[In the following essay, Scott analyzes the role of warfare and rules of conduct in three of Kipling's short fiction works: the Mowgli stories, Captains Courageous, and Stalky & Co.]

Kipling's obsession with the mastery of rules, laws, and codes of behavior dominates his work as it did his life. He wrote a charter for his children that identified in detail their “rights” to the Dudwell River near Bateman's; he created a Jungle society with a code “as perfect as time and custom can make it” (The Second Jungle Book 125); and he knew how to manipulate the rules to hasten his son's classification into active military service in World War I. Anyone at all familiar with Kipling's childhood will readily understand these concerns. The shock of being moved at the age of five from a pampered life with his family in India to the care of a harsh foster mother in Southsea, England, must have been traumatic enough. To be rescued after five long years from this “House of Desolation” only to be sent away again in less than a year to public school, a place of strict, often physical, discipline and institutionalized bullying, reinforced Kipling's sense that the world was a dangerous and uncertain place. These early experiences shaped his vision of the world and taught him how to survive: one must understand the system of order, master its code of rules, and apply them relentlessly.

Many writers, especially writers for children, have created unforgettable imaginary realms with their own sometimes fantastic rules; the entrances to such “otherworlds” are often surprising—a mirror, a wardrobe, a rabbit hole—dramatizing the borders of these magical realms and emphasizing their distinctness from the “real” world from which the children have come. It is not surprising, considering the drastic and painful changes to which little Rudyard had been subjected, that the grown Kipling would similarly plunge his young fictional protagonists into parallel worlds with new rules and new modes of survival, and that these otherworlds would be decidedly nonutopian. To Kipling, life was brutal, and his books for young people express this clearly, too clearly perhaps for modern tastes. For just as we find it hard to understand why a proud and loving father would push a seventeen-year-old into battle long before it was necessary, we wonder at his fascination with rules and laws, and why they are associated with such a high degree of violence. We are concerned that he expresses not only casual tolerance, but even encouragement, of behavior and attitudes that we consider unnecessarily brutal and cruel, even sadistic, especially in books for young people. Kipling exalts the harshest side of the manly code, especially the enthusiastic approval of physical punishment and violence and the stalwart indifference to pain, while encouraging the suppression of softer “feminine” feelings that he thought made men vulnerable. Published within a span of five years (1894-99), each of the three works I have selected for analysis, the Mowgli stories (which I shall be treating as one work), Captains Courageous, and Stalky & Co., features a testing ground for the protagonist, a combat zone with its own set of laws, code of behavior, mode of being, and appropriate style of language.

The sense that Kipling's harsh code goes too far is not just a modern reaction. Despite his many admirers, there has always been an undercurrent of criticism, even revulsion (particularly in the period between the two World Wars) against the sentiments he expresses.¹ When Martin Seymour-Smith in 1989 describes Kipling's publicly expressed philosophy of life as “cheap, shoddy, unworthy and impractical” and his public utterances revealing of a man “grotesque, merciless and insensitive” (8), he follows in the tradition of Richard Buchanan who, in 1900, declared that Kipling was “on the side of all that is ignorant, selfish, base and brutal in the instincts of humanity” (25) and that “the vulgarity, the brutality, the savagery, reeks on every page” (31). Max Beerbohm's well-known caricatures of Kipling, which began in 1901 and continued for almost thirty years, express a similar opinion.

However, in spite of the criticism, there is no doubt that Kipling's exaltation of the ideals of warfare and its opportunities for manly conduct and heroism was widely shared in his time; it is not often that a new writer achieves popularity as fast as he did. Indeed, his successful expression of the exultant warrior mentality in his books for young people makes them of special cultural significance, for they helped to shape the minds of the young men who were later to die in the mud of Flanders fields. The books teach the ways to achieve success and self-esteem in later life, creating a picture of manliness, courage, and obedience to a clearly enunciated code of behavior from which one may not deviate for any reason. It is not surprising that the young men encouraged to display these traits would advance cheerfully to be mown down by the relentless German machine guns, and would even show their gallant sportsmanship by kicking footballs before them as they went, steadfastly “playing the game.” John Kipling naturally falls into this metaphor when he writes his father from the war zone, “Remember our C.O. was 7 months on a ‘Brigade’ staff & what he doesn't know about the game isn't worth knowing” (Gilbert 213).

