g as primarily an
Imperialist pamphleteer with a brief for the Services and a contempt
for the Progressive Parties. It is an error which has acted
mischievously upon all who share it--upon the reader who mechanically
regrets that Mr Kipling's work should be disfigured with fierce heresy;
upon the reader who chuckles with sectarian glee when the "much
talkers" are mocked and confounded; upon Mr Kipling himself who has
been encouraged to mistake an accident of his career as the essence of
his achievement and to regard himself as a sort of Imperial laureate.
The origin of this misconception is not obscure. Mr Kipling has
written intimate tales of the British Army: he is, therefore, a
"militarist." He has lived in India many years, and realised that men
who live in India, and administer India, and come into personal contact
with Hindus and Mohammedans, know more about India than Members of
Parliament who run through the Indian continent between sessions: he
is, therefore, a reviler of the free democratic institutions of Great
Britain. He has realised that Government departments in Whitehall are
not always thought to be very expeditious, well informed and devoted by
men who are often confronted with matters that cannot afford to wait
for a telegram: he is, therefore, a lover of the high hand and of
courses brutal and irregular. He has celebrated the toil and the
adventure of pioneers and of outposts: he is, therefore, one who
brandishes unseasonably the Imperial sword.

The grain of truth in these deductions is heavily outweighed by the
massive absurdity of regarding them as in any sense essential. Mr
Kipling brings political prejudice into his work less than almost any
living contemporary. At a time when there was hardly an English novel
or an English play of consequence which was not also a political
pamphlet it was completely false to regard Mr Kipling as a pamphleteer.
When most of our English authors were talking from the platform, Mr
Kipling--with a few, too few, others--remained apart. He is suspect,
not because his Anglo-Indian tales or his army tales are political, but
because they record much that is true of the English Services, which
fails to square with much that once was popularly believed about them.
The real reason of Mr Kipling's false fame as a politician is, not that
he is an Imperial pamphleteer, but that, writing of the Army and the
Empire, he fails to be a pamphleteer on the other side. His
de