# Kipling, is he over-rated? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 21, 2016, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789 "2016-03-21T18:40:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 4:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/41 "2016-03-23T04:42:00Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Yeah, I agree with this. Mainly where I see Kipling fans is in the military, or people with a military background…you often get Kipling quotes tossed in as an almost inside joke in those circles. The general population, though, hardly know who he is, if they know at all and probably couldn’t name anything he’s done if you put a gun to their heads. He’s very under-rated, IMHO. John Ringo, at least in the first few books in the Posleen War series, referenced quite a lot of Kipling. Especially his first one, which was constantly referencing “Hymn Before Action”. So there you go. Not particularly well-known ex-military military science fiction writer referencing Kipling. That’s pretty damn insider. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/42 "2016-03-23T11:39:57Z")
I really liked “If” and “White Man’s Burden.” It takes a pretty selective reading of the latter to make it into a celebration of white privilege; given our own nation’s military adventurism in (mostly) the same locations over a century later, I think the poem is overdue for a critical reappraisal. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/43 "2016-03-23T13:35:20Z")
> [@Ukulele\_Ike](#): > > _King Solomon’s Mines_ is the most popular in that it’s probably the one some people still know about these days. But back in Haggard’s time, _She_ was the Big One. > > Only the serious wonks still read it today (blush) and it’s remembered primarily for the descriptive “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” But now that _Rumpole at the Bailey_ is fading into the past, that’s being forgotten too. > > I just asked the Ukulele Lady if she knew the phrase and she said “Yeah, I’ve heard it, but I just thought it was something all men said about their wives.” Hey, I read it as a kid - my grandfather had an ancient hardcover edition, with an art-nouveaux-looking cover. I wish I knew what happened to that book! It was beautiful. I also read some of his more obscure stuff - like _Nada the Lilly_, a romance set during the rise and fall of the Zulu Empire. All in all, his stuff provides an interesting take on 19th century racial issues from the British perspective - he positively admired the Zulus, because of their warlike ways; to him, personal dignity and integrity - combined with a willingness to do violence in the cause of ‘duty’, however defined - were the criteria of a “gentleman”, and he was perfectly willing to see Africans as just as entitled to the title of “gentleman” as Europeans (he wrote on this topic in the introduction to King Solomon’s Mines). ---
**Author:** ![Labor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/74df32/32.png) [@Labor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labor)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/44 "2016-03-23T15:45:08Z")
Thanks for the suggestions (especially Trinopus) I’m going to give them a try. Ike, I read King Solomon’s Mines [KSM] and She. She didn’t do it for me, too much philosophy, not enough action. I think that KSM is a great adventure story. > [@Ukulele\_Ike](#): > > _King Solomon’s Mines_ is the most popular in that it’s probably the one some people still know about these days. But back in Haggard’s time, _She_ was the Big One. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/45 "2016-03-23T16:02:17Z")
No love for the other books in the Allan Quatermain series? The eponymous (and definitely chronologically last) Allan Quatermain novel also features Curtis and Good again, but there are also seven or eight other novels about Allan’s earlier life, including the “Zulu trilogy”. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/46 "2016-03-23T16:08:46Z")
> [@Labor](#): > > I read King Solomon’s Mines [KSM] and She. She didn’t do it for me, too much philosophy, not enough action. I think that KSM is a great adventure story. One of the best ever written, in my opinion. I greatly enjoyed it as a teenaged reader. A couple years ago I picked up “She” at the library. It was so bad (and dull) that I gave up about 70 pages in. ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/47 "2016-03-23T16:33:54Z")
I have fond feelings about an outlier among Haggard’s novels: _Montezuma’s Daughter_, published 1893. I read it decades back, and forget most of the details – but I was favourably impressed. Setting, the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The hero’s situation is altogether odd: he is an Englishman whose circumstances compel him reluctantly to travel to the New World with the conquistadors – subsequently he lives among the Aztecs for a considerable time. I found the author admirably even-handed in his neither exalting nor demonising, either of the parties involved in the Conquest. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/48 "2016-03-23T16:41:54Z")
> [@Horatio\_Hellpop](#): > > I really liked “If” and “White Man’s Burden.” It takes a pretty selective reading of the latter to make it into a celebration of white privilege; given our own nation’s military adventurism in (mostly) the same locations over a century later, I think the poem is overdue for a critical reappraisal. If memory serves, “Take up the White Man’s Burden” was encouragement to do exactly that following the Spanish-American war, on the assumption that the former Spanish colonies needed saving from the wrong sort of imperialism, and from what was then generally considered as the obscurantism of feudal and traditional social structures. Any sort of resonance with the present day? ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/49 "2016-03-23T21:59:08Z")