The rules of war are very different from the rules of games, but Kipling and his contemporaries were not at all clear on this issue; tragically, it took the Great War and its spokesmen, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke, to change the popular vision of the time. For the metaphor of war as game, which Kipling endorsed but by no means invented, had been nurtured by such poets as John Masefield and Sir Henry John Newbolt, whose “Vitaï Lampada” (1898) became a public school favorite. Beginning with the image of a school cricket match, Newbolt's poem ends with the later depiction of the boys at war. I reproduce the first and last verses:

There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote—
Play up! play up! and play the game!
The sand of the desert is sodden red—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke;
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honor a name;
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
Play up! play up! and play the game!

While it is true that moving onto the playing field or the battlefield involves entering into a distinct arena, where there are opposing teams and winners and losers, carrying the metaphor further is frightening. It is noteworthy that Newbolt's lifelong friend Douglas Haig was the general most responsible for the squandering of life, because he stubbornly persisted in relying on the soldiers' courage and fortitude instead of realizing that these qualities were meaningless in the face of the “stuttering rifles' rapid rattle.”

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell discusses in detail the common attitude to war in the decades prior to 1914. He particularly notes the sense that when ordinary men moved into battle they took on the dimension of heroes, and points out how the elevated diction of warfare, very different from the language of everyday life, contributed to this perception. Thus the enemy is “the foe,” the dead on the battlefield are “the fallen,” to die is to “perish,” warfare is “strife,” and a soldier is a “warrior.” The vision that war is glorious and transforms its participants into figures of mythical proportion is aptly illustrated in the mid-century incident that led to Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade.” “Someone had blundered,” the poem tells us; but the stupidity and bungling that sent close to six hundred men to their deaths for absolutely no purpose is passed over lightly. Instead, the poem focuses upon the glorious bravery of the men of the Light Brigade, and how valiantly and honorably (though futilely) they gave their lives, ennobled by their sacrifice and enshrined in the hearts of posterity for time immemorial. It was not surprising that young men reared on the glowing illusion that “laying down one's life” or “making the supreme sacrifice” for family and country was a beautiful and somehow sanctified act should flock to the recruiting stations at the declaration of war. Thomas Babington Macaulay's “Horatius,” written a few years before Tennyson's poem, put it well:

… how could man die better
                    than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
                    And the temples of his Gods.

No wars are pretty, but the gulf that lay between rhetoric and reality in the Great War was especially striking.

In this context, Kipling's fictional realms, the “otherworlds” he created as arenas of conflict or combat zones, are more understandable. They are definitely men's worlds; most of the players are male, and the few women we encounter are, like Harvey's mother or the fishermen's womenfolk in Captains Courageous, safe on land outside the field of combat. At home the women are soft, nurturing, and emotional. They fear, they weep, they suffer vicariously for their menfolk. Harvey's mother breaks down completely, incapable of any kind of action, when she thinks he is drowned; the passion with which Kipling describes how the entire railroad system conspires to speed her to her recovered son is sentimental to the point of excess. Messua, too, is pictured as vulnerable, suffering for her maternal love and kindness to Mowgli when the villagers stone her; incapable of self-preservation, she must depend on her adopted son for protection. The only self-sufficient female is Raksha, but of course she is a wolf! The men, on the other hand, display no such soft emotions; they are fierce, courageous, hard, even cruel; they exult in pain and they exult in winning. But to escape from the female world and female feelings, they must move over the boundary into another world.

