This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’.

He was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able to be nowadays. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.Īnd yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was not a Fascist. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct - on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that Kipling is a ‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not defensible. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry (1), but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works.

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