Time, wrote W.H. Auden in a splendid elegy on the death of W.B. Yeats in 1939, “worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives; pardons cowardice, conceit, lays its honours at their feet. Time, that with this strange excuse pardoned Kipling and his views, and will pardon Paul Claudel, pardons him [Yeats] for writing well.” And others too, Auden could have added, for speaking well.

Kipling was an imperialist, Claudel an aggressively Catholic French poet (and diplomat), Yeats a romantic Irish one. Auden, who was on the left, thought all three mistaken. Lamentably, he later cut these lines from the poem, his own views having shifted toward theirs. That, I suppose, was why. Or, just possibly, did he recognize that the lines could apply to himself?

In the 1930s, he had written eloquently against fascism and Nazism. Yet when war against Hitler arrived, he was in America — and there he stayed. Not for him to get down in the mud and actually fight for his country, as so many lesser men had to. Being a fairly simple-minded patriot, I find that hard to forgive. But I’d forgive anything to the writer of the poem that begins, “Lay your sleeping head, my love...”

For Auden was right. The world will excuse almost anyone who uses language brilliantly. Kipling’s views, seen from our time, can be forgiven on other grounds; he merely shared typical British attitudes of his day. But if you don’t find that excuse enough, as many Indians very reasonably don’t, read him. Few minor poets — he didn’t claim to be more — have written so well. Few storytellers have told their tales better. Few journalists have reported with such detail and colour, in such English.

Claudel is a closed book to me, and I can’t see that Yeats needed forgiveness. But many masters of language have, and have been given it. Churchill’s reactionary views, his towering ego and his twisting of facts in his favour have largely been forgotten in Britain, or at least forgiven, not just for his wartime leadership but also for the sonorous rhetoric he brought to it.

Two of the 20th century’s wittiest novelists, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, were shameless snobs. When both contributed, with well-paid articles, to the 1950’s brouhaha about “U” speech — that of Britain’s upper classes, hence the U — I penned a snarky little verse against them in a student magazine: “How nice to be a snobocrat, and make some money too. Tante Nancy,” (she was an addict of France) “Uncle Evelyn, I wish that I were U”. But their books will endure, as few works of humour do, when their snobbery is forgotten.

English is not alone in this. The French novelist Céline was a rabid anti-semite, but in French eyes a significant writer. The Norwegian Nobel prize-winner, Knut Hamsun, outspokenly admired the Quisling regime foisted on his country by the occupying Nazis during World War II; he presented his Nobel medal to Goebbels. Yet today’s Norwegians have forgiven him. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean communist poet, in his later years enjoyed a lifestyle as “communist”, three houses included, as that of any Soviet apparatchik. But few hold that against his poetry.

Further back, who today gives a damn for Shelley’s role in his first wife’s suicide? Or Byron’s very probable incest? Virtue and genius aren’t often found together. That’s true in other fields, of course. Einstein was a heartless womanizer. Know-all Bertrand Russell had the emotional sensitivity of a log. Many an admired statesman has had not just feet of clay but also legs, usually up to the groin, like John Kennedy. But who cares?

Yet the fine use of language — which can mean plain language, like Orwell’s — seems able to win pardon for the user’s faults even more than do other abilities. Why? Maybe because language is the way we humans communicate, the root of all our social skills.