User:MacAuslan/sandbox/kipatt

The attitudes of the British writer Rudyard Kipling have led to controversy. They have sometimes been misunderstood and sometimes misrepresented. George Orwell, for example, that great standard-bearer for the left, wrote, in his review of T.S.Eliot's A Choice of Kipling's Verse : "During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him." (He added ", and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there," which is a tribute to Kipling's success.) The political basis of this judgement may subsist in Orwell' further belief that Kipling's "sense of responsibility ... made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one."

Perhaps the controversy about his beliefs is because Kipling was above all a reporter - "probably the best reporter who ever lived" - and as such gives the views of other people, including those with whom he does not agree. To muddy the waters further, most of the work for which he is known is fiction, although he is always careful to give it the air of real life. So we cannot be sure what Kipling himself, as the author, feels at any point in the largest part of his work. Furthermore, his career was a long one - he published his first professional journalism at the age of 17, his first collection of verse in book form (Departmental Ditties) in his 21st year, and Plain Tales from the Hills, his first book-length collection of short stories at 22 (and one month) and second great success: his views were not always consistent throughout this period. He does appear to have formed his opinions on the British Raj early on, largely on the model of his father's (Allen)and of the social group around him; but he was not simply a conventional Anglo-Indian.

It is also true that, particularly as a young writer, Kipling was given to making sweeping generalisdations, largely for effect, such as "there are only seven men in India who know this secret" ('Consequences (Kipling story)'. One example of this may be found early on in Kim: "India is the only democratic country in the world" . This is said in the narration of a children's game; but it was written while Kipling was reient in the United States, after his education in England and two years of residence there as a successful author; the remark should not be taken merely at face value.

Controversies have arisen about his attitudes to race and the related matter of Empire. His views about women are also not those, perhaps, of a majority of people in the western world in our own time.