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diff --git a/6873-0.txt b/6873-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ea55f84 --- /dev/null +++ b/6873-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4580 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Mark Twain + +Author: Archibald Henderson + +Release Date: August 21, 2006 [EBook #6873] +Last Updated: February 24, 2018 +Language: English + +Character set encoding: UTF-8 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN *** + + + + +Produced by David Widger + + + + + + MARK TWAIN + + By Archibald Henderson + + With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn + + + + + “Haply--who knows?--somewhere + In Avalon, Isle of Dreams, + In vast contentment at last, + With every grief done away, + While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait, + And Moliere hangs on his words, + And Cervantes not far off + Listens and smiles apart, + With that incomparable drawl + He is jesting with Dagonet now.” + + BLISS CARMAN. + + + + + PREFACE + +There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe +a debt of almost personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his +humour and the charm of his personality. In the future they will, I +doubt not, seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt. My +own experience with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional. +From the days of early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived +first solely from acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm +and, as it were, personal affection. With limitless interest and +curiosity, I used to hear the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one +of our old family servants, a negro to whom I was devotedly attached. +These stories were narrated to me in the negro dialect with such perfect +naturalness and racial gusto that I often secretly wondered if the +narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in disguise. I was thus cunningly +prepared, “coached” shall I say, for the maturer charms of Tom Sawyer +and Huckleberry Finn. With Uncle Remus and Mark Twain as my preceptors, +I spent the days of my youth--excitedly alternating, spell-bound, +between the inexhaustible attractions of Tom, Huck, Jim, Indian Joe, the +Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers on the one hand; and Brer +Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a thousand other fantastic, but very real creatures +of the animal kingdom on the other. + +I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark +Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him. +It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that +Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me, +then a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was +expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow +never dared to utter! + +My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it +was--an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a guest +in his home--gave me at last the justification for paying the debt +which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently +obligatory. I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to +pay that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work. + +It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark +Twain's works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens. It +is an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a +great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own +country and his own age as no American has so completely done before +him; a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and +bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of +cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; constitutionally a reformer who, +heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a +philosopher and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret +springs of human motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that +intuition in works which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and +went straight to the human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius +who lived to know and enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great +man who saw life steadily and saw it whole. + + ARCHIBALD HENDERSON. + +LONDON, +August 5, 1910. + + +NOTE.--The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in +having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn. All the +illustrations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr. +Coburn. + + + + + CONTENTS + +PREFACE + +I. INTRODUCTORY +II. THE MAN +III. THE HUMORIST +IV. WORLD-FAMED GENIUS +V. PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST + + + + + “I've a theory that every author, while living, has a projection of + himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant + places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never + knew him in the flesh. When the author dies, this phantom fades + away, not caring to continue business at the old stand. Then the + dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature; + this impression may grow sharper or fainter according to the + fashions and new conditions of the time.” + + Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS + of date December 23, 1901. + + + + +INTRODUCTORY + +In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has +been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and +chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America, +the colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity +was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with +laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from +the “Wild and Woolly West.” Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an +international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world. It +would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were +reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of “Literature.” They +were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all. + +The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of +the supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when +the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there +is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and +incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully +dawned upon the American consciousness. The literatures of England and +Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive +crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain. +It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic, +and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great +artist. It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to +posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be +absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a +world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the +supreme and imperishable glories of American literature. + +At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can +be attributed what a Frenchman would call _mondial eclat_ is +surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling, +with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned +title of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has +suffered eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a +fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the +British Isles. His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from +Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to +Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the +literary hierarchy of the world--according to popular verdict. Since +Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged +the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the +world. This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his +life, less from his intellect than from his conscience. The _literati_ +bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?' The whole world +pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration. + + [While this book was going through the press, news has come of the + death of Tolstoy.] + +Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most +widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world. In a sense +not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts +of the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if +measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is +without a parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the +defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends +many an inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent +wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon +the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is +perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's +works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet +his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the +magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal +mysticism of his unrealizable hopes. + +If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal, +it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour. +That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust +sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently “gone about in near +and distant places,” everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk +of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The +French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a +select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a +country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects, +there is some reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author +appeals to many different “publics” or classes of readers--in proportion +to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the +catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a +boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of +experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he +points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to +whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real +psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid +irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid +Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that +innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the +omnipresent influence of a “good example” and stilled the painless pangs +of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill +condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the +equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the +growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of +democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human +experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young, +provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the +tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth. The +navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the Mississippi'. Youth and age may share +without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of +'Huckleberry Finn'. True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly +narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. The artist may bestow his critical meed of +approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'. The moralist may heartily +validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. +Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the +horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents +Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the +hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in the spontaneity and +refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation +of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing +air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom. The stevedore on the dock, the +motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the riverman on +the Mississippi--all speak with exuberant affection in memory of that +quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths +of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of silvery hair. In one +day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an emperor and a _portier_ vied +with each other in tributes of admiration and esteem for this man and +his works. It is Mark Twain's imperishable glory, not simply that his +name is the most familiar of that of any author who has lived in our own +times, but that it is remembered with infinite irrepressible zest. + +“We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we +knew and loved,” said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address. “We +remember the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and +natural manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his +affections, his laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and +faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing. + +“Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he +faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet +a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to +provide not only things honest, but things 'honourable in the sight of +all men.' + +“Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know +that he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those +who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and +irrepressible humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of +serious thoughts and noble affections and desires. + +“Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour +means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the +unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world +which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible +says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall +hold them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humour is that it +does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only +at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical. + +“Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his +humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift, +not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and +wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's +false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false +witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories, +coloured with his own experiences, he touched the absurdities of life +with penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow +the infinite pathos of life's realities. No one can say that he ever +failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the +little children, of whom Christ said, 'Of such is the kingdom of +heaven.' + +“Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. +We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of +the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left +such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own +sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, +happy in the fuller light. + + “'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas, + Death after life doth greatly please.”' + + + + “'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime--the + thin air stifles'--I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush + always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor + remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry + continually, 'O Beautiful! My country!' Yet, in the long dull + interspans between these sacred moments we need some one to remind + us that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the + years insidious foes are lurking--anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan + decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the + cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant + fraud and corruption. When our countrymen migrate because we have + no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us + what we can count on. When they complain that our soil lacks the + humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for + the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark + Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use + words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with + prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on + all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by + Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the + Republic shall suffer no harm.” + + STUART P. SHERMAN: “MARK TWAIN.” + The Nation, May 12, 1910. + + + + + THE MAN + + +American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no +example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as +the example of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the United +States, as did Grant and Johnson. But assassination began for Lincoln +an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and +adulation. Grant was one of the great failures in American public life; +and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark +Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive +development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of +intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his +career. From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of +Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a +merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy +navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be +taken as symbolic of the romance of American life. + +With a sort of mock--pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral +glories of his house--the judge who condemned Charles I., and all those +other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre upon the +name of Clemens. Yet he claimed that he had not examined into these +traditions, chiefly because “I was so busy polishing up this end of the +line and trying to make it showy.” His mother, a “Lambton with a p,” of +Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of +determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed +with means, and their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown, in the +mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as +Judge Hawkins is said to have done in 'The Gilded Age', settling at +Florida, Missouri. Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months +after their arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he +stated that he had increased by one per cent. the population of this +village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man +in history had ever done for any other town. + +Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life, +and survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different +times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the +rescue. He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she +hadn't been uneasy about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about +him the whole time. But when he inquired further if she was afraid he +would not live, she answered after a reflective pause--as if thinking +out the facts--that she had been afraid he would! + +His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the +writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was +intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his +writings. + +In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida +and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a +lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to +Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all +the dignity of a local autocrat. His forum was a “dingy” office, +furnished with “a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a +puncheon bench.” The solemnity of his manner in administering the law +won for him, among his neighbours, the title of Judge. + +One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to +realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn. +“Sam was always a good-hearted boy,” his mother once remarked, “but he +was a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could +never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me +dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much +in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and +sober-minded as they were.” At school, he “excelled only in spelling”; +outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn, +mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity +afforded. “Often his father would start him off to school,” his mother +once said, “and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his +whereabouts. There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and +Sam would take his position behind that, and as his father went past +would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight. +Finally, his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to +teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn. But I never +gave up. He was always a great boy for history, and could never get +tired of that kind of reading; but he hadn't any use for schoolhouses +and text books.” + +Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a “loafing, out-at-elbows, +down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town.” Young Clemens +accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his +father was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted in +part of two or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like +so many other slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery. To his +children, especially to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however, +a stern taskmaster. Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and +his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality. If at times this +neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the +suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them +--his father doing the breaking and he the suffering! Sam claimed to +be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy. But this modest +estimate is subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off +a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, +and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he +pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every +original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to +pry into the result--as it was of no consequence to any one but himself! + +The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam's +favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky +Thatcher of Tom's admiration. “Sam was always up to some mischief,” + this lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood. +“We attended Sunday-school together, and they had a system of rewards +for saying verses after committing them to memory. A blue ticket was +given for ten verses, a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red, +and a Bible for ten yellow tickets. If you will count up, you will see +it makes a Bible for ten thousand verses. Sam came up one day with his +ten yellow tickets, and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but had +just got them by trading with the boys. But he received his Bible with +all the serious air of a diligent student!” + +Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has never pretended that his +success was due to any marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable +industry, any innate energy and perseverance. I have good reason to +recall his favourite theory, which he was fond of expounding, to the +effect that circumstance is man's master. He likened circumstance to +the attraction of gravity; and declared that while it is man's privilege +to argue with circumstance, as it is the honourable privilege of the +falling body to argue with the attraction of gravity, it does