racial superiority . . . civilizing the world was a worthwhile task . . . a task in which all might join if they would accept the Law. (213–14) Thus, not surprisingly, Kipling, in a letter written in 1895 addressed to someone called ‘Madam’, defines the Law as explained in the verses ‘The Law of the Jungle’ (following the story ‘When Fear Came’) as a set of rules and regulations for life among wolves which contain good advice for human beings as well (Itzkoff). It is moral and social, in Lancelyn Green’s words, ‘a part of . . . the basic Knowledge of Good and Evil, of Right and Wrong conduct implanted in mankind’ (119). This is also the view of most critics. J.I.M. Stewart echoes Kipling when he observes that the Law of the Jungle provides a set of rules, ‘a sensible code for conducting the necessarily predatory and lethal routine of a wolf pack on lines which will preserve the pack’s social cohesion’ (117). Shamsul Islam in Kipling’s Law states that ‘The Law of the Jungle is based on five essential elements: (i) Reason, (ii) the Common Good, (iii) Ethical Values, (iv) Law-making Authority and Promulgation, (v) Custom and Tradition’ (124), and The Jungle Books strongly advocate two values, ‘love and justice’, which are ‘essential for an ideal social order’ (127–9). Kipling believed, in Noel Annan’s words, that what prevented society from ‘going over the precipice’, from disintegrating, were ‘religion, law, custom, convention, morality – the 35

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forces of social control – which imposed upon individuals certain rules which they broke at their peril’ (104). How this works is illustrated in ‘How Fear Came’, where a Water Truce is proclaimed because the rains have failed and there is only ‘one source of supply’, the ‘shrunken’ Waingunga. All animals – ‘tiger, bear, deer, buffalo, and pig, all together’ – come to drink ‘the fouled waters’ and hang around, ‘too exhausted to move off’ (70), secure in the knowledge that ‘By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the drinkingplaces when once the Water Truce has been declared’ (68). The Law is ‘arranged’ so as to cover ‘almost every kind of accident that may befall the Jungle-People’ (66) and aims to ensure security and survival. The Law is elaborate and detailed and codified and is, indeed, as Harrison suggests, the ‘distinctive feature’ of jungle life (83). To quote Nesbitt: The basic idea is that of responsibility; from a sense of responsibility comes willing obedience to the law, which is made for the good of all. It is the old, old idea of the obligation owed by the one to the many and by the many to the one . . . it is the concept of true freedom, for only those who are truly free can discipline themselves so that liberty does not become license. (312–13) Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back – For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack. The Law legislates on elementary things like cleanliness – ‘Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip’ – on more important things like keeping peace with ‘the Lords of the Jungle’, on giving ‘fair words’ a chance rather than resorting to violence in a confrontational situation, on killing for ‘need’ but ‘not for the pleasure of killing’ and with the warning ‘seven times never kill Man’, on the authority of the Head Wolf ‘In all that the Law leaveth open’, and culminates in the final summation: Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is – Obey! (87–9) 36

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Mowgli, as a man-cub, is taught much more than these laws. Baloo teaches him the ‘Wood and Water Laws’, how to speak politely to the wild bees, what to say to the bats and water snakes if he disturbs them and, most importantly, the ‘Master Words of the Jungle that shall protect him with the birds and the Snake-People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack’ (36–7). These Master Words, ‘We be of one blood, ye and I’ (37), make him, as Muller, the Head of the Woods and Forests of all India, says, ‘blood-brother to every beast in der rukh’ (261) and bring him aid and succour in a critical situation. When the Bandar-log abduct him, Chil the Kite – to whom Mowgli calls out – informs Baloo and Bagheera of his whereabouts and they, together with Kaa, rescue him and bring him safely home. Mowgli thus learns what it is to live in society; he learns to discriminate; he learns the values of love, loyalty, respect, kindness, fortitude, humility, gratitude, being honourable, and keeping faith. All this, however, does not become tedious moralising. Quite the contrary. Nesbitt expresses this admirably: ‘Vitalized by Kipling’s great power as a writer this moral code transcends didacticism and becomes something immensely convincing and unquestionably acceptable’ (313). In the letter of 1895 which I mentioned earlier, Kipling writes that ‘a little’ of the ‘code’ [of the Law of the Jungle] ‘is bodily taken from (Southern) Esquimaux rules for the division of spoils’. He confesses with disarming candour that ‘it is quite possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen’ (Itzkoff). In Something of Myself, he recalls that he had: written a tale about Indian forestry work which included a boy who had been brought up by wolves. In the stillness, and suspense, of the winter of ’92 some memory of the Masonic Lions of my childhood’s magazine, and a phrase in Haggard’s Nada and the Lily, combined with the echo of this tale. After blocking out the main idea in my head, the pen took charge, and I watched it begin to write stories about Mowgli and animals, which later grew into the Jungle Books. (113) Lancelyn Green cites two close literary sources for the Mowgli story: Elizabeth Anna Harte’s poem ‘Wolfie’ in Child-Nature (1869), in which a child is carried off by a wolf and brought up among young wolves, and Menella Smedley’s poem ‘A North Pole Story’ in the companion volume Poems Written for a Child (1868), where ‘nine white wolves’ 37

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fly from a man who stares them in the eyes (116). The chief literary sources mentioned by most critics are Sterndale’s Mammalia of India (1884), which refers to ‘the red dog of the Deccan’ and wolf-child stories, and Lockwood Kipling’s anecdote-filled and encyclopaedic Beast and Man in India (1891) (Robson, xv). Martin Seymour-Smith lists these two works but then goes on to list a third which he feels is the most important of all, ‘the Jataka tales’, 550 ‘Buddhist birth-stories’ of Buddha in previous incarnations (237) which Carrington tells us ‘the Kiplings knew so well’ (161). If they knew the Jataka Tales, it is more than likely, given Lockwood Kipling’s vast knowledge about India and Indian folklore, that they knew the Panchatantra, the book of animal tales of India which had such a great impact on narrative literature the world over and which, I suggest, impacted The Jungle Books, especially the code by which the jungle lives – the Law of the Jungle.4

III The stated purpose of the Panchatantra is to teach the art of good government and statecraft to the three dull sons of a king and it deals, in Patrick Olivelle’s words, with ‘the complexities of human life, government policy, political strategies, and ethical dilemmas’ (x). It is, as Arthur Ryder explains in his translation, ‘a niti-shastra, or textbook of niti . . . [which] means roughly “the wise conduct of life” [. . .] [that] can be practiced only by a social being’ (5). Niti is the harmonious development of the powers [. . .] a life in which security, prosperity, resolute action, friendship, and good learning are so combined as to produce joy. It is a noble ideal [. . .]. And this noble ideal is presented [. . .] in five books of wise and witty stories, in most of which the actors are animals. (10) The ‘animal actors’ present, he continues, ‘far more vividly and more urbanely than man could do, the view of life here recommended – a view shrewd, undeceived, and free from all sentimentality’ (12). The Panchatantra moves in Book I from the world of men to the world of the jungle or forest and speaking animals, ‘the world of a parallel animal society built according to the same principles of government and political science as the human’ (Olivelle, xvii). This first book shows how the pursuit of self-interest can destroy alliances and 38

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friendships. Book II shows the reverse: how alliances can be formed, how friends can be made, and how valuable these are. The four animals in this book are all weak – a mouse, a turtle, a crow, and a deer – but together they can counter any threat, even that of Man. Book II seems to have a special bearing on The Jungle Books and Kipling’s Law. The Law is framed so as to protect and ensure security for all members, even the weakest. As we saw in ‘How Fear Came’, all animals come together during the Water Truce and no animal can kill at the drinking place once the Truce has been declared. The Law thus enforces fairness and equitable dealing and assures harmony especially in times of need. Mowgli is taught consideration and respect for all his fellows from the water snakes to Mang the bat to Baloo and Bagheera. When he disregards instructions, plays with and is misled by the Bandar-log, causes pain and humiliation to his mentors, punishment has to be meted out to him by Bagheera: ‘the head and the hoof of the Law [. . .] is – Obey!’ Thus Mowgli may dominate the animal world by virtue of being Man but he is not a law unto himself. He is subject to constraints, he, like the other animals, has to submit to a code and be governed by it. (It might also be pointed out here that if sometimes he ‘stares’ the wolves into submission ‘At other times he [picks] the long thorns out of the pads of his friends, for wolves suffer terribly from thorns and burs in their coats’ (21), hardly the actions of a ‘fraternal despot’.) Acceptance of the Law leads to harmony and, in Ryder’s words on the Panchatantra quoted earlier, ‘the harmonious development of the powers’ which help in ‘the wise conduct of life’. What the Jungle represents is, indeed, the ‘noble ideal’ of an integrated, unified, and cohesive society – ‘We be of one blood, ye and I’ – a society that upholds and demonstrates familial ties, friendship, love, loyalty, and gratitude. The Panchatantra (and the Jataka Tales) perhaps served also as the model for Kipling’s style in The Jungle Books. They are a mixture of prose and verse, the prose narrative portions being interspersed with epigrammatic verses. ‘It is the beauty, wisdom, and wit of the verses’, Ryder declares, ‘which lift [the work] far above the level of the best story-books’ (12). Kipling’s Mowgli stories, too, use a mixture of prose and verse – there is an epigraph in verse at the beginning of each story and verses or songs follow the conclusion of each story – and it is this distinctive style that sets The Jungle Books apart and makes them unique. In A Critical History of Children’s Literature, Nesbitt’s chapter on Kipling is entitled ‘The Great Originator’ and she calls him a ‘new and 39

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original genius’ (310). Harvey Darton in Children’s Books in England (1932) observes that ‘The Jungle Books were not romance, not fiction, even; they were young life conscious of itself and its extraordinarily stimulating world. . . . The two volumes were and are genuinely a modern children’s book, with no predecessors in their kind’ (quoted in Green 118). Robson states that Kipling ‘extends the range of English literature in both subject-matter and technique’ (viii).5 The beast fable goes back to the beginnings of almost every literary tradition and the animal story is a favourite in children’s literature. In a 40-year span from the writing of The Jungle Books onwards we have what many would consider some of the best writers of animal books or children’s books for that matter – Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne. Grahame in 1908 wrote the magical and superb The Wind in the Willows which Theodore Roosevelt, among many others, loved. He (like Beatrix Potter) shows an ‘instinctive understanding of a child’s attitude towards life and of things a child holds important’ (Nesbitt 328–9) and the animals he writes about – the Rat, the Mole, the Toad, and the Badger – are familiar and domestic animals endowed with human traits and human emotions. Milne’s ‘whimsical tales’, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, capture the ‘child’s world of . . . imaginative play’, the world of Christopher Robin, the six-year-old at the centre of the books, and the characters are stuffed animals which belong to him (Viguers 465). The Wind in the Willows and the Pooh books are very ‘British’: the tone is British and the countryside is British or English. The Jungle Books are not. In a way, the subtleties, especially the subtle humour, of all ‘children’s’ books are best understood not by children but by adults. The Jungle Books in particular are certainly not just children’s books. They are much more. Kipling is not showing ‘a child’s attitude towards life’ or a ‘child’s world of . . . imaginative play’, and his animals are neither small and domestic nor ‘stuffies’ with which children play. They are large and wild and inhabit a jungle and that, too, in India, far, far away in the strange and exotic East. Rosemary Sutcliff, herself an outstanding writer of children’s books, appreciates: the immense master-skill that has gone to creating the Jungle Dwellers, each emerging as a completely realized character, free-standing from the page . . . with no suggestion of the human being in a beast’s skin. Indeed, that narrow but impassable gulf that divides Mowgli the man-cub from the

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rest of his jungle world, is the key tragedy underlying the joys and terrors and excitement of The Jungle Books. (quoted in Green 121) Kipling’s literary work stems from ‘the experience of life, whether animal or human’ and the Mowgli stories combine ‘a new kind of realism and a new kind of romanticism’ (Nesbitt 312, 311). J.I.M. Stewart puts it succinctly but memorably, making a subtle but key distinction: in Kipling we have ‘a real world, although it is certainly not an actual world’. ‘In the Rukh’ is realistic but there is a touch of the utopian in the closing section. As in the first story, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, the mancub, this time Mowgli’s son, is once again at the centre surrounded by the four wolves, his mother, and Gisborne, representing perhaps (as in his father’s case) both aspects of his nature, wolf on the one hand, human on the other. At the same time, we also have the wonderful image of men and animals coexisting in love, mutual trust, and harmony, the four wolves gambolling around Gisborne, Mowgli’s wife, and child. This is the culmination, the result of instruction in and living by the Law of the Jungle, the set of rules and regulations for life among wolves which Kipling suggested was good for human life as well. It leads to alliances and team work among men and animals. Or, to quote Ryder again, this final picture is the outcome of ‘niti’ or ‘the wise conduct of life’, which ensures the ‘harmonious development of powers, a life in which security, prosperity, resolute action, friendship, and good learning are so combined as to produce joy’. Without being in the least bit didactic, the animal fable in Kipling’s hands, as in the Panchatantra, becomes a means of fostering human truths. In Elizabeth Nesbitt’s words, ‘the chief quality of these stories is that of a high ethic, a morality transmuted by imagination into something both functional and inspirational’ (312).6

Notes 1 Charles Carrington, Kipling’s official biographer, drawing on Mrs. Kipling’s diary, contradicts Kipling and states that ‘In the Rukh’ was published before but written after ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ (162 n). Kipling’s statement in McClare’s Magazine in June 1896, quoted above, is, however, clear and authoritative on the subject. 2 All quotations from The Jungle Books are from Rudyard Kipling, All The Mowgli Stories (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1964). In subsequent references, page numbers follow the quoted passage in the text.

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3 In a private exchange Professor R.W. Desai (whose brainchild the YeatsKipling conference was) asked whether the Law of the Jungle ‘prevails’ with reference to India’s struggle for independence in the 1920s and 1930s, observing that Kipling died in 1936 when the struggle was at its height. As I point out later in the paper, there are several laws within the Law of the Jungle but the last four lines endorse the word of the Head Wolf as decisive in all matters that are left open and state that obedience is the ‘head’, ‘hoof’, ‘haunch’, and ‘hump’ of the Law. Those who emphasise the political/colonial theme in The Jungle Books interpret these lines as clearly demanding obedience and submission to their British rulers from the Indian subjects. The Law, however, also advocates ‘fair words’, negotiation in the first instance rather than confrontation and violence. Carrington makes an interesting point when he reports that Kipling and his sovereign George V’s travels throughout the British dominions endowed both men with a devoted love for India and the Indian peoples; and both retained a marked distrust of those professional politicians, in England and in India, whose projects for solving India’s problems seemed to be guided by motives other than love (383–4). This would suggest that they favoured a peaceful approach, talks between the two parties – ‘fair words’ – based on genuine good feeling and concern to come to an agreement and resolve the issue.   Having said this I must also say that it is difficult to establish parallels between political happenings in India and happenings in The Jungle Books and an attempt to offer a sustained reading of the Mowgli stories along these lines would result in distortion and divert attention from the ‘profound and universal truths’ underlying Kipling’s work. 4 In the Introduction to his translation of The Jataka Tales, T.W. Rhys Davids points to the common liking of Buddhists and Hindus for ‘the kind of moral-comic tales which form the bulk of the Buddhist Birth Stories’ and the fact that collections of such tales ‘have been among the most favourite literature of the Hindus’ (xxvii). The oldest of these collections, the Panchatantra, itself the origin of worldwide collections including, according to some scholars, Aesop’s Fables, perhaps borrows from the Jataka but, unlike the latter, is wholly secular in character. 5 The Jungle Books, as Kipling notes in Something of Myself, ‘begat zoos’ of imitators and he singles out Edgar Rice Burroughs for special mention. 6 All the three books I have mentioned share a common theme – perhaps a great many literary works (including Shakespeare’s Hamlet) share this theme: the inevitability of growing up and the sadness, sometimes even tragedy, involved. In The Wind in the Willows Mole has to make difficult choices, even painful choices, and the irrepressible and flamboyant Toad has to become ‘sensible’ and mature. At the end of The House At Pooh Corner Christopher Robin is ‘going away’ to the world of ‘ Kings and Queens and something called Factors’ (173) – going to school – and he and Pooh share a highly-charged emotional moment when Christopher Robin asks Pooh to come occasionally to the ‘Enchanted Forest’ for old-time’s sake and ‘promise’ never to forget him (179). And, of course, Mowgli has to grow up, choose a new trail and shoulder new responsibilities. But he never wholly abandons the Jungle. By virtue of his upbringing as a wolf, the qualities instilled in him by his foster parents and his mentors as well as

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his internalising of the Law mark his conduct and behaviour even when he takes up permanent residence in the world of men. He remains straightforward and true and honest and loyal, and chooses to become a forest ranger, a position in which he can protect the inhabitants of the jungle and his brothers who are seen at the end guarding his first-born son.

Works cited Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. London: Little, Brown, 2007. Annan, Noel. “Kipling’s Place in the History of Ideas.” Kipling’s Mind and Art, Ed. Andrew Rutherford. Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1964. 97–125. Carrington, Charles E. The Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc, 1955. Davids, T.W. Rhys. Buddhist Birth-Stories (Jataka Tales). Varanasi: Indological Book House, 1973. Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1908. Green, Roger Lancelyn. Kipling and the Children. London: Elek Books, 1965. Harrison, James. “Kipling’s Jungle Eden.” Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Ed. Harold Orel. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989. 77–92. Islam, Shamsul. Kipling’s “Law”: A Study of His Philosophy of Life. London & Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1975. Itzkoff, Dave. “Arts Beat: The Culture at Large.” New York Times Blog (28 May 2013). Web. Kipling, Rudyard. All the Mowgli Stories. London: Macmillan & Co, Ltd., 1964. ———. Something of Myself For My Friends Known & Unknown. London: Macmillan & Co., 1937. Mason, Philip. Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow and The Fire. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. McClure, John. Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. Milne, A.A. The House at Pooh Corner. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1928. ———. Winnie-the-Pooh. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1926. Nesbitt, Elizabeth. “A Landmark in Fantasy” (Kenneth Grahame), A Critical History of Children’s Literature. Ed. Cornelia Meigs. London: Macmillan, 1969. 328–37. ———. “The Great Originator” (Rudyard Kipling), A Critical History of Children’s Literature. Ed. Cornelia Meigs. London: Macmillan, 1969. 310–17. Olivelle, Patrick, The Panchatantra. Translated from the Original Sanskrit. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Robson, W.W. Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Books. Ed. with an Introduction and Notes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

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Ryder, Arthur W. The Panchatantra. Translated from the Sanskrit. Chicago, IL: U Chicago P, 1925. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Rudyard Kipling. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Stewart, J.I.M. Rudyard Kipling. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1966. Viguers, Ruth Hill. “Worlds Without Boundaries.” (Milne) A Critical History of Children’s Literature. Ed. Cornelia Meigs. London: Macmillan, 1969. 446–83. Wilson, Edmund. “The Kipling That Nobody Read.” Kipling’s Mind and Art. Ed. Andrew Rutherford. Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1964. 17–69.

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3 THE UNGENDERED SELF Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ in the light of Indian philosophy Ruth Vanita*

In this essay I read ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (written 1919, published 1921) as a reverie on the self – the individual self, but also, more importantly, the Self in the sense of universal spirit, as Yeats used the term in his and Purohit Swami’s translation of the ancient Indian philosophical texts, the Upanishads.1 In ‘A Prayer’ Yeats invokes crosscultural tropes, such as the tree and the bird, to bring the Upanishadic understanding of the self into relation with everyday life. I argue that reading ‘self’ in the poem to refer only to the individual ego, and ignoring other philosophical resonances of the term, has resulted in misreading the poem as narrowly personal and politically conservative. Throughout his adult life Yeats was deeply engaged with Indian philosophy. When he was 22, he heard about the notion of consciousness as universal Self from Mohini Chatterjee (Yeats 1916, 1–71); in 1885, he participated in the Dublin Hermetical Society’s discussions about the Upanishads; and, in 1935–36, he and Purohit Swami executed a beautiful translation of ten Upanishads. The Upanishads are a set of philosophical dialogues between teachers and students, composed circa 1200–800 BC. They explore such questions as the nature of knowledge, of action, and of the self. All the Upanishads posit, first, that spirit (which may also be termed consciousness or Self) exists; second, that spirit participates in all that exists, and, third, that each individual self (the changing, acting ego with name, form, gender, and physical attributes) is a temporary manifestation of an unchanging Self without name and form that witnesses action but does not itself act.

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Yeats’s familiarity with these philosophical concepts is evident early in his poetic career. Many of his poems, both early and late, are shaped by these ideas as well as by ideas drawn from Western philosophy. However, critics have largely ignored both the formative influence of the Upanishads and the Gita on Yeats’s poems and also his and Swami’s translation of the Upanishads. Bloom’s 500-page book nowhere mentions Yeats’s translation of the Upanishads or his essays on Hindu philosophy. Even Snukal, who sets out to examine philosophical issues in Yeats’s poems, nowhere mentions Hindu philosophy. Shalini Sikka is the first critic to undertake a sustained examination of Yeats’s engagement with Hindu philosophy, but close readings of his major poems taking this perspective into account have not yet been undertaken. My reading of ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ is an endeavour in this direction.

The good life and the singing bird The word ‘prayer’ calls up in English the idea of a Christian God but Yeats, unlike earlier poets, such as Donne or Hopkins, who wrote prayer-poems, does not explicitly address God. Nor, however, is the poem ‘an agnostic’s prayer’ (Toker 100–10, 108) or a ‘secular prayer’ (Adams 143). Rather, it is in the nature of a spell, a mantra, an incantation, such as are found in ancient Greek texts and also in the Upanishads. ‘Poetry’, writes Vereen Bell, ‘was a mantra for Yeats, an instrument of thought’ (Bell 39). In ‘A Prayer’ Yeats adumbrates his idea of the good life. To do so, he draws on Aristotelian as well as Hindu value systems. In the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas, he includes physical beauty, good breeding, and material prosperity as aspects of the good life, along with love and friendship. His inclusion of material prosperity has been read as politically conservative (Maddox 143). It is also contrary to some traditional Christian understandings of the virtuous life. These readings disregard the fact that several ancient philosophers, both Greek and Indian, considered material well-being essential to the good life. For Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, eudaimonia (well-being/flourishing) and arête (virtue in the sense of excellence) are composed of more than just right action. Aristotle considers virtue or excellence necessary but not sufficient for a life of eudamonia. Good birth and breeding, beauty, love, friendship, and prosperity are also required. Likewise, the classical Hindu idea of the complete life includes four goals – kama (desire) and artha (material prosperity) based on dharma 46

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(the law of one’s being), lead to moksha (spiritual liberation). This trajectory can be traced in ‘A Prayer’. Modern forces that erase difference (‘the haystack-and roof-levelling wind’) threaten the good life which the poet struggles to envision for his daughter and, implicitly, for himself. The poem moves from the threatening external world to the stillness of the inner world. Stanzas three to five imagine the good life in terms of love and friendship, both of which require relating to the external world. But in the fifth stanza the virtue of courtesy, which has both external and internal dimensions, becomes a bridge to contemplating the essence of happiness, which requires turning inward. The sixth stanza registers this shift through the interdependent tropes of the bird and the tree. As Sikka points out, while Yeats was aware that ‘symbols drawn from nature, sun, moon, and sea, for example, were universal, shared by West and East alike’ (154), he ‘insisted on drawing his symbols from his race and nationality’ (151). ‘The distant in time and space’, he wrote, ‘live only in the near and present’ (Yeats, 490). In his representation of the bird and the tree, the linnet and the laurel, Yeats blends Upanishadic meanings with those derived from English literature. I examine both in tandem here. Having wished for his daughter beauty, kindness, the intimacy of friendship, and courtesy, Yeats hopes that her thoughts will be like the linnet’s song, a ‘glad kindness’ dispensed freely and magnanimously (Finneran 188). The choice of the linnet rather than another song bird is significant. The female linnet in English poetry generally appears as a mother while the male linnet is free and self-delighting.2 Thus, Robert Burns’s female linnet in ‘The Linnet’ does not sing; she is a mother-bird raising her young in a nest. Tennyson’s female linnet’s song is determined by her offspring’s fate: And one is glad; her note is gay For now her little ones have ranged; And one is sad: her note is changed, Because her brood is stolen away. (Ricks 884) In Wordsworth’s ‘The Tables Turned’, the linnet, a spontaneous songster, is male, and represents the superiority of nature to art: Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, 47

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How sweet his music! on my life, There’s more of wisdom in it. (Morley 85) In Wordsworth’s ‘The Green Linnet’ the bird is an analogue of Yeats’s linnet in its self-sufficient gladness: While birds, and butterflies, and flowers, Make all one band of paramours, Thou, ranging up and down the bowers, Art sole in thy employment: A Life, a Presence like the Air, Scattering thy gladness without care, Too blest with any one to pair; Thyself thy own enjoyment. (Morley 186) However, the bird in this poem is emphatically male; the male pronoun is repeated eight times in the last two stanzas to refer to the linnet, which is also termed a ‘Brother of the dancing leaves’. Robert Bridges’s linnet, a symbol of the devoted lover, is also definitely male: I heard a linnet courting His lady in the spring: His mates were idly sporting, Nor stayed to hear him sing His song of love. (Cumberlege 231) In Wilde’s short story, ‘The Devoted Friend’, the narrator is a male linnet who tells a story contrasting a selfless friend with a selfish one; both friends are male. Yeats is perhaps the first major English poet to connect a linnet’s song to a woman’s rather than a man’s thoughts. He makes a new move in feminising this symbol of freedom and joyful creativity. This feminising connects with the feminine gendering of the spirit or soul, which I discuss later.

The self-healing tree That the self in ‘A Prayer’ is not just the individual ego but rather, as in Yeats’s translation of the Isha Upanishad, universal Self or spirit, is 48

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indicated also through Yeats’s deployment of the tree as trope. In Yeats’s and Purohit Swami’s translation of the Prashna Upanishad: ‘All things fly to the Self, as birds fly to the tree for rest’ (Yeats and Swami 45). Likewise, in the Chhandogya Upanishad, the bird is the mind, which retains its connection with the inner life of spirit: ‘A tethered bird, after flying in every direction, settles down on its perch; the mind, after wandering in every direction, settles down on its life; for, my son! mind is tethered to life’ (Yeats and Swami 90–1). In ‘A Prayer’ the bird is not tethered but free. It spontaneously flies to the tree that constitutes its life. In the Upanishads, the tree is a recurrent symbol of Self or spirit, for example, in Yeats’s and Swami’s translation of the Katha Upanishad: Eternal creation is a tree, with roots above, branches on the ground; pure eternal Spirit, living in all things, and beyond whom none can go; that is Self. (Yeats and Swami 36) This eternal tree is not to be confused with its illusory reflection. In his poem, ‘The Two Trees’, Yeats contrasts the ‘holy tree’ growing in the heart with the ‘fatal image’ of a tree seen in a mirror held up by demons. This trope is similar to that of the inverted tree in the Gita, with its roots above and branches below, which suggests a tree reflected in water; the Gita advises the seeker to cut this tree down: With its roots upward and its branches downward, they speak of the everlasting Aswattha tree [. . .] Cutting this Aswattha tree whose roots are fully grown with the strong ax of detachment (Schweig 193–4) As in the Gita, so also in ‘The Two Trees’, the tree reflected in the mirror is the delusional tree of ‘outer weariness’ which is barren, while the eternal tree in the heart bears flowers and fruit: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there [. . . .] Gaze no more in the bitter glass 49

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The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows [. . .] Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness [. . .] There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat (Finneran 48–9) Just as ‘A Prayer’ moves from external forces (howling storm, screaming wind, and frenzied drum) to the inner stillness of bird and tree, so also in ‘The Two Trees’, the speaker modifies his injunction not to gaze in the bitter glass with ‘Or only gaze a little while’; the modification suggests that wrestling with political change should be temporary and should not take over one’s consciousness. This is because the external world is like a reflection in a mirror, mesmerising but delusory and ever changing. Gazing too long at this delusory world, becoming enraptured with its political power struggles, damages the spirit. The ‘ravens of unresting thought’, which are the equivalent of the hate-filled intellectual opinions of ‘A Prayer’, produce bitterness and greed: ‘cruel claw and hungry throat’. In the seventh stanza of ‘A Prayer’, Yeats considers the damage that the mind suffers from forces of hate that rampage through the world. If the mind retains its connection with spirit it survives these assaults; the linnet is not torn from the leaf. Here it is not the imagined daughter’s mind but the poet-speaker’s mind that has ‘dried up’ like a tree in a drought. Such a damaged mind can revive like a tree that revives from its roots even after its branches have dried up. Likewise, in the Chhandogya Upanishad, the Spirit is a living tree that has the ability to revive after being damaged: Strike at the bole of a tree, sap oozes but the tree lives; strike at the middle of the tree, sap oozes but the tree lives; strike at the top of the tree, sap oozes but the tree lives. The Self as life, fills the tree; it flourishes in happiness, gathering its food through its roots. (Yeats and Swami 93) 50

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This self-healing quality of the tree in the Upanishads is paralleled by the revivifying quality of the laurel in particular, as discussed later. Several feminist critiques of ‘A Prayer’ are premised on unidimensional readings of Yeats’s symbols. Such readings are problematic because symbols are inherently multidimensional. For example, Joyce Carol Oates reads the tree as an object that exists only for human consumption: ‘This celebrated poet would have his daughter an object of nature for others’ – which is to say male – delectation. She is not even an animal or bird in his imagination, but a vegetable: immobile, unthinking [. . .] brainless and voiceless, rooted’ (17). Oates’s reading is untempered by any awareness of the fault lines of its own Cartesian humanism. Just because trees do not have human brains, it does not follow that they exist simply as objects. Nor is Oates’s construction of a hierarchy (derived from Great Chain of Being thinking) wherein trees are inferior to animals and birds, which in turn are inferior to humans, self-evidently accurate. Her italicisation of ‘rooted’ suggests that rootedness is oppressive, which is highly debatable. The tree of life is a symbol of the universe, of growth and continuity, and other critics have noted it as the obvious referent here (Adams 144; Stallworthy 35). Also, both in Western and in Indian texts, humans are often figured as trees. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad constructs the self-healing tree as a model for humanity: Man is like a big tree; his hairs are leaves, his skin bark [. . . .] his muscles are like its fibres, his bones like hard wood, his marrow like its pith. The tree when felled grows up again from its root, from what root does man grow when cut down by death? [. . . .] Spirit is the root, the seed; for him who stands still and knows, the invulnerable rock. Spirit is knowledge; Spirit is joy. (Yeats and Swami 146) Here, humans in general are envisioned as trees, and the stillness of knowledge (‘him who stands still and knows’) is valued over the busyness of thought. Although the laurel has multiple meanings in Western tradition, some of which are explored below, and although the poem nowhere alludes to the Greek myth wherein Daphne’s father turned her into a laurel to save her from rape by Apollo, some critics read the laurel in 51

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‘A Prayer’ as directly and only referring to the Daphne story. Cullingford reads the laurel as a symbol of imprisonment, ‘preserving [the woman’s] chastity at the expense of her humanity’ (137). Maddox justifies this reading of the laurel not on the basis of any internal evidence in the poem but on the grounds that ‘The cause of “the great gloom” in the poet’s mind could be the incestuous thoughts that a daughter can stir in a father’ (Cullingford 144). Maddox also accepts Cullingford’s interpretation of the poem’s last stanza as incestuous (138–9). If we refrain from importing into the poem themes that are nowhere evident in it, such as incest, other meanings of the laurel emerge. These meanings are directly relevant to the poem’s exploration of spiritual damage and recovery. Through its association with Apollo, the laurel is a symbol of creativity and knowledge, hence the crowning of poets with laurel wreaths. Also through association with Apollo, the laurel stands for healing, rejuvenation, and immortality. This meaning is reinforced by its being an evergreen that can revive from its roots after it turns brown and seems to have dried up. In the Bible and in Roman culture, the laurel is a symbol of prosperity, victory, and fame, hence the laurel wreath worn by victors. All of these combined meanings later resulted in its becoming a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. Furthermore, Daphne’s turning into a laurel too may be read as gesturing towards autonomy rather than chastity, and thus in consonance with the linnet, which Cullingford sees as a symbol of ‘the single life’ and an allusion to Wordsworth’s ‘The Green Linnet’ (137). Yeats’s contemporary, E.M. Forster, in his 1909 short story, ‘Other Kingdom’, explicitly refers to the Apollo and Daphne narrative, and reads it as celebrating autonomy, not chastity. In ‘Other Kingdom’, a young Irishwoman turns into a tree to retain her freedom and spontaneity in the face of her overbearing English fiancé’s conformity to convention. Frederick Williams has pointed out the significance of the freedom-loving heroine’s Irishness in the context of Forster’s support for both Irish Home Rule and women’s suffrage (45–62). Both in Forster’s story and in Yeats’s poem, green, the colour of modern Irish nationalism, is associated with the heroine’s freedom and joy: Forster’s heroine wears a flowing green dress when she is happy, and Yeats’s imagined daughter is compared to ‘some green laurel’. Thus, the tree symbol is not, as Oates would have it, self-evidently indicative of mindlessness and imprisonment; it is much more strongly associated with vitality, joy, and autonomy. Yeats’s imagined daughter is both laurel and linnet (‘May she become a flourishing hidden tree/That all her thoughts may like the 52

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linnet be’). Both are simultaneously rooted and free. This figuration as both tree and bird can be read as the oneness of the individual self (the bird) with the universal Self (the ‘holy tree’ growing in the heart of all beings).

Ideas and innocence The eighth stanza has been a prime target of feminist critique; many critics, discussed later in this essay, read it as specifically about women, and claim that Yeats wants his daughter to eschew ideas. This reading stems from an incorrect conflation of ideas with opinions. Oscar Wilde (who, as many biographers, starting with Ellmann, have noted, exerted a major influence on Yeats) made a crucial distinction between the play of ideas and the violence of opinion. In the letter he wrote from prison to Alfred Douglas, he pointed out Douglas’s fatal flaw: ‘you had not yet been able to acquire the “Oxford temper” in intellectual matters, never, I mean, been one who could play gracefully with ideas but had arrived at violence of opinion merely’ (155). Wilde terms this flaw ‘fatal’ because it renders hatred stronger than love in Douglas’s nature. Hate triumphing over love, or the rigidity of self-righteous opinion triumphing over the play of ideas is not at all specific to women; Maud Gonne is merely one example for Yeats (as Douglas was for Wilde) of a tendency that is not unique to her but is a widespread malaise. Yeats’s ungendered use of the term ‘quiet natures’ indicates that opinions that generate ‘intellectual hatred’ are damaging for everyone, not just for women. Critics who read the eighth stanza’s critique of intellectual hatred as relevant to women alone ignore the way this stanza flows from the preceding one. The seventh stanza, with its repetition of the ungendered ‘mind’ (‘the minds that I have loved’; ‘no hatred in a mind’) and its shift from daughter to father (‘her thoughts’ to ‘My mind’), indicates that a general malaise is under examination (Finneran 189). In the last line of the seventh stanza, the linnet represents not just the daughter’s or a woman’s mind but the speaker’s own mind that has dried up yet is capable of revival, and indeed any individual’s mind: ‘If there’s no hatred in a mind/Assault and battery of the wind/Can never tear the linnet from the leaf’ (Finneran 189). Yeats’s contemporary Sri Aurobindo suggested that many Romantic poems work as mantra, which he defined as ‘rhythmic revelation’ (31). The marvellous ninth stanza of ‘A Prayer’ is a good example of poetry working as mantra; it presents a logical culmination of the poem’s argument but also seems to lift out of the poem, constituting as 53

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it does a self-contained sentence with a meaning that does not depend on what went before: Considering that, all hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; She can, though every face should scowl And every windy quarter howl Or every bellows burst, be happy still. (Finneran 189–90) Here, ‘she’ becomes almost interchangeable with ‘it’, used to refer to the ungendered soul. In the third line, the soul is ‘it’ but when ‘She’ returns in the sentence’s main clause: ‘She can . . . be happy still’, the pronoun refers to the daughter, as it has throughout the poem, but now also refers to the soul – any soul. The self or soul, the anima, is feminine in Latin, masculine in Sanskrit (atman) but feminine in modern Sanskrit-based languages, such as Hindi (atma). Let us examine the main clause in the first part of this stanza – ‘the soul recovers radical innocence’. The word ‘recovers’ (rather than, say, ‘retains’) indicates that the soul loses innocence but then regains it. Yeats’s metaphor is the tree that heals itself, the laurel that dies down to its roots and grows again. The tree metaphor is implicit in the word ‘radical’ – innocence is said to live in the soul’s roots. The reference to the root (in the word ‘radical’) also recalls the root meaning of the word ‘innocence’. From Latin nocere (to injure), the word ‘innocence’ literally means not harmful, not injurious. The poem reaches its climax in this focus on the soul recovering its innate non-harmful nature. Innocence as non-injuriousness is contrasted with the hatred and anger fostered by political radicalism, the ‘murderous innocence’ or ignorant violence of the mob, whether imaged as a sea or as ‘thoroughfares’. Physical chastity or virginity is not the point here; ‘innocence’ refers to freedom from hatred, not to the imagined daughter’s virginity. In the Chhandogya Upanishad, a wounded tree continues to live, drawing food through its roots. The ‘dear perpetual place’ in which the individual self is rooted could be read as a geographical location but more importantly, it is Spirit or universal Self, as in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: ‘The tree when felled grows up again from its root, from what root does man grow when cut down by death? [. . .] Spirit 54

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is the root, the seed’ (Yeats and Swami 146). The poet prays, then, not just for a happy life for his child but for spiritual rootedness and the ability to recover from spiritual death, both symbolised by the laurel. The words ‘at last’ suggest that this healing and learning are a process. Like the poet-speaker-father whose mind has dried up but who knows that spiritual integrity is possible if one sheds hatred, the daughter (and any soul) can experience loss and recovery, yet finally learn, in the Gita’s words, that ‘the self alone/is the self’s friend;/the self alone/is the self’s enemy’ (Schweig 92) or, in the words of the Isha Upanishad: ‘He who sees all beings in the Self itself, and the Self in all beings, feels no hatred by virtue of that (realisation)’ (Swami Gambhiranand, I:13). The ‘self-delighting, /Self-appeasing, self-affrighting’ spirit, which Harold Bloom reads as solipsistic and autistic rather than autonomous (326), a judgment Oates echoes in her phrase, ‘an autism of the spirit’ (14–15), resonates very differently in the light of the Upanishads and the Gita. The Isha Upanishad characterises the Self as ‘self-depending, all-transcending’ (Yeats and Swami 16), and in the Gita, one whose ‘self becomes/ connected to/ the self in all beings’ (Bhagvad Gita 5:7, p. 83), is satisfied within the Self alone, and thus is both happy and peaceful. This innocence is not what Bloom terms a ‘perpetual virginity of the soul’ (327); rather, if one were to stay with Bloom’s metaphor, it would be like Aphrodite and Hera recovering their virginity by bathing in a sacred spring.

Wholeness and joy The main clause in the ninth stanza shifts from the wishful ‘may’ to ‘can’, asserting ability: ‘She can [. . .] be happy still’, with a play on the word ‘still’, meaning both ‘continuously’ and ‘calm’. The word ‘still’ on which the final emphasis falls, brings to a provisional conclusion the series of contrasts throughout the poem between agitated activity (howling storm, pacing speaker, screaming wind, roving man) and calm action (sleeping child, choosing right, dispensing sound, living rooted). The concept of stillness as joy appears frequently in the Upanishads with relation to the Self or spirit, for example, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: ‘Spirit is the root, the seed; for him who stands still and knows, the invulnerable rock. Spirit is knowledge; Spirit is joy’ (Yeats and Swami 146). In contrast to Christian doctrine, wherein the individual is best off freely subordinating his or her will to the will of an omnipotent God, here the soul becomes happy (or fortunate, in the original meaning of the word ‘happy’) once it realises that its own will and divine will are inseparable because it is itself divine. 55

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As in the closing lines of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, the self, having cast out regret and guilt, sees everything, even the apparently painful, as divine: So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest. (Finneran 236) This sentiment is very close to that in the famous opening verse of the Isha Upanishad: ‘That is perfect. This is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect. May peace and peace and peace be everywhere’ (Yeats and Swami 15). Translation cannot entirely convey the meaning of the original because the word purnam, translated by Yeats and Swami as ‘perfect’, means ‘whole’ but also means ‘full’ and ‘complete’. It could be understood to indicate perfection but there is no exact equivalent of the word ‘perfect’ in Sanskrit. Rather, purnam indicates wholeness, fullness, and completeness. An insistence on confining the poem in the framework of a father’s protective feelings for a daughter, and, more importantly, in the framework of Western philosophical categories alone, results in missing some of the joy that builds as ‘A Prayer’ moves to its conclusion. For instance, Leona Toker states that ‘the emotional stance that transpires from underneath the intellectual position of the poem is somewhat alienating: something in it dampens the sympathy evoked by an elderly father’s anxiety for his infant’ (107). When one reads the poem with an awareness of the Indian philosophical framework towards which its language and its tropes point, it evokes not the alienating patriarchal stance Toker discovers, but a joyful centring in the Self, the same emotion found in the Taittireeya Upanishad’s statement: ‘joy is Spirit. From joy all things are born, by joy they live, toward joy they move, into joy they return’ (Yeats and Swami 76). The poem’s concluding stanza has also been criticised for its supposedly patriarchal imagining of a daughter being handed over to a protective husband in a conservative or elite context (Maddox 143). Protection, though, is nowhere mentioned in this stanza. Instead, ceremony and custom are emphasised. Ceremony refers to ritual observance or worship, and is here identified with abundance and prosperity, one of the desired outcomes of worship rituals such as the Vedic yajna. The non-injurious (innocent) and beautiful self flourishes 56

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in the context of a ceremonious tradition. Tradition and custom arise from rootedness in the universal Self and in a community. As Snukal points out, the phrase ‘ceremony of innocence’ also suggests the seriousness with which a child invests its play (Snukal 171). Just as the self in the poem is not merely an individual ego, so too, marriage here is not merely the daughter’s conjugal union. Marriage is also a trope for union with the universal Self. In many religious traditions, marriage is a symbol of union between divine spirit and individual spirit (the Jewish people and Yahweh; Christ and the Church; Sufi mystic and God; Hindu devotee and God or Goddess). In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the Self is compared to a solitary bird who dreams that it is suffering and is killed or that it is a king or a god; this Self recovers from the dream’s effects, and the recovery is symbolised by the delights of marriage: But his true nature is free from desire, free from evil, free from fear. As a man in the embrace of his beloved wife forgets everything that is without, everything that is within; so man, in the embrace of the knowing Self, forgets everything that is without, everything that is within; for there all desires are satisfied, Self his sole desire, that is no desire; man goes beyond sorrow. (Yeats and Swami 151) The Upanishads frequently depict the pleasures and pains of individual existence as a dream. Descartes famously pointed out that it is impossible to prove beyond doubt that life is not a dream from which we will awaken; the Upanishads assert that life is in fact a dream (which has, nevertheless, its own reality as a reflection of ultimate reality). At the beginning of ‘A Prayer’ the poet-speaker suffers this dream, an ‘excited reverie’, but the ninth stanza establishes that the self’s realisation of its own nature is the basis for happiness. The tenth stanza then envisions this happiness through the trope of marriage with the divine. In the Taittireeya Upanishad, the trope of marriage evokes integration and joy – the thinking individual self unites with the knowing divine Self within, which is of the nature of joy: The knowing Self is the soul of the thinking Self, but within it lives its complement and completion, the joyous Self. The joyous Self grows up side by side with the knowing Self. Satisfied desire is its head, pleasure its right arm, contentment its left arm, joy its heart, Spirit its foundation. (Yeats and Swami 71) 57

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In ‘A Prayer’, marriage refers to the imagined daughter’s mundane wedding but because of the weight of the preceding stanza, it also carries an undertone of completion through self-integration. Bride and groom, nature and spirit, are in the Upanishads two dimensions of the same Self, as imaged in the icon of Shiva, half of whose body is female (ardhanarishwara, the God who is half woman).

Misreading symbols Almost all critics, across four decades, from Harold Bloom in 1970 to Glaser in 2009, read ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ as primarily about fatherhood. Many critics tend to argue that it represents ‘woman as the reproducer of the ideals and values of a patriarchal society’ (Cullingford 138), and that it reveals Yeats’s reactionary political views. Lock cites (211), apparently in Yeats’s defence, Empson’s self-consciously hyperbolical declaration that all the great writers in English in the first half of the twentieth century, except Joyce, were fascists (were Forster and Woolf not great writers, one wonders). Because these critics ignore Yeats’s engagement with Hindu thought, they miss some of the philosophical issues at the heart of the poem. Most importantly, they read the self in the poem as simply the individual ego, entirely missing its other connotation, as soul or spirit. In their translation of the Upanishads, Yeats and Purohit Swami use ‘Self’ and ‘soul’ interchangeably, as Yeats does throughout ‘A Prayer’. Joseph Hassett is almost alone in pointing out that courtesy, ceremony, and rootedness were positive and gender-neutral attributes for Yeats who ‘thought opinions were accursed for himself as well as his daughter’ (143). The few European and American critics who do mention Hindu philosophy dismiss it as part of the ‘silly’ and ‘off the wall’ mix of mythology, spiritualism, and magic with which they see Yeats as involved (Eagleton 52). Today, when philosophers like Jonardon Ganeri are demonstrating that Indian philosophy has historically been just as serious an enterprise as Western philosophy, asking many of the same questions and suggesting answers, some of which are similar to and others of which are divergent from those posited by Western philosophers, it is time to take seriously Yeats’s engagement with Indian philosophy. With its repeated use of ‘May’, ‘A Prayer’ has the form of an invocation, similar to that of the opening verse in an Upanishad, and the poem concludes with an idea of union that mirrors the form of the Upanishads. The Upanishads are largely cast as dialogues between 58

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teacher and student (who are, in Indian thought, like parent and child); thus, the Katha Upanishad opens with a famous invocation, referring to teacher and student: ‘May He protect us both. May He take pleasure in us both. May we show courage together. May spiritual knowledge shine before us. May we never hate one another. May peace and peace and peace be everywhere’ (25). So also, ‘A Prayer’ is about an ‘us both’ – parent and child, both of whom must traverse the same human journey. Unlike English, Sanskrit has not just the grammatical singular and plural numbers, but also the dual number, which is used to refer to two persons together. The term Yeats and Purohit Swami translate above as ‘us both’ is in the first person dual, referring to two persons, teacher and student. ‘A Prayer’, I suggest, likewise casts speaker and child as a dual unit, an ‘us both’. Praying as much for himself as for the child, the speaker wishes, as in the Katha Upanishad, for peace, spiritual knowledge, and the absence of hatred for both of them.

Notes * This essay first appeared in Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 2014–15, 24 (2): 239–57 in a slightly different form. 1 Indian philosophical texts use the word atman (self) to refer both to the individual and the universal self as both are in the ultimate analysis identical. In English, commentators often use ‘self’ to refer to the individual atman, and ‘Self’ to refer to the universal atman. 2 Lady Lynette in the Arthurian cycles seems to have no associations with the bird.

Works cited Adams, Hazard. The Book of Yeats’s Poems. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1990. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Bell, Vereen M. Yeats and the Logic of Formalism. Columbia, MO: U Missouri P, 2006. Bhagavad Gita. Trans. Graham M, Schweig. New York: Harper Collins, 2007 Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Cumberlege, Geoffrey, ed. Poetical Works of Robert Bridges. London: Oxford UP, 1953. Eagleton, Terry. Figures of Dissent. London: Verso, 2003. Finneran, Richard, ed. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New York: Scribner, [1989] 1996.

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Gambhirananda, Swami. Isa Upanisad, in Eight Upanisads with the Commentary of Sankara. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 1957. I. Ganeri, Jonardon. The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of the Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Hassett, Joseph M. Yeats and the Muses. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Lock, Charles. “Speaking for the Infant: On Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Connotations 9 (1999–2000): 2. Maddox, Brenda. Yeats’s Ghosts. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. Morley, John, ed. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. London: Macmillan, 1903. Oates, Joyce Carol. “ ‘At Least I have made a Woman of Her’: Images of Women in Twentieth-Century Literature.” Georgia Review (Spring 1983): 37. Ricks, Christopher, ed. The Poems of Tennyson. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1969. Sikka, Shalini. W. B. Yeats and the Upanisads. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Snukal, Robert. High Talk: the Philosophical Poetry of W. B. Yeats. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973. Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953. Stallworthy, John. Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962. The Ten Principal Upanishads. Trans. W.B. Yeats and Shree Purohit Swami. New York: Collier Books, 1937. Toker, Leona. “W.B. Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’: the Ironies of the Patriarchal Stance.” Connotations 9 (1999–2000): 1. Wilde, Oscar Wilde. Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Williams, Frederick. “Daphne Transformed: Parthenius, Ovid, and E. M. Forster.” Hermathena, Summer 1999. 166. Yeats, W.B. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Collier Books, 1916. Yeats, W.B. Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1956.

