SOURCE: Stewart, D. H. “Stalky and the Language of Education.” Children's Literature 20 (1992): 36-51.

[In the following essay, Stewart asserts that Stalky & Co. “can be read as a celebration of language, boys' language—how they sift and assimilate both their cultural heritage and their immediate experiences through it, and how this prepares them to confront the challenges of adulthood.”]

When he wrote Stalky & Co. (1899),¹ Rudyard Kipling had become a master stylist. The book retains its appeal nearly a century later but no longer as a manual for training administrators of the British Empire, which is how many early critics interpreted it. Rather, it can be read as a celebration of language, boys' language—how they sift and assimilate both their cultural heritage and their immediate experiences through it, and how this prepares them to confront the challenges of adulthood. The book is about education, and a reader's experience with its language constitutes the very process of education as Kipling envisions it.

Stalky & Co. tells the story of three English schoolboys in about 1880. The school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! was a corporation established in 1874 by military officers who could not afford distinguished schools but who wanted their sons well enough educated to pass entrance exams into military academies. Operated “on the cheap” (Smith 8), the school occupied a row of connected buildings facing the Atlantic in North Devon. Kipling immortalized those “twelve bleak houses by the shore” where the boys endured plenty of raw weather and never much food (Something 46).

Because the three boys (Stalky, M'Turk, and Beetle) and all other characters are modeled on real people, the book is often treated solely as a roman à clef. Indeed, the three (L. C. Dunsterville, G. C. Beresford, and Kipling himself) later wrote autobiographical accounts augmenting or revising their fictional selves. But exclusively biographical readings seem inadequate. Kipling's imagination ran with a free rein once he escaped the bonds of journalism during his “seven years' hard” in India (Something 56). Moreover, he developed a “poetic” process of composition that emphasized the sound and rhythm of language. This polyglossic (and polysonic) style coupled with his high-speed imagination radically transformed events and people, blurring fact and fantasy. The distance between fictive language and “reality” became Shakespearean, which explains why a gap opens between form and content and tempts critics to treat him sometimes as a photographic realist and sometimes as a verbal magician.

Few critics undervalue Kipling's skill with language.² It is his morality or ideology that antagonizes. But if one approaches his style first in terms of recent “orality-literacy” theory, then a special claim can be made for Stalky & Co.'s value to teachers and students. Walter J. Ong, one of the best known advocates of this theory, calls attention to the primacy of orality (“written words are residue,” Orality 11), dramatizes its evolving relationship with the “technologies” of writing, printing, and electronic texts, and warns against the “impoverishment” resulting from our “addiction” to unreflective visualization in literary criticism (Interfaces 103). The theory is especially applicable to Stalky & Co., which re-creates the old oral-rhetorical tradition that survived in English schools. It illustrates the study of Latin as a “puberty initiation rite” reserved for boys (Ong, Presence 251, Rhetoric 120-24). The book is a virtual case study of oral and literate “language acquisition,” exhibiting the full range of competencies that empower skillful users. In “The Last Term,” Beetle's “shouting and declaiming against the long-ridged seas” like Demosthenes concentrates in a momentary image the book's “acoustic” appeal.

Further, a second claim for the book's value can be made based on the relationship between language and morality or ideology that Kipling may have discovered in Friedrich Froebel's theory that genuine knowledge derives from “mind-world-language,” which is threefold, yet in itself one.

In “The Propagation of Knowledge,” Beetle was reading about mad Elizabethan beggars in Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (1791-1823):

Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse—of incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds—from a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran:

With a heart of furious fancies
          Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
          To the wilderness I wander.
With a knight of ghosts and shadows
          I summoned am to tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end—
          Methinks it is no journey.

He sat, mouthing and staring before him. …

[225–226]

Our term for this experience is “the shock of recognition,” but we understand “shock” as an internalized, cerebral experience because our reading is almost exclusively visual and passive. Kipling adds a physical, oral dimension. The song “leaped out on him,” and he “mouthed” it.

Throughout his work, Kipling foregrounds the oral-aural power of language as if to demonstrate the thesis from orality-literacy theory that ears are more sensitive than eyes.³ In “Slaves of the Lamp, Part I,” the boys sing a music-hall song, “Arrah, Pasty, mind the baby!” In “Slaves of the Lamp, Part II,” Stalky, now an officer fighting in northwest India, plays the song on a bugle to guide a fellow officer's attack. The sound of word games in school echoes in deadlier imperial games, where words are used mainly to give orders.