no good: +man has to obey. Circumstance has as its working partner man's +temperament, his natural disposition. Temperament is not the creation +of man, but an innate quality; over it he has no authority; for its acts +he cannot be held responsible. It cannot be permanently changed or even +modified. No power can keep it modified. For it is inherent and +enduring, as unchanging as the lines upon the thumb or the conformation +of the skull. Throughout his life, circumstance seemed like a watchful +spirit, switching his temperament into those channels of experience and +development leading unerringly to the career of the author. + +The death of Judge Clemens was the first link in the long chain of +circumstance--for his son was at once taken from school and apprenticed +to the editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier. He was allowed +the usual emolument of the office apprentice, “board and clothes, but no +money”; and even at that, though the board was paid, the clothes rarely +materialized. Several weeks later his brother Orion returned to +Hannibal, and in 1850 brought out a little paper called the 'Hannibal +Journal.' He took Sam out of the Courier office and engaged him for the +Journal at $3.50 a week--though he was never able to pay a cent of the +wages. One of Mark's fellow-townsmen once confessed: “Yes, I knew him +when he was a boy. He was a printer's devil--I think that's what they +called him--and they didn't miss it.” At a banquet some years ago, Mark +Twain aptly described at length his experiences as a printer's +apprentice. There were a thousand and one menial services he was called +upon to perform. If the subscribers paid at all, it was only sometimes +--and then the town subscribers paid in groceries, the country +subscribers in cabbages and cordwood. If they paid, they were puffed in +the paper; and if the editor forgot to insert the puff, the subscriber +stopped the paper! Every subscriber regarded himself as assistant +editor, ex officio; gave orders as to how the paper was to be edited, +supplied it with opinions, and directed its policy. Of course, every +time the editor failed to follow his suggestions, he revenged himself by +stopping the paper! + +After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home, +a “two-story brick”; and here for several years it managed to worry +along, spasmodically hovering between life and death. Life was easy +with the editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended +until the next week. They always suspended anyhow, every now and then, +when the fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the +editor as a convenient excuse, Mark admitted that this was a paltry +excuse, for the all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just +as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead +one than with either of them. At the age of fifteen he considered +himself a skilled journeyman printer; and his faculty for comedic +portrayal had already betrayed itself in occasional clumsy efforts. In +'My First Literary Venture', he narrates his experiences, amongst others +how greatly he increased the circulation of the paper, and incensed the +“inveterate woman-killer,” whose poetry for that week's paper read, “To +Mary in H--l” (Hannibal). Mark added a “snappy foot--note” at the +bottom, in which he agreed to let the thing pass, for just that once; +but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon Runnels that the paper had a +character to sustain, and that in future, when Mr. Runnels wanted to +commune with his friends in h--l, he must select some other medium for +that communication! Many were the humorous skits, crudely illustrated +with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out with his jack-knife, which +the mischievous young “devil” inserted in his brother's paper. Here we +may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of the genuine humorist. +“It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal',” says his biographer, Mr. +Albert B. Paine, “that young Sam Clemens began his writings--burlesques, +as a rule, of local characters and conditions--usually published in his +brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble on his return. Yet +they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his possession +he might have turned his brother's talent into capital even then.” + +One evening in 1858, the boy, consumed with wanderlust, asked his mother +for five dollars--to start on his travels. He failed to receive the +money, but he defiantly announced that he would go “anyhow.” He had +managed to save a tiny sum, and that night he disappeared and fled to St +Louis. There he worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a +time, and then started out “to see the world”--New York, where a little +World's Fair was in progress. He was somewhat better off than was +Benjamin Franklin when he entered Philadelphia--for he had two or three +dollars in pocket-change, and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the +lining of his coat. For a time he sweltered in a villainous mechanics' +boarding-house in Duane Street, and worked at starvation wages in the +printing-office of Gray & Green. Being recognized one day by a man from +Hannibal, he fled to Philadelphia where he worked for some months as a +“sub” on the 'Inquirer' and the 'Public Ledger'. Next came a flying +trip to Washington “to see the sights there,” and then back he went to +the Mississippi Valley. This journey to the “vague and fabled East” + really opened his eyes to the great possibilities that the world has in +store for the traveller. + +Meantime, Orion had gone to Muscatine, Ohio, and acquired a small +interest there; and, after his marriage, he and his wife went to Keokuk +and started a little job printing-office. Here Sam worked with his +brother until the winter of 1856-7, when circumstance once again played +the part of good fairy. As he was walking along the street one snowy +evening, his attention was attracted by a piece of paper which the wind +had blown against the wall. It proved to be a fifty-dollar bill; and +after advertising for the owner for four days, he stealthily moved to +Cincinnati in order “to take that money out of danger.” Now comes the +second crucial event in his life! + +For long the ambition for river life had remained with him--and now +there seemed some possibility of realizing these ambitions. He first +wanted to be a cabin boy; then his ideal was to be a deck hand, because +of his splendid conspicuousness as he stood on the end of the stage +plank with a coil of rope in his hand. But these were only day-dreams +--he didn't admit, even to himself, that they were anything more than +heavenly impossibilities. But as he worked during the winter in the +printing-office of Wrightson & Company of Cincinnati, he whiled away his +leisure hours reading Lieutenant Herndon's account of his explorations +of the Amazon, and became greatly interested in his description of the +cocoa industry. Now he set to work to map out a new and thrilling +career. The expedition sent out by the government to explore the Amazon +had encountered difficulties and left unfinished the exploration of the +country about the head-waters, thousands of miles from the mouth of the +river. It mattered not to him that New Orleans was fifteen hundred +miles away from Cincinnati, and that he had only thirty dollars left. +His mind was made up he would go on and complete the work of +exploration. So in April, 1857, he set sail for New Orleans on an +ancient tub, called the Paul Jones. For the paltry sum of sixteen +dollars, he was enabled to revel in the unimagined glories of the main +saloon. At last he was under way--realizing his boyhood dream, unable +to contain himself for joy. At last he saw himself as that hero of his +boyish fancy--a traveller. + +When he reached New Orleans, after the prolonged ecstasy of two weeks on +a tiny Mississippi steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving for +Para, that there never had been one leaving for Para and that there +probably would not be one leaving for Para that century. A policeman +made him, move, on, threatening to run him in if he ever caught him +reflecting in the public street again. Just as his money failed him, +his old friend circumstance arrived, with another turning-point in his +life--a new link. On his way down the river he had met Horace Bixby; he +turned to him in this hour of need. It has been charged against Mark +Twain that he was deplorably lazy--apocryphal anecdotes are still +narrated with much gusto to prove it. Think of a lazy boy undertaking +the stupendous task of learning to know the intricate and treacherous +secrets of the great river, to know every foot of the route in the dark +as well as he knew his own face in the glass! And yet he confesses that +he was unaware of the immensity of the undertaking upon which he had +embarked. + +“In 1852,” says Bixby, “I was chief pilot on the 'Paul Jones', a boat +that made occasional trips from Pittsburg to New Orleans. One day a +tall, angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs appeared to be +fastened with leather hinges, entered the pilot-house, and in a +peculiar, drawling voice, said-- + +“'Good mawnin, sir. Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and +teach 'im how to be er pilot?' + +“'No sir; there is more bother about it than it's worth.' + +“'I wish you would, mister. I'm er printer by trade, but it don't 'pear +to 'gree with me, and I'm on my way to Central America for my health. I +believe I'll make a tolerable good pilot, 'cause I like the river.' + +“'What makes you pull your words that way?' + +“'I don't know, mister; you'll have to ask my Ma. She pulls hern too. +Ain't there some way that we can fix it, so that you'll teach me how to +be er pilot?' + +“'The only way is for money.' + +“'How much are you going to charge? + +“'Well, I'll teach you the river for $500.' + +“'Gee whillikens! he! he! I ain't got $500, but I've got five lots in +Keokuk, Iowa, and 2000 acres of land in Tennessee that is worth two bits +an acre any time. You can have that if you want it.' + +“I told him I did not care for his land, and after a while he agreed to +pay $100 in cash (borrowed from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett, +of Virginia), $150 in twelve months, and the balance when he became a +pilot. He was with me for a long time, but sometimes took occasional +trips with other pilots.” And he significantly adds “He was always +drawling out dry jokes, but then we did not pay any attention to him.” + +It cannot be thought accidental that Sam Clemens became a pilot. Bixby +became his mentor, the pilot-house his recitation-room, the steamboat +his university, the great river the field of knowledge. + +In that stupendous course in nature's own college, he “learned the +river” as schoolboy seldom masters his Greek or his mathematics. With +the naive assurance of youth, he gaily enters upon the task of +“learning” some twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great +Mississippi. Long afterwards, he confessed that had he really known +what he was about to require of his faculties, he would never have had +the courage to begin. + +His comic sketches, published in the 'Hannibal Weekly Courier' in his +brother's absence, furnish the first link, his apprenticeship to Bixby +the second link in the chain of circumstance. For two years and a half +he sailed the river as a master pilot; his trustworthiness secured for +him the command of some of the best boats on the river, and he was so +skilful that he never met disaster on any of his trips. He narrowly +escaped it in 1861, for when Louisiana seceded, his boat was drafted +into the Confederate service. As he reached St. Louis, having taken +passage for home, a shell came whizzing by and carried off part of the +pilot-house. It was the end of an era: the Civil War had begun. The +occupation of the pilot was gone; but the river had given up to him all +of its secrets. He was to show them to a world, in 'Life on the +Mississippi' and 'Huckleberry Finn'. + +The story of the derivation of the famous _nom de guerre_ has often been +narrated-and as often erroneously. As the steamboat approaches a +sandbank, snag, or other obstruction, the man at the bow heaves the lead +and sings out, “By the mark, three,” “Mark twain,” etc.