Rudyard Kipling

’s “The Light Yhat Failed” Essay, Research Paper

Rudyard Kipling is remembered today mostly as a children’s author. Kipling’s poetry and adult fiction are both worth serious examination; “The Light That Failed” is probably the most important of his adult novels, in which he apparently makes the clearest statements of his beliefs about art and the purpose of life.

It’s a pretty bleak picture he paints, cloaked in finery and delight but at the core full of stoic acceptance of misery, hardship and death. While there is a good deal of this that Kipling probably believed, even a casual examination of his own life suggests that this book is more of a bare-bones explication of the fundamental issues than a fully fleshed out portrait of how an artist ought to live.

It’s particularly telling in light of this that “The Light That Failed” is dedicated to his mother. How is someone with an artist’s soul to live in a world where, despite all protestations to the contrary, not even the love of a mother — much less that of any other woman — can be relied upon?

Dick Heldar is an orphan, a young savage who is not civilized by the beatings he gets from Mrs. Jennet, his foster-mother, nor by the contempt he receives from his school-fellows for his cheap and shoddy clothing. Coming out of his childhood, he goes off to wander the world, learns to paint, and finds he can see things that others can’t, and capture them on canvas. His childhood companion, Massie, who is aptly described as “an atom” — indivisible and impenetrable — also learns to draw, but with considerably less success than Dick as she fails to give her whole life and soul to the work.

Dick’s career is given its first great boost by a chance meeting with Torpenhow, a Special Correspondent for a news syndicate sent to the Sudan to cover the ultimately unsuccessful expedition to relieve Gordon. Torpenhow sees Dick’s talents and immediately signs him up to supply drawings for his syndicate at a pittance. In this world of manly men, it’s assumed that the strong will struggle forward on the thinest of chances, and the weak will be swept away. Dick and Torpenhow become close friends in the course of the campaign, but in the midst of a battle Dick is wounded on the head and has a moment’s flashback to the world of his childhood and Massie, whom he fell in love with shortly before they last parted.

The bulk of the story is taken up by the life Dick and Torpenhow share in London, living pleasantly in each other’s company, arguing about the value of their work, and helping each other fail romantically. Women are implicitly a great threat to their work, to their whole way of being, and yet they provide something that can’t be done without, either. Dick describes his greatest work to date as being a mural he painted in the hold of a ship while involved in a tryst with the captain’s mistress, Passion and sex feed the work, but love — true love rooted in friendship and mutual respect — challenge it.

Kipling shows Dick facing an age-old dilemma, part of the horrific legacy of sexual discrimination. If love can only exist between equals, and women are basically inferior to men — something that Kipling clearly believed — then the only true love that can exist must be between men. But that love, amongst the Victorians, had to be chaste, non-sexual love. None of this is explicit in “The Light That Failed”, and I doubt Kipling would have seen it this way, but there are only two (thankfully non-exclusive) ways out of this dilemma: acknowledge women as equals to men, or accept the legitimacy of homosexual love. Men of Kipling’s era found it virtually impossible to do either, thus ensuring themselves a nearly loveless existence. No wonder they flung themselves off to the further ends of the Empire as if driven by an insatiable thirst.

Dick’s pursuit of Massie, and Torpenhow’s brief involvement with a waif named Bessie whom he helped out in a moment of kindness, create an impossible tension between them. As an adult, Massie is more atomic than ever, simply failing to feel anything for Dick, which aggravates him no end because as an artist she is capable of appreciating his work. Her failure to love Dick when she can see his success is unaccountable to him, and yet at the centre of her attraction. Her distance seems to suggest a degree of independence that will allow him to love her as something like an equal. Yet even then, in his descriptions of their proposed future together he envisions her as weak and incapable — he tells her that they’ll see the world but he “won’t let you see anything horrid.” But as an artist he knows the horror of walking through a field of dead men, bloated and blackening beneath the North African sun — he knows that you cannot “do anything until you have seen everything.”

Kipling saw a good deal of horror in his life, both as a reporter in India and later as a war correspondent and finally as a parent whose child was killed in the first world war and whose body was never found. His response to these horrors drove a good deal of his mature art, as it drives Dick Heldar’s. For Dick, his work is his justification for living, and he wants to succeed based on some absolute standard of work, not in terms of material rewards; he holds the wilful pursuit of social or material success as inimical to artistic success, though he doesn’t shun good fortune when it comes his