Kipling saturates Stalky & Co. with sound. The boys convert most texts they read into living language. In “The United Idolaters,” Uncle Remus sets the boys shouting and dancing:

Ti-yi! Tungalee!
I eat um pea! I pick um pea!
Ingle-go-jang, my joy, my joy!

The chants seemed to answer the ends of their being. … They all sang them the whole way up the corrider. … The book was amazing, and full of quotations that one could hurl like javelins.

[144]

The war games in “The Satisfactions of a Gentleman” occur amid a mad jumble of phrases from the Bible, Horace, and Captain Marryat's Peter Simple. The boys mangle French by compounding it with English: “Tweakons” means “let us tweak.” “Je cat, tu cat, il cat. Nous cattons!” (“Cat” means vomit in boys' argot.) In “In Ambush,” the boys, dancing like dervishes, intone “the primitive man's song of triumph, ‘Ti-ra-la-la-i-tu! I gloat! Hear me!’” In “An Unsavoury Interlude,” this becomes “Je vais gloater tout le blessed afternoon.”

“In Ambush,” the lead story in the 1899 edition of Stalky [Stalky & Co.], contains almost audibly explosive language. The three boys trespass on Colonel Dabney's land when his gamekeeper fires a shotgun at a fox, narrowly missing the boys. Instead of slinking back to the college, M'Turk marches up to Colonel Dabney to report the keeper's outrage. (Shooting a fox is a cardinal sin among gentry.) Querulous old Dabney at first belabors the boy for trespassing and asks, “Do you know who I am?” Righteously indignant, M'Turk relapses into Irish dialect: “No, sorr, nor do I care if ye belonged to the Castle [Dublin Castle] itself. Answer me now as one gentleman to another. Do ye shoot foxes or do ye not?”

Kipling underlines the sound of this by noting that M'Turk had been “kicked out of his Irish dialect” at school. Then he elaborates:

Forgotten—forgotten was the College and the decency due to elders! M'Turk was treading again the barren purple mountains of the rainy West coast, where in his holidays he was viceroy of four thousand acres, only son of a three-hundred-year-old house. … It was the landed man speaking to his equal—deep calling to deep—and the old gentleman acknowledged the cry.

[35]

The passage is remarkable for several reasons. Language here has the force of gesture. It is reminiscent of Odysseus' meeting with Nausicaä and her people. Naked and alone, Odysseus has only his language for protection against capture and enslavement, his upper-class Greek that validates his identity and position. Here a boy speaking the right dialect (it is gentry Irish, not shanty Irish) breaks across the barriers of age and locale (Dabney speaks gentry Devon, not the “potwalloper Devon” that Kipling records affectionately elsewhere). But Kipling carries us beyond class-specific language with the biblical allusion—“deep calling to deep” (Psalms 42:7). This is David in prayer, a glancing allusion too portentous for the context if we take it literally, but deftly resonant for dramatizing orality's impact.

Kipling deploys language harmonically, so that informed hearers pick up counterpoints behind the surface melody. For example, “The Propagation of Knowledge” recounts students' cramming for a literature exam. It is so densely packed with allusions to major and minor writers that only literary specialists can now hear the harmonies that Kipling devises.⁴ At the same time, it demonstrates the vitality of the literary heritage as students reconstitute it in living language. For example, when Stalky reads the steward's speech from King Lear (II,ii), he drops “d” from “and” and all his terminal g's. One must read aloud to savor the passage.

Most readers of Kipling register the high volume of his prose. He is “noisy.” In a letter to his aunt (Mrs. Alfred Baldwin—September 13, 1909), he wrote, “In your own drawing room your own piano is all right—for an audience in a larger room it must be a concert grand, tuned to concert pitch. And yet the notes you play are the same.”⁵ The public performer dominates, but Kipling's versatility opens a wide array of moods and melodies, from strident to tender.