-meaning three +fathoms deep, two fathoms, and so on. The thought of adopting Mark +Twain as a _nom de guerre_ was not original with Clemens; but the world +owes him a debt of gratitude for making forever famous a name that, but +for him, would have been forever lost. “There was a man, Captain Isaiah +Sellers, who furnished river news for the New Orleans Picayune, still +one of the best papers in the South,” Mr. Clemens once confessed to +Professor Wm. L. Phelps. “He used to sign his articles Mark Twain. He +died in 1863. I liked the name, and stole it. I think I have done him +no wrong, for I seem to have made this name somewhat generally known.” + +The inglorious escapade of his military career, at which he himself has +poked unspeakable fun, and for which not even his most enthusiastic +biographers have any excuse, was soon ended. Had his heart really been +enlisted on the side of the South, he would doubtless have stayed at his +post. In reality, he was at that time lacking in conviction; and in +after life he became a thorough Unionist and Abolitionist. In the +summer of 1861, Governor Jackson of Missouri called for fifty thousand +volunteers to drive out the Union forces. While visiting in the small +town where his boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County, young +Clemens and some of his friends met together in a secret place one +night, and formed themselves into a military company. The spirited but +untrained Tom Lyman was made captain; and in lieu of a first lieutenant +--strange omission!--young Clemens was made second lieutenant. These +fifteen hardy souls proudly dubbed themselves the Marion Rangers. No +one thought of finding fault with such a name--it sounded too well. All +were full of notions as high-flown as the name of their company. One of +their number, named Dunlap, was ashamed of his name, because it had a +plebeian sound to his ear. So he solved the difficulty and gratified +his aristocratic ambitions by writing it d'Unlap. This may serve as a +sample of the stuff of which the company was made. Dunlap was by no +means useless; for he invented hifalutin names for the camps, and +generally succeeded in proposing a name that was, as his companions +agreed, “no slouch.” + +There was no real organization, nobody obeyed orders, there was never a +battle. They retreated, according to the tale of the humorist, at every +sign of the enemy. In truth, this little band had plenty of stomach for +fighting, despite its loose organization; and quite a number fought all +through the war. Mark Twain is doubtless correct in the main, in his +assertion that he has not given an unfair picture of the conditions +prevailing in many of the militia camps in the first months of the war +between the states. The men were raw and unseasoned, and even the +leaders were lacking in the rudiments of military training and +discipline. The situation was strange and unprecedented, the terrors +were none the less real that they were imaginary. As Mark says, it took +an actual collision with the enemy on the field of battle to change them +from rabbits into soldiers. Young Clemens, according to his nephew's +account, was first detailed to special duty on the river because of his +knowledge acquired as a pilot; it was not long before he was captured +and paroled. Again he was captured, this time sent to St. Louis, and +imprisoned there in a tobacco warehouse. Fearing recognition and tragic +consequences, perhaps courtmartial and death, should he, during the +formalities of exchange, be recognized by the command in Grant's army +which first captured him, he made his escape, abandoned the cause which +he afterwards spoke of as “the rebellion,” and went west as secretary to +his brother Orion, lately appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada by +the President. + +A very credible and interesting biography of Mark Twain might be +compiled from his own works; and 'Roughing It' is full of autobiography of +a coloured sort, though in the main correct. His joy in the prospect of +that trip, the exciting details of the long journey, are all narrated +with gusto and fine effect. In the “unique sinecure” of the office of +private secretary, he found he had nothing to do and no salary; so after +a short time--the fear of being recognized by Union soldiers and shot +for breaking his parole still haunting him--he, and a companion, went +off together on a fishing jaunt to Lake Tahoe. Everywhere he saw +fortunes made in a moment. He fell a prey to the prevailing excitement +and went mad like all the rest. Little wonder over the wild talk, when +cartloads of solid silver bricks as large as pigs of lead were passing +by every day before their very eyes. The wild talk grew more frenzied +from day to day. And young Clemens yielded to no one in enthusiasm and +excitement. For vividness or picturesqueness of expression none could +vie with him. With three companions, he began “prospecting,” with the +most indifferent success; and soon tiring of their situation, they moved +on down to Esmeralda (now Aurora), on the other side of Carson City. +Here new life seemed to inspire the party. What mattered it if they +were in debt to the butcher--for did they not own thirty thousand feet +apiece in the “richest mines on earth”! Who cared if their credit was +not good with the grocer, so long as they revelled in mountains of +fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied cant of the hour over their +immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at last the practical +necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm. Clemens +was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common +labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board--after flour +had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had gone +to eight per cent. a month. This work was very exhausting, and after a +week Clemens asked his employer for an advance of wages. The employer +replied that he was paying Clemens ten dollars a week, and thought that +all he was worth. How much did he want? When Clemens replied that four +hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was all he could reasonably +ask, considering the hard times, he was ordered off the premises! In +after days, Mark only regretted that, in view of the arduous labours he +had performed in that mill, he had not asked seven hundred thousand for +his services! + +After a time, Mark and his friend Higbie established their claim to a +mine, became mad with excitement, and indulged in the wildest dreams for +the future. Under the laws of the district, work of a certain character +must be done upon the claim within ten days after location in order to +establish the right of possession. Mark was called away to the bedside +of a sick friend, Higbie failed to receive Mark's note, and the work was +never done--each thinking it was being properly attended to by the +other. On their return, they discovered that their claim was +“re-located,” and that millions had slipped from their grasp! The very +stars in their courses seemed to fight to force young Clemens into +literature. Had Samuel Clemens become a millionaire at this time, it is +virtually certain that there would have been no Mark Twain. + +After one day more of heartless prospecting, Clemens “dropped in” at the +wayside post-office. It was the hour of fate! A letter awaited him +there. We cannot call it accident--it was the result of forces and +events which had long been converging toward this end. Samuel Clemens +began his career as an itinerant, tramping “jour” printer. He wrote for +the papers on which he served as printer; and he actually read the +matter he set up in type. By observation on his travels, by study of +the writing of others, Clemens acquired information, knowledge of life, +and ingenuity of expression. He hadn't served his ten--years' +apprenticeship as a printer for nothing. In the process of setting up +tons of good and bad literature, he had learned--half unconsciously--to +appraise and to discriminate. In the same half-unconscious way, he was +actually gaining some inkling of the niceties of style. After he began +“learning the river,” Clemens once wrote a funny sketch about Captain +Sellers which made a genuine “hit” with the officers on the boat. The +sketch fell into the hands of the “river-editor” of the 'St. Louis +Republican', found a place in that journal, and was widely copied +throughout the West. On the strength of it, Clemens became a sort of +river reporter, and from time to time published memoranda and comic +squibs in the 'Republican'. That passion which a French critic has +characterized as distinctively American, the passion for “seeing +yourself in print,” still burned in Clemens, even during all the +hardships of prospecting and milling. At intervals he sent from the +mining regions of “Washoe,” as all that part of Nevada was then called, +humorous letters signed “Josh” to the 'Daily Territorial Enterprise' of +Virginia City, at that time one of the most progressive and wide--awake +newspapers in the West. + +The fateful letter which I have mentioned, contained an offer to Clemens +from the proprietor of the 'Enterprise', of the position of city editor, +at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. To Clemens at this time, +this offer came as a perfect godsend. Twenty-five dollars a week was +nothing short of wealth, luxury. His enthusiasm oozed away when he +reflected over his ignorance and incompetence; and he gloomily recalled +his repeated failures. But necessity faced him; and opportunity knocks +but once at every door. His doubts were speedily resolved; and he +afterwards confessed that, had he been offered at that time a salary to +translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly +have accepted, despite some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw +as much variety into it as he could for the money. It was to fill a +vacancy, caused by the absence of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter, +on a visit to “the States,” that Clemens was offered this position; but +he retained it after De Quille returned. “Mark and I had our hands +full,” relates De Quille, “and no grass grew under our feet. There was +a constant rush of startling events; they came tumbling over one another +as though playing at leap-frog. While a stage robbery was being written +up, a shooting affray started; and perhaps before the pistol shots had +ceased to echo among the surrounding hills, the firebells were banging +out an alarm.” A record of the variegated duties of these two, found in +an old copy of the Territorial Enterprise of 1863, bears the +unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain. “Our duty is to keep the universe +thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls and +theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and +school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and +Bible societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand other things which it +is within the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify +into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily +newspaper. Beyond this revelation everything connected with these two +experiments of Providence must for ever remain an impenetrable mystery.” + An admirable picture of Mark Twain on his native heath, in the latter +part of 1863, is given by Edward Peron Hingston, author of “The Genial +Showman,” in the introduction to the English edition of “The Innocents +Abroad.” + +The fame of the Western humorist had already reached the ears of +Hingston; and as soon