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.
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.
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).
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.)
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.”
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.”
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!
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 (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.
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,