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4 SONGS OF THE WANDERING AENGUS Echoes of the political Yeats in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s The Habit of Fear Peter Schulman

In discussing ‘Yeats and Decolonization’ in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes: ‘His greatest theme, in the poetry that culminates in The Tower (1928), is how to reconcile the inevitable violence of the colonial conflict with the everyday politics of ongoing national struggle’ (Said 235). Although Yeats has been considered, as Said asserts, ‘the indisputably great national poet who during a period of antiimperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the domination of an offshore power’ (220), Yeats is seldom portrayed or referenced in contemporary fiction, let alone detective fiction, as a major influence on narratives. Despite the publication in 2002 of the provocatively titled collective work Yeats is Dead (Vintage) in which 15 Irish novelists including Roddy Doyle and Gene Kerrigan each contributed a chapter to a mystery novel about a missing Joyce manuscript, it is really with Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s overlooked novel The Habit of Fear (Scribners) that Yeats is used most potently as a political as well as literary figure in keeping with Said’s notion of him as a writer immersed in Irish ‘literary nationalism’ (236). Indeed, as Davis’s title suggests, The Habit of Fear is steeped in direct references to Yeats. The plot centres around the search in Ireland of a New York reporter, Julie Hayes, who had just been brutally raped by two Irish thugs in New York, for her father, a nationalist poet who abandoned her at birth. Yet, as soon as she is on Irish soil, Hayes becomes embroiled in the conflicts of a series of nationalist Irish organisations including the Sin Fein, the ‘Provos’, and the extremist 61

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ONI (One Nation Indivisible). As she tracks down the traces of her father, she discovers that his code name was Aengus as she reads and quotes from the poem ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’: ‘The golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon’ (Davis 129). At one point, she visits Yeats’s grave in Sligo and tries to decode his enigmatic epitaph ‘Cast a cold eye/On Life, on Death./Horseman, pass by’ (182); she listens to a local rock group called the Wolfe Tones in echo of Yeats’s ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ in which he writes ‘How could you dream they’d listen/That have an ear alone/For those new comrades they have found,/Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone’ (Collected Poems 253); and visits a monument to the fallen of the 1799 insurrection at Wicklow, her father’s birthplace. This piece will examine the numerous intertexts between Davis’s The Habit of Fear and Yeats’s more political poems in order to understand how Davis uses Yeats not only as a figurehead for the confused nationalist agendas of the political groups she explores in Ireland but as the key to her protagonist Julie Hayes’s personal identity quest as well. If, at the beginning of André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja, the narrator asks himself ‘Who am I?’ but then corrects himself by asserting rather that ‘perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt”?’ (Breton 11), Julie Hayes is first seen storming alongside the deserted West Side Highway in Manhattan in a ghostly fashion after an argument with her soon to be ex-husband. In order to escape her anger and anxiety, she heads for the Hudson River as she lets her unconscious dictate her steps. She automatically thinks of a romantic Ireland and her absent father: The Hudson river lay beyond the highway and, time no longer mattering, she set the river as her immediate distraction, wherever she could gain access to the pier. Sky and water and ships that were going out to sea. She thought of an Irish seaman she had known who spouted poetry although he could barely write his name . . . and she thought of her Irish father, whose very name had been taken from her. (16) If ‘tell me who you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are’ (‘dis-moi qui tu hantes et je te dirai qui tu es’) is the proverb upon which Breton bases his opening lines to Nadja, Yeats – who was also obsessed with outer ghosts in the form of the séances described in A Vision as well as his inner ghosts in the form of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne – and Hayes make a synergistic pair. As Breton continues paradigmatically 62

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in relation to The Habit of Fear: ‘My image of the “ghost”, including everything conventional about its appearance as well as its blind submission to certain contingencies of time and place, is particularly significant for me as the finite representation of a torment that may be eternal’ (Breton 12). Throughout the novel, Hayes will be forced to confront those who haunt her and that which torments her in order to become renewed and changed for the better. Guided by Yeats’s political, poetic, and geographic topography, Hayes will be pushed into a search within her unconscious in order to find out who she truly is before she can find out who she will become. As Breton further explains regarding the verb ‘to haunt’: ‘Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am’ (11). After her brutal rape in an abandoned trailer, she will be dually haunted by her quest for her father, who she feels might still be alive, and the image of Yeats, who is referenced at key moments throughout the narrative. It is no wonder that her missing father, Thomas Francis Mooney, chose the code word Aengus – so potent in Gaelic but also in Yeatsian mythology. In ‘Under the Moon’, for example, Yeats writes of Aengus in terms of ‘Land-of-the-Tower, where Aengus has thrown the gates apart’ (Collected Poems 129). Similarly, when Hayes tracks down Mooney’s last whereabouts in Sligo, she finds all his papers stored in a room called ‘the tower room’ (Davis 227). At the beginning of the novel, she in fact unearths a poem her father had written for The New Yorker in the 1950s when he was briefly living in New York. He was working on a biography of an obscure Irishman from the American civil war who belonged to a proto-IRA organization called the Young Irelander. As she reads her father’s piece titled ‘Where the Wild Geese Fly No More’ with a retired literary agent who knew him, she realises that he was a poet essentially filled with notions of diaspora and longing. The Wild Geese of the title in fact only tangentially refer to Irish soldiers who had fought for Napoleon, but rather Van Dieman’s Land in Australia, a nineteenth-century penal colony. ‘Now, you see’, the agent explains to her: what’s wrong with the poem you just said for me. He’s talking about Irishmen in exile, a long way from home. But the far place he’s talking about is Van Dieman’s Land in Australia where many Irishmen were sent off to in the nineteenth century. They were not Wild Geese. The Wild Geese emigrated on their own to Europe after the penal laws in the seventeennineties. Never mind, it’s a fine piece of imagery, and poets 63

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don’t necessarily make good historians. But at least they get the spirit right, wouldn’t you say? (71–2) Could the same be said of Yeats’s relationship to history as well? Indeed, poets do not always make good historians, but just as Hayes’s father had sought to capitalise on his exilic feelings through the prism of historical figures (Alexander Pearce, for example, was one of the most famous Van Diemen prisoners who had escaped his British captors several times), Yeats too is deeply connected to his own set of heroes: Parnell, O’Leahry, and of course the Easter Uprising martyrs Connolly and Pearce. As he writes famously in ‘Easter, 1919’, contemporary history, politics, and poetry are forever merged: I write it out in a verse – MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born (Collected Poems 252) While the fictitious poet Hayes seeks writes erroneously of soldiers as ‘wild geese in exile’, Yeats, in ‘September 1913’ laments that ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’, and asks wistfully: Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’ Leary in the grave. (Collected Poems 159) Both Davis and Yeats seem haunted by an Ireland often immersed both in violence and futility which adds a certain melancholy to each author. Describing the characters in Yeats’s play The Words upon the Window Pane, for example, Leonard E. Nathan writes that the protagonists’ failure at love mirrors ‘the failure of the mob-ridden, irrational Irish nation to come to terms with its own heroic past or find 64

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some noble model to emulate’ (217, quoted by Derek Hand 189). Similarly, Richard Raskin Russell notes, discussing Yeats’s use of horses as metaphors for the decline of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy which seemed so promising at first but disillusioning at the end: Horses, first skillfully ridden or joyfully riderless, then only ominously riderless, disturb the surface of this metaphoric and literal stream, indicating first the temporary direction and dynamism brought to the Irish Free State by the rebels, then the loss of that focused energy brought about by the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. For Yeats’s nationalism always had an elitist tinge to it; once members of the Ascendancy – whom he saw as Ireland’s natural leaders – were shunted aside, he feared an Irish descent into political chaos. (Fleming 109–10) Moreover, towards the end of Davis’s novel, when Hayes, who had been pursued by ONI members with the possible intent of kidnapping her for a ransom, discusses her situation with a police inspector and his Sergeant, she is impressed by how ingrained Irish nationalist martyrdom remains within the Irish psyche. When the Inspector describes the funeral he and Hayes attended for one of the last veterans of the Easter Uprising, Roger Casey, who had been a drummer boy at that time, the Inspector recounts how it ended with an oration of ‘Padraic Pierce’s famous rallying cry in 1915 at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa. How does it go?’ he asks, ‘the fools, the fools – they have left us our Fenian dead’ (Davis 251). The Sergeant too cannot stop himself from finishing his sentence: ‘Sergeant Carr said the rest with him: “And while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace” ’ (251). While the two policemen instinctively identify and chime in with Pierce’s speech, that moment is also tempered by a sad realisation that the senseless bloodshed would continue: ‘The two men were looking at each other across the table. It was a fleeting instant, but in it Julie sensed the sorrow of men who identified with the cause and despised its most passionate advocates’ (251). In parallel fashion, in Yeats’s poem ‘The O’Rahilly’, Yeats laments the absurdity of Michael Joseph O’Rahilly’s death during the Easter Uprising. Although O’Rahilly was famous for his quotes such as ‘it is madness, but it is a glorious madness’, or the one Yeats inserts in his poem, ‘Because I helped to wind the clock/I come to hear it strike’ (Collected Poems 409), Yeats focuses on the refrain, code words used among covert Irish nationalists, ‘How goes the weather?’, to underline the tragic 65

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aspect of his useless death. ‘Sing of the O’Rahilly/That had such little sense’ (408), Yeats proposes before ending most conclusively: What remains to sing about But the death he met Stretched under a doorway Somewhere off Henry Street; They that found him found upon The door above his head ‘Here died the O’Rahilly. R.I.P’ writ in blood. How goes the weather? (409) Hayes is further entwined in the Yeatsian literary topos through her budding liaison with an Irish playwright, Seamus McNally, whom she meets in New York before she embarks for Ireland to heal from the trauma of her rape on the one hand, and to regain some sort of wholeness by finding resolution to her search for her long lost father on the other. McNally is visiting New York in conjunction with his new Broadway play in which one of Hayes’s interview subjects, Richard Garvy, is thinking of performing. McNally, as it turns out, had already had a play, The Comeallye, open and fold in one night. When she brings him up to her apartment for tea after a date with him, he can’t help but notice that a collection of Yeats’s poetry is prominently displayed alongside a crystal ball as well as a copy of her father’s poem on the wall above her desk: ‘Do you think in symbols, Julie?’ he asks. ‘I do look for signs. I don’t always believe in them’, she affirms (91), foreshadowing the forest of poetic symbols she will soon encounter in Ireland. When her personal copy of one of McNally’s plays that she was reading, To Spite the Devil, disappears and then turns up torn into three pieces in her hotel in Sligo (aptly named the Abbey Hotel) she realises that his plays have aroused passions in a way that echoes the reception of John Synge’s play Playboy of the Western World when it opened at the Abbey Theater in 1907. When Hayes visits Garvy’s grandmother in Sligo, the grandmother is alarmed about her son potentially starring in a McNally play as one of his earlier ones, The Far, Far Hills of Home, about Irish oil wells and greed, had caused such an uproar: ‘Are you forgetting what happened when they put it on here?’ she explains, ‘There were demonstrations and alarms. It puts us in a bad light. He’d not take that kind of part, I’m sure’ (170). Later,

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she warns of terrorist reprisals if her grandson gets involved with the play: ‘It’ll be us they’ll take it out on. I’m too old myself to be listening in the night for trouble’ (171). When Hayes discusses McNally’s play with Roy Irwin, a police detective assigned to watch over her, Irwin assures her: ‘You don’t need to bridle . . . McNally doesn’t write the kind of poetic propaganda that lot likes exported’ (184). Hayes’s numerous references to theatre in the novel underline her connections to Yeats’s involvement with the Abbey Theatre and his quest for a national theatre.1 As Irwin comments regarding McNally: ‘It’s not a new play. It may be that to New York, but to Ireland it’s an old, old play’. He glanced at her and then looked back at the road. ‘It was put on over here last spring, and there were near riots. That sort of thing is out of the history books – Synge and O’Casey’ (157). Later in the novel, she visits another one of her father’s acquaintances, a certain Lady Graham, at her Georgian mansion in Ballina. As Hayes walks through her house, one is reminded of Yeats’s friend Lady Augusta Gregory with whom he had co-founded the Abbey Theatre. Instead of supporting the Irish Literary Revival as Gregory had done, however, Graham supports indigenous Irish art. Just as Lady Gregory had hosted Irish artists and writers at her manor at Coole Parke, Lady Graham also holds artistic events in her home, ‘musical Fridays to which people came from as far away as Castlebar and Sligo’ (161). She had in fact met Hayes’s father at a fundraiser for a ‘building to house primitive Gaelic art’ (161). As she explains, however, ‘it was another of my lost causes’ (162) and echoing Davis’s cynicism regarding ongoing Irish violence, she asserts, as she describes her encounter with Hayes’s father: ‘He was always passionately involved with Ireland. He wanted to write its history. Or to rewrite it. It’s a great wonder to me, the Irish attachment to our history. What is it but a series of lamentations?’ (162). When Hayes visits the National Gallery of Ireland to investigate a painting by her father’s second wife, Edna O’Shea, she is able to examine a portrait of a young Yeats as she leaves, in addition to the silhouette of a man who had been sent by the ONI to tail her: Julie went down the magnificent circular stairway, the walls around which were hung with portraits of Ireland’s great. She was turning from the painting of a young William Butler Yeats by his father when she saw the Gray Man on the floor below her. He disappeared immediately beneath the stairs. (152)

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The Gray Man refers to the man dispatched to spy on her, but it is also a spectral image of the men who haunt her, her father, and perhaps the elderly Yeats himself, the Gray Man looking out from the past in a sort of mise-en-abîme. ‘It’s as though he deliberately shows himself and then disappears. I wish I knew what it means’ (155), Julie remarks regarding her sightings of the phantom-like Gray Man. One can indeed think of the public art battles over the Dublin Art Gallery Yeats was involved in as well. As Anthony Bradley suggests: ‘The visionary and ideal versions of reality in the early poetry are now to be tested . . . in public controversies over the Dublin Art Gallery and what was to become the national theatre, against a backdrop of class warfare exploding in the streets of Dublin, increasing militant nationalist agitation and the impending cataclysm of the First World War’ (Bradley 26). In Yeats’s later poem, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, for example, Yeats confirms the ghostly nature of art and history inexorably linked: Around me the images of thirty years: An ambush, pilgrims at the waterside, Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars, Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride; Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears A gentle questioning look that cannot hide A soul incapable of remorse or rest; A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed (Collected Poems 423–5) Further along in the poem, Yeats connects personal memories with collective ones, historical pasts with private ones: And here’s John Synge himself, that rooted man, ‘Forgetting human words’, a grave deep face. You that would judge me, do not judge alone This book or that, come to this hallowed place Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace (425) Yet, if Davis is so focussed on Yeats’s work within Hayes’s therapeutic Irish narrative, it is because she is also emotionally linked to what French historian Pierre Nora has termed lieux de mémoires or

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places of memory. Hayes’s cartographic stops throughout Ireland are all laden with double significance for her: Wicklow, Yeats’s grave in Sligo, monuments and songs to Wolfetone, even her visit to the dark tower where her father’s wife, Edna O’Shea, lives with her donkey appropriately named Maud (in honour of Maud Gonne) and where he was last seen, wraith-like in a row boat near a cave. As Davis describes it: She passed yet another monument to the men of 1798. It had been erected in 1898; and so, likely, she now realized, had the other monuments in Wicklow, Ballina, and wherever else the centennial of that disaster had been celebrated. Achieving a perspective on those manifestations restored a faltering self-confidence. (168) When she finally visits Yeats’s gravesite itself, she is transfixed by the gothic ruin-like atmosphere around the spot: ‘What does it mean?’ she asks, reading Yeats’s enigmatic tombstone. ‘Julie shook her head. She was not going to interpret Yeats. She took a long look at the mountain, Ben Bulben, and thought it resembled a larching beast against the sky’ (181). A bit later, she thanks Irwin for accompanying her on her visit there: ‘For what?’ He asks. ‘Everything. For bringing me here. I feel better now. Stronger’ (182–3). Irwin then proposes that they visit the Lake Isle of Innisfree. ‘Oh, God love you. You are a romantic’, she retorts delighted by her immersion in a Yeatsian triangle of poetic locations: Ben Bulben, Sligo, and Innisfree. If one can read in Innisfree the words Free Island (as Innis means island in Gaelic), her visit there suggests her own personal need to be free from her traumatic past and the burden of her father’s absence. ‘The passage from memory to history has required every social group to redefine its identity through the revitalization of its own history’, Nora writes in The Realms of Memory. ‘The task of remembering makes everyone his own historian’ (Nora 638). If, for Nora, places of memory within a nation are made up of ‘the events, holidays and monuments that give people their identity’, what can one say of the fusion between Yeats’s idiosyncratic attempts at mythologising Irish nationalist spaces and the American with Irish roots, Hayes’s, desires to appropriate them as well? Revealingly, some of the clues might come from Davis’s own life which had never been alluded to before during her 40 years of writing novels prior to The Habit of

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Fear. Discussing her fictitious alter ego Hayes, who appears in three earlier novels, Davis admits to Lucy Freeman: I didn’t think there was anything of me in Julie Hayes, certainly not in the first book, except the urge to bite my thumb in psycho-therapy. I wrote it trying to break out of a slump. I tried to be outrageous, to defy the therapist, to mock my Catholic girlhood. ‘Jesus after open heart surgery!’ and me a graduate of a Sacred Heart college! But it was a kind of reverend mockery – the mix of anger and tears. And love. Well disguised, but I see now that I was there. And now that Julie grows into her own person in The Habit of Fear, I see that I’ve written an apocryphal autobiography. (Freeman 272) Indeed, as she shared publically in her last published short story, ‘The Letter’, her youth was filled with family secrets (in ‘The Letter’, the young narrator finds out that her father had informed on her grandfather to the police after he had killed a man, and then ran away). She, in fact, only found out as an adult that she had been adopted at birth, and although she had been raised by an Irish immigrant mother, her father, like Hayes’s, had mysteriously vanished. As Davis further explains: I think a writer must have a folklore. In fact everybody does have. It’s a matter of searching it out, building on it, maybe even making it up. Every character I write must have a lore of his own. And he or she is part of me. I am – all writers are – their own best material. There’s more of me in my villains than heroes. Or, come to think of it, more than I recognize of me. Yeah! (Freeman 272) While the ‘collective memory of a nation’ in Maurice Halbwachs’s typology ‘is represented in memorials. . . . Whatever a nation chooses to commit to physical or more significantly what not to memorialize is an indication of the collective memory’ (Halbwachs 46), an analysis of Yeats’s and Davis’s attempts to commit to a larger national whole are also attempts to overcome their own respective ‘habits of fear’. ‘You Americans are a careful sort these days’, remarks the clerk at a hotel Hayes stays at and that happens to be over-run by extremist nationalist groups gathered for the Casey funeral. ‘I don’t wonder with what’s

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going on in the world but I wouldn’t like to live that way myself, being fearful all the time’ (143). ‘It’s a bad habit’, Hayes responds. Although Davis’s title, The Habit of Fear, could well make one think of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first stories to be set in the United States, ‘The Valley of Fear’2 which also discusses secret Irish nationalist societies in Ireland and America, the ‘Molly Maguires’ (known as the ‘Mollys’), it is really from Yeats’s childhood memories in Sligo (‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth’) that Davis found her title. In it, as he discusses his fear of his grandfather among other fears that had plagued him, one can see parallels between the child Yeats’s and Hayes’s own child-like frightful places: ‘Some of my misery was loneliness and some of it fear of old William Pollexfen my grandfather. . . . He was never unkind, and I cannot remember that he ever spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to fear and admire him’ (Reveries 6). Moreover, his grandmother also shared a similar fear: ‘she too had the habit of fear’ (6). Yet Hayes truly ‘grows up’ in the novel – and heals – by confronting her ‘proper dark’ as Yeats put it in ‘The Statues’ (Collected Poems 431): her inner demons as well as her outer ones in the form of rapists (whom she literally confronts in Ireland by accident) and extremist Irish nationalist groups that want to harm her. As Yeats further writes in his ‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth’ as an echo to Hayes’s emotional progress at the end of the novel: ‘I have grown happier with every year of life as though gradually conquering something in myself’ (11). The language of the colonised, often associated with rape vocabulary, has been transformed into a more autonomous state within Hayes’s psyche. When she goes back home to New York, Hayes has conquered the internecine spaces that had been drawn before her as gauntlets and has broken ‘the habit of fear’. She is healed in part by a living look at Yeats’s poetic and political landscape in keeping with what Yeats has written himself in ‘Under Ben Bullen’: ‘Cast your mind on other days/That we in coming days may be/Still the indomitable Irishry’ (Collected Poems 459). By reconnecting with her own ‘Irishry’, through a Yeatsian prism, Hayes too has become ‘indomitable’.

Notes 1 Davis too was very engaged in theatre. Her husband, Harry Davis, was a member of the Actor’s Studio in New York and appeared in many plays and films. 2 I am indebted to Professor Subhajit Sen Gupta of the University of Burdwan for this illuminating rapprochement.

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Works cited Bradley, Anthony. Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W.B. Yeats: Nation, Class and State. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2011. Breton, André. Nadja. Translated Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Davis, Dorothy. The Habit of Fear. New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1987. ———. “The Letter.” Murder in the Family. New York: Berkeley Prime Crime, 2002. 60–88. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. “The Valley of Fear”, 1915. Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift Editions, 2005. Fleming, Deborah, ed. W.B. Yeats and Postcolonialism. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001. Freeman, Lucy. “An Interview with Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Grandmaster of the ’84 Edgars.” The Armchair Detective 20.3 (1987): 266–78. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory (Heritage of Sociology Series). Translated Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: U Chicago P, 1992. Hand, Derek. “Breaking Boundaries, Creating Spaces: W.B. Yeats’s The Words Upon the Window-Pane as a Postcolonial Text.” W.B. Yeats and Postcolonialism. Ed. Deborah Fleming. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001. 187–204. Nathan, Leonard E. The Tragic Drama of W.B. Yeats: Figures in a Dance. New York: Columbia UP, 1965. Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, vol 1. Conflicts and Divisions. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. O’Connor, Joseph, ed. Yeats is Dead. New York: Vintage, 2002. Russell, Richard Rankin. “W.B. Yeats and Eavan Boland: Postcolonial Poets?” W.B. Yeats and Postcolonialism. Ed. Deborah Fleming. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001. 101–32. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Yeats, W.B. Collected Poems. Collectors Library, London: CRW Publishing, 2010. ———. Autobiography: Consisting of Reveries over Childhood and Youth; The Trembling of the Veil; and Dramatis Personae. New York: Macmillan, 1953.

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Part II SELF AND SOCIETY

5 YEATS, KIPLING, AND THE HAVEN-FINDING ART Malabika Sarkar* Centenaries, bi-centenaries, and similar milestones are occasions to reflect upon people, events, institutions. 2015 was the year that brought together two major authors born in the same year, one hundred and fifty years ago – W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling – both with connections with India, although in two entirely different ways, as Alexander Bubb points out in his book Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle. Reading milestones is a temptation to dwell on the moment, on uniqueness and on individual achievement. What I wish to do here instead is to open up the perspective. Milestones are part of a process and that process is a journey. I would like to suggest that the very notion of a journey is central to the ways in which Yeats and Kipling wrote their finest poetry. Their individual modes of interweaving this concept into their poetry are an index to both their similarities and their differences. The motif of voyaging that is so central to the creative energies of Yeats and Kipling is an orientation of mind that connects them with the poetry of the Early Modern and Romantic periods. The impulses connecting these nodal points in the history of poetry are energised by the fundamental need to define the creative moment as sanctuary and the creative process as a voyage or a journey. The context for this needs to be established for a fuller understanding of the poetry of Yeats and Kipling. In a fascinating book called The Haven-Finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook, E.G.R. Taylor, a geographer, with extensive knowledge of complex technical aspects of navigation, tells a riveting story about navigation from the days of classical Greece to the eighteenth century. She reminds us that while navigation was catalysed by the spirit of adventure, the excitement of exploration and discovery, it was rooted in the basic and fundamental need for sanctuary.1 Ships needed to find a safe haven. Indeed, remarkable 75

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collections of letters survive, written in the sixteenth century, addressed to English scientists like the charismatic John Dee – a strong candidate as role model for Doctor Faustus and Prospero – in which Dee’s guidance is sought by navigators on the high seas for whom reaching a safe haven was as important as discovering new lands. At some point, as science and literature intersected in the Early Modern period, voyaging became a metaphor for the idea of the search for the creative moment. This is not to suggest that such a connection had not been made earlier. Simply, that it was perceived with greater urgency in the age of advancement in navigation. One of the clearest examples of this is in Andrew Marvell in whose poetry there is a special way in which the outer world is reflected in the mind, as in The Garden in its reflections on ‘a green thought in a green shade’, and in the search for safe havens, as in the 1653 poem Bermudas in which the localisation of English boat – ‘Thus sung they, in the English boat’ – roots a dream in reality. Nature, in the form of the idyllic Bermudas, is a divine hieroglyph offering sanctuary and creative possibilities imaged as song – ‘the listening winds received this song’. Whether it be in the cartographic certainty and imaginative control of the physical world such as made possible in sailing to the Bermudas, or the journey over land to the productive space of Lord Fairfax’s estate at Nun Appleton, creative moments in Marvell’s poetry are negotiated through journeys and the attainment of a sanctuary. This same motif is central to the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. The Prelude begins with a journey and this great work encompasses many expeditions including the climbing of Mount Snowdon towards the end of The Prelude where the sight of the moon breaking through mists initiates a sustained contemplation of the imagination. A simpler version of this is Tintern Abbey, with its many journeys into the past, present, and future, and its arrival at the moment when ‘with an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony, and with the deep power of joy,/ We see into the life of things’. Keats’s early poems, Sleep and Poetry and Endymion, are also dominated by this analogy between voyaging and searching for the creative moment. More subtly, this equation is also interwoven into The Fall of Hyperion and Keats’s major odes, with the possible exception of Ode on a Grecian Urn. It is interesting to examine the trajectory that led to Yeats’s appropriation of the voyaging and sanctuary motif into his poetry. W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) began writing poetry in his late teens. It is often said that his poetry began by echoing Shelley, Spenser, and the PreRaphaelites. He was soon drawn towards Rosicrucianism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism – and to Swedenborg and Boehme – and these 76

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interests naturally led him to Blake. He edited Blake’s works, with Edwin Ellis, during 1891–93, when he was in his late twenties. His great involvement with Ireland, Irish literature, and the Irish Literary Renaissance – a distinctive geographical identity – coexisted with a deep interest in magical, philosophical, and visionary thought. To be simultaneously linked with the Irish movement – a public engagement – and with a deeply inward-looking search for fundamental truths, that was the avowed aim of both the Neoplatonists and the secret brotherhood known as the Rosicrucians, was not in any way a flawed agenda because both were inspired by a reformist zeal. This is the kind of public/private vision that produced a work like Blake’s Jerusalem – centred on the city of London but transformed into a visionary space. Among Yeats’s early volumes of poems is The Rose (1893), which includes ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, hauntingly beautiful in its simplicity. With The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), Yeats, influenced by his friend Arthur Symons, by the French symbolists, by Verlaine and Mallarme, produced poetry that is intense, almost translucent in the beauty of its imaginative impulse. One of Yeats’s essentially simple but timeless poems is ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’ which belongs to this volume. This is one of those ageless poems that appeals from the time one is young and first falls in love to the time one has travelled past middle age and is beginning to look back on life. The mood and style of Yeats’s poetry change from the volume In the Seven Woods (1903), through The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), to Responsibilities (1914). The rarefied world of Yeats’s early poetry makes way for realism and, eventually, satire. The Easter Rising of 1916 – which took Yeats by surprise – was a turning point in his life. He had been in love with the beautiful and tempestuous Maud Gonne from his early twenties but she had always refused him. Now her husband was one of the 16 leaders executed. Yeats proposed to her again and, turned down again, proposed to her adopted daughter Iseult who also turned him down. In October 1917, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees whom he had known for some years. It was her gift for ‘automatic writing’ – in a way reminiscent of Blake’s dream encounters with his dead brother Robert which led to the illuminated plates – and Yeats’s deciphering of this ‘automatic writing’ that led him to evolve what he was to call ‘a system of symbolism’ which he published much later in 1926 as A Vision. Yeats’s fascination with India had grown following his meeting with Rabindranath Tagore in 1912. Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913. Poems that grew out of the experiences of these years can be found in The Wild Swans at 77

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Coole (1919) and in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). These include ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. By this time, Yeats’s life appeared to have acquired a new stability. A daughter, then a son, was born to him and Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. The Nobel award ceremony speech referred to Yeats’s ‘inner promptings’ that determined his relationship with the world and made him a unique poet. For many poets, this might have been the beginning of the end. Recognition and stability could have led to an elder statesman attitude and an erosion of the urge to stretch himself further as a poet. For Yeats, it was, in fact, quite the opposite. He had bought a Norwegian tower in Galway, Thoor Ballylee, where he lived for part of the year. He read Swift and Goldsmith with renewed interest and his poetry now reached a different level of achievement. If the last plays of Shakespeare – including The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale – reach a level of maturity and understanding when life and death are no longer contraries, cancelling each other, Yeats’s final volumes of poems – The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems (1936–39) among them – encapsulate a similar paradox, an old decaying body and, within it, a young spirit, dynamic and vital. Many scholars have felt that the poems of the post-Nobel period are among Yeats’s finest. In these great poems of Yeats’s final volumes, written at a time when his tower at Galway was both a physical as well as an emotional sanctuary, Yeats rediscovered the analogy of haven-finding and creativity that Marvell and the Romantics knew so well. One of the great poems that illustrate this is ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. It belongs to the volume The Tower. Written in 1926, it was published in 1928. While the title establishes the motif of the voyage – repositioning the quest pattern of Romantic poetry – it is a complex and multi-layered poem. Yeats embarks on a journey that takes him, not to new lands, but back to the classical past. The Byzantium of the seventh century BC (660 BC) became Constantinople in 330 CE and was to be named Istanbul in 1930, two years after The Tower was published. Yeats’s journey takes him back in time, back to the past, to an ancient world of culture. The name of Byzantium evokes a rich tapestry of art, philosophy, and the cultural wealth of an ancient civilisation. But it is essentially an inward journey, rather than an archaeological discovery or a museum visit. In a draft script for a 1931 BBC broadcast, Yeats wrote: I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about 78

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that subject I have put into a poem called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jewelled crosiers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolized the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city. The two Byzantine poems – ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927) and ‘Byzantium’ (1930) – fascinated the celebrated British composer Sir Michael Kemp Tippett who composed a musical score for soprano and orchestra for ‘Byzantium’.2 In a preface to this musical work, reminding us that Yeats bought his tower from Lady Gregory in 1917, restoring and renovating it extensively so that he could climb its impossibly winding staircase to its tiny battlemented roof to look out, Tippett writes: Inhabiting both the solid tower and the visionary city, Yeats produced a new kind of poetry. Leaving behind romance, nationalism and politics, he felt that his verse could be hammered out from a mixture of the European culture in which he was steeped, and from his latest explorations in Eastern culture, spiritualism and the occult. The two Byzantium poems subsist thus on a rich substratum of ideological and pictorial experience. A more recent reading of Yeats’s poems examines some of the complexities that exist in his explorations of architecture in terms of astronomy and aesthetics, reading Yeats in a post-Einstein context (Ebury). These are exciting pathways to explore, but I wish to focus here on a different area of complexity. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is a poem of four stanzas in ottava rima. One cannot fully understand the poem by confining oneself to the binaries that seem to have been noticed most – memory and desire, knowledge and intuition, nature and history. And the most obvious – youth and old age. Cleanth Brooks interprets the poem as engaging with the duality of idealism and materialism, the world of being and becoming. And although Yeats was a devotee of Plato, he apparently does not privilege one above the other. However, confining oneself to such binaries does not truly reflect the complexities that the poem engages with. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ focuses on ‘song’, taking us through the song of the birds in the trees in stanza one to the song of the soul and the ‘singing school’ of stanza two to the ‘singing masters of my soul’ in stanza three to the final stanza’s singing ‘To lords and ladies of 79

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Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come’. What narrative do these song references weave through the poem? The song of the birds in the trees in the land left behind was ‘sensual music’ – limited, eulogising the joys of this life, not transcending history but celebrating ‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies’. This life. And that is why these birds that sing are ‘those dying generations’, unlike Keats’s immortal bird, the nightingale, whose immortality Keats announces in the ode ‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird/ No hungry generations tread thee down’. That poem is clearly at the back of Yeats’s mind as he writes. The birds in Yeats’s poem are entirely mortal. They sing of the joys of mortal life and ‘neglect/ Monuments of unaging intellect’. These monuments will have to be considered again later. In stanza two the birds are replaced by the scare-crow figure of the poet in his old age – ‘A tattered coat upon a stick’. The music that an old man can create would not be the song of a vibrant young voice, but it can be from the soul. A hallelujah? Or is it like the combination of rhythm and blues and jazz and gospel music that came to be known as soul music in the civil rights era of the 1960s in the US? Perhaps an early and prophetic incarnation of it? The rhythms of soul music were characteristically stressed by the use of handclaps and body movements. Are we seeing in Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ an earlier avatar of that? ‘Unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing’. It is indeed a song about rights – an ‘aged man’s’ need to be heard and to matter. But there are no singing schools for such songs in the land left behind. Only schools for studying ‘monuments of its own magnificence’ – this ‘monument’ is an echo of the monument of the first stanza but with a significant difference. The attitude here is narcissistic, limited. For the old man, singing of the soul was not encouraged in the land left behind. ‘And therefore I have sailed the seas and come’, says Yeats, ‘To the holy city of Byzantium’. In the land left behind there was the ‘sensual music’ of the birds in the trees and the possibility of the old man’s soul clapping its hands and singing. What happens in Byzantium? Yeats turns to the sages in the gold mosaic walls of Byzantium asking them to step out, engage in a spiralling dance – ‘perne in a gyre’3 – and become the ‘singingmasters’ of his soul. This would be a song of a different order. The gyrating, spinning dance movement could remind us of the baul songs of eastern India, a region Yeats would had been introduced to through his acquaintance with Rabindranath Tagore. The baul singer characteristically twirls around as he sings. The song will doubtless remind us also of the second half of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan:

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Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ‘twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! Those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. The circular trance-like movements of both song-and-dance sequences – in the two poems by Coleridge and Yeats – are unmistakable and both take singing to a different transcendental level. Participation in this music releases the poet in his decrepit old age – the state of a ‘dying animal’ – ‘Into the artifice of eternity’. Eternity, yes. Eternity and infinity are always ideally desired. But ‘artifice’? The answer comes in the first two lines of the last stanza – ‘Once out of nature I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing’. Instead, he would like to be fashioned into a form like that of the proverbial golden nightingale singing to the emperor. Perhaps the most useful gloss on these lines are Yeats’s own words in A Vision (1937) – ‘Plato . . . separates the Eternal Ideas from Nature and shows them self-contained’. Denial of nature – separation from nature – is a movement away from the transient, the mutable, the ‘dying animal’ status, to the eternity of song that is not tied to a mortal body – ‘those dying generations’ of the poem’s first stanza. This song – made eternal by delinking art from life – therefore moves from the finality of ‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies’ to the Platonic continuum of ‘what is past, or passing, or to come’. But what happens with the monuments of the first two stanzas? The ‘monuments of unaging intellect’ of stanza one stands like a beacon or a lighthouse guiding the voyager onward – its serenity and sublimity a contrast to the frenetic activity all around. By the time we encounter ‘monuments’ in stanza two, it is no longer a resource, a benediction, but has become self-indulgent – ‘monuments of its own magnificence’. This dominant but still, motionless, architectural image of the monument makes way for the dynamic moving image of ‘perne in a gyre’

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in the third. The safe haven of Byzantium with its ageless mosaic is eternal, but not static. It could not have been a sanctuary otherwise. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is thus all about a voyage to achieve the recreation of song. For the poet in his old age, the only redemption to be found is in the timeless status of art that is endlessly creative. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is a journey to the safe haven of this life-renewing timeless art. This motif of a journey – so prominent in Early Modern as well as Romantic poetry – is one which, I submit, in fact pulls together the different phases of Yeats’s poetry from his journey to the Lake Isle of Innisfree, to Coole Park, the home of Lady Gregory, the centre of many of his poems, to his own tower towards the end of his life. For Yeats’s creativity, voyaging to a safe haven was an important requirement. Rudyard Kipling, born in the same year as W.B. Yeats, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 and was also offered the Poet Laureateship which he declined. There cannot be two poets so utterly different from each other as Yeats and Kipling. If Yeats’s is a tormented mind – first because of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne and later the agony of a passionate mind and a vibrant imagination within an aging decaying body – Kipling’s persona in his poems appears to be marked by dominance and an imperialist generosity. These are the two characteristics that swiftly led to the term ‘Kiplingesque’, a term of which Rupert Brooke was one of the early users. Harry Ricketts has identified what might be called Kipling’s essential predicament (111–25). Reminding us of Dan Jacobson’s remark in the 2005 Times Literary Supplement about ‘Kipling, a poet I cannot abide yet cannot stop reading’ and Max Beerbohm’s 1904 cartoon of Kipling and Britannia, Ricketts observes, ‘Beerbohm’s cartoon and Jacobson’s comment point to one aspect of Kipling’s poetry on which everybody seems to agree, its sheer memorability’ (111). This easy recall, which ensures recognition for the poet, unfortunately also encourages trivialisation and disregard for any complexities or resonances behind the surface meaning. In consonance with this version of Kipling as poet are his parodies of the nineteenth-century poets in Echoes (1884) and a volume of light verse Departmental Ditties (1886). One is encouraged to believe that light verse is Kipling’s essential forte and social acceptability is his comfort zone. And yet, his affiliations with both the Pre-Raphaelites and the war poets are undisputed and point in a different direction. Kipling’s mother’s sister was married to the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and Kipling was familiar with the work of William Morris, Swinburne, and Robert Browning. He was also, as Ricketts points out elsewhere, 82

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in dialogue with the war poets – Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Gurney, David Jones, Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Charles Sorley, and Edward Thomas (91–110). Kipling’s influence on the war poets, he suggests, is a complex matter inspiring an ambivalent response. With the increased critical attention that is being paid to Kipling’s poetry, ambivalence remains the predominant response (Ricketts 111). Two representative poems from Kipling display his characteristic style – ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Mandalay’. Kipling identifies Gunga Din thus: Now in India’s sunny clime Where I used to spend my time A-servin’ of ‘Er Majesty the Queen, Of all them blackfaced crew The finest man I knew Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din. The dark skinned man, eventually killed by a bullet, deeply admired by the white man who has loved him and hit him many times, is the subject of a story narrated over gin and beer back in Britain. ‘Mandalay’ looks back at the Burmese girl left behind. With all the arrogance of the white man back in London, the poet imagines that the Burmese girl in the hot but greener and sweeter land is pining for him. Both ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Mandalay’ have a catchy rhythm and when they first appeared might have been admired for sincerity of feeling and just appreciation. Today both poems appear unbearably condescending in their attitude. The easy assumption of racial superiority in the black and white connotations of ‘Gunga Din’ and the combined racial and gender protocols of ‘Mandalay’ seem far from nuanced sensitive poetry. The most profound poem written by Kipling is ‘If’, written in 1895. It is advice given by Kipling to his son – a very British blend of ‘stiff-upper-lip’ attitude with grace, humanity, and courage. The parallel Yeats poem is surely ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. Placing the two poems side by side, the difference between the two poets at once becomes clear. Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, like Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, is addressed to his sleeping child. Although Yeats’s wish list for his daughter has many similarities with that of Kipling’s in ‘If’, the differences between the two poems are immense. Kipling’s poem is a ‘public’ poem, its tone of advice privileges both the receiver and the giver. We are expected to admire Kipling for the sage advice he gives his son and to recognise the superiority of British imperialist virtues that are encoded in the poem. Yeats’s poem is entirely private, 83

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the concern of a father for his daughter, and this natural bonding is reinforced through the poem’s dominating images from nature – the laurel tree and the linnet’s song. Yeats’s poem, in spite of its specific geographical location near Gregory’s wood, speaks a language that is valid for everyone everywhere at all times. Kipling’s poem is culture specific, innately British, imperialist, white, masculine. It is true that in recent years there have been attempts to defamiliarise the poem, reading allusive nuances into the text, and seeking to create a more accommodating and interrogative text breaking through long perceived fixities. However, at the end of it all, the consensus that emerges is that Kipling was a poet in spite of himself. This is the crux behind the debate between T.S. Eliot’s version of Kipling the poet and the more recent versions of Craig Raine and Jan Montefiore. In the poetry of Kipling, as with Yeats, voyaging occupies a position of centrality. In his fifth volume of poems, The Seven Seas (1896), Kipling draws upon his experiences in India, in Britain, and in Vermont where he lived with his wife from 1892 to 1896, to weave a tapestry of imperial vision from America to New Zealand. Perhaps two poets Kipling might remind us of are Byron and Southey. But while, in Byron and Southey, exotic lands provide landscapes and narratives as materials for poetry, and it is the sense of otherness that prevails, Kipling, while deeply conscious of otherness, is continuously drawn into a dialogue with other cultures in a process of self-construction. This natural impulse towards self-construction is what draws Kipling closer to Wordsworth and Keats and distinguishes him from the dramatised selffashioning of Byron. Voyaging, encounters with other lands and other cultures, matter to Kipling in his poetry as a means of defining the poet’s own identity albeit in culture specific terms. It is in this sense that voyaging becomes for Kipling, too, an essential part of the creative process. However, it does not extend for him to the recognition of the importance of a sanctuary because consciousness of the creative process is not a fundamental concern in his poetry, as it is in the poetry of W.B. Yeats. Yeats’s journey ultimately is not to a destination. For him, voyaging and sanctuary are not verb and noun, two distinct modes. Their coexistence, the synergy between them, the unity of that experience, is critical for our understanding of Yeats’s creative life. As he says at the end of ‘Among School Children’: O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? 84

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Voyaging, the haven-finding art, and the gift of a sanctuary, constitute a dynamic seamless process in Yeats’s poetry.

Notes * This paper was first presented at a conference on ‘Yeats and Kipling: Retrospectives, Perspectives’, Bharati College, University of Delhi, in March 2015. 1 We remember Donne’s The Good Morrow ‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone/ Let maps to others worlds on worlds have shown’ although those lines of course encapsulate navigation with astronomy (since ‘maps to others worlds on worlds have shown’ refer to star maps/ globes not geographical maps/globes) rather like Milton in that famous passage in Paradise Lost Book I comparing Satan’s spear with the tallest pine shaped to form the mast of a ship and his shield to the moon as seen by Galileo. 2 Co-commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Carnegie Hall, it was first performed on 11 April 1991 at the Orchestra Hall, Chicago, with Faye Robinson, Soprano, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir George Solti. The New York Premiere was at the Carnegie Hall on 15 April 1991. 3 A pern in Gaelic is a bobbin.

Works cited Allt, Peter and Russell K. Alspach. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1927. Brooks, Cleanth. “Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium.” Literary Theories in Praxis. Ed. Shirley F. Staton. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1987. Bubb, Alexander. Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siecle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Ebury, Katherine. Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Eliot, T.S. Introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. London: Faber & Faber, 1941. Foster, R.F. W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997–2003. ———. Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Green, Roger Lancelyn, ed. Kipling: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971. Howes, Marjorie and John Kelly, eds. The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Kipling, Rudyard. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: The Definitive Edition. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940. Montefiore, Jan. In Time’s Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Manchester & London: Manchester UP, 2013. ———. Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2007.

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Perry, Ann. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation. Bristol: Open UP, 1992. Raine, Craig. Introduction to Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poetry. London: Penguin, 1992. Ricketts, Harry. “ ‘Nine and sixty ways’: Kipling, Ventriloquist Poet.” The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling. Ed. Howard J. Booth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 111–25. Taylor, E.G.R. The Haven-Finding Art: A History of Navigation From Odysseus to Captain Cook. Hollis and Carter Ltd, 1971, 2nd edn. with Appendix by Joseph Needham. Tippet, Michael. Byzantium for soprano and orchestra (1989–90). London: Schott & Co. Ltd., 1991.

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6 TRANSGRESSED MARGINS Reading the ‘Other’ Kipling Madhu Grover Rudyard Kipling’s early oeuvre, conjured out of a complex experience of colonised India, manifests considerable ‘discursive ambivalence’ owing to fluid narratorial shifts between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, as also Anglo-Indian and ‘native’ frames of reference.1 Further complicating his divided stance are his emotive affiliations with the colonised subjects of empire, revealed in certain unresolvable contradictions within his writings where his sympathies militate against his undisguised agenda to celebrate imperial interventions. This paper reads such cultural mixing through the lens of transgression by re-examining a few representative early Indian fictions of Kipling to show how they encode the vulnerability of imperial power, and also stage subversive native stances. I argue that such affective positioning within the texts represents momentary dispersals of colonial authority, thereby inadvertently creating an-‘other’ discourse to that of the official imperial one. The broader notions of this paper are located within a growing body of Kipling studies that ‘re-read’ various aspects of his writings in the cultural context of imperial politics, but do so in contestation with unitary modes of thinking about them.2

Imperial stereotypes and ironic articulations Kipling’s narrative stances alternate between participation, withdrawal from, and marginal positioning in relation to his target audiences, both English and Anglo-Indian. Despite his six years as an Anglo-Indian child and ‘Seven years’ hard’ journalistic career in India, writing presumably for an Anglo-Indian audience, Kipling’s sense of membership within this community is rendered ambivalent by his satirical stance toward its ‘official sinning’, chronicled in the Simla ‘Plain’ tales; instances of colonial corruption and administrative mismanagement in the periphery.3 Ironically however, he has contempt 87

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even for metropolitan political interferences based upon inadequate knowledge of the exilic, alienated Anglo-Indian life in the colony. Simla society ‘with the varnish off’ (Plain Tales from the Hills 181), perceived as manipulating affairs of the heart and state with equal ease, proved the perfect subject for the writer’s caustic word-crafting. The cool summer capital of the Raj with its fashionable spots – Peliti’s, the Mall, Peterhoff, Benmore, Jakko – was popularly represented as the husbandhunting-ground for the ‘Miss Sahibs’ from ‘Home’, as well as the site of summer flirtations for the ‘Memsahib-away-from-husband-toilingin-the sweltering-plains’. Much of the criticism of Anglo-Indian ‘immorality’ was generated within the metropolis by the increasingly vocal lower-middle and working classes who were in the process of developing an ideology of respectability. Alternatively, in the colony, attempts to ward off the powerful attraction of a ‘sensual’ India led to the discursive construction of the ideal Sahib immersed in his imperial duties and his ideal companion, the Memsahib, an embodiment of the virtues of domesticity and moral purity. This disciplining of the Anglo-Indian body was, however, a discursive aspect of a more recent socio-political paradigm shift, the early eighteenth century having been a period of significant cultural mixing. Under the influence of evangelical and moralising Victorian attitudes in the nineteenth century, white female presence in India increased greatly to help cultivate and reinforce an ‘English’ identity within a self-conscious empire-building exercise. Following this discursive restructuring, it was seen as imperative that the more sordid aspects of European life be not exposed to the gaze of the Indian population. Thus it is that certain early reviewers of Kipling’s writings attempted to strategically displace his critique of the British Government in India, highlighting instead the politically ‘correct’ image of a ‘nobler AngloIndian world’ doing ‘England’s greatest work on earth’.4 Hence, the formal instabilities of Kipling’s writings may perhaps be attributed to his own complex personal positioning on a colonial limen.

The ‘I-witness’ figure: ‘Insider’ and ‘Outsider’ points of view Who is the Public I write for? Men ’neath an Indian sky Cynical, seedy and dry, Are these then the people I write for? No, not I. (Echoes, Early Verse 250) 88

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Part of a ‘private’ dedication, this early poetic disavowal is characteristic of Kipling’s anxious self-reflexivity concerning his chosen addressees, and points also to the conundrum of his ideological locations within the colonial ‘public’ space. Despite this conscious disaffiliation from the Anglo-Indian community and although not writing for these ‘men ’neath an Indian sky’, in fact, he will increasingly write about them. Many of his Indian short stories were ‘turnover’ pieces in the Civil and Military Gazette, as also, some verses of Departmental Ditties (1886), before taking their more enduring and official form as Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). Spoken through plural ‘voices’ as they are, the earliest of his contemporary Anglo-Indian readers failed to seek an ideological location for the sardonic persona behind the Ditties and speculated ‘whether he sincerely admires his pretty marionettes, or whether he is not inwardly chafing and raging at the people among whom he is condemned to live’ (Green 39). Kipling’s representations of adulterous liaisons and images of administrative nepotism in the Ditties and Plain Tales perhaps alarmed establishment circles. The ‘outward and visible signs’ of British authority – to use Kipling’s phrase (Plain Tales 93) – as embodied in the elite Indian Civil Service, could ill afford to be depicted in such a dubious light. Nevertheless, his sharp portrayals of the Anglo-Indian spectacle fascinated his English readers and animated their patriotism. Yet, instead of an honest engagement with the whole political dynamic of these popular writings, contemporary English reviewers chose to read them selectively. Upon reading Plain Tales, their voyeuristic ‘Orientalist’ desires luxuriated in images of, for instance, the opium den in ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’; the powerful but deadly magic of the love-charm in ‘The Bisara of Pooree’; the seal-cutter’s jadoo conjured ‘In the House of Suddhoo’; or of Fleete turned were-wolf upon his desecration of the idol of Hanuman in ‘The Mark of the Beast’ in Life’s Handicap (1891). They avidly consumed this escape world of romance, conveniently eliding the potentially anarchic subtext in its metaphoric and ironic discourse. On his part, Kipling’s predominant stance is that of an ‘insider’ professing access to specialised knowledge of colonial social and official circles, acquired from shared experience. While implying that his Anglo-Indian audiences also share his judgments on these characters, he considers his solidarity with their society as uniquely empowering him to deal with ‘things that are not pretty and uglinesses that hurt’; matters depicted by him in these narratives (Preface, Under the Deodars). He assures ‘the ill-informed that India is not entirely inhabited by men and women playing tennis with the Seventh 89

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Commandment’, the biblical reference coyly glancing at the adulterous love-affairs in four of the six stories of the volume. In this Preface, he seeks extra-fictionally to balance these tendentious glimpses of Anglo-Indian ‘immorality’ by stressing ‘that very many of the lads in the land can be trusted to bear themselves . . . bravely, on occasion’. Evidently Kipling’s psychological stance here is one of distinct affinity with ‘men ’neath an Indian sky’, in adducing an inner perspective on their tragi-comic affairs. His fears that English readers might misconstrue Anglo-Indian life from these tales about ‘going wrong’, show him as culturally implicated in the broader political defensiveness of periphery towards metropolitan assessments of its conduct. Yet ironically, it is Kipling’s own outsider’s perspective as an eye-witness figure on the Anglo-Indian community that records the flaws in the system: the incidents of ‘official sinning’ within government departments; the officiousness of ‘the Little Tin Gods’ of the administration, and the distance between not only the state and the Indian but also between the state and the ordinary Anglo-Indian (Definitive Edition 14). Colonial administrators continually suffered the political critique and control of Westminster guided by metropolitan ‘experts’, those ‘travelling M.P.s’ who became stock figures of ridicule in Anglo-Indian fiction. Kipling’s fictional treatment of the type suggests that he shared the colonial antagonism towards the ‘perpetual and vexatious interference, on the part of the central authority’ in Indian policy-making.5 His outspoken writings, though distressing to officials sensitive to discredit, revealed colonial life from the perspective of one inhabiting a border zone. Implicit in Kipling’s remarks in the afore-mentioned preface is a search for the correct response to these portraits of men and women trapped in a claustrophobic yet public routine of trivial pursuits, petty intrigues, and scandalous liaisons, with their private selves struggling to unravel their sorry, scrambled relationships. Indeed, this preface is one of many extra-fictional texts in which he negotiates a fine balance between his ideological instinct to protect the imperial image, and his unrelenting commitment as a writer to tell the ‘truth’.

A culturally ‘other’ Kipling Kipling’s divided sensibility is famously avouched poetically among ‘Chapter Headings’ in Kim (1901) where he thanks Allah for having blessed him with two ‘separate sides’ to his head (179). It is tempting to read such extra-fictional views as representing his double-consciousness on India: an ‘Official’ view, essentially paternalistic and administrative, 90

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allied to an ‘Orientalist’ perspective on reform for India, based on a conviction that ‘the natives were not suited by western forms’, combined with a ‘distrust of democracy’ (Pinney 18–20). A subconscious but more powerful matter is the anxiety of being alone in a potentially hostile and mysterious India. This ‘colonial terror’ about the un-readability of the other culture is articulated through psychosomatic images of disease and death, of rank, unclean humanity and of colonial habitation in the imperial periphery as existentially imperilled (Suleri 1). Such betrayals of vulnerability are instanced in demonic fears of alien environments: the lone English reporter crowded by northwest frontiersmen of Peshawar in ‘The City of Evil Countenances’ (Pinney 81–5), or recoiling from familiar but more repellent horrors as in ‘Typhoid at Home’ while depicting the foul, fetid cow-biers of Lahore (69–77). Lending ambiguity to his official tone, however, is a more personal and humane response. If imperialism’s mythology is largely championed in Kipling’s work, his narrative stance also registers an emotional disenchantment with the inequities of imperial processes. So, irresponsible colonial figures taking advantage of the simplicity and innocence of their native subordinates are depicted unsympathetically as for instance, the eponym Georgie Porgie, who ‘buys’ a native wife to cure his loneliness and later deserts her in favour of an English bride (Life’s Handicap 381–93); or the missionary couple in ‘Lispeth’ who baptise and raise an orphan hill-girl, yet treacherously conspire with the Englishman whom she loves but who heartlessly jilts her (Plain Tales 33–7). By endowing the native interlocutors or narrators in these stories with emotional, moral, and narrative authority, Kipling introduces ideological indeterminacy concerning the authorial stance on the discourse of authority. Among Kipling’s travel writings are the Letters of Marque (From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, Vol. I) whose quasi-fictional persona, the ‘Englishman’, congruent with the quaint title (‘Letters of marque’ historically being documents providing the bearer with a license to plunder) acts as a ‘journalistic privateer’, raiding foreign lands for newspaper spoils (Mallet 35). Kipling distances himself from stereotypically English presumptions by displacing them onto this ‘globetrotter’ who has come to ‘do’ India. This traveller’s negative Orientalist indoctrination is undermined by the rich, deeply layered cultural historicity he encounters in his passage through ancient India. However, curiously anticipating E.M. Forster’s depiction of the psycho-sexual and delusional dimensions of certain colonial desires, a terrible, primordial fear grips this Englishman, as he clambers up the surviving Tower of Victory (Vijay Stambha), of the old ruined fort 91

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of Chitor. Doubt, fear, anxiety overthrow his self-mastery as he stumbles his way up this nine-storied structure through winding, maze-like staircases, ‘worn hollow and smooth . . . by the tread of innumerable naked feet’ (Marque 124). He is overwhelmed with psycho-physical disgust at ‘the thronging armies of sculptured figures, the mad profusion of design’ and revolted by contact with ‘the slippery sliminess of the walls worn smooth by naked men’ (126). This reaction is discrepantly punctuated by aesthetic awe at the palimpsest of imperial historical layers of this magnificent fifteenthcentury relic. He speculates on the builder’s ideological purpose in creating so abhorrent a passage before providing at its top ‘a boundless view fit for kings’ like Kumbha Rana who must have ordered it, moved by ‘fine insolent pride of life and rule and power’(127). Inadvertently allegorising the violent drama of all imperial encounters, he muses: To attain power, wrote the builder of old, in sentences of fine stone, it is necessary to pass through all sorts of close-packed horrors, treacheries, battles and insults, in darkness and without knowledge whether the road leads upwards or into a hopeless cul-de-sac. (126) Ironically, at this discursive juncture the mask of colonial self-assurance slips, revealing to this Englishman, in a self-created mirror, the image of European culture as arriviste in relation to India: ‘he wondered what Lord Dufferin, who is the nearest approach to a king in this India, must have thought when aide-de-camps clanked after him up the narrow steps’ (126–7). Kipling’s authorisation of this juxtaposition, of indigenous historical grandeur with a contemporary but foreign self-styled image of power, results in ‘the Viceroy and his clanking entourage’ to be seen ‘as diminished figures, brash intruders in this relic of a heroic Indian past’ (Ricketts 105). Descending from the tower, the Englishman comes to the Gau-mukh where, in uncanny cross-textual anticipation of Adela Quested’s colonial terror about the old sound in the Marabar caves of Forster’s text, the oppressive weight of history and old culture fractures his English sang-froid as well as the certainties of his racial supremacism. Through a vertiginous archaeological recall, the text here revisits the guilt of an older imperial moment: the sack of Chitor by Alaudin Khilji when in the subterranean chambers of this very ruin, the vanquished Queen ‘Pudmini and her handmaids had slain themselves’ (Marque

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130). Shaken from this cultural collision, the Englishman feels that he must ‘go quickly out of this place of years and blood’, believing himself to have done ‘a great wrong in trespassing into the very heart and soul of all Chitor’ (130). In privileging intrusion as a seminal category of the Englishman’s self-images here, Kipling imbues this inchoate cross-cultural encounter with the energy of a controlling metaphor for understanding acts of imperial mastery. An uneasy conjunction of fear and affect engenders a self-reflexive resonance in the colonialist’s private discourse. Significantly, this memory recovered from medieval history of Chitor’s penetration by that other ambitious ‘intruder’ and its violent repercussions in the legendary jauhar, or mass self-immolation of Queen ‘Pudmini and her handmaids’ creates an ideological fracture whose cracks continue to be visible much further in this passage in textual references to ‘trespassing’, to being ‘no better than the beasts that perish’, and to his uncanny sensation of ‘treading on the soft, oiled skin of a Hindu’(130).

The ‘figure in the carpet’: the ‘personal’ note in Kipling It is worth remarking that while a ‘public’ voice established Kipling’s image as popular ideologue for empire, an earlier, ‘personal’ voice, is equally and compellingly present. Although remaining subordinate to his triumphalist articulation, this voice murmurs a tale of gloom about human impermanence, presenting thus a counter-narrative to the brave imperial one but which should be linked to the historicity of the imperial moment itself and its contextual anxieties. Thus, if the public voice sings a paean to the work ethic in the colonies, a personal sense of the impermanence of achievement within imperial work relative to the existential impediments and the psycho-social pressures of the colonial situation lies embedded in the interstitial spaces of Kipling’s manifest text, remaining inerasable like a figure in the carpet. Let us not attempt to link this deeper, sombre note to a kind of trans-historical Hardyesque pessimism as suggested, for instance by Philip Mason in an impressionistic and nostalgic account of the critic’s responses to Kipling’s fiction. Thus, the tragic situation of the lovers Ameera and Holden in Kipling’s ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ (Life’s Handicap 149–82), is related by Mason to the unavoidable and ‘universal human experience’ of struggling against ‘a metaphysical background’ of impersonal forces (Mason 24). Such a reading, instead of

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contextualising the protagonists’ wretchedness within the specific, material pressures of a colonialist time seems to project the story into a timeless, classless zone where human life is pitted against wholly abstract and universal factors, viewed as the ‘tragic’ destiny of particular individuals. I submit that this ‘existentialist-inspired’ critical perspective is in denial about the specific humanly constituted socio-political realities and divisive class-biased and racist ideologies inseparable from the practices of colonial governance.6 Hence, the repercussions of these practices on colonial subjects underpin the tragic denouement of such transgressive cross-cultural, interracial relationships as the one in this story. In keeping with the ideological assumptions of the time, John Holden’s de facto marriage with the native Ameera in this story is illicit; so, this colonial transaction is conducted covertly, with the white man leading a double life: a day-time life of duty and a night-time life of desire. Despite Holden’s deep emotional commitment and utter psychic immersion in his native context, the lovers’ marital peace is constantly disturbed by Ameera’s fear of the superior racial and social claims of the ‘bold white mem-log’ on Holden’s life and desires (Life’s Handicap 152). These racial distresses are less traumatic than the blight on their domestic bliss when their infant son, Tota, dies of ‘the seasonal autumn fever’ (167). Eventually during an outbreak of cholera Ameera too dies, leaving Holden bleakly contemplating his official daylight life of work and loneliness. Although Nature’s hand in ‘audit[ing] her accounts with a big red pencil’ is stressed in the narrative, the reader cannot escape an oppositional intuition that the ‘famine, fever, cholera’, ‘local scarcity’, and the ‘unusual prevalence of seasonal sickness’ ravaging the countryside are attributable to humanly created socioeconomic paradigms. ‘The English sent their wives to the hills’ but Ameera would not leave Holden and go (172–4). A dismal cynicism marks the narrative awareness that the ‘gaps’ among the English caused by the ‘black cholera’ would be filled because the productive ‘work of superintending famine-relief, cholera-sheds, medicine-distribution, and what little of sanitation was possible’ (176) must go forward; measured against this utility of the whites is the redundancy of the native population; these ‘other’ deaths depicted as the land needing: a little breathing-space ere the torrent of cheap life should flood it anew. The children of immature fathers and undeveloped mothers made no resistance. They were cowed and sat

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still, waiting till the sword should be sheathed in November if it were so willed. (176) Against Kipling’s arguably cynical despair at the powerlessness of the ‘cowed’ natives seems juxtaposed his imaginative sympathy with the lovers, emphasised by the Anglo-Indian’s emotional distance from and disgust at the shallowness of his own community, and by his emotional and sexual fulfilment in his hybrid existence at each night-time boundary crossing over into native territory. Despite Ameera’s lovetalk with Holden being invaded by a persistent master-slave dialectic, Kipling’s sensitive portrayal of this interracial sexual relationship transgresses contemporary norms of official Anglo-Indian morality. The tragic denouement is underpinned by the narrative awareness of the socially doomed nature of this ‘alternative’ cultural space created by the boundary-crosser. This note of gloom in Kipling’s narrative perspective resonates less the despondency of individual belief and more the psychic urgency and historical specificity of imperial anxieties, that get inevitably translated into the varied shades of these stories. These compelling fictions stage multiple, often contradictory, impulses, performing antithetical ideological and aesthetic functions. They are thus over-determined as cultural objects and evidence formal heterogeneity through shifting authorial points of view. They manifest, moreover, the writer’s awareness of the fragility and paradoxical resilience of the indigenous cultural and moral traditions, that silently bear the traumatic marks of colonial interventions. It is also significant that this particular volume, Life’s Handicap, carries the subtitle ‘Being Stories of Mine Own People’ like a badge of honour, while its preface upholds the cultural inclusiveness of these stories, ‘collected from all places and all sorts of people’ . . . ‘from women spinning outside their cottages in the twilight’ as also from ‘officers and gentlemen now dead and buried’ (xiv). Significantly, on the level of form in this preface, as in several of the narratives proper, the authoritatively knowledgeable subject is a native one. Etymology tells us that a narrator is one who knows (Latin verb narrare meaning ‘relate, recount’, from gnarus, ‘knowing, skilful’). Keeping this cognitive attribute of the narrative function in mind, it is revealing that while in this preface the frame narrator occupies a position of narratorial authority subordinate to his primary interlocutor, Gobind the one-eyed bardic tale-teller, in a few other narratives it is the native alone whose speech may be heard.

