C H A P T E R T W O

Kipling’s Contrasts

In poem after poem, story after story, and novel after novel Kipling repeat-

edly and untiringly carved out sharp, broad areas of contrast. Kipling

insists on the distinctions between man and beast, the primitive and the

civilized, the insider and the outsider, the patrician and the plebian, East

and West, England and India, black and white, heaven and hell. There is

the possibility for violent antagonism here but it doesn’t develop in

Kipling’s world, even though his characters are often bloody and scarred.

In his earliest work—Plain Tales from the Hills, Life’s Handicap, and ThePhantom Rickshaw—he contrasts the plain with the extraordinary, phan-

toms with realities, the handicapped with the potent; he contrasts provin-

cial Anglo-India with England, comfortable society with the anarchic

forces beneath its surface and beyond its frontiers. He marshals the forces

of order and disorder, stability and fragmentation, onto the Indian stage.

In Captains Courageous he contrasts Harvey Cheene, the rich boy, with

Dan Troop, the poor boy; the novice with the initiate; the life of leisure

with the life of work. In The Naulahka, “A Story of East and West,” writ-

ten in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, he compares the American

West with the Indian plains; the fair American girl with the dark Indian

princess; the aristocratic splendor of India with the simplicity and indus-

triousness of Colorado. In The Light That Failed he compares the

Egyptian battlefield and Tommy Atkins, the British soldier, with London,

the literary world and the artist. He compares the world of respectability,

love and marriage with passion, sex and the disreputable. He contrasts the

demands of art with the necessities of action. In The Jungle Book he com-

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pares the tribe with the outsider, the village of man with the confederation

of beasts, law with anarchy.

The contrasts are firmly established but the dramatic situations are

terminated without rigorous struggle. They do not precipitate dialectical

conflicts. Kipling’s heroes stand in a world which is divided between East

and West, Black and white, rich and poor. They are composed of atomic

particles which pull them toward the East and then back toward the West,

toward the Brown man and then back to the white man. But there is little

pull or push. The particles do not collide to produce new particles or

antiparticles. Kipling keeps the opposing impulses in his heroes and the

rival armies in society under control. He is the master at the machine,

pulling levers and pushing buttons. Kipling’s contrasts are immutable; he

catalogs and compartmentalizes his characters. He allows his men time to

wander on the leash, but demands of them that they remain close to

home. They inevitably do. Hell, the East, the Jungle—these worlds are

seen and explored by his heroes, but they are seen in concave or convex

mirrors and they are scouted rather than explored. The under and the

outer worlds are rejected. Kipling’s characters scurry back to heaven, the

West and civilization. Early in the game the outcome of the foraging expe-

ditions is clear. In The Naulahka we know that Tarvin will not remain in

India; he will not marry the Indian princess. He must return to Colorado

with the plain American girl. At moments he is terrified and fascinated by

the extraordinary horrors and beauties of India, but he goes back to

Middle America. In Captains Courageous we know that Kipling will lift

Harvey Cheene from the fishing schooner We’re Here as swiftly and deci-

sively as he lets him fall from the luxury liner into the Atlantic Ocean.

Work is attractive for a summer but not as a way of life; Cheene returns to

his wealthy and powerful family. We don’t feel, as the author wants us to

feel, that he will be a better capitalist because he has been a worker.

Kipling describes the organization man in isolation, the puritan in

Bohemia, the white man among Brown men. His men are defined, their

minds made flexible, their muscles made taut, through contact with their

opposing types. They watch the moves of their adversaries in a magical

mirror and adjust their own selves accordingly. There is rarely open con-

flict between Kipling’s characters. In Captains Courageous there is no con-

flict between workers and bosses. In the tales of Anglo-India there is no

dialectical relationship between East and West, Black and white. Kipling

creates harmony between classes and cultures. On his ladder there is

movement in only one direction: the puritan moves down among the

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bohemians, but the bohemian cannot move up among the puritans; the

white man lives among Brown men, but the Brown man cannot live among

whites. The rich boy plays poor boy, but the poor boy cannot play rich

boy. Harvey Cheene exchanges his tweeds for a fisherman’s garb, he learns

the fisherman’s slang, but he is always a rich boy mimicking a fisherman.

Mowgli is the prototype of all Kipling’s heroes. He defines his own

predicament when during a jungle ritual after the hunt he chants:

I dance on the hide of Shere Khan, but my heart is very heavy. My mouth is cut

and wounded with the stones from the village, but my heart is very light because

I have come back to the jungle. Why? These two things fight together in me as the

snakes fight in the spring. The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while it

falls. Why? I am two Mowglis . . . .