Stridency is the most obvious in Stalky. The distinctive “key” of Mr. King (the boys' Latin teacher) is sarcasm and invective. As the boys construe Horace, King interrupts: “Idiot! … May I ask if [the passage] conveys any meaning whatever to your so-called mind?” Today we frown on sarcasm from teachers, but in his autobiography Kipling claimed that

one learns more from a good scholar in a rage than from a score of lucid and laborious drudges. … I think this “approach” [sarcasm] is now discouraged for fear of hurting the souls of youth, but in essence it is no more than rattling tins or firing squibs under a colt's nose. I remember nothing save satisfaction or envy when C——[William Crofts, the model for King] broke his precious ointments over my head.

[Something 51]

Beetle mimics King perfectly in “An Unsavory Interlude.”

Less prominent, but nonetheless present, are the modulated notes to communicate gentler moods. In “A Little Prep.,” the headmaster reads to the boys an account of an alumnus' gallant rescue in battle of a schoolmate who dies, and one boy says in a hushed voice, “That's nine of us, isn't it, in the last three years?” Later the hero recounts his exploits to the awestruck boys, and Stalky questions him in a “voice tuned to a wholly foreign reverence.” The muted sentences derive their power by contrast with the customary racket of boy talk.

In addition to “voicing” texts and making language audibly active, Kipling introduces a kind of theory about the importance of orality in education. In “Regulus,” Mr. King recites Virgil: “For … forty minutes, with never a glance at the book, King paid out the glorious hexameters (and King could read Latin as though it were alive).”⁶ His purpose is to instill “balance, proportion, perspective—life.” “Character—proportion—background,” he says, “that is the essence of the Humanities.” He tries to counteract the science teacher's “modern system of inculcating unrelated facts about chlorine, for instance, all of which may be proved fallacies by the time the boys grow up.” The science teacher answers with a question: “Is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue?”

In the end King wins the argument when a particularly studious boy, a goody-goody, goes berserk in a fight and earns high marks for courage. He gains the sobriquet “Regulus,” a valorous Roman martyred for republican virtue. King insists that Latin has given the boy backbone. At least a little of King's message “sticks among the barbarians” to influence their actions.

We know that Kipling approved of King's use of Latin “for a discourse on manners, morals, and respect for authority” because he repeated King's ideas in 1912 when he spoke at Wellington College. Granting that boys remember only a few old Latin tags and quotations after seven years of study, he insists that they

give one the very essence of what a man ought to try to do. Others … let you understand, once and for all, the things that a man should not do—under any circumstances. There are others—bits of odes from Horace, they happen to be in my case—that make one realize in later life as no other words in any other tongue can, the brotherhood of mankind in time of sorrow or affliction.⁷

Latin tags fixed themselves in memory because teachers “performed” them aloud and boys repeated them aloud. By contrast, boys learned chemistry by making “stinks” in the laboratory. The Latin classroom remained the same in Kipling's school as it was a thousand years earlier, a place of oral recitation. As a result, not only “exalted sentiments” but some of the language itself “stuck” among the barbarous boys. In “The Satisfaction of a Gentleman,” Kipling records a hilariously garbled Latin telegram that a former student manages to construe correctly.

Kipling's passion for language in Stalky seems to have begun with his discovery that words were like javelins in the hands of skillful users. However daunting the boyish jargon, the dialects, and allusions may be for today's readers, we may still share the joy of language unleashed. We may “mouth” some lines, amazed at “opening doors into inexplicable worlds.” We may conclude that Kipling enhances reading ability and language facility by challenging readers with lexical, grammatical, and rhetorical surprises and by quickening the aural response to texts as a supplement to chronic visualization, so that (as he said), words somehow become “alive and walk up and down in the hearts of all hearers.”⁸

Three of Kipling's remarks about Stalky may help remove obstacles that critics hostile to his ethos have created. At the end of his career he wrote that the book “is still read and I maintain it is a truly valuable collection of tracts” (Something 113). In the face of countless denunciations of the book (Quigly catalogs them in her edition, xiii), Kipling's insistence on its value prompts one to reexamine it carefully. Responding to early protests against Stalky, Kipling made several surprising, perhaps playful, claims. In 1899, he wrote Cormell Price, headmaster at USC, that Stalky “will cover (incidentally) the whole question of modern education” (Letters 2. 359). To another person, he wrote: “It's in the nature of a moral tract—only a perverse generation insists on calling it comic, and a boy's book, and a lot of other things which it isn't. It's all cribbed from Froebel, with a few slight alterations to disperse plagiarism. …”⁹

