Description
Rudyard Kipling, it is now coming to be generally acknowledged, has been more grotesquely misunderstood, misrepresented, and in consequence denigrated, than any other known writer. I have attempted here to present him as outside any of the camps into which careless readers have wished to, indeed have, put him, either in praise or in blame. I say 'careless readers' because I have found that most of those who so readily label him have not really read him, or have done so with preconceived notions of what he wished to impart. Not long ago a distinguished man of letters and lecturer wrote to me: "People are not only blinded, but deafened by prejudice. If you talk (as I sometimes do...) about him, nobody hears what you say. They simply switch off their aids, or have an automatic cut-out." Thus I have not attempted, except by occasional incidental remarks, to refute the ill-based accusations made against him. An unbiased view of the totality of his work makes such a labour unnecessary.
He must be seen in relation to his day. He was intensely alert to what was going on around him-more than alert, knowing it in his bones. Yet he was never thrall to the 'ideas' that swept across his time; his strong feeling of tradition saved him from that, though he had an astonishing prophetic vision of the future. But based on a lively historic sense, he was wary of accepting the ideological movements that surged around him, being possessed of that centrality of mind so highly praised by Bagehot. Thus on one side he stoutly fought the noisy jingoism of the 'nineties, and on the other was opposed to what was regarded as 'liberal' thought. For all his intellectual vigour he was no extremist; and if he cherished the past, he also delighted in prospects of the future.
- Bonamy Dobree
