When the judges got it right

In 1907 the Nobel Prize for Literature was for the first time awarded to an English-language writer: Kipling. It wasn’t even then a choice that went down well with those whose opinions counted. ‘The denizens of literary London,’ David Gilmour remarked in The Last Recessional, ‘were aghast that the prize should have gone to Kipling while Swinburne, Meredith and Hardy were still alive. It was a case, said one of them, of neglecting the goldsmiths and exalting the literary blacksmith.’ This was a curious judgment, for, whatever else may be said about Kipling, he was, in the short stories especially, the most careful and cunning craftsman. But by 1907 the youthful virtuosity which had so impressed Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James had staled. Literary London was now more conscious of his stridency and ‘vulgarity’, cruelly and brilliantly parodied by Max Beerbohm. ‘It is no use pretending, Orwell would write in Horizon in 1942, ‘Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilised person … Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.’