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RUDYARD KIPLING AIID HIS IMPERIAL YERSE:CRITICAL DILEMMAS

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1. His poetry; his verse

Part of the long-sla1dlng contempt .for_Klpling's metrical writing hasfocussed on the problem of defini-ng what'it is. rn iq+t"r. S. Eliot grurp"? tt.nettle as firmly as he dared in editlng a volume entitled A Choice if fAi"ii(Vse: verse, not poetry. A year latei, George Orwell's reaction ** to attict<Eliot's non-committal stance. In spite of thE grossness of much of fipfing,,writing, he suggested, "there is much of it that:is capable of giving pdil;i;people wh9 knoly.what poetry means.J' His conclusion was prlcticfi:"'One caqpe$.aRs, placeXipling more satisfactorily than by juggling w1lh the words .verse,and 'poetry,' if one describes him simplylas a go,;d UiA'poEt.',r

A common critical.perception statesthal muih of Kipling's..good badpoetry" isdorryula_ic, expre-ssing the prejudices of the ordinary readei. C. Ft: Sjssonsuggests that he "rammed his maximi into metre with a iledgehammer,,,2 *jmakgs ? ve.ry plausible comparison. betwgel Kipling and the "ri*t..rtt -..rtu.Vmetrical writer Thomas. Tusser, author,of Five Hun1ered lsicl po,ints of C:oohUbqf.dry;-which Kipling also read. Sisson's statement is irarittelled by ;;;iorwell's, where he zuggggts that muo.h. of Kipring's verse ii ,.a kind orirry*irgproverb." fo_. oly.rll, this is a positive quiliry, since l.verse is a mnemonicdevice" and, if nothing else, Kipling's verse ?'recdrds in 4emorable-form . . . sorneemotion which hearly e.v.gry \y*uq being can share.,'3 one,example: the finalcouplet of the war poem."For all we have and are,,,(1914): '

Who dies if England live?a

Another, the reiterat.!, .Tplrqt_,c refrain at lhe end of ,.The Glory of the Garden,,[i.e. England and the Empir-e] (1907):

FortheGloryoftheGarden,thatitmaynotpassaway|And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass awoyf

Orwell also makes the very cogent point- that "Kipling is the onlyEnglish writer of our time who has addedplrysg^s to the language,,, "citing ,.Easll's

Pus, and west is lMest," "The white Man's Burden," "What"do they"know oiEngland who o..nly.Fngland l.no*?']and "The female of the species is -or. deadlythan the male,"o all of which could be categorized as the,kind of fossilized clich"6

*r*r"*-rr**1t*,-*r*r** ,volume I, Number z,lggs.copyright @ by HJEAS.All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved. r ,

which does indeed survive even into the 1990s, bearing with them the heritage ofthe prejudices of the past.

To state a reaction lo Eiptilg which is no more subjective than Orwell's,I would emphasise that reading Kipling arouses in me muchbf the irritation that iassociate with authors whose ideologiel se_gry not to approximate at all to my9w.n: Kingsley Amis,_&t iqltgce, who for all his technicii virtuosrty as a noveliitis detectably"of the Right.:' The.result is that at the same time as reidir,g his textsfor the us.rryl pleasures of reading literature, I s,can them for their ileological"monstrosities." With Kipling this is compounded to a certain deigree Uf ttrefeeling that he is one of those writers who have been "unaware": unarw*e of thesources of some of his inspirations and ideas and creations, and unaware of theultimate impact, the reception, of what he has created. His psychological insights$o n9t qyite mesh with ryV own.perceptiol olre u!!V; cause ind ef6ct jar su6tlybut fatally; the crazy twisted mirrors of the EngHsli seaside amusemeirt *.udtproduce tlre distentions and swellings of the distorted image.