If we can take the reference to Froebel seriously, it places Stalky & Co. in a new light. Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) was the champion of the kindergarten movement in Germany, and Elizabeth Peabody (Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister-in-law) popularized it in America. The first sentence of Froebel's The Education of Man is “In all things there lives and reigns an eternal law,” and the book is full of ideas that might have attracted Kipling. Many self-willed, “bad” children turn out to have “the liveliest, most eager, strongest desire for spontaneous goodness” (6-7). Often educators themselves (“men of mischief”) make boys bad by misinterpreting high-spirited behavior as malicious (124). The ideal school serves as an “intelligent consciousness” that “hovers over and between the outer world and the young scholar.” It “mediates” between the two, “imparting to them language and mutual understanding” (138-39).

Most importantly for this essay, Froebel claims that

the mind and the outer world (first as nature), and language which unites the two, are the poles of boy-life, as they also were the poles of mankind as a whole in the first stage of approaching maturity (as the sacred books show). Mind-world-language [are] three fold, yet in itself one, knowledge.

[129]

According to Juliet Dusinberre (15-19), Froebel reinstated the body as the center of experience and linked it organically with mental development; hence his insistence on manual training. Babies are animals en route to full humanity. Important corollaries derive from this: First, the child must evolve “naturally,” without undue adult constraint, to avoid the perversions detailed by Rousseau, Wordsworth, and other Romantics; hence disobedience to parents is at times permissible. Second, the child prodigy, the genius, is linked both to childishness and insanity, that is, the retention of vital spontaneity within the usual automatism of adults. Third, the mother's role is exalted because moral ideals are born from maternal affection, not self-interest. (Kipling dramatizes this corollary in “The Brushwood Boy” (1895), which precedes Stalky.) Thus Froebel is a touchstone for the “cult of childhood” that blossomed in the 1890s and culminated in Barrie's Peter Pan.

No doubt Kipling sympathized with many of Froebel's notions. After all, he was a boyish prodigy familiar with unstable mental states.¹⁰ His letters to his children evidence concern for their physical and mental development equally (O Beloved Kids). In his tales for little children, it is language that links the child and the world, and language is the basis and medium of education.

Finally, he may have found a literary application of Froebel's bracketing of the physical and mental. Froebel's Mother-Play and Nursery Songs contained fifty engravings illustrating all trades and professions. Each picture includes symbolic hand gestures and a song. By touch, by sight, and by hearing, the child absorbs lessons. This ingenious array of sensory appeals reminds one of Kipling's Just So Stories [Just So Stories for Little Children] that he recited to his children and also illustrated. But Stalky & Co.'s appeal is exclusively oral-aural, like a mother's songs. Here Kipling devised a “phonotext” that frequently cancels print's visuality, invites the reader back to “voicing,” and thus restores the power inherent in sounded words (Ong, Presence 111-13). He does this by saturating his text with aphorisms, clichés, and formulaic expressions, the hallmarks of orality, borrowed directly or imitated from biblical, classical, or folk repositories, even from “the great holiday world” of music-hall gags: for example, “Satan rebuking sin with a vengeance”; “a Daniel come to judgement”; “the bleatin' of the kid excites the tiger”; “I can connive at immorality, but I cannot stand impudence”; “he came, he sniffed, he said things.”

The link between harsh school life and the oral, parodic-literary nature of school language, used in tandem with, or as an alternate to, physical aggression, lies in the purpose for which the boys are being educated—a purpose with which Kipling aligns himself at the end of the book.

Now, if we combine the “Froebel clue” with Kipling's unusually hyperbolic and polemical style in Stalky & Co., we may reach conclusions at variance from much critical opinion. Let us consider three “objectionable” passages.

(1) All editions of Stalky end with “Slaves of the Lamp, Part II.” Ex-students reunite ten years after graduation. Coarsened by their experience as imperial governors (one shivers with ague, another's “face was like white glass”), they behave like boys and tell the story of an absent comrade (Stalky) who won a skirmish in northwest India by duplicating a trick played on a schoolmaster (“Slaves of the Lamp, Part I”). The story ends with Kipling's boast: “Just imagine Stalky let loose on the south side of Europe with a sufficiency of Sikhs and a reasonable prospect of loot.” When he claims responsibility for creating Stalky by contriving the school trick years before, an old schoolmate asks, “What's that got to do with it?”