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Against the ‘well-ordered road’: boundary-crossings in the stories A stone’s throw out on either hand From that well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange . . . (‘From the Dusk to the Dawn’ Plain Tales 143) Kipling had written to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones that ‘immediately outside of our own English life, is the dark and crooked and fantastic, and wicked, and awe inspiring life of the “native” ’.7 The literary craftsman in Kipling perhaps sought to represent more vividly these forbidden cultural margins of colonial life through a kind of ‘literary ventriloquism’ (Ricketts 114) in several stories like ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee’, ‘At Howli Thana’, ‘Gemini’, and ‘In Flood Time’ (Plain Tales). Such narratives deploy multiple perspectives to create a plural discourse. Not only do they incorporate but also embrace and celebrate cultural difference by introducing a shadowy, outlawed world that exists on the sub-cultural margins of officially administrable territory, inhabited by morally slippery derelicts, inebriates, and addicts. Surely, the creation of these multiple subjectivities argues a desire to abjure cultural limits and dwell in hybrid promiscuity as do the medley of characters inhabiting the famous opium den in ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’: Chinamen, Afghans, Eurasians, ‘half-castes’, ‘baboos’, bazar-women, and ‘an English loafer’, the latter a boundarycrosser, McIntosh Jellaluddin, an Oxford scholar-turned-addict (the tale of whose psycho-social ‘fall’ in ‘To be Filed for Reference’, significantly culminates Plain Tales). The self-divided colonial spectator (often a reporter figure) in these stories evinces desire for cultural immersion into this ‘alter-native’ existence or attempts to forge countervailing, affective bonds that resist the divisive, Manichaean logic of imperial control. His rambles, like Kipling’s own ‘night-wanderings’ (Something of Myself 64), lead him beyond the official white domain. This frequently encountered character-type (in Strickland, Trejago, John Holden, McIntosh Jellaludin, and Kim) significantly resembles the modern flaneur-in-the-city as he collects sensations, sights, and sounds of native life and, with a quasi-erotic frisson of cross-cultural desire fluidly penetrates that inner frontier, urged irrepressibly toward the threshold of that forbidden colonial paradigm of ‘coloniser-turned-native’. Kipling’s memorable boundary-crossings into nocturnal, urban territory seem responsible 96

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for the settings of many sordid yet vivid Indian narratives like ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, ‘In the House of Suddhoo’, and ‘Beyond the Pale’. The texture of these stories is distinctively ‘other’, rendered more so by the ornate, even stilted, non-idiomatic English with which Kipling hoped to replicate the formal quality of the native vernacular. The rebarbative content of some of these dramatic monologues and the startlingly amoral perspectives of some central characters may be attributed to the deforming effect of ideological intentions of a contradictory discourse of imperial authority upon aesthetic practice. ‘This is the story’, we are told by the frame narrator of ‘Beyond the Pale’, ‘of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily’ (Plain Tales 162–7). This tale of Trejago’s illicit excursions to the terrifyingly enclosed territory of the ‘Other’ in Amir Nath’s Gully, culminating in the native Bisesa’s horrific mutilation, unfolds a tangled medley of forbidden desires and official fears, apparent reinforcement of ideological assumptions that encourage racial segregation, and a transgression of such proscriptive norms. This Englishman quite by chance meets Bisesa, ‘a widow, about fifteen years old’ and this interracial liaison proceeds in true ‘Oriental’ fashion with an exchange of amorous verses from the Arabian Nights and an ‘object-letter’ – ‘half of a broken glass bangle, one flower of the blood-red dhak, a pinch of bhusa or cattle-food, and eleven cardamoms. . . . No Englishman should be able to translate object-letters’, says the imperious narrative voice censoriously about Trejago’s privileged yet unacceptable knowledge of native symbolism (163). The narrator then promptly proceeds to translate sign by sign the symbolic native meaning encoded in that unfortunate love-epistle: ‘A widow, in the Gully in which is the heap of bhusa, desires you to come at eleven o’clock’ (163). The mediation and possession of this transgressive cultural knowledge by the ‘official’ narrator is ironical, particularly as he also openly disdains ‘second hand’ accounts of Oriental passion (166). There are several other strands of irony and ambiguity and multiple narrative perspectives in this complex Indian tale. The epigraph, a ‘Hindu Proverb’, constitutes a native perspective that voices a romantic defiance of authority and the acceptance of loss of one’s self in love: ‘Love heeds not caste nor sleep a broken bed. I went in search of love and lost myself’ (162). Ironically, the ‘official’ opening note disapproves of such interracial liaisons: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black’ (162). The impact of this narrator’s disapproval that Trejago knows and sees ‘too much’ and takes ‘too deep an interest in native life’, is 97

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undermined somewhat by a curious narrative detailing of the topography of Amir Nath’s Gully, ‘deep away in the heart of the City’ (162). Further, a self-consciously ironic play on the word ‘approve’, reveals that there are native contexts of patriarchal disapproval: ‘Neither Suchet Singh nor Gaur Chand approve of their women-folk looking into the world’, which is the cultural explanation for the young widow’s confinement in a room ‘pierced by one grated window’ that looks out ‘into the narrow dark Gully where the sun never came’ (162). This may well suggest that native patriarchal anxieties mirror colonial racial ones but ironically it also undermines the power of official disapproval as being no longer the sole voice of authority. Further, the semantic force of the word ‘approval’ is utterly undermined when we are told with narratorial tongue firmly in cheek that the pretty widow, Bisesa, ‘prayed the Gods, day and night, to send her a lover; for she did not approve of living alone’ (162). Against his mind-numbing official and social routine, the narrator sets Trejago’s ‘endless delight’ in Bisesa’s ‘lisping attempts to pronounce his name – “Christopher” ’, her ‘funny little gestures with her roseleaf hands’, and her ‘little feet, light as marigold flowers, that could lie in the palm of a man’s one hand’ (166). We might estimate the frame narrator’s complicity in this eroticised embedded narrative by this play of sensuous detail seemingly endorsing the pleasures of forbidden interracial love. Thus, for instance, not only does the narrator know ‘The Love Song of Har Dyal’ that brings the lovers together, but the song ‘is really pretty in the vernacular. In English you miss the wail of it’, he claims (164). This excessive, pleasurable involvement of the narrator with native cultural forms, apart from being redolent with Orientalist associations, points also to the implied author’s ideological irresponsibility or alternatively to his conscious assertion of aesthetic freedom to indulge vicariously in the eroticised delights of a cross-cultural encounter. Apart from narratorial deviations from the official tone and the values of colonial power, this story demonstrates as well how the public, official day-time prohibitions placed on the coloniser’s body are frequently transgressed by his secret, private night-time self, that irrepressibly trespasses the cultural limits in the spirit. At the end of the narrative, the confidence of both Trejago and of the official-sounding frame narrator is undermined; we are up against indeterminacy and lack of closure introduced through the problematic of knowing and telling, the hidden and the seen. With ‘the grating that opens into Amir Nath’s Gully’ walled up, we suspect that the inner,

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unseen world of Bisesa will never be fully revealed to Trejago or to the narrator who admits to the inadequacy of his knowledge: What was the tragedy – whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair, told everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured to tell; whether Durga Charan knew his name, and what became of Bisesa – Trejago does not know to this day. Something horrible had happened, and the thought of what it must have been comes upon Trejago in the night now and again, and keeps him company till the morning. . . . He has lost [Bisesa] in the City where each man’s house is as guarded and as unknowable as the grave. (167) Bisesa holding out the stumps of her arms in the moonlight to Trejago through the grating to show where her hands have been chopped off at the wrists is an image that haunts both her English lover and the reader at the horrific, hidden nature of the events leading to the action of the unseen executioner, and the unnecessary cruelty of the punishment meted out to Bisesa for her transgression of the laws of the domestic threshold. In this utter silence of the official voice, we read Kipling’s sympathetic orientation toward the complex human dilemmas resulting from ideological norms of race-separateness, and to the truth of the ‘Hindu Proverb’ in the epigraph whose native perspective foreshadows Trejago’s disastrous near loss of self. This official silence points to the tensions in the unconscious of imperial discourse induced by the affective pulls of native culture. Kipling’s own proclivity toward the potentially dangerous charms of such officially inappropriate boundary-crossing is indulged in vicariously in these writings through characters like Kim, Trejago, and Strickland: ‘When a man once acquires a taste for this particular amusement, it abides with him all his days. It is the most fascinating thing in the world – Love not excepted’ (Plain Tales 52). Thus speaks the narrative voice in the story ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’ about the adventurous policeman, Strickland’s ‘outlandish custom of prying into native life’. Although representing it disapprovingly as an addiction, Kipling evinces an implicit affective tilt in favour of what Strickland calls ‘shikar’, his ability to don disguise, step into ‘the brown crowd’, and be ‘swallowed up for a while’ (52). Interestingly, as an AngloIndian policeman Strickland is well within his limits as he frequently

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uses his temporary lapses from the strictly official persona for more efficient performance of colonial surveillance by acquiring more knowledge about natives from his excursions. The last story in Plain Tales, ‘To be Filed for Reference’, shares with the above narratives their imaginative fascination with cultural boundarycrossings and a throwing-off of the restraints of Anglo-Indian life (270–7). If Strickland used his cross-cultural exploits strategically to enhance his colonial resources of surveillance, the convert to Islam, McIntosh Jellaludin’s deeper and differently oriented plunge beyond the inner frontier, transgresses colonial imperatives of race-separateness by blurring all social, religious, and racial distinctions. Culturally though, this loafer-scholar-cultural hybrid still drags the detritus of his Oxford education wherever he goes and raves in Greek and German while in his cups. Kipling’s sympathetic and compelling portrayal of this figure of physical and socio-racial decline through the ambivalent narrator’s fascination for him might be read as a celebration of cultural fluidity. Upon hearing the drunken English loafer sing D.G. Rossetti’s ‘The Song of the Bower’, the narrator’s curiosity and admiration is awakened. Pronouncing him ‘worth cultivating’, in tones almost of deference, he says ambiguously: ‘As a Mahommedan fakir – as McIntosh Jellaludin – he was all that I wanted for my own ends’ (275). McIntosh inhabits a border zone of cultural fecundity-as-sterility: ‘Man, when you have reached the uttermost depths of degradation. . . . Believe me . . . the highest is as the lowest – always supposing each degree extreme’ (274). His prolific bric-a-brac, the cultural ‘objects’ he still cherishes and parades – Browning’s ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’, Swinburne’s Atlanta in Calydon, Rossetti, Ovid, Virgil, Horace – all these and more in this imperial narrative, serve as figural embedding of the debris of the cultural lineage of Empire which, anticipating Eliot’s Fisher King, he heroically shores up against his ruin. It might be a significant fact that this case-study of intellectual-artistic-colonial degradation should crown the volume that concerns itself with the administrative politics of colonial power, to be ‘filed for reference’ as a warning to other wanderers from ‘the well-ordered road’ regulated by the official imperial discourse. On the credit side of the balance, the story seems to thematically valorise the cultural bricoleur’s hybrid existence over the imperial acts performed in the rest of the volume. Significantly anticipating the selfdenunciatory cry of Conrad’s Kurtz against the ‘Horror’ of his own imperial machinations, McIntosh Jellaludin rises on his death-bed to 100

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announce ‘as loudly as slowly, “Not guilty, my Lord!” ’ (277) – a selfexpiatory proclamation matching in positive dignity and dramatic power Kurtz’s negatively sublime shriek. During his seven years as a native (interestingly the same number of years as Kipling’s ‘Seven years’ hard’ in India) McIntosh has embraced native religion and a faithful native wife and produced the ‘Book’ that Kipling himself could never complete – ‘An account of the life and sins and death of Mother Maturin’ – the story of an old Irishwoman who owns an opium den in Lahore (276). As another figural embedding of the writer’s own submerged creative desires, this deliberate biographical intertextuality reasserts Kipling’s own affective inclinations that mirror McIntosh’s hybrid sensibility. Thus, we see that several of the ideological meanings in these stories are rendered complex by the formal narrative techniques employed by Kipling, such that the actions and articulations of the represented characters flicker with a range of ironic and resistant possibilities. Kipling’s deployment of a polyphonic narrativity conjures up an alternative, pluralistic discourse. Reading against the grain of the overt text, one may therefore posit an alternative discourse that derives from the artist’s commitment to his area of individual free will where intellectual and moral choices are exerted independent of the processes of history.

Notes 1 ‘Discursive ambivalence’ is Homi Bhabha’s term for the ‘conflictual economy of colonial discourse’ that relates to the perpetual slippages of its authority (Bhabha 85). 2 Prominent among these are Sandra Kemp’s Kipling’s Hidden Narratives, Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Kipling and ‘Orientalism’, Benita Parry’s Delusions and Discoveries, Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India, and Zohreh T. Sullivan’s Narratives of Empire. 3 ‘Seven years’ hard’ is from Kipling, Something of Myself 157; ‘official sinning’ is from Kipling, ‘A General Summary’ (Definitive Edition 4). 4 William Wilson Hunter, Signed review, Departmental Ditties, The Academy, No. 852, 128–9 (1 Sept. 1888), (Green 39). 5 W.R. Young, A Few Words on the Indian Question (Bengal Civil Service, 1858) (qtd. in Moore-Gilbert’s Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ 71). 6 Bart Moore-Gilbert uses ‘existentialist-inspired’ in another context (Postcolonial Theory 23). 7 Kipling, Letters I, 99 (qtd. in Ricketts 36).

Works cited Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Green, R. L. ed. The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971.

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Kemp, Sandra. Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Kipling, Rudyard. The Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002. ———. From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1900. ———. Kim, 1901. Reprint. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. ———. Life’s Handicap, 1891. Reprint. London: Macmillan, 1982. ———. Plain Tales from the Hills, 1890. Reprint. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. ———. Something of Myself, 1936. Reprint. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. ———. Under the Deodars, 1892. Reprint. North Yorkshire: House of Stratus, 2002. Mallet, Phillip. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, 2003. Mason, Philip. Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Kipling and “Orientalism”. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986. ———. Post-colonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London and New York: Verso, 1997. Parry, Benita. Delusions and Discoveries: Studies of India in the British Imagination 1880–1930. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1974. Pinney, Thomas, ed. Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88. London: Papermac, 1987. Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Pimlico, 1999. Rutherford, Andrew, ed. Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879–1889: Unpublished, Uncollected and Rarely Collected Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1992. Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

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7 ‘TURNING FROM THE MIRROR TO MEDITATION UPON A MASK’ Yeats’s search for his Daimon in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ Amiya Bhushan Sharma1

I W.B. Yeats’s (1865–1939) ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ was first published in 1917 in the pages of the celebrated Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Volume 11, No.1, 29–32). The following year the magazine introduced a volume of essays entitled Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) – that is, ‘through the friendly silences of the moon’. Yeats used the style of an introductory poem going before a philosophical essay again in A Vision (1937). ‘The Phases of the Moon’ introduced ‘The Great Wheel’ and the sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’ formed the introduction to the essay ‘Dove or Swan’. ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ and ‘The Phases of the Moon’ are dialogue poems a la Andrew Marvell’s (1621–78) ‘A Dialogue between Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure’ and ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’. In 1919, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ was published again in the volume of poems called The Wild Swans at Coole. It is a poem of the later phase of Yeats in which, while being conscious of his achievements as a poet, he was aspiring to climb peaks of poetic expression not yet attained. It was a phase of irresolution in Yeats’s poetry. ‘We make’, Yeats wrote in ‘Anima Hominis’, ‘out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (M 331).2 ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (CP 180–3) gives voice to Yeats’s cogitations on creative talent or karayitri pratibha, as it is called in Sanskrit. The title of the poem is a quotation from Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321)

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La Vita Nuova (1292–3). Yeats read Dante in the translation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) and also in that of C.L. Shadwell. ‘At times’, wrote Yeats, ‘I remember that place in Dante where he sees in his chamber the ‘Lord of Terrible Aspect’, and how, seeming ‘to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking he said many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these this: “ego dominus tuus” or “I am your master” ’ (M 326). Yeats’s title tells us that his poem is about his Daimon – anti-self or antithetical self – which governs his life and creativity. While the Daimon3 is often used as the guardian angel among Christians, the anti-self or ‘antithetical self’ as Yeats calls it is part of a poet’s personality. However, it is that person in his personality which he is not but would wish to be. It must be said that Yeats did not always use these concepts in the same sense. Herbert J. Levine has pointed out that Yeats used the term ‘anti-self’ for the first time in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ (171). We hear about Michael Robartes at the outset: still A lamp burns on beside the open book That Michael Robartes left Michael Robartes was Yeats’s old creation, his old anti-self, tutor and guide in occult wisdom described thus in ‘Rosa Alchemica’: Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. (M 271) It is Michael Robartes who leads Yeats or Ille in the poem towards his search for a mask; indeed he is his mask but the mask is no ordinary mask. It is a new identity like the Butterfly of Zhuangzi (396–286 BC). ‘I thought’, wrote Yeats: the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask, where perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to his fancy touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or putting a gilt line where the

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cheek-bone comes; that when at last he looked out of its eyes he knew another’s breath came and went within his breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the forest? (M 335) Yeats believed that contemporary culture ‘with its doctrine of sincerity and self-realisation, made [them] gentle and passive, and that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the imitation of Christ or of some classic hero’. Yeats explained, ‘Saint Francis and Caesar Borgia made themselves overmastering, creative persons by turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask’ (M 333–4). The antithetical self or Daimon, Yeats points out, ‘comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for a man and Daimon feed the hunger in one another’s hearts’. The poet puts on a mask ‘whose lineaments permit the expression of all [he] most lacks’ (M 335). As pointed out earlier, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ is in the form of a dialogue. It is between Hic, Latin pronoun for ‘this one’, understandably his ‘present self’, and Ille, Yeats’s ‘intended’ or ‘new self’, a Latin pronoun for ‘that one’ or ‘the other’. Ezra Pound heard an echo of William or Willie in ‘Ille’ (Ellmann 201). Hic identifies the scene of the action – the ‘wind beaten tower’ of the poem is Thoor Ballylee – which, dramatically enough, Ille has left to seek his opposite, his antithetical self. Hic observes: You walk in the moon, And, though you have passed the best of life still trace, Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion Magical shapes. Yeats was in his early fifties when he wrote ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’. About the same time, i.e. in 1916, in his ‘Certain Noble Plays of Japan’, Yeats decried realism in the following words: Realism is created for the common people and was always their peculiar delight, and it is the delight to-day of all those whose minds, educated alone by schoolmasters and newspapers, are without the memory of beauty and emotional subtlety.

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Yeats had sought and received the guidance of Michael Robartes in ‘the transmutation of life into art’ through alchemy. Yeats thought that the doctrines of the alchemists were: no merely chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to man himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals merely as a part of universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance. (M 267) While Ille seeks his Daimon, Hic would ‘find’ himself ‘and not an image’. ‘I had set out on life’, Yeats had written in 1906 in ‘The Tree of Life’, ‘with the thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood this as a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the non-essential’ (EI 271). The precept had apparently come from two sources. In the first place, Yeats recalled what he had heard Paul Verlaine (1844–96) say at Oxford: ‘the poet should hide nothing of himself’ (EI 270). This was in keeping with the aesthetic he inherited from his father J.B. Yeats (1839–1922) who had been weaned on the Romantic ideology of the early nineteenth century. J.B. Yeats ‘did not care even for a fine lyric passage unless he felt some actual man behind its elaboration of beauty, and he was always looking for the lineaments of some desirable, familiar life’ (Au 65). Yeats’s father cared less for ideas in art. ‘[H]e’, Yeats recalled, ‘had discovered in the shape of the head of a Wordsworthian scholar . . . all the animal instincts of a prize-fighter’. For similar reasons he ‘despised the formal beauty of Raphael, that calm which is not an ordered passion but an hypocrisy, and attacked Raphael’s life for its love of pleasure and its self-indulgence’ (Au 66). The influence of his father on his early writings was so great that while writing, he said, ‘I entered into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life’ (EI 271–2). This period of self-indulgence can be said to have taken a turn, as Levine points out (170), in 1908 when a deluxe edition of his works was published and established Yeats as a leading poet of Ireland, and Ezra Pound (1885–1972) came from America and began to change Yeats’s sensibility and also his poetry. ‘Mr. Yeats’, Pound wrote in his review of Responsibilities (1914) in Poetry (65), ‘has brought a new music upon the harp’ and went on to marvel at his ability as a poet in leading ‘two movements to triumph’ (Pound 378). 106

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Yeats reconstructed his poetic persona by assuming ‘the mask of some other self’. He recorded in his diary in 1909: all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something which has no memory and is created in a moment and perpetually renewed. (Au 503) Ille represents this persona of Yeats, ‘Willie’ or William, the poet. Yeats in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ is announcing his new aesthetic. In the words of Ille: By the help of an image I call to my own opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon. Yeats is apparently using magic to invoke his Daimon or anti-self for the purposes of his poetic evolution. Yeats’s Collected Poems is meant to be read as a new work, not an odd anthology of his poetry. So we often get assistance from poems that precede a certain poem and/ or succeed it in making out the meaning of the poem being focussed upon. ‘Upon a Dying Lady’, a poem sequence on a terminally ill Mabel Beardsley, precedes ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). Mabel was the sister of the celebrated artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1908). She was fond of dolls and had a large collection of them. When she was ill, some of her friends brought her gifts of dolls. The second poem in the series ‘Certain Artists bring her Dolls and Drawings’ (1912, 1917) ends with the lines: We have given the world our passion, We have naught for death but toys, (178) Yeats holds that the Mabel death would claim for itself would be nothing but a toy, whereas Mabel’s passion in the form of her toys will remain forever. Earlier, in Responsibilities (1914), Yeats had recorded the ire of a doll over the doll-maker’s baby: The man and the woman bring Hither, to our disgrace, A noisy and filthy thing. (‘The Dolls’, 20 September, 1913, 142) 107

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Yeats frequently expressed his wish to preserve himself into some work of art. In the introductory poem of The Tower (1928) ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (CP 217–18), he dreamt of casting his body aside and becoming a golden bird. In ‘Byzantium’ (CP 280–81) written in 1930 and published in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) the ‘golden handiwork’ ‘can like the cocks of Hades crow’ and: . . . scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal (281) We observe a thread of continuity in Yeats’s poetry written in different phases of his long and varied poetic career. Yeats believed, like Walter Pater (1839–94), that the artists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ‘made themselves over mastering, creative persons by turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask’ (M 333–4). Ille blames the modern era for its Ibsenian Realism and Zolaian Naturalism,4 losing thereby the unexcited, unmoved, cool, and detached artistic spirit which alone can create timeless art. The contemporary poet, the painter and the sculptor, Yeats thought, were more critics than artists: ‘Timid, entangled, empty and abashed’. Yeats goes on then to test this theory on Alighieri Dante and John Keats (1795–1821).

II After the two turns of opening dialogues, Hic remains no more than a foil for Ille’s ideas and discourse. Hic’s praise thus of Dante for discovering his true self in the Divina Commedia and making himself most well-recognised in Christendom, next only to Jesus Christ, lacks self-assurance. Ille disagrees with Hic. Was it Dante’s satisfaction that caused the hollow on his face, Ille wishes to know: And did he find himself Or was it hunger for the apple on the bough Most out of reach? Yeats believed that Dante set himself the most difficult task in art, while in life he fought a double war ‘with his unjust anger and his lust’ (M 330). Guido Cavalcanti (c.1230–1300) found ‘too much baseness’ in Dante’s ‘abject life’ (Ibid), while Giovanni Boccacio (1313–75)

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‘Always’ found in Dante ‘both in youth and maturity . . . room among his virtues for lechery’ (Ibid). Yeats also recalled Matthew Arnold’s (1822–88) euphemistic evaluation of Dante’s conduct as ‘exceeding irregular’. Ille asks:  . . . and is that spectral image The man that Lapo and Guido knew? If Dante was as Lapo and Guido thought of him, then the Dante who composed the Commedia was one ‘fashioned from his opposite’: An image that might have been a stony face Staring upon a Bedouin’s horse-hair roof From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned Among the coarse grass and the camel-dung. Norman Jeffares has suggested that this is a scene of Petra (Jeffares 564) in south-western Jordan. Petra was the capital of the Nabataean kingdom from 312 BC until its defeat by the Romans in 106 CE. Thomas Dilworth suggests the poem’s link with James Joyce’s (1882–1941) ‘Araby’, a story in the Dubliners (1914) about an unnamed boy who is just about to discover his sexual identity. As the boy shoots off to the bazaar, late in the evening, to buy a gift for his friend Mangan’s sister, he enters a shop in which the sales-girl is having a frivolous talk with two Englishmen. She neglects her young customer, who recounts: Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. (41) The ‘Araby’ or Arabia is mirrored in ‘Ego’ owing to its romantic connection with and the parallel between the young protagonist in Joyce’s story and Dante: Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life, Derided and deriding, driven out It is true that the young adolescent in ‘Araby’ cannot be compared with the grown-up Dante who incurred Guido’s censure, but Yeats is not comparing them. He is only using Joyce’s words in the story

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while also alluding to the boy’s disappointment and insult in order to have it reflected on the personae in the poem. However, Dante was also derided by the ‘most exalted lady loved by a man’ – Beatrice. The young protagonist in ‘Araby’ went home to sleep in his lonely bed with a corpse of a miserly priest lying in another part of the house. Yeats has underscored the similarity and the contrast between Dante on the one hand and the protagonist in ‘Araby’ on the other. As Dilworth has pointed out, Dante chooses the dry, withered, deflecting Arabian setting as symbolic of self-denial. The harsh realism of Yeats’s Arabian setting implies that such selfdenial need not be synonymous, as in Joyce’s story, with self-deception. Yeats implies that Dante consciously chose to repress and sublimate his sexuality (234). For the young protagonist, Araby is the site of imagined union with the present he will buy for Mangan’s sister if not with her physical self. Dante is derided not by Beatrice but by Cavalcanti. The boy in ‘Araby’ is derided by the sales-girl engaged in a frivolous talk with two Englishmen in the shop.5

III With the Dante episode over, and Hic having lost in his argument with Ille, they resume their dialogue on karayitri pratibha6 – creative talent. Hic holds that some poets, unlike Dante, love life and succeed and record their triumphs in their writings. Yeats – Ille – replies that those who love the world are men of action. They grow rich, powerful, and influential. Such men’s writings are an extension of their physical activity, their struggle for material success and triumph. The image that substantiates such a struggle of bureaucrats, industrialists, and politicians is ‘The struggle of the fly in marmalade’. When Yeats met Verlaine at his house, the latter’s ‘bad leg’ was ‘swaddled in many bandages’. He asked Yeats if he ‘knew Paris well’ and went on, as Yeats narrates: pointing to his leg, that it had scorched his leg, for he knew it ‘well too well’ and ‘lived in it like a fly in a pot of marmalade’. (Au 341) The words of Verlaine, however, have found a different and negative import in the poem. Here they describe the struggle of the politician and man of action for self-aggrandisement. ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric’, wrote Yeats, ‘but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (M 331). Yeats was half-rephrasing the lines in ‘Ego’: 110

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The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is a vision of reality. ‘Dissipation and despair’ fall to the lot of the artist. It is the price s/he pays for the superior vision. The politician averts misfortune by paying a price, i.e., his/ her integrity. As Yeats wrote in Per Amica Silentia Lunae: Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. (M 331) French drama, Yeats wrote in ‘Emotion of Multitude’, was dominated by rhetoric: in that context, he characterised rhetoric as ‘the will trying to do the work of the imagination’. On the other hand, Yeats opined that ‘poetry and imagination [are] always the children of far-off multitudinous things’ (EI 251), ‘a vision of reality’. Poets are insular to quotidian facts. ‘[W]e select our images’, wrote Yeats, ‘from past times, we turn from our own age and try to feel Chaucer nearer than the daily paper’ (M 341). Hence Ille’s ‘reality’ envisioned in art is not the same as the reality of live-a-day world. Yeats was immensely fascinated not only by Dante but also by a criminal-poet such as François Villon (1431 – c.1463), a drug addict and alcoholic like Paul Verlaine, and a serial womaniser such as Robert Burns (1759–96), all of whom led rather ‘irregular’ lives. Yeats was no George Herbert. He indulged in his passion for women. Yeats disliked people like William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who he thought were followers of conventional morality. Wordsworth, ‘honoured and empty-witted’, would ‘climb to some waste room and find, forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust’. As against Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864): lived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, all lost but the favour of the muses (M 342) Poets and artists, Yeats believed, looked at life anew and even their lapses were to be seen from a fresh perspective such as those of two of 111

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his contemporaries – Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) and Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) – whom Yeats knew quite intimately. Johnson and Dowson were drunkards. The latter was also mad after women. In order to explain their dissipation, Yeats quoted the words of Ille in The Trembling of the Veil (1922): What portion in the world can the artist have Who has awakened from the common dream But dissipation and despair? In his preface to The Trembling of the Veil (1922), Yeats wrote that ‘the life of a man of genius, because of his greater sincerity, is often an experiment that needs analysis and record’ (Au 109). About five years back, he had recorded: Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad about women, and yet had the gravity of men who had found life out and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. (M 331) Yeats went on: Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. (Ibid) The poet should refuse to be a sentimentalist because it involves selfdeception, which is poison for a poet. Yeats’s experience of his friends helped him form his views about creative talent and in that context he looked at the formation of Keats’s creative genius.

IV Yeats concluded the third chapter – ‘Hodos Chameliontos’ – of The Trembling of the Veil with lines 49–62 of ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ and, thus, offered an insight into his mind and a clue to understanding his poem. Hic believes that John Keats, unlike Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, was satisfied with his life and in his poetry recorded that satisfaction. 112

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Ille responds by accepting that Keats’s art celebrates the beautiful things of life, the joy of the senses. However, he is not sure that Keats experienced happiness in his real life and that his senses were satisfied, as portrayed in his songs: Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever – or else swoon to death (Sonnet XX, ‘Bright Star’7 372) Keats made his luxuriant song, Yeats believed, with ‘His senses and his heart unsatisfied’. Yeats could not marry Maud Gonne; Keats did not have the satisfaction of holding Fanny Brawne (1800–65) in his arms. Keats, Yeats thought, was a ‘coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper’. Whenever Yeats thought of Keats, he saw a ‘schoolboy’ – ‘With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window’ – unable to afford the condiments. Keats could not taste ‘a beaker full of the warm South’ (‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 207). His poetic inspiration may have come from Hippocrene, the fountain on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses, but for Yeats Keats remained: . . . poor, ailing and ignorant Shut out from all the luxury of the world. Yeats was not putting on the poet’s mask in writing these lines. ‘When a man writes’, Yeats wondered in ‘Hodos Chameliontos’, ‘any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond his mind?’ (Au 272). ‘Ego’ was composed in October 1915. On 24 January 1918, Yeats was talking through his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees to some Thomas, a ‘Communicator’ who had moved Keats from the company of Nietzsche (1844–1900), Virgil, and Wordsworth at phase 12 of the moon to phase 14. The Communicator told him that Virgil was ‘not so near beauty – a more logical & audacious mind’ (Harper 164), while Keats ‘loved or sought the material good of the world’. His later poetry became more personal through love of the world, and while we cannot be sure if Thomas, the Communicator, was not expressing Yeats’s own subconscious impressions, feelings, and beliefs, it seems certain that Yeats firmly believed in the existence 113

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of some supernatural agency that conditioned poets’ lives and suggested images for their poems.

V Towards the close of ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, Hic recalls the image of Ille – a code we may recall for William or Willie – tracing magical shapes on the sands of the river by Thoor Ballylee. Hic reminds us that Ille has left the lamp ‘Burning alone beside an open book’. Hic hints, as Yeats perhaps conventionally believed: A style is found by sedentary toil And by the imitation of great masters. The new Yeats, i.e. Ille, has left the open book of Michael Robartes because he now wants to follow, metaphorically speaking, his occult art. Yeats/Ille now seeks ‘an image, not a book’. Practical men of the world – lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats – and, philosophers – such as G.E. Moore (1873–1958), author of Principia Ethica (1903), and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) – are representatives of what Yeats called the primary faculty, who ‘own nothing but their blind stupefied hearts’. Hence, Yeats/Ille is calling the ‘mysterious one’, his ‘anti-self’ or Daimon who would ‘walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream’ with him: And standing by these characters disclose All that I seek; Yeats/Ille seeks that occult knowledge which can be given only secretly. He wants his anti-self to: . . . whisper it as though He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud Their momentary cries before it is dawn, Would carry it away to blasphemous men. The sense, feeling, tone, and intention of Yeats are aptly conveyed by the image, rather exempla, with which the poem memorably ends. It is light and bright and other worldly in keeping with the spirit of the poem. However, Yeats actually believed in the existence of supernatural agents that fashion our lives: 114

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There are, indeed, personifying spirits that we had best call but Gates and Gate-keepers, because through their dramatic power they bring our souls to crisis. . . . They have but one purpose, to bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without despair. They contrived Dante’s banishment, and snatched away his Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might through passion become conjoint to their buried selves. (Au 272–3) Turning to his own art, Yeats wrote: And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard and cold, some articulation of the Image which is the opposite of all that I am in my daily life, and all that my country is. (Au 274) ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ is significant because it is Yeats’s earliest, most effective statement in verse of the vision of the source of creative faculty, or karayitri pratibha – the Daimon.

Notes 1 Acknowledgements: I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. J. Derrick McClure (Aberdeen) and Prof. R.W. Desai (New Delhi) for commenting upon an earlier draft of this paper and suggesting changes. For the lapses, I am entirely responsible. 2 Abbreviations for the various works of W.B. Yeats, such as CP, Au, M, EI, E have been used in the text. These are specified and highlighted in the Works cited. 3 Yeats apparently borrowed the term ‘Daimon’ or ‘Demon’ from Greek mythology. The Greeks had good and bad Daimons, i.e. ‘eudemons’ and ‘cacodemons’. Yeats seems to have merged the concept with that of ‘guardian angel’ and also the psychological idea of ‘anti-self’: ‘[M]an and Daimon’, wrote Yeats, ‘feed the hunger in one another’s hearts’ (M 335). 4 At various places in his essays and autobiographical writings Yeats expressed his disapproval of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1823–1906) and the French novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902). For instance, Yeats recalls his experience of A Doll’s House in the theatre. He wrote, ‘I hated the play . . . I resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.’ Yeats went on, ‘Art is art because it is not nature.’ Yeats never liked ‘Realism’ and ‘Naturalism’ in literature.

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5 Alistair Cormack has demonstrated in his comparative study of Yeats and Joyce, that despite their differing stances on Irish nationalism Yeats’s idea of the gyre as a contradictory opposite of an idea within its opposite ‘interpreting contraries that Yeats calls the gyres’ (p. 162) can be seen in Joyce’s texts also. 6 In Sanskrit poetics, we hear for the first time in world literature about something akin to the ‘writerly text’ in ‘karayitri pratibha’ and the ‘readerly text’ in ‘bhaviyitri pratibha’. 7 Keats wrote the final version of ‘Bright Star’, his last sonnet, in September 1820, on board the ship to Italy. He died on 23 February, 1821 (Garrod XXIX).

Works cited Cormack, Alistair. Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and Reprobate Tradition. Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008. Dilworth, Thomas. “Yeats’s Argument with Joyce in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’.” Review of English Studies XLII.166 (1991): 232–4. Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Harper, George Mills. The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script, 2 Vols. 1987, London: Macmillan, I. 162–5. Jeffares, Norman. Yeats’s Poems. London: Macmillan, 1989. Joyce, James. “Araby.” Dubliners. Ed. Padraic Colum. New York: The Modern Library, 1926. 33–41. Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” (1819). Keats: Poetical Works. Ed. H.W. Garrod. London: OUP, 1973. 207–9. ———. Sonnet XX. “Bright Star.” (1820). Keats: Poetical Works. 372. Levine, Herbert J. “Yeats at the Crossroads: The Debate of Self and Anti-Self in ‘Ego Dominus Tuss’.” Modern Language Quarterly, 1978, XXIX: 132– 53. Reprinted, “At the Crossroads of Self and Anti-Self in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’”. W.B. Yeats: Critical Assessments, 4 Vols., The Banks, East Sussex: Helm Information, 2000, IV. 170–87. Pound, Ezra, “The Later Yeats.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. IV, 11 May 1914. 64–9. “The Later Yeats.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. Faber and Faber Ltd.: London, 1954, 1968. 378–81. Yeats, W. B., Autobiographies (1955), Au. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980. ———. Mythologies (1959), M. Ed. W. B. Yeats. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971. ———. Essays and Introductions (1961) EI. Ed. W. B. Yeats. London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1971. ———. Explorations. E. Ed. W. B. Yeats. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1962. ———. “The Dolls” (1914), Responsibilities, 1963, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. CP London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1963. 111–43.

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———. “Ego Dominus Tuus”? “Upon a Dying Lady.” “Certain Artists bring her Dolls and Drawings.” (1919). “The Wild Swans at Coole.” CP 145–94. ———. “Sailing to Byzantium.” 1928. “The Tower.” CP 215–59. ———. “Byzantium.” 1933. “The Winding Stair and Other Poems.” CP 261–89.

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8 KIM’S MODERN EDUCATION Rudyard Kipling the zealot K.B.S. Krishna

The Victorian era was a period of unquestionable prosperity and relative stability in England. Thus, it afforded the government the luxury to debate over necessary reforms that could better the lives of English citizens. Various reform acts of that period such as the repeal of Corn Laws in 1846, the Reform Act of 1867, and the 1885 Redistribution Act – dealing with land, crops, education, suffrage, etc. – reflect this. Hence, the period is justifiably termed as the Age of Reform (Briggs). However, the reforms did not meet with unanimous approval. In fact, these reforms have been criticised for increasing the have and have-not divide (Bloy). A probable reason for this could be that the government, peopled with citizens from the upper echelons of society, operated with a restricted vision. The intelligentsia of the period, on the contrary, did not have to grapple with such blinkers. Hence, they could visualise a world that was, albeit not utopian, not too far from being called a veritable paradise. Even a cursory perusal of the period’s literature is enlightening as we find utopian fiction such as W.H. Hudson’s (1841–1922) A Crystal Age (1887),1 Edward Bellamy’s (1850–1898) Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888),2 and William Morris’s (1834–1896) News from Nowhere (1890);3 and essays charged with reformative zeal such as Cardinal John Henry Newman’s (1801–1890) The Idea of a University (1858) and John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) ‘Utilitarianism’ (1861). John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) essay ‘Modern Education’ (1853) too comes under the same category. In it, he argues for a utopian world – to achieve which, he feels, educational reform is the path. He says ideally the education of a child should focus on natural history, politics, and religion. These would result in developing a child’s mind in a holistic manner, and thus ensure a better society. However, he does not 118

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believe that these ideals are practical in his era due to his lack of faith in the government. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), on the other hand, had immense faith in the government and the British Crown4 and showed that these ideals were practical in the Victorian era. He does this through the manner in which he depicts Kim, the eponymous hero of the arguably imperialist novel (1901).5 Kim’s education is not limited to his formal schooling, but is only complete when he figures out who he is – a conundrum he struggles with throughout the novel. This he is able to answer at the end of the novel after his various adventures alongside the Lama. Kim’s wanderings with the Lama through the plains and mountains of India familiarise him with the natural history of the land, which enable him to partake in the political minefield of the Great Game. Moreover, his dealings with the Lama result in his understanding of the politics and religion of the world that he moves in. Due to this, as Kipling suggests at the end of the novel, he is able to empathise with the British as well as the Indians and thus matures into a true leader who is interested in bettering society. The paper will attempt to show how this is done, and thereby prove that Kipling was a zealot for education reforms. However, before progressing, it is desirable to clarify what education means. Is it just a matter of imparting knowledge, judgement, skills, and values? If so, what kind of skills, knowledge, values, and judgement are to be imparted? And more importantly, what is the manner in which these should be imparted? Etymologically, ‘education’ is derived from the Latin ‘educare’, which means ‘breeding’ or ‘bringing up’ (Ayto 194). This leads us to question what is meant by breeding and whether all societies view breeding in the same fashion. Obviously, they do not; as even early societies, depending on whether they were agrarian or predatory or otherwise, needed different skills to survive and the education of the young had to be necessarily moulded likewise. However, by the time Socrates (c.470–c.399 BC) and Plato (c.424–c.348 BC) established their schools, education had developed beyond imparting rudimentary skills to training pupils to think logically (Durant 6) and dabble in philosophy (Durant 129) and science. But as Geoffrey Blainey points out in A Very Short History of the World, the development of education collapsed in Europe after the fall of Rome in 476 CE, and the Catholic Church hegemonised education in Western Europe. Moreover, as most of these countries subscribed to the feudalistic viewpoint till the nineteenth century, education was limited to the elite (Blainey). 119

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In England, with the advent of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, there was a slight change, which while it did not altogether benefit the lower classes, at least made a dent in the Catholic education which was being imparted till then. So students in early nineteenth-century England generally learnt Greek, Latin, and little else of note (Lambert). While this might seem surprising and even silly now, people of that time considered that such knowledge made the students civilised and disciplined.6 In fact, the pride the English took in their education system has become a part of popular history, as evidenced by the tales about the Duke of Wellington who is supposed to have credited the public school of Eton for the victory at Waterloo (Nevill 125). The earliest complaints against education in England incidentally started not due to an appraisal of what was happening in England, but due to what was needed in English colonies. Thomas Macaulay’s (1800–1859) Minute on Indian Education in 1835 denigrated the then prevalent education system in India and argued for creating a class of English-speaking Indians who could be used as interpreters and clerks (Macaulay). The Minute was forceful in its condemnation of the Sanskrit and Persian being taught in Indian schools and universities, as was the practice then, as he considered them ‘dead’ languages. The classification of Indian classical languages as ‘dead’ languages due to their being obsolete and impractical prompted certain Englishmen to raise similar questions regarding their own educational system (Gillard). This zeal for reform led to soul searching regarding other aspects of education. Thus, soon there were complaints from various quarters that ranged from laments against the unhealthy conditions prevailing in schools to debates on what should or should not be included in the curriculum, and recommendations on the need to teach ethics. This championing of ethics is reflected in the literature of the period as well, and Anne Bronte’s (1820–1849) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) is a prime example of this.7 Schools also become a cause for complaint as depicted in Charlotte Bronte’s (1816–1855) Jane Eyre (1847)8 and in Charles Dickens’s (1812–1870) bildungsromans.9 The problems of the schools are, however, nowhere dealt with as realistically as in Thomas Hughes’s (1822– 1896) Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), which is an eye-opener in this regard. Apparently, an autobiographical novel, it shows how boarding schools were hubs of bullying, ragging, fagging, smoking, drinking, and womanising. The students, who were the progeny of titled patrons, treated the staff with disdain.10 These practices, although they successfully created a culture of survival of the fittest which in all 120

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probability was useful in the battlefields, did not produce cultured citizens. Hughes shows how the advent of Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) as the headmaster of Rugby School changed this. Dr. Arnold popularised a system of education, which, while cynically termed Muscular Christianity, gave equal importance to physical fitness, mental development, and moral growth and tried to do something similar to what ancient Greek educationalists had done (Delderfield, Part 4).11 While Dr. Arnold’s education system was aimed at children and adolescents, Newman was concerned with the education of youth. Newman in The Idea of a University posits the teaching of Catholic theology as significant in the development of a proper citizen, and arguably harked back to an early era of education (Newman 12). Even sensation novelists had a vision of education as exemplified by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859–1930) depiction of Sherlock Holmes.12 Doyle, through this delineation, suggests that for success in one’s profession, education has to be designed specifically rather than imparted in a homogenised manner. This concept of education is what John Ruskin in his ‘Modern Education’ propounds. Arguably the most important art critic of the Victorian era, Ruskin was a veritable polymath as he donned in turn the hats of artist, mythologist, botanist, geologist, and educationist, among others (Atwood). His views on art show his interest in education reforms. For him art is not just about aesthetics, but should have a moral purpose. A Rousseauan at heart, he believed that it is possible to awaken man to behave in a noble manner. He also realised the importance of education for women as pointed out in his Sesame and Lilies (1865). He not only wrote about education reforms, but also was an educator himself who taught various sections of society. He taught girls at Winnington Hall, the working class at Red Lion’s Square, and was also a professor at Oxford. As Sarah Atwood points out, for Ruskin, education was ‘a part of his programme of social reform’ he believed that people ought to be educated in accordance with their aptitude and circumstances (Atwood). His ‘Modern Education’ too reiterates this as it challenges traditional pedagogical practices and seeks to establish a new method of creating ideal citizens. Ruskin begins his ‘Modern Education’ by pointing out that it is erroneous to believe that classical texts discipline the intellect and are the final object of scholastic institutions (Ruskin 214). He feels that science is the best discipline to acquire as it is the most profitable to learn. From there, he moves on to questioning what is necessary for man to be an ideal citizen. He says that, ideally, man should know where he is, where he is going, and what he should do under given circumstances 121

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(Ruskin 215). Ruskin expostulates that these three questions refer to the three great branches of human knowledge, i.e. Natural History, Religion, and Politics. However, he feels that the European system of education of his time ignores these. Ruskin then explains what he means by the term ‘Natural History’ and why it is necessary. He says that man should know what kind of a world he is living in, its vastness; and moreover, he should have a clear idea of the kind of beings that fill it (Ruskin 215). He believes that this is necessary, as ignorance of these facts leads to people not appreciating the simple pleasures of nature and its processes. This, in turn, would lead to their either becoming dissipated as the upper classes in Europe in the nineteenth century were wont to, or being mindlessly ambitious. He further states that this neglect of nature results in people forgetting God.13 This becomes the take-off point for his ideas on religion. For Ruskin, religion does not mean theology; and in that sense he is different from Newman. Ruskin argues for religion tempered with science. He does not believe in coaching the youth to mindlessly follow theological doctrine as he feels that it will only lead to heresy and hypocrisy. By science, he means the rigorous practice of subjecting religious theories or hypotheses or even doctrines to a severe examination based on experimentation and observation. Thus, for him, Religion becomes not so much about rules, regulations, and rituals learnt by rote, but practical understanding and appreciation of God’s handiwork. His understanding of Politics is as ‘a science of the relations and duties of men to each other’ (217). Such an education in politics, he believes, was not practiced at that time as it would imply an understanding of the various sections of society, and their desires and needs. While he states that this cannot be taught in a school room, he thinks that every citizen can be provided with adequate tools to develop such knowledge (Ruskin 217–18). Ruskin concludes his essay by complaining that the prevalent education system mistakes ‘erudition for education’ (Ruskin 219) and warns against teaching every individual in the same manner the same things. This is because he believes in a need-based education system. However, as pointed earlier, Ruskin is not hopeful that such an education system is possible as he feels that for it to succeed, ‘the government must have an authority over the people’ (Ruskin 222), which, for him, ‘was the stuff that dreams are made of’. However, Kipling believed otherwise; and Kim is a practical exposition of how this is possible.14

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Education, for Kipling, was paramount. His works, be it The Jungle Book (1894), or Stalky & Co. (1899), or Kim, show not only his understanding of its importance but also his appreciation of the problems with the education system of his time. He believed along with the Lama in Kim that ‘Education is greatest blessing if of best sorts. Otherwise no earthly use’ (Kipling 96). But what is the ‘best sort’ of education? Obviously, for Kipling, it was not the kind of education that was then being taught in schools. Characters that support the system become objects of mockery and satire, as Hurree Chunder is in Kim. The postgraduate from Calcutta University proudly tells Kim of his education: There were marks to be gained by due attention to Latin and Wordsworth’s Excursion [. . .]. French too was vital [. . .] Also a man might go far, as he himself had done, by strict attention to plays called Lear [sic] and Julius Caesar [sic], both much in demand by examiners. Lear [sic] was not so full of historical allusions as Julius Caesar [sic]. (Kipling 149) The unnatural focus on grading rather than on understanding the text or context shows the education system in a poor light. Kipling, however, goes beyond simply pointing out the lacuna in the pedagogy. He concludes the conversation with Hurree himself stating that he is a quinine addict. This confession by Hurree implies that the education which he has acquired has not taught him how to fight addiction. Later on in the novel Kipling brings out the phoney nature of Hurree as well when Hurree says that he speaks in English to show off and distance himself from the natives (Kipling 167). Hurree’s confessions are damning, as Kipling does not present him as a simpleton, who has no clue as to what is good for him. When Hurree Chunder tells Kim: Still more important than Wordsworth, or the eminent authors, Burke and Hare, was the art and science of mensuration. A boy who had passed his examination in these branches – for which, by the way, there were no cram-books – could, by merely marching over a country with a compass and a level and a straight eye, carry away a picture of that country which might be sold for large sums in coined silver. (Kipling 149)

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He comes across as shrewd and worldly wise. This makes him dangerous to society as his education has only taught him to think materialistically.15 For Kipling education thus signified not only adapting to a situation and behaving accordingly, but also learning ethics and values. This comes through in The Jungle Book. Mowgli has to be taught the ways of the jungle, and Kipling pontificates that its inhabitants are best suited to teach him. This is a significant sub-plot in the seemingly innocuous children’s novel, and brings out the author’s realisation that education cannot and should not be homogenised. Moreover, it also shows that Kipling knew that education is best taught through experience. His Stalky & Co., arguably inspired by Thomas Hughes’s novel,16 delineates the various escapades and adventures of Stalky and his friends. These experiences, not all of which are either pleasant or planned, bring out the lack in Victorian education system. Kipling was well placed to make such a judgement as, at the tender age of six, he was ‘thrust into the hostile environment of Victorian England and subjected to the ritual humiliations and sadisms that were then understood to be part of the proper training for low-level imperial bureaucrats’ (Wegner 131). This criticism and offering of corrective measures in pedagogy is a theme in Kim as well, as: Kipling provides the reader with his ruminations on an alternative educational system – a system he hoped would result in something better than the tyrannical, intolerant, and ultimately ineffective imperial agents represented in Kim by the Reverend Arthur Bennett and the abusive drummer boy. (Wegner 131) The novel deals with the protagonist questioning himself in a manner that would have gladdened Ruskin’s heart, as it shows Kim pondering his place in the world: ‘ “I am Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?” He considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl of India’ (Kipling, Kim 109). With this begins Kim’s journey of discovering himself; in other words, his education. In a manner similar to Ruskin, Kipling depicts Kim awakening to an understanding of the world around him, the multitude of cultures and customs that are prevalent in the land, the beliefs and superstitions of the people, and finally to his concept of

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God as not just a myth or a fabrication of sadhus and saints but as a divine presence. This knowledge begins with his training by the various teachers and mentors that he encounters on his journey(s). Lurgan Sahib, Colonel Creighton, the Lama, Mahbub Ali, Hurree Babu, et al., aid him in his self-discovery. When Kim is sent to school, with the financial aid arranged by the Lama, he learns from Lurgan Sahib the methods of the apothecary: He [Lurgan Sahib] told Kim the names and properties of many native drugs, as well as the runes proper to recite when you administer them. [. . .] More to the point, he advised Kim as to the care of his own body, the cure of fever-fits, and simple remedies of the Road. (Kipling 155) This enables him to understand the natural history of the country that he is living in, while empowering him to befriend and harmonise with the world that he is a part of. However, Kipling does not stop there; he also shows how Kim is goaded by the colonel to remember the landscape. Colonel Creighton tells Kim that ‘ [. . .] thou must learn how to make pictures of roads and mountains and rivers to carry these pictures in thine eye till a suitable time comes to set them upon paper’ (Kipling 109). Kipling, earlier on in the novel, points out that this knowledge is not garnered by books: the banker on the train, while obviously educated, is unaware of the Lama’s River of the Arrow (Kipling 31). The knowledge that Kim acquires through the practical experience of geography and natural history makes him realise that he is living in ‘a great and a wonderful world’ (206). However, at that point, he still thinks that he is alone: ‘I am Kim – Kim – Kim – alone – one person – in the middle of it all’ (Kipling 206). For Kim to understand his relationship with the world at large, he needed to be educated in religion and politics. Kim owes his concept of religion as well to his teachers. Whether it is the Lama, or Mahbub Ali, or Lurgan Sahib, they expound on religion and divinity and God, till the eponymous hero of the novel manages to think on his own and conceptualise his notion of God.17 At school, Lurgan Sahib made Kim learn: whole chapters of the Koran by heart, till he could deliver them with the very roll and cadence of a mullah. [. . .] And

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in the evenings he wrote charms on parchment – elaborate pentagrams crowned with the names of devils – Murra, and Awan the Companion of Kings – all fantastically written in the corners. (Kipling 155) While this learning by rote might have deadened Kim’s sense of religion and solidified it into theology, his mentors such as the Lama and Mahbub Ali quickly provide an antidote. For the Lama religion is a path to the divine. But his belief in the soul leads him to question empiricism and trust transcendentalism. As he says to Kim: To those who follow the Way there is neither black nor white, Hind nor Bhotiyal. We be all souls seeking escape. No matter what thy wisdom learned among Sahibs, when we come to my River thou wilt be freed from all illusion – at my side. (Kipling 194) This might sound like an endorsement of the Lama’s faith in his own religion. But it also shows how various religions are homogenised depending on the ‘Way’. For the Lama, the ‘Way’ obviously meant the middle path pertaining to the four noble truths of Buddhism (Franklin 146). However, Kim is not similarly dreamy. He is earthier, and his understanding of religion and the divine is thus more complex. Before his final understanding, Kim still believed that the identity of a person depended on his religion, and he asks Mahbub Ali, the mentor with whom he is almost on companionable terms: ‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist?’ (Kipling 132). The answer that he gets from Mahbub Ali is, in essence, what the novel is about, as it in turn questions the basing of identity on one’s religion: Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my Law – or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of all the World, and I love thee. So says my heart. This matter of creeds is like horseflesh. The wise man knows horses are good – that there is a profit to be made from all; and for myself – but that I am a good Sunni and hate the men of Tirah – I could believe the same of all the Faiths. (Kipling 132)

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Kim is the little friend of the world,18 a phrase that is repeated umpteen times in the novel. Such repetition might lead one to ignore it as litany. However, Kipling subtly points out that this is the role of the protagonist: to be a friend to the whole universe. Kim, once he figures out his role, is able to perceive religion as ‘a universal, humanistic celebration of the binding ties of (specifically) brotherly love’ (Thrall 46). This is significant when we consider the meaning of the name ‘Kim’. In the novel, ‘Kim’ is a shortened version of ‘Kimball’, a name derived from the Welsh ‘cymbel’ or the Old English ‘cynebald’, meaning ‘war chief’ (Behindthename.com). Thus, for Kipling, Kim is a leader and his education is the education that a leader ought to have: as that would result in making him the friend of the whole world. Kipling, thus, through the novel seeks to convey that a leader should consider religion as fraternity19 rather than as a tool to discriminate and distance. Moreover, when the leader follows this understanding of religion, he is setting an example for others to follow, which would, thus, lead to universal brotherhood. Kim’s concept of race and class too comes from a similar understanding. He snidely comments to the Lama after his first meeting with Reverend Arthur Bennett and Father Victor that they think that ‘once a Sahib is always a Sahib’ (Kipling 82). These comments of Kim on the manner in which English imperialists distanced themselves from the natives are certainly endorsed by the author, and he thus slyly condemns a ruling class which, with its racist stance, shirks from governing and only pays lip service to the white man’s burden. But this suspicion and contempt of the Saidean other was not limited to the Caucasian race, according to Kipling. In the conversation that Kim has with the Lama soon after, the elderly Buddhist is shown to be equally snobbish as he warns the boy that Sahibs ‘follow desire and come to emptiness’ (Kipling 86). Why such wanton chasing of desire should only be limited to sahibs is something only the Lama can answer: with the only possible explanation being racial discrimination. Kipling mocks the notion of class and race earlier as well in the novel, when a young soldier tells Kim that to be considered a Sikh all he needs to do is ‘Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi’ (Kipling 36). Kipling points out that this is a Northern proverb, thereby implying that racism was predominant in India; as a proverb, by its very definition, suggests that it is a basic truth. However, Kim, with his fraternising nature, is able to befriend people irrespective of their caste, class, race, religion, gender, and even age. Thus, he is able to play with the drummer boy, banter with Mahbub

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Ali, travel with the Lama, learn from Hurree Babu and Lurgan Sahib, mingle with Colonel Creighton, and chat freely with the Sikh girl on the train. Son of an Irish army captain Kimball O’Hara, Kim becomes at the same time a medley of all races and belongs to no particular race or religion.20 Thus, the Lama’s question earlier in the novel seems prophetic: ‘As a boy in the dress of white men – when I first went to the Wonder House. And a second time thou wast a Hindu. What shall the third incarnation be?’ (Kipling 84). However, the identity of Kim is not limited to his race or religion or, for that matter, even his gender or age. Kim’s relationship with the various characters in the novel shows that he treats the whole world as not just his playground, but also his family. Thus, he feels a filial devotion and affection for the Lama – irrespective of the latter’s religious beliefs, and shares a brotherly comradeship with Mahbub Ali. With the fraternity comes an understanding of politics and an ability to actively participate in the turbulent times that he lived in. His actions would lead him to find his own middle way – which is a happy marriage of his sense of duty towards the British Crown, and his love for and responsibility towards the Lama and his friends.21 Moreover, his sense of the world in which he roams, first as a street urchin in search of the Red Bull and the River of the Arrow, and later as an active participant in the Great Game, shows how he managed to not just understand the natural history and politics of the world that he moved in, but harmonise with it. For Kim, there is no hegemony or hierarchy, as the world is a place of universal brotherhood. This realisation is understandably not sudden, but a gradual realisation brought about by numerous experiences. Although, Kipling depicts Kim configuring the meaning of his existence in an almost epiphanic manner: with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true – solidly planted upon the feet – perfectly comprehensible – clay of his clay, neither more nor less (Kipling 258)

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the fact remains that Kim throughout the novel by being the little friend of the world manages to learn from everyone and everything, and thereby gains an understanding and appreciation of himself and the universe. This is Kim’s education; an education that Kipling suggests is possible for everyone who desires to learn from the world rather than from books and in libraries. In essence, this is modern education of the kind that Ruskin hoped for but was pessimistic about. However, Kipling, through Kim, proves that it is possible: if one only keeps not only one’s senses open, but one’s mind and heart as well – and leads a life that is free from pride and prejudice but not sans sense and sensibility. By showing how this education makes Kim a natural leader, Kipling, further becomes a zealot in not only education but also administration.

