Kipling in and on India

170 book which must be written some day on che organic vision of the Victorians. Not only that, by emphasising the literature and thought of Germany and France, Fletcher has made it impossible for the writer of that book to ignore continental Influences, and by drawing our attention to the nineteenth-century American view of the old world, he has suggested a meaningful perspective. Romantic Mythologies is a splendid book, but it is only an overture to the symphony which has yet to be written. American University of Beirut John M. Munro 4. KIPLING IN AND ON INDIA Louis L. Cornell. Kipling In India. NY; St. Martin's Press, 1966. K. Bhaskara Rao. Rudyard Kipling's India. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 196Y. Louis L. Cornell's Kipling In India is a study of Kipling's literary apprenticeship which surveys the author's early work from the Pre-Indian Juvenilia to the Anglo-Indian poetry and short fiction written during the years 1882-1889. Cornell's book is satisfying; his biographical, critical, and bibliographical methods of examination succeed In presenting the reader with a vivid portrait of Kipling in India and a greater understanding and appreciation of his Anglo-Indian writings. The first half of Kipling In India charts the development of Kipling's poetry from Schoolboy Lyrics (1881) to Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (1886-9ÖK Cornell suggests that the cynicism of Schoolboy Lyrics saves the poems from becoming mere passionate adolescent effusions. This cynicism, however, is a defense because Kipling had fallen in love with Florence Garrard, and an unpublished book of love poems "Sundry Phansies" contains the adolescent effusions that we are generally spared from in Schoolboy Lyrics. Kipling had imitated the Pre-Raphaelites in "Sundry Phansies," but his return to India caused him to produce a different kind of poetry. In India the English schoolboy was quickly transformed into an average Anglo-Indian, thereby abandoning his literary and personal ties with England. The drastic differences between "Sundry Phansies" and Departmental Ditties results from the differences between Kipling's English and Indian audience and his English and Anglo-Indian Identity. Kipling began to write for the members of the Punjab Club - the readers of the Pioneer and the Civil and Military Gazette - in an AngloIndian tradition of light verse and satire that dated back to the Bengal Gazette and Lays of Ind. The full-blown Anglo-Indian poet emerges in Departmental Ditties which "define a position within the Anglo-Indian hierarchy...." T. S. Eliot has observed that young Kipling was not trying to write poetry at allj in a surprising conclusion Cornell contends that this observation is truer than Eliot realized. Cornell sees "Sundry Phansies" as an attempt to write poetry and the later light verse as a conscious choice on Kipling's part to write "verse" and not great poetry, because "he attempted only what he knew he could accomplish." 171 The kind of deliberate choosing that marked Kipling's decision to write verse Instead of poetry also informed his decision to concentrate on realistic tales instead of his earlier fantastic, Poelike tales. Cornell sees Kipling moving away from fantasy toward realism in "City of the Dreadful Night" and »The City of the Two Creeds" which are transitional pieces, neither pure journalism nor pure fiction. Kipling's realistic mode is marked by the introduction of an "I" narrator who usually relates a story that has much to say about India and Anglo-Indians. These stories record "the experience of a typical Anglo-Indian trying to understand the conditions in which he lives and works." Stylistically, the new prose moves from the formal to the colloquial, from self-conscious seriousness to irony, with a new found wit and delicacy, for he adjusted his rhetoric to the tastes and expectations of his AngloIndian audience. The crowning success of Kipling's early years is Plain Tales From the Hills. in this volume Kipling's new found realism was tempered by his growing sense of the strangeness of Indian life. "Thus from a delicate disparity between exotic subject and realistic treatment arises the most characteristic mode of the 'Plain Tales.·" Technically, the "reporter's conversational tone, understatement, and habitual...