“Everything,” said I.

“Prove it,” said the Infant.

And I have.

[297]

Kipling credits his own stories for creating a generation of imperial buccaneers.

Stalky's model did indeed render distinguished military service and deserves praise. We, however, read Kipling after the Boer War, the battles of Loos, the Somme, and Gallipoli, and the Amritsar Massacre, when other Stalkies behaved with disastrous stupidity. We suspect that time trapped Kipling. Having mocked Dear Ferrar's Eric and other “pure-minded boys” for their priggishness, he substituted Stalky and other clever-minded boys whom we mock. The Erics of the world may be nuisances, but the Stalkies risk people's lives. We may wish to believe that Stalky's prank in “Slaves of the Lamp, Part I,” vandalizing a schoolmaster's quarters, anticipates Graham Greene's “The Destructors” or William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Indeed, the blatant “I” in the last sentence of “Slaves, Part II” is so obtrusive that it seems to nullify the book's pretentions to fiction and reduce it to propaganda.

(2) The titular hero of “Regulus” is a teacher's pet named Winton. He is a good student, a polite boy who apologizes at once for any infraction. Teachers like him because he is unlike the “Army brats,” the bullies, who populate the USC. But his nickname is Pater, and other boys tease him about his “caree-ah.” He is earnest. But when boys press him too far, language fails him. He explodes, goes “berserk,” physically attacking a schoolmate and the boys who try to stop him. To mitigate punishment, a teacher pleads his case with the headmaster: it was the lad's first offense. The headmaster counters with, “Could you have damned him more completely? … Winton's only fault is a certain costive and unaccommodating virtue.” Later the chaplain observes that he will “never be anything more than a Colonel of Engineers” rather than a gallant leader.

The story cuts two ways, exposing both goody-goody students and goody-goody teachers. Like Mr. Brownell in “The United Idolaters,” academicians take pride in themselves as social and moral activists—for which Kipling makes them uncomfortable. They dislike reminders of their pomposity, low social station, and venality. Reverend John says, “Ours is a dwarfing life—a belittling life, my brethren. God help all schoolmasters!” Both he and the headmaster admit that “we must all bow down, more or less, in the House of Rimmon.” But before we object too strenuously, we should remember Kipling's tribute to teachers in the book's prefatory poem, “Let us now praise famous men.”

(3) In “The Moral Reformers,” the Reverend John Gillet, calling Number Five study his “Tenth Legion” (Caesar's favorite), encourages the boys to punish two senior students who habitually bully a youngster named Clewer. Number Five subjects the miscreants to the entire repertoire of schoolboy “tortures” (Letters 2. 352-53). They inflict pain, not injury (except to senior pride). They exact contrition as well as confession because their message is, Repent and sin no more. Punishment matches crime.

Kipling's description of the punishment provokes indignation because the boys relish the process of reducing bullies to abjection. Executioners are not supposed to enjoy their work; but the boys, especially Beetle, become intoxicated by the retribution they inflict and the pain they cause. “The bleatin' of the kid excites the tiger.” Certainly there is nothing pleasant about torturing two louts until they weep and plead for mercy. The hurt and humiliation are too painful to be funny.

“The Moral Reformers” may have offended more readers than any story in the book. It “proves” that the three boys are “little beasts,” “small fiends in human likeness,” “mucky little sadists, as critics have called them.” It infuriated Edmund Wilson so that he called the book Kipling's worst, “crude in writing, trashy in feeling, implausible in a series of contrivances that resemble moving picture ‘gags’” (23). Andrew Rutherford, a sympathetic critic, concluded that “a sophisticated Philistinism, a deliberate brutality of speech, is one of the most unpleasant features of Stalky & Co.” (183). The story so upset H. G. Wells that he denounced Stalky as “the key to the ugliest, most retrogressive, and finally fatal idea of modern imperialism; the idea of a tacit conspiracy between law and illegal violence” (307; Wells's italics).

