Thread by @BillKristol

1. Thread.

OK, I'm just going to quote a few passages from Orwell's 1941 essay on Kipling, which as I mentioned earlier I happened to re-read this morning.

orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-fou…

2. "Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly."

3. "But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity."

4. "All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy."

5. "The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words (‘palm and pine’ – ‘east of Suez’ – ‘the road to Mandalay’), is generally talking about things that are of urgent interest."

5a. "It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him."

6. "Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent."

7. "But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form – for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things – some emotion which very nearly every human being can share."

8. "There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks."

9. "One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested – his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one."

10. "Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists."

11. "He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality."

12. "The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions."

13. "Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return."

14. "Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement...but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like."

15. "He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks."

END