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 susceptible of
being reconciled till they had been reduced to very simple terms. The
instinct to simplify--to get down to something in nature that included
the East with the West, the First with the Twentieth century, was
naturally strong in one who was born between two nations; and it was an
instinct which drove Mr Kipling in the opposite direction from that in
which his contemporaries were moving. While Mr Kipling's generation
was learning to analyse, refine and interrogate, to become super-subtle
and incredulous, to exalt the particular and ignore the general, to
probe into the intricate and sensitive places of modern life, Mr
Kipling was looking at mankind in the mass, looking back to the
half-dozen realities which are the stuff of the poetry of every climate
and period--to love of country which is as old as the waters of
Babylon, to the faith of Achates, and the affliction of Job. While Mr
Kipling's contemporaries have been working towards minute studies of
individuals and groups, Mr Kipling has been content to catch the metal
of humanity at the flash point, to wait for the passionate moment which
reveals all mankind as of one kindred. "We be of one blood, ye and
I"--the phrase of the Jungle holds.

To find here evidence of a bias merely political, of an attitude