The Nobel Prize

The Presentation Speech of 1907’s Novel Prize in Literature in short

The purpose of the present text is to synthesize the Presentation Speech of 1907’s Novel Prize in Literature, conferred to Rudyard Kipling.

First of all, Kipling is introduced with a comparison between his style and Alfred Tennyson’s. Kipling, though differing widely, shares traits of an idealism similar to Tennyson’s, and is renown for “for his vivid word-picturings of the various phases of the strenuous, pulsating life of our own times”.

Secondly, there’s a focus on Kipling’s works with a short biography of the author.

Kipling was born in Bombay on December 30, 1865. After studying in England, he came back to India where he worked as a journalist and “acquired a thorough insight” into Indian culture, that is reflected in his writings. His early productions were the satire “Departmental Ditties”, the collections of stories “Plain Tales from the Hills”, “Soldiers Three”, “The Story of the Gadsbys", “In Black and White” and “Under the Deodars”, concerned with society life in Simla, the series “Life’s Handicap”, a collection of stories of serious import and “The Light that Failed”, a novel “harsh in style but containing some strongly coloured descriptive passages of excellenteffect.”

Kipling also wrote the “Barrack Room Ballads”, a collection of songs that depict in a tragicomical way soldiers and sailors, “often in the very language they themselves employ”, and the cycle “The Seven Seas”, where he “reveals himself as an imperialist”.

Particularly praised are “the jungle books”, a collection of mythlike tales about a boy, Mowgli, growing up in the jungle with the other animals. They are described as “marvellously delightful, wonderfully imaginative fables of animals.”, that make “adults share the delight experienced by the young and relive their childhood” and “have made Kipling a favourite author among children in many countries.”

The novel “Kim” is told to “deserve special notice for, in the delineation of the Buddhist priest, […] there is an elevated diction as well as a tenderness and charm which are otherwise unusual traits in this dashing writer's style.”

After this, there’s a short focus on Kipling’s style, often accused to be vulgar, but mostly invigoratingly direct and ethically stimulating.

Finally, the speaker tells why Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature: “Kipling may not be eminent essentially for the profundity of his thought or for thesurpassing wisdom of his meditations. Yet even the most cursory observer sees immediately his absolutely unique power of observation, capable of reproducing with astounding accuracy the minutest detail from real life.”, and also his “marvellous power of imagination enables him to give us not only copies from nature but also visions out of his own inner consciousness.”

Kipling is then called the English poet, because of his aesthetic and ethical-religious idealism, his soldier-songs and because of the hymn that he composed on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, that “voices the spirit of national pride, yet it also conveys a warning

against the dangers of presumptuous pride…”

After another focus on Kipling’s style, (“Kipling favours concreteness and concentration; empty abstractions andcircumlocutionary descriptions are wholly absent from his works. He has a knack for finding the telling phrase, the characteristic epithet, with swift accuracy and certainty.He has been compared now to Bret Harte, now to Pierre Loti, now to Dickens; he is, however, always original, and it would seem that his powers of invention areinexhaustible. […] Kipling thus advocates courage, self- sacrifice, and loyalty; unmanliness and lack of self-discipline are abominations to him,and in the world order he perceives a nemesis before which presumption is

constrained to surrender.), he is compared to other British authors, with which he shares some traits while remaining original and personal.

The speech ends with a recall of the author’s main themes: “Kipling has written and sung of faithful labour, fulfillment of duty, and love of one's country. […] Kipling has given us descriptions in vivid colours of many different countries. But thepicturesque surface of things has not been the principal matter with him; he has always, in all places, had a manly ideal before him: ever to be «ready, ay ready at the call of duty» and then, when the appointed time comes, to «go to God like a soldier». […] The Swedish Academy, in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature this year to Rudyard

Kipling, desires to pay a tribute of homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories, and to the greatest genius in the realm of narrative that that countryhas produced in our times.”