Mowgli the son of man is an alien in the jungle, and Mowgli a brother

of the jungle tribe is an outcast among men. He has parents in both the

Indian village and the Indian jungle. He is a man-child in the jungle.

Kipling creates a contrast between man and beast, but it is diversion-

ary. The vital contrast in The Jungle Book is not between man and beast

but between law and anarchy, the empire and the Indians. When Mowgli

chooses sides he leaves the beasts to join the world of men; but the men

are white men, not Brown men. He exchanges the yoke of jungle law for

the yoke of empire; he rejects the lawless rabble and embraces the stern

officials. Mowgli leaves the beasts’ world to become a man, but he mounts

a rung at the bottom of the imperial ladder in the Department of Woods,

exchanging a tribe for a bureaucracy. Kipling’s contrasts give the appear-

ance of objectivity, but no stories are more partisan. Behind the cunning-

ly arranged contrasts lie the values of an authoritarian.

The first story Kipling wrote about Mowgli, “In the Rukh,” describes

the last incident chronologically in his saga—his coming of age. His hero

is married to an Indian woman and appointed to a post in the Empire.

From the start Mowgli is respectable. In the stories that followed, Kipling

retraced his earlier career; he described the boy Mowgli. But Kipling does

not reject the British Empire, as one might expect, when he describes

Mowgli’s youth. He celebrates law, hierarchy and empire in different

ways. At the conclusion of The Jungle Book Kipling’s spokesman says:

Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant,

and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his

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major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three

regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the ser-

vant of the Empress.

The tales about men and beasts offer a message: the Empire. TheJungle Book culminates in a vision of the imperial hierarchy. The little

world of the jungle forms a small circle within other circles within the cir-

cle of empire. Kipling’s circle of empire contains all. In The Naulahka,

Captains Courageous, and Plain Tales from the Hills, contrasts are sus-

tained and differences are tolerated because all individuals, classes, races,

and groups are incorporated under the Empire or into the imperial hier-

archy. In Kipling’s model society the bear, the wolf, the snake, accept the

law. In the Anglo-Indian society of his day men pledged their allegiance to

Victoria, Empress of India. Each species is different from the next, each

man is distinct from his fellow man, but they are all contained in an over-

arching structure. Divisions in the hero are subsumed under his one patri-

otic self. The two Mowglis merge in the one Mowgli, who accepts the law

in the worlds of both man and beast.

Kipling’s theme is simultaneously the separation of races, classes and

lands, and the links between two men of opposite places of origin. The

societies are opposed, but the individual men are together. Kipling writes

of diversity in unity and unity in diversity. Rich and poor are different, but

Harvey Cheene and Dan Troop are comrades; man and beast are differ-

ent, but Mowgli is a friend of the wolf and the bear. The contrast at the

core of Kipling’s work is between cultures which are at opposite ends of

the spectrum and individuals from those cultures who stand side by side.

Kipling’s classic statement of the theme is from “The Ballad of East and

West”:

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgment Seat,

But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face though they come from

the ends of the earth!

Kipling is concerned equally with the irreconcilable hemispheres and

the reconciled men. He is the poet of inequality who simultaneously cel-

ebrates the friendship between the Brown man and the white man, the

rich man and the poor man. The poet of inequality deceives us; he

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appears in the guise of the poet of democracy and lauds Black men,

Brown men, poor men. In Kipling’s work the common soldier loves his

officer and praises the colonial people. “The finest man I knew,” says the

cockney soldier in one of Kipling’s best-known poems, “was our regimen-

tal bhisti Gunga Din.” But when two strong men from the ends of the

earth come face-to-face and embrace in Kipling’s world, it is not a celebra-

tion of human fraternity. The friendships between the rich and the poor,

Black and white, the tribe and the alien, in Captains Courageous, TheJungle Book, “The Ballad of East and West” and “Gunga Din” are unlike

the genuine moments of humanity reflected in literature. When Melville

describes Ishmael and Queequeg locked in each other’s arms, he presents

an ideal of human fraternity in a world of violent hatred. When Tolstoy

depicts an old Russian peasant sharing bread with Levin, he offers a

utopian vision in a world where masters and peasants are in conflict. At

first glance, Kipling’s scenes have the look of these situations in Tolstoy

and Melville. But unlike Melville and Tolstoy, Kipling neglects the real

conflicts between rich and poor, Black and white. Kipling is out to co-opt

us. He wants us to remember the friendship between Kim and the lama,

Cheene and Troop, and forget about the exploitation of Black by white,

the oppressed by their oppressors. When his heroes, Mowgli and the

wolf, Cheene and Troop, join in common aim, they stand in contrast

with—but not in defiance of—the divisions between men. Kipling’s

images of unity define oppositions and contrasts. The exception proves

the rule. His characters offer fellowship to each other because they know

their places, they accept the social hierarchy. There is only fraternity

between unequal partners in Kipling’s world, and that is no fraternity at all.

