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.’

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No wonder, Orwell continued, ‘During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him.’ Nevertheless, Orwell had to admit, ‘At the end of that time nine tenths of these enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.’ His own essay went on to try to explain why this was the case, and may be seen as an early contribution to the revival of Kipling’s reputation. The contribution was limited partly because the essay was a review of Eliot’s selection of Kipling’s verse, and so paid scant attention to the short stories and none at all to Kim. Not many years later Somerset Maugham, with characteristic good sense,would claim that Kipling was the only writer of short stories in English who could be considered the equal of Maupassant and Chekhov.