In both the Mowgli stories and Captains Courageous we find the main character clearly crossing over from his ordinary world into a completely different one. Mowgli has somehow strayed from the sphere of humankind, and when he walks into Raksha's lair he has entered the Jungle world where animals talk and have created a social structure and history, and where he must learn to survive on their terms. Harvey tumbles from his old life in the luxury liner headlong into another realm. Saved from drowning in the ocean, he is literally reborn into the microcosm of the fishing boat named the We're Here, where he takes the place of a young man lost at sea just a few days before. He has shed his old identity as he has his wad of money, and must take on new habits, new behavior, and a new perspective on his place in society, playing the part of a man in a man's world, subject to the common code that ensures the survival of the floating community. In Stalky & Co., although we receive some description, especially regarding M'Turk, about the homes from which they have come, there is no account of the boys' arrival at the school. The boundary over which they have stepped is not dramatized, although it is clear that it exists, for their excursions into the surrounding countryside are carefully prescribed, and being out of bounds is punishable. The incident where the Head banishes himself from this sequestered world to preserve it from the danger of diphtheria outside emphasizes its separateness.

The Law of the Jungle in the Mowgli stories is described by Kipling as preeminent and “as old and as true as the sky” with a code that is absolute, seemingly immutable, and unquestionable. The reader is never told how or by whom it was established, or how it might be changed. Driven by a supposedly ageless and eternal vision imbued with a rational wisdom that accepts and incorporates the apparent vagaries of animal behavior and provides a clear pattern fair to each, the law defines each creature's hierarchy, its rights and obligations, and the rules of interaction with its own kind and with other species. Thus the tiger can claim one night of the year when he is entitled to kill Man; a mother wolf has the right to a portion of any wolf's kill for her litter; the jackal may run with the tiger and take what he leaves; and the elephant who lives a hundred years and more has the responsibility to proclaim the Water Truce. Only the Bandar-log, the Yahoos of the Jungle, are outside the law and are consequently viewed with contempt by all of the other animals. While time moves on and the players change, the principles and rules remain; the law has “arranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the Jungle People, till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can make it” (125). Because it is clearly understandable and dependable, it governs even out-of-the-ordinary situations, like the time of drought, or Mowgli's kidnapping by the Bandar-log and his incarceration among the snakes of the ruined city, when the Master-words of the Jungle ensure safe passage.

The notion of the supremacy of the law, driven by a Darwinian belief in the perfectibility that “time and custom” will unquestionably bring about, suggests a supreme power whose vision is realized in this exact code. Whether this supreme power is divine, or a reflection of the Victorian imperialistic sense of responsibility for bringing light and civilization to benighted areas of the world, is not important here; in fact, the sense of mission characteristic of both is clearly expressed in Mowgli's need to “let in the Jungle” in an attempt to cleanse the nearby village where superstition and greed has led to behavior that violates the morals of the Jungle Law. Because he is so clever and learns the Jungle Law better than the animals, Mowgli becomes invincible. He achieves individual power by following the law and interpreting it with human intelligence, illustrating that the individual is the expression of this deeper power rather than a free agent who can operate outside it.

Those of us who were introduced to the Mowgli stories in childhood probably accept without question that the Jungle in this context is an appropriate source of values. We still delight in Mother Wolf's claiming of the naked man cub, protecting him against the villainous Shere Khan, and watching benignly as he suckles with her own brood. Like Mowgli we feel the joys of companionship with the other wolves and his sense of belonging as he learns to claim, “We be of one blood, ye and I”; and we know his loneliness when he is thrust out of this idyllic existence because of his growing manhood. We share his sense of increasing competence as he learns the rules and becomes Master of the Jungle, and his distaste for the moral turpitude of the village.