Notes 1 Hudson’s Smith (the protagonist of the novel) hopes to recreate a world far removed from Victorian artificiality. While the term ‘utopian’ might be unseemly for what is essentially a chilling dystopian work, it does show Smith preferring a normal life with ills and problems over idyllic immortality – which is akin to lifelessness. In essence, the story anticipates James Hilton’s (1900–1954) Lost Horizon (1933), which, however, romanticises Conway’s experiences in Shangri-La. 2 While Bellamy’s novel is an obvious cover for his ideas on socialism, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that it is a prophetic work – as his predictions regarding credit cards and televisions have come true. 3 Morris’s novel, which was born out of his disdain for Bellamy’s work, shows his deep-rooted mistrust of the industrial revolution, and a desire to return to a pastoral setting. 4 Kipling’s faith in the British government of his time with its predilection to conquer and colonise is notorious to the extent that he has been called the ‘Apostle of Empire’ (Burnashov) and a ‘jingo-imperialist’ (Orwell). However, he was a product of his time and believed that the British were destined to rule over the world as he had ‘sold out to the British governing class [. . .] emotionally’ (Orwell). This faith, nevertheless, was shaken, as Edward Said points out, after the First World War (9). But Kim was written prior to this and though he had expressed his doubts over the colonisers’ missionary zeal, as in ‘Recessional’ (1897), his faith in the governing class was still intact and he believed that a few tweaks in the education system would easily result in administrative reform. 5 Edward Said, writing about the novel, says, ‘Kim is a master work of imperialism’ (45). However, for Said this is not contemptible, as he goes on to exhort readers to remember the context of the novel’s birth as he believes that Kipling, while not writing a ‘political tract’ (46), was blinded to reality by his ‘own insights about India’. 6 Even as late as early twentieth century, Frank Richards and Enid Blyton regularly used such examples. Examples of Form Master Quelch teaching

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his students how to construe Latin texts into English often form a part of Richards’s (1876–1961) Billy Bunter series. While Richards uses such instances to concoct humour, the stories themselves serve as cultural documents of the history of that period as they show that Quelch and his colleagues believed that such translations helped in disciplining the young students’ minds. Similarly, children in Blyton’s Adventure and Mystery series keep complaining about the difficulty in construing. 7 Anne Bronte portrays how a debauchee father can corrupt a young mind and how such ills need to be fought against by teaching proper values at the right time. In the process, she also highlights the ills that were accepted in Victorian society as codified gentlemanly behaviour and thereby raises a pertinent question on what was being taught in schools in the name of education. 8 The early chapters of Jane Eyre are a veritable diatribe against the manner in which teaching is imparted. 9 Dickens, who is the ‘voice of the mob’ (Chesterton 20), satirised various ills that were rampant in schools through the depiction of Dotheboys’ Hall in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and Salem House in David Copperfield (1850). 10 Flashman, a character in the novel, who is the representative of all the ills that were prevalent in the Victorian public school system, ironically, is the protagonist of a series of novels written by George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) in the second half of the twentieth century. 11 In R.F. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, the protagonist, a war wounded schoolteacher who later goes on to become the headmaster of the school, explains how Muscular Christianity is regularly misinterpreted – and thus vilified. He points out that the development of the physical, mental, and moral makeup of the child is an integral part of education; and as something that the Greeks knew. Interestingly, he goes on to refer to it as the golden key of education. 12 Holmes is presented as someone who has studied the effects of chemicals, toxicology, and has a professorial knowledge of Britain’s topography. However, he does not even know the principles of helio-centric theory, which is considered rudimentary knowledge (Doyle 12–13). A more detailed analysis of Sherlock Holmes’s education is given in my paper ‘Is Sherlock Holmes a Children’s Hero?’ (Krishna 20–25). 13 This notion of his is similar to the tenets of pantheism. 14 While it is uncertain whether Kipling actually read ‘Modern Education’, he did show characters in Stalky and Co. reading Ruskin. 15 Kipling still seems to have sympathy, however grudging, for the character, as he depicts him in a heroic manner later. These inconsistencies in the characterisation of Indians have led to Kipling being branded an imperialist – as such depictions fit into a clichéd understanding of Oriental nature as mysterious and probably mythical. 16 Don Randall argues that while Hughes’s novel ‘serves to establish the public school as an insular class-specific little world [. . .], the school of Stalky is not an insular relatively autonomous little world, susceptible to internal self-referential definition. It is a carefully delineated microcosm of the British Empire’ (Randall 164). However, such a reading tends to overlook the purpose behind Dr. Arnold’s teaching, which was to prepare the boys

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to face the harsh realities of the outside world – and this outside world, though Hughes never explicitly points it out, is an obvious reference to the British Empire, and the boys’ future is as either soldiers or missionaries or traders, but mainly as torch-bearers of the Empire. 17 Jeffrey Franklin points out in this context: “Kipling created Kim as a character who is able to embrace and move between a variety of religious possessions. He was careful to give Kim a father-figure of every religious stripe: a Buddhist lama, a Muslim in Mahbub Ali and a hybridised Hindu in Hurree Babu. Kim’s lesser father figures are Lurgan Sahib, an occultist, and Father Victor from the Church of ‘Bibi Miriam, the Virgin Mary’(147)” (133), and interestingly comments on the lack of an Anglican Father Figure. 18 This is similar to how the beasts of the jungle are friends of Mowgli in The Jungle Book. 19 In this context, Zohreh Sullivan pontificates that Kim is like Lord Krishna: just like ‘Krishna will survive where the other gods will not – because he walks among men as one of them [. . .], Kim [. . .] will survive where other colonials will perish, because [he] will walk among the natives as one of them’ (125–6). 20 This is similar to Kipling’s own position as Jeffrey Franklin points out ‘Kipling’s religion, like that of his protagonist, was too heterodox and syncretistic to be reduced to any single belief’ (131). 21 Edmund Wilson considers this attitude of Kim as a betrayal towards the lama and others (129) whereas Jeffrey Franklin considers that for ‘non-monastic lay practioners such as Kim, the Middle Way does not preclude active engagement in the cultural, social, and political worlds’ (159). Both are incorrect, as Kim neither betrays anyone nor does he ignore the world he lives in.

Works cited Atwood, S.E. “John Ruskin on Education.” The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, 2008 www.infed.org/thinkers/ruskin.htm. Ayto, John. Bloomsbury Book of Word Origins. London: Bloomsbury, 1990. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward 2000–1887, 1888. New York: Signet Books, 2006. Blainey, Geoffrey. A Very Short History of the World. Australia: Penguin, 2007. Kindle AZW file. Bloy, Marjorie. “Economic and Social Causes of Chartism.” Victorian Web, 2002 www.victorianweb.org/history/chartism/3.html. Briggs, Asa. ‘Reforming Acts.’ BBC History, 2011 www.bbc.co.uk/history/ british/victorians/reforming_ acts_01.shtml. Bronte, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, 1847. Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2008. Burnashov, Igor. “Rudyard Kipling and the British Empire: Methodological Innovations in Classes on British Foreign Policy.” Kiplingsociety.uk www. kiplingsociety.co.uk/facts_burnashov.htm. Chesterton, G.K. The Victorian Age in Literature. New York: Henry Holt, 1913.

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Delderfield, R.F. To Serve them all My Days, 1972. Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2008, Kindle AZW file. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, 1850. New York: Chelsea Book Publishers, 1993. ———. Nicholas Nickleby, 1839. London: Tiger Books International, 1953. Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Study in Scarlet.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes Novels and Stories Volume I. New Delhi: Classic Paperbacks. Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers from Plato to John Dewey, 1926. New York: Washington Square P, 1954. Franklin, Jeffrey, J. The Lotus and the Lion: Buddhism and the British Empire. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. Gillard, D. “Education in England: A Brief History.” Education England, 2011, www.educationengland.org.uk/history/. Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. London: Macmillan, 1933. Hudson, W.H. A Crystal Age. London: T Fisher Unwin, 1887. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 1857. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. “Kim.” Behindthename.com, www.behindthename.com/name/kim-1. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Books, 1894. London: Penguin, 1994. ———. Kim, 1901. Ed. Jim Manis. Hazleton: PSU, 2004. ———. Stalky and Co, 1899. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Krishna, K.B.S. “Is Sherlock Holmes a Children’s Hero.” Golden Line: A Magazine of English Literature, 1.2 (2015): 20–5. Lambert, Tim. “A History of Education.” Local Histories, 2014 www.local histories.org/education.html. Macaulay, T.B. “Minutes on Education.” (1835), Columbia.edu www.colum bia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/. Mihaela, Anca. “Cultural Aspects of the Victorian age Reflected in Literature.” Uaob, 2003 https://nanopdf.com/download/cultural-aspects-of-the-victorianage-reflected-in-literature_pdf. Morris, William. News from Nowhere, 1890, Ed. D. Leopald. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Nevill, Ralph. Floreat Etona: Anecdotes and Memories of Eton College. London: Macmillan, 1911. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University, 1858. Washington: Regency, 1997 generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html. Orwell, George. “Rudyard Kipling.” Orwell.ru, orwell.ru › Library › Reviews › Kipling › English. Randall, Don. “Kipling’s Stalky and Co: Resituating the Empire and the ‘Empire Boy’.” Victorian Review 24.2 (1998): 163–74. Ruskin, John. “Modern Education.” Stones of Venice Volume III. 1853, New York: National Library Association, Project Gutenberg, 2013, www.guten berg.org/ebooks/30756. ———. Sesame and Lilies. 1871, Yale: Yale UP, 2002. Said, Edward. “Introduction.” Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. London: Penguin, 1941. 7–46.

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Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. Thrall, James H. “Immersing the Chela: Religion and Empire in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.” Religion & Literature 36.3 (2004): 45–67. Wegner, Philip E. “Life as He Would Have It.” Cultural Critique 26 (1993– 94): 129–59. Wilson, Edmund. The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941.

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Part III CRAFT, MEDIUM, POLITICS

9 THE CHAMELEON AND THE PEACOCK Kipling and Yeats as creative readers of Shakespeare Robert S. White

Apart from being born in the same year, 1865, Kipling and Yeats seem to have little in common in their writing. They did, however, share at least two abiding interests, India and Shakespeare. The first of these was obviously Kipling’s home for a time, and inspiration for much of his best-loved writing. For Yeats, it was at least a place of the mind, an important, indirect influence. Although he never visited the country, he drew on Indian philosophy and enjoyed a close relationship with India’s great writer Rabindranath Tagore (Hurwitz 55–64). The second shared interest, Shakespeare, was a supremely important literary influence on both writers’ creative lives, but in different ways for each. This, in turn, may explain some differences between their respective works, as I hope to show in this chapter. An earlier poet who had also claimed Shakespeare as his ‘Presider’ was John Keats, and he used the example of the dramatist, in contrast to the poets Wordsworth and Milton, to create a distinction between two different, opposite kinds of writers. The first is non-judgmental, assimilating a variety of impressions, and without obtrusive ego: As to the poetical Character itself, I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se, and stands alone it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving 137

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an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h] er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. (To Woodhouse, 27 October 1818) (Keats 386–7) The second, which Keats distances himself from, is exemplified mainly by Wordsworth as the prime example of a different kind of poet, which he identifies with the peacock: It may be said that we ought to read our Contemporaries. that Wordsworth, &c should have their due from us. But, for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist? – Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself. (To Reynolds, 3 February 1818; Keats 223) Keats amplified his distinction by identifying the first as Shakespearean, and coining the phrase ‘Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’ (To George and Tom Keats 27 [?] December 1817; Keats 193–4). The other is ‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone’, and among whose ranks he includes Milton. It is the difference between one who is able ‘to make up ones mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party’ (To the George Keatses, 24 September 1819; Keats 213), and the other ‘who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his Mind about every thing’ (ibid). The one, a ‘camelion’, is driven by open-minded curiosity; the other, a peacock, maintains the confident gaze of self-certainty. Two creatures, then, both familiar in India: the chameleon, a lizard able to change its colours to blend in with those of its landscape, and the peacock, symbolic as the national bird of India, embodying proud aloofness and authorial fixed identity. These, I shall suggest, epitomise some fundamental artistic differences between Kipling and Yeats, and help to define their respective stances towards the shared influence of Shakespeare, which is the main subject of this chapter. In following this trail, I must acknowledge works by two critics represented in this collection. Professor Desai’s comprehensive book, Yeats’s Shakespeare, and John Lee’s fine essay, ‘Kipling’s Shakespearean Traffics 138

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and Discoveries’, have just about covered the field. All I can offer are observations, which at most are modest footnotes or small developments from the work of these two authorities, and bring them together in suggesting that Kipling and Yeats use Shakespeare to express and realise their respective concepts of the creative imagination, but very differently in each case. In doing so, they illuminate not only their own works but Shakespeare as well.

Kipling – the chameleon On surveying and refreshing my schoolboy readings of Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Stalky and Co., Captains Courageous, one fact stands out, namely the almost incomparable differences between these works. It is as though they had all been written by a different person, and although the central figures in each are boys, there the similarity ends, since one is a homeless orphan in India, another a pampered son of an American railroad magnate, and yet another boy a pupil in an exclusive British private school. An even greater cultural range is revealed between vivid vignettes of street-life in India’s crowded cities on the one hand and, on the other, poems – most famously ‘If’ – reflecting attitudes identified with the spirit of the Victorian British Empire and yet others depicting conflict and war. On reflection, Kipling exhibits a kind of ventriloquial ability of the writer to imagine and inhabit very different worlds through his flexible imagination and by using very different personae in each work. This is not even to broach the quite dizzying range of subjects and voices at work in the voluminous number of short stories written by Kipling. By coincidence, some biographers of Kipling have chosen the metaphor of the chameleon, without reference to Keats’s contrast. Harry Rickett speaks of Kipling’s chameleon nature, the ability he celebrated in characters such as Mowgli and Kim to cross boundaries and switch identities. Ricketts writes of ‘the full range of these diverse Kiplings, so fascinating and at times so frustrating’. A more recent critic, Jad Adams, agrees, saying that while Kipling to European readers is ‘just another Dead European Male in the literary canon’ his works still arouse active interest for readers in other countries, such as India: ‘Kipling the literary chameleon is still crossing boundaries’ (Adams 197). No doubt this eclectic stance was a discipline acquired through his background in journalism, which is emphasised in John Lee’s essay in this book, since Kipling was often writing anonymously for newspapers and journals on a host of different subjects. In a recent, fascinating book, Alexander Bubb, another contributor here, has unearthed a 139

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quotation by Yeats scorning Kipling as ‘a kind of imperialist journalist in prose and verse’, which obviously deals with politics but may also carry a sting in the implication of the stylistic facility associated with journalism and this genre’s requirement of often extreme adaptability (Bubb 1). Kipling’s father, too, must have been an important influence, as a man who admired the Arts and Crafts Movement, a Yorkshireman who identified with working people, and one who showed considerable initiative in moving to Bombay as Professor of Art and Architectural Sculpture (Sullivan 33).1 I am not suggesting Kipling’s works are ‘Shakespearean’ in quality, but rather in their sheer diversity and the capacity to inhabit or project into different environments and personalities. Surprisingly, my preconception was, if anything, the opposite. I had assumed that Kipling, as a writer who is often seen as a consistent apologist for the values of imperial England, would more likely belong to the ‘egotistical sublime’, imposing his views on the material, while Yeats seemed more like a Keatsian poet of ‘negative capability’, constantly reinventing his style from the early lyricism of ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ to the austerity of his later work. However, the more I read Kipling’s works I find that if we did not know of their authorship we might well guess they had different creators. Those who know Kipling’s ouevre as a whole might disagree with this judgment, since there are no doubt many underlying continuities and consistencies from book to book, but judging from my more limited reading the differences are quite profound from work to work, covering not just subject matter but language, style, imaginative vision, and world-view. Stalky seems to be a fictionalised version of Kipling’s own experiences and contemporaries at a British boys’ boarding school, so it perhaps reflects his own attitudes, but it has its own unity as a novel or collection of incidents. Although there is a level of comedy, it is certainly not one of the ‘jolly’ accounts of school life based on rose-tinted nostalgia, but rather a dark reflection of the repressed sexuality, sadism, bullying, and eccentric teachers at such schools in the late nineteenth century. The atmosphere is curiously claustrophobic, despite the camaraderie of the boys and their joking slang. At the opposite end of a spectrum, Kim presents a remarkably vast canopy, a history of the whole of the Indian nation at a particular, historical moment, during conflicts involving international tensions and wars. Arnold Kettle defines its central subject in terms of ‘the sense of teeming fullness and variegated colour of Indian life . . . essentially about India the subcontinent rather than about Kim the boy’ (Kettle 212). It shows in colourful detail issues of class, race, 140

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local cultures, and religion in a large geographical swathe of India’s regions. Its eponymous hero, although claiming Irish ancestry, is an orphan of the streets, far from the ethos of a privileged British schoolboy, and instead living alongside those who are in squalid poverty. The novel’s point of view is not private or personal but epic, and the narrator adopts a distanced and largely unsentimental perspective on events. The two books, considered side by side and compared with other works by Kipling, reveal an author who could exercise profound imaginative projection into diverse circumstances, and a temperamental inclination to Keats’s ‘negative capability’. Such a conclusion seems supported by Kipling’s own ability not only to live with apparent ease in radically different cultures, but also to rapidly accept new inventions of his time. He immediately saw the future potential in the public dissemination of electricity, radio (he wrote the King’s Speech in 1937 and gave many interviews), motor cars, and the moving images of film, all of which appear in his works and are extolled with enthusiasm. It is in his haunting short story ‘Wireless’ published in Traffics and Discoveries that Kipling shows his knowledge of Keats’s poetry ‘channeled’ in a way juxtaposed with an early experiment in radio. Esemplastic and imaginatively open modes of thinking and feeling placed him at the forefront among thinkers of his time in the reception of modernity, and he was able to exploit them in creating himself as an international celebrity. Although his more conservative autobiographical works, such as Something of Myself (1937), which earned Orwell’s dismissal as ‘jingo patriotism’, alongside his extraordinary international celebrity and exhausting lecture tours, might suggest the opposite, yet Kipling had a kind of self-annulling and creatively open side revealed in his works. Tom Paulin, a postSaid admirer, writes that Kipling was ‘culturally an Indian child’ who became ‘an ideologue’ of Western moral and political supremacy. One of these voices belonged to his martial, violent, self-righteous self; the other was ‘full of awe for the culture and mind of India’ (Paulin 254–64). Paulin also suggests that the figure of Kim ‘has a shifting, ambiguous, protean identity’ which may reflect not only the author’s rootlessness but also resembles ‘an identity that expresses so much that is essential to the experience of the colonised, a cunning personality which often takes on or mirrors the identity of the colonizer’ (Paulin 255). In other words, Kipling can to an unusual degree empathise with both colonised and coloniser, just as Shakespeare could imply sympathy for both Christian and Jew, or Prospero and Caliban. I suggest that Kipling’s multi-vocal temperament is related to his admiration for, and what he learned from, Shakespeare. 141

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Whatever term we choose to describe this rare ability, we might assume that those endowed with it make acute listeners, and it is no surprise that it is exactly this quality which Kipling attributes to Shakespeare. In his letter to the Spectator in 1898, ‘How Shakespeare Came to Write The Tempest’, it is not so much the Bermuda travel document, which he cites as a potential source, that matters so much to Kipling as his observation that Shakespeare might well have heard the story told by a drunken sailor in London reminiscing about his travels. The ability to listen acutely, and to turn what he has heard into fiction, is the attribute that Kipling perceives in Shakespeare the dramatist – and also perhaps finds in himself. Another recent biographer, David Gilmour, describes Kipling as having a ‘sensory receptiveness’ which helped him to ‘watch and listen and not condemn’, a capacity close to Keats’s ‘thoroughfare’ as much as Shakespeare’s multi-vocality (Gilmour, qtd Paulin 257). The fabric, ambience, and local detail abounding in Kim could not have existed without such chameleon qualities. The second remarkable ability Kipling detects in Shakespeare is his delight in, and power over, language. This is demonstrated in his fictional and very clever short story ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’. Shakespeare, helped by Ben Jonson’s greater grasp of Latin and Greek, translates a passage from the biblical Isaiah, chapter 60, into the stunning English prose-poem which it alchemised into. The story is intended to reinforce whimsically the popular, if unproven, notion that Shakespeare must have been employed in turning into English poetry the words that appear in the King James Bible in 1611, but more central is Kipling’s interest in showing in action ‘the quick forge and working house of thought’ driving Shakespeare’s creativity. The story ‘Wireless’ demonstrates a similar interest in Keats’s compositional process in writing ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. It is creativity itself which is Kipling’s true subject in such works, what Lee describes as ‘the transformative nature of the artist’s imagination’. Paul Franssen detects in Kipling’s presentation a semi-conscious identification with the kind of writer Shakespeare was, ‘middle-brow’ and popular, but this seems less significant than the celebration of poetic language as a metamorphic tool (Franssen 106–17). Some of the other direct allusions to Shakespeare in Kipling’s work are through parody and the comic. In the parodic story The Marrèd Drivers of Windsor he audaciously places Shakespeare’s characters in a motor car, another fanciful example of his willingness to accept modern inventions, since the motor car became available only later in his own lifetime. The capacities of the negatively capable listener, creator, and deft wordsmith are the deeper preoccupations behind his attitude to the bard, and a conscious source of his own creative endeavours. 142

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Kipling is also constantly drawn to contemplate a mysterious process linking Shakespeare’s personal life with the artistic outcome of his works. Although he relies largely on popular myths rather than biographical scholarship, he is clearly fascinated in speculating where the plays and poetry came from. The poem ‘The Craftsman’ gives one set of answers, positing first a Shakespeare in his cups in The Mermaid Tavern reminiscing with Ben Jonson, and explaining how his conceptions of Shakespeare’s women – Cleopatra, Juliet, ‘Lady Macbeth aged seven’, and Ophelia – entered his imagination at specific, intense moments in his life. At least one of the aspects that most intrigued Kipling was how the roots of literary creativity lie in everyday occurrences, which in one alert enough to notice can be transformed in moments that combine self-aware consciousness and the ‘negative capability’ of self-annulment: So, with a thin third finger marrying Drop to wine-drop domed on the table, Shakespeare opened his heart till the sunrise – Entered to hear him. London wakened and he, imperturbable, Passed from waking to hurry after shadows, Busied upon shows of no earthly importance? Yes, but he knew it! Puck of Pook’s Hill is another work inspired by Shakespeare’s inventiveness and fertile imagination, and it has received even less attention from critics. This book, written for children when Kipling was in England, and published in 1905, is again completely unlike Kim and The Jungle Book, and it starts as an homage to Shakespeare presented this time as spiritual guardian of the age-old, mythical English countryside. The children are rehearsing a shortened version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a natural, outdoor theatre beside an old mill: They began where Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a donkey’s head on his shoulder, and finds Titania, Queen of the Fairies, asleep . . . Dan was Puck and Nick Bottom, as well as all three Fairies. He wore a pointy-eared cloth cap for Puck, and a paper donkey’s head out of a Christmas cracker – but it tore if you were not careful – for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of columbines and a foxglove wand. (Kipling, 5) 143

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At this stage Puck appears, ‘a small, brown, broad-shouldered, pointyeared person with a snub nose, slanting blue eyes, and a grin that ran right across his freckled face’. He quotes from the play: What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here, So near the cradle of our fairy Queen? He stopped, hollowed one hand round his ear, and, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, went on: What a play toward? I’ll be auditor, An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause. (5) Puck points out to the children that they are acting on Midsummer Eve on one of the oldest hills in England, ‘Pook’s Hill’, and by doing so they have broken a spell which releases him into visibility as Puck the fairy. He is all that is left of the People of the Hills who have included ‘Giants, trolls, kelpies, brownies, goblins, imps; wood, tree, mound, and water spirits; heath-people, hill-watchers, treasure-guards, good people, little people, pishogues, leprechauns, night-riders, pixies, nixies, gnomes and the rest – gone, all gone!’ (10). Puck becomes a 3,000-year-old spokesman for the ‘lost lore’ of the English countryside, making reference to many legends and stories, beginning with a telling of Weland’s Sword and proceeding to others in later chapters. The sheer antiquity and natural magic of the English countryside are presented as the repository and driving spirit behind all these tales, and it is the abiding presence of Shakespeare as a writer who had the language to convey these dimensions and bind them all together. In many ways, Kipling’s Shakespeare is the history of England, through Puck and his other creations. It is Shakespeare’s words and fertile imagination which have transformed ‘Oak and Ash and Thorn’ into the landscape rich in stories, and antique secrets and stories evoked by Kipling. He, in turn, almost literally loses himself in obvious delight in the three-dimensionality of time – past, present, and future – represented through literature. He also surreptitiously places himself on this creative spectrum, as the latest of the mind adventurers able to break the age-old spell and open up this mythic underworld to modern readers, creating a barely visible narrator who is a mediator rather than a preacher, akin to the fairy Puck and more ambitiously to Shakespeare himself.

Yeats – the peacock Opposed to the writer as chameleon is the ‘egotistical sublime’ characterised as a peacock, too aware of its own solitary splendour ever to be 144

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invisible or self-forgetting. Yeats in fact wrote a poem which could be taken as self-referential, to suggest the zoological comparison: What’s riches to him That has made a great peacock With the pride of his eye? The wind-beaten, stone-grey, And desolate Three-Rock Would nourish his whim. Live he or die Amid wet rocks and heather, His ghost will be gay Adding feather to feather For the pride of his eye. (Yeats, 63) While Kipling’s use of Shakespeare, and Kipling himself as a writer, to some extent, manifest a spirit of ‘negative capability’ capable of a free flowing and adaptive language and style, Yeats stands as the exemplar of the artist who, like Keats’s view of Milton and Wordsworth, delved within for creative material, and imposed his own personality on his creative material, turning the works of others to his own use. As a result, where Kipling’s works often seem to be by different authors depending on the material, Yeats even in his own developing ideas and styles is always recognisable as the author. One of his titles seems to announce this: ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’. Yeats’s attitude to Shakespeare is less reverential than Kipling’s, more critical, and also focussed more exclusively on his own personal preoccupations in what he finds in Shakespeare. There is no hint of what Harold Bloom called ‘the anxiety of influence’ in Yeats, but rather a bending of Shakespeare to his own uses. Yeats writes in such a way that ‘every word doth almost tell [his] name’ (Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76), a figure of the ‘egotistical sublime’ imposing his formidable ego upon the material. In dealing briefly with this aspect of his authorial persona, I am indebted to R.W. Desai’s deeply researched, thorough, and elegantly written Yeats’s Shakespeare, which covers almost every aspect of the relationship, and admittedly leaves little to be said, except by way of briefly amplifying some observations. Yeats in his brief and trenchant essay written in May 1901, ‘At Stratford-upon-Avon’ collected in Ideas of Good and Evil, draws a major distinction which runs through his comments on Shakespeare, that between the utilitarian and the poetic ways of seeing life. It is his 145

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way of distinguishing Shakespeare’s contrast between the world views of Henry V and Richard II, and is clearly central to Yeats’s own thinking. Whereas Henry was ‘useful to the state’ while Richard was a failure as a king, in terms of human values Yeats reverses them. Henry, he says, perhaps with some recollection of the words of the debunking republican Hazlitt, ‘has the gross vices, the coarse nerves, of one who is to rule among violent people … He is as remorseless and undistinguished as some natural force, and the finest thing in his play is the way his old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on their way to the gallows’ (Yeats, 163). Richard II, however, despite his capriciousness, shares with the Artist or the Saint ‘some contemplative virtue, whether lyrical phantasy, or sweetness of temper, or dreamy dignity, or love of God, or love of His creatures’ (159) that appeals far more to the poet. Yeats’s general point is that Shakespeare always works through such antitheses and complementarities, and that while the poets draw his admiration, the world of successful utilitarians do not interest him, ‘apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart’ (160). Yeats argues that literary critics, however, and for this Yeats blames German scholars and even the critic he personally knew, Dowden, reverse the equation and extol worldly, ‘vulgar’ efficiency, turning Henry V into an ideal king, while denigrating as ‘sentimental’ the poetic sensibility of a Richard II, ill-suiting a worldly and pragmatic king. Yeats’s phrase to encapsulate the various paradoxes is ‘tragic irony’, and although it is a quality which he feels lies at the heart of the Shakespearean vision, it may have more significance to Yeats himself than the dramatist. The elegiac tone, and some explicit hints towards the end of the essay, make it clear that Yeats is in fact using Shakespeare – quite legitimately as a creative artist but still in the self-centred fashion of an ‘egotistical sublime’ poet, to justify his own belief in bardic values: ‘The poor Gaelic rhymer leaves a nobler memory among his neighbours, who will talk of Angels standing like flames about his death-bed, and of voices speaking out of bramble-bushes that he may have the wisdom of the world’. Professor Desai writes, ‘even while establishing his own jurisdiction outside of Shakespeare’s territory, Yeats at the same time had no compunction about expropriating the Shakespearean landscape to form a Yeatsian synthesis whenever it suited his purpose’ (205). Desai continues, with a flicker of amusement, ‘How closely Yeats identified himself with Shakespeare . . . may be seen in his enlisting Shakespeare’s support for the presentation of his views’ (210). This finds endorsement from another great scholar of Yeats and Shakespeare, Peter Ure, who says ‘Yeats uses Shakespeare as a stick to beat’ other causes, such as naturalistic theatre (Ure 1969, 208). 146

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We see this demonstrated in the brief but intense Purgatory, the last and perhaps the best Yeats play wrote. There even seems to be a link between Kipling and Yeats here, in the probably coincidental but rather uncanny similarity of imagery and unflinching point of view in Kipling’s poem ‘The Craftsman’, another poem dealing directly with Shakespeare: Saying how, at an alehouse under Cotswold, He had made sure of his very Cleopatra, Drunk with enormous, salvation-contemning Love for a tinker. How, while he hid from Sir Thomas’s keepers, Crouched in a ditch and drenched by the midnight Dews, he had listened to gipsy Juliet Rail at the dawning. (Kipling 346–7) In a strange way, these austere lines could have been written by Yeats, whose imagery in Purgatory bears close comparison. In analysing this play, Professor Desai has beaten me to the main Shakespearean echoes, which he astutely detects in Timon of Athens, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. But I hope to add two quick points, the one small and specific while the other, I think, is larger and more suggestive. The first is to add one unnoticed Shakespearean allusion. Yeats’s line ‘I’ll to a distant place, and there/Tell my old jokes among new men’, surely recalls with some ironic contextualisation Kent’s words in King Lear upon his banishment: ‘Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu;/ He’ll shape his old course in a country new’ (The Tragedy of King Lear 1.1.185–6). Yeats, once again using Shakespeare for his own ends, has added a sly, debunking Irish touch of substituting ‘old jokes’ for ‘old course’, and perhaps he is also conflating in his mind the character of Kent with that of the Fool, pointing out a link in roles between those two characters in relation to Lear which also has relevance in Purgatory. Desai reminds us also of other allusions and the harsh and bleak tonal similarities between Yeats’s play, in which his character says, ‘I am a wretched foul old man/ And therefore harmless’, and Shakespeare’s ‘I am a foolish, fond old man’. Once noticed, the words linking Kent’s line and Purgatory reveal a beautiful aptness, showing the way in which a great poet’s intense immersion in another’s words feeds from and illuminates both works in a spirit of rich intertextuality. Unlike this textual point which is almost too small to notice, though it enhances the perception of King Lear as major source, my second 147

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suggestion seems so obvious that it is almost too glaring to see in front of us. A play involving ghostly apparitions, a father and son, and the notion of purgatory must bring to mind another play which includes the same ingredients, Hamlet. Here, once again, memory opens up new understanding into the two plays brought into imaginative collusion and mutual illumination. Peter Ure’s phrases describing Purgatory apply also to Hamlet, since both are plays about ‘hauntings’ or the consequences of the past on the present, and ‘polluted blood’ of heredity (Ure 1969, 103–12). They are also both about a self-destructive family in which the sins of the past can never be undone, since in Hamlet revenge leads only to further revenge, while in Purgatory the Old Man lives on, even after his first murder in the past and the killing of his son as an ineffectual way to end the line of family pollution in the play’s present. The crossover between plays goes deep and the allusiveness is richly functional. Hamlet’s uncle is guilty of murdering his brother, his mother is warned by her son that, in Yeats’s words, ‘Do not let him touch you! It is not true/That drunken men cannot beget’, and in Hamlet’s ‘Refrain tonight,/And that shall lend a kind of easiness/To the next abstinence’ (4.3.100–02). His father is in purgatory because he was taken with unshrived sins on his head, especially ones of fornication of the kind that begat his son, ‘cut off, even in the blossoms of [his] sin,/Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’. The Ghost is not only intent on using his son as agent for revenge from beyond the grave, but also remorseful of his sins, so that the consequences of his unsatisfied life have consequences for the future. These consequences are now foisted by old Hamlet upon the son he begat, Prince Hamlet, whose life becomes a misery, and also ends prematurely through his own death in his mission to appease his father in purgatory. Yeats’s words are just as relevant to Hamlet, when he says the dead, ‘know at last/The consequences of those transgressions/Whether upon others or upon themselves’, and it becomes the central theme of Yeats’s play. His Old Man must ‘Re-live [his parents’] transgressions, and that not once/But many times’, and he is condemned to live the ‘deathin-life and life-in death’. The phrase is repeated from Yeats’s poem ‘Byzantium’ and accurately describes the state of purgatory, inheriting from his father not the title of king but the unending state of unappeased, inter-generational ‘disappointment’. Both Hamlet and Yeats’s Old Man are stuck similarly between generations, between purgatory and life. The latter continues to relive vicariously the tale of his own conception by a drunken bridegroom upon a noble lady, and his own act in creating the apparently pointless life of his son, a bastard begot ‘upon a tinker’s daughter in a ditch’. He too is locked in purgatory 148

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since it is too late to kill his father to prevent his own existence. By killing his son he hopes this will break the circuit since ‘He would have struck a woman’s fancy,/Begot and passed pollution on’, but instead he now must continue to live out all the consequences of his own actions as well as his father’s. It is not difficult to compare his cry of anguish, ‘Appease the misery of the living and the remorse of the dead’, with the stifling, circular situation facing Hamlet. Just as Shakespeare’s play is haunted by an unquiet, wronged soul in purgatory, a ‘perturbed spirit’, so Yeats’s Purgatory is haunted by Shakespeare’s play, and his own spiritual and emotional entrapment in the predicament of his play can be ended only by his death. As the egotistical sublime writer, he has located his own imaginative centre in both King Lear and Hamlet, and used Shakespeare in his own creative way. The contrast I have drawn is between Yeats’s assertive and selfvindicating way of bending Shakespeare to his own ends, as the proud self-awareness of the peacock, and Kipling’s more empathetic and chameleon-like relation to Shakespeare’s works, allowing them to speak more diversely and admiringly without imposing upon them a personal dogma. He is the greater and the lesser for this. It is the difference between two kinds of artistic temperaments, and may speculatively be explained by a different sense of ‘home’. Yeats’s preferred imaginative abode is confidently rooted in Ireland and its historical past, despite the time he spent in London, while Kipling moves imaginatively through human landscapes as diverse and extreme as India and England, remaining alertly accommodating in the face of profound cultural difference. There are some similitudes, however, since ultimately one feels Kipling’s most imaginatively rooted sense of home is located in ‘Pook’s Hill’, an evocation of England’s mythical past recaptured in the present through Shakespeare. Generally speaking, however, whereas Yeats represents Keats’s ‘Man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his Mind about every thing’, Kipling is content ‘to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party’. This is actually a conclusion I did not at the outset expect to draw between the two writers but I think it partly explains something of their artistic and temperamental differences, allowing Kipling to roam the earth in his fiction and poetry without imposing any strong ego-wish upon diverse places, and Yeats to write about everything from consistent and deep personal convictions. It is the paradoxical figure of Shakespeare who, for both, again in Keats’s words, is the ‘only Presider’. Kipling seems to have responded more to the comedies and especially the imaginative freedom of a Puck putting a girdle round the earth in 40 minutes, while Purgatory may come 149

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closest to achieving what Yeats most admired in Shakespearean tragedy, its quintessential ‘tragic joy’. But it was Shakespeare who managed to do both.

Note 1 Zohreh T. Sullivan repeatedly mentions the importance of father figures in Kipling’s work, and points out evidence that it was his own father who taught Kipling the importance of language and poetry.

Works cited Adams, Jad. Kipling. London: Haus Books, 2005. Bubb, Alexander. Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Corcoran, Neil. Shakespeare in Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Desai, Rupin W. Yeats’s Shakespeare. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1971. Franssen, Paul. “The Bard, the Bible and the Desert Island.” The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature. Ed. Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1999. Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: John Murray, 2002. Hurwitz, Harold M. “Yeats and Tagore.” Comparative Literature 16 (1964): 55–64. Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821. Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958. Kettle, Arnold. “What Is Kim?” The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight. Ed. D.W. Jefferson. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969. Kipling, Rudyard. Puck of Pook’s Hill. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1905. ———. Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition. Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922. Lee, John. “Kipling’s Shakespearean Traffics and Discoveries.” republished in the Kipling Journal 10 (2006): 10–25. Paulin, Tom. “Rudyard Kipling: An Indian Child.” Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Shakespeare, William, Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, William Montgomery, eds. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, second edition. Oxford: Clarendon P, 2005. Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Ure, Peter. Yeats and Anglo-Irish Literature: Critical Essays by Peter Ure. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1974.

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———. Yeats the Playwright. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats. London: The Macmillan Company, new ed., 1953. ———. Ideas of Good and Evil. London: A. H. Bullen, 2nd ed., 1903. ———. Responsibilities. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916.

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10 ‘THE WRITER IS INDEBTED TO THE PIONEER AND CIVIL AND MILITARY GAZETTE’ Kipling, newspapers, and poetry John Lee

The title quotation comes from the Contents page of the first edition of Departmental Ditties, published in Lahore in 1886 (Richards 13). In context, it gives Kipling’s polite acknowledgement of his thanks to the two mentioned Anglo-Indian newspapers for granting him permission to republish poems which first appeared within their pages.1 One may also, though, usefully take this quotation out of context: Kipling is indebted to the Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette in more substantial ways than his original acknowledgement intended. The ‘Departmental Ditties’, the ten poems (plus a ‘General Summary’) that form the core of the volume of poetry and give it its name, have recently been argued both to be more coherent in their concerns, and more serious in intent, than has generally been allowed (Baldi). I agree, and wish to argue in particular that this seriousness owes a literary debt to the fact that those poems were first published in newspapers. ‘Departmental Ditties’ are in part to be understood as Kipling’s exploration of how he might best use the literary medium of the newspaper. Given his positions as sub-editor and occasional acting-editor on the Civil and Military Gazette, and later, on the Pioneer, Kipling’s relationship to this medium was particularly personal and intimate, and the space between written composition on the foolscap page and appearance in newsprint particularly narrow.2 Such a position and relationship is highly unusual; indeed, in terms of poets of significance, it may be unique. Did any other such poet write, to such an extent, and for so long, and at such an important time in his literary career, primarily for 152

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a newspaper audience? And, given the typically isolated, geographically diverse, and expatriate nature of the Anglo-Indian reader of these two newspapers, did any other such poet write for a society that was so intimately constituted by the newspaper itself?3 Kipling’s sense of what poetry might do and be, I will suggest, was shaped by his sense of what newspapers did and were. The ‘Departmental Ditties’ may be slight verses by comparison with Kipling’s later achievements but, even granted such a weighting of the scales, they represent serious and significant explorations of this particular literary medium, and the role of the poet within it.

* Some time ago, Khwaja Jamiludin suggested readers of Kipling imagine the impact on Kipling’s writing of his day job, from 1881 to 1886, as sub-editor at the Civil and Military Gazette (henceforth the CMG), a by-then daily paper published in Lahore. Kipling is to be pictured at his editorial desk, cutting and pasting telegraph news from all over the world to produce columns of copy for the next day’s newspaper. Jamiludin’s particular critical interest is in the effects this work might have had on Kipling’s view of the world, and especially on his imperial attitudes. It is an interesting question, and one which has been more recently considered by Matthew Rubery. Rubery describes a Kipling remarkably receptive to ways in which the traditions of personal story-telling, and its notions of veracity, reshaped themselves, in the nineteenth century, through and against an engagement with a ‘post-telegraphic world of impersonal intelligence transmitted from an unseen source’ (167). Dealing specifically with Kipling’s prose, Rubery traces the impact of Kipling’s exposure to the day-to-day business of the newspaper, and especially the modes and methods of newsgathering, on his narrative techniques. I want to take up Jamiludin’s question with reference to Kipling’s poetry but, in doing so, I want to imagine this quasi-primal scene, of Kipling, the sub-editor, at his desk, in a way that is a little different. I suggest that this editing process may be seen not as it generally is, in centripetal or intensive terms, where everything arrives, pressing in on, and possibly overloading, the labouring sub-editor, but rather to imagine it in centrifugal or extensive terms, where the sub-editor is seen to have a sense of elevation and purview, and the ability to reach out into the wider world. There is, of course, a good reason why Kipling’s time as an editor is usually thought of in terms of burden and confinement: Kipling encourages this. Famously, in Something of Myself, he gives 153

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the section dealing with his time working in India the carceral title of ‘Seven Years’ Hard’; and his account of that time is full of pressures that were often, for him, nearly intolerable, and sometimes actually intolerable, leading to breakdowns – the pressures of work, the pressures of the climate, the pressures of solitude, the pressures of society, and the pressures of disease and the threat of disease. This is a Kipling confined in hostile conditions to work in ‘decent obscurity’, as he put it, at ‘the far end of an outlying province’ (25 and 41). That sense of a writer in obscure exile in turn dominates the critical narrative around Kipling’s work at the CMG, and around the ‘Departmental Ditties’. It becomes clearest, in recent critical accounts, in discussion of the second edition of those poems, published, in 1886, by Thacker, Spink and Co. of Calcutta – the first volume that took the form of a book-proper. Discussing Kipling’s letters to the publishing house, Pinney and Richards state that ‘At the outset of the correspondence Kipling is mostly unknown beyond the small circle who read the Civil and Military Gazette’ (5).4 Similarly Baldi, in her detailed discussion of the ordering of the poems in the volume, sees the ‘book-form edition of the Ditties’ as marking the moment when Kipling ceased to be ‘a mere journalist writing for his Lahore community’ and became instead ‘the author of a collection of poetry for which he envisages a much broader audience’ (61). There is some truth in both these statements. Just as Kipling provides evidence for the view of his time at the CMG as a kind of imprisonment, so his letters to Thacker, Spink and Co. clearly show him wanting his work to receive more extensive advertising than he could achieve himself. That need for publicity, in fact, provides the keynote of his relationship with his publishers. At the beginning of his correspondence with them, he writes of the advantage of having ‘the name of a well established publisher’. More importantly, in the letters that follow, he negotiates different terms of publication. Where he had originally offered to cover the publishing expenses for the poems, offering the collection as ‘a piece of job-printing’, by the time of the third edition he asks the publishers to cover the publishing expenses, offering them the copyright of the poems for 500 rps (11). He prefers these terms in part because he wants the money, but also because of his ‘distrust’ of a publisher when ‘he is publishing a book at the writer’s risk’. Such a guarantee against loss, Kipling went on to explain, meant that the company ‘were not deeply concerned in the success of the venture’ (46).5 Publishers are more likely to exercise themselves to the utmost in terms of the promotion of a volume, he believed, when they took on monetary risk. 154

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Kipling, then, did seek to increase his audience, and saw publishing in volume form as a means to that end. But to acknowledge that is not to say, with Pinney and Richards, and with Baldi, that he only had a small and local audience before the publication of the second, bookform edition of Departmental Ditties – or before the first edition, which had been published in the form of a departmental envelope with the poems as enclosures (for more detail, see below). Publication figures alone suggest this. The first edition of Departmental Ditties was of 500 copies, and the second edition of 750 (Richards 12 and 15). By contrast, the daily circulation of the CMG in 1891 was some 4,000, and those largely European readers were spread out over Northern India (Narain 303).6 Indeed, many were further afield: Kipling tells us of how, when he advertised the first edition of Departmental Ditties, he sent out reply-cards as order forms to the CMG’s subscription list, which involved him in sending cards ‘up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore, and from Quetta to Columbo’ (Kipling 176). In geographical terms this is an area somewhat larger than Russia, and in terms of land-mass on a par with America. Kipling’s strategy was successful; even after the first edition has sold out, he is in a position to tell Thacker, Spink and Co. that he has received a further 89 ‘registered applications’ for copies, ‘ranging from Quetta to Ceylon and from Karachi to Mandalay’ (Pinney and Richards 18). Far from being a local paper, the CMG – with its interest in Anglo-Indian affairs as a whole, alongside British and European affairs (often as those touch on Anglo-Indian affairs)—is a newspaper aiming to serve a spreading British community centred on, but not limited to, Anglo-India. Before the publication of Departmental Ditties, then, Kipling’s poetry had a significant and geographically widespread audience through the CMG; and this audience was very likely far greater in number than his book-reading audience. Publishing the Departmental Ditties, then, for Kipling, was in no simple way about gaining an audience. It was, most directly, about interacting with a large and preexisting audience in a new way. For Kipling, the publication of these poems looks, primarily, more about the attempt to profit from his existing popularity and, as a step towards that, to gaining access to the professional system of promotion and advertising which was under the publishers’ control. Such a description of his stance, if correct, may explain a feature of Kipling’s relationship with Thacker, Spink and Co. which Pinney and Richards find puzzling. That feature was Kipling’s evident ‘suspicion of the genus Publisher’, as they phrase it, seen above in Kipling’s repeated questioning of Thacker, Spink and Co.’s commitment to the success of his publications. At rather a loss 155

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to suggest where this lack of trust may have come from, they suggest it may have arisen from Kipling’s reading, and particularly his reading of Thackeray’s Pendennis (1848–50), in which unscrupulous publishers ‘batten upon the brains of their helpless authors’ (6). Kipling’s reading may have been an influence on his attitudes, but his suspicion of his publisher’s behaviour would seem more likely to arise more generally from the fact that, possessing a large audience and the means to communicate with them, he feels rather less indebted to, and more sceptical of, his publishers than do most authors setting out on their publishing career. The scene of Kipling at his desk in the CMG, then, has various aspects, and while his job may have seemed an imprisonment in an obscure town at moments, at other times his desk could seem to look over all India and beyond, offering to Kipling a large and wide audience. This aspect of his time at the CMG is also, as it happens, present in Something of Myself: the CMG years, Kipling declares, were his own ‘five years Viceroyalty’. ‘To say that I magnified my office’, he comments wryly, ‘is to understate’ (41–2). Moreover, the opportunities that office gave Kipling should give us pause before either accepting the standard narrative of the poet seeing volume publication as the be-all-and-end-all, or as a self-evidently superior medium than the newspaper. Indeed, the possibility that volume publication is a somewhat secondary activity for Kipling – and one which perhaps represents a narrowing in his audience and so perhaps a diminishment in his poems’ effectiveness – needs to be considered.

* What then did Kipling make of the opportunities and audience offered by the literary medium of the Anglo-Indian newspaper? An obvious place to start is with what is believed to be Kipling’s first poem published in the CMG, ‘A New Departure’, printed in the 29 March 1883 issue. While the autobiographical aptness of this title may or may not be coincidental, its primary reference is to the Ilbert Bill. This bill aimed to introduce what was seen, at one point early in its progress, as a rather small change to the legal system (the Criminal Procedure Code), by changing who was, and who was not, qualified to try Europeans in courts outside of the main cities (Anon; Hirshmann). However, the introduction of the bill produced, or perhaps was chosen to produce by those opposed to the political direction in which it tended, a storm of opposition amongst the Anglo-Indian population. The Ilbert Bill, in other words, was a polarising issue in the British debate as to 156

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where imperial rule should be headed, and would come to be seen as a significant moment in the formation of the Indian political movement for Independence. In India, Lord Ripon, Viceroy since 1880, and a radical and Liberal, as the foremost backer of the bill, came under immense and organised pressure from the Anglo-Indian community, from around the middle of February 1883 onwards, to have the bill in some way neutered, or dropped (ODNB and Wolf 130). It is Ripon’s annual departure for the ‘Himalayan snows’ of Shimla which gives the title is secondary meaning. As the poem characterises that journey, Lord Ripon is seen running away from a controversy which he has stirred up. The title nicely captures the way in which the poem’s satire works towards bathetic ends; what was hoped to be a brave new legal departure is turned into an ignominious loss of nerve, and consequent humiliating flight. ‘A New Departure’ is the kind of poetry one might expect a politically interested poet to write to an audience he believed largely shared his values. This is ‘political verse’, as that was understood at the time. It is tied in to the biographical and contextual details of the controversy over the Ilbert Bill. It is animated by its personal attack on the Viceroy, which is conducted in a comic-satirical mode, sounding at times like a combination of comic operetta and Lewis Caroll: And the papers they print in Calcutta, And the journals men read in Madras, Were known in their pages to utter Some hints that he might be an . . . ! Between ‘A New Departure’ and the ‘Departmental Ditties’ are some three years and 35 other newspaper poems. The ‘Departmental Ditties’ do not represent some kind of wholly new poetic departure in themselves. At the same time, however, it does seem that those poems were successful, amongst their audience, in a way ‘A New Departure’ and other previous poems had not been – and that that success spurred Kipling to publish his first, sole-authored, volume of poetry. In describing some aspects of these poems and in speculating on the nature of their success, I want to suggest that their differences from ‘A New Departure’ owes much to their being more intimately related to their newspaper medium and, what is very close to that in the case of the papers Kipling published in, to their newspaper audience. Put most succinctly, I think that by the time of ‘Departmental Ditties’ Kipling can be seen consciously to be attempting to write one of, what he would later characterise in the poem ‘In the Neolithic Age’, ‘the nine 157

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and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays’ – that is poetry which gives expression to the life of a particular community. The ‘Departmental Ditties’ are unusual for newspaper poetry in being envisaged as a group, and written in a series. Their nature as a group was clear from the publication of the first poem. Generally speaking, for the 20 or so poems that Kipling published in the CMG between ‘A New Departure’ and ‘Army Headquarters’, the first published poem of the ‘Departmental Ditties’, the titles of the poems were given on the front page of the newspaper, in the contents section. With ‘Army Headquarters’, however, this practice is dropped, the 9 February CMG listing ‘Departmental Ditties’ on its front page, and only giving the poem’s title on the page of the poem’s publication (here, as in general, on page 3). Adding to this sense that these poems were conceived of as a group is the fact that they were all published without attribution. This was unusual for Kipling at this time. The three previous poems he had published in 1886 were published above his initials, in various forms, as was the poem published after the final poem of the ‘Departmental Ditties’, the aptly named ‘The Last Department’. Similarly, for the two poems which were published elsewhere while the Ditties were ongoing, one was given a pseudonym (‘T. Musical Toon Tree’ in the Pioneer) and the other was signed in full (in the Calcutta Review). The obvious way of reading such a lack of attribution is to see it as anonymity: the ‘Departmental Ditties’ in this view would be an anonymously published group of poems, given coherence by their titling. Yet such a reading seems to me to pay too little attention to the poems’ integration within the CMG. It is not that they simply have no authorship attributed, but rather that, in that situation, they enter into a different relationship with the CMG, becoming to an extent a section of the newspaper—anonymity gives way to a form of communality. Why, then, might such communality be desirable? In the 21 June 1884 CMG, Kipling had inserted a letter under the pseudonym of ‘Jacob Cavendish, MA’, in which Cavendish declared his intention ‘to publish, by subscription, a series of Songs entitled “Music for the Middle-Aged” ’. Such songs were necessary, he felt, as the English drawing-room ballads commonly recited by the mothers of families made no sense in India. Cavendish gives as an example Tennyson’s ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ which, given the Indian heat, is seen as being scarcely credible. Much more understandable would be ‘Come under the Punkah, Maud’. What were needed, that is, were ‘ditties dealing with the conditions under which we of the East live and work [. . .] songs as distinctly sui generis as an overland trunk or 158

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a solah topee’ (Rutherford 220–1). ‘Departmental Ditties’ can be seen to be fulfilling that need. ‘Army Headquarters’, the first poem of the ‘Departmental Ditties’, is, in one way, very traditional. The poem tells a story of love: Ahauerus Jenkins, a rather poor soldier, but a good singer, while on leave at Shimla captures the attention and affection of Cornelia Agrippina. As the poet declares, ‘Old is the song I sing’. What gives the poem its sui generis nature is the way in which the poem is interested in looking at how that sexual interest is a part of this society’s working life, as it goes on to show how Cornelia Agrippina persuades her husband, a man in charge of a government department, to give Ahauerus Jenkins a departmental position; the poem is interested in tracing out how, ‘thanks to fair Cornelia’, Ahauerus Jenkins’s ‘fame has waxen great’ until he has become ‘a Power in the State!’ What the ‘Departmental Ditties’ look to give, in fact, is an analysis of the workings of particular kinds of institutional life found within ‘British’ India. This is largely confined to the military and civil service, and the (hetero-) sexually infused mingling of the personal and political. Similar situations to that in ‘Army Headquarters’ are reprised, with variations, in ‘Study of an Elevation, In Indian Ink’ and ‘Pink Dominoes’. ‘The Story of Uriah’ gives a particularly dark version of the situation, where a husband is sent by his superior to a unhealthy place of work, so that, after his inevitable death, the superior may marry the husband’s widow. Kipling had a particular talent for identifying such representative anecdotes; McBratney has argued that, in this, Kipling was shaped by the ethnographic influences of the time. Generally in Kipling’s writing, as in Anglo-Indian writing, this ethnographic study looked outward to the India beyond Anglo-India, ‘to isolate the discrete, “original” essence of each society [. . .] encountered, building up an ethnological museum to house pieces of an India [. . .] readers might not have known’ (178). Yet, as McBratney acknowledges, Kipling also turned this ethnographic study onto Anglo-India itself in his journalism and, it is here suggested, in the case of ‘Departmental Ditties’, in his verse. The lack of authorial attribution in the ‘Departmental Ditties’, then, may productively be seen as a part of its ethnographic aims. The anonymity is a declaration of the shared values of a community, here that of the newspaper; the poems’ lack of attribution allows them the semiofficial objectivity of the CMG’s journalistic values. These are poems which are in a way also leading articles: they look to sum up, to critique, to entertain, and to influence. They look to use the newspaper’s editorial voice or voices – as the CMG declared in 1873, it spoke ‘to be a faithful and conscientious advocate of the true interests of the services [ . . . 159

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and] to represent in the best sense that honourable spirit which has made our English Fourth Estate the power it is’ (Barns 277) – in order to produce effects similar to the eighteenth-century couplet.