as he reached Virginia City, he went to the office +of the 'Territorial Enterprise' and asked to be presented to Mark Twain. + +When he heard his name called by some one, Clemens called out: + +“Pass the gentleman into my den. The noble animal is here.” + +The noble animal proved to be “a young man, strongly built, ruddy in +complexion, his hair of a sunny hue, his eyes light and twinkling, in +manner hearty, and nothing of the student about him--one who looked as +if he could take his own part in a quarrel, strike a smart blow as +readily as he could say a telling thing, bluffly jolly, brusquely +cordial, off-handedly good-natured.” The picture is detailed and vivid: + + “Let it be borne in mind that from the windows of the newspaper + office the American desert was visible; that within a radius of ten + miles Indians were encamping amongst the sage--brush; that the + whole city was populated with miners, adventurers, Jew traders, + gamblers, and all the rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in + a new territory collects together, and it will be readily + understood that a reporter for a daily paper in such a place must + neither go about his duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be + fastidious about having gilt edges to his note-books. In Mark + Twain I found the very man I had expected to see--a flower of the + wilderness, tinged with the colour of the soil, the man of thought + and the man of action rolled into one, humorist and hard-worker, + Momus in a felt hat and jack-boots. In the reporter of the + 'Territorial Enterprise' I became introduced to a Californian + celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy, + quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization + had allowed his humour to develop without restraint, and his speech + to be rarely idiomatic.” + +Under the influence of the example of the proprietors of the +'Enterprise', strict stylistic disciplinarians of the Dana school of +journalism, Clemens learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style +which characterizes his writing. As a reporter, he was really +industrious in matters that met his fancy; but “cast-iron items”--for he +hated facts and figures requiring absolute accuracy--got from him only +“a lick and a promise.” He was much interested in Tom Fitch's effort to +establish a literary journal, 'The Weekly Occidental'. Daggett's +opening chapters of a wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs Fitch, J. T. +Goodman, Dan De Quille, and Clemens were to write successive +instalments, gave that paper the _coup de grace_ in its very first +issue. Of this wonderful novel, at the close of each instalment of +which the “hero was left in a position of such peril that it seemed +impossible he could be rescued, except through means and wisdom more +than human”; of the Bohemian days of the “Visigoths,”--Clemens, De +Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich, and their confreres; of the practical +jokes played on each other, particularly the incident of the imitation +meerschaum (“mere sham”) pipe, solemnly presented to Clemens by Steve +Gillis, C. A. V. Putnam, D. E. M'Carthy, De Quille and others--all these +belong to the fascinating domain of the biographer. When Clemens was +sent down to Carson City to report the meetings of the first Nevada +Legislature, he began for the first time to sign his letters “Mark +Twain.” In his Autobiography he has explained that his function as a +legislative correspondent was to dispense compliment and censure with +impartial justice. As his disquisitions covered about half a page each +morning in the Enterprise, it is easy to understand that he was an +“influence.” Questioned by Carlyle Smith in regard to his choice of +“Mark Twain,” Mr. Clemens replied: “I chose my pseudonym because to nine +hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning, and +also because it was short. I was a reporter in the Legislature at the +time, and I wished to save the Legislature time. It was much shorter to +say in their debates--for I was certain to be the occasion of some +questions of privilege--'Mark Twain' than 'the unprincipled and lying +Parliamentary Reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise'.'” + +Already his name was known the whole length of the Pacific Coast; the +Enterprise published many things from his pen which gave him local, and +afterwards national, fame; such sketches as 'The Undertaker's Chat', +'The Petrified Man' and 'The Marvellous Bloody Massacre' had attracted +favourable and wide notice east of the Rocky Mountains. But his career +in Carson City came to a sudden close when he challenged the editor of +the Virginia Union to a duel, the bloodless conclusion of which is +narrated in the Autobiography. But even a challenge to a duel was +against the new law of Nevada; and obeying the warning of Governor +North, the duellists crossed the border without ceremony, and stood not +upon the order of their going. + +While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise, he was in the habit of +reserving all his “sketches” for the San Francisco newspapers, the +'Golden Era' and the 'Morning Call'. He now turns his steps to that +storied city of “Frisco,” and was not long in extending his fame on that +coast. He was incorrigibly lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the +Call, soon discovered; and Kipling was told when he was in San Francisco +that Mark was in the habit of coiling himself into a heap and meditating +until the last minute, when he would produce copy having no relationship +to the subject of his assignment--“which made the editor swear horribly, +and the readers of 'The Call' ask for more.” His love for practical +joking during the California days brought him unpopularity; and one +reads in a San Francisco paper of the early days: “There have been +moments in the lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of +California and Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members +of a vigilance committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or +arson, it is to be feared his shrift would have been short. What a +dramatic picture the idea conjures up, to be sure! Mark, before these +honest men, infuriated by his practical jokes, trying to show them what +an innocent creature he was when it came to mules, or how the only +policy of fire insurance he held had lapsed, how void of guile he was in +any direction, and all with that inimitable drawl, that perplexed +countenance and peculiar scraping of the left foot, like a boy speaking +his first piece at school.” If he just escaped disaster, he likewise +just escaped millions; on one occasion, for the space of a few moments, +he owned the famous Comstock Lode, which was, though he never suspected +it, worth millions. His trunkful of securities, which were eminently +saleable at one time, proved to be of fictitious value when “the bottom +dropped out” of the Nevada boom; and that silver mine, which he was +commissioned to sell in New York, was finally sold for three million +dollars! It was, as Mark says, the blind lead over again. Mark Twain +had the true Midas touch; but the mine of riches he was destined to +discover was a mine, not of gold or silver, but the mine of intellect +and rich human experience. + +To The 'Golden Era', Mark Twain, like Prentice Mulford and Joaquin +Miller, contributed freely; and after a time he became associated with +Bret Harte on 'The Californian', Harte as editor at twenty dollars a +week, and Mark receiving twelve dollars for an article. Here +forgathered that group of brilliant writers of the Pacific Slope, +numbering Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Henry +Webb, and Prentice Mulford among its celebrities; two of that remarkable +coterie were soon destined to achieve world-wide fame. “These ingenuous +young men, with the fatuity of gifted people,” says Mr. Howells, “had +established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly +co-operated in its early extinction.” Of his first meeting with Mark +Twain, Bret Harte has left a memorable picture: + + “His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, + and even the aquiline eye--an eye so eagle-like that a second lid + would not have surprised me--of an unusual and dominant nature. + His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, + and his general manner was one of supreme indifference to + surroundings and circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam + Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a + number of newspaper articles contributed over the signature of + 'Mark Twain.'” + +Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San Francisco--on one +occasion he was reduced to a solitary ten--cent piece; and General John +McComb wooed him back to journalism just as he was on the point of +returning to his old work on the Mississippi River, this time as a +Government pilot. During the earlier years in San Francisco, he was in +the habit of writing weekly letters to the 'Territorial Enterprise' +--personals, market-chat, and the like. But when he criticized the police +department of San Francisco in the most scathing terms, the officials +“found means for bringing charges that made the author's presence there +difficult and comfortless.” So he welcomed the opportunity to join +Steve Gillis in a pilgrimage to the mountain home of Jim Gillis, his +brother--a “sort of Bohemian infirmary.” Mark Twain revelled in the +delightful company of the original of Bret Harte's “Truthful James,” and +he enjoyed the mining methods of Jackass Hill, like the true Bohemian +that he was. Soon after his arrival, Mark and Jim Gillis started out in +search of golden pockets. As De Quille says: + + “They soon found and spent some days in working up the undisturbed + trail of an undiscovered deposit, They were on the 'golden + bee-line' and stuck to it faithfully, though it was necessary to carry + each sample of dirt a considerable distance to a small stream in + the bed of a canon in order to wash it. However, Mark hungered and + thirsted to find a big rich pocket, and he pitched in after the + manner of Joe Bowers of old--just like a thousand of brick. + + “Each step made sure by the finding of golden grains, they at last + came upon the pocket whence these grains had trailed out down the + slope of the mountain. It was a cold, dreary drizzling day when + the 'home deposit' was found. The first sample of dirt carried to + the stream and washed out yielded only a few cents. Although the + right vein had been discovered, they had as yet found only the tail + end of the pocket. + + “Returning to the vein, they dug a sample of the decomposed ore + from a new place, and were about to carry it down to the ravine and + test it, when the rain increased to a lively downpour.” + +Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry another pail of +water. In slow, drawling tones he protested decisively: + +“Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable. +Let's go to the house and wait till it clears up.” + +Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just taken out. + +“Bring just one more pail, Sam,” he urged. + +“I won't do it, Jim!” replied the now thoroughly disgusted Clemens. +“Not a drop! Not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan!” + +Moved by Sam's dejected appearance--blue nose and humped back--and +realizing doubtless that it was futile to reason with him further, Jim +yielded and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the ground. They +now started out for the nearest shelter, the hotel in Angel's Camp, kept +by Coon Drayton, formerly a Mississippi River pilot. Imagine the jests +and shouts that went around as Mark and Coon vied with each other in +narrating interesting experiences. For three days the rain and the +stories held out; and among those told by Drayton was a story of a frog. +He narrated this story with the utmost solemnity as a thing that had +happened in