When we think a little more objectively, however, the notion of finding codes of behavior in the Jungle, a place usually used as a metaphor for savagery and lawlessness, seems contradictory and strange. And when we analyze these codes more carefully, we find that a great many of them regulate the ordered hierarchy of power, particularly power over killing and ownership of the kill. When you wish someone well you wish him “good hunting,” and Chil the Kite's function as the scavenger of the dead is cheerfully acknowledged: “almost everybody in the Jungle comes to [Chil] in the end” (238). Moments of great accomplishment are similarly violent: Mowgli laughs when he sets fire to Shere Khan's coat, and later, having killed him, dances in triumph upon his skin pegged out on the Council Rock. “Letting in the Jungle” features Mowgli's relentless revenge against humankind, and the story is followed by “Mowgli's Song Against People,” which celebrates the obliteration of a village. The nature of the language as well as the splendid rhythms of the death chants and songs gives a legendary quality to this long tale of hunting, killing, and revenge. The violence is continuous, but the everyday tone encourages us to accept it as the way things are, where winning means survival. “‘When tomorrow comes we will kill for tomorrow,’ said Mowgli, quoting a Jungle saying; and again ‘When I am dead it is time to sing the Death Song. Good Hunting Kaa!’” (229). There are really only two occasions where death seems frightening. The first is in “Kaa's Hunting,” where Kaa tells Mowgli “what follows is not well that thou shouldst see” (47) and we are left with the image of the mesmeric Dance of the Hunger of Kaa that will lead to the death of many of the Bandar-log, unable to resist in their hypnotized state; the second is in “The King's Ankus” where men kill not for food, but for greed. Somehow the killing on these two occasions seems unsporting and not played by the appropriate rules.

Like the Mowgli stories, Captains Courageous presents an autonomous world whose code of behavior is absolute, and where the stakes once again are life and death. Here it is not other people, or humanized animals, but the sea that is the threat. The never-ending fatal power of the ocean is poignantly acknowledged at the ship's homecoming and at the service where wives, sweethearts, and mothers suffer from the news of the latest losses at sea, and grieve for those who have died before.

Kipling has sought to create not a fantasy world, but one characterized by verisimilitude, having spent hours of careful research and interviews to represent an accurate picture of the fisherman's life. The strong sense of a natural law whose incontrovertible power and strength must be understood and whose rules followed faithfully and with insight is expressed just as strongly in Captains Courageous as it is in the Mowgli stories. As Mowgli seeks to emulate the superior senses of the animals, so Disko Troop, the “master artist who knew the Banks blindfold” (50), is recognized by the entire fleet for his amazing knowledge of the contours of the sea beneath him and for his almost uncanny gift for sensing “the roving cod in his own sea” (36); he steers his craft even in fog and darkness, “always with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen board” (77).

This oneness with his natural environment, together with his thoughtful control of his crew, gives Troop unchallenged power over both nature and human nature. But he has achieved this stature through mastery of the rules of the sea and the lore of those who sail upon it; he has learned not only the maritime geography, but the way of the currents, the wind, and weather; not only how to catch and preserve the fish, but the reasons why they will congregate in certain places; not only the rules that make a ship's crew work together—who is assigned which task, who takes precedence at mealtime, who stands which watch—but also the more delicate codes of behavior and of ethics that cause him to take on the tragic amnesiac Pratt and his guardian Salters, even though they are not outstanding fishermen. His boat is a minicosmos that includes representatives of various nationalities and religious beliefs, including the cook's unearthly magical rituals and second sight. The deep natural morality that inspires Troop's way of life and work is highlighted by the contrast of Uncle Abishai's boat: “foul, draggled and unkempt, … a blowzy, frowzy, bad old woman” (68) manned by a drunken crew who all go down with the boat in clear sight of the We're Here. In their drunkenness, their violations of the code of seamanlike behavior, and their prideful and foolish underestimation of the power of the sea, they have broken all the rules and they must pay with their lives.

Of the three books I am considering, Captains Courageous involves the least violence and cruelty. It is also, interestingly enough, the work in which the lawmaker, Disko Troop, is the most human. His rules are less ideal codes than practical behavior, and he is allowed to make mistakes; one of Dan's continuing sources of merriment is that his father is “mistook in his jedgment” regarding Harvey's true account of his father's wealth and position in society. Nonetheless Kipling seems to take a good deal of pleasure in detailing Harvey's physical trials: being worked to exhaustion, suffering painful “gurry sores” (the mark of a real fisherman); being knocked around generally if he doesn't move or learn fast enough. The seaman teaching Harvey “emphasized the difference between fore and aft by rubbing Harvey's nose along a few feet of the boom, and the lead of each rope was fixed in Harvey's mind by the end of the rope itself” (47). And the incident where Harvey and Dan accidentally catch the corpse of the dead sailor with “the head that had no face under its streaming hair” (121) does seem gratuitous. Kipling convinces us that Harvey ultimately enjoys what could be considered abusive treatment of a minor, and that the end result is a matured and enriched youth well on the way to the assumption of his manly responsibilities.

