The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (review)

Long unpopular in academic circles, Kipling's reputation has undergone a sea change since 9/11 provoked American sabre rattling, and David Gilmour could not have picked a better time to publish his latest work, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, a sympathetic look at the British Empire's best known and possibly most prescient apologist. As Gilmour points out in his readable and well-informed biography, Kipling prophesied the Hindu-Muslim butchery in an independent India and the racism of a Boer South Africa, both of which he felt the British Empire's benevolent paternalism could have prevented, and cautioned an indifferent England that Germany would soon prove a vicious enemy.

For Gilmour, Kipling's fall from favor as a popular imperialist mirrors the collapse of the Empire and the triumph of the liberals Kipling loved to hate. He may have been an apologist for racism and imperialism, but, more complex than his critics admit, Kipling was also among the first to celebrate the Tommy Atkinses and Gunga Dins who built an empire for those who only England knew, and Gilmour argues that Kipling's views were more moderate for his time than we might think. And, while Tommy's cry to, "Ship me somewhere east of Suez/ Where the best is like the worst/ Where there ain't no Ten Commandments/ And a man can raise a thirst," may be "orientalism," the British India in Kim, short stories like The Man Who Would Be King, and like those in Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses, is a more nuanced portrait than many we are subjected to today.

Reread Kipling, and you may well wonder if the nineteenth century is that far removed. "If's"stiff upper-lipped masculinity still mesmerizes:

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;
you'll be a Man, my son!

Change "The White Man's Burden" to "U.S.," and you have a foreign policy:

Take up the White Man's burden —
The savage wars of peace —
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;

while "Recessional," Kipling's ambivalent celebration of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, cautions against national hubris:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The Long Recessional is worth reading, for the light it sheds on both Kipling and our own political views.