Angel's Camp in the spring of '49--the story of a frog +trained by its owner to become a wonderful jumper, but which failed to +“make good” in a contest because the owner of a rival frog, in order to +secure the winning of the wager, filled the trained frog full of shot +during its owner's absence. This story appealed irresistibly to Mark as +a first-rate story told in a first-rate way; he divined in it the magic +quality unsuspected by the narrator--universal humour. He made notes in +order to remember the story, and on his return to the Gillis' cabin, +“wrote it up.” He wrote a number of other things besides, all of which +he valued above the frog story; but Gillis thought it the best thing he +had ever written. + +Meantime the rain had washed off the surface soil from their last pan, +which they had left in their hurry. Some passing miners were astonished +to behold the ground glittering with gold; they appropriated it, but +dared not molest the deposit until the expiration of the thirty-day +claim-notice posted by Jim Gillis. They sat down to wait, hoping that +the claimants would not return. At the expiration of the thirty days, +the claim-jumpers took possession, and soon cleared out the pocket, +which yielded twenty thousand dollars. It was one of the most fortunate +accidents in Mark Twain's career. He came within one pail of water of +comparative wealth; but had he discovered that pocket, he would probably +have settled down as a pocketminer, and might have pounded quartz for +the rest of his life. Had his nerve held out a moment longer, he would +never have gone to Angel's Camp, would never have heard The Story of the +Jumping Frog, and would have escaped that sudden fame which this little +story soon brought him. + +On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret +Harte, and told him this story. As Harte records: + + “He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself + irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, + and half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the + original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who + came in, and they asked him to write it for 'The Californian'. He + did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the + first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it + crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was 'The + Jumping Frog of Calaveras.' It is now known and laughed over, I + suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never + be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first + time, by the unknown Twain himself, on that morning in the San + Francisco Mint.” + +When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864, +Mark Twain regaled him--as he regaled all worthy acquaintances--with his +favourite story, 'The Jumping Frog'. Ward was delighted with it. + +“Write it out,” he said, “give it all the necessary touches, and let me +use it in a volume of sketches I am preparing for the press. Just send +it to Carleton, my publisher, in New York.” + +It arrived too late for Ward's book, and Carleton presented it to Henry +Clapp, who published it in his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18, +1864. In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated how 'The Jumping +Frog' put a quietus on 'The Saturday Press', and was immediately copied +in numerous newspapers in England and America. He was always proud of +the celebrity that story achieved; but he never sought to claim the +credit for himself. He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but +the frog, that became celebrated. The author, alas, remained in +obscurity! + +Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life +--time by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain's old friend, +Charles Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it. About four +thousand copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story +was in its newspaper and magazine notoriety. In 1872 it was translated +into the 'Revue des Deux Mondes'; and it was almost as widely read in +England, India, and Australia as it was in America. + +Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and +doing literary hack work of one sort or another. In 1866 the +proprietors of the 'Sacramento Union' employed him to write a series of +letters from the Sandwich Islands. The purpose of these letters was to +give an account of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar, +but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had +nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the +sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these +months of “luxurious vagrancy” he described in the most vivid way many +of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such +letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his 'My Debut +as a Literary Person', Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic +style his great “scoop” of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson +Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital, +so that he could interview the half-dead sailors. His bill--twenty +dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a +column for the Hornet story--was paid with all good will. On the +strength of this story, he hoped to become a “Literary Person,” and sent +his account of the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it +appeared in December, 1866. But alas! he could not give the banquet he +was going to give to celebrate his debut as a “Literary Person.” He had +not written the “Mark Twain” distinctly, and when it appeared it had +been transformed into “Mike Swain”! + +When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved to follow the example +of Stoddard and Mulford, and “enter the lecture field.” The “extraneous +matter” in his letters to the Sacramento Union had made him “notorious”; +and, as he put it, “San Francisco invited me to lecture.” The historic +account of that lecture, in 'Roughing It', is found elsewhere in this +book. Noah Brooks, editor of the Alta California, who was present at +this lecture, has written the following graphic piece of description: +“Mark Twain's method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His +slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his +visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his +sentences, and, above all, the surprise that spread over his face when +the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer +passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had +ever known. All this was original; it was Mark Twain.” Employing D. E. +McCarthy as his agent, Mark gave a number of lectures at various places +on the Pacific Coast. From this time forward we recognize in Mark Twain +one of the supreme masters of the art of lecturing in our time. + +In December, 1866, he set out for New York, preparatory to the grand +tour around the world. His own account of the circular describing the +projected trip is famous. He had proposed, for twelve hundred dollars +in gold,--at the rate of twenty dollars apiece, to write a series of +letters for the 'Alta California'. Brooks, the editor, fortified the +grave misgivings of the proprietors over this proposition; but Colonel +John McComb (then on the editorial staff) argued vehemently for Mark, +and turned the scale in his favour. While Mark was in New York, he was +urged by Frank Fuller, whom he had known as Territorial Governor of +Utah, to deliver a lecture--in order to establish his reputation on the +Atlantic coast. Fuller, an enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain, overcame +all objections, and engaged Cooper Union for the occasion. Though few +tickets were sold, Fuller cleverly succeeded in packing the hall by +sending out a multitude of complimentary tickets to the school-teachers +of New York City and the adjacent territory. That lecture proved to be +a supreme success--Mark's reputation as a lecturer on the Atlantic coast +was assured. + +On June 10, 1867, the Quaker City set sail for its Oriental tour. It +bore on board a comparatively unknown person of the name of Clemens, +who, in applying for passage, represented himself to be a Baptist +minister in ill-health from San Francisco! + +It brought back a celebrity, destined to become famous throughout the +world. Prior to sailing he arranged to contribute letters to the 'New +York Tribune' and the 'New York Herald', as well as to the 'Alta +California'. + +“His letters to the 'Alta California',” says Noah Brooks, “made him +famous. It was my business to prepare one of these letters for the +Sunday morning paper, taking the topmost letter from a goodly pile that +was stacked in a pigeon-hole of my desk. Clemens was an indefatigable +correspondent, and his last letter was slipped in at the bottom of a +tall stack. + +“It would not be quite accurate to say that Mark Twain's letters were +the talk of the town; but it was very rarely that readers of the paper +did not come into the office on Mondays to confide to the editors their +admiration of the writer, and their enjoyment of his weekly +contributions. The California newspapers copied these letters, with +unanimous approval and disregard of the copyrights of author and +publisher.” + +It was the Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American +intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, +which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin +field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the +playground of America. It was rather a _terra incognita_, regarded with +a sort of reverential ignorance by the average American tourist. By the +range of his humour, the pertinency of his observation, and the vigour +of his expression he awoke immediate attention. And he aroused a deeply +sympathetic response in the hearts of Americans by his manly and +outspoken expression--his respect for the worthy, the admirable, the +praiseworthy, his scorn and detestation for the spurious, the specious +and the fraudulent. In this book, for the first time, he strikes the +key-note of his life and thought, which sounds so clearly throughout all +his later works. It is the true beginning of his career. + +On his return to the United States in November, he resumed his newspaper +work, this time at the National Capital. On his arrival there he found +a letter from Elisha Bliss, of the 'American Publishing Company', +proposing a volume recounting the adventures of the “Excursion,” to be +elaborately illustrated, and sold by subscription on a five per cent. +royalty. He eagerly accepted the offer and set to work on his notes. + +“I knew Mark Twain in Washington,” says Senator William M. Stewart of +Nevada, in his reminiscences 'A Senator of the Sixties', “at a time when +he was without money. He told me his condition, and said he was very +anxious to get out his book. He showed me his notes, and I saw that +they would make a great book, and probably bring him in a fortune. I +promised that I would 'stake' him until he had the book written. I made +him a clerk to my committee in the senate, which paid him six dollars +per day; then I hired a man for one hundred dollars per month to do the +work!” His mischievously extravagant description of Mark Twain at this +time is eminently worthy of record: “He was arrayed in a seedy suit which +hung upon his lean frame in bunches, with no style worth mentioning. A +sheaf of scraggly, black hair leaked out of a battered, old, slouch hat, +like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar +butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He +had a very sinister appearance. He was a man I had known around the +Nevada mining camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L. +Clemens.” + +It was during this winter that Mark wrote a number of humorous articles +and sketches--'The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract', the +account of his resignation as clerk of the Senate Committee on +Conchology, and 