ABSTRACT
Kipling, the poet laureate o f British imperialism, was no admirer o f British national institutions or British national character. His heroes, typically, are those who transcend the limits of time and place and class; they are born in a nether-world o f dark imaginings. Given these ambiguities - the subject o f this essay - it is surprising how Kipling’s imperialism is taken for granted, as though it were o f a piece with the official propaganda of the day. Indeed, rather little has been written about the impact o f Kipling’s imperialism on the thought and imagination o f his time.1 The reason may paradoxicaly be the unique extent of Kipling’s popularity - particu larly in the 1890s - and the fact that he attained his popularity for expounding an authoritarian world-view and style which later versions o f nationalist ideology have attempted to excrete as essen tially ‘foreign’ . Many o f the mental structures and emotional ener gies that give Kipling’s writings their peculiar form and power are difficult to distinguish from those that helped to constitute the mass influence and ideological domination o f fascism (particularly in its German version), i.e. of a cultural construct which modern British nationalism has fought to pose as its own opposite.2 There fore Kipling’s immense influence and the fact that it was a popular rather than a ‘high’ cultural influence has a certain embarrassment attached to it.
