In the Mirror of the Imagination: Mark Twain's Kipling

Abstract

GREGG CAMFIELD In the Mirror of the Imagination: Mark Twain's Kipling You won't know why this topic has come up without you have read a book by the name of Marie Twain & Company, by Leland Krauth. After all, Kipling's literary stock is low; while regularly cited, his works are not considered in their own rights but rather as symptoms of colonial attitudes at their worst.1 Such citations do not invite us to read Kipling, but merely to nod and wink in his direction. Krauth's charming and insightful new book invites us to change this approach to Kipling, at least insofar as Kipling reveals something of Mark Twain. Krauth reminds us that literary galaxies are rich and confusing things, and that the constellation ofwriters with whom any great writer converses is quite broad. We need to know about those literary relationships if we wish to know our authors. Krauth has put Twain in the company of many ofhis contemporaries in a rich collection of chapters, each focusing on Twain and one other writer. The last of these pairings , "Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling" is the most unusual in current Twain criticism. Not since Howard Baetzhold's Mark Twain and John Bull, published over thirty years ago, has anyone gone into such depth on the reciprocal influences of Twain on Kipling and Kipling on Twain. And while Baetzhold was trying to show the degree to which Twain embraced elitist political visions and thus found much consonance between Kipling and Twain, the general run of Twain criticism since— encouraged by contemporary liberal cultural relativism—has been to find more value in Twain's anti-imperialist writings. No doubt many critics have fought against this tendency to turn Twain into a liberal icon, but, recently, scholars have persuasively Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number i, Spring 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 86 Gregg Camfield illuminated Twain's emphatic public attacks on imperialism.2 Twain took these positions at great risk to his reputation and income. Thus, the consensus opinion seems to hold Twain to be a progressive, fighting against authoritarianism and cultural bigotry. Krauth is in this camp. He acknowledges some very strong parallels in Twain's and Kipling's literary situations—both began as provincial journalists, worked with regional materials, grew popular and were often deprecated for their popularity , and were ultimately celebrities, having their value sanctioned by honorary Oxford degrees, conferred in fact during the same ceremony where the two, like unruly schoolboys, shared cigars against the ceremonial rules of the day (Twain, Chapters 170). Nonetheless, Krauth predicates his chapter on antithesis. He shows that despite strong similarities in outlook "we are returned again to the fundamental difference between the two writers: Kipling cherishes authority, Twain challenges it. In terms of colonial affairs, Kipling sanctions imperial dominion, finding it both necessary and just; Twain contests it, seeing it as both inappropriate and immoral" (256). Krauth's analysis is compelling, but I think his conclusions about the relationship between the two can be refined. I don't think Krauth fully illuminates how Twain interpreted Kipling and, consequently, misses a chance to more richly understand Twain's own political morality, which is far more complex, far more tangled between eighteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of rights, human nature, and social morality than Krauth reveals. Twain's "A Fable" shows that Twain thought that Kipling had been misinterpreted. This little beast tale begins with a cat watching a man put a beautiful painting on a wall opposite a mirror. One is supposed to view the picture through the mirror, that is, to approach the painting through the "mirror of the imagination" in order to gain perspective. Yet when the cat tells the other animals about this nearly divine beauty, they all step between the mirror and the painting and thus see only themselves. The moral of the story, delivered "by the cat," explicitly sets the story up as an allegory about how to read: "You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your [donkey] ears, but they will...