The approach is reminiscent of Lord Northcliffe's propaganda piece to families of men at the front entitled “What to Send ‘Your Soldier.’” A very acceptable gift, he says, is peppermint bulls' eyes:

The bulls' eyes ought to have plenty of peppermint in them, for it is the peppermint which keeps those who suck them warm on a cold night. It also has a digestive effect, though that is of small account at the front, where health is so good and indigestion hardly ever heard of. The open-air life, the regular and plenteous feeding, the exercise, and the freedom from care and responsibility, keep the soldiers extraordinarily fit and contented.

[Fussell 87]

The cold, wet, exhausted soldier eating his unheated canned rations, crouching at the bottom of a rat-infested trench with shells screaming overhead, the decaying dismembered bodies of his comrades around him, would have some difficulty recognizing Northcliffe's absurd description. Yet it is clear from the soldiers' letters home that a cheerful and willing response and sturdy inattention to physical comfort was the attitude that was expected of them. John Kipling, in his last letter home, writes, “We have to push through at all costs so we won't have much time in the trenches, which is great luck. Funny to think one will be in the thick of it tomorrow” [Gilbert 222].

In Stalky & Co. the codes are much more complex, and the kinds of behavior described present a challenging dynamic that mediates between a number of conflicting possibilities. In the world outside the school we have the accepted codes of the village, the farmers and shopkeepers who inhabit it, and representatives of the gentry. The boys bring some of these codes from home with them, as we see for example in the event where M'Turk and Colonel Dabney share outrage at the shooting of a fox. Within the school we find the rules of the masters such as King and Prout, with their sometimes narrow perspectives of what is acceptable; the ordinary boys with ordinary rules, limited and rudimentary in daring, imagination, and intelligence; and at another level the startling trio of Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle, who play out with the Head a symbolic stichomythia of creative behavior, each interweaving with the others to form new variations on the accepted patterns.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the Head is the source of absolute order; for even the Three, though they can manipulate everyone else, bow to his authority. In fact, one of the especially significant events of the later part of the book is the discovery of the reason for the Head's punishing them in a manner and for an offense that they did not understand at the time. To maintain the fiction that he is infallible is so important that Abanazar covers up the true reason (the Head had to impress one of the trustees) and reinterprets the offense to the other two (the Head knew they had been dueling). It is apparently necessary that the boys' vision of the Head as a god-like figure be protected, for he is the only visible source of authority and of ultimate values in the book; human failings are not permitted him as they are to Disko Troop. As he tells Beetle, “There is a limit … beyond which it is never safe to pursue private vendettas, because … sooner or later one comes into collision with the higher authority” (141). When the Head ironically points out that the enforcing of limits involves some “flagrant injustice,” M'Turk refers to him as a “dearr man,” and Stalky laughs heartily at the thought. The boys must preserve the system of authority that they need, helping to construct and maintain it through their willing collusion.

The Jungle and the We're Here present worlds where the laws are clear, and the sense of order dependable. The characters know the rules and the dangers of flouting them, and though Mowgli must use his intelligence to interpret the Jungle Law as it should apply to the world of people, within the discrete boundaries in which the rules apply there is little need for any individual to redefine the codes of ethics and behavior.

In sharp contrast to the serenity born of the clear order in the Jungle and the We're Here, Stalky & Co. is permeated with a sense of uneasy rambunctiousness where the expected structural order is consistently sabotaged, and various codes of behavior vie with each other for supremacy. While it is true that the Head reigns supreme, like Disko Troop a natural leader and arbiter setting the ethical standards of which codes and rules are the ultimate expression, the other masters' authority is constantly challenged by Stalky, Beetle, and M'Turk, who usually emerge victorious. In addition, the hierarchical structure that the boys in general set up and defer to, the system of prefects whose seniority is usually respected, is also overturned by the three protagonists, who consider their judgments and intelligence vastly superior. The tension that Philip Mason notes between Kipling's love of rules and his respect for human potential is very evident here. Mason believes that in “all his life [Kipling] was to be divided between his instinct as an artist and his understanding of the administrator; between an emotional sympathy for the waif and the outlaw but a firm belief that, if chaos is to be kept at bay, men must be ruled by laws and the individual may have to suffer. He is usually on the side of the system but often against its manifestations; always on the side of the Head but often against the housemaster” (47).

