On preparing to read Kipling (1961)

A Victorianist Looks Back: Fluidity vs. Fragmentation

“…Kipling, who, according to Randall Jarrell, was the only writer who could "invent a conversation between an animal, a god, and a machine," might have cherished talking to George Eliot. 34 His shade would apologize to her for having misrembered that it was her witty Mrs. Poyser and not Anthony Trollope's Mrs. Proudie who had uttered the memorable sentence about the deficiency of men's "insides" that he quoted in a letter to the mother-substitute he also entrusted with a reconstruction of childhood traumas he dared not show to his parents. 35 To make amends for not crediting Adam Bede for that citation, Kipling might even have tried to convince George Eliot that his poem "The Land" was a distant and modest cousin of her Warwickshire pastorals.…”

“…Randall Jarrell called Kipling a "Wandering Jew" because he lived in many places as "an uncomfortable stranger repeating to himself the comforts of earth." 37 Indeed, Kipling endorsed the henpecked but wise King "Suleiman bin Daoud" he orientalized in the last of his Just So Stories and cast the princely Kadmiel as a mythic Sephardic wanderer who causes a lawless medieval England to adopt the Magna Carta at the end of Puck of Pook's Hill. As his poem "The Rabbi's Song" demonstrates, he found it easy to identify himself with such ancients.…”