Kipling’s earliest coherent expression of this idea is the story “East

and West.” Two passengers, one of them Kipling and the other an elegant

and educated Afghan, sit facing each other on a train. They converse cor-

dially. They never fight, but they never sit arm in arm and they never

embrace. They are rigid machines whose jaws open and close, and whose

arms move up and down. Kipling, the white machine, tells the Afghan that

“God made us different.” The oracle has spoken. Differences in this case

mean British superiority and Afghan inferiority. Kipling asks us to imag-

ine “parallel straight lines” which, “being continued to all eternity, will

never meet.” As the train goes onward, carrying an Afghan and Kipling in

the same compartment, the railway tracks remain forever apart, a

reminder to Kipling of the inevitable and necessary division of Black from

white. Apartheid is his law of nature.

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In Life’s Handicap he describes a monastery in Northern India which

shelters men of different races and religions: “Mohamedan, Sikh, and

Hindi mixed equally under the trees. They were old men, and when man

has come to the turnstiles of Night all the creeds in the world seem to him

wonderfully alike and colourless.” It sounds internationalist in spirit, but

these men, none of whom are white, come together in weakness rather

than in strength, rejecting rather than preserving their individual differ-

ences. Here unity is based on the denial of diversity. As a Freemason in

India Kipling boasted that he knew Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jews,

but he accepted them because the important thing was not that they were

Jews or Hindus or Muslims, but because they were Freemasons. His view

of empire was of Freemasonry writ large. He would shake any man’s

hand—Black or white, rich or poor—if he defended the empire. The dif-

ferent nations were incorporated after combat in one body. In the forma-

tion of the Empire he noted that the Zulus, the Malays, the Maoris, the

Pathans, the Arabs, and the Sudanese “played a thoroughly good game.

For this we owe them many thanks.” It was all good sport.

Kipling’s contrasts, his celebrations of individual customs and traits,

are incorporated into a world of masters and slaves, rich and poor, victim-

izers and victims. The fear of miscegenation, rebellion, and social

upheaval struck deep into the core of his being. In his nightmares he envi-

sioned the overthrow of white by Black, West by East. Those nightmares

were warnings to him that the things that he loved, things as they were and

as he hoped they would continue to be, were threatened. He believed in

the necessity of racial separation, class lines, law, social hierarchy; but he

was captivated by the things he feared most. Kipling defended the estab-

lishment, the West, the white man, the rich, and was fascinated by the

world outside and beyond those limits—by the poor, the East, the Black

man. His fascination for the latter does not call into question or negate his

commitment to the former. Kipling stands for order, empire, and white

men, and he stands for them precisely by going beyond them to describe

disorder, Black men, loneliness and horror. Kipling creates his contrasts—

sits in heaven as opposed to hell, with the white as opposed to the Black,

with the philistines as opposed to the bohemians, with the tribe as

opposed to the alien—but he descends into the regions he fears. When he

describes his expeditions into the world beyond and below, his vision is

more significant than when he describes the protected, secure world.

When he stops seeing the jungle as the law, as he does in The Jungle Book,

and begins to see it as a threat, when he describes white men as estranged

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from white society and fearful of Black men and hostile nature, he reveals

himself, the white man, and offers work of importance. His intention was

usually to strengthen the law and the imperial hierarchy through making

the descent into hell, but apart from his conscious aim the sense of con-

trast which results from the descent is important. When he writes that

“when a man is absolutely alone in a Station he runs a certain risk of

falling into evil ways,” when he notes that “few people can afford to play

Robinson Crusoe anywhere—least of all in India,” there is the sound of

truth. This Kipling encircled the core of reality that Conrad probed in

Heart of Darkness. While he did not confront loneliness as Conrad did,

he offers more meaningful and vital material when he presents horrors

and terrors than when he hides the facts and retreats into his luxurious,

exotic and nostalgic worlds.

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