* If one accepts that Kipling was attempting, in the ‘Departmental Ditties’, to explore and exploit the nature of the newspaper as a literary medium, using the semi-official CMG editorial voice in place of, or as part of, a poetic persona, the form of the first edition of the Departmental Ditties looks more of a continuation of his original concerns rather than a new idea. The 2 June advertisement for the volume in the CMG had promised that the poems would appear in a ‘convenient and characteristic form’. This form turned out to be that of ‘an official government envelope’, as David Richards puts it. The poems, that is, whose publication Kipling oversaw at the CMG’s presses, appear to be a departmental circular letter of collected clippings or, as they are called, ‘papers’, for information and/or action. The letter is addressed in long-hand to ‘All Heads of Depar[tment] and all Anglo-Indians’, and comes from the invented ‘Department of Public Journalism, Lahore District’, from where they have been sent by the Departmental ‘Assistant’, ‘Rudyard Kipling’ (12–13). What Kipling seems to be doing, then, with the form of this volume, is to find ways of recreating the editorial voice of the poems. Once again, now as sender not author, he disowns authorship, and here opts for the collective community of the Department. The volume form, that is, seeks as best it can to recreate the effects of Kipling’s exploitation of the newspaper medium. Once again, this is both playful and serious, and that it is serious is confirmed by Kipling’s attachment to the form. In his discussions with Thacker, Spink and Co. for the poems’ second edition, he specifies that the company is ‘to give an appearance of greater finish and richness to the book; while adhering strictly to its original shape’ (14 July 1886). ‘Normal’ volume publication only came about in the face of the publisher’s telegrammed insistence that the shape was ‘awkward’, to which Kipling finally deferred, while asking that they make ‘the little book as sober and official looking as may be’ (Pinney and Richards 14–15). Indeed, even the choice of Thacker, Spink and Co. as his publisher may be related to Kipling’s attempt to recreate as best he is able the effects of the poems in the CMG. For while Thacker, Spink and Co. published a range of authors, they ‘remained, essentially, official publishers’ of the British government (Condie 120). 160

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The way in which the ‘Departmental Ditties’ became the Departmental Ditties may, in fact, be seen rather less in terms of a culmination in volume form and rather more as a progressive set of actions by which Kipling tried out strategies to address and remedy the loss of the poems’ original context and community. ‘Departmental Ditties’ show the emergence of a notion of the poet as a singer of tribal lays, an emergence which, as I have tried to argue, occurs through the poet’s submersion in the literary medium of the newspaper. One can see the earlier poet, given to parodies and pastiche, a poet caught up very much in the world and places of literary traditions, maturing into the editorial and communal voice of the CMG’s ‘Departmental Ditties’. Doing so, this Kipling begins to write what is a modern form of pastoral poetry, a mode whose highly conventional nature sits well with newspapers’ community-building nature. T.S. Eliot wrote in the ‘Introduction’ to his A Choice of Kipling’s Verse that Kipling’s verse and prose were inseparable, and that he should be judged as the inventor of a mixed form (1941). What has been argued here is related, but distinct – that Kipling’s poetic voice emerges out of his exploration of the newspaper as a poetic medium. Such a voice was not characteristic or, to put it more precisely, that voice was not recognisably singular, but rather recognisable for its articulation of a variety of positions which might be characterised as belonging to, and constitutive of, a particular reading community. Again, this is close to, but distinct from, a view of Eliot’s; in an earlier review-essay in 1919 Eliot had compared Kipling to Swinburne since the verses of both had ‘no point of view to hold them together’ (298). For Eliot the modernist this ‘lack of cohesion’ demonstrated immaturity. For a critic such as Bromwich, by contrast, Kipling ‘seems willing to succeed in a dozen separate manners and to associate himself with none of them particularly’, a success which, in its public nature (the communality argued for in this essay) contrasts with the more typical modernist anonymity, to which modernity, Bromwich goes on to argue, Kipling appears as a kind of threatening doppelganger (152). Kipling, as his career progressed, found that his name had increasingly to take on the communal and editorial function he had first found for it in the pages of the CMG and the Pioneer. It had to remain unhonoured by the institutions of the state, however much it might choose to support them; it had to speak, as best it could, for all, while speaking for itself. It had to become the name for a poetry whose place was on the editorial page, and for poems which were the poetic equivalents of a leading article. This was the poetry of the tribe, and such poetry belonged in newspapers and the present, where it was first read, before it later retreated to the future in books. 161

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Notes 1 ‘Anglo-Indian’ is used throughout in an historical sense, to refer to persons of British descent living in India and, more generally as here, to refer to their culture. 2 Lycett 1999 provides good general biographical information. More detail on the journalistic background can be found in Allen 2007, and Moran 2005. 3 For the importance of newspapers to ‘imagined communities’ see Benedict Anderson, 33–34. 4 Any disagreement with either of Pinney or Richards needs to acknowledge the huge debt that Kipling scholarship owes to both. This article relies upon their work for details of the first publication of poems and volumes of poetry. 5 See also Baldi 53. 6 Narain notes this figure comes from the Banganivasi of Calcutta of 16 January 1891, as summarised in the Reports on Native Newspapers. It is worth noting that this is a Calcutta daily newspaper in Bengali commenting on a Lahore daily newspaper in English.

Works cited Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. London: Little, Brown, 2007. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006. Anon. Anglo-Indian Opinion on The Ilbert Bill. Compiled by An AngloIndian. London: Dorrell and Son, 1883. Baldi, Roberta. Kipling’s “Departmental Ditties”: A Closer Look. Milano: Pubblicazioni dell’ I.S.U. Università Cattolica, 2007. Barns, Margarita. The Indian Press: A History of the Growth of Public Opinion in India. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1940. Bromwich, David. “Kipling’s Jest.” Grand Street 4.2 (Winter 1985): 150–79. Civil and Military Gazette. British Library. Asia Pacific and Africa SM 48 (008627224). Condie, Victoria. “Thacker, Spink and Company: Bookselling and Publishing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Calcutta.” Books Without Borders: Volume 2—Perspectives from South Asia. Ed. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan Fraser and Hammond, 2008. 112–24. Eliot, T.S., ed. A Choice of Kipling’s Verse. London: Faber and Faber, 1941. ———. “Kipling Redivivus.” Athenaeum (9 May 1919): 297–8. Hirshmann, Edwin. Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Jamiluddin, K. The Tropic Sun: Rudyard Kipling and the Raj. Lucknow: Lucknow U, 1974. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

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Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999. McBratney, John. “ ‘Strange Medley[s]’: Ambiguities of Role, Purpose and Representation in Kipling’s From Sea to Sea.” Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Ed. David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. 164–84. Moran, Neil K. Kipling and Afghanistan: A Study of the Young Author as Journalist Writing on the Afghan Border Crisis of 1884–1885. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005. Narain, Prem. Press and Politics in India 1885–1905. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968. Pinney, Thomas and David Alan Richards, eds. Kipling and his First Publisher: Correspondence of Rudyard Kipling with Thacker, Spink and Co. 1886–1890. High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2001. Richards, David Alan. Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography. London: British Library, 2010. Robinson, George Frederick Samuel, first marquess of Ripon.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Anthony F. Denholm. Oxford UP, 2009. Web. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35792. Rubery, Matthew. The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Rutherford, Andrew, ed. Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling, 1879–1889: Unpublished, Uncollected, and Rarely Collected Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Wolf, Lucien. Life of the First Marquess of Ripon, 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1921.

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11 POLITICS, DRAMA, AND POETRY The political vision of W.B. Yeats as reflected in select plays and poems Prashant K. Sinha

Several plays of W.B. Yeats have dramatised political issues, especially those embracing Irish nationalism and class conflict including the increasing tension between the native Catholic middle class and the landed aristocracy, especially of the Protestant variety. The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan (written in collaboration with Lady Gregory), The Dreaming of the Bones, and Purgatory among other plays are instances of this group. Yeats’s plays and his politics have been subjected to incisive scrutiny, but not the political components in his plays. Peter Ure, one of the seminal critics of Yeats’s drama, takes up in his classic study Yeats the Playwright: A Commentary on Character and Design in Major Plays all the significant plays with the exception of Cathleen ni Houlihan, but he too makes no detailed comment on the political elements of any of these plays. Similarly, his essay on ‘The Plays’ – i.e. chapter IX of Dennis Donoghue and J.P. Mulrayne’s An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W.B. Yeats – eschews any reference to Yeats’s political vision in his drama. Alex Zwerdling in his Yeats and the Heroic Ideal dwells upon the nineteenth-century political background in Ireland and Yeats’s views on the aristocracy, the middle class, and the public life then, but he touches upon the political vision in the plays only in a sentence on The Countess Cathleen. Daniel T. Torchiana’s highly informative study, W.B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland provides a detailed analysis of the political issues in Purgatory, but it does not examine them in any other play of this kind. In Marjorie Howes’s edited volume The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats, neither Bernard O’Donoghue in his essay on ‘Yeats 164

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and the Drama’ nor Jonathan Allison in ‘Yeats and Politics’ analyse the political elements in the plays, nor does Howes herself in ‘Yeats and the Postcolonial’ consider the political vision in them. Alastair D.F. Macrae in W.B. Yeats: a Literary Life has a chapter on Yeats and Politics that only has skimpy references to the political elements in the two Cathleen plays. This paper aims to illuminate the dark political corners in the four above mentioned plays. It will also contrast the treatment of political themes in them to that in select poems which articulate similar concerns to highlight what is distinctive as also more shadowy, oblique, and peripheral about the dramatisation of these issues in the plays. The poems to be considered are ‘At Galway Races’, ‘September 1913’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’, and ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’: poems dealing with issues like class distinction, militant resistance to the English, and the Civil War. Yeats got involved in numerous political activities and controversies even as temperamentally he continued to despise political actions. He never whole heartedly admired politicians and their profession. In his mind, there was a certain ambivalence towards militant nationalism, especially armed rebellion against the English colonial rule. But he was a very self-conscious poet with a persistent awareness of his vocation. On one hand, he had an instinctive inclination to escape through literature into a world of dreams, beauty, and romance – it was also a world of old myths and legends – all Irish and therefore in harmony with his patriotic feelings. On the other hand, he also consciously willed himself to accept his ‘responsibilities’ as an Irish national poet, who reflected not only the aspirations but also the lived reality of his country and countrymen. A substantial part of this reality comprised the political developments of his time. This struggle in his self between the desire to escape into a world of fantasy and his political endeavours ironically appears to be more evident in his plays than in his ‘political’ poems. Ireland has had a tempestuous history since the potato famine of 1840s: starvation deaths were followed not only by large scale emigration, especially to America, but also a political upheaval directed against the colonial masters. Reforms like the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland by Gladstone’s Government in 1869, the passage of the First Irish Land Act (1870), and the Second Irish Land Act (1883) did not deter militant revolutionaries from trying to overthrow British rule by force of arms. The Fenians came into existence in 1867, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood arose out of it. It in 165

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fact triggered bombings in London in 1883. Parallel to the growth of militant groups was the rise of Charles Stuart (Stewart) Parnell, who tried to secure Home Rule and freedom for Ireland through parliamentary and constitutional means. The fall of this charismatic leader in 1890–91 following the Kitty O’Shea affair and howls of protest from the Catholic clergy, and his subsequent death, ended this movement. The Home Rule bill, which had earlier been defeated in 1886 in the British parliament, fell this time in the House of Lords in 1893. Soon after Yeats published his first poems and became active in various Dublin circles in the 1880s, he met John O’Leary, a Fenian who had served years in both prison and exile for opposing British rule. Yeats came greatly under his spell and said later of himself that he ‘was a nationalist of the school of O’Leary’. Yeats perhaps joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. His political commitment was further enhanced after he met Maud Gonne, a dedicated activist of Irish nationalism. This young poet had been earlier fired by Shelley’s revolutionary lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, and now, under these two inspirations, he got actively involved in public affairs. Following O’Leary, Yeats had reservations about Catholics and land agitators, who had organised a fervid rent strike from 1889 to 1891, leading perhaps to the Land Acts of 1903 and 1909. His major public actions in 1890s were his opposition to the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign and his leadership of the committee to commemorate the centenary of the United Irish Rebellion of 1798, especially its leader Wolf Tone. However, following Maud Gonne’s disastrous marriage to John MacBride, and, four years later, the death of O’Leary, Yeats grew progressively disillusioned with active politics. Nevertheless, Yeats’s political engagements and reactions took a new turn with the revolutionary capture of the Dublin GPO on Easter 1916 and the declaration of Irish independence by the leaders of this act. The proclamation of the Irish Free State in 1921 and the Civil War that raged during the next two years between the Free Staters and the Diehard Republicans opposing the partition, that is the Black and Tan as against the IRA, drew Yeats deeper into politics. In fact, in 1922, he was nominated to the Irish Senate, in which he served for six years with distinction. The 1930s certainly mark a dark phase in the political career of W.B. Yeats. Like D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, he had been an admirer of Mussolini during the early years of the Fascist Government in Italy, but in 1932–33 he took the controversial decision to back the Irish Fascist Blue Shirts led by General Eoin O’Duffy and even wrote the marching song for them. Eventually he realised his 166

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mistake and withdrew his support, but he did not openly denounce them. One instance of his misplaced position regarding totalitarianism came in 1936, when he refused the request of Ethel Mannin, his then lover, to nominate Ossietsky, the German poet in a Nazi concentration camp, for the Nobel Prize. the German poet in a Nazi concentration camp, Ossietsky. George Orwell expectedly called him a fascist. His belief in eugenics also had a parallel in the Nazi espousal of the idea of the superior race. How did our plays and poems relate to his political convictions and stances? The Countess Cathleen, based on the old legend of Countess Kathleen O’Shea, first published in 1892, and revised in 1895, 1901, 1912, and 1923, but first produced in 1899, had as its backdrop the terrible famine of 1847 and also the relief work carried out much later by Maud Gonne who sacrificed much, even her soul according to Yeats, among the peasants of Donegal and Mayo facing starvation and eviction. It was really remarkable that she herself played the role of the Countess when the play was produced. This story of Countess Cathleen distributing her wealth among the starving peasants to save them from the merchants trying to buy their souls, suffering the theft of her remaining money, and finally selling her own soul in order to redeem the needy peasants’ souls provided Yeats with a fine opportunity to condemn the merchant class and project the landed aristocracy as the caring, benevolent guardians of the poor. In stage directions for scene I, Yeats says ‘The scene should have the effect of missal painting’, thus preventing the total illusion of reality. Moreover in the early production, Florence Farr played the role of Aleel, the poet, and the very fact that a female was playing a male role must have created further aesthetic distance. The two men dressed as Eastern merchants who come to buy souls tell Shemus, their first victim: ‘We travel for the Master of all Merchants’. So Satan is portrayed as the Master merchant in scene I itself. In contrast, Cathleen gives money to the peasants, even emptying her purse after Shemus says: ‘My curse upon the rich’. Zwerdling observes in Yeats and the Heroic Ideal that ‘middle class envy and hatred is perfectly brought out in The Countess Kathleen’ (75). Here the poor as well show this hatred. In scene II, Cathleen even orders her Steward to: Sell all I have Go barter where you please, but come again With herds of cattle and with ships of meal. (38) 167

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In scene III, the two merchants enter Cathleen’s house stealthily and hurriedly and tell her: We saw your grain ships lying all becalmed In the dark night; Cathleen censures those: Who have stored it up To prosper on the hunger of the poor (43) Thus, she denounces the fundamental capitalistic system of demand and supply. The trading class is shown as going beyond this system and falling to stealing and robbing. Oona, the Nurse, rushes in to report: The treasure room is broken in. The door stands open, and the gold is gone. (45) Finally, the sale of her own soul represents the supreme sacrifice made by the landed aristocracy to protect and defend the poor peasants. John Lucas points out in Modern English Poetry From Hardy to Hughes: A Critical Survey that for Yeats the ‘ideal Ireland must be that of the gentry and peasantry’, with no place for ‘Middle-class philistinism’ (113). In contrast, poems dealing with the middle class are more explicit in their critique of it. ‘At Galway Races’ in two compact but powerful lines denounced it, as the poet referred to the time: Before the merchant and the clerk Breathed in the world with timid breath. A later poem, ‘September 1913’, makes a frontal attack on the business class as also the devout: But fumble in a greasy till And add the half pence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone? For men were born to pray and save (ll.2–6) 168

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They are contrasted with the great martyrs in the cause of Irish freedom: Little time had they to pray For whom the hangman’s rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save? (ll. 12–14) He wonders if it was: for this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolf Tone And all that delirium of the brave (ll.19–22) So all the sacrifices made by the heroes were wasted on this miserly, timid, and devout people. In this poem, Yeats’s aristocratic contempt for the calculating bourgeois is quite obvious. Marjorie Howes accurately says in her Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats: ‘Increasingly . . . Yeats’s critique of the modern world targeted the middle-classes’ (7). He has a ‘special scorn and anger for the middleclass Irish Catholics’ (8). Cathleen ni Houlihan, written in prose in collaboration with Lady Gregory and produced in 1902 by Maud Gonne’s revolutionary group with herself playing the role of Cathleen, is more overtly political than The Countess Cathleen. In this work, which distinctly embodies the theme of Irish patriotism, the title itself refers to a symbol of Ireland. Set in 1798 at the time of the French landing on the Irish coast near Killala, it dramatises how Michael Gillane on the eve of his wedding to Delia Cahel abandons his family and fiancée in order to join in the Irish revolt supported by French forces against the ruling English colonisers. At the outset, as the family gets ready for the wedding, Patrick, the younger son, sees an old woman coming down the road, who is Cathleen ni Houlihan – i.e., Ireland herself. She is ‘the strange woman that goes though the country whatever time there’s war or trouble coming’. As the old woman enters their house and receives shelter there, she complains: ‘there’s many a one that doesn’t make me welcome’ (80–1). She has no place of her own as the English have occupied it and many Irishmen whose help she sought refused to come to her aid. She has had ‘too many strangers in the house’ (81). She explains: ‘my land that was taken from me’ contained ‘my four beautiful green fields’, alluding 169

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to four provinces of the country—i.e., Ulster, Munster, Leinster, and Connacht. The old lady makes an overt reference to her friends, to actual historical personage who had suffered or even died for ‘love of me’. They include yellow-haired Donagh who ‘was hanged in Galway’ (82) and others that died ‘a long time ago’. ‘There was a red man of the O’Donnells from the north, and a man of the O’Sullivans from the south, and there was one Brian that lost his life at Clontarf by the sea, and there were a great many in the west, some that died hundreds of years ago, and there are some that will die to-morrow’ (83). When offered food or drink or silver, the old woman responds ‘If anyone would give me help he must give me himself, he must give me all’ (84) – obviously a stirring call for patriotism. The old woman has ‘the hope of getting my beautiful fields back again; the hope of putting the strangers out of my house’. This hope of throwing the English out of Ireland is based on people both Irish and foreign coming to help her: ‘I have good friends that will help me. They are gathering to help me now. I am not afraid. If they are put down today, they will get the upper hand to-morrow’ (84). The lines also hold out a message of hope that in spite of failures of hundreds of years to drive the English out, the endeavour will succeed one day. When Michael utters, ‘I will go with you’, the old woman warns him: ‘It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are redcheeked now will be pale-cheeked and for all that, they will think they are well paid’. She continues with her song: They shall be remembered for ever, They shall be alive for ever, They shall be speaking for ever, The people shall hear them forever. (86) The idea of the immortality of the patriots is sung and thereby the impact is enhanced on account of its sensuous appeal as also its manner of encapsulating the theme succinctly. As Delia, the fiancée of Michael, enters with Patrick, the play shifts from the allegorical to the literal mode. Patrick reports that ‘There are ships in the Bay; the French are landing at Killala!’ He adds: ‘The boys are all hurrying down the hillside to join the French’ (87). Although Michael yields to Delia’s request to stay behind and marry her, when he hears the old woman singing outside: ‘They shall be speaking for ever’, ‘he breaks away from Delia and rushes out’. The brother reports that the old woman has become a young queen. To go back to 170

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the Irish legend, Shan Van Voght (Sean Bhean Bhochd: the wretched old woman) has become Cathleen ni Houlihan. Thus, this play is a straight-forward political piece moving from allegory to the literal statement but invariably aiming at giving a stirring call to the Irish audience to rush to action to liberate Ireland from the English yoke. The naturalistic mode of presentation further contributes to the total immersion of the audience in immediate action. The use of prose also brings the characters and events closer to real life and leads to more direct involvement of the audience. So, in one sense, the play does not explore the complexity of the situation as it gives a somewhat simple minded battle cry. Perhaps the role of Maud Gonne and her group in the production – of both the Cathleen plays – at least partially accounts for the one sided nature of the play. As it were, Yeats asked much later in ‘The Man and the Echo’: Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? After all, Constance Markievicz is reported, when in prison, to have told her sister Eva: ‘That play of W.B.’s was a sort of gospel to me’. The Dreaming of the Bones (written 1917) is another play that overtly deals with Irish resistance in the past. Here, Yeats dramatises the shame, disgrace, and penance of Dermot MacMurrough and Dervorgilla, two traitors, who betrayed the nation for their personal cause in 1170 and enabled the Normans under Strongbow to become masters of Eastern Ireland. Whereas Michael Gilllane had sacrificed his love and marriage for his country, these two sacrificed their country for their love. The play however is set in 1916, and the Young Man, who is the first character to enter, was a part of the uprising at the General Post Office: I was at the Post office and if taken I shall be put against a wall and shot (435) He puts the shades of the betrayers to an agony of shame as he states that the Irish who sided with the aliens deserved greater condemnation than the enemy soldiers: In the late Rising, I think there was no man of us but hated To fire at soldiers who but did their duty And were not of our race, but when a man 171

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Is born in Ireland and of Irish stock, When he takes part against us – (436) The Young Girl, who is the shade of the female traitor, describes the agony they feel on account of their betrayal of Ireland When he has bent his head Close to her head, or hand would slip in hand, The memory of their crime flows up between And drives them apart. (441) The Young Man immediately knows who these figures were: Young Girl Her King and Lover Was overthrown in battle by her husband, And for her sake and for his own, being blind And bitterly in love, he brought A foreign army from across the sea. Young Man You speak of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla (442) The Young Girl concedes the gravity of their crime but pleads: and yet They were not wholly miserable and accursed If somebody of their race at least would say, ‘I have forgiven them’ The young man can only reply: O, never, never Shall Diarmuid and Dervorgilla be forgiven (442) One consequence of their inviting foreigners to invade their country has been the destruction of the land around this little village that the Young Man can see from the summit: The enemy has toppled roof and gable, And torn the paneling from ancient rooms; 172

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What generations of old men had known Like their own hands, and children wondered at, Has boiled a trooper’s porridge. (443) The devastations their action has brought on are so enormous that the sufferings of the guilty seem negligible against it. Yeats, moreover, uses devices for preventing audience empathy and identification with the characters on either side of the divide. As in another ‘play for the dancers’, like At the Hawk’s Well which shows the influence of the Japanese Noh drama, the use of musicians with ‘their faces made up to resemble masks’, employing masks for the shades of the Stranger and the Young Girl, the choice of ‘any bare place in a room close to the wall’ as the stage, a curtain or a screen with a pattern to only symbolise or suggest the scenery, the musicians singing at the time of the folding and unfolding of the cloth all create aesthetic distance and make us more dispassionate when judging and not forgiving the traitors in spite of an awareness of their suffering. One of the most celebrated poems about Irish patriotism, ‘Easter 1916’—written a few months after the sensational event—is a fuller treatment of the theme as it looks at the heroic actions of the leaders of the Easter uprising from more than one angle. At the outset, Yeats depicts them as mediocre, even clownish people. Constance Markievicz, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and John Connolly all led futile and ordinary lives. The poet is especially censorious of John MacBride, ‘A drunken, vainglorious lout’ who: Had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart However, as a result of their heroic action on that eventful day: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. This refrain shows how these leaders have become larger than life. But yet the poet wonders how worthwhile their action was. He asks: Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. 173

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As Marjorie Howes writes in ‘Yeats and the Postcolonial’, this poem ‘discovers the relative emptiness of claims about revolutionary or decolonizing moments’ (217). So Yeats gives us his complex reaction to an action that many glorified as supremely heroic. Another major poem, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, as Norman Jeffares points out in his Notes to Yeats’s Selected Poetry, arose out of Lady Gregory’s account of some atrocities committed by both the IRA and the Black and Tan.1 The poet describes the devastations caused by the armed conflict: Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep; a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; (Section I) The poet includes in the violence of this ‘warfare’ the loss of ‘lovely things’ and the destruction of art works and artefacts. He nostalgically recounts with sadness: O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed. He complains against the ‘leveling wind’ and tendency to ‘mock at the great’, ‘mock at the wise’, and ‘mock at the good’. In the concluding section of the poem, we go back to ‘violence upon the roads: violence of horses’. Purgatory, placed at the end of On the Boiler (1938), is definitely an elitist play, engaged with the issues of eugenics and the superiority of the aristocracy.2 The Old Man recalls the past grandeur of the ruined house: Great people lived and died in this house Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament Captains and Governors. (ll. 61–3) He refers to its desecration when his mother polluted the aristocratic blood by mating with a stable groom. ‘She should have known he 174

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was not her kind’. Repudiated by her mother for this act, she died in childbirth. The fact that her husband squandered all her wealth in drinking, whoring, and gambling is seen as directly related to his class. Even his act of burning the house down must be seen as a result of his low birth. So must be the felling of the tree. The once green flourishing tree, now stripped bare, is symbolic of the decay of the house. As the Old Man says: I saw it fifty years ago Before the thunder-bolt had riven it, Green leaves, ripe leaves, leaves thick as butter, Fat, greasy life. (ll. 2–23) He states: They had loved the tree that he cut down To pay what he lost at cards Or spent on horses, drink and women, (ll. 69–71) An uncultured plebian cannot appreciate the ‘green leaves’. The Old Man, the child of this unfortunate union, was not sent to school and grew up as a boorish lout. As a poor pedlar, who at 16 had killed his wastrel father for burning the house down, he had begotten the ‘Young Man’ ‘upon a tinker’s daughter in a ditch’ (l.90). The cycle continues and the Young Son of 16, uneducated and uncultured, grows up to be like his father and grandfather – he attempts to rob the former of his money bag. It is also significant that the age of the Old Man when he murdered his father and that of the Young worthless son whom he kills at the end is the same as that of the Irish Free State at the time of Yeats’s writing of the play – 16 in 1938. Is the play at least partially about the failure of the independent Eire? Do the ruined house and the cut tree represent the ruin of the country dominated by merchants and Catholic priests who renounced the great tradition descending from the Protestant Ascendency? Are the Old Man and the Young Son symbolic of two generations of such Irishmen who had destroyed their nation? Their lack of names further encourages an allegorical interpretation. In an interview in the Irish Independent (13 August 1938), Yeats said: ‘In my play a spirit suffers because of its share in the destruction of an honoured house: that destruction is taking place all over Ireland today’. Several Big Houses were burnt down by fanatics in 1922–3. 175

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Anguished concern about the anti-aristocratic trends prevailing in Ireland can also be discerned much earlier in ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’ (1909): Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall, How should their luck run high enough to reach The gifts that govern men, and after these To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease? (ll.8–12) Here we have a direct expression of Yeats’s belief that equality in any nation or society would mean tangible lowering of levels of culture, refinement, and artistic taste which only an elite aristocracy can preserve. It may be rewarding here to recall that in 1902, John Quin had lent him Thomas Common’s anthology of Nietzsche’s selection. As it were, Herbert Grierson refers to ‘Yeats’s interest as a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity’. A decade later, after the horrors of not only English-Irish conflicts but also the First World War when he felt ‘things fall apart’, he expressed again in ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ his unhappiness at the enemies of the existing aristocracy: ‘Once more the storm is howling’ (l.1) and wondered if the ‘haystacks and roof-levelling wind,/Bred on the Atlantic can be stayed;’ (ll.5–6). Years of admiration for not only the dwellers of the house at Coole, Lady Gregory and her son Robert, but also her nephews, Captain Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Land, had hardened him against all the levellers – the enemies of Great Houses and their rich tradition of culture, taste, and courtesy. From our attempt to examine the plays, not only in terms of their own textures, but also the context of relevant poems, we have seen that Countess Cathleen has a more subdued attack on the merchant middle class – even though the stance is one sided – than ‘At Galway Races’ and ‘September 1913’, which have more open statements condemning them. The two patriotic plays, Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Dreaming of the Bones, take a partisan view of the Irish resistance whereas ‘Easter 1916’ is a more complex and multifaceted reaction to a heroic action of a revolutionary patriotic kind. We can say of these two plays: ‘We make out of our quarrel with others rhetoric’, and of ‘Easter 1916’, ‘but of the quarrel with ourselves poetry’. In fact, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ goes beyond them with its gory account of the devastations brought about by the Black and Tan and the IRA during their prolonged armed conflict. Purgatory, concerned 176

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more with class distinction than class conflict, in a direct and partisan manner extols the traditional aristocracy at the expense of the ‘lower or inferior’ classes. The reference to the condition of Ireland, though, is allegorical rather than literal. In comparison, ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’ and ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ make clear but brief and restrained statements against the demand for equality. Thus the dramatic representations are either partisan or vague and shadowy or both compared to some of the poems. Moreover, these poems deal with the contemporary situations and figures, but the plays are ‘remote, spiritual and ideal’. To consider the genre related matters, the scope offered by the greater length of the plays leads Yeats to more detailed but not necessarily more comprehensive depiction of the themes. At the same time, factors like stage censorship, popular demands, and audience responses have also influenced his work. Could he have said something highly controversial to which the reaction could be as violent as that to The Playboy of the Western World? Could he have directly attacked the Catholic Church and faced the kind of ostracism that Sean O’Casey did? Ultimately, however, we have to go back to his own mental orientation. Perhaps the nature of Yeats’s dramatisation of political issues in his plays was rooted in a mode of thinking and feeling based on duality, on counterpointing and balancing of opposites: on an interaction of contraries, on a ‘dialectical process of synthesis’, so evident later in his system in A Vision and with interesting parallels in earlier and contemporary thinkers as far apart from him as Hegel, the philosopher of history; Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology; and of course William Blake, one of his early inspirations.

Notes 1 This reference to the incident of Ellen Quinn, murdered at Gort, County Galway in early November 1920 was placed in a wider context in the poem. 2 The production of Purgatory at the Bharati College, Delhi University Conference on Yeats and Kipling dramatised eugenics as a seminal theme in the play. Jonathan Allison in ‘Yeats and Politics’ in The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats also refers to Yeats’s belief in eugenics. In fact, Yeats himself in ‘Tomorrow’s Revolution’, a section of On the Boiler, argues for national enhancement through eugenics. He also attended meetings of the Eugenics Society in the thirties. In a column regarding Purgatory, he referred to ‘my interest in certain problems of eugenics’ (Torchiana 357). Torchiana proceeds to explain the play along symbolic lines: the mother represents the second period of Ireland from the Battle of Boyne till the French Revolution; her marrying the groom is like the

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‘democratic seduction of the French Revolution:’; the Old Man’s career is representative of the nineteenth-century Ireland under O’Connell; and the Boy is Eire itself (Torchiana 360).

Works cited Donoghue, Denis and J.P. Mulrayne, ed. An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W.B. Yeats. London: Edward Arnold, 1965. Finneran, Richard J., ed. The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama and Prose. New York: Scribner, 1997. Howes, Marjorie, and John Kelly, ed. The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats. 2006. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Jeffares, Norman, ed. W.B. Yeats: Selected Poetry. Macmillan, 1962. Calcutta: Rupa, 1992. Lucas, John. Modern English Poetry From Hardy to Hughes: A Critical Survey. London: B.T. Batford, 1986. Macrae, Alistair D.F. W.B. Yeats: A Literary Life. Houndmills. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1995. Menon, V.K. Narayan. The Development of W. B. Yeats. Edinburgh, 1942. Torchiana, Daniel T. W.B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1966. Ure, Peter. Yeats the Playwright: A Commentary on Character and Design in Major Plays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Yeats, W.B. “The Countess Cathleen.” Classic Irish Drama. Ed. W.A. Armstrong. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1975. ———. The Collected Plays, 2nd ed. 1952. London: Macmillan, 1966. Zwerdling, Alex. Yeats and the Heroic Ideal. London: Peter Owen, 1966.

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12 REDEFINING THE BODY OF CENSORSHIP Reading Rudyard Kipling’s Indian short stories (1888–1902) Indrani Das Gupta

Literature as the play of words has often been classified as concerned with representations and misrepresentations, with the power to reveal both the known and the unknown, the truth and the falsehood, the reality and the unreality of life. If words convey meaning, shape our reality, and are a source of power, then ‘reality is precisely the reality of the word’ (Patterson 137) and literary texts are the prime sites for the enactment of the boundaries of our thought and the margins of our knowledge. The ‘border’, as Margaret E. Montoya puts it, is ‘an epistemic space’ which both defines and limits: it is also, at the same time, the site of ‘intersection, bridge, and membrane’ (131). Even as borders, as Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward claim, ‘transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces’ (4), these borders are far from being fixed and static entities evocative of only separation and differentiation. Rather, borders are also dynamic spaces marked by the crossing of thresholds. The high imperialistic politics of nineteenth-century British India was contingent upon just such a boundary as the defining limit between the coloniser and the colonised. As Montoya observes, this was a liminal space that blurred and also extended ‘on both side of the boundary’ where cultures, people, and words combined to become irrevocably changed (132). Censorship became remarkably more pronounced during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Censorship may be thought of as a system wherein the politics and the ethics of monitoring the signification of words, speech, and gestures (verbal, visual, and written) is

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constitutive of what is legal or seditious within a contingent historical and political situation. In this chapter, I argue that censorship, both explicit and implicit, is a fabricated border. A construct that not only controls and limits what is being thought and said so as to shore up a community’s identity, history, and culture, but also expresses the failure of government mechanisms to regulate, to discipline, and to purvey the boundaries of these limitations. Censorship emerges as a testimony of the presence of the unknown and the ‘Other’ within the set of regulatory measures or surveillance mechanisms employed by the colonial state. More than any other writer of British India, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), acknowledged as the ‘bard of Empire’, epitomises what Trinh-Minh-ha called ‘both-in-one insider/outsider tendencies’ (75), the perspective which makes his work straddle different and multiple allegiances. His art invariably alternates between the oppositions of what Zohreh Sullivan termed as ‘home/England/empire and home/ India/jungle’ (1), an art which is fragmented and divided. His art negotiates an antithetical terrain in his longing for Empire and his resistance to its authority. Kipling’s early writings find themselves in a double bind moving simultaneously between spaces of the unfamiliar native cultures, which is also a ‘home’, and within the familiar yet remote terrain of the Europeans. His writings are bound inevitably to notions of power. Yet, controlling colonial subjects as part of Empire is not the only key tone registered in these writings. They also embody, as he put it in the ‘Preface’ to Life’s Handicap, the priests from Chubara, carvers from Ala Yar, Jiwun Singh the carpenter, and Gobind the one-eyed storyteller within the intimate category of ‘mine own people’.1 Kipling’s art was constantly shaped and reshaped in a colonial milieu where the border between self and other, inside and outside, dream and waking life, private and public, truth and lying, speech and silence was ‘in a constant state of transition’ (Anzaldua 3). If his art, his ‘words’, were shaped and inextricably intertwined with ‘daybreak, light and colour, golden and purple fruits [of] the Bombay fruit market’ (Kipling Something 3), they were also simultaneously engendered by a ‘colonial system that sanctified control and domination’ (Sullivan 2). Kipling’s narratives push at the ‘margins’ to comprehend what Ambreen Hai described as the ‘truths’ ‘regulated, produced and constrained within the circumscriptions and limits’ of Empire and thus, to ‘negotiate the boundaries of the unspeakable’(On Truth 600– 3). I extend this paradigm of censorship as a ‘boundary’ in Kipling’s early writings, wherein a constant preoccupation with perceived limits 180

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and peripheries is apparent. This serves to locate his early writings as ambivalent, hybrid, and multi-voiced instead of being simply unequivocal stories of Empire. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section provides a brief overview of historical and social conditions of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial politics in India. The various censorship laws during this period which form the framework to Kipling’s early writings allow us to locate his stories as attempting to constitute and re-constitute imperial relations between the colonised and the coloniser. The second section examines the early stories as not being unequivocal mouthpieces of Empire but as torn, troubled, and mutilated, afflicted by silence, disease, lying, and death.2 Governed by a sense of fear of crossing over to the mystifying darkness of the natives, these stories reveal a play of words pushing and transgressing prescribed borders to deal with censorship as a limit of imagination and as a threshold of signification. These early stories of Kipling present him in the uneasy role of a British writer trying to perpetuate the glories of Empire and at the same time, resisting the metanarrative of the ‘white’s man burden.

Empire as home and ‘Other’ To understand the play of censorship as a frontier in Kipling’s writings, one needs to comprehend the political and social scenario in the aftermath of 1857 and subsequent changes which led to a mode of colonial governance said to inaugurate modernity in India. The events of 1857, termed the Sepoy Mutiny by the British, also read as the Great Revolt and the First War of Independence, led to far-reaching changes in the imperial apparatus within India. The Mutiny of 1857 was carried out against the East India Company by several sections of the peasantry and the disgruntled indigenous rulers of north and central India. In spite of the uprising being a failure, Manu Goswami concurs that ‘a spectacular reworking of the institutional, political-economic, and spatial coordinates of the colonial state, its technologies of power, and its material and epistemological modes of reproduction’ was inaugurated (Goswami 8).3 Post-1857, the transition from the mercantilist and commercial institutions to administrative and bureaucratic structures of the colonial state with the Queen emerging as the sole legitimate authority over the Indian subcontinent changed ‘the way Indians conceived of the social world and its possibilities of organization’ (Kaviraj 12). Furthermore, the Mutiny ‘codified the oppositions between metropole and colony in a new register of significance’ (Rand 4) wherein the civilised, masculine individuals of integrity and honour representative of British culture and taste appeared pitched 181

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against the lazy, emasculate, effeminate, cowardly people representative of the darkness of Indian civilisation. The pronounced censorship of this period begins to make sense given this imagined threat of rebellion, an incipient nationalism on the rise (the Indian National Congress was formed in the 1880s), and an emergent literary culture. Though Lord Lytton’s controversial Press Act of 1878 sought to discriminate Indian and European writing under strict legislation, Act XXVII of 1870 had brought even European writers under the eye of imperial censorship and for the ‘first time made sedition punishable under the Indian Penal Code (Section 124A)’ (Hai, Making Words 43). Similarly, Act XXV of 1867 had created a surveillance system ‘for the regulation of Printing Presses and Newspapers for the preservation of copies of books printed in British India, and for the registration of such books’.4 Read against the backdrop of the subsequent increase in political and military surveillance over Indians following the Mutiny, Kipling’s early fictional ventures register the necessity to further the interests of the Empire as well as an intense self-questioning of the colonial project. This functioned to dislocate and displace the authority associated with what Mary Pratt has called ‘the imperial eye’ (5). Censorship as the ‘suppression of speech caused by state legal action, market forces, and dominant discourses’, is, according to Deana Heath, ‘different kinds of power’ for the construction ‘of subjects’ (512). Censorship is an ‘operation of power’ which ‘rule[s] out in unspoken ways what will remain unspeakable’ (Butler 249). Yet, this restriction on speech imposed on subjects by state authority implies a state-subject who makes use of that power to make ‘acceptable’ what is meant to be unspeakable in given historical junctures. If ‘borders’ ‘are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe’ (Anzaldua 3) in the same vein, censorship’s objective is to contain words so as to bound them within an ‘acceptable limit’ and to exclude words, speech, and writings which are ‘unsafe’ in a given legal, political, and social context. Moreover, if the construction of borders entails the possibility of transgression, likewise, the notion of censorship construes the inevitability of not merely a power imposed upon but ‘a text [that] always escapes the acts by which it is censored’ (Butler 249). The effect of power involved in censorship as a border is destabilised to reveal literary creations as dynamic and slippery, revealing ‘the constraining conditions that makes possible any given decision’ (Butler 249). This chapter attempts to read Kipling’s early stories as not a mere apprentice’s work but as renegotiations of the visible and the invisible lines of censorship as, ‘repressed and alternative re-readings of official imperial mythology’ (Sullivan 10). 182

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The title of my chapter ‘Redefining the Body of Censorship’ expresses not a physical connotation of censorship, but ‘an entity whose contours can be clearly recognised, measured, and mapped’ (DeChaine 44). If both body and border are invested with power, then even after crossing the border the body carries the connotation of the border. Accordingly, this essay seeks to outline how the rhetoric of censorship as a border tends to control and shift the problematic of meaning. The amount of censorship imposed during this period reflects in a curious turn the instability that marks the imperial discourse on boundaries. In an age paranoid over the contact being formed between the uncivilised natives and the superior race of the British, illustrated through various taxonomical classifications of race and identities5, the multiple censorship imposed on writers and playwrights exposes literature as the ‘site of disorder’ (Heath, Purifying 2). Even though the imperial administration enforced strict regulatory behaviour to curtail seditious activities amongst the natives and Europeans alike, an imperial storyteller like Kipling could produce, re-produce, and narrate stories which negotiated the borders. A writer whose happiest moments were during the first six years that he spent in India, Kipling’s writings reveal a discordant note of coming to terms with his role as an imperial author. His oft-quoted lines from the poem ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1889) represent the border which establishes the East and West as mutually irreconcilable opposites: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat; (Kipling 1–2) And yet, in the same vein, this border which was reiterated in different domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century marks the impossibility of censorship or literary surveillance in restricting the movement of words. This poem also signifies this liminal space: But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! (Kipling 3–4) Kipling’s early ventures testify a conflict-ridden space where not only do the sources of his stories lie in a mixed, hybrid parentage but their 183

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audience too fluctuates from the British in India as well as the metropole. In the speech titled ‘Literature’, Kipling narrates a parable of a storyteller whose words translate the acts of a man who, after performing a noble deed, is ‘smitten with dumbness’. The storyteller narrated the story so well that ‘the Tribe, seeing that the words were certainly alive, and fearing lest the man with the words would hand down untrue tales about them to their children, took and killed him’. What this speech renders is the agency of the writer in describing the history of his tribe in such a manner that the ‘tribe’ feels threatened, leading to the censoring of the storyteller and his art. At one level, this speech dramatises the power of the writer to render the truth as well as recognises that the words, signs, and significations can verbalise the cracks within the colonial ideology for which he and his stories can be silenced. Kipling’s writings register the self-reflexive quality inherent in his stories, which inevitably lead to the understanding that his art is constantly under a censorious eye—both extrinsic (political acts) and intrinsic (selfimposed)—to cater to his metropolitan/home audiences. Hai describes the ‘duality’ of Kipling’s narratives using this ‘speech’ as an example to enumerate his early stories as fluctuating between perpetuating the glory of the Empire and as resisting its hegemonic authority: The storyteller, like Kipling, the proverbial bard of empire, is enabled to be a storyteller by his tribe … But the storyteller is also threatened by that structure: fearful of the ‘masterless man’s’ unruliness, his implicit claims to authority (and authoriality), and the potential ungovernability of even those stories that purport to redound to its credit, the tribe enacts a primal censorship, substituting the death of the author for the death of his stories, (ex)terminating him to terminate his language. (Hai, ‘On Truth’ 603) Understanding censorship as a limit to define and domesticate the unknown alien space and as a barrier that excludes and eliminates, I propose to explore the manifestation of boundaries in some of Kipling’s early stories. These stories, I argue, present instances of the dynamic nature of linguistic idiom and narrative strategies characteristic of Kipling’s writings.

Exploration of the limits of censorship The fascination with peripheries, thresholds, and liminal spaces in Kipling’s narrative and linguistic schemas point towards an ambivalent 184

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language rooted in the history and the socio-political context of imperialism. Kipling’s narratives work constantly to push at the limits, as illustrated in his autobiography Something of Myself. Kipling’s stories move, slip, and cross over beyond accepted divisions and are suggestive of being ‘the progeny of a figurative or linguistic interracial liaison’ (Hai, Making Words 30). The interracial liaison with India is the basis of the material of his stories. It is also the source of its language. Moreover, Anglo-Indian and English metropolitan audiences serve as his additional co-parents. This mixed parentage establishes the description of his book ‘as a physical and symbolic space upon which sexual, textual, national, and linguistic identities are vectored’ (Vigo 1), underpinning the body as a ‘hybrid’ space forever breaking the concept of a singular identity. If the language of his stories is ‘broken’ English, shaped and formulated ‘out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in’ (Kipling, Something 4) and the stories themselves created by the nightly wanderings of the narrator into night-towns and opium dens, then these stories through their narrative schemas tend to negotiate boundaries. But, what is more interesting is the fact that his first production is also ‘afflicted with . . . modern ailments’ (Kipling, Something 177). Gobind’s stories, even when ‘true’, are necessarily incomplete, ‘mangled’ (Kipling, Plain Tales 242), and changed to reveal the sense of an immense gulf between the sensibilities of a native and an English audience. This is a manifestation of a border which, like a censor, polices the imperial order through its figuration of omissions, silences, disease, and death. In the story ‘Tod’s Amendment’ from the Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), the Anglo-Indian child breaking up the ‘supreme legislative council’ (Kipling 165–6) in the very opening of the narrative flouts norms and regulations imposed by the colonial government. However, his mediation is borne of the intimate knowledge of both the policy makers and the natives languages, allowing him to act as a ‘buffer between the ‘servants and his Mamma’s wrath’ (Kipling 166). Also, Tod’s arbitration between the British government and the natives enables to conclude a crucial amendment in the making of colonial law and to avert natives’ resistance. The reversal of hierarchies enacted in the figure of the child, Tod, seeks to celebrate the ethos of Empire through his education of the ‘imperial readers to be more effective holders of power’ (Hai 39). However, the story also presents Tod as not being completely governed by imperial limits. His ‘interruption’ of the supreme council is in a language which is hybrid, showing a child performing the responsibility of an adult and ‘translating in his mind from the vernacular to English’ (Kipling, Plain Tales 166). This 185

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displaces the monologic voice of authority of censorship to be coded as double-voiced. A child fostered by both natives as well as colonisers, he threatens Empire by mischievous infractions which not only break up the council but also compare the physiognomy of the ‘Councillor Sahib’ to an Indian servant (‘Ditta Mulls’). Language itself becomes slippery and dynamic in its representation of varied voices, dramatising how authorial powers as borders are being negotiated and challenged. The figure of Tod and the reference to Kipling’s first literary production dislocates singular identity as these ‘children’ symbolise the entry of ‘other “denied” knowledges . . . upon the dominant discourse and estrange[ing] the basis of its authority’ (Bhabha 162). However, though borders have legal and political connotations which inform cultural values, shape public attitudes, and prescribe individual and collective actions, they are also historically context bound, human constructs which can be contested, altered, and managed (DeChaine 2). So, in ‘Tod’s Amendment’, the Anglo-Indian child’s hybrid thought which enables a change in public policy itself redefines the limit of censorship and rhetorically embodies the critique of imperial myth-making. The reference to Tod’s death and ailments afflicting his creative output as an outcome of unnamed adversarial power, extracting punishment on account of transgressing the boundaries of censorious limitations, is also illustrative of Kipling’s own self-imposed censorship. The frequent references to death in Kipling’s stories are representative of the pervasiveness of mortality, death, and disease in nineteenth-century writings. In Something of Myself, Kipling mentions ‘[D]eath was always our near companion’ (26), which is not only a literal account of the inescapability of death but also a description of the visibility of a liminal space that deconstructs the boundary between death and life, spoken and unspoken language. If the representation of death envisions the logic of censorship to curtail and control the writer’s power, Kipling’s repeated references to death even in stories like ‘Tod’s Amendment’ point to his complicity with imperial ideology as well as to breaking its ramparts. Silence is often posited as the opposite of speech wherein ‘when an enforced silence is broken, what emerges is truth borne by the vessel of authenticity or experience’ (Brown 83). Using Wendy Brown’s understanding of silence and speech as ‘not only constitutive of but modalities of one another’ in a way that ‘speech harbours silences; silence harbours meanings’ (83), I argue that in Kipling the notion of silence as the absence of words – and, in effect, being the manifestation of censorship – becomes a way to negotiate the borders of imperial hegemony. In the story ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’, the rupturing of speech dramatises the colonial administration as negating 186

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independence of thought and ‘uncomplicated belief’ (Hai, Making Words 46). The termination of speech of the narrator in McGoggin is an act of punishment levied by the state on account of disobeying its laws which ironically, at one level, can kill stories, clamp down words, and circumscribe the agency of the writer. But, as Hai rightfully affirms, ‘by presenting the existence of this censorship, Kipling breaks the silence it imposes, drawing attention to what is not there or to something that has been suppressed’ (47). In ‘The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows’, written during the summer of 1884 and collected in Plain Tales, the narrative technique of frame and embedded tales foregrounds a sense of fencing in against the native narratee, Gabrial Misquitta – introduced as ‘my friend’ and ‘half-caste’ of the embedded tale. Misquitta’s location at the ‘discarded margins of colonial life’ needs to be read against the distant, impersonal administrative self which informs the frame narrative. His denial ‘that this no work of mine’ to a description of the gate whose location can remain elusive ‘however well he may think he knows the city’ to the uncertainty of the existence of the gate itself, ‘which isn’t really a gate though. It’s a house’ (Kipling 201), all of these point to the uncertainties of the correspondence between words and images. In the words of Zohreh Sullivan, the ‘gate signifies a penetrable boundary between the world of the narrator – European, intact, and masterful – and the previously unheard and silent world of the narratee’ (56). The gradual decay of the gate signifies the disintegration of boundaries imposed upon other voices as the narrator is now identified with the half-caste narratee, an act which finds its resonance in the presence of polyphonous voices of the dead and the mutilated in the embedded tale, as if to inform that some truths are not meant to told and the unspeakable is not to be breached. If the oppositions between the framer and the framed tend to get blurred, then the coloniser’s dual act of both distancing himself and identifying himself with the Other points to the vulnerability of his position as well as foregrounds the inconsistencies that mar the larger sociopolitical context. Kipling’s stories in the Plain Tales are redolent of the journalistic style, expressive of a certain vividness and an epigrammatic, sparse tone. The language so used in these tales is ‘of an ethos of government he absorbed in the colonial Punjab, where rhetorical directness was associated with administrative assurance, and succinct language considered the proper medium of British rule’ (Hagiioannu 7). Kipling’s early writings espouse the need to keep the pen ‘razor-sharp’ ‘and clean’ (Hagiioannu 8) to render unambiguously and clearly the 187

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‘boundless sea’ that was India. That he was concerned about words and their effects is evident in the way he hopes literature would ‘save men and cattle alive and lead to really tangible results’. But, the phrase ‘clean’ is interesting, as it evokes both a sense of order and systematisation and an anxiety and fear about the troubled representation of the relationship between the colonised and coloniser. In Something of Myself, Kipling terms his narrative art as ‘necessary lies’ (6). It is, however, incorrect to assume that Kipling’s thinking about language and literature had undergone a change when considering ‘clean’ and ‘lying’ as two different concepts. Moving from the phrase ‘clean’, which at once suggests ‘a literary aesthetic rooted in the running of the land’ (Kipling 6), it also clearly betrays the desire and the contradiction that lie at the ‘body’ of the Empire. The art of cleanliness does not imply only unambiguity. It also exposes the troubled material reality between the natives and the imperialists. ‘Lying’, likewise, does not merely indicate deception or the inverse of moral ideas of truth, but also a resistance to unquestioning acceptance of established truths. Kipling’s writings partake of an uneasy alliance between ‘delighting’ in natives’ ‘variety and copiousness, and responding to the individuality of its people’ (Pinney 22). Likewise, his desire for the perpetuation of Empire is marked by a contradiction that Empire was itself ‘founded upon lies’ (Hai 600). Aware about his role within the ‘space between two frames’ (Sullivan 49), Kipling reveals through his narratives a constant preoccupation with words that can perpetuate imperial interests. These are words which conform to prescribed ‘truths’, are regulated by the demands of authorial borders, and necessarily construe the space of fiction as ‘necessary lies’ given to the re-telling of certain ‘truths’ which they have no business to tell. They cause, inevitably, the blurring of boundaries. In ‘The Mark of the Beast’, published in Life’s Handicap (1891), a macabre horror story about a ‘faceless’, speechless leper magically transforming an Englishman into a wolf and then subjected to violence by the Englishman’s friends to reverse the metamorphosis is a colonial encounter that defies ‘description’ (Kipling 205). The confrontation of the repressed Other is one which cannot be recounted, ‘cannot be put down here’ (Kipling 205). The implication of crossing acceptable boundaries underscores the ‘uncontainability in normal language’, the manifestation that in ‘every silence… ‘there is something of the spoken word’ (Clair 3). Calling attention to itself, silence creates a ‘repertoire of conflictual positions’ (Bhabha 110) and reveals cracks in the borders of imperial administration. Kipling’s 188

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narratives are framed within the logic of ‘knowing’ the alien space so as to control, contain, and colonise this strange land of darkness. But, in doing so, his linguistic phrases must ‘enter into another’s skin’, an act that situates his early texts at the ‘borderline spaces of Empire’ to at once defy the imperial repercussions within the text in its use of silences and incomplete stories. The story ‘At the End of the Passage’ – whose title again shows a recurring fascination for the limit to both curtail interpretations and to break free – presents Hummil’s suffering from hallucinations as unknowable and unrepresentable: ‘In the staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen’ (Kipling 172). The cause of the death of Hummil is ‘beyond the pale of language’, but to render it as ‘nothing’ is a ‘damned lie’ (Kipling 174). Even as the narrator advises Pansey to write as that might ‘ease his mind’ and strengthen the ‘parable of imperial nationhood’ (Hai, ‘On Truth’ 604), the fear and seduction of ‘dreams’ that might ‘disturb’ his ‘rest’, and the ‘powers of darkness’ that may ‘molest’ him, remain and implicate his writing as unstable and marked by ambiguity. His language exists ‘as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context’ (Bakhtin 284). Kipling’s art was produced and limited by colonial politics’ censorious eye. This locates his fictions in an interstitial space, forever on the limits, breaking to cross over, transgress, and, at the same time, be contained. His narrative strategies and linguistic manoeuvres betray an anxiety which problematise the edges of colonial power. This makes the colonial encounter fractured, unsettled, and inconsistent, destabilising the authority and the power attached to imperial governance.

Notes 1 The epigraph to Life’s Handicap states, ‘I met a hundred men on the road to Delhi and they were all my brothers’ (Kipling, vii–xiii). This reasserts the contradictory element and the discordant notes of the imperial Bard. 2 Ambreen Hai, in her article ‘On Truth and Lie in a Colonial Sense: Kipling’s Tales of Tale-Telling’, examines Kipling’s stories as paradoxical and contradictory, asserting both imperial power as well as its hollowness. My reading borrows from Hai to further locate Kipling’s early stories as dealing with irreconcilable dichotomies framing late-nineteenth-century colonial India as an imaginary of boundaries. 3 With the establishment of the colonial state subsequent to the events of 1857, the drawing up of boundaries and hardening of erstwhile fluid identities in the colonial regime was accompanied by ‘all those tactics, strategies, and meticulous intimate knowledges, from census to surveys’ (Wakankar 45). 4 Ibid. The Official Secrets Act, in fact, censored Kipling’s book A Fleet in Being: Notes of Two Trips with Channel Squadron (1898) for allegedly revealing naval secrets and harming national security.