Kipling brought my grandmother and grandfather together. In Kipling’s story “The Brushwood Boy,” two characters recognize each other from dreamland by an allusion to a dream they both share. One of them says, “‘Ha ha,’ said the duck, laughing,” and the other knows what it meant. My grandmother and grandfather had both read the story, and one of them, conversationally, said, “‘Ha ha,’ said the duck, laughing.” (It’s a very sentimental story, sugary-sweet, very syrupy, but still fun. It is not Kipling’s finest by any means…but it’s a darling little love-story nonetheless.) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2016, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/50 "2016-03-23T23:19:07Z")
> [@Horatio\_Hellpop](#): > > I really liked “If” and “White Man’s Burden.” It takes a pretty selective reading of the latter to make it into a celebration of white privilege . . . Quite true. That is what makes it dishonest. Isaac Asimov, in his history-juvenile _The Golden Door,_ remarked that “Kipling made it sound almost as if the Americans were going to the Philippines to pull rickshaws for Filipino riders and polish shoes on Filipino feet. It was the other way around, of course, and Kipling knew it. The Filipinos knew it too.” ---
**Author:** ![MacSpon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@MacSpon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MacSpon)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2016, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/51 "2016-03-24T00:21:55Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Kipling brought my grandmother and grandfather together. > > In Kipling’s story “The Brushwood Boy,” two characters recognize each other from dreamland by an allusion to a dream they both share. One of them says, “‘Ha ha,’ said the duck, laughing,” and the other knows what it meant. > > My grandmother and grandfather had both read the story, and one of them, conversationally, said, “‘Ha ha,’ said the duck, laughing.” > > (It’s a very sentimental story, sugary-sweet, very syrupy, but still fun. It is not Kipling’s finest by any means…but it’s a darling little love-story nonetheless.) Yes, I love it too. As you say, it’s sugary-sweet and sentimental…but it \*is \*nice. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/52 "2016-03-29T02:21:14Z")
N.B.: While Kipling was undeniably a self-appointed apostle of British imperialism, that does not simply and neatly sum things up about his world-view. He had enough breadth of imagination to write some things that stand British ethnocentrism on its head – or at least introduce a bit of cultural relativism, while mocking the narrow provincialism of the majority of Brits who never left Britain, e.g., [“We and They.”](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_wethey.htm) FATHER, Mother, and Me Sister and Auntie say All the people like us are We, And every one else is They. And They live over the sea, While We live over the way, But - would you believe it? - They look upon We As only a sort of They ! We eat pork and beef With cow-horn-handled knives. They who gobble Their rice off a leaf, Are horrified out of Their lives; And They who live up a tree, And feast on grubs and clay, (Isn’t it scandalous?) look upon We As a simply disgusting They! Orwell again: > [@](#): > > How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early. With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class, the people who read BLACKWOOD’S. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’, which must have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter. ---
**Author:** ![Waltzes\_with\_Cacti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/90ced4/32.png) [@Waltzes\_with\_Cacti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Waltzes_with_Cacti)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/53 "2016-03-29T13:40:23Z")
> [@hogarth](#): > > I’ve read “Kim”, “Captains Courageous” and “The Light That Failed”. I thought Kim was kind of a “Mary Sue” character, which was a turn-off for me. I liked “Captains Courageous” as a kid, but I don’t remember much of it now. “The Light That Failed” was interesting, but I suspect it would fall into the category of “too many details” for you. **Hogarth** , were you startled by the homoerotic subtext of _The Light That Failed_? I know I was. ---
**Author:** ![john\_b\_2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9a28c/32.png) [@john\_b\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/john_b_2)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/54 "2016-03-29T19:49:00Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > He’s brilliant! Short stories like “The Eye of Allah” or “The Church That Was At Antioch” show a depth of insight and compassion. > > Yes, his poetry is forced, heavy on meter and rhyme – but he intended a kind of “ballad” tone. He’s in the same category as, say, A.B. Banjo Paterson (if you haven’t read “The Man From Snowy River,” you ought to! The movie was good, too!) > > Kipling, like G.K. Chesterton, was a product of his time, and there are some flaws we can identify in hindsight. Both are still great writers; we just have to read them with modern reservations. > > To answer the question in the OP, actually, at this point in time, Kipling is under-rated. There was a heavy kick against him in the latter half of the twentieth century, during the devolution of the British Empire and the erosion of the Commonwealth. He was persona non grata on many college campuses, both in the English-speaking countries and in countries formerly part of the Empire. > > Kipling is neglected, today, but retains the greatness of, say, Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle: a writer of great contemporary popularity, who’s still pretty hot beans even today. I agree wholeheartedly. The comparison with Chesterton is spot on. Both men were erratic geniuses, and neither is politically correct by today’s standards. Their stock has been rising slowly in recent years. Kipling’s more so. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/55 "2016-03-29T22:54:42Z")
> [@Waltzes\_with\_Cacti](#): > > **Hogarth** , were you startled by the homoerotic subtext of _The Light That Failed_? I know I was. Not really. To me, it seemed more like slobbering over the bonds that soldiers make. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/56 "2016-03-29T23:52:44Z")
> [@john\_b\_2](#): > > I agree wholeheartedly. The comparison with Chesterton is spot on. Both men were erratic geniuses, and neither is politically correct by today’s standards. Their stock has been rising slowly in recent years. Kipling’s more so. [Orwell on Chesterton](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30) (in “Notes on Nationalism,” 1945 – in this essay, Orwell is using “nationalism,” expressly for want of a better word, to mean “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests”): > [@](#): > > Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent–though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one–was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it–as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the MARSEILLAISE over glasses of red wine–had about as much relation to reality as CHU CHIN CHOW has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton’s battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved. I actually like “Lepanto” – I’ve almost memorized it in hopes of reciting it at a filksing someday, it’s a very recitable poem, with lots of possibilities for the amateur actor – but everything Orwell says about it sticks. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2016, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/57 "2016-03-29T23:57:44Z")
> [@hogarth](#): > > Not really. To me, it seemed more like slobbering over the bonds that soldiers make. There’s a difference? ---
**Author:** ![john\_b\_2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9a28c/32.png) [@john\_b\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/john_b_2)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2016, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/58 "2016-03-31T19:55:38Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > [Orwell on Chesterton](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30) (in “Notes on Nationalism,” 1945 – in this essay, Orwell is using “nationalism,” expressly for want of a better word, to mean “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests”): > > I actually like “Lepanto” – I’ve almost memorized it in hopes of reciting it at a filksing someday, it’s a very recitable poem, with lots of possibilities for the amateur actor – but everything Orwell says about it sticks. hester ---
**Author:** ![john\_b\_2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9a28c/32.png) [@john\_b\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/john_b_2)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2016, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/59 "2016-03-31T20:08:21Z")
I know that Orwell analysis of Chesterton, BrainGlutton, and it’s all hyperbole. Chesterton wrote about many things, and from different perspectives. Yes, he was a Roman Catholic “apologist” (if you will), but egads, there was to much more to the man. He wrote on so many topics, some more authoritatively than others. GKC was not a scholar but he was a major writer and thinker of vast originality and, if one pays close attention, the truth is often in the details of his writing, his phrasing. He was in love with irony and paradox, often wrote in sweeping generalizations, but even at his most “dogmatic” there was much room for thought, even dissent. I must have read Orthodoxy a hundred times,–I loved it that much when I was a younger fellow–and it never nudged me in the direction of Roman Catholicism, and in the end I became a Deist! I’m not orthodox at all. Chesterton used Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism as safety nets, in my humble opinion, and with all due respect for the sincerity of his religious belief. My sense is that as a private person his imagination, the sheer originality of the man, demanded restraints, and that his unconscious told him to cool it, thus his orthodoxy and RC function, depending on one’s point of view, as lucky charms, on some occasions, and when he was in more “dangerous” moods as butterfly nets or even strait-jackets. No, GKC wasn’t mad, but there was so much to him that he’d have burst if he had not put himself in irons, as it were. To this I should add, I love the man, ---
**Author:** ![john\_b\_2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9a28c/32.png) [@john\_b\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/john_b_2)\ **Post date:** [March 31, 2016, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789/60 "2016-03-31T20:18:42Z")
> [@john\_b\_2](#): > > hester the above post is, pretty obviously, a mistake. Blame it on my keyboard! :mad: [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/kipling-is-he-over-rated/749789.md?page=4)