my England’. His ‘Madam Life’s a piece in bloom / Death goes dogging everywhere’,
a realistic sketch of urban life, uses the figure of the prostitute not for stock pathos
but to make an unromantic moral point.
But the master of the hearty mode was Rudyard Kipling(1865–1936), born in
India, schooled in England. A journalist back in India, his prose reputation began
with Plain Tales from the Hills(1888) and theJungle Books(1894, 1895); his prose is
discussed on page 329.Barrack Room Ballads(1892) come in the Cockney accents of
the soldier who knows nothing of ‘the Widow of Windsor’, Queen Victoria, and the
policy of her Empire: all he knows is the army. The rollicking vigour of this verse
made it welcome in houses without bookshelves. Kipling became the favourite
writer of millions in the Empire, with poems like ‘Gunga Din’, ‘Ladies’, ‘If ’, ‘Tommy’,
‘Danny Deever’ and ‘The Road to Mandalay’. His vulgar quotability has been used
against him: ‘A woman is only a woman, / But a good cigar is a smoke’, for exam-
ple, but these are the words of a nervous man, not of his creator.
Kipling’s prodigious popularity fell with that of the Empire, but his imperialism
could be critical. In 1897, he warned the British of their fate in ‘Recessional’, written
for Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; a recessional hymn is sung as the priest processes out
of church at the end of the service.
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget.
The end of Empire is foreseen: ‘The tumult and the shouting dies; / The
Captains and the Kings depart’ ... ‘Far off, our navies melt away.’ Kipling’s final peti-
tion is:‘For frantic boast and foolish word – Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!’ Few
ofthe Queen-Empress’s subjects would have been surprised by the idea that the
English were God’s people.
nFurther reading
Fletcher, Ian (ed.),British Poetry and Prose, 1870–1905(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987).
Innes, C.,Modern British Drama, 1880–1990(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Raby, P. (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
FURTHER READING 323