If we cannot stomach a nonjudgmental account of education for empire, we must always remind ourselves that Kipling's tales are also sheer adventures in language. The exuberance of child talk bubbles over, so that our initial pleasure in reading comes from recalling our own thrill at language acquisition, verbal play. Almost nothing in the Stalky tales actually happened or could have happened in reality. Kipling exaggerated his three heroes' adventures beyond what memory and reason dictate. Poetical and rhetorical license supplement each other and yield an experience that is almost autonomous. Our delight is similar to that provided by Lewis Carroll. The boys' and the narrator's verbal audacity starts and holds the reader's imagination, carrying him through a series of incredible pranks. The language is so convincing that the events it narrates seem credible, “realistic,” which of course they are not.

But Kipling writes prose, not jabberwocky; his language is referential as well as autonomous. It provides vicarious experience and instills moral values. Here something peculiar happens. By his own embodiment of Froebel's theory, and by ignoring or nullifying Victorian ideals that animated children's stories, Kipling sets the reader adrift. If we try to locate ourselves in the fictive world of Stalky & Co. by using Victorian standards (or modern “progressive” standards, for that matter), we remain lost—titillated perhaps by Kipling's stylistic virtuosity but suspicious that our experience is somehow spurious, even immoral.¹¹

One way to chart our whereabouts is to stay attuned to the tone of Kipling's volatile prose. He revised texts by performing them aloud, a practice that exaggerates tone. But tone is hard to communicate to readers unaccustomed to hearing texts or to readers belonging to “response communities” different from those that the author presupposes. Both Kipling's narrator and his characters can move with little warning from, for example, neutral description to braggadocio to sarcasm. Mr. King is a master at sarcasm and irony, but when the boys mimic his ironies (“the crass and materialised ignorance of the unscholarly middle classes”), a doubling occurs that forces the reader to listen carefully for the object of Kipling's satire.

Once he passed beyond his early infatuation with postromantic writers, Kipling seems to have been equally at home among preromantics. He called John Donne “Browning's great-great grandfather” and described himself as Robert Ferguson preceding some yet-to-be-discovered Burns (Letters 2. 115, 279). His mature style (or styles) always skips back beyond the lush sonority and “fragrance” of the nineteenth century to sparer models of the eighteenth that were still heavily influenced by school Latin. No doubt the telegraphic language of high-speed presses, of machinery generally, magnifies his stylistic novelty and enables him to respond enthusiastically when “all unseen, Romance brought up the nine-fifteen” (“The King”). But there is an older tradition at work in Kipling's style descending from Cicero, Horace, and Juvenal, reinforced by the scientific and Protestant plain style.

In Stalky, another way to chart our whereabouts is to follow Kipling's pointers to imperial, pagan Rome. Number Five study is the Tenth Legion. Winton becomes Regulus. Beetle defaces a complete set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Old Latin tags turn up continually; but even without them, the oral process of transmitting the Latin heritage echoes in the masculine, polemical harshness of boy talk. “A little of it stuck among the barbarians” who, with the aid of it, become responsible procurators. Kipling, in his own style and that of the boys, blended common speech with classical rhetoric, a striking combination.

If we come to terms with Kipling's rough-and-tumble language, we may suspect that its alleged brutality misses the point. In “The Moral Reformers,” Reverend John claims that “most bullying is mere thoughtlessness.” M'Turk corrects him: “Bullies like bullyin'. They mean it. They think it up in lesson and practise it in the quarters.” The older boys who have tormented little Clewer are “flunk-outs” whose parents sent them to the USC in desperation to get them into an academy. They have “hammered [Clewer] till he's nearly an idiot.”

Bullying is reprehensible, and Kipling shows, quite plainly, the pleasure produced when it combines with self-righteousness. For all the rhetorical extravagance in the “torture” scene, the aim is not to encourage bullying but to stop it. This is Kipling's message to imperial governors.

Kipling's ideal school is one that leaves boys to themselves as they grope through frantic deliquencies toward adulthood. But his school presupposes an “intelligent consciousness,” embodied in the best teachers, that “hovers over” and “unites” the outer world with students' inner worlds. Language bridges and links them. It is a fierce language, capacious, contentious, but generous. It neutralizes hypocrisy without neutralizing values authenticated by two thousand years of Western history. One is not surprised that Kipling praised Horace and Juvenal for upholding republican virtues in decadent Rome. In them he may have heard Froebel's “eternal law.”¹²

In his introduction to an edition of Stalky & Co., Steven Marcus accepts the charge that Kipling's school prepared boys to become part of the governing caste of the British Empire, which included brutalizing them and girding them for “domination of the weak by the strong.”¹³ Conceding that this is “calculated to outrage the values that most educated persons today affirm,” he then notes that the book contains values “described by old, obsolete words like honor, truthfulness, loyalty, manliness, pride, straightforwardness, courage, self-sacrifice, and heroism” (7).