In Stalky & Co. it is important to remember that the setting is the United Services College, which is preparing boys for a career in the military, as Stalky's ditty makes clear:

It's a way we have in the Army,
It's a way we have in the Navy,
It's a way we have in the Public Schools
                    Which nobody can deny!

[250]

The later part of the book does tell us about the boys' actions in battle, not at all like the Great War to come, but part of the preservation of the Empire against the tribesmen who stir up unrest. This war and the characters' actions are as outrageous as the school environment illustrated, and Kipling goes to some extremes to suggest the continuity between the two, for example the two chapters entitled “Slaves of the Lamp,” where the closing song of the boys' pantomime reappears in a military telegram, and Stalky is recognized in action by his singing “Arrah, Patsy, mind the baby.” Though this connection is common to all the books considered here (Mowgli takes his sense of values into the human world with him; Harvey's experience of men and boats serves him well in his father's shipping empire), the war stories told by Dick Four and Tertius fifteen years later reveal a Stalky little different from the schoolboy. War is almost as much of a game as the battles at school, replete with glee at outwitting the enemy, bravado which now shows as bravery, and cheek to higher authority.

There is no doubt at all that Kipling intends us to admire the boys-become-men, and especially Stalky, for their derring-do, their sense of adventure, their intelligence, their humor, their camaraderie, and their flouting of authority. He suggests that these qualities are what makes the Empire great and lauds their expression in military life. The fact that USC prepares boys for the military makes the school's sense of disorder and violence justifiable, and the friction a way to define a deeper kernel of truth. The code is based not on superficial rules but on a deeper understanding of manliness, which finds its ultimate expression in the final chapters where the boys' early training prepares them not only for honorable behavior, but for survival. Stalky can thus use a comrade's dead body to cover and keep hidden a passageway he does not want others to use, and he can carve a symbol on the chest of a man he has just killed to confound his enemies and put them at war with each other. The callousness at school toward physical punishment becomes, in this context, simply preparation for a life whose high point is the glorification of war and the fighting man. Once again, conquest is survival.

The contrast in the degree of physical punishment in the three books is of particular interest. Mowgli is treated with kindness and chastised only once, after he consorts with and is kidnapped by the Bandar-log; Bagheera provides “half-a-dozen love taps” which wouldn't have wakened a panther cub but which “for a seven-year-old boy amounted to as severe a beating as you could wish to avoid” (48). Similarly, in Captains Courageous Disko Troop strikes Harvey just one time, causing him to fall down onto the deck with a bloody nose. In both of these cases Kipling expects the reader to accept that the punishment is correct, deserved, and very efficacious. But in Stalky & Co. there is an endless ritual of beatings, lauded as a much better punishment than lines or other tiresome impositions. These are administered by the Head, and the boys are always both impressed by his actions and grateful for their punishment. In fact, in the most extreme case, after the Head is cheered by the entire school for his bravery in dealing with a diptheria case, his decision to beat every boy in the school for unruly behavior is met with “wonder and admiration. … Here was a man to be reverenced” (248). And partway through the beatings he is cheered again. A scene which is particularly revealing is the one in which the Head discusses limits while beating the boys. Kipling's representation of the process of punishment is quite evocative; afterward the boys run down to the lavatory and, while admitting they had suffered severe pain, laughingly compare welts with the aid of a mirror. One is reminded that flagellation is considered “le vice Anglais” and is apparently a standard feature of most British pornography.