There is_nothing n_ew in this. Edmund Wilson records that by the end ofthe First World Y* '1h9 disappearance in the middle Kipling of th6 interest inhuman beings for their own- sake and the deliberaie c"ultivation of theexcommunicato^Y. imperialist hatreds had already had the effect of discouraging*:.SPpttite of the general public."7 Contradittorily, although by the tfZO!Kipling was fullygut gf stgp wittr his literary contempbraries, ttr-. gtoomsbury setand others, Charles Carrington records that, while tris critical reception was"cbol," his uncritical reception was l'rapfurouq."t In addition, Canington suggestsmore.than once that, from a critical perspeclive, Kipling's prose wlrk is iistlysuperior t9 his verse, ironically despite the greater popular icclaim awarded hislerse.pV the contemporary_"co^mmon m-an." Slmilarly, Orwell.records that "duringf1ve.litgrary- ggnerations^ f'qry years'l every.-enli-ghtened person has despisei!i*,'1 though Orwell d_efensively'continues *iflr the thoughi that "at the end ofthat time nine-tenths o{tlose. enlightened persons are forg6uen and Kipling is insome sense still there."'guTirgton, again,-points out in his Prologue thit'to thisday he *$._q men lose their tempers," a phenomenon which, helsuggests, is .,asure proof of his importance."''

Curiously, in the light of Kipling's enormous sales in his lifetime,Orwell asserts that

it is a fact that Kipling's "message" was one that the big public did notwant, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the peopre, in thenineties as now U9421, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, andonly unconsciously patriotic. Kipling's official admirers are and were the"seryice" middle class. . . [,] the blimps [who] have [never] read himwith any attention, any more than they have read the Bible.ll

work has varied considerably both in his-lifetime and since. What little iriti[alreputation he already possessed went into a decline a few years before theoutbreak of the Gleat Wer, and enjoyed no revival before hii death in 1936,despite the continu.tp of ttr_t popular appeal: "the children still read his books; thecollege students still read his poetry; ihe men and women of his own generation38

still reread his early work."l2 While a number of critics began to pay seriousattention to'his work in the 1940s, in the imm6diate years afterhis death ind whena renewal of the Great War was raging about their ears, it would seem on theextremely liniited.gvidence of a single anthology of English and American versepublishel in Lg47r3 that, at teast forlhat anthol5giser, little ultimate value had yetbeen attached to Kipling's verse. Williams reprints only two short pieces:"Recessional" (1897) and "If' (1910), compared with fifteen poems by W. B.Yeats, an exact contemporary, as'to birth-year, of Kipling's.

The subject of this brief study is, then, the nature of the generational driftof the borderline between Kipling's popular and critical reputations, a movementwhich received yet another fillip in 1986-1987, when the lapsing of the usual fiffy-year copyright constraints provoked a fl.rt ), of reprints and stimulated critics suchas the poet Craig Raine inio declaring with some vehemence (though in referenceto his prose) thai "We need to think again about Kipling."'*

2. The rise and fall of Kipling's Empire

Kipling seems to have preserved his personal philosophy largely intactuntil the Great War.. John A. Lester Jr. indicates that poems as early as Tennyson's"Locksley Hall" (1842) articulate the growing dilemma of the ni4-eteenth-centurythinker: 'zI mysetf *rsf mix with actioi, lest I-wither by despair."r'A whole halicentury later, Kipling unconsciously resists the very thought of despair; whatmatters is, simply, action: the deeds of the makers and doers of the Empire.

Initially, the "doers" of Kipling's Empire explicitly include the ordinaryman, the foot-soldier whose voice speaks through many of his earlier poems like"Mandalay" (1889). In this poem we have a typical example of Kipling's"dialecf': the Cockney dropping and insertion of h's, the reduction of -ing to -in',and so on. Strangely, this seems almost the only dialect of British English that hissoldiers know: London-centred-Kipling's England was very small, and unreal.Edmund Wilson points out that "Kipling's use of dialect makes a screen for arelinquishment of his grip on the real organism of huma11 personality" since"dialect is the code of a caste, not the voice of an individual."'o

Although Kipling's principal abuse of the English language and of verselies in his dialect verse, his other caste-dialect is that of the ruling-class, aStandard Englishpf a variety elevated by the inclusion of religiosity ("Kipling hadno real religion"'/) and the language of pompous occasion. He was not selected asPoet Laureate in 1896 to succeed Tennyson, who had died in 1892 (the new.incumbent was the miserable Conservative Parly appointee, Alfred Austin), butnevertheless felt inspired to produce the celebratory poem, "Recessional," on theoccasion of the Queen-Empress's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Its metrical patternmatches that of an extremely popular and emotive hymn ("Eternal Father, strongto save"), its language, especially in its first stanza., that of the Psalms:

God of our fathers, known of old,Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful Hand we holdDominion over palm and pine--

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Lord of God hosts, be with us yet,Lest we forget-lest we forgetils

Carrington, w.h9 has devoted a weighty volume to Kipling's life and work, withextensive revisions and extensions.since its first app-earairce in 1955, suggests:"Admire its solemnity, its vision, its permanence: Tnir was the word giiln atBritain's pr.oudest Tgrygnt bv th.. grfat imperialist,"te and of its recef,tion heconcludes: "Again Kipling astonished the nation by revealing its heaitfelt butunrealized emotion. Humiliry not pride, awe not arrogance, a sEnse of transiencenot a sense of permanence."'u

In reblity, Kipling's English patriotism was always subordinate to hislove. of {mpire, however much kiowledge of English history anA *yttrotog:y lledisplays in verse like "Puck'l Soqg,'l published ii Puck of Pook't ltill (t9d'6), acollection 9{ tJo.y and verse for children. The book is all a fantasy of a iairy-fit<eEngland wh!c!, somehow, in .spite of its "dimpled tracks," "little mills," 'zstillywoods," "windy levpls" 3nd."paslures wide and lone," has managed-to repelsuccessive waves of foreign invaders. For England "is not any corimon Earth,rvater or wood or air."2l

a

in "The Children's Song," in the same volume, suggests:

Teoch us to rule ourselves always,Controlled and cleanly night and day [!J;That we may bring, if need arise,No maimed or worthless sacrifice.22

His love of F''mpire bellowed with the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War.23He had visited South Africa in 1898, made the acquaintance of Alfred Milner andCecil -Rhodes, and became a fanatical anti-Boer, so strongly that he spent longperiods there during the War helping the British to maintain morale. Besides itf|ggressive anti-Boerishness, his verse from this experience is noticeably fuitherfrom that of his Indian experience, in that-he speaks for the governing, controllingprinciple of the Empire. The ordinary soldier-has declined to a man-.who shoullobey orders and show respect for his natural superiors. In the first decade ofthetwentieth centu:y, this_ p9s!!i91 is clearly articulated in another patriotic poem,"The Glory of the Garden" (1907):

Land of our Bfuth [Kipiing's?], we pledge to theeOur love and toil in the years to be;When we are grown and take our placeAs men and women with our race.

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and ,prentice boysTold offto do as they are bid and do it without noise.

There is also a return to his old ideal of action as the paramount virtue:

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Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not madeBy singing:-"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade,

While better men than we go out and start their working livesAt grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner knives [!].24

Kipling's imperial spirit was gravely shaken by the First World War.The determination of poemi like "For all w€ have and are" (1914) wasundermined by the death in action of his son in 1915 on the Somme, his bodynever identified. Much of his later verse conveys a hazier vision of the imper-manence of Empire, coupled with a resurgence of nostalgia for a non-existentpast. Debits and Credits (1926), another interleaving of prose and verse, containslines such as "Empires fall / And Gods for Gods make room . . .,"" and, in aludicrous comparison between the narrator and Lobengula (the last Matabele king,whose kingdom was destroyed in the late-19th century by the British) he describeswith some melanc[rply "a valley, under [very British] oakwood, where a man maydream his dream."'o

3. A way in

It is difficult to find a way in to an understanding of the verse of a writerlike Rudyard Kipling.As Orwell points out, "Kipling is in the peculiar position ofhaving been a byword for fifty years [by 1942)."'' A typical dictionary definitionof byword is that in Collins English Dictionary Q979): "a person, place, or thingregarded as a perfect or proverbial example of something; an object of scorn orderision." Possessing the stafus of "byword" would seem to imply an essentialquality: that the thing so described is accepted at long-held face-value, taken forgranted, and only with difficulty re-evaluated from alternative perspectives.Orwell, Wilson and others attempted a re-evaluation in the 1940s, Carrington inthe 1950s; J. I. M. Stewart struck again in 1966; and in 1975 it was KingsleyAmis's turn. Amis willingly accepted the task of writing an illustrated monographon Kipling for the popular Thames & Hudson series on "Writers and theirWorldi"-he praises-Kipling's poetry (not "verse") for its "diverseness," that is,on.technical groundsi Kipling's. "one novel," The Light thqt.Failed (.18.9,9i 1892),is "successful"; and "he is clearly one of our best writers of short stories.

