CS Lewis had this to say about Kipling:

One moment I am filled with delight at the variety and solidity of his imagination; and then, at the very next moment, I am sick, sick to death of the whole Kipling world. . . I mean a real disenchantment, a recoil which makes the Kipling world for the moment, not dull (it is never that), but unendurable — a heavy, glaring, suffocating monstrosity. It is the difference between feeling that, one the whole, you would not like another slice of bread and butter just now, and wondering, as your gorge rises, how you could ever have imagined that you liked vodka.

Lewis went on to explain that Kipling was a master of describing the pleasures and challenges of work, and of working together. The problem with Kipling, a kind of moral rot at his center, was that he never dealt with the question of what the work was for, and whether the goal pursued was morally valid. So he could rhapsodize about the challenges of colonializing an exotic world without ever questioning the moral validity of colonialism. It was a matter of the means justifying the ends, rather than the flipside of that maxim often attributed to Marxists.