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CHAPTER TWO

Kipling’s Contrasts

In poem after poem, story after story, and novel after novel Kipling repeat-
edly and untiringly carved out sharp, broad areas of contrast. Kipling
insists on the distinctions between man and beast, the primitive and the
civilized, the insider and the outsider, the patrician and the plebian, East
and West, England and India, black and white, heaven and hell. There is
the possibility for violent antagonism here but it doesn’t develop in
Kipling’s world, even though his characters are often bloody and scarred.
In his earliest work—Plain Tales from the Hills, Life’s Handicap, and The
Phantom Rickshaw—he contrasts the plain with the extraordinary, phan-
toms with realities, the handicapped with the potent; he contrasts provin-
cial Anglo-India with England, comfortable society with the anarchic
forces beneath its surface and beyond its frontiers. He marshals the forces
of order and disorder, stability and fragmentation, onto the Indian stage.
In Captains Courageous he contrasts Harvey Cheene, the rich boy, with
Dan Troop, the poor boy; the novice with the initiate; the life of leisure
with the life of work. In The Naulahka, “A Story of East and West,” writ-
ten in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, he compares the American
West with the Indian plains; the fair American girl with the dark Indian
princess; the aristocratic splendor of India with the simplicity and indus-
triousness of Colorado. In The Light That Failed he compares the
Egyptian battlefield and Tommy Atkins, the British soldier, with London,
the literary world and the artist. He compares the world of respectability,
love and marriage with passion, sex and the disreputable. He contrasts the
demands of art with the necessities of action. In The Jungle Book he com-
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pares the tribe with the outsider, the village of man with the confederation
of beasts, law with anarchy.
The contrasts are firmly established but the dramatic situations are
terminated without rigorous struggle. They do not precipitate dialectical
conflicts. Kipling’s heroes stand in a world which is divided between East
and West, Black and white, rich and poor. They are composed of atomic
particles which pull them toward the East and then back toward the West,
toward the Brown man and then back to the white man. But there is little
pull or push. The particles do not collide to produce new particles or
antiparticles. Kipling keeps the opposing impulses in his heroes and the
rival armies in society under control. He is the master at the machine,
pulling levers and pushing buttons. Kipling’s contrasts are immutable; he
catalogs and compartmentalizes his characters. He allows his men time to
wander on the leash, but demands of them that they remain close to
home. They inevitably do. Hell, the East, the Jungle—these worlds are
seen and explored by his heroes, but they are seen in concave or convex
mirrors and they are scouted rather than explored. The under and the
outer worlds are rejected. Kipling’s characters scurry back to heaven, the
West and civilization. Early in the game the outcome of the foraging expe-
ditions is clear. In The Naulahka we know that Tarvin will not remain in
India; he will not marry the Indian princess. He must return to Colorado
with the plain American girl. At moments he is terrified and fascinated by
the extraordinary horrors and beauties of India, but he goes back to
Middle America. In Captains Courageous we know that Kipling will lift
Harvey Cheene from the fishing schooner We’re Here as swiftly and deci-
sively as he lets him fall from the luxury liner into the Atlantic Ocean.
Work is attractive for a summer but not as a way of life; Cheene returns to
his wealthy and powerful family. We don’t feel, as the author wants us to
feel, that he will be a better capitalist because he has been a worker.
Kipling describes the organization man in isolation, the puritan in
Bohemia, the white man among Brown men. His men are defined, their
minds made flexible, their muscles made taut, through contact with their
opposing types. They watch the moves of their adversaries in a magical
mirror and adjust their own selves accordingly. There is rarely open con-
flict between Kipling’s characters. In Captains Courageous there is no con-
flict between workers and bosses. In the tales of Anglo-India there is no
dialectical relationship between East and West, Black and white. Kipling
creates harmony between classes and cultures. On his ladder there is
movement in only one direction: the puritan moves down among the
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bohemians, but the bohemian cannot move up among the puritans; the
white man lives among Brown men, but the Brown man cannot live among
whites. The rich boy plays poor boy, but the poor boy cannot play rich
boy. Harvey Cheene exchanges his tweeds for a fisherman’s garb, he learns
the fisherman’s slang, but he is always a rich boy mimicking a fisherman.
Mowgli is the prototype of all Kipling’s heroes. He defines his own
predicament when during a jungle ritual after the hunt he chants:

I dance on the hide of Shere Khan, but my heart is very heavy. My mouth is cut
and wounded with the stones from the village, but my heart is very light because
I have come back to the jungle. Why? These two things fight together in me as the
snakes fight in the spring. The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while it
falls. Why? I am two Mowglis . . . .