If they appear at all, such words are as embarrassing among the boys at Westward Ho! as they are among children today. However, in Stalky, according to Marcus, they signal virtues that exist as active and credible possibilities; whereas in our world, they are absent or corrupted. In Kipling, these unspoken virtues propel the boys (and the reader) into the agonia that occurs when young minds collide with the adult world. As Isabel Quigly notes, “Stalky & Co. is the only school story which shows school as a direct preparation for life” (xv).

Kipling achieved this by assigning vital roles to adults in every story and also by revitalizing language—from old Latin tags to earthy dialect and music-hall tunes. Hyperliterate that he was, he reactivated the “oral encyclopedia,” the storehouse of values that outlast ephemeral political and economic systems. Perhaps this explains how, in addition to imperial bluster, he reaffirmed “the brotherhood of mankind in time of sorrow or affliction.”

Defunct British imperialism seems to have transmitted through Kipling the legacy of values bequeathed by ruined Rome. Late-twentieth-century readers will determine whether these values outweigh imperialism's vices, whether traditional values of any kind can survive in a depleted, overcrowded world. Kipling had his doubts when he conceded that the generation for which he wrote “conked out” in the First World War. And yet the tough boy talk of Stalky & Co. goes on calling to us, like the songs of mad Elizabethan beggars, inviting us to recall times when grander and less sentimental aims than ours governed behavior. Perhaps the offending “I” in the book's last sentence, with its candid affirmation of a traditional rhetorical ethos, vindicates Kipling's implied claim: I tried to create a conscience for my race. At the very least, the “I” is both stalky and self-transcending.

Notes

1. One should be aware that many editions of the book are unsatisfactory. The Stalky tales appeared initially in magazines between 1897 and 1929. Only nine of them were included in the first edition with the title Stalky & Co. (1899). The remaining five tales were added to The Complete Stalky & Co. in 1929. The best edition currently available is edited by Isabel Quigly. It is annotated and contains a valuable introduction.

2. The most notable exception is Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), who analyzed three paragraphs of Kim and accused Kipling of “bad syntax, bad grammar, bad rhetoric.” No one seems to have noticed that her transcription of Kipling's text contains over a dozen misprints. In any case, she failed to realize that Kipling's texts are often visual signals for oral performance, not silent reading. If you “voice” them, flaws that Lee records vanish. (The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology [London: John Lane, 1923]). The Kipling essay appeared originally in 1910.

3. “Sound situates man in the middle of actuality and in simultaneity, whereas vision situates man in front of things and in sequentiality” (Ong, Presence 128). “Sight isolates, sound incorporates” (Orality 72).

4. Today readers will find the notes in the edition mentioned above indispensable. It is ironic that Kipling, often damned as an uneducated hooligan, is now celebrated for his almost Joycean allusiveness. For example, Nora Crook claims boldly that “Kipling wants to make readers of us all and to keep up literature, not to hoard his riches” (xv).

5. Quoted by permission of the National Trust from the Kipling Papers, University of Sussex Library.

6. It is worth reminding ourselves that since the decline of classical rhetoric, teachers of literature have grown increasingly text-bound. We pretend to be champions of culture, repositories of the finest utterances of humanity. But how many of us are trained to recite (from memory, dramatically) a thousand lines? Neither the certified teacher nor the Ph.D. is routinely tested as an oral performer; yet oral performance, as Kipling claimed, is the surest way to impress students with the values and beauty inherent in grand language. He wrote that gramophone records of good teachers “on the brink of profanity, struggling with a Latin form, would be more helpful to education than bushels of printed books” (Something 52).

