The Wish House and Other Stories Read Free Page B

themselves and a code of ethics foreign to the climate and instincts of those races whose most cherished customs they outrage and whose gods they insult.”
    Kipling returns to this idea in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, p. 61): “Very many Americans have an offensive habit of referring to natives as ‘heathen.’ Mahometans and Hindus are heathen alike in their eyes….”
    Which seems almost enlightened—were not the protester Kipling.
    Nevertheless, Kipling’s idea of the white man’s burden is predicated on a self-pitying gloss on imperialism—seen not as economic exploitation but as the fatiguing exercise of authority and enlightenment. It also seems to be predicated on the idea of “lower races,” however much sympathy Kipling would like to bring to their administration.
    But even this is complicated. The poem “The White Man’s Burden” has been widely misread. In effect, critics have stopped, affronted, at the first stanza: “Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child.” It is the imputation of childishness that lodges in the throat—and, alas, in the brain. Has anyone, I wonder, read to the end of the poem and understood it?
    The reward for taking up the white man’s burden is stated in the last line: “The judgment of your peers!” Who are those “peers,” those equals? Since the poem is addressed to the United States, you might think that “peers” refers to British imperialists. But you would be wrong. The “peers” in question are the “new-caught, sullen peoples”—raised to equality. As the previous three stanzas make clear (my italics throughout):
    Take up the White Man’s burden—
   And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
   The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
   (Ah, slowly!)
toward the light:—

“Why brought ye us from bondage,
   “Our loved Egyptian night?”
    Take up the White Man’s burden—
   Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
   To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
   By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples

   
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
    Take up the White Man’s burden—
   Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
   The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
   Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom
,
   
The judgment of your peers!
    In this account, the imperialist aim, which mustn’t be rushed, is eventual independence: “Nor call too loud on Freedom / To cloak your weariness.” In other words, grant freedom at the proper juncture, when the moment is ripe—and not because fatigue makes you want to rest.
    Kipling’s penultimate stanza ends explicitly with the judgment of the colonized on the colonizers: “The silent, sullen peoples / Shall weigh your Gods and you.” But Kipling waits until the last line of the poem to spring his surprise—a surprise marked by an exclamation point. There he makes it clear that, in the end, the judgment of the colonized on the colonizers will be the judgment of equals, “the judgment of your peers.”
    The aim, then, is not subjection and exploitation in perpetuity, but “Freedom” with a capital “F” and elevation to equality.
    Ah yes. Those “lower races”…As we shall see, Kipling was capableon occasion of seeing Oriental races—the Japanese, the Chinese—as racially superior.
    While Kipling can respect another race, he seems to reserve a special dislike/distaste for the half-breed. In a letter to Andrew Macphail (November 20 to December 7, 1908), he refers to the Afrikaner—post–Boer War, of course—as “a race largely tainted with native blood.”
    Yet consider Kipling’s humane comment on Eurasians in
From Sea to Sea
(vol. 2, p. 262 ff): “We know nothing about their life which touches so intimately the White on the one hand and the Black on the other…. Wanted, therefore, a writer from among the