Most of Kipling's critics that I have consulted seem obliged by his statusand by the nature of his writing to approach his work initially from a biographicalperspective. Much, for example, is made of his birth in Bombay a matter of onlyeight years after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, an event which, according to Sisson,"determined the character of the imperial period:"

The proclamation of 1858 accepted the differences of caste andcreed in India as something not to be meddled with by the British, whothus admitted that these foreign ways were too diffrcult for them and thatit was better for them not to act according to their own lights. . . . TheBritish became spectators and manipulators of the wonders of lndiarather than radicaf **ug.r, and reformers.2e

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Again, critics have speculated to a greater or lesser extent on thepsychological impact of Kipling's subsequent ten years in England, where in anapparently unsympathetic_ foster-home with his sister (their pirents remained inIndia) he suffered the childhood torments of rejection and relatively severepunishmeqtf ?qd deprivations which, again apparently, scarred him foi life andhave provided his. critics wi-th.qxcuses Qr hii lapses-in moral insight, his openadvocacy and enjoyment of brutality, the "vulgarity" of his wrlting for it ecomrTlon man.

. KingsleyAmis, !o_yg-u.t, casts doubt on this approach, which is typified

by.a-critic-sych. as Edmund Wilson-who, after all, is a ii^t"rary critic ratheithan achild psychiatrist. Could a reason for Kipling's auihoritarian personality lie in hiseventual heig{ of (only) 5.&_qt .{ inchei .(197 centimehes)? Intent on debunkingthe attemptt_gtamateur anti-Kipling psychologists, Amis

^ru.., the reader at th6

very start of his monograph that "in the lateinineteenth century, this would notha,,e been so very much below average height.,,30 J )

What may have been of greater sign-ificance for the artistic developmentgf tfe y9.ury Kipling was the artislic personality of his father (who at the time ofRudyard's birth taught in an art school in Bom6ay) and the tatnt of his mother,sYsters fof qurytng into the families of prominent artists: Edward Burne-Jone{the.Pre-Raphaelite, and the .$oyal Academician, Edward Poynter, were bothunc les

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by marriage, *!-o, p. :gu i ded extra contact during Rudyard is schoo l -ho l idaysalso with the family of William Morris. Another of Ki-plingis mother's sisters duiybecame the mother of the future Nationalist-Conservative"Prime Ministei, Siu;i;iBaldwin.

4. Rehabilitations

.Perhaps more useful for this ltudy of the problems inherent in Kipling'su.Tt? and his imperialism might, therefore, b^e-apart from his actual writing-fispublic_status. It is afactthat within ayear of returning to England in 1889,

"after ajournalistic career in India lasting some seven years Irom th5 age of 17, IiudyarJ

Sintint was famous throughout England: he wis not so much "i"n', as ,,pop.,'thi,initial fame came out of his first publications in that year: a series of "Barrack-Room Ballads" (in pseudo-Cockney dialect, eminentiy suitable for music hallLgrfoyn?nc), Plai1 laQl from the Hills (stories written in India), and his nou.i,The Light that.Failea.T\" catalyst that set the farne alight *ur'irir pre-existin[connection with the world of art.

.Kipling.w3s. a dgsgised phenomenon from the start of his career, arivingas he did at the height 9f the art-for-art's-sake movement, and coming fr; th;outer darkness of the Empire-- .much rumour-mongering centred on"his slightlrild,his swarttry complexion, his birth and long resi-d.n.E in India. Neverthelelss,in the course of 1889 his fortunes and popularity rose from week to week with thepublication of his "Barrack-Room Ballads" in The Times. These culminated in"Mandalay," a poem of the Empire full of the common soldier's sentiments andsentiment ality, containing the much-quoted I ines :

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For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:

"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

How could such an appeal placed between the lips of a "Burma girl" fail, lipswhich until the ordinary English soldier arrived and enlightened her were surelywasted:

Anl I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,An' a-wastin' Christian kisses orr an 'eathen idol's foot:

Bloomin' idol made s' 6sd-Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd-Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er whereshe stud!On the road to Mandalay. . .31

The message spread through recitals and music-hall adaptations: Kipling was theBeatle of his day.