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5 The last decade of the nineteenth century was marked by increased differentiation between natives and imperialists on taxonomical classifications of race (Basu and Banerjee, 479).

Works cited Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U Texas P, 1981. Basu, Subho and Sikata Banerjee. “The Quest for Manhood: Hinduism and Nation in Bengal.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26.3 (2006): 476–90. muse.jhu.edu/article/207576. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Butler, Judith, “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor.” Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation. Ed. Robert C. Post. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1998. 247–59. Clair, Robin Patric. Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities. Albany: State U New York P, 1998. ———. Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. DeChaine, D. Robert. “Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defence Corps.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95.1 (2009): 43–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630802621078. Goswami, Manu. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to Nationalist Space. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2004. Hagiioannu, Andrew. The Man Who would be Kipling: The Colonial Fiction and the Frontiers of Exile. Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003. Hai, Ambreen. Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Athens: Ohio UP, 2009. ———. “On Truth and Lie in a Colonial Sense: Kipling’s Tales of TaleTelling.” ELH 64.2 (1997): 599–625. www.jstor.org/stable/30030149. Heath, Deana. “Obscenity, Censorship, and Modernity.” A Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2009. Henderson, Mae G. “Borders, Boundaries and Frame(work)s.” Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Henderson. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kaviraj, Sudipta, ed. “Introduction.” Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997. 1–36. Kipling, Rudyard. The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1991. ———. The Jungle Book. Ed. W. W. Robson. London: Oxford UP, 1987.

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———. Life’s Handicap. Ed. A. O. J. Cockshut. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. ———. Plain Tales from the Hills. Ed. Andrew Rutherford. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. ———. Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, Ed. Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Minh-ha, Trinh. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. 1991. Montoya, Margaret E. “Border/ed Identities: Narrative and the Social Construction of Legal and Personal Identities.” Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research. Ed. Austin Sarat et al. Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1998. 129–59. Patterson, David. Literature and Spirit: Essays on Bakhtin and his Contemporaries. Kentucky: U Kentucky P, 1988. Pinney, Thomas, ed. Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884–88. London: Macmillan, 1986. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2007. Rand, Gavin. “ ‘Martial Races’ and ‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–1914.” European Review of History 13.1 (2006): 1–20. www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/13507480600586726. Silberman, Marc, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward. “Walls, Borders, Boundaries.” Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe. Eds. Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. 1–22. Sullivan, Zohreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Vigo, Julian. Performative Bodies, Hybrid Tongues: Race, Gender, Sex and Modernity in Latin America and the Maghreb. Oxford: Peter Lang, 1966. Wakankar, Milind. “Body, Crowd, Identity: Genealogy of a Hindu Nationalist Ascetics.” Social Text 45 (1995): 45–73 www.jstor.org/stable/466674.

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13 RUDYARD KIPLING AND THE NETWORKS OF EMPIRE Writing imperial infrastructure in The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous Dominic Davies

Introduction: the infrastructures of empire Month by month the Earth shrinks actually, and, what is more important, in imagination. We know it by the slide and crash of unstable material all around us. For the moment, but only for the moment, the new machines are outstripping mankind. We have cut down enormously – we shall cut down inconceivably – the world-conception of time and space, which is the big flywheel of the world’s progress. What wonder that the great world-engine, which we call Civilisation, should race and heat a little; or that the onlookers who see it take charge should be a little excited, and, therefore, inclined to scold. [. . .] For the moment the machines are developing more power than has been required for their duties. But just as soon as humanity can get its breath, the machines’ load will be increased and they will settle smoothly to their load and most marvellous output. (Kipling 241)

Speaking at the Royal Geographical Society in 1914, Rudyard Kipling described the British Empire as a network of imperial lines materialised in physical infrastructural technologies, those ‘great world-engine[s]’ that were, for him, both literal and symbolic manifestations of ‘Civilisation’. The ‘bard of empire’, who travelled imperialism’s extensive 192

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networks of ‘railways and sea-lanes’ (Bubb 391–4), stressed both the economic and cultural capital invested in these infrastructures, which were as important ‘in imagination’ as they were in their physical and economic actuality (241). Writing some years earlier, Kipling reflected that the ‘fifty thousand miles of railways laid down and ten thousand under survey’ had transformed India into a landscape not only ‘fit for permanent habitation’ by its British rulers; these infrastructural circuitries enabled him to ‘dream’ of a networked world functioning on the principle of ‘free trade’ (Kipling 233–5). His resulting fantasy – ‘one great iron band girdling the earth’ (235) – is indicative of the way in which physical infrastructural systems gave imaginative shape to the imperial networks in which he was invested. They provided a metaphoric language with which to describe the empire, a trope common to British colonial administrative writings to ‘explain the ideal of colonial government’ (Mitchell 157–8; see also Davies). However, if by 1914 Kipling had consolidated this networked conceptual and physical map of the economic, social, and cultural relations that gave shape to the British imperial project, and had been able to translate this into the infrastructure of his literary writing, it was a hard won project. In this chapter, I want to focus on Kipling’s failed attempts to write a worlded novel in the 1890s, as he conflated the form of the novel with the construction of a newly global and notably infrastructural imagination. In the decade preceding the publication of Kim (1901), the novel widely regarded as Kipling’s masterpiece, he wrote two other novels: The Light that Failed (1891) and Captains Courageous (1896). Kipling’s first attempts at novel writing, unlike the short stories and poems he had already published to critical acclaim, have widely been regarded by literary critics as failures, and their publication and sales history suggests as much. I argue that Kipling, at a historical moment in which communication and transport networks were drastically expanding across the face of the globe, was struggling to write a novel that represented these imperial infrastructures and global networks in the worldly reach they were beginning to attain. In so doing, Kipling was trying to write a new kind of networked literature, one both formally and geographically expansive in scope, often with an eye on the U.S., but always with an eye on the world. The fact that these efforts failed in this regard is revealing – by counter-intuitively looking at the moments when his novels fail, this chapter asks what they might be able to tell us about imperial identity, global consciousness, and the rise of an imperial network of physical infrastructures and highways of communication and exchange that still, at least in some part, shape the world in the twenty-first century. 193

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The chapter will therefore use Kipling’s first two novelistic attempts to address the following questions: how does literature, but in particular the novel itself as historically a relatively recent literary form, correspond to cross-national networks of imperialism and contemporary ideas of globalisation, which were in many ways direct outgrowths of those imperial networks? How did a writer like Kipling help readers to imagine a new globalised world connected by the kinds of transport and communication infrastructures that the British Empire played such an important role in expanding on a planetary scale? How does Kipling configure the relationship between literary writing – the lines on the page – and the physical, infrastructural networks of empire – the lines of the railways and the telegraphs that Britain built? And finally, how does writing about these imperial lines reveal the way in which Empire shaped the social and geographic inequalities that are still indexed in contemporary planetary infrastructures? Kipling was born in India in 1865, in what was then known as ‘the jewel in the Crown of the British Empire’. His life straddles the turn of the twentieth century almost exactly (he died in 1936), a period that also saw the British Empire reach its height, roughly around 1914, but also begin its decline – Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru would lead India to independence little more than a decade after Kipling’s death in 1947. The contrasting locations of Kipling’s birth (he spent the first six years of his life in the multicultural and vibrantly bustling colonial city of Bombay) and his death (he spent the final years of his life in the rolling green hills of the quintessentially ‘British’ Sussex countryside) epitomise the paradoxical nature of Kipling, the literary man. Where so many of his writings set in India exhibit a zest and enthusiasm for Eastern culture, landscape, and peoples, an equally large number of his poems are filled with a pro-imperial, jingoistic rhetoric and an unquestioning belief in the white man’s right to global rule. Just as his life-span straddled the century, Kipling straddled geographical boundaries and ideological positions, and these inconsistencies come through most prominently, and productively, in his literature. Kipling alluded directly to this paradoxical duality when he prefaced a chapter in Kim with two short excerpts from a poem he had written entitled ‘The Two-Sided Man’, in which he celebrates the two ‘separate sides’ of his ‘head’. Though we should be cautious of reading Kipling’s literature solely through a biographical lens, certain decisions Kipling made during his lifetime suggest an ambivalence that gestures towards the schizophrenic nature of his British imperial identity. Despite his

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adamant patriotism and obvious talent for popular poetic composition, Kipling declined an unofficial offer to become, after the death of Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1892, Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate. If a jingoistic nationalism emerged in his poetry towards the end of the nineteenth century, and if he still wrote poems to mark large public occasions (his poem ‘Recessional’ marked Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897), Kipling’s refusal of the Laureateship suggests a reluctance to fully assume the role of the ‘British’ poet. In 1907, Kipling became the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. But, in fact, Kipling was not an ‘English’ writer as such – indeed, like the Laureateship, he at first refused the prize because of his reluctance to be associated with any specifically national identity. Kipling wanted instead to be a global writer. His extensive travels, his time spent in different geographical and colonial settings, his constant feeling of being an outsider (one side of his head was always ‘out of place’), make him one of the first truly worlded writers. We should not disregard Kipling for his racism and jingoism, but instead interrogate his literature with the critical lens that theories such as postcolonial and world literary studies offer us, and in this way try to understand that rather than producing ‘English writing’, Kipling in fact authored some of the earliest world writing in English. In an article written for the Civil and Military Gazette, a prominent Anglo-Indian newspaper with a wide circulation, on 14 November 1885, the young Kipling described and reflected on a meeting he had on a train journey to Lahore with ‘an Urdu-speaking Pathan magistrate from Peshawar’. The Pathan had explained to Kipling that their ‘two peoples would always think and act differently’ because they followed ‘different ethical codes’. ‘You come and judge us by your own standard of morality’, said the Pathan, rebuking the colonial Kipling. Your ‘morality [. . .] is the outcome of your climate and your education and your tradition’. Clearly affected by the accusations levelled in this face to face encounter, Kipling concluded in his article that, ‘[l]iterally and metaphorically, we were standing upon different platforms; and parallel straight lines as everybody does not know, are lines in the same plane which being continued to eternity will never meet’ (Allen 208). A year earlier, in 1884, ‘a brass strip’ had been ‘set in the pavement’ outside ‘the Old Royal Observatory’ in Greenwich, London. This line, literal in its physicality but nevertheless powerfully symbolic, marked ‘the division of the newly homogenised temporal world into East and West’, with imperial Britain at its centre (Young 1). Then, five years

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later, in 1889, Kipling would turn both his personal encounter and this global paradigm shift into what are now some of his most wellremembered lines: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! (Kipling 187) Kipling’s biographers have remarked that this opening stanza of ‘The Ballad of East and West’ are among ‘perhaps the most quoted and misunderstood lines’ he ever wrote (Allen 208), subject to ‘selective quotation and under-reading’ (Adams 65), and often accompanied by ‘the charge of racism’ (Gilmour 69). At first glance, this stanza seems to imagine Western and Eastern cultures locked in a kind of static, metaphorical limbo, never able to communicate with or understand one another. An important politics haunts more recent terms for these different global geographical categories. The labels of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds, as Aijaz Ahmad has shown, contain an explicit hierarchy, defining the latter ‘purely in terms of an “experience” of externally inserted phenomena’, that being, of course, imperialism (Ahmad 100). However, even ‘politically correct’ geographical categories such as ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ worlds continue to contain an implicit Eurocentric hierarchy, placing all countries on a singular, progressive line, with the ‘modern’ West at the forefront of ‘civilisation’, and with the world once again split into a reductive binary division. Reading the opening lines of Kipling’s ‘Ballad’ more closely, however, it becomes clear that the ‘face to face’ encounter occurs in neither ‘East nor West’. Rather, it is rooted in a set of networked lines running across or through a space located between and beneath them: the ‘parallel straight lines’ may ‘never meet’ but, as Kipling noted in his article in 1885, they occur within ‘the same plane’. Edward Said’s landmark discussion in his book Orientalism of the ‘boundary notion of East and West, the varying degrees of projected inferiority and strength’ identifies ‘a willed imaginative and geographic division’. However, whilst Said draws on Michel Foucault’s ‘notion of a discourse’ in order to ‘understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient’, he maintains that ‘it was not the thesis of [Orientalism] to suggest that 196

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there is a real or true Orient’ (201, 3, 22). Said’s account might be accused of being abstracted from material reality and located ‘solely in the aesthetic realm of the text’, implying ‘an ideology-versus-reality’ distinction that, in its very attempt to deconstruct Western representations of the Orient, disallows the Orient, or the East, a physical or theoretical dimension in which to exist (Young 399). Following the corrective suggested by postcolonial critic Robert Young, we should think of Kipling’s writing, and of colonial discourse more broadly, not as a ‘a disembodied imaginative representation prior to any interaction with the real’, but rather a kind of knowledge that is always ‘acting in and on the material world’ (400). When we read colonial and imperial literature, we need to remember that we are engaged in an analysis not only of an imagined or metaphorical colonial project, but also of active structures of inequality, exclusion, and discrimination physically imposed through infrastructural developments upon the colonial landscape and its peoples. This adds an important socio-political relevance to the discussion of Kipling’s fiction: imperialism was and is a historical reality, and any discussion of imperial writing must, I argue, take account of the physical and ideological tools it used to assert and maintain its authoritarian rule. As Said later recognised, such a reading will entail a ‘spatial’ approach to ‘actual spaces, territories, domains and sites’ (239–40). We must trace not only the metaphorical but also the literal, infrastructural grid-work that structured both Kipling’s narratives and the networks of the British Empire. By approaching Kipling from this perspective, we can begin to deconstruct the idea that Kipling’s fiction is adamantly jingoistic, fixed in a dualistic hierarchy between coloniser and colonised, or between one global region and another. Furthermore, in looking at his early attempts at novel writing, which sought to depict an explicitly global, or worldly space, rather than simply a local one, we can identify a repeated recurrence of representational failure. This pattern of failure will become the formal hallmark of the Modernist novel, but it can also be found in much postcolonial literature and perhaps, in the twenty-first century, in the formal structures of what we might want to call ‘world literatures in English’. I am, then, conducting a ‘postcolonial’ reading of Kipling’s fiction. I don’t use that term with a hyphen between ‘post’ and ‘colonial’, because the hyphen suggests a historical time frame or period, one that only comes temporally after colonialism. The extent to which we might think that colonialism or imperialism is now ‘finished’, or is somehow ‘over’, is clearly a debatable one – consider American and British interference in the Middle East, 197

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for example, or indeed, China’s various investments in infrastructural projects in Africa, both of which are conveniently oriented around the extraction of various mineral resources. I argue that it is more helpful to think of the ‘post’ in postcolonialism as a spatial designation. With this conceptual reorientation, we can see how the postcolonial might itself be situated behind or below, rather than temporally after, the oppressive bureaucratic, ideological, and physical networks that constituted the British Empire. This not only blurs the apparent dichotomies of colonialism and postcolonialism by revealing how the two are inextricably bound up with one another, but also allows us to identify the early traces of a postcolonial aesthetics and politics that are embedded into the lines of Kipling’s imperial writing.

Novels and networks: building imperial lines As his speech at the Royal Geographical Society indicated, Kipling had by 1914 come to conceive of the British Empire as a network of lines spanning the face of the globe in a kind of imperial mesh, or grid. Though he set most of the short stories that he wrote in the 1880s in Britain’s imperial India, when he began to try his hand at novelwriting in the 1890s he was also trying to imagine a more global or worldly kind of literature, and it is the relationship between the length of Kipling’s writings – novels rather than short stories – and their geographical scope – how much of the imperial world they sought to take in – that I want to emphasise. Kipling left India in 1889, and would return only once for a brief visit in 1891, spending much of the final decade of the nineteenth century either travelling or living in a variety of different locations, including London, America, and South Africa. At this moment in his life, as he set foot into a ‘wide open world’ he became, to use Jonathan Rutherford’s terminology, ‘bereft of those spatial and temporal coordinates essential for historicity’ (24). By historicity here, we mean the kinds of continuities, both temporal and geographical, that one needs to build an identity for oneself, to situate oneself in the world, a process that strikingly resembles the process of constructing a narrative. Perhaps it is unsurprising then, that in 1897, after the two novels I will discuss here had failed, Kipling did indeed have a ‘minor crisis of national identity’ (Lycett 359). This didn’t go unnoticed at the time, and two contemporary commentators offered two different diagnoses. The journalist and reviewer J.H. Miller argued in 1898 that ‘[w]hile Mr. Kipling surveys mankind from China to Peru, he does so not from the dubious point-of-view of the cosmopolitan but from the 198

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firm vantage-ground of a Briton’ (Green 200). However, seven years later in 1905, the novelist G.K. Chesterton disagreed, writing that ‘Mr. Kipling is naturally a cosmopolitan. He happens to find his examples in the British Empire, but almost any other empire would do’ (ibid.: 295). Kipling’s problem, then, seems to be that as he travelled the world, moving along networked routes that cut across different colonies, empires, continents, and oceans, and stopped to live in a great many of them for varying lengths of time, he was reluctant to identify himself as ‘British’: as I’ve mentioned, his refusal of the Poet Laureateship in 1892 suggests a certain ambivalence towards adopting a British identity, and it is perhaps also relevant that he refused a knighthood in 1899 (Adams 101, 138). Which part of the world, then, did Kipling identify with most? Where, if you were to ask him during this time, would he have said that he was ‘from’? Certainly not Britain itself, and Chesterton, Kipling’s contemporary, thought likewise: Rudyard Kipling was not a man of Britain, he wrote, but ‘a man of the world’, and for Chesterton ‘the proof’ of this was ‘that he [still thought] of England as a place. The moment we are rooted in a place’, Chesterton observed, ‘the place vanishes’ (Green 295). Kipling was trying, and mostly failing, to work out a new kind of identity, a global identity, and in so doing, he was also struggling to write a new kind of literature – quite possibly, a world literature. Reading Kipling’s two first published solo novels of the 1890s, it seems that he was actually beginning both to conceive and identify not with ‘Britain’ as such, but rather with a new vision of ‘empire’ as a global network of intersecting grids, framing and dividing the earth’s surface via the technologies and infrastructures of railways, shipping lines, and telegraphs. These physical and imaginary grids that broke up the world map into digestible pieces, that crossed national borders and covered huge areas of the earth, gave Kipling somewhere to ‘be from’. When he first left India to explore other countries and colonies at the end of the 1880s, he wrote of ‘one great iron band girdling the earth’ (Gilmour 75–6), imagining the Empire as both a set of imagined networks and connections between different colonies and nations and also as a network of physical infrastructures that spread across and constituted the British Empire. In the novels that Kipling wrote during this time, there is a constant struggle between these strong, solid imperial networks, and the huge swathes of empty spaces that still lay beyond imperial control. The newly ordained lines of longitude and latitude, as well as the numerous shipping and telegraph lines, that now criss-crossed the world map, apparently consolidated the globe into a unified whole. But while networks are comprised of lines, certainly, 199

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these webs or nets are also necessarily constituted through the empty spaces that lie in between them. These empty spaces haunt Kipling’s novels. Moreover, these spaces are not only displaced outwards onto incomprehensible expanses of real geographical landscape, but also inwards, disrupting his efforts to consolidate a global identity. Despite the success of his early short stories and poetry, at the beginning of the 1890s Kipling wrote in a letter from America to his sister in Britain of yearning ‘wildly to write a real novel – not a one volume or a two volume book but a really decent three-decker’: for Kipling, the novel was ‘the real vehicle’. He continues: ‘Independent firing by marksmen is a pretty thing but it’s the volley-firing of a full battalion that clears the front’ (Gilmour 106), a suggestive metaphor that makes the direct comparison of an aggressive, expanding imperial army, with the process of novel writing. However, both The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous are certainly not ‘really decent’ three-decker novels in the Victorian sense, but slim volumes that might be thought of as novellas, or the kind of long short stories that a writer like Joseph Conrad was beginning to write at this time. More interestingly, both of these novels have at their centre a climactic moment in which the novel self-consciously foregrounds an empty space, one that destabilises the imperial networks on which they otherwise rely. In 1993, Edward Said observed in his landmark text, Culture and Imperialism, that ‘centrality is identity’: ‘centrality gives rise to semiofficial narratives that authorise and provoke certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the same time preventing counter-narratives from forming’ (Said 393). If Kipling is trying to imagine the world in its entirety, held together by the vast array of imperial networks, the empty space at the heart of these two novels works to de-centre what Said calls the ‘semi-official narratives’ of the ‘cause and effect’ sequence. And, if these official narratives are de-centred by Kipling’s novels, what remains? Perhaps, in these moments, a new space is revealed within which ‘counter-narratives’ may begin to form. In this way, we might view this empty space as a postcolonial one, existing between and beneath Kipling’s imperial networks. Furthermore, maybe this spatial failure can begin to tell us something about alternative world literary systems and circuitries of exchange that exist beyond, and perhaps even subvert, the global hierarchies that the British Empire had put in place.

Empty spaces in The Light that Failed Dick and Maisie are the two main characters of Kipling’s first novel, The Light that Failed. These two characters are both painters, or 200

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artists, seeking to express their individual identity through their creative work – much like Kipling himself. Early on in the novel, Dick is walking through London with Maisie when he spots a picture he has painted in the window of a ‘print-shop’ surrounded by a crowd of admirers. He’s delighted, of course, and cries out: ‘Me – all me!’ Maisie is impressed by the popularity of his work and asks him about his creative process, to which Dick responds thus: From the beginning [Dick] told the tale, the I-I-I’s flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. [. . .] At the end of each canto he would conclude, ‘And that gave me some notion of handling colour’, or light, or whatever it might be that he had set out to pursue and understand. (Kipling 53–4) Dick’s ‘tale’ uses the metaphor of the telegraph – a networked infrastructure, the global reach of which had by the 1890s been fundamental to the consolidation of imperial power – to connect the different ‘I’s’ of his past together. He attempts to construct the same sense of ‘historicity’ with which Kipling himself was struggling, plotting the spatial and temporal coordinates of his identity. But the ‘I’s’ remain divided on the page by the hyphens with which they are interspersed, and Dick is subsequently unable to build a ‘cause and effect’ narrative around the separate moments that he discusses. The tension between a consolidated, globally networked identity, and the empty, unchartered, or unmapped spaces of the earth, breaks up Kipling’s narrative and, in turn, his protagonist’s attempt to construct a global selfhood. Jumping forward to the novel’s climactic, central scene, we find a similar theme of artistic identity coming to the fore. Here, Kipling’s plot makes one final attempt to isolate and control, to literally ‘frame’ the identity Dick is seeking to express through his creative work, but this once again ends in failure. After receiving news that a head wound he sustains in the novel’s opening pages is soon going to make him blind, Dick embarks upon what he claims will be his final, self-defining masterpiece, and he repeatedly reiterates the ‘centrality’, or significance, that this artwork will have for him. Coincidentally, on the night that Dick completes this final work, his blindness overcomes him and he loses his eyesight (129, 136). The picture is a portrait of a model, Bessie, who then comes to see the painting, and on viewing it decides that ‘it’s just the horridest, beastliest thing I ever saw’. Out of spite, she scrubs and scrapes the face of Dick’s artistic masterpiece with a 201

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pallet knife. Within five minutes, we are told, the picture is reduced to ‘a formless, scarred muddle of colours’ (ibid.: 135). However, Dick doesn’t realise what Bessie has done to his masterpiece, and because he is now blind he is unable to see the damage. The result is that he believes the framed picture in his hands to be the pinnacle of his life’s artistic work, whilst in fact it has been reduced to nothing more than a smeared, indistinguishable space. The climactic scene occurs when Maisie, his admirer, visits the recently blinded Dick. He offers the portrait up to her, and Kipling writes that ‘the man knew he was speaking of his best work’ as ‘he turned a scarred, formless muddle of paint towards Maisie’ (ibid.: 161). The artist’s work, a framed empty space at the centre of the novel, is offered up by the central character to the reader, as though drawing attention to the futility of Kipling’s own narrative art. The critic Harold Bloom discusses Kipling’s fiction alongside decadent figures such as Walter Pater and Friedrich Nietzsche, arguing that ‘the darker and truer Kipling’ ‘lingers’ on the edge of ‘the sudden vision of nothingness’ (Bloom 6). First published almost coterminously in an issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (which appeared, notably, in the same magazine), the reader is here presented with a portrait that evokes the dislocated identity of its protagonist and predicts his forthcoming death. As though to emphasise the centrality of this scene, it is at this point that the ‘two versions’ of the novel diverge: the first version, which Kipling completed and published in Lippincott’s in 1890, is longer and is prefaced solemnly with the words ‘as it was originally conceived by the Writer’. This version ends in Dick’s death, completely eradicating his identity, whilst the latter, rewritten in 1891 at the request of Kipling’s editor, is a shorter version with a rather forced ‘happy ending’ that culminates with the ‘engagement’ of Dick and Maisie (xxiv, 5). It is illuminating to compare these two endings. In both versions, Maisie isn’t honest with Dick, forcing instead an empty compliment: ‘Oh, Dick, it is good’, she says. However, in the shorter, ‘happy’ version she quickly follows this remark with these words: ‘do you imagine when a woman loves a man that she cares for his work? She loves him for himself – self – self’. Presented by a framed, empty space, Maisie disregards the picture and echoes the hyphenated ‘I-I-I’s’ noted in Dick’s description of himself just a moment ago. Despite Dick’s failure, she is determined to recognise in him a distinct and coherent identity. However, the very act of this recognition results in the swift death of the novel’s narrative, which lasts for just another page and a half before coming to an abrupt end. As Robert Caserio writes, ‘The 202

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Light That Failed suggests an ultimate, necessary rubbing out of its own power to act as a world-portraying canvas’ (Bloom 121). The version ‘originally conceived’ by Kipling does include a few more chapters, though this climactic scene still ends abruptly, a paragraph after the empty portrait’s revelation, with a bitter sentence: ‘And that is the end of Maisie’ (ibid.: 161). She concludes that he must have gone mad and leaves Dick’s apartment, never to appear again. The remaining pages of this version, whilst creating more narrative space, indicatively detail Dick’s movement abroad into imperial space by traversing its transportation networks, but still ultimately results in his death. The novel’s attempt to assimilate a wider world into its grand narrative forces Kipling’s text to admit, albeit at these levels of metaphor and narrative, the inherent failure of such a project. Dick, now blind, undertakes a suicidal mission into North Africa, where at the time British imperial forces were fighting a violent war with the Sudanese from their colonial foothold in Egypt. Dick boards a train on a railway line that ‘runs out’ to the frontline of ‘English troops’. This train not only provides the soldiers with ‘everything they require’, thus reminding us of the importance of these infrastructural networks for the consolidation of imperial military power in colonial warfare (see Arnold 102), but also serves a more specific function for Dick: ‘the narrow-gauge armoured train, plated with three-eighths inch boilerplate’ is described and acts as ‘one long coffin’ for Kipling’s deathseeking hero (ibid.: 200). Meanwhile, the ‘darkness’ of the landscape traversed by the railway line is emphasised throughout these final pages, as the train carries him to his death (ibid.: 201–5). This portrayal of the railway penetrating a dark space, its ‘rapid progress’ allowing it to pass through an incomprehensible and dangerous landscape, recalls Kipling’s conception of ‘one great iron band girdling the earth’ (Gilmour 75–6). For Kipling as for Dick, these imperial networks are, at this historical moment, beginning to ‘cut down’ this incomprehensible expanse, making the earth’s vast, empty spaces – and which threaten an imagined global identity – knowable and penetrable. In so doing, Kipling’s novel self-consciously foregrounds the relationship between the construction of narrative and that of imperial infrastructural networks, as each one contributes to the consolidation of the other. As Elleke Boehmer explains, the ‘metaphoric connections of the syntax of a journal plotted lines of orientation’ that allowed the coloniser to ‘decipher unfamiliar spaces’, and these metaphoric connections extend into the ‘actual’ world (13–16). Kipling’s descriptions of the colonial train network are inspired by its physical reality, and in turn, his own narrative helps to build a global imagination of 203

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the imperial networks that operate across space and time. As these grids, both actual and imagined, solidified, drawing the world into the clasp of empire, Kipling at last begins to find a secure location from which he can further articulate his consolidations of a worldly (though importantly, still imperial) identity. But whilst Kipling was able to articulate this more fully in the speech he delivered to the Royal Geographic Society in 1914 (and by which time he had written his ‘great’ novel, Kim), the networks of imperial infrastructure remain, like the novel that describes them, unstable, fragmented, and incomplete. Dick actually laments that ‘the world’s so big, and all but a millionth of it doesn’t care’ about his individual identity or his own artistic output (ibid.: 77). The lines of the railway network and the lines of the novel, which are here metaphorically conflated, might be able to traverse, cut across, and ‘cut down’ the world’s three-dimensional spaces, passing over and penetrating through them. But through the fragmentation of its form and the recurrence of a set of thematic and visual preoccupations, Kipling’s novel suggests that narratives attempting to negotiate spaces of such massive epistemic and geographic proportions still remain vulnerable to de-stabilisation, contingency, and incompleteness. The de-centring, vacant artistic space that lies at the heart of The Light that Failed might be said to preempt Joseph Conrad’s ‘heart of an immense darkness’ or E.M. Forster’s ‘Marabar caves’, both of which remain ‘entirely devoid of distinction’ (Conrad 77; Forster 136–7). However, it is not my intention to argue that Kipling is somehow a ‘modernist’ writer, a contention made by others elsewhere (see Raine). Rather, I want to emphasise that what we see in Kipling’s early attempts at novel writing is an attempt to work out the symbiosis that might operate between the physical, infrastructural networks of empire and the role that literary narratives played in imagining and perhaps even shaping them. If he has in large part achieved this by the time he writes Kim at the turn of the twentieth century (a novel that is set solely in British India), Kipling’s first novels of the 1890s show a global, or worldly literary writing in the process of its construction, one that because unconsolidated, largely results in literary failure.

Grids and networks in Captains Courageous Kipling’s other novel of the 1890s, Captains Courageous, similarly conflates identity construction with the development of imperial networks of communication, transport, and exchange. As the title might suggest, this novel is set mostly at sea, and tells the story of a small 204

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fishing boat, the very name of which, the ‘We’re Here’, suggests an attempt to construct a stable location and identity in the face of the turbulent seascape it negotiates (7). By the 1890s the ‘great complicated web’ of the British Empire had become ‘an industrial loom spanning the globe, in which the shuttles flying to and fro were the ships of the British merchant marine’ (Boehmer 37), and Kipling himself had already used this metaphor in his poem, ‘The Exiles Line’ (1890). The gridded network of Britain’s imperial shipping lines is imposed onto the seascape throughout Captains Courageous, but these conceptual networks are nevertheless threatened throughout by the ocean’s unpredictable currents that run beneath and between them: The We’re Here slid, as it were, into long, sunk avenues and ditches which felt quite sheltered and homelike if they would only stay still; but they changed without rest or mercy, and flung up the schooner to crown one peak of a thousand grey hills, while the wind hooted through her rigging as she zigzagged down the slopes. (59) In this passage, we see Kipling struggling to control the seascape through an imposition of gridded lines, ‘sheltered and homelike’ in their efforts to map and control it, dangerous in the attention they draw to their own instability. In the face of the sea’s restlessness, a gridded image is repeatedly imposed as each previous attempt is destabilised: the ‘sunk avenues of the ditches’ of the water become merciless, the ‘rigging’ is disrupted by the hooting ‘wind’, and the schooner’s own ‘zigzagged’ tracks lead only ‘down’ into the empty space below. The threat of this incomprehensible expanse of empty seascape is emphasised in one of the novel’s climactic scenes, occurring at almost exactly the same narrative point as the scene in The Light that Failed already discussed. Harvey and Dan, the novel’s main characters, are out fishing, when they think they’ve made a prize catch. However, out of the sea comes not a large fish but: the body of the dead Frenchman buried two days before! The hook had caught him under the right arm-pit, and he swayed, erect and horrible, head and shoulders above water. His arms were tied to his side, and – [here Kipling inserts a hyphen in order to delay the flow of his syntax before uttering a final four words that describe the dead sailor] he had no face. (106) 205

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The bizarre climax of this passage, the corpse’s facelessness, isn’t explained by the novel, and we never find out exactly how or why the dead Frenchman has ‘no face’. Instead, the narrative speeds away from this horrifying moment in a manner that draws attention to its own anxiety about imperial identity and the precarious nature of the networks that consolidate it. This contrasts notably with the meticulous details that set up the scene: as with the artistic portrait in The Light that Failed, Kipling makes sure we understand the sudden and dramatic presentation of the ‘face’, detailing where the ‘hook had caught him’ and exactly how the sailor is positioned when his blank face is revealed. The hyphens interrupting this descriptive process again allude to the way in which the narrative is constructed, highlighting its deterioration, or precariousness, even as it puts itself together. However, despite this central episode, the remaining half of Captains Courageous is able to conclude with a sense of imperial confidence that is articulated through the successful consolidation of these global networks. We learn in the novel’s closing pages that Harvey’s father is a businessman, who uses the shipping lines and other imperial networks to sustain his commercially successful career as a trade-driven imperialist. Indicatively, the novel concludes by suggesting that Harvey, too, will become a successful shipping merchant. In this novel, Kipling’s protagonist comes close to death at the novel’s midway point, but the narrative is able to claw its way back from this moment of insecurity to position Harvey as a new model imperialist, one who can comfortably travel across the face of the globe along the imperial networks it describes. Kipling’s character is imbricated in what Benedict Anderson has called ‘the march to space’, one that draws on the ‘totalising classification’ of ‘European-style maps’ that subjected the ‘entire planet’s curved surface’ to a ‘geometrical grid’, squaring off ‘empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes’ (173). Kipling’s novels of the 1890s, which are attempting to construct narratives that can imagine space on a global scale, contribute to this imperial project, as they address and control these spaces through a series of ‘geometrical’ lines and attempt to assimilate the three-dimensional land and seascapes into the linear grooves of realist narrative.

Global infrastructures and imaginations in ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’ In conclusion, I want to turn briefly to a poem written by Kipling in the 1890s, the same decade in which he was attempting to write these ‘global’, worlded novels. ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’ is a poetic tribute to the 206

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‘submarine cables’ that were laid, in sprawling networks between different imperial possessions and geographical spaces, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first cables to connect Britain with America were completed in 1858, and cables were also laid between Britain and India in 1870. These astonishing infrastructural feats, which quite literally laid cross-national networks of communication along the seabed of these different oceanic spaces, allowed for the integration of different colonies ‘more completely than ever before into the administrative, military and commercial network of the British Empire’ (Arnold 114). Again, Kipling’s poem emphasises the symbiosis between the networked lines of longitude and latitude on the map, the physical infrastructures of railways and telegraph routes built during this period and, I want to stress, the lines of Kipling’s writing. They each speak to and reinforce one another, building an imagination of space that is not regional or national in scale, but global. Here, the ‘shell-burred’ telegraph cables ‘creep’ across the ‘deserts of the deep’. The ‘utter dark’ of the ‘great grey level plains of ooze’ is reiterated, drawing attention to the emptiness of this incomprehensible space (Kipling 138). It is only the telegraphic networks, systems of communication, and cross-national exchange that have the ‘Power’ to traverse and defy this space: ‘the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat’ across the emptiness of the ocean, just as we have seen Kipling’s novels negotiating the spatial dimensions of landscape, seascape, and identity (ibid.). Kipling’s lines map the imperial networks that fix, arrest, and regulate space and time, both symbolically and actually, working in the imagination and, quite physically, upon the earth’s surface, enhancing imperial control of colonial spaces and enabling the kinds of global economic and social exchange that are still with us today. Dislocated by his cross-national movements and geographic instability throughout the 1890s, Kipling strives to stabilise his global identity through coherent, controlled ‘narratives’ that seek to realise his vision of ‘one great iron band girdling the earth’ (Gilmour 75–6). The poem’s final sentence claims, ‘Let us be one!’: these cross-national communications unite the globe into one unified system, a worlded space bound together by imperial networks. However, we also find a sense of futility in this poem, as the difficulties that are perhaps more obviously articulated by his first attempts at novel writing continue to haunt his more confident poetic depictions of these networks. These two-dimensional lines might be able to traverse three-dimensional spaces, but narratives that negotiate areas of such massive geographic proportions have to necessarily allude to the spaces in between them. Despite that final exclamation – ‘Let us be one!’ – these voices are in fact still only ‘whispers’. The words of men only ‘flicker 207

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and flutter’, they do not dominate and control – this is not a particularly confident rhetoric. In the same moment that Kipling seeks to build imperial networks through the development of a new global, or worlded infrastructural imagination, he must also always acknowledge the futility of such a project. Returning to Said’s terminology, these imperial lines are always haunted by a de-centring space within which counternarratives might begin to form. It is in this sense that we might think of these spaces as postcolonial, in that they bring elements of doubt into the imperial attempt to establish its power across the face of the globe. This space that lies at the very centre of these two novels encapsulates a moment of fragmentation that disrupts the ideological confidence of what Kipling had called the ‘really decent’ three-decker realist novel, destabilising his attempts to consolidate an imperial identity. Notably, this is a trope that will go on to inform the political and aesthetic projects of more self-consciously postcolonial novels in the first decades of decolonisation. Consider the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. Achebe takes his title from the Irish modernist poet W.B. Yeats, and his poem, ‘The Second Coming’, the full line of which reads: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ (Yeats), which once more recalls the terminology described by Said. World literatures in English no longer orbit one geographical centre – the British imperial centre – and though they may gravitate towards the U.S., the number of economic and cultural lines of communication and exchange, facilitated by today’s proliferation of intersecting and crisscrossing global networks and multiform infrastructures, are becoming increasingly more numerous, if also unevenly developed and unequal. In the twenty-first century, associations with the geographical category of ‘the West’, which for so long signified for writers like Kipling an ‘advanced’ industrialisation and economic growth, have clearly migrated ‘East’. Kipling’s early attempts at envisioning a planetary order centred on a globally interconnected network, as opposed to one specific imperial country, were therefore astonishingly prescient. By writing – and indeed failing to write – novels that were truly ‘worlded’ along those networked lines, his novels still have something to teach us about the infrastructures and imaginative models of ‘World Literature’ today.

Works cited Adams, Jad. Kipling. London: Haus Publishing Ltd, 2005. Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London and New York: Verso, 2008.

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Allen, Charles. Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling. London: Abacus, 2009. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 2006. Arnold, David. Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bloom, Harold, ed. Rudyard Kipling: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. ———. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Bubb, Alexander. “The Provincial Cosmopolitan: Kipling, India and Globalisation”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49.4 (2013): 391–404. Chrisman, Laura and Patrick Williams, eds., Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Davies, Dominic. Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017. Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Gilbert, David, David Matless, and Brian Short, eds. Geographies of British Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003. Gilmour, Robert. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: Pimlico, 2003. Green, Roger Lancelyn, ed. Kipling: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 1971. Kipling, Rudyard. From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913. ———. Captains Courageous. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. ———. The Complete Verse. London: Kyle Cathie, 2006. ———. Kipling Abroad: Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil. Ed. Andrew Lycett. New York: Macmillan, 2010. ———. The Light That Failed. London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London: Phoenix, 2000. Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. London: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Raine, Craig. “Kipling and Modernism.” London Review of Books 14.5 (6 August 1992): 15–17. Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 1990. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.

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———. Orientalism. London: Vintage Books, 1979. ———. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007. Yeats, W.B. Yeats’s Poetry, Drama and Prose. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008.

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Part IV MASCULINITY AND/AS EMPIRE

14 ‘THE PASSIONLESS PASSION OF SLAUGHTER’ Heroism and the aesthetics of violence Alexander Bubb

Over the six years running up to 2015, my principal research agenda was attempting to restore two highly dissimilar poets – as Kipling and Yeats are usually considered – to a common frame of reference. Though the sesquicentennial of each man in 2015 was not at first apparent to me, my realisation that they were born in the same year did prompt me to reconsider the neglected links between them. Indeed, Yeats and Kipling led not only parallel, but also curiously intertwined lives – born in a colonial milieu, each was painfully wrenched from his boyhood haunts to be schooled in England, later rediscovering his homeland at the age of 16. A few years later, each migrated simultaneously back to London, determined to make a literary career founded on their romantic foreign background. For a brief, formative period they moved in close proximity in London, before drifting apart into opposed political camps. Moreover, even after their mutual alienation they remained tethered by a persistent, and telling, habit of echoing one another in their thought and poetry. Gradually the notion grew on me of them as paired, antithetical influences, shadowing one another through the literary world; grappling with the same dilemmas, but producing very different responses; each man haunting the other with the example of what he couldn’t achieve. My efforts to reacquaint Kipling with Yeats elicited a variety of puzzled responses. More than one person said that comparing two such writers was like pairing chalk and cheese. Another gave me a rather more nauseating analogy: powdered milk and molasses. People were often surprised to be told that the two were born in the same year, and those who were aware of their contemporaneity tended to 213

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suspect that they would only ever have encountered one another as enemies. This suspicion, I should hasten to add, was by no means unfounded. In 1903 Yeats arrived in New York, and like many savants on the transatlantic lecture circuit, was immediately asked by an interviewer for his views on the best-known Anglophone author of the day. ‘I will not comment on the work of any living writer’, replied the pre-eminent Irish poet. ‘If Mr. Kipling would have the goodness to die I would have plenty to say’. Of course, the reporter was never going to let her quarry halt on the brink of such a promising diatribe. ‘Ten years ago Kipling mattered greatly to men of letters’, Yeats finally concluded after a series of acute criticisms, ‘today he matters much to journalists’ (Kelly vol. 3, 467). Yeats could hardly have phrased his repudiation in stronger terms. However, I couldn’t help wondering what lay behind such a relatively sudden and gleefully controversial outburst. Was this just the Irish nationalist rebuffing the imperialist and Ulster militant? Should we see no more than a Parnassian snob decrying an unscrupulous populist, in the ongoing battle between high and low moderns? Or was there something more intimate about this enmity – was it the product of prior rivalry, or former friendship? For example, might Yeats’s efforts to grab headlines have something to do with the fact that, a dozen years before, he and Kipling had been brought to the notice of literary London in the pages of the same newspaper? Indeed, as editor of the National Observer, W.E. Henley had been their mutual patron, welcoming them into his circle of young men. Alternatively, might Yeats have been piqued by his father’s habit of harping on Kipling and India, whenever he chose to remind his son of the need to draw inspiration from his native soil (Bubb 107)? Perhaps even Yeats was embarrassed by the knowledge that in 1897, barely six years prior to his trenchant remarks, he had actually expressed admiration for Kipling in the literary press, praising his renderings of ‘the colour and spectacle of barbarous life’, and identifying him as a fellow-traveller helping to sweep away the tiresome abstractions of late Victorian poetry in favour of ‘passion’, ‘beauty’, and ‘imagination’ (Yeats 1970–1976, vol. 2, 42). The whole episode indicates, it seems to me, a wish on Yeats’s part to now distance himself from a man to whom he was briefly very proximate. When Yeats and Kipling had arrived as young writers in London, in 1887 and 1889 respectively, a series opened up to them of interlinked social networks. The fin-de-siècle literary world was a place of cliques and factions, with no acknowledged laureate but many upcoming writers vying for the mantles of the recently deceased Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson. Richard Le Gallienne, the decade’s 214

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consummate networker, once compared 1890s London to ‘a tenringed circus, with vividly original performers claiming one’s distracted attention in every ring’. The analogy was more apposite than he realised, because, like a great Venn diagram, there were pockets of overlap between these multiple rings. This was a fluid era, in which a poet like Ernest Dowson could hear Yeats read his latest lyric at the Rhymers’ Club and go home to devour the Barrack-Room Ballads; a time in which Henley could be a fervent supporter of Ireland’s cultural awakening yet a bitter opponent of its political autonomy; and in which Kipling could deride Wilde’s ‘epicene’ personality but speak up for Beardsley against his prurient censors (Bubb 59, 125). The event that antagonistically realigned these appealingly asymmetric relations was the war in South Africa, which began the very year after Yeats’s favourable notice of Kipling’s ‘colour and spectacle’ in the literary press. Britain’s ultimatum to the Boer republics prompted divisive splits in London intellectual life, while in Ireland support for the Transvaal became a cause célèbre that perhaps for the first time brought anti-imperialism to the activist forefront, giving radicals a way to distinguish themselves from conventional, proempire Home Rulers. Thus Yeats, for example, was able to scandalise elite opinion by persuading his theatrical colleague Edward Martyn to ban the playing of ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ in his home at Christmas, and could play to the gallery by telling a Dublin lecture audience that Shakespeare was ‘no Rudyard Kipling’ (Bubb 221). In the meantime Kipling himself was at Bloemfontein, networking with old Indian Army friends and helping to run an army newspaper, and this is what Yeats presumably refers to in New York by Kipling’s degeneration into ‘an imperialist journalist’. Thus it is really the Boer War – Kipling’s fierce advocacy of it, and Yeats’s active campaigning against Irish enlistment for it – that crucially intervenes between those experimental years in London, and Yeats’s trenchant remarks in 1903 about Kipling’s betrayal of art for the sake of propaganda. Furthermore, it is with the war that the general tide of critical opinion gradually begins to turn against Kipling, and the canonical split with which we are left today begins to open. While Yeats was recognised for going on to pioneer radical new trends in poetry, his contemporary was repeatedly characterised as a retrograde throwback, who – as Yeats would remark in his preface to the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse – never mentally left the nineteenth century (Yeats 1936, xii). As the combined result of this critical partition, and Yeats’s and Kipling’s own attempts to construct their reputations, much of the rich literary texture that connects these two authors has slipped into 215

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a lacuna. We have forgotten that both of their fathers were artists loosely affiliated with the pre-Raphaelite movement, and that both poets were nurtured in a painterly milieu. We have forgotten that both were members of Henley’s circle. More importantly, we have lost our ear for the telling echoes that parallel reading will yield. Besides their interest in the visual arts, both men were similarly preoccupied with heroism, with folklore, balladry, and the demotic voice. They were drawn to heterodox religion, and each devoted much time to secretive and hierarchical orders – in Kipling’s case Freemasonry, in Yeats’s Theosophy, and later the Golden Dawn. Most of all, both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the ‘philomythic’, or myth-loving, impulse in fin-de-siècle culture (Bubb 154). How then to recover this shared history? From the letters and memoirs left by their interlocutors and go-betweens, and from a study of their reception in contemporary periodicals, a picture of Kipling and Yeats embedded within the social nexus of the 1890s gradually emerges. But the elucidation of these mutual themes and shared concerns running through their work calls for us to read each poet against the other, yielding textual echoes and meetings which then might be mapped against the intersections in their lives. For example, having travelled from India and Ireland respectively to make a name in literary London, each man experienced profound culture-shock. Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree, in which he imagines himself restored to the haunts of his semi-mythologised Irish childhood in the rugged western county of Sligo: And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. (Yeats 1957, 117) Now in spite of Kipling’s reputation for rhetoric, he too betrays a fundamental need of reverie. Making 1860s Bombay into his private imaginative space, he also creates a fantasy of primitive return to a childhood place on the far side of his hybrid nature: We shall go back by the boltless doors, To the life unaltered our childhood knew 216

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To the naked feet on the cool, dark floors, And the high ceiled rooms that the Trade blows through. To the trumpet-flowers and the moon beyond And the tree-toad’s chorus drowning all – And the lisp of the split banana-frond That talked us to sleep when we were small. (Kipling 2013, 523) Note the allied themes of innocence and nostalgia. Both poems describe a flight from urban civilisation to the whispering embrace of nature – the ‘banana-frond’ and the enclosing ‘purple glow’. The poets are envisaging real places that have become deeply internalised. As their followers would have known, the departure point was exile – in the barbarian province of London. And the destination was the haven of their colonial childhoods. These are poems in the Romantic tradition – a tradition in which Kipling needs to be reinserted. Both poets are recapitulating into what Wordsworth famously called the ‘hiding-places of my power’. But the really important axis of comparison is ‘power’. A word that can be traced right through Yeats and Kipling, it connotes more than just artistic inspiration. These are hiding-places of their political imagination. Their innocent longing for belonging is premised in fact upon laying a claim on their place of origin. This was an attempt to translate memory into identity. Yeats himself spoke of ‘passionate reverie’. While their opinions on Ireland and India were opposed, their work proves how nationalist and imperialist politics at the turn of the century could employ the same discourses. The most suggestive illustration of this is when Kipling actually adapts Yeats. His poem ‘Chant-Pagan’ is the monologue of a discontented English labourer. As the speaker resolves to abandon ‘awful old England’ for South Africa, he misquotes the well-known refrain from ‘Innisfree’. The exile’s sigh ‘I will arise and go now’, becomes the emigrant’s slogan: ‘I will arise and get ’ence’ (Kipling 2013, 578). Published in the same year Yeats went to New York, perhaps this poem too, and its borrowed line, contributed to his outburst. The link between ‘Chant-Pagan’ and ‘Innisfree’ is treated at greater length in my full study of Kipling, Yeats, and their occluded relations. Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle closely compares their early, experimental, formative work – though this focus on the 1880s and 1890s obliged me to reduce the attention I could give to their equally suggestive intersections across the 1910s and 1920s. Let us turn now therefore to that more distant but also 217

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more antagonistic relationship in the latter part of their lives, within an era of upheaval and violence. Giving up on the Indian situation, from 1910 Kipling threw himself into Irish politics as though Ulster were the last line of imperial defence, hoping that inflammatory poems like ‘The Covenant’ and ‘Ulster 1912’ would rouse a complacent public to the gravity of the threat. In due course Yeats, after watching his country ravaged by rebellion and civil war, would ask himself whether his drama Cathleen ni Houlihan had fired the Easter insurgents with the flame of martyrdom: ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’ (Yeats 1957, 632). He became more than ever convinced of the apocalyptic forebodings that had preoccupied him in the 1890s, while his interest in eugenics and national vigour eventually led him into unsavoury company. How is each man’s grief, and each man’s responsibility, implicated in the other’s? Not through confrontation. Yeats chose not to cross swords with Kipling in these years – unless, as Fran Brearton (314) proposes, his title ‘Easter 1916’ may be taken as a conscious snub to Kipling’s ‘Ulster (1912)’.1 Instead, the verbal record of his thought can be seen to collide and occasionally blend with his adversary’s – especially in his diehard postures; and his sense, or zest, for the recrudescence of primitive brutality. It was a time when political setbacks pushed both men towards bitterness, remorse, fierce prophecies, and desperate solutions. It was also a dénouement of sorts, when the images each man had summoned during the fin-de-siècle – of heroism, sacrifice, and kinship – rebounded upon their creators, and extravagantly proved the old Nineties dictum that life imitates art. In the early months of the First World War, a correspondent asked Yeats’s friend George Russell (‘AE’) why he feared for Ireland. ‘I have a conviction deep within me that we are going to have one more heartsearching trial, baring our lives to the very spirit, and that within the next few years’. An occultist who had been keenly awaiting doomsday for decades, Russell now looked upon its advent with mounting horror. ‘The dragons of the past have not died and were only sleeping’ (Denson 99). The idea that dormant forces of chaos were about to revenge themselves on a complacent world was mixed in the common murmur of that autumn. It was later given concrete expression in Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’: ‘Public opinion ripening for so long/We thought it would outlive all future days./Oh what fine thought we had because we thought’ (Yeats 1957, 428). Yet few, perhaps, would have noticed that this rueful note had already been struck in warnings issued on behalf of the Empire, such as the poem Kipling published in Belfast to coincide with a fiercely pro-Union speech at Tunbridge Wells: 218

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We thought we ranked above the chance of ill. Others might fail, not we, for we were wise – Merchants in freedom. So, of our free-will We let our servants drug our strength with lies. (Kipling 2013, 1066) Republished in 1919, ‘The Covenant’ shares its narcotic metaphor with Yeats’s landmark poem (‘the half-deceit of some intoxicant’), while its ‘merchants’ and their political commerce recall the memorable ‘we traffic in mockery’ (Yeats 1957, 433). It describes the steady inroads of delusion in the same eight-line, ABAB pentameter stanza – though without the kick of Yeats’s terminal couplets. Another of Yeats’s lines tells us how ‘All teeth were drawn’ and ‘all ancient tricks unlearned’, while his poem’s manuscript title was ‘The Things Return’ or ‘The Things that Come Again’ (Wood 161). The forgetting, or rather deliberate drilling-out of received wisdom, and the approach of dim, dishevelled fiends also jogged Kipling’s admonishing pen. Printed probably for deliberate effect in a placid Sunday morning newspaper, ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ imagines the ironic vengeance wrought by unlearned maxims. Like ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, on publication it was prominently dated ‘1919’, although in Yeats’s case this was a calculated misdating. However, it also bears comparison with a work that was produced early that year: ‘The Second Coming’.2 Though Kipling’s vatic posture is not without irony, both are prophecies of coming apocalypse, linked by a grim notion of historic cycles that is reflected in the quite different metre and syntax of each poem. Yeats’s is the more sophisticated philosophy: as one phase of history circles to its climax, the revolving symmetry of ‘turning and turning’, ‘falcon’ and ‘falconer’, and ‘hold’ and ‘world’ gives way to disassociated impressions of chaos (Yeats 1957, 401). Glib were it not expressed so harshly, Kipling’s is a more didactic moral drawn out through successive generations of dreamers undone by ever-defective human nature. By antithetical twists of fate, pacifism results in war and socialism in poverty – reversals embodied in sharptongued lines whose rhymes coil reproachfully back on themselves. Some of Yeats’s lyrical quality is echoed, however, in the inexplicable and eerily silent cruelties of history: ‘presently word would come/That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome’ (Kipling 2013, 1392). The Irish poet aspired, with reservations, to look upon such catastrophes as tragic consummations: ‘Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!’ is another line from the poem that heads this chapter. Both poems also imagine sinister harbingers of 219

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the coming darkness – the ‘rough beast’ and eponymous Gods, the first of which ‘slouches’ while the latter ‘limp’. The Biblical millennium is evoked, but the destruction that fascinates each writer is wholesale and arbitrary: like Yeats’s ‘Things’ that inevitably come again, the Gods always ‘with terror and slaughter return!’ (Kipling 2013, 1394). The conservative temperament evinced, it is clear, is reflective less of conformity than of deep-seated anxiety, skepticism, and disgust.3 ‘Now days are dragon-ridden’, Yeats tells us in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’. But something that particularly distinguishes his and Kipling’s responses to the European war, the 1916 Rising, and subsequent Irish Troubles is their suspicion that AE’s dragons may have been creatures of their own making. Once decorous shapes in a Nineties frieze, like Yeats’s Japanese horses they had now awakened and thundered down from the wall. The symbolic elision of the Easter martyrs with Cuchulain, most notably, became such that Yeats later imagined the mythic hero not limping, or slouching, but ‘stalking’ through the scene of their last stand (Yeats 1957, 611). Heroic legend had always been the alternative to folklore, as Kipling was reminded in 1911 when he watched a Belfast cinema audience applauding a production of Scott’s Rob Roy (Pinney vol. 4, 60). The previous year Yeats had published The Green Helmet, the second of his Cuchulain plays. This five-play cycle had been in his mind at least as early as 1897, and was no doubt given impetus by the poet Alice Milligan, who urged both Yeats and Hyde to abandon folklore and instead produce ‘modern versions’ of the Irish epic corpus (Kelly vol. 2, 75, 413). Yeats’s long-time collaborator Lady Gregory was another influence, overseeing a marked new emphasis on the ‘hero tale’ when he reissued The Celtic Twilight one month after the end of the Boer War, as was the inspirational historian Standish O’Grady who in 1896 had published Cuchulain tales in Henley’s New Review (Thuente 152).4 It was ultimately in The Green Helmet (1910), however, that the legendary warrior emerged as the embodiment of Yeatsian tragic joy: I choose the laughing lip That shall not turn from laughing, whatever rise or fall; The heart that grows no bitterer although betrayed by all; The hand that loves to scatter; the life like a gambler’s throw; (Yeats 1966, 453) This gallant nonchalance was very much in keeping with Kipling’s heroes, starting with the Colonel’s son who saves his life with a witticism in ‘The Ballad of East and West’. Most comparable is Corbyn 220

