THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Mackellar, who, like the reader, is drawn into a duality of response to the central characters, two politically and
emotionally divided brothers. The story, set yet again in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, follows the
twists and turns of an intensely fraught family relationship which has larger implications for the historic tensions
within Scottish culture. Stevenson’s romantic fascination with travel, with the dangerous side of things and with the
exotic, evident enough in his famous boys’ story Treasure Island (1883), culminated in his South Sea adventures The
Beach at Falesá (1893) and The Ebb Tide (1894), both of which offer indictments of the malign effects of eighteenthcentury
colonialism as a new variation on piracy.
‘Our Colonial Expansion’: Kipling and Conrad
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the apostrophizer of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (a poem addressed, incidentally, to the
American imperial mission in the Philippines), has all too often been seen as the noisiest popular apologist for the
climactic expansion of the British Empire. The closing years of the nineteenth century were marked by the European
grab for Africa and by European rivalries as to which power could manage to grab most territory. Given its existing
footholds, Britain did pretty well out of the enterprise, cementing it with effective influence over Egypt and, following
Kitchener’s
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victory at Omdurman in 1898, extending Anglo-Egyptian influence over the Sudan. Though the wars against Boer
settlers in South Africa were brought to an end in 1902 with an uneasy compromise over British influence in the
colony, the wars themselves had by no means always gone Britain’s way. For Kipling — assuming, as he periodically
did, the voice of the ordinary British infantry, ‘Tommy Atkins’ — the African campaigns were more a matter of slog
than of swashbuckling and Africa itself not so much a burden as a pain in the feet:
We’re foot—slog—slog—slog—sloggin’ over Africa —
Foot—foot—foot—foot—sloggin’ over Africa —
(Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin’ up and down again!)
There’s no discharge in the war!
Kipling, born in Bombay, was, however, always more stimulated by the idea of the British imperial adventure in India
than by the less romantic drive to acquire a colonial hegemony over Africa. He proved the most perceptive observer of
the quirky anomalies of the British Raj in the relatively peaceful and prosperous period between the suppression of the
Mutiny of 1857-8 and the growth of independence movements at the beginning of the twentieth century.
It would be difficult to describe Kipling as a cerebral writer. The social and moral dilemmas, the religious or
irreligious scruples, and the alternative pulls of decadence and despair, which are evident in the work of his Britishbased
contemporaries, seem at first sight to be quite absent from both his prose and his jingling, jingoistic verse. His
work rapidly gained esteem both in Britain and in British India in the 1880s, and his particularly privileged place in
English letters was internationally acknowledged in 1907 when he became the first British Nobel Laureate.
Nevertheless, Kipling was in many ways an outsider, a colonial articulator of a commonsensical, almost proverbial,
philosophy and a conservative upholder of the powers that be, but not a cultivator of the styles and codes of the
London literary scene. The poet of ‘If’ and of the Jubilee poem ‘Recessional’ seems to sit uneasily in an anthology of
the often effete poetry of the 1890s, and Kipling’s deliberately ‘plain’ story-telling can seem flat, even coarse, beside
the stylistic refinements of a Pater and a Wilde or the complex allusiveness of a James. His bluff, no-nonsense cruder
side as a Cockney versifier is wittily summed up in Max Beerbohm’s cartoon of a tweedy, drunken poet taking ‘a
bloomin’ day aht, on the blasted ’eath, along with Britannia ’is gurl’.
Kipling is not, however, an untroubled apologist for the common man’s idea of Empire and of the colonial races.
His values may well be those of a world of masculine action, but he is also a writer who, at his best, is always alert to
subtleties, to human weakness, to manipulation, vulnerability, and failure. India with its empty spaces and its densely
overcrowded cities, its hill-stations and its hot deserts, its princely states and its cantonments, conditioned him; its
ancient, mutually severed cultures fascinated, rather than overwhelmed him
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(as is the case with some other English writers). He retained the detachment of a European outsider, but he tried to see
India from the inside, not as a curious interloper or as an obsessed neophyte. In his greatest literary achievement —