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 detachment, not his partiality, is at fault.

Mr Kipling’s detachment from the politics of his day explains virtually everything that has offended his modern critics.  Almost the first thing to realise in discussing Mr Kipling’s attitude to modern life is that Mr Kipling has kept absolutely clear of the political and social drift of the last thirty years.  He has been conspicuously out of everything.  He has had nothing to say to any of the ideas or influences which have formed his contemporaries.  While others of his literary generation were growing up amid intellectual movements, democratic tendencies and advances of humanity, Mr Kipling was standing between two civilisations in India which were hardly