even to the droop of her wrist there. Every sign of it! She will need restoratives, that woman, and, afterwards, sleep natural.’” He pays the artist a physician’s compliment: ‘“Sir, you should be of our calling”’. This reconciliation of the theological and the physical is matched by another profound pun, however, to set against that of ‘illumination’: John’s great Luke begins with the Magnificat and he has literally
magnified
the Lord, using the microscope, so that what, when unexplained, seemed miraculous, becomes part of the natural world. The Lord is no longer outside his creation: he
is
his creation, a position which is theologically untenable. Christ – if this line of argument is pursued to its conclusion – is nothing more, or less, than the gifted leech identified by Karshish. Stephen seems the only person to reach out towards this possibility – and he destroys the microscope, to save a system which, however imperfect, ensures a necessary order against chaos. The chaos he fears is not purely social. He fears, too, ‘that man stands ever between two Infinities’ and I think Kipling shared this fear.
The impersonal scale of things and the smallness of the individual made him flinch, as Kim’s crisis and breakdown show: ‘He tried to think of the lama – to wonder why he had stumbled into a brook-but the bigness of the world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked thought aside.’ And at last the outcry of the threatened ego is heard: “‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’” Mental breakdown interested Kipling. He himself was twice afflicted as a young man and his sister was troubled for most of her life. He treats the subject directly in ‘The Janeites’, where the shell-shocked Humberstall is restored to a sanity of sorts by Macklin, who persuades him to memorize the works of Jane Austen, by pretending that they will give him an entrée to a quasi-Masonic society of ‘Janeites’, with attendant perks. It is, of course, a gentle conspiracy of a different kind – to exercise and re-educate a mind which has been disturbed by trench warfare and experiences that are the more horrific for Humberstall’s insouciant Cockney retelling: ‘“then I saw somethin’ like a mushroom in the moonlight. It was the nice old gentleman’s bald ‘ead. I patted it. ’im and ‘is laddies ‘ad copped it right enough.’” I
patted it.
Kipling didn’t flinch from much.
Eliot, Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, Borges, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, and the most gifted Kipling critic of all, Miss J.M.S. Tompkins, have all spoken out for Kipling – without success.His work remains ignored by the literary intelligentsia, largely for political reasons. Yet his politics are more various than their reputation. It isn’t difficult to find attitudes in his work which are unpleasant and one could compile a damning little anthology. There is the anti-Semitism of ‘“Bread Upon the Waters’”, where McPhee remarks, ‘“Young Steiner – Steiner’s son – the Jew, was at the bottom of it”’ and the prejudice is reinforced by McRimmon’s ‘“there’s more discernment in a dog than a Jew’”. Sometimes it is possible to write off remarks like this as elements of characterization. For instance, the racial prejudice of Curtiss in
The Story of the Gadsbys:
‘Hang it all! Gaddy hasn’t married beneath him. There’s no tar-brush in the family, I suppose.’ Kipling’s ‘Lispeth’, ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, or ‘Beyond the Pale’ show clearly enough that, though he saw the difficulties of mixed marriages, he was disinterested enough to register disapproval of the ‘white’ position: the clergyman in ‘Lispeth’ is exposed as a mendacious hypocrite. Similarly, Ortheris’s prejudice is undermined by Learoyd’s report of it: ‘“Orth’ris, as allus thinks he knaws more than other foaks, said she wasn’t a real laady, but nobbut a Hewrasian. Ah don’t gainsay
magnified
the Lord, using the microscope, so that what, when unexplained, seemed miraculous, becomes part of the natural world. The Lord is no longer outside his creation: he
is
his creation, a position which is theologically untenable. Christ – if this line of argument is pursued to its conclusion – is nothing more, or less, than the gifted leech identified by Karshish. Stephen seems the only person to reach out towards this possibility – and he destroys the microscope, to save a system which, however imperfect, ensures a necessary order against chaos. The chaos he fears is not purely social. He fears, too, ‘that man stands ever between two Infinities’ and I think Kipling shared this fear.
The impersonal scale of things and the smallness of the individual made him flinch, as Kim’s crisis and breakdown show: ‘He tried to think of the lama – to wonder why he had stumbled into a brook-but the bigness of the world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked thought aside.’ And at last the outcry of the threatened ego is heard: “‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?’” Mental breakdown interested Kipling. He himself was twice afflicted as a young man and his sister was troubled for most of her life. He treats the subject directly in ‘The Janeites’, where the shell-shocked Humberstall is restored to a sanity of sorts by Macklin, who persuades him to memorize the works of Jane Austen, by pretending that they will give him an entrée to a quasi-Masonic society of ‘Janeites’, with attendant perks. It is, of course, a gentle conspiracy of a different kind – to exercise and re-educate a mind which has been disturbed by trench warfare and experiences that are the more horrific for Humberstall’s insouciant Cockney retelling: ‘“then I saw somethin’ like a mushroom in the moonlight. It was the nice old gentleman’s bald ‘ead. I patted it. ’im and ‘is laddies ‘ad copped it right enough.’” I
patted it.
Kipling didn’t flinch from much.
Eliot, Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, Borges, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, and the most gifted Kipling critic of all, Miss J.M.S. Tompkins, have all spoken out for Kipling – without success.His work remains ignored by the literary intelligentsia, largely for political reasons. Yet his politics are more various than their reputation. It isn’t difficult to find attitudes in his work which are unpleasant and one could compile a damning little anthology. There is the anti-Semitism of ‘“Bread Upon the Waters’”, where McPhee remarks, ‘“Young Steiner – Steiner’s son – the Jew, was at the bottom of it”’ and the prejudice is reinforced by McRimmon’s ‘“there’s more discernment in a dog than a Jew’”. Sometimes it is possible to write off remarks like this as elements of characterization. For instance, the racial prejudice of Curtiss in
The Story of the Gadsbys:
‘Hang it all! Gaddy hasn’t married beneath him. There’s no tar-brush in the family, I suppose.’ Kipling’s ‘Lispeth’, ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, or ‘Beyond the Pale’ show clearly enough that, though he saw the difficulties of mixed marriages, he was disinterested enough to register disapproval of the ‘white’ position: the clergyman in ‘Lispeth’ is exposed as a mendacious hypocrite. Similarly, Ortheris’s prejudice is undermined by Learoyd’s report of it: ‘“Orth’ris, as allus thinks he knaws more than other foaks, said she wasn’t a real laady, but nobbut a Hewrasian. Ah don’t gainsay
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