Interestingly, both Orwell on the Left and Amis on the Right, in definingKipling's public and poetic stance, take up one of Kipling's qualities whiqh Sisson(and Kipling himself) defines as "plainness," that is, the desire to speak directly tothe reader, with no obscurantism. Harry Blamires, too, says in reference to Kiplingthat he "puts all his poetic cards on the table face upwards."" Orwell: "Kipling lsa jingo imferialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting"'r; Amisuses much the same approach, though in greater detail: "Kipling was anauthoritarianl'14 an oligarihist, though Amis i--s quick to remind-the-reader ofOrwell's reasoned verdict that Kipting was far from being a proto-fascist. (He alsopoints out later that when Kipling "found out what Hitler was up to he ceased hisIifelone habit of marking his books with the Hindu good-luck emblem of theswasti[a."35)

Ai one would expect from the total context of Amis's writing over thepast quarter-century, his analysis of Kipling has an ideologically rehabilitativemotive which ties in with the wider British political ambience of the mid-1970sand later. Hencg, he goes on to qualif, his

^"Kipling was an imperialist"36 with

statements about Kipling's mystical and psychological interests, though he goqqon also to assert with apparent bluntness that "Kipling was a racialist, or racist,"''the propagator of the concept of the White Man's Burden; and, finally, "Kipling*u r'u plte"rna li st.'

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In contrast to Kipling, Amis is a rhore consciously skilled manipulator ofthe word and phrase. Consider the subtle tone of his qualification of Kipling's"racialism, or racism" and the tongue-in-cheek positioning of his footnoteddisclaimer:

This is a limited racialism: white men, in practice those whose native tongue is

English, are good at ex'ercising authority in beneficent ways and have the where-withal . . . to do it. Other races may well be good at other things, and their rightsand customs must in any event and at all times be scrupulously respected. Amongthem are many individuals who are superior to many white men, and a white

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degenerate is always worse than any other kind. All the same, Kipling believed inthe separation, or rather the continued separateness, of races.*. . .

[Amis's footnote:] *Throughout this section, as elsewhere, my attempt isto explain what he believed, not to condemn or, on other points, to defend tiror.beliefs, and certainly not to put him right on facts.3e

Amis's apolory for Kipling's paternalism is similar:

Whqt is envisaged is society as a network of obligations, each individualdoing the job appropriate to him to the best of his ability. Law, order, duty,reskaint, obedience, discipline . . . may sound to us in iombination like theprogralnme of some right-wing political adventurer; for Kipling they were valuesto be pursued freely, at the bidding of self-respect and s"lf-r.ji*.e. Theirmessageo is, of course, a conservative one, without much relevance to ourtimef?f.'

5. Closure

Orwell,.then, was right in -pq! i, his assessment that Kipling makes an impact oneach "literary generation.'r But what he fails to see is ti'at the "enligften.dli(presumably. ?n _Orwellian euphemism for anti-imperialist; a less biaied termmi8ht be "critical") members of each Blneratlon re-inscrib. kiphrg Oiff.r"ntfy tosuit contemporary needs; in this Amis performs a role whiih d"oes not diferessentially from that of Stewart, Carringt6n, Wilson or Orwell himself. In Amis,scase, it would seem, given the impending British pblitical shift at the close oi tfr.1970s, that an attempted literary rehabilitation of kipting might have served morethan mere literary ends.