It was a fair, sustained, equable stroke, with a little draw to it, but what they felt most was his unfairness in stopping to talk between executions. Thus:—“Among the—lower classes this would lay me open to a charge of—assault. You should be more grateful for your—privileges than you are. There is a limit—one finds it by experience, Beetle—beyond which it is never safe to pursue private vendettas, because—don't move—sooner or later one comes—into collision with the—higher authority, who has studied the animal. Et ego—M'Turk please—in Arcadia vixi.”

[141]

In addition to these beatings exerted by the Head, we find in “The Moral Reformers” (a rather distasteful chapter, at least to sensitive eyes), the Padre turning over a discipline problem to the Three, who subject two bullies to a well-documented and carefully detailed succession of painful bullying techniques—techniques that the bullies themselves had used on a young victim. This rough justice, though probably deserved and certainly effective, seems motivated by revenge as well as justice (Beetle had been bullied when young) and leaves rather a sour taste. It really isn't fun, though the Three seem to enjoy it. It seems that though Kipling apparently found Stalky exceedingly funny, the challenge to order required him to reinstate it in the book through constant violence; it appears that the threat to order provoked a deep anxiety that both humor and violence relieved.

It is very possible that the sharp and not altogether pleasant memories that inspired Kipling to write Stalky & Co. are expressed not only in the noticeable degree of hysteria that permeates the book, but also in the absence of a clear dividing line between the “Coll.” and the “real world,” and in the disordered hierarchy and unstable rules that operate in the school. It has become commonplace to look back upon Kipling's childhood experiences through the eyes of the boy in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” and perceive the agony of a child deserted by his parents and abused by his foster family. But anecdotes from the biographies also suggest that Rudyard was a pampered little boy, spoiled by the family's Indian servants and sorely in need of some discipline. Furthermore, two images of the child reveal a boy who, when he could not see well, took a stick and slashed what he thought was his grandmother to determine if the blurry image was indeed her, and who would come to lunch with his boots red with blood from the pig slaughtering that so fascinated him. There are also mixed messages about his time at school. Was he mistreated at United Services College, or did he simply object to the usual restraints and rough-and-tumble normal in a group of adolescent boys? Certainly he was perceived as being very physically mature for his age, and his demeanor at school was described as challenging and arrogant. In fact, he had discovered, shortly before writing Stalky & Co., that his schoolmasters had suspected him of homosexual behavior, a suspicion that made him extremely angry, for he considered such acts “beastliness.” The violence in the book may be expressing some of this anger.

Such anecdotes provide no firm base for an interpretation, but they do provide some additional perspective to the disconcerting violence that simmers so close to the surface of Stalky & Co., erupting not only in the canings, but in the killing and persecuting of animals, the smashing of furniture and windows, the shooting at other boys, and the near-burning of the dormitory. Revenge frequently inspires the violence, for example, the Three's killing a cat and placing it under the floorboards of King's house to decompose in retaliation for his suggestion that they smelled bad, or their smashing up King's study when they are evicted from their own. “Didn't I say I'd get even with him?” says Stalky (250); “Ti-ra-la-la-i-tu, I gloat! Hear me!” (54) cry the boys as they celebrate their revenge. The sense of sweet satisfaction celebrated in these and other incidents is more frighteningly evident in a later story, “Mary Postgate,” where the pleasure of the revenge Mary feels at the death of a German soldier is expressed as sensual ecstasy.

Where rules are broken, they must be mended, and this, it appears, can only be accomplished with violent action. The more uncertain the rules, the harsher the violence that is needed to reestablish the necessary order. While Kipling portrays the duel between order and disorder in social terms, clearly this must also be a metaphor for the surge of personal desires and inappropriate motivation, and the necessity to restrain or redirect them into acceptable channels. Kipling's writings suggest that he held within him serious unresolved conflicts that find expression in the obession with rules and with the violence necessary to keep order dominant. With equal violence, he disciplines and divides emotions and feelings appropriate for men from those fit only for women. This macho vision of masculinity is hard to sustain for someone like Kipling, whose ambivalence toward the first important woman in his life, who petted and then abandoned him, is depicted so well in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep,” where the young boy throws up his arm to defend himself against his mother's caress. By attempting to deny that part of his personality he identifies as “feminine,” Kipling is forced to exaggerate the “masculine” characteristics that become, as one would expect in this dichotomy, stereotypically expressed in the bravado, indifference to pain, and brutality of the manly code he proposed.

