ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling, who anticipated Hitler in the use of the swastika as an emblem for his work, had the same nostalgic admiration for the ruling caste of his country. Convincing though Beresford is on the whole, his anxiety to picture the youthful Kipling as utterly indifferent to the enthusiasms of his maturity sometimes carries him too far. As a journalist in India, Kipling suffered a good deal of mortification. Kipling, having escaped from Kipling, expressed his new-found philosophy through Dick Heldar, the hero of a novel appropriately called The Light that Failed. The cruelty in Kipling sprang from the envy of happier natures in which his deification of the machine, literal or metaphorical, was rooted. The vein of cruelty in Kipling was not accepted as a virile protest against over-civilized effeminacy without some preliminary squirming.
