CHAPTER TWO

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.Kiplinginsists on the distinctions between man and beast,the primitive and thecivilized,the insider and the outsider,the patrician and the plebian,Eastand West,England and India,black and white,heaven and hell.There isthe possibility for violent antagonism here but it doesn’t develop inKipling’s world,even though his characters are often bloody and scarred.In his earliest work—

Plain Tales from the Hills

Life’s Handicap

,and

The Phantom 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 anarchicforces beneath its surface and beyond its frontiers.He marshals the forcesof order and disorder,stability and fragmentation,onto the Indian stage.In

Captains Courageous

he contrasts Harvey Cheene,the rich boy,withDan Troop,the poor boy; the novice with the initiate; the life of leisurewith the life of work.In

The Naulahka

,“A Story of East and West,”writ-ten in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier,he compares the AmericanWest with the Indian plains; the fair American girl with the dark Indianprincess; the aristocratic splendor of India with the simplicity and indus-triousness of Colorado.In

The Light That Failed

he compares theEgyptian 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 thedemands of art with the necessities of action.In

The Jungle Book

he com-

pares the tribe with the outsider,the village of man with the confederationof beasts,law with anarchy.The contrasts are firmly established but the dramatic situations areterminated without rigorous struggle.They do not precipitate dialecticalconflicts.Kipling’s heroes stand in a world which is divided between Eastand West,Black and white,rich and poor.They are composed of atomicparticles 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 littlepull or push.The particles do not collide to produce new particles orantiparticles.Kipling keeps the opposing impulses in his heroes and therival armies in society under control.He is the master at the machine,pulling levers and pushing buttons.Kipling’s contrasts are immutable; hecatalogs and compartmentalizes his characters.He allows his men time towander on the leash,but demands of them that they remain close tohome.They inevitably do.Hell,the East,the Jungle—these worlds areseen and explored by his heroes,but they are seen in concave or convexmirrors and they are scouted rather than explored.The under and theouter worlds are rejected.Kipling’s characters scurry back to heaven,theWest 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 inIndia; he will not marry the Indian princess.He must return to Coloradowith the plain American girl.At moments he is terrified and fascinated bythe extraordinary horrors and beauties of India,but he goes back toMiddle America.In

Captains Courageous

we know that Kipling will liftHarvey 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 tohis wealthy and powerful family.We don’t feel,as the author wants us tofeel,that he will be a better capitalist because he has been a worker.Kipling describes the organization man in isolation,the puritan inBohemia,the white man among Brown men.His men are defined,theirminds made flexible,their muscles made taut,through contact with theiropposing types.They watch the moves of their adversaries in a magicalmirror 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 nodialectical relationship between East and West,Black and white.Kiplingcreates harmony between classes and cultures.On his ladder there ismovement in only one direction: the puritan moves down among the

62THE MYTHOLOGY OF IMPERIALISM

bohemians,but the bohemian cannot move up among the puritans; thewhite man lives among Brown men,but the Brown man cannot live amongwhites.The rich boy plays poor boy,but the poor boy cannot play richboy.Harvey Cheene exchanges his tweeds for a fisherman’s garb,he learnsthe 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 ownpredicament 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 cutand wounded with the stones from the village,but my heart is very light becauseI have come back to the jungle.Why? These two things fight together in me as thesnakes fight in the spring.The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while itfalls.Why? I am two Mowglis ....

Mowgli the son of man is an alien in the jungle,and Mowgli a brotherof the jungle tribe is an outcast among men.He has parents in both theIndian 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 beastbut between law and anarchy,the empire and the Indians.When Mowglichooses sides he leaves the beasts to join the world of men; but the menare white men,not Brown men.He exchanges the yoke of jungle law forthe yoke of empire; he rejects the lawless rabble and embraces the sternofficials.Mowgli leaves the beasts’world to become a man,but he mountsa 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,”describesthe last incident chronologically in his saga—his coming of age.His herois married to an Indian woman and appointed to a post in the Empire.From the start Mowgli is respectable.In the stories that followed,Kiplingretraced his earlier career; he described the boy Mowgli.But Kipling doesnot reject the British Empire,as one might expect,when he describesMowgli’s youth.He celebrates law,hierarchy and empire in differentways.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