I like Sutcliff's plea that people know what they are talking about before they hurl abuse at writers of yesteryear. Too many of our contemporary culture critics are prone to besmirching the reputations of writers from long ago without actually having read them.
Rudyard Kipling died just when the old order was dying, and many of the things that he believed in were falling into disrepute; when Britain was beginning to be ashamed of having - or ever having had - an Empire. And so the charge of Jingoism was levelled at him, and has been levelled at him off and on ever since, by people who have never troubled to read his books with an open mind. I have even heard conscientious parents and school teachers doubting the rightness of giving certain of his books to their children, lest they should imbibe jingoistic ideas from them - particularly from Stalky and Co., the very book which contains, had those conscientious parents and teachers noticed it, the unforgettable portrait of the Jelly-Bellied Flagflapper.
Empire had not become a dirty word to Kipling, but he saw it in terms, not of dominion but of service. One of the extremely sound lessons he has for the child of to-day is that service is not something to be ashamed of. Another is that history is something to do with oneself. Most children tend to grow up seeing history in a series of small static pictures, all belonging to the past and with no communicating door between them and the present. The two Puck books, with their mingling of past and present in one corner of England must help them to feel it as a living and continuous process of which they themselves are a part, and so see their own times in better perspective than they might otherwise have done.
Yes, Rudyard Kipling still has an honourable place to fill in the ranks of children's writers, and it is a place which, without him, must remain empty, for nobody else can fill it.
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