Mark Twain in Eruption

Abstract

11 Aug 1966. This morning’s cables contain a verse or two from Kipling, voicing his protest against a liberalising new policy of the British Government.which he fears will deliver the balance of power in South Africa into the hands of the conquered Boers. Kipling’s name, and Kipling’s words always stir me now, stir me more than do any other living man’s. But I remember a time, seventeen or eighteen years back, when the name did not suggest anything to me and only the words moved me. At that time Kipling’s name was beginning to be known here and there, in spots, in India, but had not travelled outside of that empire. He came over and travelled about America, maintaining himself by correspondence with Indian journals. He wrote dashing, free-handed, brilliant letters but no one outside of India knew about it.

(New York: Harper, 1922); ed. Bernard De Voto (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1940), pp. 309–12.