The attemp.t.mSy:_.h9y.r9.r, have been in vain. More than sixty yearsbq"-k, iq "The Birthright," Kipling displayed as an emblem of Empire th. f{.iitug.of the English language:

The miracle of our land's speech-so knownAnd long received, now marvel when 'tis shown!We have such wealth as Rome at her most prideHad not or (having) scattered not so wide

But in this global scattering of the language he detects a dangerous profligacy:

We neither guard nor garner, but abuse;So that our scholars-nay, our children-flingIn sport or jest treasure to arm a King;And the gross crowd, at feast or market, holdTraffic perforce with dust of gems and goldlal

pltirytg]y, F. "qoss. crowd" perhaps provides the best critique of Kipling, thelmperialist, the authoritarian, the paternalist, th-e "racialist." In iti populai adolptionand its irreversible, creative adaptations of the English t^n!'uigithat' olJ44

g-ryllem of Empie-,. the Empire itself has indeed struck back. Soyinka, Rushdie,Walcott flourish: Kipling, though unforgotten, is dead. J

NOTES

This essay is _dedicated to the memory of my fellow undergraduate at theUniversity -of Edinbu.tgtir Kathleen (Heailop) Wodala, late of thJnipartment ofEnglish at the J6zsef Attila U;riversity, Szegdci.

1. George orwell, "$ydyard Kipling"_(lg4z), Decline of the Engtish Murderand other Essrys (Harmondswortli: penguiii, 1965) 5g." o

2. C. H. Sisson, English Poetry 1900-195d: An Assessment (London: Methuen,1e8l) 36.

3. Orwell 60.

1. T. s. Eliot,2d:l Qholce 9f{iplng'! Yerse (London: Faber, t.g|t) t4t.5. B tn {Varq ^t{ipt[S_J , A Kipling Treasury: Stories ond'Poems (London:

Macmillan, 1940) 307 .

6. Orwell 56.7. Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (New

York: Farrar, 1978) 138-9.8. charles Ca:rington, Rudyard Kipling (London: Macmillan,lgTg) 540.9. Orwell45.10. Carrington24.I 1. Orwell 50-1.12. Wilson 86.13. Oscar Williams, A Little Treasury of Modern Yerse (London: Routledge,

1947) 640 pp.14. lraig- Rarne: introduction, A choice o1 Kipling's prose, ed. craig Raine

(London: faber, -1987) l. Ra!n-e's,cry, of cou?se,-did not remairi unhelrd; see

?l:o,pop,llar studies such as Yjrgtfnita_{--askr., From palm to pine: RudyardKipling Abroad qnd at Home (Londo_ry p_idgwick, 1987), and scholarly *".ksuch as Sandra $eyry,- Kipliryg's Hiddei Natativei (Oxford: Blackwell,l2q!),No1a crook,.Kipling's Myths of Love and Deafh(London: Macmillan,1989), and many others.

15. John A. L9s!er,__.J1, Journey through Despair, 1880-lgt4 (princeton:Princeton LiP 1968) 8.

16. Wilson 124.17. Wilson 132.18. Eliot 139.19. Carrington324.20. Carrington322.21. Rudyard Kip!i1g, *Puck's Song," Puck of Pook's Hiil (1906; London:

Macmillan, 1908) 3-4. Note that later anthologised versions of this verseg_pp-e.ar with twelve stanzas, expanded from the ortginal nine.

22. Kipling, "The Children's Song," Puck of Pook's frttt lOS.

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23. For an interesting_introduction t9 this phase in Kipling's life and work seeRenee Durbach, Kipling's soutlt AfriCa (Diep River, Rsa: chameleon p,1 e88).

?1 Siplirg, 'ill_r. Glory ofthe Garden," Kipling Treasury 305-307 .

25. Kipling, "The Survival," Debits and-Ciedirs (London: Macmillan, 1926)146.

26. Kipling, "Alnaschar and the Oxen," Debits and Credits 233.27. Orwell 45.28. Kingsley Amis, Rudyard Kipling and His World (London: Thames, lg75)

114.29. Sisson 32.30. Amis 9.

11 Kipling,"Mandalay," Eliot 187, 188.32- Eqry B^lamires, A Short History of English Literature (London: Methuen,

1984) 299.33. Orwell 46-7.34. Amis 52.35. Amis 53.36. Amis 52.37. ATil_53; here, too, Amis is signalling his self-confessed reactionism, by

quibbling over th.e increasingly popular use_of what he considers an unaccep-table neologism, "racist," rather than the older "racialist.,,

38. Amis 55.39. Amis 54. l

19 4p!l 55; my emphasis, and Amis's implied query.41. Kipling, "The Birthright," Debits and Credik Zit.

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