Kipling and Fantasy

Boris Ford voiced the opinion of many when he wrote: "Except for children, there seems little to be said on behalf of [Kipling's] imagination; but of course, though children probably do enjoy, Puck of Pook's Hill and the Jungle Books, Kipling rather hoped that adults would like them too."¹ I object both to this view of Kipling's prose fiction and to another, less harsh judgment found on the crowded critical battlefield that spreads around this most evaluated of writers. The other view is that Kipling did not really come into his own until he developed what is commonly referred to as his "late manner" after 1900.² There is a third view which embraces all of Kipling and dismisses his negative critics as the victims of political prejudice,³ but measured rejection on the one hand and equally measured selection of the mature work on the other mark the bounds of worthwhile Kipling criticism.

Indeed, these views are trying to get at the same thing in Kipling, but they share an error of interpretation that has so far not been pointed out. Both Ford and those who boost the later work as mature take a superficial view of stories "children probably do enjoy." Ford assumes that grown-ups ought not to enjoy such stories. Those who take the other side seem to agree with him because they look for a maturity they do not find in early Kipling. On one side, simplicity of substance is rejected because it is not complex; on the other, simplicity is virtually ignored on the ground that it disappears later on.

Through an examination of a few of Kipling's works, I wish to show that while there is reason to believe he could not achieve the particular kind of complexity we associate with tragedy, he did achieve brilliantly a kind of simplicity we associate with some stories "children probably do enjoy." "Complex" and "simple" are appropriate (though all too value-tinged) words because the kind of story at which Kipling fails and the kind at which he succeeds require our assent to different views of human possibility. The view I call complex assumes that the great challenges in life are within us. More simple is the view that human beings are either good or bad, and that consequently great challenges come always from outside the self. Thus, measured on the single scale of human possibility, the simple assumption is that we can do only what evil outside us and a limiting Providence will allow. The complex view is that we can do what we will. The simple view is that we are what we are made. The complex view is that we are what we make ourselves.

This pronouncement should not be taken very broadly; I am concerned only with what Kipling could and could not do well. I have no wish to argue either that children cannot enjoy the kind of complexity Kipling could not create or that such complexity is always absent from stories commonly considered "for children."

My argument runs as follows. In The Light that Failed, there is evidence Kipling was trying to write a species of tragedy. He fails because he cannot adopt the complex view of human possibility. But in certain of the Mowgli stories in the Jungle Books, we find Kipling succeeding brilliantly at an effect quite as soul-shaking in its way as is successful tragedy. J. R. R. Tolkien has called this effect "The Consolation of the Happy Ending" in his discussion of fairy stories.⁴ Once Kipling adopts the convention of fantasy, a kind of heroism that has nothing to do with blameable human error is available to him, and he uses the gift of joy, Tolkien's eucatastrophe, again and again in his later work. I shall show in detail how it operates in "They," a story very much in Kipling's "late manner."

Kipling could accomplish one thing superbly despite his inability to accomplish another, and it is not very fruitful to look in his work for the complex. But it is futile to damn him for succeeding in...