ABSTRACT
The kinds of characters and actions that could figure in a fictional world governed by Kipling’s ideas, as portrayed in the last three chapters, would not be those imagined in a characteristic remark by George Eliot:
While Kipling’s stories are full of difference, they are bereft of “struggling erring human creatures.” Instead, remembering the sources of Kipling’s philosophy and his commitment to “the notion” in 1890, we ought rather to be wary in his work of what Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch calls “this power of generalizing which gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals” (409). Hence the reader who believes with Eliot in the frequency of error among good people and the weak explanatory power of generalizations about human nature-and who values the human capacity to aspire beyond cultural commonplaces-must surely look in vain for sympathetic thinking in Kipling’s stories of right, ignorance, and wrong. Therefore in at least my case, and more significantly in the cases of those modern critics for whom Kipling is “a great writer”—like Craig Raine and Daniel Karlin and Edward Said and Philip Mallett-there must be something more. Somehow, Kipling’s stories can appeal to readers who can be supposed to dislike some or all of the key assumptions that shape them.