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in ‘A Sahibs’ War’, the boyish subaltern who makes his way to the front by a japing ruse and who, turning in his saddle at the fated moment, meets his bullet with a smile (Kipling 1916, 94). Yet the link between the two authors runs deeper and still earlier. Propelled by the late Victorian impulse to make society fit for poetic ideals, they equated literary influence with the force of action, and valued decisive deed over passive thought – ‘I delight in active men’, Yeats wrote in an introduction to his plays, characteristically justifying his remark with a gnomic ‘Indian tale’ (Yeats 530). Taken to its extreme, what excited this logic was not just valour or will, but the deed itself in its absolute quality. One acquaintance, the French aristocrat Robert d’Humières, regarded Kipling as a Nietzschean in the making, losing his pity and ‘scruples’ as the conviction grew on him that men attain identity through struggle: [I]f we dared to question Mr. Kipling as to what is at the back of his thought, I believe that he would answer: ‘Yes, I consider that the aesthetic enjoyment resulting from the performance or the spectacle of an heroic deed is such as to permit us entirely to disregard its ethical significance.’ (d’Humières 249) Kipling had never disguised how India was governed, and as early as 1888 campaigns against Burmese dacoits had given him matter for a consciously aesthetic treatment of violence. In ‘The Ballad of Boh Da Thone’, lads from Galway and Meath go ‘to their death with a joke in their teeth’, flesh puckers blue at the bayonet’s kiss; and for years Captain O’Neil’s wife embraces him without an inkling of his elemental self: As the shape of a corpse dimmers up through deep water, In his eye lit the passionless passion of slaughter. (Kipling 2013, 255) Superbly graphic, the ballad is however not wholly a colonial spectacle. Its very luridness betrays its kinship with fin-de-siècle writing, including elements of the Celtic lobby. When Yeats refused Milligan’s request for heroic material in 1899 he suggested Fiona Macleod (nom de plume of William Sharp), who had recently published her Barbaric Tales. The American critic Cornelius Weygandt was at a loss to explain such stories as ‘The Song of the Sword’ – all sex, blood, mass blindings, and a title shared with a Henley poem – though he tentatively suggested the influence of Yeats’s Dhoya (Weygandt 286). 221

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The all-sufficiency of action would have lasting consequences, not least in Yeats and Kipling’s mutual attraction to Mussolini. In a final irony, each man would project his most intemperate fantasies not onto the degraded metropole both had resented, but on the other’s homeland. To the dismay of the Indian student Abhinash Chandra Bose, who called on him at Rathfarnham towards the end of his life, Yeats recommended that Hindus and Muslims settle their grievances with a 200,000-man battle royale: ‘Shanti? Life is a conflict’ (Dasgupta 22). Kipling had often faced criticism for his obsession with militarising the young. But after Easter 1916 itself, he paradoxically wished to punish Ireland by not enforcing conscription, thus depriving her of cathartic violence. ‘I want Ireland to die’ was an unguarded remark reported by Moira Somerville to her sister Edith, the novelist, in Cork (Rauchbauer 172). Kipling by this point had already suffered the personal cost of war, and his statement to Somerville coincided with the most excoriating phase of his mourning: the composition of a series of terse, undemonstrative, and sometimes harrowing ‘Epitaphs’: If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. (Kipling 2013, 1144) An officer in the Irish Guards who had passed his medical only through his father’s intercession, John Kipling had disappeared at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Kipling made no direct allusion, though he wrote of the comfort afforded by his conviction, arrived at through painstaking researches, that ‘My son was killed while laughing at some jest’ (2013, 1140). At the close of the war, it had evidently appeared to some that the literary response called for would not be forthcoming from the spent forces of the 1890s. ‘From Mr. Kipling and Mr. Yeats’, the London Mercury commented in 1920, ‘we do not now expect the unexpected’ (1920, 259). Instead each would make dramatic – in Yeats’s case revolutionary – departures while recapitulating, and reassessing, their perennial themes. Remorseful enumeration of the dragon’s teeth they had sown would become a prominent motif, as would a sense of finality. If commentators like Israel Zangwill had, in 1916, begun already to lay blame for the Somme on a generation of ‘Ruined Romantics’, then the Nineties’ two foremost survivors wondered whether their poetic was capable of assimilating the postwar world (Zangwill 93). In ‘The Fabulists’, published in 1917, Kipling meditated on the impossibility

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of fantasy – and the obsolescence of the imaginative writer – after ‘the groaning guns’ of war had done their work: When each man’s life all imaged life outruns, What man shall pleasure in imaginings? (Kipling 2013, 972) What Yeats regarded as the squalid impressionism of the war poets, meanwhile, contributed to his view of the ebbing away of comprehensive vision. Acknowledging Matthew Arnold’s lifelong influence, he mourned the passing of the ‘Grand Style’ with a direct allusion to ‘Dover Beach’ in ‘The Nineteenth Century and After’: Though the great song return no more There’s keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave. (Yeats 1957, 485) The death of imagination is seen as concomitant, moreover, with the wasting of gentility and manhood by vulgar democracy. After Conservative defeat in the 1906 General Election, Kipling wrote of a national conspiracy by ‘every form of unfitness, general or specialised’ (Kipling 1920, 119); and though Home Rule was brought nearer by the Liberal Party’s landslide victory, this too found its eugenic echo in The Green Helmet, the giant addressing his tribute to Cuchulain’s laughter to an age ‘When heart and mind shall darken that the weak may end the strong’ (Yeats 1966, 453). Yeats had already harangued Dublin with ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’ in his polemic ‘September, 1913’, and in 1931 Yeats elegised himself and his colleagues as ‘the last romantics’ – the last to lay demotic claim on ‘what poets name/The book of the people’ (Yeats 1957, 122, 492). Whatever follows is illegitimate. If Kipling had ever needed any reminder that it is the fate of all sages to be ignored, the bleak outlook of the 1920s and 1930s drew him towards the gesture Yeats had long been rehearsing: if only in the cold rapture of death, the visionary must finally awaken from his illusions into ‘the desolation of reality’. One of his last poems is voiced by St. Paul who, having spent his ministry ‘being all things to all men’, prays at the scaffold before his execution: ‘Restore me my self again!’ (Kipling 2013, 1043). Following their lead, many younger critical voices felt the Romantic legacy itself, and its attenuation, suggested a line to be drawn under

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both Yeats and Kipling’s chequered careers. They were charged not merely with insincerity, but with bad faith or even conscious duplicity. In 1911, E.M. Forster wrote to Malcolm Darling of the wickedness of instilling in children identities based on national difference. ‘Kipling and all that school know it’s an untruth at the bottom of their hearts – as untrue as it is unloveable. But, for the sake of patriotism, they lie’ (Lago and Furbank 123). Forster had long resented Kipling, but he also noted in his commonplace book that Yeats was a ‘dishonest bard’ (234) – an opinion echoed by Robert Graves and by W.H. Auden, who in 1964 told Stephen Spender that Yeats’s poems ‘make me whore after lies’ (Carpenter 416). When Yeats died in 1939, three years after Kipling, Auden produced an elegy that vouchsafes both men the forgiveness of Time. It is a somewhat bathetic commemoration, with a credo (‘poetry makes nothing happen’) with which both the deceased would have thoroughly disagreed (Auden 242). But it reflects a plain appetite shared by many following a second world war. Few poets would now advocate a career so powerfully devoted to artifice as that for which Yeats made apology in one of his last poems: ‘Players and painted stage took all my love/And not those things that they were emblems of’ (Yeats 1957, 630). My aim has been to bring Kipling and Yeats back into critical contemporaneity. At the centenary of their births in 1965, the critic Cyril Connolly remarked on how his and Auden’s generation had witnessed one man eclipsed, in the literary pantheon, by the other: It is significant that Yeats was born in the same year as Kipling. Who could foretell, when both attained their half-century in 1915, the reversal of fortune which would relegate the universallyacknowledged laureate (in prose and verse) of the world’s greatest empire to semi-oblivion when his hundred was up, while the long-haired floppy-tied survivor of the Celtic Twilight . . . would have amassed a twenty-page bibliography . . . solely of books about him since 1950? (Connolly 244) Another half-century has now come round, and if Yeats’s pre-eminence remains justified, we must remember that the two authors were perceived for much of their lifetimes – not least by the Nobel Prize committees – as the two major representatives of Anglophone literature. They interacted obliquely, but no less potently, within a cultural nexus that their comparison helps to reanimate. Their discursive intersections reveal, moreover, why imperial and anti-colonial movements might 224

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echo one another. ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric’, wrote Yeats, ‘but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’ (Yeats 1969, 331). Yeats’s quarrel with Kipling, and Kipling’s with Ireland, certainly produced rancorous rhetoric, but their subjective writing often effected the continuation of politics by other means. Their sesquicentennial anniversary is a useful prompt to students, who are often given anthologies in which Kipling and Yeats are assigned to different eras. It is also a salutary reminder to critics, some of whom have dismissed very peremptorily any possibility of comparing the first two Anglophone Nobel laureates (Regan 79). Much can be learned by restoring to dialogue two writers who actually met only in the pages of satirical sketches of Nineties life like Richard Le Gallienne’s 1897 novel Young Lives, or in cartoons like Max Beerbohm’s ‘The Academic Committee’ of 1913. What we stand to gain from such an exercise is best stated, it is humbling to note, by a seemingly chance editorial comment in an American reference work: ‘Mention of Yeats and Kipling in the same sentence suggests a different way of defining the Victorian era’ (Flesch 417).

Notes 1 Though George Russell did challenge him directly, in his ‘Open Letter to Mr. Rudyard Kipling’, published in the Daily News, 15 April 1912 (reprinted in Russell 1921, 94). 2 This comparison was originally suggested to me by remarks in Montefiore 2007, 111. 3 For an argument that the modernist apocalypticism exemplified by ‘The Second Coming’ derives from the sensibility of imperial romancers like Kipling, see McClure 1994, 51. 4 See New Review 14 (80): 93–102 and 14 (81): 202–214.

Works cited Auden, W.H. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber, 1977. Brearton, Fran. “Yeats, Dates, and Kipling: 1912, 1914, 1916.” Modernist Cultures, 13.3 (2018): 305–22. Bubb, Alexander. Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Carpenter, Humphrey. W.H. Auden: a Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. Connolly, Cyril. The Evening Colonnade. London: David Bruce & Watson, 1973. d’Humières, Vicomte Robert. Through Isle and Empire. Trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. London: Heinemann, 1905.

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Dasgupta, R.K., ed. Rabindranath Tagore and William Butler Yeats: The Story of a Literary Friendship. Delhi: Department of Modern Indian Languages, U Delhi, 1965. Denson, Alan, ed. Letters from AE. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1961. “Editorial Notes.” London Mercury 1.3 (1920): 259. Flesch, William. The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry: 19th Century. New York: Infobase, 2010. Forster, E.M. Commonplace Book. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Scolar Press, 1985. Kelly, John and others eds. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986–2006. Kipling, Rudyard. Traffics and Discoveries, 1904, Reprint. London: Macmillan, 1916. ———. Letters of Travel, 1892–1913. London: Macmillan, 1920. ———. Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, 3 vols, Ed. Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. Lago, Mary and P.N. Furbank, eds. Selected Letters of E.M. Forster. London: Collins, 1983. Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999. McClure, John A. Late Imperial Romance. London: Verso, 1994. Montefiore, Jan. Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2007. Pinney, Thomas, ed. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, 6 vols. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990–2004. Rauchbauer, Otto, ed. The Edith Œnone Somerville Archive, in Drishane: A Catalogue and an Evaluative Essay. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1995. Regan, Stephen. “Poetry and Nation: W. B. Yeats.” Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990. Ed. Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi. London: Routledge, 2000. Russell, George (“AE”), Imaginations and Reveries. Dublin and London: Maunsel & Roberts, 1921. Thuente, Mary Helen. W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980. Weygandt, Cornelius. Irish Plays and Playwrights. London: Constable, 1913. Wood, Michael. Yeats and Violence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Yeats, W.B., ed. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. New York: Oxford UP, 1936. ———. Variorum Poems. Ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. London: Macmillan, 1957. ———. The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, Ed. Russell K. Alspach and Catharine C. Alspach, London: Macmillan, 1966. ———. Mythologies, 1959, Reprint. New York: Collier Books, 1969. ———. Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, 2 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1970–1976. ———. Essays and Introductions, 1961, Reprint. New York: Collier Books, 1986. Zangwill, Israel. The War for the World. London: Heinemann, 1916.

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15 ‘I AM NOT A SAHIB’ Boys and masculinity in Kipling’s Indian fiction Usha Mudiganti

In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), the eponymous hero categorically declares that he is not a Sahib while trying to figure out who he is. Of Irish parentage, Kim grows up in the bazaars of Lahore until he is recruited into the ‘Great Game’ run by the British imperial services in India. The unusually large and diverse number of father figures in the life of this white orphan exposes him to varied ‘civilising’ mores through which the gendering process takes place, till he is placed in a boarding school which is entrusted with the task of applying the finishing touch in converting Kim into a British young man in the imperial services in India. While Kim unwittingly but enthusiastically joins the ‘Game’, his choice of father figures belies his willingness towards becoming a Sahib. Kim is not the only child in Kipling’s gallery of child characters to resist the roles earmarked for them. Growing up is a pyrrhic victory for most child characters in Kipling’s work, irrespective of whether the children have British or Indian parentage. Among the other child characters, Mowgli goes through a good deal of heartache before he accepts that he is different from the other inhabitants of the Jungle. The eponymous Little Tobrah’s ‘Karmic’ poise while accepting his guilt leaves the reader as baffled as the grown-up audience within the tale. Punch, whose poignant tale is told in ‘Baa-baa Black Sheep’ (1889) and recurs as that of Dick in The Light that Failed (1891) are examples of’ to ‘(1891), is yet another example of the emotional abuse of boys while ‘civilising’ them into a set notion of manliness. Kipling also created child characters like Adam and Tod who are better than their fathers at being young subjects of the British Empire in India.

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Many of Kipling’s child characters are protagonists of stories set in India. Kipling’s engagement with India has been a matter of critical attention from the 1890s. While Kipling has been reviled as an imperial apologist by many, he has also been recognised as a chronicler of colonial India. In his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), Kipling acknowledged his mother’s help during the early days of his career in India with her pithy remark: ‘You’re trying to say: “What do they know of England who only England know” ’ (47). Beginning with Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) to Kim (1901), Kipling has created many Indian and Anglo-Indian characters.1 The focus of this study will be Kipling’s child-characters, Indian and Anglo-Indian, and the attempt will be to argue that these characters posit the burgeoning of a new kind of masculinity which could be called an Anglo-Indian masculinity. These child characters who display an Anglo-Indian masculinity would change the rules of the Great Game. They can also be seen as exemplars of a departure from the notion of ‘ideal’ British masculinity which is believed to have set the standard for the ‘norms’ of masculine behaviour in India and the other erstwhile colonies of Britain.2 Kipling was writing during the height of the British Empire and is either admired or despised for his depictions of British presence in India. Andrew Lang, one of the early critics to praise Kipling’s ability to chronicle colonial India, commented in 1891 that Kipling was bringing to the notice of the British public the ‘errors’ the British were making in India (qtd. in Whitlark, 24). Conversely, George Orwell’s opinion of Kipling was that he ‘is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting’ (qtd in Montefiore1). Although he criticises Kipling scathingly, Orwell suggests that, ‘[i]t is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him wear so badly’ (qtd in Montefiore 1). Jan Montefiore follows up Orwell’s remarks on Kipling by quoting Randall Jarrell, who called Kipling ‘a great genius; and a great neurotic; and a great professional’ (qtd in Montefiore 1). Montefiore opines on the reactions of Orwell and Jarrell that ‘their ambivalence seems to me more helpful than unqualified adulation could ever be’ (Montefiore 1). In the introduction to the 2011 edition of Kim (1901), Harish Trivedi remarks upon Kipling’s intimate acquaintance with the British colonies and his depictions of them. Trivedi quotes Leonard Woolf’s observation on the British in Ceylon, where Woolf says that ‘he could “never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or 228

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whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story” ’ (Trivedi xx). Some studies show that there were attempts to mould young people on the lines of Kipling’s characters. In his critical introduction to the 1987 edition of Kim, Edward Said remarks on Baden-Powell enthusiastic adoption of Kipling’s creations in the launching of the Boy Scouts Movement in England in 1907–8: An almost exact contemporary of Kipling, B.P., as he was called, was greatly influenced by Kipling’s boys generally and Mowgli in particular. As we have come to understand his ideas about ‘boyology’, B.P. fed those images directly into a grand scheme of imperial authority culminating in the great Boy Scout structure ‘fortifying the wall of empire’. The recent research of Michael Rosenthal, in his excellent book The Character Factory: Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire, manifestly confirms this remarkable conjunction of fun and service designed to produce row after row of bright-eyed, eager and resourceful little middle-class servants of empire. (297–8) Although Kipling enthusiastically encouraged Baden-Powell’s project,3 in Kipling’s large and varied array of child characters who could have inspired Baden-Powell none of them is British. All the boy characters training to join the imperial services in Kipling’s fiction are either Indian children or Anglo-Indian children. This distinction is important owing to the difference in boyhood experienced by boys growing up in Britain and those growing up in India. It was a fairly common practice among the British in India to send their children ‘home’ to Britain to get educated. Kipling too was sent ‘home’ at the age of six. In the specific case of Kipling, the years between his leaving India and his enrolment in a British public school called the United Services College were spent in a boarding house in Southsea in England, run by a woman called Mrs. Holloway. Kipling calls Mrs. Holloway’s place the ‘House of Desolation’ in his autobiography and mentions her simply as the ‘Woman’. The six years he spent at her place ruined his eyesight and left emotional scars which troubled Kipling throughout his life. The resonances of Kipling’s trauma occur in two of his works – in his autobiographical short story ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ (1889) and in the first chapter of the novel The Light that Failed (1891). Montefiore remarks on these 229

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two works, in her introduction to the 2008 edition of Something of Myself, in the following manner: Kipling’s biographers have seen these traumatic years as the origin of Kipling’s permanent feeling of displacement and homelessness (Ricketts p. 29), of his ‘mistrust of his own impulses . . . unacknowledged sense of maternal betrayal, [and] desperate anxiety lest the things that he cherished be taken from him’ (Pinney p. x), and of his ‘emotional interest in cruelty’ combined with a ‘deep understanding of the vulnerabilities of children’ (Gilmour p. 9). All this is true, but I think it is his passionate, lifelong hatred of the ‘Woman’, combined with his buried rage against the parents who had betrayed him to her and whom he never consciously accused, that fuelled his profound investment in the authority of fathers and governors, and his real hatred of liberals who questioned its rightness. (xv) The sudden removal from a nurturing environment at a very young age and the ensuing emotional abuse turned Kipling into a complicated person with contradictory emotions towards India and towards authoritarian structures. Kipling romanticised the first six years of his life, and thereby romanticised India, while he learnt to become a radical believer in the authority of the British Empire during his years in school. In his seventieth year, while writing his memoir, Kipling recalls the sights and sounds of his childhood with words that reveal his divided emotions towards India: ‘I have always felt the menacing darkness of tropical eventides, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through palm or banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs’ (3). The contrasting experiences of childhood Kipling had before he reached school would not only make him resent the ways in which Mrs. Holloway was trying to introduce him to British boyhood but also lead him to invest too much in the memory of the privileged childhood he had in colonial India. However, his training in the United Services College built his faith in the British Empire. That school was set up to train young boys for the imperial services. The school’s ethos was formed on the lines of Dr. Thomas Arnold’s Rugby, immortalised in Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). In the late nineteenth century, Dr. Arnold’s school had become the model for English public schools. These schools were structured to inculcate 230

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ideas such as upright behaviour, self-sacrifice, and the incorporation of team spirit, with serious focus on the athletic development of boys. David Floyd quotes James Lawrence as remarking that, ‘[t]he British officer who emerged from this system “commanded by force of character” and embodied an “innate self-confidence” that suggested British predominance’ (123). Floyd adds, ‘publications such as Boy’s Own Paper, Chums, Pluck, Union Jack and Young England, whose primary readership was young males, infused adventure narratives with concepts of political duty that proved preparatory for imperial enterprise’ (123). However, the trajectory of Kipling’s childhood which involved abrupt removal from a life of privilege to that of desolation and then to a school meant to toughen boys up into militaristic masculinity led to Kipling’s ambivalence about British masculinity. His unusual childhood experiences could also have contributed to Kipling’s perpetual shift between a display of a ‘lifelong emotional investment in patriarchal authority’ (Montefiore xv) and his child characters, who diversify from the stereotype of the British public schoolboy. Although Kipling was sent to the United Services College, he was never in training to take any of the competitive examinations for the imperial services.4 The headmaster of the school, Cormell Price, nurtured his aptitude for writing rather than expecting him to suffer through team sports with his weak eyesight. In fact, his schoolmates gave Kipling the nickname ‘Gig-lamps’, which morphed into ‘Gigger’, owing to the spectacles he wore. Most of the recollections of Kipling’s schoolmates recorded by Harold Orel in Interviews and Recollections (1983) recall Kipling’s devoted attention to their school magazine called the Chronicle. While his close associates in school L.C. Dunsterville and Charles Beresford, who were the inspirations for Stalky and M’Turk respectively in Stalky & Co (1899), did remark on the schoolboy pranks Kipling indulged in, they highlight his commitment to the lonely activity of writing. These recollections mark out Kipling as an exception in a school in which most of his peers were encouraged to be similar to schoolboys in public schools across Britain. Kipling, however, eulogised his school years by calling it ‘The School Before Its Time’ in Something of Myself. Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis remarked in Kipling’s Hidden Narratives (1988) that: In later life Kipling’s devotion to his headmaster, and through his headmaster to his old school, led him to make exaggerated claims for the United Services College as a ‘school before its time’. That is just what it was not. It was a school that precisely satisfied a need for preparing boys for the new 231

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competitive examinations; and when the Army Exam ceased to be a troublesome obstacle the school lost ground. (56) However, they concede that the school was secular unlike most other mid-Victorian Public Schools which were led by men in holy orders. The secular tone of the school was a stark contrast to the preceding six years of aggressive evangelical Christianity suffered by Kipling. Further, Kemp and Lewis opine that though the ‘code which the boys enforced on one another was irregular and harsh’ (58) and that ‘it was rough experience and again Kipling was cut off from the family life that alone satisfied his deepest emotion, but he was not wretched as he had been at Southsea. He was bigger and stronger now, and he acquired a new comfort in masculine comradeship’ (58). While his years in the United Services College taught Kipling the skills to survive as a British boy among British boys, it did not turn him into a stereotypical British boy who would become a representative of Britain in India. Kipling’s childhood experience of finding India to be the nurturing space and England the traumatising space combined with unorthodox training in a British public school ensured that he did not turn into the stereotypical British young man. However, this very difference from his peers left in him a lifelong yearning to be the model British young man in colonial India. Kipling used his skill and training to become a young journalist who recorded life in colonial India. While he was nostalgic for the India of his memories, the India he recorded in his journalistic writings and in much of his early fiction was an India viewed and reported by a British public school alumnus, albeit one with a slightly unusual perspective towards India. The difference in the young Kipling’s perception of India from that of the memories of his childhood made Kipling create child characters who seem to connect with the beliefs and practices of India much more than most of the adult characters in Kipling’s fiction. A study of the three categories of boy characters in Kipling’s fiction makes this evident. There are Anglo-Indian boys such as Kim, Adam, and Tod. Then, there are boys in Britain such as Punch and Dick who are pining for their lost childhood in India. Also, there are Indian boys growing up among the natives and growing into foot soldiers of the British Empire—for example, Tobrah and Mowgli. For the purposes of this study, the least complicated of these characters is Tobrah in the short story ‘Little Tobrah’. Although Tobrah leaves his adult audience bewildered with his tale and makes them gasp ‘what art thou?’ (8), he is quite clearly an Indian orphan who has to survive through extreme 232

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distress. Eight-year-old Tobrah, who is caught stealing grain from a horse’s nosebag, narrates to his audience a tale of poverty, starvation, and exploitation which ended with his pushing his blind younger sister into a well. The tale reverberates with a sense of astonishment and incomprehension of Tobrah’s guiltless reporting of his act. The narrator of the story does not narrate Tobrah’s tale in an accusatory or judgmental manner. Similarly, Tobrah’s audience, comprising the servants of an Englishman, does not judge him for his action. As a vignette of life in India, it depicts the life of a starving Indian orphan child who thinks it pragmatic to push his blind younger sister into a well rather than expose her to more poverty and exploitation. This childhood is in stark contrast to Kipling’s privileged childhood in India; it is a childhood Kipling could probably sympathise with but could never identify with. A linear extension of the plot would mean that Tobrah would grow up as a servant to an Englishman and would, therefore, be a minor cog in the imperial mechanism in India. Not being of British or Eurasian origin, Tobrah might not be a likely choice for a place in the Great Game in India. Moreover, his childhood is radically different from that the average British public schoolboy. The other Indian boy in Kipling’s fiction, Mowgli, in the stories of The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) is unique due to his location and the parental figures in the stories. Tales such as ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, ‘Tiger, Tiger’, and ‘The Spring Running’ emphatically portray the painful realisation that Mowgli the child is different from his wolf brothers. Even if one were to read the jungle as a depiction of the Edenic India of Kipling’s childhood, the nurturing wild animals as the Indian servants in the Kipling household in Bombay, and Mowgli as the alter ego of the young Rudyard Kipling, the stories show a largely symbiotic relationship between the boy and the beasts instead of depicting the child Mowgli as the master of the jungle and of its denizens. In the first story of The Jungle Book (1894) titled ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, there is a serious discussion among the animals before he is accepted within the wolf pack. The leader of the pack, Akela, points out that, ‘Men and their cubs are very wise. He may be of help in time’ (23); and on his imminent departure from the jungle, owing to the rise of opposition to his presence in the wolf pack, Mowgli remarks bitterly: I go from you to my own people – if they be my own people. The Jungle is shut to me, and I must forget your talk and your companionship; but I will be more merciful than ye are. Because I was all but your brother in blood, I promise that 233

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when I am a man among men, I will not betray ye to men as ye have betrayed me. (34, emphasis added) A study focussing on Mowgli’s anger due to a sense of rejection could examine the development of Mowgli’s psyche. However, the focus of the present study is to look at the boyhood of Mowgli and to examine whether it would come anywhere close to promoting an English boyhood; especially because Baden-Powell was said to have been inspired by Mowgli in his founding of the Boy Scout Movement.5 In the jungle, Mowgli is neither brought up to adopt Indian cultural tropes nor is he brought up with the tropes of a British boarding school. The stories of Mowgli in the two books are those of survival among people who do not seem to share either his physical features when he is in the jungle or his ethical beliefs when he is in the village. The village around the jungle is a British writer’s representation of Indian culture whereas the English are just a distant but benign presence in the Mowgli stories of the two books. While Kipling did not move away from his imperialist beliefs about Indians in these stories, his protagonist is hardly aware of the English. Mowgli’s awareness of English presence in the vicinity is seen only in ‘Letting in the Jungle’ when Messua mentions that she and her husband hope to meet the English if they escape the wrath of the villagers. Mowgli facilitates the escape with the help of his beast brethren. However, there is no evidence in any of the stories that Mowgli had any interaction with the English. Moreover, he refers to the villagers as his people in the angry tirade quoted earlier instead of referring to the English. The only Mowgli story in which he is working for the British as a forest ranger shows him as an adult. This story is titled ‘In the Rukh’ and was first published in 1893 in Many Inventions. However, it was not included in the 1895 edition of The Second Jungle Book. In ‘Kipling’s American “Berangements” for the Young’, U. C. Knoepflmacher mentions that Daniel Karlin declared in his introduction to the 1989 edition of The Jungle Books ‘that he would “have nothing to do” with the ‘ “creeping legitimization of “In the Rukh” as a “Jungle Book tale”, although Kipling did eventually insert that tale to conclude the “re-arranged [Mowgli] stories of the Outward Bound edition” of 1897’ (60). Nevertheless, it is a Mowgli tale, albeit with an adult Mowgli. While Kipling made this adult Mowgli a servant of the English, the child Mowgli is oblivious of English presence in India. While the two Indian boys in Kipling’s fiction, Tobrah and Mowgli, are shown to end their fictional lives as seemingly compliant servants 234

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of the British Empire, the British boys who have been sent from India to Britain in Kipling’s fiction seem to share the schoolboy Rudyard’s nostalgia for India. Punch in ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ and Dick in The Light that Failed find England a gloomy and threatening space whereas they remember India to be a nurturing space. While Dick’s story is a bildungsroman set in England and is a tale in which a traumatic childhood leads to the fatal failure of a young person in attaining adulthood, Punch’s tale has a happier end. He is rescued from the English boarding house by his mother. Rather than feeling a sense of belonging in England during his stay in the boarding house, Punch feels that he has been exiled to an alien land from his home in India. ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ has been read as an autobiographical story by many serious readers of Kipling owing to its similarity with Kipling’s experience in the boarding house run by Mrs. Holloway. In her introduction to the 2008 edition of Something of Myself, Jan Montefiore states: When Kipling writes about his childhood, and particularly of his years of misery at the ‘House of Desolation’ in Southsea, he is not just explicit but overtly furious about the devastating pain and trauma which he suffered. He had as a young man written about those years of abandonment in the harrowing early story ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ (1889) and in his novel The Light that Failed (1891), but only in Something of Myself does he ‘come out’ (as we might now put it) as the victim of bullying and abuse. (xiv) While the parents had followed the Anglo-Indian tradition of leaving the very young Kipling and his younger sister with strangers in England to ensure a British education, Kemp and Lewis comment that Kipling had found England a cold and dark space even as a three-yearold during a trip to his grandparents’ house in March 1868. They note that Kipling’s ‘old and ailing grandparents noted him down as a talkative inquisitive child, more forward and self-assertive than Victorian children were expected to be’ (43). This difference from his contemporaries in Britain was noted and remarked upon by his schoolmates in their reminiscences about the adolescent Kipling. From the ages of three to sixteen, Kipling was marked out as a departure from the ideal English boy. The British boys among Kipling’s child characters reiterate Kipling’s troubled relationship with the ideal of British masculinity. The two Anglo-Indian boys in Kipling’s fiction who are too young to be sent to England for their training are Adam and Tod. Both come 235

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across as opinionated, articulate boys who are not just observing and absorbing the Indian way of life but are also looking out for their Indian friends. Tod in ‘Tod’s Amendment’ behaves in a manner which is at odds with the Victorian ideal of child behaviour. He participates in the conversations in his parents’ drawing room and also intervenes with his opinions. Tod’s intervention is shown to bring about a crucial amendment which ensures that the Indian tenant farmer is not completely inconvenienced by the passing of an agrarian act. Although Tod is an English boy, he is making a case for Indian farmers owing to his familiarity with their lives. Kipling seems to suggest that the British would make fewer errors in India if they followed the lead of their children and intermingled with Indians rather than segregating themselves into all British social activities. This idea is reinforced in his short story ‘The Son of His Father’. It is the story of the Anglo-Indian child Adam’s role in solving the mysterious robbery of Inspector Strickland’s horse and groom on their way to Dalhousie from the plains. When a confession is finally extracted from the culprit, Adam cries out with childish glee: ‘We all knew. We all knew. I and the servants’ (209). There are multiple instances in the story where Strickland6 believes that boys trained in India are more useful in the imperial services than the ones who are trained in British public schools for the imperial services in India. Strickland expresses his exasperation at the inefficiency of a subordinate by declaring: He is just an English boy, born and bred, and his father before him. He has about as much tact as a bull, and he won’t work quietly under my Inspector. I wish the Government would keep our service for country-born men. Those first five or six years in India give a man a pull that lasts him all his life. Adam, if only you were old enough to be my Assistant! (205) Strickland’s thesis about ‘country-born men’ seems to justify his naming the child Adam, for not only is Adam a cherished first-born in the Strickland household but he is earmarked to be a new kind of British officer who would bring the edge of an insider’s familiarity with India coupled with a British public school education to his post in the imperial services in India. With Kim, Kipling was ready to forego even the mandatory training in a British public school to prepare the India-born British child for inclusion in the Great Game. The phrase the ‘Great Game’ was 236

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coined in this novel to describe the spy network of the British imperial services. The playful metaphor of a game works well in drawing the adolescent Kim towards the imperial services but also alienates him from the people he identifies with. When he is asked, ‘[a]nd who are thy people’, he replies, ‘[t]his great and beautiful land’ (222). Kimball O’Hara, a poor Irish orphan, grew up in Lahore largely due to the generosity of his neighbours and to the survival skills he acquires from his association with a few older men. As the novel progresses and Kim sets off on a journey, he finds more father figures for himself. The only legacy Kim inherits from his Irish father is a birth certificate and his father’s regimental papers, which were folded up into an amulet and strung around his neck. Until Kim meets a Tibetan Lama and sets out on a journey with him, he was unlettered and penniless but was full of knowledge of the ways of the people; knowledge which would ensure that he survives as a man-child in a man’s world. During his days in Lahore, Kim is often engaged by Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse trader, to fetch and carry messages—ostensibly about horses. During his journey, Kim starts suspecting that Mahbub Ali engaged him in spy work. It is clear to the reader that Kim had been unwittingly co-opted into the Great Game even before he became a ward of his father’s erstwhile regiment. Owing to the Lama’s offer of financing Kim’s education, the adolescent Kim is sent to get the best education an English orphan could get in India. It is decided to send him to a school in Lucknow – a decision he resists and hopes to defer. With Mahbub Ali’s help, Kim drives a hard bargain with Colonel Creighton, the director of the Great Game, to make sure that he is left to be footloose during the school vacations. The deal ensures that Kim continues to freely mingle with Indians while being trained by the British in their ways. Some of his training happens precisely through this intermingling with Indians. Surrounded by many older men of varied ethnic origins and training, Kim is a far cry from the British public schoolboy. He is trained in the ways of the world by the Afghan Mahbub Ali, allowed access to some knowledge owing to the generosity of the English curator of the Lahore Museum, adopted as a disciple by a Tibetan Lama, sent to a school through the efforts of a Protestant priest, employed by the British Colonel Creighton, given training for his work by the enigmatic Lurgan Sahib,7 and mentored as an apprentice spy by the Bengali Hurree Babu. With such an exposure to ‘rival masculinities’,8 it is not possible for Kim to be anything like the average British entrant into the imperial services in India. In ‘The Empire of Youth: Crossing and Double-Crossing Cultural Barriers in Kipling’s Kim’, Judith A. Plotz 237

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remarks on this multifaceted identity of Kim by stating: ‘So freely does Kim criss-cross the bounds of British and Indian culture that he is hard to place’ (113). With the India-born Irish Kim’s successful entry into the imperial services despite his being a poor orphan9 and his rather brief education at an Indian boarding school for Anglo-Indian children, through Kim Kipling announced the possibility of entry into the imperial services in India without training in a British Public School.10 Through his child characters such as Tobrah, Mowgli, Punch, Dick, Tod, Adam, and Kim, Rudyard Kipling challenges the efficacy of the ideal of British masculinity in colonial India and suggests an alternative in the form of an Anglo-Indian masculinity.

Notes 1 The term Anglo-Indian is used in this paper in the manner in which it was used in the nineteenth century. During that period and in many studies of the literature of the period, the term was and has been used to indicate the British who were either born in India or were domiciles of British India owing to service or trade. People with a mixed ancestry of Indian and European origins were called Eurasian. This usage was discontinued and the term Anglo-Indian began to be used to describe the progeny of Indian and European marriages only by the middle of the twentieth century. Article 366 (2) of the Indian Constitution describes an Anglo-Indian as: ‘An Anglo-Indian is a person whose father or any of those male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there of temporary purposes only’. 2 Studies such as those of Ashis Nandy in The Intimate Enemy (1983); Chandrima Chakraborty in Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism (2011); and Mrinalini Sinha in ‘Giving Masculinity a History’ (2012) argue that the ideal of Indian masculine behaviour underwent a shift during colonial times on the lines of the ideal of British masculinity which was emerging in the British public schools. 3 Postcolonial work on gendering in India, including the aforementioned works of Nandy, Sinha, Chakraborty, and those of Indrani Sen in Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writings of British India (1858–1900) published in 2002 and Anjali Arondekar’s For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2010) refer to Kipling’s endorsement of British ideal of masculinity. 4 Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis have recorded in Kipling’s Hidden Narratives (1988) that John Lockwood Kipling had written to a friend, in December 1881, of his plan to arrange some work in a newspaper in India for his son because they could not afford to send him to Oxford. The father did not seem to have considered the army or the civil services as career options for Rudyard.

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5 In ‘Kipling and Scouting, or “Akela, we’ll do our best” ’, Richard Flynn quotes Gillian Avery’s study tracing the rituals of the Wolf Club of the Boy Scout Movement to the first Jungle Book and her opinion that Kipling endorsed Scouting as a way of making the masses accept the Imperialist ideology. However, later in the essay Flynn argues that Baden-Powell ‘bowdlerized’ Kim to suit his purposes. 6 Strickland, the protagonist of ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais’, is an upright and efficient young policeman who is unconventional in the discharge of his duties, for he disguises himself to mingle with the local people to solve his cases. He features in Kim as a policeman who is shown to be a member of the imperial spy network. 7 Alec Mason states in ‘A Note on Lurgan Sahib’ that it was believed that the character was modelled on one Alexander M Jacob whose obituary stated that he claimed to be a Turk born near Constantinople while a guest who accepted the invitations of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob eight times one summer described them as ‘nice Christian people’. 8 This term is used by Rosalind O’Hanlon in ‘Issues of Masculinity in North Indian History: the Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad’ (1997) to describe the presence of different sets of behavioural norms which were recognised to be masculine by different ethnic groups. 9 A recent study on the inoculation of elite white children against small pox by Lydia Murdoch titled ‘Carrying the Pox: The Use of Children and Ideals of Childhood in Early British and Imperial Campaigns Against Smallpox’ shows that poor, white, working-class orphans in the colonies were used as global carriers of the vaccine which was used to protect elite, white children from small pox. Kipling’s Kim being trained to become a part of the spy network seems less hazardous than being a human carrier of a virus – a task for which orphans from Kim’s social class were regularly used in the British colonies. 10 Kipling’s proposal in Kim met with resistance from young British officers of the civil services. Professor Harish Trivedi in his paper ‘Kipling and Indian Nationalism’ at a conference titled ‘Kipling in India – India in Kipling’ at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla on 26 April 2016 mentioned that the young probationers of the imperial services met in London in 1921 to pass a resolution that Kim should not be part of compulsory reading for they felt that Kipling was wrong in his assessment of India.

Works cited Arondekar, Anjali. ‘In the Wake of 1857: Rudyard Kipling’s Mutiny Papers’, For the Record: On Sexuality in the Colonial Archive in India. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010. Chakraborty, Chandrima. Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings in India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2011. The Constitution of India. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/294137/. Floyd, David. Street Urchins, Sociopaths and Degenerates: Orphans of Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction. Cardiff: U Wales P, 2014.

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Flynn, Richard. “Kipling and Scouting, or ‘Akela, We’ll do our Best’.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16.2 (Summer 1991): 55–8. Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. London: John Murray, 2002. Kemp, Sandra and Lisa Lewis. Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Kipling, Rudyard. “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.” (1887). Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling. Ed and Intro Jeffrey Meyers. New York: A Signet Classic NAL 1987. ———. The Jungle Book & The Second Jungle Book (1894–5). Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2007. ———. Kim (1901). New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. ———. Something of Myself (1937). Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2008. ———. Stories of India. Ed. Sudhakar Marathe, New Delhi: Penguin, 2003. Knoepflmacher, U. C., “Kipling’s American ‘Berangements’ for the Young.” Kipling Journal, 88 (July 2014): 335, 58–74. Mason, Alec. “A Note on Lurgan Sahib.” Readers’ Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling, (1961): 202–3 www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_kim_notes8_ lurgan_p.htm. Montefiore, Jan. “Introduction.” Something of Myself (1937) by Rudyard Kipling. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2008. ———. Rudyard Kipling. Tavistok, Devon: Northcote British Council, 2007. Murdoch, Lydia. “Carrying the Pox: The Use of Children and Ideals of Childhood in Early British and Imperial Campaigns Against Smallpox.” Journal of Social History, 48.3 (Spring 2015): 511–35. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1983. O’Hanlon, Rosalind. “Issues of Masculinity in North Indian History: the Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 4 (1997): 1–19. Orel, Harold, ed. Kipling: Interviews and Recollections. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan, 1983. Plotz, Judith A. “The Empire of Youth: Crossing and Double-Crossing Cultural Barriers in Kipling’s Kim.” Children’s Literature 20 (1992): 111–31. Said, Edward. “Introduction to the Penguin Classics, 1987 edition of Kim.” Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Ed. Harish Trivedi. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. Sen, Indrani. “Woman, Ideology, Empire: Inventing the White Woman in Nineteenth-Century British India.” Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writings of British India (1858–1900). Hyderbad: Orient Longman, 2002. Sinha, Mrinalini. “Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India.” Gendering in Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism. Ed. Charu Gupta. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2012. Trivedi, Harish. “Introduction.” Kim (1901). New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.

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———. “Kipling and Indian Nationalism.” Paper presented at the conference on ‘Kipling in India – India in Kipling’, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, April 26, 2016, Shimla. Whitlark, James. “Kipling’s Scriptural Paradoxes for Imperial Children.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 24.1 (Spring 1999): 24–33.

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16 DOES KIPLING’S ‘IF’ APPROPRIATE THE GITA? Correlating Empire, Muscular Christianity, and Sthitaprajna Nanditha Rajaram Shastry

‘If’ is, arguably, one of the most popular works of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) – coming a close second after The Jungle Book (1894). While The Jungle Book, with its depiction of the animal world, has regaled readers all over the world, with Mowgli becoming almost a household name, lines from ‘If’ have inspired generations of readers. First written in 1895 and published in Rewards and Fairies, a collection of Kipling’s short stories and poetry in 1909, the poem has been prescribed in schools all over the world, including India. A framed copy of the poem, finds a place in the National Defense Academy of India. Its place in popular culture can be assessed by the inclusion of two of its lines in even the players’ enclosure in Wimbledon: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two imposters just the same; (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170) Voted as Britain’s most popular poem in 1995 by a poll conducted by BBC (Flood), the poem has been, more often than not, looked at as a text that delineates the qualities of an ideal man – courage, levelheadedness, perseverance, etc. It is to Kipling’s credit that the poem has become an inspiration for people of all ages and eras, especially young people. This is, perhaps, not surprising as Kipling wrote the poem addressed to his son John Kipling.

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But is the poem simply a guide-book for young people? Or is there more beyond the surface of the poem? Kipling’s life and beliefs might help us in this regard. Kipling was born in India, but was taken back to England at the age of six (Wegner 129). His early impressions of India stood him in good stead, as proven by the delineation of Indian characters in Kim (1901) as well as The Jungle Book. Kipling’s relationship with India as a coloniser is complex. He was proud of England’s imperialistic achievements, not just in India but all over the world. In fact, he has been criticised for being an imperialist by many, right from 1899. For instance, critics like Robert Buchanan have argued that Kipling was promoting a brand of aggressive nationalism that did not bode well for England. It is then possible to view Kipling as an unapologetic coloniser and see these attitudes being reflected in ‘If’. But Kipling’s pride for England cannot simply be classified as jingoistic. Major-General Lionel Charles Dunsterville, the model for Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky from Stalky and Co. (1899), reiterates this point, speaking of Kipling’s beliefs: He [Kipling] has been such an unswerving advocate of what we call, for want of a better word, Imperialism, that every little-englander – and there are lots of them, I’m afraid – naturally rushes to the attack. The noble form of Kipling’s Imperialism is distorted by these critics into ‘Jingoism’, a most foolish and unjust line of attack on the writer of ‘Recessional’. (Dunsterville in Green, Roger 372) Kipling was the same writer who wrote ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899) to highlight the serious sense of responsibility that is oft ascribed to imperialism, as is said in the concluding lines of the poem: Take up the White Man’s burden, have done with childish days – The lightly proferred laurel, the easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood, through all the thankless years Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, the judgment of your peers! (Brooks and Faulkner 307) This was a sentiment that found resonance in many others. Dunsterville explains how the British rulers in India were different from all the other rulers who invaded India – the Aryans, the Moghuls, and the

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others. The difference in British ‘alien rule’, according to him, was the ‘sense of responsibility’ felt by the English towards Indians, regardless of whether their contribution is acknowledged or not (Dunsterville in Green, Roger 373–4). The same spirit pervaded ‘If’; and thus, if ‘If’ is about imperialism, it is about the right way of imperialism, of not being a monster out to terrorise the natives, but of becoming a caring individual. It is evident that Kipling thought of colonisation as a great responsibility that the whole of England felt. Not any one and every one can deal with the natives; such men should be impeccable human beings first, according to Kipling. The manner in which people view such men is not important for Kipling; it is their own inner qualities that matter. So, the qualities detailed in ‘If’ are those necessary for an ideal person, and a man set out to rule the world. For Kipling, therefore, there was a right way of imperialism, as opposed to the wrong way, and he strongly advocated the right way of imperialism. This is opposed to the general view that Kipling was in favour of imperialism of any hue. It can then be said that it was not imperialism per se, but certain qualities that Kipling felt were ideal. As we shall see later in the paper, he criticised the imperial masters, while extolling the qualities of an ideal man. In that sense, Kipling was an advocate of Muscular Christianity. Although used later for the purpose of imperialism, Muscular Christianity is not directly connected with colonisation. Muscular Christianity was the advocacy of physical strength in order to be true Christians, rather than ignore the physical for the spiritual. This idea developed in Victorian England, notably in works of authors such as Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) and Thomas Hughes (1822–1896). The work that is considered as the gospel of Muscular Christianity is Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). The setting makes it clear that Hughes thought that training for becoming an ideal man had to be given right from childhood. The general attitude of the period was reflected by Edward Thring, the headmaster of Uppingham from 1853 to 1857, who states, ‘the whole efforts of a school ought to be directed to making boys, manly, earnest and true’ (Watson et al.). The qualities extolled in the novel, and present in the protagonist Tom, make it clear that Muscular Christianity was more than just physical prowess. Of course, Tom does play rugby and, later, cricket, but those are not the only reasons he is a hero. When Tom is bullied by Flashman, he does not tell tales to his headmaster, but bears all with stoicism. He might not have prayed in public earlier, but he recognises Arthur’s courage in doing so and encourages him. He is also protective of Arthur. 244

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In fact, most of Victorian literature in general, and literature for boys in particular, sought to imbibe the values of Muscular Christianity in its young readers. R.L. Stevenson’s (1850–1894) Treasure Island (1883), an adventure tale, highlights values such as bravery, stoicism, and responsibility. Rider Haggard’s (1856–1925) King Solomon’s Mines (1885) speaks of the values of chivalry, bravery, and, most importantly, the sense of responsibility that the British ought to have towards the ‘natives’. The adventurers Henry Curtis, Allan Quartermain, and Captain Good take up the responsibility of restoring the rightful heir Umbopa to his throne. Muscular Christianity, as represented in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and other novels, stood for the qualities of self-respect, standing up for one’s rights, and the importance of fighting, team spirit, and responsibility. It is also important to note that respecting religion as a personal right is an important tenet. Muscular Christians were not out to rule; they were not aggressive pushovers who ruled over weaklings. The aggressive ones were bullies such as Flashman, Tom Brown’s persecutor, who tried to assert their authority. Therefore, Muscular Christianity was not about imperialism per se, but about the creation of ideal men, suitable not just for colonial service, but for the service of humanity. As Ian C. Bradley says, Muscular Christianity was a Protestant strain as opposed to the Catholic strain of Christianity. This simply means that the kind of Christianity they advocated was ‘fiercely patriotic and based on the chivalric spirit of self-sacrifice’ (Bradley 147). Bradley also ascribes a Scottish strain to Muscular Christianity, when he quotes the story of Robert Bruce and the spider and the famous words – ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again’ as embodying the spirit of Muscular Christianity (148). It was this Muscular Christianity that Kipling wanted imperialism to be infused with. That he was a supporter of the concept was evident. W.E. Henley, who was an ardent champion of Muscular Christianity and the editor of the Scots Observer, was the first person to give Kipling a chance to write pieces on chivalry and valour after his return from India (Bradley 149). So, Kipling wanted imperialism, but one that was not predatory – but humane.’ to ‘but one that was humane instead of predatory. However, it is not just an understanding of Kipling’s imperialistic leanings that prompts one to label ‘If’ as an imperialistic tract of a certain kind. Kipling’s model for the poem makes it clear as to the kind of person Kipling wanted his son, and all young people, to be. This man was no governor-general, or a victorious general at war, or even a soldier who died honourably in battle. Kipling wrote ‘If’, keeping in mind Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who was betrayed and imprisoned 245

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by the British government after a failed raid against the Boers in South Africa’s Transvaal in 1896. That Jameson was the inspiration for ‘If’ is no conjecture; Kipling said so himself in his autobiography Something of Myself, published a year after his death in 1937. Kipling notes, ‘Among the verses in Rewards was one set called ‘If’ – they were drawn from Jameson’s character, and contained counsels of perfection most easy to give’ (Wansell).1 So what did Jameson do to be imprisoned and why did he become a model of perfection for Kipling? For this, an understanding of the background of the Boer rebellion and the politics surrounding it is necessary. In 1895, before South Africa became a nation, it was divided into the British colonies of Cape Colony and Natal and the Boer colonies of Orange Free State and Transvaal. In 1895, Sir Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of Cape Colony (and, incidentally, the person who introduced Jameson to Kipling) wanted to incite the disgruntled Uitlanders against the Transvaal government. In this, he was supported by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Accordingly, Leander Starr Jameson was sent with a troop of six hundred men to Transvaal. But at the last moment, Chamberlain panicked and decided not to support Jameson as well as Rhodes. He also instructed the British in Transvaal not to lend their support to the raid. Jameson, miffed over the uncertainty, carried out the raid, and was defeated due to the lack of support from Britain (Ash 45). After he came back to England, he was derided by a lot of people for acting against the orders of the government. He was also sentenced to 15 months for leading the raid. But this did not break Jameson’s spirit, and he returned to become the President of the Cape Colony from 1904 to 1910 (Ash 45). Rudyard Kipling was influenced by Jameson’s character while writing ‘If’. Jameson’s influence on Kipling was so strong that reportedly he rejected knighthood because he was disgusted with the attitude of the Empire towards Jameson (Ash 56). It would be fruitful to now analyse ‘If’ keeping in mind the qualities of Jameson that are reflected in it, and the message that emerges through them. By this, I would like to prove that Kipling was not an imperialist for all seasons and reasons, but a supporter of Muscular Christianity in the sense of the values that it propounds. I also seek to weaken the assumption that Kipling supported the British government, regardless of what it did. Also, I would like to connect ‘If’ to the Bhagavadgita, the holy scripture of the Hindus, and relate the concept of the Sthitaprajna to the ideal man extolled in ‘If’. 246

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Let us first examine the poem in the light of the life of Leander Starr Jameson and the impact it had on Kipling’s life. The first two lines: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170), have been looked at as general advice about being level-headed, even when one is innocent, and yet being blamed. This is also a reference to Jameson’s conduct of not getting ruffled, even when Chamberlain and the British government blamed him for their mistake. The next two lines: ‘If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,/But make allowance for their doubting too;’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170) are again seen as a general platitude about self-confidence, in the face of distrust by society, while analysing whether the doubters are indeed right. Jameson too did not give up, believing in himself while not protesting when he was imprisoned. The next four lines of the poem, If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170) are about the values of patience, truth, love, and modesty. Despite Jameson’s innocence, he did not utter a word about the British government’s injustice, and bided his time for an opportunity to create a new life for himself. The next lines about dreaming without being overwhelmed by dreams, and thinking without over-thinking are wonderful lines, the application of which to Jameson’s life would require a closer understanding of his life, which Kipling probably had. True to the lines written in the Wimbledon court about treating Triumph and Disaster in the same manner, Jameson was a general when he was part of victories, as well as the ultimate disaster, when he was imprisoned. But he seemed to have borne it all with equanimity. The lines about truth being twisted to serve the ends of knaves can be read as a bitter indictment of Chamberlain’s irresponsible behaviour towards Jameson. So, Kipling was not as loyal to the Empire as he was made out to be, as he condemned the actions of the imperial government and those in charge. The next stanza, about the ability to take risks, and being able to recover and make a new life for oneself, and persevere to achieve one’s goal, makes it clear that winning battles was not Kipling’s idea 247

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of imperialism. He appreciated the courage to take risks, and to be resilient. The ideal man is not the winner, but the loser who does not remain so for long. These were qualities that Jameson exhibited, when he did not give up but returned to become the President of Cape Town. The concluding stanza contains some of the most inspiring lines of the poem. Imperialists should not be snobbish, according to Kipling, and be the same with everyone – royalty or the masses. Kipling understood that the life of the ideal man was not easy – as he could trust neither friends nor foes. He had to make his own decisions at every point in life. The line: ‘Yours is the earth and everything in it’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170) is often read as supporting the imperial philosophy of conquering the whole world. But it is the next line that shows what Kipling really means: ‘And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170). So, if one does all that Kipling exhorts one to do, the ruling of an empire is not the gift, but being a man, i.e. a mature, stoic person who is ready to take on the responsibility of being a protector to many people. Therefore, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ is about the values of an ideal human being, which, as we have seen, are not necessarily seen in an ideal imperialist, but are definitely seen in an ideal Muscular Christian. As Kipling was a Christian, the most common interpretation of the poem has been in terms of Christianity per se, if not Muscular Christianity. James. P. Bernens, in his article titled ‘A Lesson in Manhood: Rudyard Kipling’s “If” ’ links the penultimate lines of ‘If’ to the words of St. Paul. In the line ‘sixty seconds worth of distance run’ in the poem, Bernens sees echoes of St. Paul – ‘Know you not that they that run in the race all run indeed, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that you may obtain’. Bernens also relates the Parable of the Prodigal Son to ‘If’. He quotes the lines where the good father of the Bible instructs the Prodigal Son – ‘thou art always with me, and all I have is thine’ (Bernens). However, given Kipling’s imperialistic and personal relationship with India, the influence of Indian religion and culture cannot be ruled out. My contention is that the values extolled in his ‘If’ prove that this might indeed be the case. The values of stoicism, of doing one’s duty without bothering about the reward, of being alike with everyone and in all situations, are qualities of a Sthitaprajna—or the one who remains stable at all times—that the Bhagavadgita extols. The line about treating triumph and disaster the same is, in fact, a pithy expression of the idea of Sthitaprajna. In fact, Khushwant Singh went so far as to say that ‘If’ is the ‘Bhagavadgita translated into English’ (Singh). 248

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While there is not proof to suggest that Rudyard Kipling read the Bhagavadgita, it is possible that he might have read the Bhagavadgita and other philosophical texts, or at least read commentaries on them. Hence, it is possible to view Kipling’s ‘If’ as either a conscious or an unconscious appropriation of the Bhagavadgita. At first glance, comparing the Bhagavadgita and ‘If’ might seem a hopeless exercise, mainly because of the religious importance attached to the Bhagavadgita. Here, we can find a predominance of philosophical concepts and the concept of God. However, it has to be remembered that Kipling was writing in his age, addressing the concerns of his milieu. Therefore, if Kipling was indeed using the Bhagavadgita in his poem, it was not a translation but an adaptation, using those values to fit into twentieth-century Britain. So what is Sthitaprajna? And what does the Bhagavadgita say? The Bhagavadgita, which literally means ‘Song of the Lord’, is one of the holy books of the Hindus, a book which embodies all the knowledge of Hinduism, according to scholars. A work of seven hundred verses, the book is in the form of a dialogue between Lord Krishna and Arjuna, characters in the epic Mahabharata. Apparently occurring just before the famous Kurukshetra battle between the cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the book is mainly about Sri Krishna urging Arjuna to give up his state of indecisiveness and enter the battlefield. It is divided into 18 chapters, or discourses, called ‘Yogas’, such as ‘Jnana Yoga’, ‘Atma Samyama Yoga’, ‘Vijnana Yoga’, and others, based on the predominant theme of the particular discourse. Although the Bhagavadgita as a whole forms an important part of Indian philosophy, the focus of this paper is on the Second discourse, called ‘Samkya Yoga’.2 ‘Samkya’ or ‘Sankya’ means number. The ‘number’ here is the duality of ‘purusa’ (self) and ‘prakrti’ (not-self) (Radhakrishnan 115). In other words, the difference between body and soul is explained to Arjuna, which enables him to make a distinction between his actions and his being, which, in turn, sets him free to do his duty. In this discourse can be found two inter-related concepts that are an integral part of Hindu philosophy. They are ‘Nishkama Karma Yoga’ and ‘Sthitaprajna’. The latter concept is a logical conclusion of the former. Nishkama Karma Yoga, in turn, stems from the concept of ‘Karma Yoga’, which is simply the philosophy of doing one’s duty to become one with God. The performance of such duty, however, ought to be free of all attachment, according to Sri Krishna in the Gita. This is ‘Nishkama Karma Yoga’, as ‘Nishkama’ means ‘sans all attachment’. The philosophy of ‘Nishkama Karma Yoga’ can be summarised in the oft-quoted sloka of the Bhagavadgita: ‘Karmanyeva’dhikaraste ma 249