   Peter Green testified to the survival of Kipling's ideal up to the Second World War. He began his translation of Juvenal with an acknowledgment: “I first became acquainted with Juvenal through the good offices of Mr. A. L. Irvine, my old sixth-form master, who—with what I took at the time, wrongly, to be pure sadistic relish—set us to translate Satire X aloud, unseen, and afterwards made us learn long stretches of it by heart, together with parallel passages from Dr. Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes. But in fact, of course, this was by far the best introduction to a notoriously difficult poet that one could hope for. … This book is, in a sense, the belated fruit of a seed sown some twenty-five years ago, and I am happy to acknowledge my debt to an inspired and inspiring teacher” (7).

7. “The Uses of Reading” (1912), Sussex Edition of The Complete Works, xxv, 85.

8. “Literature” (1906), Ibid., xxv, 3.

9. To “Dear Musician” (October 9, 1899), Livingston Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard. I have used A. W. Yeats's transcription. According to Thomas Pinney in a letter to me, the passage was inscribed on a flyleaf of Stalky & Co.

10. Anthony Storr includes Kipling in his psychiatric study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors who illustrate “separation, isolation and the growth of imagination” (Chap. 8). Kipling deserved space in a recent study of manic-depressive creators: D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb, The Key to Genius (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1988), but the seminal study for Kipling's generation was Cesare Lombroso's The Man of Genius (1891).

11. Robin Gilmour concludes his sympathetic analysis of Stalky & Co. with praise for Kipling's subversion of Victorian sentimentality about children, but also with condemnation. “The optimistic Victorian moralism of ‘fair play’ expunged in Kipling's revision of the Hughes code is not replaced by anything of comparable largeness or decency, but by something narrower, more efficient, more ‘realistic’” (31). Quite the contrary, Kipling reopens the “spaciousness of old rhetoric” (Richard Weaver's phrase) that reanimates voices across two thousand years of Western history.

12. Kipling's interest in education (as distinct from his writing for children) has received little attention, but Richard A. Maidment helps fill the gap. He describes the USC's exemplary curriculum and schedule (37, 191) and portrays Cormell Price as an educator in the spirit of Froebel (124-25).

    When it suited him, Kipling praised the USC as a military school. At Price's retirement (July 25, 1894), he claimed that the headmaster produced “men able to make and keep empires” (18). But the four more mature stories, composed years after the first edition of Stalky & Co., emphasize unmilitary values. Little wonder that Price himself labeled the first edition “an amusing travesty” (144).

13. But Kipling explicitly rejected domination of the weak by the strong in the epilogue to Puck of Pook's Hill (1906): “Teach us the Strength that cannot seek, / By deed or thought, to hurt the weak.” These lines would seem to augment the claim in Stalky's poetic prologue, “Save he serve no man may rule.”

Works Cited

Crook, Nora. Kipling's Myths of Love and Death. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Dusinberre, Juliet. Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiment in Art. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

Froebel, Friedrich. The Education of Man. Trans. W. H. Hailman. New York: Appleton, 1887.

———. Mother-Play and Nursery Songs. Trans. Fanny E. Dwight and Josephine Jarvis. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891.

Gilmour, Robin. “Stalky & Co.: Revising the Code.” In Kipling Considered, ed. Phillip Mallett. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Green, Peter, ed. The Sixteen Satires of Juvenal. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967.

Kipling, Rudyard. O Beloved Kids: Rudyard Kipling's Letters to His Children, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. San Diego: Harcourt, 1983.

———. Something of Myself, ed. Robert Hampson. London: Penguin, 1988.

———. Stalky & Co., ed. Isabel Quigly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

———. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990.

Maidment, Richard A. “Imagination and Reality in Rudyard Kipling's View of Education: A Literary Study.” M.A. thesis. University College at Swansea, Wales, 1981.

Marcus, Steven, ed. Stalky & Co. New York: Collier, 1962, Introduction rep. in Kipling and the Critics, ed. Elliot L. Gilbert. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.

———. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

———. The Presence of the Word. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971.

———. Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.

Quigly, Isabel, ed. Stalky & Co. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Rutherford, Andrew. “Officers and Gentlemen.” In Kipling's Mind and Art, ed. Andrew Rutherford. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964.

Smith, Janet A. “Boy of Letters.” In The Age of Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World, ed. John Gross. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.

Storr, Anthony. Solitude: A Return to Self. New York: Free Press, 1988.

Weaver, Richard. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953.

Wells, H. G. “Kipling.” In Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. L. Green. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.

Wilson, Edmund. “The Kipling That Nobody Read.” In Rutherford, 1964.