Rudyard Kipling The Gardener Analysis

Vehemently abused as a jingo-imperialist and sometimes not without proper grounds (one may recall Kipling’s appeal for War recruits at Southport, June 1915), the post-War years produced some of the finest stories of Kipling questioning the higher moral status that war used to be attributed to. Written nearly one decade before death “The Gardener” mirrors an author who ceases to harp on ‘Lyra Heroica’1 and set out to find an ideal nobler than ‘Britannia rule the waves’ 2. The loss of his only son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915 imparts to this story a veritable, sombre and tragic ambience thereby restoring it from being merely a fabrication of anti-war propaganda. In the discussion that follows I will endeavour to explain how the dominant note of this twelve page narrative, almost in spite of its narrator’s intention and attempt, is gradually raised from the level of personal grief and despondence to that of an

Given the fact that the Christ motif and a renewed interest in spiritual mysticism is more than a usual feature in the British literature and culture after the First World War, this conjecture does not seem outlandish. Along with this Kipling’s familiarity with French literature lends credence to the thought that the story might have been influenced by Honoré de Balzac’s “Christ in Flanders” (1831) where Christ’s identity is not disclosed in his first appearance:
Just at that moment a man appeared a few paces from the jetty, to the surprise of the skipper, who had heard no sound of footsteps. The traveler seemed to have sprung up from the earth, like a peasant who had laid himself down on the ground to wait till the boat should start, and had slept till the sound of the horn awakened him. Was he a thief? or someone belonging to the custom-house or the police? (qtd. in Trout