Mowgli the son of man is an alien in the jungle, and Mowgli a brother
of the jungle tribe is an outcast among men. He has parents in both the
Indian village and the Indian jungle. He is a man-child in the jungle.
Kipling creates a contrast between man and beast, but it is diversion-
ary. The vital contrast in The Jungle Book is not between man and beast
but between law and anarchy, the empire and the Indians. When Mowgli
chooses sides he leaves the beasts to join the world of men; but the men
are white men, not Brown men. He exchanges the yoke of jungle law for
the yoke of empire; he rejects the lawless rabble and embraces the stern
officials. Mowgli leaves the beasts’ world to become a man, but he mounts
a rung at the bottom of the imperial ladder in the Department of Woods,
exchanging a tribe for a bureaucracy. Kipling’s contrasts give the appear-
ance of objectivity, but no stories are more partisan. Behind the cunning-
ly arranged contrasts lie the values of an authoritarian.
The first story Kipling wrote about Mowgli, “In the Rukh,” describes
the last incident chronologically in his saga—his coming of age. His hero
is married to an Indian woman and appointed to a post in the Empire.
From the start Mowgli is respectable. In the stories that followed, Kipling
retraced his earlier career; he described the boy Mowgli. But Kipling does
not reject the British Empire, as one might expect, when he describes
Mowgli’s youth. He celebrates law, hierarchy and empire in different
ways. At the conclusion of The Jungle Book Kipling’s spokesman says:

Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant,
and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his
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64 THE MYTHOLOGY OF IMPERIALISM

major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three
regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the ser-
vant of the Empress.

The tales about men and beasts offer a message: the Empire. The
Jungle Book culminates in a vision of the imperial hierarchy. The little
world of the jungle forms a small circle within other circles within the cir-
cle of empire. Kipling’s circle of empire contains all. In The Naulahka,
Captains Courageous, and Plain Tales from the Hills, contrasts are sus-
tained and differences are tolerated because all individuals, classes, races,
and groups are incorporated under the Empire or into the imperial hier-
archy. In Kipling’s model society the bear, the wolf, the snake, accept the
law. In the Anglo-Indian society of his day men pledged their allegiance to
Victoria, Empress of India. Each species is different from the next, each
man is distinct from his fellow man, but they are all contained in an over-
arching structure. Divisions in the hero are subsumed under his one patri-
otic self. The two Mowglis merge in the one Mowgli, who accepts the law
in the worlds of both man and beast.
Kipling’s theme is simultaneously the separation of races, classes and
lands, and the links between two men of opposite places of origin. The
societies are opposed, but the individual men are together. Kipling writes
of diversity in unity and unity in diversity. Rich and poor are different, but
Harvey Cheene and Dan Troop are comrades; man and beast are differ-
ent, but Mowgli is a friend of the wolf and the bear. The contrast at the
core of Kipling’s work is between cultures which are at opposite ends of
the spectrum and individuals from those cultures who stand side by side.
Kipling’s classic statement of the theme is from “The Ballad of East and
West”:

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgment 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 is concerned equally with the irreconcilable hemispheres and