Kipling was clearly a sensitive man camouflaged by brave words and an assertive, even brash personality. His ongoing attempt to master and to hide his vulnerability, to guard the tender self within, reveals itself in the need to dedicate himself to something greater, a more powerful authority structure whose preservation, whatever the cost, must be ensured. Mowgli's commitment to the Law of the Jungle, Harvey's involvement in the survival of the We're Here, and Stalky and his friends' collusion in maintaining the authority of USC's headmaster all illustrate Kipling's belief in an ordered, all-male structure whose shaping power turns boys into men.

Many cultures celebrate rites of passage to dramatize that boys are now grown and ready to take their place in adult society. Frequently the rituals involve isolating the young men from the community and subjecting them to tests by which they must prove their worth, tests which in many cases challenge the youths' ability to endure pain, humiliation, and even physical mutilation in their quest for a new adult wisdom.² By plunging his young protagonists into “otherworlds” with clearly delineated codes, rules, and powerful authority structures that hone the boys' potential into strength and self-reliance, Kipling creates his own ritualized arenas in which the boys can prove themselves. The willing, even joyful submission to pain is associated with the need to suppress aspects of the feminine, which Kipling depicts as soft, fragile, incompetent, and rendering the individual too vulnerable to survive in a demanding world. As the need to reject the female self becomes increasingly insistent, the ideal of self-sacrifice grows stronger, so that the giving and acceptance of pain becomes an exercise in power, acknowledging both the strength of the authority figure and the strength of the individual who, by enduring pain, shows himself worthy.

In real life, the self thus divided is in danger. Kipling's public self, the brash jingoist who continued to laud the increasingly anachronistic ideals of manhood and empire, appears to have flourished at the expense of a vulnerable private self that suffered not only from the early loss of his “best beloved” daughter, but from the death of his son in combat, sacrificed to the ideals and code that Kipling espoused. He spent his later years immured in the gloomy Bateman's, protected by his wife from the demands of a too-insistent world; access to his works after death was similarly controlled by his wife and later his daughter, who appear to have decided which of his unpublished writings were appropriate for release to the public.

In his fictional realms, however, Kipling's boys relish their tough, strict training in the combat zones he has created for them, and cheerfully endure and enjoy their preparation for a challenging world where their success seems assured. In each case the “otherworld” Kipling has delineated seems tailor-made as a training ground for the “real” world to which the boys must return; their mastery of the rules and codes, whether they be Jungle Law, sea lore, or military school regulations, promises them mastery not only of the self, achieved by a code-based self-discipline, but of the world in which they will take their rightful place.

Notes

1. See, for example, Philip Mason's chapter “Admiration and Dislike” or Harold Orel's “Rudyard Kipling and the Establishment: A Humanistic Dilemma.”

2. A contemporary example of such a rite is depicted in a September 1990 Los Angeles Times series featuring “Hell Week,” which young men in the Navy must endure if they are to become SEALs, members of the elite sea-air-land commando force that is sent on dangerous clandestine missions. “Why do they endure ‘Sucking Up Pain’ and Mind Games?” the subheading asks, as it describes a week which includes only three hours of sleep and constant physical abuse.

Works Cited

Buchanan, Robert. “The Voice of the Hooligan: A Discussion of Kiplingism.” In Kipling and the Critics, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. New York: New York University Press, 1965. 20-32.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Gilbert, Elliot L., ed. O Beloved Kids. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1984.

Kipling, Rudyard. Captains Courageous. Vol. 16 of The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling. 1941. New York: AMS Press, 1970.

———. The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book. London: Octopus Books, 1984.

———. Stalky & Co. Vol. 14 of The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling. 1941. New York: AMS Press, 1970.

Mason, Philip. Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Orel, Harold. Critical Essays on Rudyard Kipling. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1989.

Seymour-Smith, Martin. Rudyard Kipling. London: Macdonald and Co., 1989.