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Elective English—IV

Notes St Andrews University in Scotland, a three-year position. Kipling who was a Francophile argued
very strongly for an Anglo-French alliance to uphold the peace, calling Britain and France in
1920 the “twin fortresses of European civilization”. Along the same lines, Kipling repeatedly
warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany’s favour, which he predicted would
lead to a new world war. An admirer of Raymond Poincaré, Kipling was one of the few British
intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 at a time when the British
government and most public opinion was against the French position. In contrast to the popular
British view of Poincaré as a cruel bully intent on impoverishing Germany by seeking
unreasonable reparations, Kipling argued that Poincare was only rightfully trying to preserve
France as a great power in the face of an unfavourable situation. Kipling argued that even before
1914 Germany’s larger economy and birth-rate had made that country stronger than France, that
with much of France was devastated by the war and the French suffering heavy losses that the
low French birth-rate would have trouble replacing while Germany was mostly undamaged
and with a higher birth rate, that it was madness for Britain to seek to pressure France to revise
Versailles in Germany’s favour. In 1924, Kipling was opposed to the Labour government
of Ramsay MacDonald as “Bolshevism without bullets”, but believing that Labour was a
Communist front organisation took the view that “excited orders and instructions from Moscow”
would expose Labour as Communist front organisation to the British people. Kipling’s views
were on the right and through he admired Benito Mussolinito a certain extent for a time in the
1920s, Kipling was against fascism, writing that Sir Oswald Mosley was “a bounder and
anarriviste”, by 1935 called Mussolini a deranged and dangerous egomaniac and in 1933 wrote
“The Hitlerites are out for blood”. Once the Nazis came to power and usurped the swastika,
Kipling ordered that it should no longer adorn his books. In 1934 he published a short story
in Strand Magazine, “Proofs of Holy Writ”, which postulated that William Shakespeare had
helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible. Less than one year before his death Kipling
gave a speech (titled “An Undefended Island”) to The Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935
warning of the danger which Nazi Germany posed to Britain.

8.1.8 Death and Legacy

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than
before. On the night of 12 January 1936, Kipling suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine.
He underwent surgery, but died less than a week later on 18 January 1936 at the age of 70 of
a perforated duodenal ulcer. It was two days before the death of King George V. Kipling’s death
had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, “I’ve just
read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
The pallbearers at the funeral included Kipling’s cousin, the UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin,
and the marble casket was covered by a Union flag. Kipling was cremated at Golders Green
Crematorium, northwest London, and his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner, part of the South
Transept of Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.
In 2010 the International Astronomical Union approved that a crater on the planet Mercury would
be named after Kipling—one of ten newly discovered impact craters observed by
the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008–09. In 2012, an extinct species of crocodile, Goniopholis
kiplingi, was named in his honour, “in recognition for his enthusiasm for natural sciences”. More
than 50 unpublished poems by Kipling were released for the first time in March 2013.

Posthumous Reputation

Various writers, most notably Edmund Candler, were strongly influenced by Kipling’s writing.
Kipling’s stories for adults remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as
different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Randall Jarrell who wrote that, “After you

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