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phaleshu kadhachana/ Ma karaphalaherutbhurmate sango’ sivakarmani’ (Chapter II verse 47), which means ‘to action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction’ (Radhakrishnan 119). This means that one has only the right to act, and does not have the right to the fruits of action. The end result of the action should not be the motive of work. However, this does not mean that one should be in a state of inaction, as the relationship between actions and motives is complex. Already, it is possible to relate the Bhagavadgita to ‘If’. After all, the essence of ‘If’ is that one should go on doing one’s duty, regardless of what society does, or even what the consequences would be. Of course, the consequence here is that one attains ‘the Earth and everything in it’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170) and one becomes ‘a Man’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170); but this simply means being one with the world and attaining inner peace. Also, the whole of ‘If’ is about detachment. Friends, foes, victories, defeats, lies, deceit, hate, love, poverty, prosperity, are all the same to Kipling’s ideal man in ‘If’. Moving on, the next sloka also says something similar: ‘Yogasthah kuru karmani sangam tyaktva dhanam jaya/Sidhyasidhyoh samo bhutva samatvam yoga uchyate’ (Chapter II verse 48), meaning ‘Fixed in yoga, do thy work, O winner of wealth (Arjuna), abandoning attachment, with an even mind in success and failure, for evenness of mind is called Yoga’ (Radhakrishnan 120), as Yoga can also be understood as the ‘union with the self’ (Vidyaprakashananda 217). ‘Even mind in success and failure’ can surely be rephrased as: ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170). Deriving from ‘Yoga’ and ‘Nishkama karma yoga’ is the concept of ‘sthitaprajna’. Arjuna asks Krishna: ‘Sthitapranajya ka bhasha samadhisthasya kesava/Sthitadhih kim prabhasheta kim asita vrajeta kim’ (Chapter II verse 54), meaning ‘What is the description of the man who has this firmly founded wisdom, whose being is steadfast in spirit, O Kesava (Krishna)? How should the man of settled intelligence speak, how should he sit, how should he walk?’ (Radhakrishnan 122). Sthitaprajna can be divided into ‘sthita’ or steady and ‘prajna’ or wisdom. Therefore, sthitaprajna means a ‘man of steady wisdom’. The interpretations of the single word sthitaprajna are many. It is possible to call the ‘man of steady wisdom’ also a ‘saint’. The former President of India and philosopher Dr. S. Radhakrishnan goes a step further in his commentary on the Bhagavadgita and says that this ‘saint’ is at the 250

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‘sanyasa’ stage of the Ashrama dharma. Radhakrishnan is of the opinion that this Sanyasa, or renouncing the world, is possible at any stage of one’s life. Such people, who can go beyond the confines of society and have nothing to do with it are good judges of the world that they once inhabited, according to Radhakrishnan (122–3). However, this stage of complete renunciation is, as far as the text of the Bhagavadgita is concerned, not what Krishna asks of Arjuna. In the second chapter of the Gita, ‘Samkya Yoga’, and more importantly, in the third chapter, ‘Karma Yoga’, Krishna recommends doing one’s duty to the world, and not just praying to God. However, he also speaks of men who remain detached while doing their duty. Men who can carry on with their lives without getting attached to the deeds they do, are, as we all know, wise men. This notion is further strengthened when we realise that Mahatma Gandhi used to recite those verses of the Bhagavadgita where a discussion about the ‘sthitaprajna’ takes place (Vidyaprakashananda 219). It is unarguable that Mahatma Gandhi believed in action, in the form of Satyagraha and non-violence. Therefore, it is only apt to assume that in the context of the Bhagavadgita, we will understand ‘sthitaprajna’ to mean a ‘man of steady wisdom’. Now, the direct answer given by Sri Krishna to the question by Arjuna is: ‘Prajahati yada Kaman sarvan partha manogathan/ Atmanyeva’tmana tustah sthitaprajna stado’cyate’ (Chapter II verse 55), meaning ‘When a man puts away all the desires of his mind, O Partha (Arjuna), and when his spirit is content in itself, then he is he called stable in intelligence’ (Radhakrishnan 123). The next two verses make this idea clearer: ‘duhkhesvanudvignamanahaah sukhesu vigatasprhah/vitaraagabhayakrodhah sthitadhirmunirucyate’ (Chapter II, verse 56), meaning ‘He whose mind is untroubled in the midst of sorrows and is free from eager desire amid pleasures, he from whom passion, fear and rage have passed away, he is called a sage of settled intelligence’ (Radhakrishnan 123). Further, lines such as ‘yah sarvatraanabhisnehastattatpraapya shubhaashubham/nabhinandhati na dvesti tasya prajnaa pratisthitaa’ (Chapter II, verse 57) meaning ‘He who is without affection on any side, who does not rejoice or loath as he obtains good or evil, his intelligence is firmly set [in wisdom]’ (Radhakrishnan 123) endorse this view. Again, the lines from ‘If’ about Triumph and Disaster and treating them the same can be applied to both verses 56 and 57 of the Bhagavadgita. As can the line: ‘And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise’. The next important verse in this regard is verse 59: ‘visayaa vinivartante niraahaarasya dehinah/rasavarjam raso’pyasyaparam drstvaa 251

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nivartate’ (Chapter II verse 59), meaning ‘the objects of sense turn away from the embodied soul who abstains from feeding on them but the taste for them remains; even the taste turns away when the Supreme is seen’ (Radhakrishnan 124). In other words, even when one does not indulge one’s senses, the longing for indulgence is hard to desist. When the Supreme Power, i.e. God, becomes visible, the need for such indulgence simply vanishes. This verse immediately brings to mind two of Kipling’s lines: ‘If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;/ If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170). Surely, it cannot be denied that these lines stress upon the necessity of being the master of one’s desires and thoughts. If we take this idea further, it can also refer to the curtailing of sensual pleasures, like the Bhagavadgita states. Verse 62 states: ‘dhyaayato visayaanpumsah sangasteuupajaayate/sangaatsanjaayate kaamah kaamaat krodho’bhijaayate’ (Chapter II verse 62), meaning ‘When a man dwells in his mind on the objects of sense, attachment to them is produced. From attachment springs desire and from desire springs anger’ (Radhakrishnan 125). Now, look at this line from ‘If’: ‘If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170). This advocates not feeling hurt or, alternatively, losing one’s temper when the ones close to you hurt you. This is a paraphrasing, to some extent, of the verse quoted above. Continuing this strain of thought, let us move on to Verse 63 which states: ‘krodhaadbhavati sammohah sammohaat smrtivibhramah/ smrtibhramsaad buddhinaaso buddhinaasaat pranasyati’ (Chapter II verse 63), meaning ‘From anger arises bewilderment, from bewilderment loss of memory; and from loss of memory, the destruction of intelligence and from the destruction of intelligence, he [man] perishes’ (Radhakrishnan 126). The opening lines of ‘If’ can be quoted in this regard: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you’ (Kipling, Kipling Poems 170). These lines too advocate the banishment of anger from one’s life, no matter what. The Bhagavadgita goes further and describes the illeffects of anger, but the starting point for both couplets is the same. Verses 66 and 70 speak about the peace of mind acquired by a sthitaprajna: ‘naasti buddhirayuktasya na caayuktasya bhaavanaa/na caabhaavayataha santirasaantasya kutah sukham’ (Chapter II verse 66), meaning ‘For the one who is not tranquil, there is no knowledge. For the one who is not tranquil, there is no contemplation, and for the one who is not contemplative, there is no peace. For the one who has no peace, how can there be happiness?’ (Kilmurray). 252

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Furthermore, lines such as ‘aapuuryamaanamacalapratistham/ samudramaapah pravisanti yadvat/ tadvatkaamaa yam pravissanti sarve/ sa saantimaapnoti na kaamakaamii’ (Chapter II verse 70) can be translated as: ‘He unto whom all desires enter as waters into the sea, which, though ever being filled is ever motionless, attains to peace and not he who hugs his desires’ (Radhakrishnan 128). ‘Being a Man’ from ‘If’, As stated earlier, ‘Being a Man’ from ‘If’ can be easily taken to imply a manhood of steady wisdom at peace with itself. The penultimate verse of the chapter in the Bhagavadgita speaks about the elimination of one’s ego: ‘vihaaya kaamaan yah sarvaan pumaamscarati nihsprhah/nirmamo nirahankaarah sa saantimadhigacchati’ (Chapter II verse 71). This means: ‘The man who abandoning all desires lives without any relish for them, and without any feeling of I and mine, attains peace’ (Vidyaprashananda 249). The whole of ‘If’ is about eliminating one’s ego, as it speaks of not taking adverse criticism to heart, as a result of a bloated sense of ‘I’. The ideal man of ‘If’ ought to forego his desires as well, as they lead to over-ambitiousness and sorrow. Therefore, it is evident that the values enshrined in ‘If’ are similar to the philosophy of the Bhagavadgita, especially the ideal of a Sthitaprajna. One way of understanding this similarity is by assuming that Kipling appropriated the teachings of the Gita. In that case, one would be forced to think of Kipling as a derivative writer, and hardly original. But there is another, less controversial explanation for this. It is possible to say that essential human values remain the same, irrespective of age, religion, and place. The same set of values are seen in the tenets of Muscular Christianity, in Kipling’s ‘If’ (both of which, of course, belong to the same milieu), and in the Bhagavadgita. So, on a concluding note, it would be fruitful to research further on the similarity of value systems across the world, thus making us realise that ‘indeed, the world is a family, i.e. ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’.’ to ‘the world is indeed a family, i.e. ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’.

Notes 1 When we realise when the poem was written, and not published, it becomes clear that the poem was written for Jameson and later dedicated to John Kipling. The poem was written in 1895, after the Boer Rebellion and the drama that surrounded it. John Kipling was 12 when the poem was published in 1910, so he could not have been born in 1895. 2 It is technically from this chapter that the teachings of Sri Krishna begin. The first chapter, or discourse, called ‘Arjuna Vishada Yoga’, deals with Arjuna’s misgivings about going to war with one’s family.

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Works cited Ash, Chris. The If Man: Dr Leander Starr Jameson, the Inspiration for Kipling’s Masterpiece. Solinull: Helion and Company, 2012. Bernens, James P. “Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If-’: A Lesson in Manhood.” Crisis Magazine.com, August 2014 www.crisismagazine.com/2014/rudyard-kip lings-lesson-manhood. Bradley, Ian. Believing in Britain: The Spiritual Identity of “Britishness”. London: Tauris and Co, 2007. Brooks, Chris and Peter Faulkner, eds. The White Man’s Burdens: An Anthology of British Poetry of the Empire. Exeter: U Exeter P, 1996. Dunsterville, Lionel Charles. “ ‘Stalky’ on ‘Kipling’s India’.” Rudyard Kipling: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Roger Lancelyn Green. London and New York: Routledge, 1971. 371–6. Flood, Alison. “Must the Nation’s Favourite Poet really be Rudyard Kipling?” Guardian. Com (14 August 2009) www.theguardian.com/books/ booksblog/2009/aug/13/kipling-nations-favourite-poet. Green, Martin. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Green, Roger Lancelyn. Rudyard Kipling: The Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 1971. Haggard, Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. 1885. London: Penguin Classics, 1994. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. 1857. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1989. “Jameson Raid.” Southafricanhistoryonline (25 January 2012) www.sahis tory.org.za/topic/jameson-raid. Kilmurray, Arthur. “Sthita prajna.” Arthurkilmurray.com, http:/www.arthurkil murray.com/resources-spirituality/bhagavad-gita/shita-prajna-stable-wisdom/. Kipling, Rudyard. “If.” 1895. Kipling Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 170. ———. The Jungle Books. 1894. New York: Tor Publications, 1992. ———. Kim. 1901. Ed. Manis, Jim. Hazleton: PSU, 2004. ———. Rewards and Fairies. 1909. London: Wordsworth Classics, 1995. Print. ———. “Something of Myself.” 1937 Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. ———. Stalky and Co. 1899. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Singh, Khushwant. “Review of Renuka Narayanan’s A Book of Prayer.” Outlook India 2001 www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/a-prayer-for-everyone/ 211656. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. 1894. London: Penguin, 1992. The Bhagavadgita. Intro and trans. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. London: George Allen & Unway ltd, 1948. Vidyaprakashananda, Swami. Gita Makaranda. Kalahasti: Sri Suka Brahma Ashram, 1980.

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Wansell, Geoffrey. “The Remarkable Story of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ and the Swashbuckling Renegade Who Inspired It.” dailymail (16 February 2009) www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146109/The-remarkable-story-RudyardKiplings-If–swashbuckling-renegade-inspired-it.html. Watson, Nick J., Stuart Weir, and Stephen Friend. “The Development of Muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain and Beyond.” Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005). Wegner, Philip E. “Life as He Would Have It.” Cultural Critique 26 (1993– 94): 129–59.

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17 CHAPS Kipling, Yeats, and the empire of men Anubhav Pradhan

Even though it is terribly passé to begin with references to the dictionary, the ritual may act as more than just a peg to hang an argument from. The word ‘chap’ is just such a word, a term whose semiotic dexterity makes this ritual rewarding. The OED lists three meanings for chap: one, ‘a cracked or sore patch on the skin’; two, ‘(British informal) a man or a boy’; and three, ‘the lower jaw or half of the cheek, especially that of a pig used as food’.1 While all of these meanings are instructive, the first two are key as metaphors for my study here of finde-siècle notions of masculinity and their translation in the works of Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats. The choice of authors as disparate as Kipling and Yeats may seem questionable. Apparently they have nothing in common: both happen to share the same year of birth, 1865, and belong to a similar context, but apart from these coincidences their careers, writings, and legacies have been seen as almost polar.2 Kipling has been caricatured often enough as a didactic apologist for the Raj, while Yeats is remembered as one of the beacons of cultural and political selfhood undermining the stranglehold of British imperialism. In attempting such a study, in comparing Kipling and Yeats in order to observe what is similar and make connections where there are apparently none, I run the risk of transgressing the limits of deduction and falling into some critical pit of no return. Fortunately, this is just the metaphor I wish to employ in making this analysis. A pit, a crack: chaps, places where wounds fester and diseases find sanctuary. Victoria’s barely British empire was run, as is well known, by chaps of all kinds, a certain breed of more or less insular, inward-looking men who lugged through real and imaginary horrors for the betterment of their god and his favourite country. In thinking 256

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of fin-de-siècle notions of masculinity and imperialism, therefore, I think both of normatives and of aberrations: of the strain of both these notions and the fissures, or chaps, produced by their operation on men, on writers like Kipling and Yeats, and the men they create. Masculinity was closely wedded to spiral of consolidation, extension, and perpetuation of British imperial rule across the world, and the fact that the oeuvres of both Kipling and Yeats dwell considerably on these ideas and processes guides my analysis. By closely studying a range of their writings in light of much that is known of the porous dialogue between masculinity and imperialism in fin-de-siècle culture and politics, I hope to be able to trace the contours of their commonalities: subtle overlaps in aesthetics and opinion with reference to power, manliness, and national and imperial politics. The kind of men who would lead and defend the Empire as well as those who would strike at it seem to be constituted similarly, and in undertaking this critical survey across the spectrum of Kipling’s and Yeats’s writing I hope to be able to link them both to a shared dialogue of masculinity and imperialism.

* Before venturing onto the texts, it will be useful to expand a little more on the context and the tools with which I will approach them. The history of British imperialism and the nature and scope of the British Empire in India are too well known to need any detailed recounting here: the corpus of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Bernard Cohn, RosieLlewellyn Jones, Christopher Herbert, Thomas Metcalfe, and Pramod K. Nayar immediately comes to mind amongst the galaxy of scholars and commentators who have written on the political, military, economic, socio-cultural, and epistemic aspects of the Raj. Equally well known is the thesis of Muscular Christian nationalism and its spectacular success in informing attitudes of warfare and imperial service throughout the long nineteenth century and the subsequent build-up to the Great War: amongst others, the work of Steven Attridge, Mrinalini Sinha, Philippa Levine, and J.R. Watson is notable for articulating the intersections of gender and territoriality in the consolidation of the British Empire. The critical interventions which frame my enquiry in this study, therefore, are those which concern the meeting of these notions with specific reference to the oeuvre of Kipling and Yeats. Highlighting the ‘creative adaptability of the masculine, imperial subject . . . to the making and maintaining of a multicultural empire’ (Randall 22), 257

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Don Randall argues that the boy in much of Kipling’s writing is a liminal figure whose unruly physical energy ‘counters yet confirms the fissuring of the masculine, authoritative subjectivity upon which a coherent, masculinist envisioning of the imperial project depends’ (Randall 22). Mediating various experiences of the Empire, the adolescent boy in Kipling is also the site of the uncanny wherein the primitive and the other are familiarised even as they, in turn, defamiliarise him. This process of disruptive consolidation had been consistently alluded to throughout British imperial history, from Edmund Burke to G. Stanley Hall, and in Kipling’s adolescent boys a flux of values and aspirations can be seen in direct relation to the shaping of not just individual minds but national and imperial culture as a whole (Randall 54). The crucible of many of these values was the public school, enduring emblem of a system of gradated education which served more than anything else to lend majestic and glorious hues to notions of national and imperial duty. C.A. Hagerman has persuasively asserted the significance of Graeco-Roman discourse circulating through the public school culture in informing the self-fashioning of many of the elites who went on to expand and rule the British Empire: ‘the classics’, he argues, ‘constituted a living element of British culture in India’ (Hagerman 15). Along with classicism and group sports, corporal punishment was also an important part of this system: as Emily A. McDermott points out, it acted ‘as a tool of domination and hierarchization’ (McDermott 384) which was believed to be necessary in preparing boys for the transition into the world of men. However, even as the masculine in Kipling is premised on ‘a hierarchy of race and class’ (Montefiore 75), it is hybrid in terms of an underlying ‘feminine shadow-shelf [which] can be subjected to the authority of control but never abolished’ (Montefiore 66). In many ways, the constant recourse to aggressive, imperial masculinity in not just Kipling’s writings but also in late Victorian national culture served as a coping mechanism ‘which helped Britons deal with the anxieties of service in India’ (Hagerman 191). A similar strain of critique may be detected in comment on Yeatsian notions of masculinity and Irish nationalism. Within the colonial hierarchy, Ireland – England’s oldest and closest colony – was associated with femininity due to its subordinate political and racial identity with reference to the British (Valente 190). Curiously, as Marjorie Howes argues, Yeats did not immediately disassociate Irishness from femininity despite this heavily skewed understanding of femininity and Irish

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masculinity. Rather, he created a different understanding of femininity as espoused by the Irish: Yeats does not reject it as pathology, or lock it into a hierarchical, complementary relationship with British masculinity. He allies femininity with racial specificity, both Irish and English, and claims that beneath Irish particularity lay a masculine universalism. (Howes 27–8) Notions of masculinity, however, circulated globally within the connected world of the British Empire, and as his poetic and political career progressed Yeats was increasingly unable to balance this delicate recovery and celebration of the culturally feminine with the heroically masculine. Referring playfully to the tensions emergent from this dilemma, Terry Eagleton found that throughout Yeats’s corpus ‘the violent, demonic, libidinal male is the architect of order, but that order itself is somehow feminine’ (Eagleton 139). The centrality of women, of the feminine, to the masculine world order of society, nation, empire, and war radically upholds as well as dramatically undermines it. The Irish being though unfit for political self-rule was considered as a consequence of their easily inflammable, feminine sensibilities, even as the sudden, violent rebellions occurring against British rule were understood as symptoms of this same femininity (Valente 192). In order to recover their individual and national agency as men, Irish poets like Yeats countered ‘British paternalism by tapping into the history and traditional lore of Ireland to produce the codes and institutions of a native patriarch’ (Valente 193). Irish nationalism, dismissed as feminine violence, necessitated a sublimation of femininity due to its depletion of libidinal male virility. Inevitably, thus, the male psyche and male creative powers stood fissured: as Eagleton points out, ‘Yeats is radically divided, strung out between an imaginary identification with the heroic patriots whose zeal has made his appear weakly feminine, and an equally imaginary identification with the deathly spectatorial mother, impotent in a different way’ (Eagleton 142).

* This fragmentation, fissuring, is the operative framework within which I place my analysis of Kipling and Yeats. It is by now a critical

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commonplace that both these authors were, to varying extents, beneficiaries as well as victims of British industrial imperialism. Their works differ much in intent, content, and form, but they inescapably engage with the gargantuan apparatus of British imperialism. What interests me in this chapter is to think of how both Kipling and Yeats create and invoke similar kinds of muscular masculinities as reactions for as well as against imperialism, and how these reactions embody a multifaceted crisis which, ultimately, is the crisis of industrialised imperialism itself. In Kipling’s vast oeuvre, Stalky & Co. is, perhaps, remarkable for its direct and detailed conceptualisation of the making of English men. In other words, the transition and transformation of boys into manhood is what emerges as a recurring motif from this text. In the short school song or ballad prefixed to the text, praise is offered to the ‘famous men’ (Kipling vii), the ‘Ancients of the college’ (Kipling viii) who with the ‘toil of their To-day/Bought for us To-morrow!’ (Kipling ix). This paean to the makers of men, the ‘famous men . . . of little showing’ (Kipling ix) evokes almost dogmatically the necessity of always remembering what was taught to be them as ‘God’s Own Common Sense,/Which is more than knowledge’ (Kipling viii); this common sense is interpreted as always following orders, the ‘safest, easiest and best’ (Kipling viii) way to perform those quiet sacrifices in the line of duty which keep together through ‘Mine and fuse and grapnel’ (Kipling viii) the vast behemoth of the Empire. Reminiscent as this untitled ballad is of ‘The Queen’s Men’, where the tragic heroism of these sacrifices in the line of duty comes strikingly through the lines ‘Scarce had they lifted up,/Life’s full and fiery cup,/Than they had set it down untouched before them’ (Kipling 82), it serves well to put in place the thematic of energetic, self-sacrificing manhood which will inform the text. Even as Stalky, M’Turk, and Beetle baffle their school masters and awe their peers with their incorrigibility,3 they are always orienting themselves and are being oriented to the proverbial demands of God and Queen. In, for instance, ‘A Little Prep’, the trio’s irritation at losing their ‘Uncle’ Stalky and M’Turk to the annual Old Boys’ football match is negated by the excitement of having the old boys, the alumnus of the school, amongst them: the old boys are cheered thoroughly, and at night Lieutenant R. Crandall – Crandall minor of his days in the Coll. – is flocked in the dormitory for a blow-by-blow account of ‘FatSow’ Duncan’s death in wilds of the North-West Frontier of India. Similarly, in ‘The Flag of Their Country’, the omniscient, paternalistic narrator informs the reader with equanimity how which boy met or 260

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would meet his death in the line of imperial duty: ‘this is that Perowne who was shot in Equatorial Arica by his own men’, etc. (Kipling 203). The tragic, albeit fiery, pathos of the ballad ‘The Queen’s Men’ here is presented in keeping with the settled order of things, a further substantiation of the evocation of selfless sacrifice presented in the school song alluded to above. The preponderance of references to Sandhurst, to the Army as the best profession, and to the many captains, lieutenants, generals, and other such military attachés who are fathers, brothers, and uncles of the boys is indicative of the vigorously aggressive patriotism that is expected as natural in proper English boys. ‘Kipling’s school boys and his imperial soldiers are remarkably alike’ (Randall 92), and the tone of well-deserved sacrifice – the equanimity with which the deaths of Old Boys are mentioned and the eagerness with which the accounts are consumed by the boys – reflects the expansive muscularity expected of English boys-into-men.4 Therefore, the vigorous activity of the fighting man blends with the self-sacrifice of the righteous martyr to lend the Victorian soldier a haloed image of zealous selflessness in pursuit of a higher, divinely appointed cause. While God’s Chivalry as a formative soldiering principle entailed a stern, near-ascetic devotion to the call of duty, a programmatic exposure to the classics meant inculcation of such values as regere imperio populous (Hagerman 89). Kipling’s patient, paternalistic equanimity about the boys’ forthcoming death in the field of action far away from home has to be located in this context, a background combining poems like ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’ and ‘Onward! Christian soldiers’ – which enmesh inextricably the work of the British soldier with the work of the British evangelist – and tales of boisterous yet wholesome adventure in the annals of journals like The Boy’s Own Paper. In other words, boys turned into men only by becoming accustomed to the inevitability of violence and expansionist aggression, by believing their duty to be so as obvious, natural, and just. In ‘Slaves of the Lamp’, the concluding story of Stalky & Co., we meet all the boys after some years’ interlude, when they have all grown up to be soldiering and administering men in their own right. An informal reunion of sorts has been organised in the baronial castle of the Infant; the primary topic of discussion and reminiscence is Stalky, an ‘adequate chap’ at ‘seven feet high and four feet thick’ (Kipling 249). Stalky’s career in India has been one long story of hair-raising escapades, daredevil acts of courage, and unstinting loyalty to his vocation. Radically appropriating early colonial fears of going native, Kipling’s narrator informs us that Stalky is quite a ‘Sikh. . . [and] takes his men to pray 261

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at the Durbar Sahib at Amritzar regularly as clockwork, when he can’ (Kipling 252). However, even as he is, so to say, one with his soldiers, a vigorous man-at-arms in perfect consort with his subordinates, he is also essentially the same Stalky of old: when he pulls a lamp over a dead comrade’s body, the look on his face is ‘beastly . . . his nostrils all blown out, same as he used to look when he was bullyin’ a fag’ (Kipling 255). His cunning, zeal, and ingenuity in India, that vast testing ground of English manhood, are quite the same as they were in the Coll., his schoolmates just as surprised at his military escapades now as they used to be in their adolescence at his pranks in school: the transition from boyhood to manhood only accentuates the peculiar form of manly zeal, dynamism, and leadership inculcated in school. Even as English men continue being English boys, their adaptable hybridity signals ‘a break-down of center/periphery thinking in favour of a more continuously applied, globalised view’ (Randall 90) of proper masculine valour and conduct. Stalky’s intimacy with his soldiers is not too unlike the charades performed in school, where the boys act through various characters and parts in pursuit of a larger goal. This is significant, because even as India appears ‘full of Stalkies – Cheltenham and Haileybury and Marlborough chaps – that we don’t know anything about’ (Kipling 271), the variant, multifarious hybridity of these men – boys – acts as a ‘fetish of imperial representation’ (Randall 108) projecting an ideal of what empire, and empire’s men, should be like. However, that they were often not so, not this, that the demands of imperial service sublimated their anxieties is also apparent in Kipling’s writing. On close inspection, it appears that to be a man is to not just stride dutifully into the future but also ‘to be shaken by love and pain’ in the performance of these duties (Montefiore 80). That these responses and yearnings are often subliminal is hauntingly apparent in ‘The Brushwood Boy’. George ‘Galahad’ Cottar is everything a man could and should be in the universal pursuit of imperial duty: dedicated as much to ars poetica as to the field of action,5 he is the perfect blend of the thoughtful athleticism which emblemises the public school ideal. The key to his success as a young subaltern in India lies in his never forgetting that ‘the difference between a dazed and sulky junior of the upper school and a bewildered, brow-beaten lump of a private fresh from the depot was very small indeed’ (Kipling 36). Yet, even as he never forgets that, he also does not forget to dream, and becomes the Georgie of his childhood who would incessantly conjure a magical universe of all his undimmed desires. While the transition from boyhood to manhood involves an expansion of this universe to the extent that it becomes mappable, ‘She’ remains a 262

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constant companion: first a little girl, by the time he earns his leave for England she is a woman with black hair whose coming fills him – as did the girl’s before her – with ‘delight unspeakable’ (Kipling 70). He goes on, of course, to recognise her in real life as Miriam Lacy, and marries her duly in his own version of the happily ever after. Though ‘nothing important is sacrificed’ in the construction of this ‘splendid masculinity’ (Montefiore 70), it is nonetheless significant that even his psyche is fissured, that the mask of the world-conquering male cloaks a crisis which is as cultural and political as it is sexual.6 This crisis of masculinity is apparent in much of Kipling’s writing on India, where minor deaths and tragedies float through as little blips of no palpable reckoning. A ready example appears in ‘Only a Subaltern’, where the intense pathos of Bobby Wick’s undeserved and sudden end very nearly runs aground the death of his colleague Porkiss. Rebuked by his major, Revere, for letting his fear of contagion in the regimental camp get the better of him, ‘Porkiss was overtaken with a great and chilly fear . . . and, two days later, quitted this world for another where, men do fondly hope, allowances are made for the weakness of the flesh’ (Kipling 136). However, even as no loss is felt or mourning held for Porkiss, whose death is recorded with a grim impassiveness, this crisis comes to a hilt in ‘Thrown Away’, part of Plain Tales from the Hills.7 Recording the suicide of a young subaltern – The Boy – who cannot live up to his expectations of self-worth and merit, the narrator informs us in a poignant, resigned tone that ‘India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously’ (Kipling 16), otherwise the consequences are fatal beyond redemption. In India, all that matters is performing one’s assigned duty and looking forward to ‘Home-furlough and acting allowances’ (Kipling 17), and ‘the wisest thing is to escape as soon as ever you can to some place where amusement is amusement and a reputation worth the having’ (Kipling 17). It is his failure to register this which leads The Boy into terrible depression and pushes him to suicide: his suicide note talks of ‘ “disgrace which he was unable to bear” – “indelible shame” – “criminal folly” – “wasted life”, and so on’ (Kipling 22). Faced with the erosion of his self-worth as an English soldier, unable to see things in their proper proportion, there was absolutely nothing else than death for The Boy.

* These currents of spectacular masculinity, and its underlying anxieties, are not apparent in quite the same way in Yeats’s corpus. His sense of nationalism and of Irishness were not singular8: they acquired 263

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different features through his career, and were linked significantly to and influenced by his notions of gender relationships. There is a deepseated ambiguity in his understanding and deployment of gender roles. His usage of the masculine-feminine binary does not remain uniform: instead, it alters during the course of his writing as he explores sexuality along a broad spectrum. Even as his framing of Irish mythology, Celticism, and nationalism evolved with changes in his notion of masculinity, masculinity as applied to his understanding of empire and nationalism influenced his conception of the Irish themselves. Ireland was firmly associated with femininity by the late nineteenth century due to its subordinate position to the England, the supposedly masculine coloniser. While women were seen to merit secondclass status because of their gender, the Irish as a people were believed to be members of an inferior race and were not considered a true nation (Howes 9–10). To counter this, Yeats routinely employed connotations of masculinity to highlight physical strength and courage in his poetry. The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), for example, evokes a heroic Irish past wherein Oisin and the Fenians stand in for a truly vital Irish nationality against the material and spiritual poverty of Patrick’s Christian Ireland. It also sets Oisin’s masculine prowess and ‘angry king-remembering soul’ against the ‘small and feeble populace’ and ‘bodies unglorious’ of Christian Ireland, and pits the ‘exultant faces’ of pagan gods against Christ’s ‘milk-pale face/Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood’ (Yeats 386). This contrast revolves around the relative presence or absence of virility: Oisin has ‘the Fenians’ old strength’ while the Christian Irish are ‘men waxing so weakly’ (Yeats 397). The world of the Fenians, quite clearly, is a world of martial exploits and male comradeship, though it is important to note that Yeats’s conception of heroism and war is ahistorical and symbolic more than tangible in a topical way (Hynes 42). While Yeats’s earliest Celtic writings repeated, both overtly and covertly, the imperial gendering of the Irish in his own day and age as feminine, in rejecting colonialism’s equation of femininity with inferiority they suggested a profound, though incomplete, departure from the imperial bracketing of genders. The incompleteness of that departure is apparent in the pervasive ambivalence about femininity and masculinity: this gendered construction of Celticism was eventually undertaken by Yeats himself, who claimed that his move away from it was a transition from the feminine to the masculine – and, hence, a more truly national art. In 1903, after he had begun making determined efforts to distance himself from the Celtic Twilight, he told Lady Gregory, ‘My work has got far more masculine’. In the same year, in ‘The 264

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Reform of the Theatre’, he insisted that ‘whatever method one adopts, one must always be certain that the work of art, as a whole, is masculine and intellectual, in its sound as in its form’ (Yeats 388). Similarly, in the next issue of Samhain he called English theatre ‘demoralising’ because it rendered ‘the mind timid and the heart effeminate’ (Yeats 112). In 1904, he told George Russell that he had acquired a positive aversion to Celticism, particularly to those aspects of it associated with femininity: ‘I cannot probably be quite just to any poetry that speaks to me with the sweet insinuating feminine voice of the dwellers in that country of shadows and hollow images. I have dwelt there too long not to dread all that comes out of it’.9 The external world of masculine vigour, thus, came to occupy Yeats’s creative attention even as he deepened his engagement with the symbolic world of spirits and occult realities. In ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ (1893), Yeats argues that his unappreciated capacity to reconcile these two worlds makes him ‘no less than other men’ even if he is not participating in active nationalist politics: his ‘rhymes more than their rhyming tell/Of things discovered in the deep,/Where only body’s laid asleep’ (Yeats 45–6). However, even as he projects himself as the guiding light of an emergent Irish consciousness in the midst of impending revolutionary change, the pressures of this self-proclaimed vocation mar the masculine heroism of his writing. In ‘To His Heart, Bidding it have no Fear’ (1899), Yeats cautions his ‘trembling heart’ that those who fear ‘the flame and the flood’ have ‘no part/With the lonely, majestical multitude’ (Yeats 26–7). This fearful mistrust of active insurrectionary politics mingled with an earlier, continuing anxiety of loss of virility and passion accompanied with ageing and the cares of the everyday world. Continuing from ‘The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’ (1889), where time is the great enemy which reduces strong, passionate men into obsolescence, to ‘Quarrel in Old Age’ (1933), where ‘I had forgiven enough/That had forgiven old age’ (Yeats 257), ageing and the decay of one’s mental and physical faculties remained a constant preoccupation with Yeats as he refined his notion of the prophetic masculine self uncloaking and cloaking the masks of reality. Thus, even though Yeats’s writing engages explicitly with notions of masculinity and heroism, it also displays a marked anxiety on not just the ends but also the feasibility of such raw manly spirit. In ‘Easter 1916’, the poet memorialises the valour of radical revolutionaries such as Thomas MacDonagh, John MacBridge, James Connolly, and Patrick Pearse: these men are the progenitors of a ‘terrible beauty’, which changes the meaning of life and of social relationships completely. Yet, 265

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their sacrifice may have been too long in the making, ‘needless death after all’ (Yeats 181): for the memory of these martyrs may well pale before the wild delirium of Romantic Ireland, the heroes commemorated in ‘September 1913’. Those men and these are separated by: The pride of people that were Bound neither to Cause nor to State. Neither to slaves that were spat on, Nor to the tyrants that spat (Yeats 199) Such is his pride, Yeats confesses in ‘The Tower’ (1928), the pride of a man convinced of his gift to lead fellow men by dint by personal example. This is the lustre of the uncommon men Yeats celebrated throughout his career, men whom ‘manhood tried, or childhood loved/Or boyish intellect approved’: men such as Lionel Johnson, John Synge, George Pollexfen, and Robert Gregory, remembered with reverence in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ (1919). Such men could ‘consume/The entire combustible world in one small room’ (Yeats 131). Such figures, devoted to worldly cares yet above them, were the men Yeats admired: such a man he fashioned himself to be, who would fight not for law nor duty but that ‘lonely impulse of delight’ (Yeats 132) which, as in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (1919), gives impetus to the nobility of spirit in all remarkable, extraordinary heroes. Valorous death alone could save this heroic spirit from dissipating itself in the decrepitude of decaying age: the masculine appears redemptive and regenerative, but only with an acute risk of fracturing from within.

* Significantly, it is this fear of breaking and splintering from within which emerges as a recurrent commonality throughout the oeuvre of Kipling and Yeats. Both of them deal with these fissures, or chaps, in their conceptions of masculinity and imperialism. Even as Kipling created prototypes of British men whose perpetual boyhood fuelled ‘the adventurous realpolitik of the new imperialism’ (Deane 691), he could not evade the pressures which this ideal put upon its adherents. Both in personal life, as Western civilisation went through the intense trauma of the Great War, as well as in his craft, Kipling saw his chaps as men ruling all lands and seas but also withering and cracking from within given the demands of their vocation. Similarly, the patterns 266

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which emerge from studying Yeats’s framing of these notions are complex and riddled with ambiguities. His ideas on masculinity cannot be isolated from his views on femininity: he is, after all, the ‘twentieth century poet in whom art and personality are most intimately one’ (Morrall 36), and the heroic men he imagines and hopes to create through his work are prone to this sexual hybridity at their core. In other words, even as he projects manliness in conjunction with femininity as a redemptive nationalistic quality, he is constantly troubled by the efficacy of pure muscularity as a nationalistic trope. Therefore, with seemingly little else in common apart from the coincidence of birth, Yeats and Kipling still come together in their conceptions of chaps, the men who were engaged in the making as well as the breaking of empire. Though both had widely divergent views on the nature and meaning of the British Empire, they were both conservative in their conceptions of male agency with reference to the heroic, militant action which should be the characteristic hallmark of a free and bold people. Both of them also expressed the psychic and emotional consequences of this expansive and conquering vision of masculinity, though the manner in which this appears in their corpus differs considerably. Nonetheless, this shared tension seems to loop back to their most apparent conjunction, their contemporaneity of birth: sharing the same context of a multivalent imperial apparatus and similar aspirations towards social elitism, Kipling and Yeats were both products of an aggressively industrial, imperial modernity which was as consumptive as it was liberating. They were both chaps striving to be whole, yet festering in the cracks which their push to completion created.

Notes 1 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/chap#chap_Noun_300 2 In a recent commemorative review, Simon Caterson found only this coincidence of birth worth comment: ‘Yeats, like his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, was a world-famous “public man” who mastered traditional verse forms and who wrote during the period just before literature, and art generally, became institutionalised and poets declined in prominence as public figures, supplanted by movie stars, pop singers and, increasingly, everyone else’ (Caterson 1). 3 A rawness of energy which is akin to the energetic uncannyness of the colonial/imperial adventurer (Randall 40–45). 4 Cf. The Brushwood Boy: ‘how . . . boys and men are all of a piece, and how he who can handle the one will assuredly in time control the other’ (Kipling 26). 5 Cf. Emily A. McDermott, ‘Playing for His Side’: the field of action was conceptualised not too differently from the field of sports, male forbearance

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and fortitude on both coming from a carefully inculcated ‘habit of obedience to authority and the concomitant development of strong communal bonds’ (McDermott 392). 6 Cf. Roger Lancelyn Green, ‘Stalky and “The Brushwood Boy” ’, for a delightful quip on the possible contemporaneity of Stalky and Georgie: ‘Even at the latest, then, Cottar must have spent most of 1884 at Sandhurst, and therefore have left Westward Ho! about the end of the previous year – exactly as did Stalky, who had won his commission and departed for India by the end of 1884 (according to “Slaves of the Lamp” Part II).’ 7 From Strickland, the brilliant police inspector adept at native disguises, to Reggie Burke, the happy-go-lucky banker with the proverbial heart of gold, the protean adaptability of the men upholding the Raj is reinforced through the Plain Tales. 8 Yeats began his career believing that the individual and the nation were or should be homologous, and therefore harmonious; Irishness was a resource and support for individuals. Later, he moved to formulations that complicated such propositions and emphasised conflict between individual and nation and the potential violence embodied in conceptions of Irishness (Howes 2). 9 This transition also produced a version of Celticism structured more closely around the class interests of the Anglo-Irish.

Works cited Attridge, Steve. “Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads: The Solider as Hooligan or Hero.” Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 70–91. Carrington, Charles. Kipling’s Horace. London: The Methuen Press, 1978. Caterson, Simon. “Yeats 150.” Books Ireland 361 (2015): 16–17. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/booksireland.361.16. Deane, Bradley. “Imperial Boyhood: Piracy and the Play Ethic.” Victorian Studies 53.4 (2011): 689–714. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/ victorianstudies.53.4.689. Eagleton, Terry. “Politics and Sexuality in W.B. Yeats.” The Crane Bag 9.2 (1985): 138–42. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/30059835. Green, Roger Lancelyn. “Stalky and ‘The Brushwood Boy’.” The Kipling Society. www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_brushwood_green.htm. Hagerman, C.A. Britain’s Imperial Muse: The Classics, Imperialism, and the Indian Empire, 1784–1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Howes, Marjorie. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Hynes, Samuel. “Yeats’s Wars.” The Sewanee Review 97.1 (1989): 36–55. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/27546003. Kemp, Sandra. Kipling’s Hidden Narratives. New York: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1988. Kipling, Rudyard. Plain Tales From the Hills. 1888. London: Penguin Books, 1994.

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———. Soldiers Three, and Other Stories. 1899. New York: Arcadia House, 1950. ———. Stalky & Co.. 1899. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1994. ———. The Jungle Book and Just So Stories. Bristol: Parragon, 1998. McDermott, Emily A. “Playing for His Side – Kipling’s Regulus, Corporal Punishment, and Classical Education.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 15.3 (2008): 369–92. Web. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/25691243. Montefiore, Jan. Rudyard Kipling. Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 2007. Moore-Gilbert, B.J. Kipling and “Orientalism”. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Morrall, John. “Personal Themes in the Public and Private Writings of W.B. Yeats.” University Review, 1.9 (1956): 28–36. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/ stable/25504396. Ohno, Mitsuko. “Gender and Heroism in Yeats’s Dance Plays.” Journal of Irish Studies 23 (2008): 24–33. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/27759605. Orel, Harold, ed.. Kipling: Interviews and Recollections, Vol 1. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1983. Randall, Don. Kipling’s Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Sinha, Mrilanini. “Introduction.” Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. 1–33. Stotesbury, John A. “Rudyard Kipling and his Imperial Verse: Critical Dilemmas.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 1.2 (1995): 37–46. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/41273895. Sullivan, K.E. comp.. Kipling: Victorian Balladeer. London: Brockhampton Press, 1996. Taneja, G.R. ed.. W.B. Yeats: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. Delhi: Pencraft International, 1995. Valente, Joseph. “The Myth of Sovereignty: Gender in the Literature of Irish Nationalism.” ELH, 61.1 (1994): 189–210. Web. JSTOR www.jstor.org/ stable/2873438. Yeats, W.B. Autobiographies. 1955. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980. ———. The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

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INDEX

Abbey Theatre 66, 67 Achebe, Chinua 208 Age of Reform 118 Ahmad, Aijaz 196 Aldritt, Keith 22 Alighieri, Dante 103, 108; La Vita Nuova 104 Allen, Charles 34 Anglo-Indian newspapers 152, 156, 195 Annan, Noel 35 Aristotle 46 Arnold, Matthew 109, 223 Arnold, Thomas 121 Arts and Crafts Movement 140 Auden, W.H. 5, 28, 29, 224 Barnes, George 26 Beerbohm, Max 82 Bhagavadgita 246, 248 – 53 Birkenhead, Lord 27 Blainey, Geoffrey 119 Blake, William 177 Bloom, Harold 58, 145, 202 Boehmer, Elleke 203 Boer War 5, 215, 220 boundary-crossing 11, 96 – 101 Bradley, Anthony 68 Brawne, Fanny 113 Breton, André 62, 63; Nadja 62 Bridges, Robert 48 Bronte, Anne 120 Bronte, Charlotte 120 Brooke, Rupert 82 Brooks, Cleanth 79

Brown, Wendy 186 Browne, Sir Thomas 27 Bubb, Alexander 75, 139 Burne-Jones, Margaret 96 Burns, Robert 47 Butler, John 2 Butterfly of Zhuangzi 104 Caroll, Lewis 157 Carrington, Charles E. 21, 35, 38 Caserio, Robert 202 Casey, Roger 65 Celticism 264 – 5 Chatterjee, Mohini 1, 26, 45 Chesterton, G.K. 199 Chunder, Hurree 123 censorship 179 – 90 Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) 10, 152 – 62, 195 collective memory 8, 70 Conrad, Joseph 204 cultural materialism 6 Darton, Harvey 40 Davis, Dorothy Salisbury 8, 61 – 71 ‘dead’ languages 120 de facto marriage 94 democratic vulgarity 176 Desai, R.W. 146, 147 Dickens, Charles 120 Dilworth, Thomas 109 discursive ambivalence 87 Douglas, Alfred 53 Dowson, Ernest 112 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 71, 121

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Dublin Art Gallery 68 Dublin Hermetic Society 4 Duke of Wellington 120 Dunsterville, Lionel Charles 243

Hughes, Thomas 120, 230; Tom Brown’s School Days 120, 230, 245 Hyde-Lees, Georgie 23

Eagleton, Terry 259 Easter Rising 77 Eliot, T.S. 5, 21, 26, 84, 161 Ellis, Edwin 77 Ellmann, Richard 19 empire: apologist of 21; barely British 256; experiences of 258; hegemonic authority 184; longing for 180; networks of 194; new vision of 199; subjects of 87

Ilbert Bill 156, 157 imperial stereotypes 87 – 8 innocence 53 – 5 Irish Home Rule 52 Irish Independent 175 Islam, Shamsul 35

First Irish Land Act (1870) 165 Forster, E.M. 52, 91, 224 Foucault, Michel 196 Franssen, Paul 142 Freeman, Lucy 70 Gallienne, Richard Le 214 Gandhi, Mahatma 194 Gillane, Michael 169, 171 Gilmour, David 142 Godolphin School 2 Gonne, Maud 4, 53, 62, 77, 82, 113, 166, 169, 171 Goswami, Manu 181 Grahame, Kenneth 40 Great War 22, 257, 266 Green, Lancelyn 35, 37 Grierson, H.J.C. 24 Hagerman, C.A. 258 Hai, Ambreen 180 Halbwachs, Maurice 70 Hamlet 148, 149 Hardyesque pessimism 93 Harrison, James 36 Harte, Elizabeth Anna 37 Hassett, Joseph 58 Hayes, Julie 61, 62, 66, 70 Henley, W.E. 19, 214 – 16, 220, 245 Holden, John 94 Home Rule Bill 166 Hone, Joseph 23, 26 Howes, Marjorie 164, 169, 174, 258, 264

Jameson, Leander Starr 246, 247 Jamiludin, Khwaja 153 Jataka Tales 7, 38 Jeffares, Norman 109, 174 Jellaludin, McIntosh 100 Jenkins, Ahauerus 159 jingo patriotism 141 Johnson, Lionel 112 Joyce, James 58, 61; Dubliners 109 karayitri pratibha 110 Keats, John 108; egotistical sublime 144, 145; Ode on a Grecian Urn 76; The Fall of Hyperion 76 Kelly, John 19 Kemp, Sandra 231 Kettle, Arnold 140 Kim (1901) 10, 21, 25, 90, 193, 227, 243 Kipling, John Lockwood 2, 7, 38 Kipling, Josephine 28, 31 Kipling, Rudyard: ‘The Ballad of East and West’ 183; Barrack Room Ballads 19, 22, 215; Captains Courageous 12, 192 – 208; ‘Chant-Pagan’ 217; ‘The City of Evil Countenances’ 91; ‘The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin’ 186; Cottar, George ‘Galahad’ 262; ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’ 206 – 8; Departmental Ditties 3, 10, 11, 82, 89, 152, 155; Echoes 82; ‘The Exiles Line’ 205; ‘The Gardener’ 28; ‘The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows’ 187; ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ 219; ‘Gunga Din’ 83; ‘How Fear Came’ 36, 39; ‘In the

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Rukh’ 31, 32; Jacob Cavendish, MA 158; The Jungle Book 7, 31 – 43, 124, 233, 242; Life’s Handicap 89, 95; The Light that Failed 12, 192 – 208, 227; ‘A Little Prep’ 260; ‘Little Tobrah’ 232; ‘The Looking-Glass’ 26; ‘The Love Song of Har Dyal’ 98; ‘Mandalay’ 83; Many Inventions 32; ‘The Mark of the Beast’ 188; The Marrèd Drivers of Windsor 142; ‘The Mother Hive’ 4; Mowgli 31 – 43, 124; ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’ 233; ‘A New Departure’ 157; Plain Tales from the Hills 20, 89, 185, 187, 228; ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’ 142; Puck of Pook’s Hill 3; ‘The Queen’s Men’ 261; The Seven Seas 84; Something of Myself 37, 153, 154, 156, 185, 186, 188, 228, 230, 231, 235; ‘The Spring Running’ 31, 33; ‘A St. Helena Lullaby’ 26; ‘The Storm Cone’ 4; ‘The Story of Paul Vaugel’ 20; ‘They’ 28; Tibetan Lama 237; Traffics and Discoveries 141; ‘The Two-Sided Man’ 194; ‘The way through the woods’ 28; ‘The White Man’s Burden’ 243; ‘Wireless’ 141, 142 Kiplingesque 82 Landor, Walter Savage 111 Lee, John 138, 139 Levine, Herbert J. 104 Lewis, Lisa 231 Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 202 Lorne Lodge 2 Lucas, John 168 Macaulay, Thomas 120 MacBride, John 173 MacDonald, George Browne 2 Macrae, Alastair D.F. 165 Maddox, Brenda 52 Mammalia of India (1884) 38 Mannin, Ethel 167 Marvell, Andrew 76 masculinity: alternate 13; AngloIndian 228, 238; British 235, 238;

crisis of 263; fin-de-siècle notions of 256; imperial 258; Irish 259; militaristic 231; rival 237; virile 4 Mason, Philip 33, 93 material pragmatism 3 McBratney, John 159 McClure, John A. 34 McDermott, Emily A. 258 McNally, Seamus 66, 67 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 143 Miller, J.H. 198 Montefiore, Jan 235 Montoya, Margaret E. 179 Mooney, Thomas Francis 63 Muscular Christianity 121, 242 – 53 Nathan, Leonard E. 64 nationalism: incipient 182; Irish 52, 61, 164, 166, 258; jingoistic 195; militant 165; Yeats’s 21, 79, 263 Nehru, Jawahar Lal 194 Nesbitt, Elizabeth 33, 35 – 7, 41 Nora, Pierre 68; The Realms of Memory 69 Oates, Joyce Carol 51 O’Hara, Kimball 128 O’Leary, John 166 Olivelle, Patrick 38 O’Rahilly, Michael Joseph 65 Orel, Harold 231 Orwell, George 5, 167, 228 Panchatantra 7, 31 – 43 Parliamentary Home Rule Party 20 Pater, Walter 22, 108 Paulin, Tom 141 Pendennis 156 Philip, Neil 21, 22 Pierce, David 21 Pioneer 27, 152 – 62 Plato 119 Plotz, Judith A. 237 Poet Laureateship 82, 199 political radicalism 54 Pound, Ezra 106 Powell, Baden 234 pre-Raphaelite 20, 216 Quin, John 176

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race: class and 4, 127, 140; inferior 264; -separateness 99, 100; superiority 183 realism 105 Ricketts, Harry 82, 139 Robin, Christopher 40 Robinson, Lennox 23 Robson, W.W. 32, 40 Roosevelt, Theodore 40 Rosicrucians 77 Rossa, O’Donovan 65 Rossetti, D.G. 100 Rubery, Matthew 153 Ruddock, Margot 19 Ruskin, John 122, 129; ‘Modern Education’ 118; Sesame and Lilies 121 Russell, Bertrand 114 Russell, George 20, 218, 265 Russell, Richard Raskin 65 Ryder, Arthur W. 38, 39 Said, Edward 61, 200, 229 Scout Movement 234 Second Irish Land Act (1883) 165 self-: aggrandisement 110; annulment 143; aware consciousness 143; healing tree 48 – 53; indulgence 106; referential poem 145; sacrifice 245 sensory receptiveness 142 Sepoy Mutiny 181 – 2 Seymour-Smith, Martin 38 Shadwell, C.L. 104 Sikka, Shalini 46, 47 Sinnett, A.P. 26 Smedley, Menella 37 Snukal, Robert 57 Socrates 119 Sri Aurobindo 53 Stevenson, R.L. 245 Stewart, J.I.M. 35, 41 Sthitaprajna 242 – 53 Stuart, Charles 166 Sullivan, Zohreh 180 Sutcliff, Rosemary 40 Swami, Purohit 1, 45, 58, 59 Symons, Arthur 77 Synge, John 66

Tagore, Rabindranath 1, 77, 80, 137 Taylor, E.G.R. 75 Thacker, Spink and Co. 160 Times Literary Supplement 82 Tippett, Sir Michael Kemp 79 Toker, Leona 56 Torchiana, Daniel T. 164 transcendentalism 126 Tynan, Katharine 23 ungendered self 45 – 59 Upanishads 8, 45, 58; Brihadaranyaka 51, 54, 55; Chhandogya 49, 50, 54; Isha 48, 55, 56; Katha 49, 59; Prashna 49; Taittireeya 56, 57 Ure, Peter 146, 148 Verlaine, Paul 106 Wellesley, Dorothy 26 Weygandt, Cornelius 221 Wilde, Oscar 53, 202; ‘The Devoted Friend’ 48; Dorian Gray 202 Wild Geese 63 Williams, Frederick 52 Wilson, Edmund 33 Wordsworth, William 52, 111, 138; ‘The Green Linnet’ 48, 52; The Prelude 76; ‘The Tables Turned’ 47 Yeats, William Butler: ‘Adam’s Curse’ 24; ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 56; ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ 25; ‘All Souls’ Night’ 28; ‘Among School Children’ 84; Anashuya and Vijaya 28; A Book of Irish Verse 23; The Countess Cathleen 164, 167, 169; The Dreaming of the Bones 171; ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ 9, 103 – 16, 145; ‘Emotion of Multitude’ 111; ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’ 23; The Green Helmet 220, 223; The Green Helmet and Other Poems 77; Hic 105; ‘Hodos Chameliontos’ 113; ‘The Holy Mountain’ 25; Ideas of Good and Evil 145;

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INDEX

‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ 266; In the Seven Woods 77; ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (1919) 266; ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ 140; The Lake Isle of Innisfree 216; ‘The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’ 265; Last Poems 78; ‘The Man and the Echo’ 171; Michael Robartes and the Dancer 7, 78; ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ 22, 68; ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ 174, 218, 220; On the Boiler 174; The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892 – 1935 23, 28; Per Amica Silentia Lunae 103, 111; ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ 7, 45 – 59, 177; Purgatory 147 – 9, 174; Responsibilities 107; ‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth’ 71; Robartes, Michael

27, 104, 106; Rosa Alchemica 27; ‘Rosa Alchemica’ 104; The Rose 77; ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 78, 79, 82; The Secret Rose 27; ‘September 1913’ 168; ‘The Song of the Wandering Aengus’ 61 – 71; The Tower 61, 78, 108; The Trembling of the Veil 112; ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’ 176, 177; A Vision 23, 28, 77, 81, 103; ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ 20; The Wanderings of Oisin 264; The Wild Swans at Coole 9, 77 – 8, 107; The Wind Among the Reeds 77; The Winding Stair and Other Poems 78, 108; The Words upon the Window Pane 64 Yeats is Dead 61 Zwerdling, Alex 164

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