the reconciled men. He is the poet of inequality who simultaneously cel-
ebrates the friendship between the Brown man and the white man, the
rich man and the poor man. The poet of inequality deceives us; he
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appears in the guise of the poet of democracy and lauds Black men,
Brown men, poor men. In Kipling’s work the common soldier loves his
officer and praises the colonial people. “The finest man I knew,” says the
cockney soldier in one of Kipling’s best-known poems, “was our regimen-
tal bhisti Gunga Din.” But when two strong men from the ends of the
earth come face-to-face and embrace in Kipling’s world, it is not a celebra-
tion of human fraternity. The friendships between the rich and the poor,
Black and white, the tribe and the alien, in Captains Courageous, The
Jungle Book, “The Ballad of East and West” and “Gunga Din” are unlike
the genuine moments of humanity reflected in literature. When Melville
describes Ishmael and Queequeg locked in each other’s arms, he presents
an ideal of human fraternity in a world of violent hatred. When Tolstoy
depicts an old Russian peasant sharing bread with Levin, he offers a
utopian vision in a world where masters and peasants are in conflict. At
first glance, Kipling’s scenes have the look of these situations in Tolstoy
and Melville. But unlike Melville and Tolstoy, Kipling neglects the real
conflicts between rich and poor, Black and white. Kipling is out to co-opt
us. He wants us to remember the friendship between Kim and the lama,
Cheene and Troop, and forget about the exploitation of Black by white,
the oppressed by their oppressors. When his heroes, Mowgli and the
wolf, Cheene and Troop, join in common aim, they stand in contrast
with—but not in defiance of—the divisions between men. Kipling’s
images of unity define oppositions and contrasts. The exception proves
the rule. His characters offer fellowship to each other because they know
their places, they accept the social hierarchy. There is only fraternity
between unequal partners in Kipling’s world, and that is no fraternity at all.
Kipling’s earliest coherent expression of this idea is the story “East
and West.” Two passengers, one of them Kipling and the other an elegant
and educated Afghan, sit facing each other on a train. They converse cor-
dially. They never fight, but they never sit arm in arm and they never
embrace. They are rigid machines whose jaws open and close, and whose
arms move up and down. Kipling, the white machine, tells the Afghan that
“God made us different.” The oracle has spoken. Differences in this case
mean British superiority and Afghan inferiority. Kipling asks us to imag-
ine “parallel straight lines” which, “being continued to all eternity, will
never meet.” As the train goes onward, carrying an Afghan and Kipling in
the same compartment, the railway tracks remain forever apart, a
reminder to Kipling of the inevitable and necessary division of Black from
white. Apartheid is his law of nature.
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66 THE MYTHOLOGY OF IMPERIALISM

In Life’s Handicap he describes a monastery in Northern India which

shelters men of different races and religions: “Mohamedan, Sikh, and
Hindi mixed equally under the trees. They were old men, and when man
has come to the turnstiles of Night all the creeds in the world seem to him
wonderfully alike and colourless.” It sounds internationalist in spirit, but
these men, none of whom are white, come together in weakness rather
than in strength, rejecting rather than preserving their individual differ-
ences. Here unity is based on the denial of diversity. As a Freemason in
India Kipling boasted that he knew Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews,
but he accepted them because the important thing was not that they were
Jews or Hindus or Muslims, but because they were Freemasons. His view
of empire was of Freemasonry writ large. He would shake any man’s
hand—Black or white, rich or poor—if he defended the empire. The dif-
ferent nations were incorporated after combat in one body. In the forma-
tion of the Empire he noted that the Zulus, the Malays, the Maoris, the
Pathans, the Arabs, and the Sudanese “played a thoroughly good game.
For this we owe them many thanks.” It was all good sport.
Kipling’s contrasts, his celebrations of individual customs and traits,
are incorporated into a world of masters and slaves, rich and poor, victim-
izers and victims. The fear of miscegenation, rebellion, and social
upheaval struck deep into the core of his being. In his nightmares he envi-
sioned the overthrow of white by Black, West by East. Those nightmares
were warnings to him that the things that he loved, things as they were and
as he hoped they would continue to be, were threatened. He believed in
the necessity of racial separation, class lines, law, social hierarchy; but he
was captivated by the things he feared most. Kipling defended the estab-
lishment, the West, the white man, the rich, and was fascinated by the
world outside and beyond those limits—by the poor, the East, the Black
man. His fascination for the latter does not call into question or negate his
commitment to the former. Kipling stands for order, empire, and white
men, and he stands for them precisely by going beyond them to describe
disorder, Black men, loneliness and horror. Kipling creates his contrasts—
sits in heaven as opposed to hell, with the white as opposed to the Black,
with the philistines as opposed to the bohemians, with the tribe as
opposed to the alien—but he descends into the regions he fears. When he
describes his expeditions into the world beyond and below, his vision is
more significant than when he describes the protected, secure world.
When he stops seeing the jungle as the law, as he does in The Jungle Book,
and begins to see it as a threat, when he describes white men as estranged
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from white society and fearful of Black men and hostile nature, he reveals
himself, the white man, and offers work of importance. His intention was
usually to strengthen the law and the imperial hierarchy through making
the descent into hell, but apart from his conscious aim the sense of con-
trast which results from the descent is important. When he writes that
“when a man is absolutely alone in a Station he runs a certain risk of
falling into evil ways,” when he notes that “few people can afford to play
Robinson Crusoe anywhere—least of all in India,” there is the sound of
truth. This Kipling encircled the core of reality that Conrad probed in
Heart of Darkness. While he did not confront loneliness as Conrad did,
he offers more meaningful and vital material when he presents horrors
and terrors than when he hides the facts and retreats into his luxurious,
exotic and nostalgic worlds.