'Riley--Newspaper Correspondent'. His time was chiefly +devoted to preparing the material for his book; but finding Washington +too distracting, he returned to San Francisco and completed the +manuscript therein July, 1868. For a year the publication of the book +was delayed, as recorded in the Autobiography; but it finally appeared +in print following Mark's indignant telegram to Bliss that, if the book +was not on sale in twenty-four hours, he would bring suit for damages. +Mark Twain records that in nine months the book had taken the publishing +house out of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, +and left seventy thousand dollars clear profit. Eighty-five thousand +copies were sold within sixteen months, the largest sale of a four +dollar book ever achieved in America in so short a time up to that date. +It is, miraculous to relate, still the leader in its own special field +--a “bestseller” for forty years! + +The proprietors of the 'Alta California' were exceeding wroth when they +heard that Clemens was preparing for publication the very letters which +they had commissioned him to write and had printed in their own paper. +They prepared to publish a cheap paper-covered edition of the letters, +and sent the American Publishing Co. a challenge in the shape of an +advance notice of their publication. Clemens hurried back to San +Francisco from the East, and soon convinced the proprietors of the 'Alta +California' of the authenticity of his copyright. The paper-covered +edition was then and there abandoned forever. + +Before leaving the West to settle permanently in the East, Mark Twain +was associated for a short time with the 'Overland Monthly', edited by +Bret Harte. In his review of 'The Innocents Abroad', Harte asserted +that Clemens deserved “to rank foremost among Western humorists”; but he +was grievously disappointed in the first few contributions from Clemens +to the Overland Monthly--notably 'By Rail through France' (later +incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)--because of their perfect gravity. +At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'--a story which has been said to contain +the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of +mediaevalism--won the enthusiastic approval of Bret Harte. + +From this time forward, Samuel L. Clemens is seen in a new environment, +in association with new ideas and a new civilization. The history of +this second period does not fall within the scope of the present work. +It has just been narrated with brilliancy and charm by his close +associate and most intimate friend, Mr. William Dean Howells, in his +admirable book 'My Mark Twain'. In the subsequent portion of the +present work attention will be directed solely to those features of Mark +Twain's life which have a direct bearing upon his career as a man of +letters, and which throw into relief the progressive development of his +genius. + +The South and the West contributed to Mark Twain's development, and +added to his store of vital experience, in greater measure than all the +other influences of his life combined. From the inexhaustible well of +those experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction +of the world. His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early +experience--the romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic +variations of colour. The civilization of the East, its culture and +refinement, tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the +indispensable criteria of classic art. Under the broadening influence +of its persistent nationalism, he became more deeply, more profoundly, +imbued with the comprehensive ideals of American democracy. He never +lost the first fine virginal spontaneity of his native style, never +weakened in the vigour of his thought or in the primitiveness of his +expression. His contact with the East compassed the liberation of that +vast fund of stored--up early experiences, acquired through grappling +with life in many a rude encounter. + +Out of its own life, the East never contributed to Mark Twain's works, +in any appreciably momentous way, either volume or immensity of fertile, +suggestive human experience. If we eliminate from the list of Mark +Twain's works those books which have their roots deep set in the soil of +South and West, we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art. +Indeed, it may be doubted whether, were those works struck from the +catalogue of his contributions, Mark Twain could justly rank as a great +genius. To his association with the South and the Southwest are due +'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', and 'Life on the +Mississippi'. 'The Jumping Frog' and 'Roughing It' belong peculiarly to +the West, and even 'The Innocents Abroad' falls wholly within the period +of Mark Twain's influence by the West, its standards, outlook, and +localized viewpoint. + +Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment, +laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the +course of the national development. But 'The Gilded Age' has long since +disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works +which are tentatively destined to rank as classics. Much as I enjoy the +satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt +that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating +nor inspiring--nor national. It tends to the gratification of England +and Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic +survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity with the national +stamp. One must, nevertheless, confess with regret that this type is +the embodiment of an “ideal” still only too commonly cherished in +America. The national type, I take it, is found in such characters as +Lincoln and Phillips Brooks, in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W. +Eliot and Edwin A. Alderman, and not in a provincial 'Connecticut +Yankee', jovial and whole--hearted though he be. I say this without +forgetting or minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting the +devastating and illimitably humorous contrast of a present with a +remotely past civilization. 'Joan of Arc' has no local association, +being a pure work of the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit. +'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a +masterpiece; but its significance lies, not in the locality of its +setting, but in the universality of its moral. + +In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit +of Mark Twain. We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him +a spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy. But it was the South +and the West which lavishly gave him of their most priceless riches, and +thereby created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable genius, the +veritable type and embodiment of their inalienably individual life and +civilization. This first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so +strongly stressed here, because the first half of his life has always +seemed to me to have been a period of--shall I say?--God-appointed +preparation for the most significant and lastingly permanent work of the +latter half, namely, the narration of the incidents of early experience, +and the imaginative reminting of the gold of that experience. + +One has only to read Mark Twain's works to learn the real history of his +life. There were momentous episodes in the latter half of his career; +but they were concerned with his life rather than with his art. We +cannot, indeed, say what or how profound is the effect of life and +experience on art. There was the happy marriage, the tragic losses of +wife and children. There were the associations with the culture and +art circles of America and Europe--New England, New York, Berlin, +Vienna, London, Glasgow; the academic degrees--Missouri, Yale; finally +ancient Oxford for the first time conferring the coveted honour of its +degree upon a humorist; the honours his own country delighted to bestow +upon him. And there too was that gallant struggle to pay off a +tremendous debt, begun at sixty--and accomplished one year sooner than +he expected--after the most spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in +history. The beautiful chivalric spirit of this great soul shone +brightest in disaster. He insisted that it was his wife who refused to +compromise his debts for forty cents on the dollar--that it was she who +declared it must be dollar for dollar; and when a fund was raised by his +admirers to assist in lightening his burden, that it was his wife who +refused to accept it, though he was willing enough to accept it as a +welcome relief. + +As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of +the man than that he was a good citizen. He possessed in rich measure +the consciousness of personal responsibility for the standards, +government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country. Civic +conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and +to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind +patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the +shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant +spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his +popularity. What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering, +he gained in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness! He +wielded the lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony upon the +wrong-doer, the hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion to +impatience with public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy. + +Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human +individual I have ever known. He was not a great thinker; his views +were not “advanced”. + +The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and +normality. The homeliest virtues of life were his: republican virtue +of simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately +simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of +public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour. Mark +Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time. But he was +something even more than this. He was not simply a great genius: he was +a great man. + + + + + + + “Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; a joke + can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars. + By simply going on being absurd, a thing can become + godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous + to the sublime.” + GILBERT K. CHESTERTON: Charles Dickens. + + + + THE HUMORIST + +Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines +of contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served +his apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism. Like +his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free +play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal +for the masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective +only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece +of his own invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native +flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more +sophisticated refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost +the ruddy glow of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end, +remained as it began--journalistic, untamed, primitive. + +Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved +comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving +the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic +apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his +journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That +trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened +verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the +new journalism. “The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which +are 'not for an age, but for all time,'” says Bernard Shaw, “has his +reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes +trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare +peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire +hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a +Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as +if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and +at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of +academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and +art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar +obsession with the ephemeral.” Mark Twain began his career by studying +the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown, +Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, +uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life +and live again in the pages of his books. Colonel Sellers, in the main +correct but “stretched a little” here and there; Tom Sawyer, the +“magerful” hero of boyhood; the shrewd and kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from +his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the gentle +heart--these and many another were drawn from the very life. In writing +of his time _a propos_ of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the +truth about humanity in general and for any time. + +In the main--though there are noteworthy exceptions--Mark Twain's works +originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life. He is a master +humorist--which is only another way of saying that he is a master +psychologist with the added gift of humour--because he looked upon +himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of universally +human characteristics. _Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi alienum est_ +--this might well have served for his motto. It was his conviction that +the American possessed no unique and peculiar human characteristics +differentiating him from the rest of the world. In the same way, he +regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human +characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race. +Like Omar he might have said “I myself am Heaven and Hell”----for within +himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power, every +feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is +capable. The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his +Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study +of the human race. His knowledge came from minute self-examination--for +he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together. It was +by concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself +the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing +works of such pure naturalness and utter verity. A humour which is at +bottom good humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more +universal appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation +of the human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'. + +It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of +America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual +life of Europe derives from history. If American literature be really +“Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions,” as defined by +the Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical +product of American literature. A certain modicum of truth may rest in +this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted +liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the +future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy +past. Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself, +and so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living +present. He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of +the ranks of American journalism. Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as +his early writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its +face the fresh stamp of contemporary actuality. + +To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be +placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely +unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less +arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour +because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly +comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British +critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they +would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay. The +New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the +futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for +extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth +in America eternally gives to old age. “America has produced great +artists,” admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains that “that +fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the +end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are +not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, +barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with +the spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and +startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.” This sweet +and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr. +Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two +American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the +art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost +touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the +ongoing rush and progress of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr. +James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only +very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid _diablerie_, was +wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That +other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles +Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic +senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case +in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter +is--Mark Twain! + +To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the +humorist--with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the +colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering, +ludicrous contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within +himself a “certain surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a +sense of conquest” which typified the youth of America. It is memorable +that he breathed in his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the +collective ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western +adventure, and expressed the crude and manly energy of navigation, +exploration, and the daring hazard for new fortune. To those who knew +him in personal intimacy, the quality that was outstanding, omnipresent +and eternally ineradicable from his nature was--paradoxical as it may +sound--not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that +might be associated with his name, but--the spirit of eternal youth. It +is comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her +death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright +nickname--“Youth.” Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller +of tales, pungent as stylist. But he has achieved another sort of +eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans. “They distinguish +in his writings,” says an acute French critic, “exalted and sublimated +by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force +and of faith; they love his philosophy, at once practical and high +--minded. They are fond of his simple style, animated with verve and +spice, thanks to which his work is accessible to every class of readers. +They think he describes his contemporaries with such an art of +distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to +create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for +Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France +for Balzac.” + +Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which +has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a +commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only, +that the world seems to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his +early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the “philosophy of +the Broad Grin.” Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that “American +humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and +sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply +the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and +mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending +it to the end of the world.” This partial and somewhat conventional +foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the +cumulative and “sky-breaking” humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no +exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax +too extreme. + +The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a +lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but +one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of +argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature. +In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic +and sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed +effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously +at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's +plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their +hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and +the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided +themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning +bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence. +What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in +native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first +heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in +the life of Angel's Camp. It was Mark Twain who “created” the story: he +endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization +of _une chose vue_, which went round the world. The humour of rustic +shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in 'The +Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the +early journalistic days in San Francisco. In 'The Golden Era' an +excellent example is found in the following observations upon a +celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San +Francisco: + +“Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at +the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or +the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it +the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No, +sir. The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet. +Them scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them +days--by a d---d sight.” + +That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just +proportion of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during +his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the +cannibals consume their food--if only some lady would lend him a live +baby. There is the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious +anecdote of Higgins. + +Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul rock; and on the day +Judge Bagley fell down the court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins +was commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the house of Mrs. +Bagley and break the news to her as gently as possible. When he +arrived, he shouted until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then +tactfully inquired if the Widder Bagley lived there! When she +indignantly replied in the negative, he gently humoured her whim; and +inquired next if Judge Bagley lived there. When she replied that he +did, Higgins offered to bet that he didn't; and delicately inquired if +the Judge were in. On being assured that he was not in at present, +Higgins triumphantly exclaimed that he expected as much. Because he had +the old Judge curled up out there in the wagon; and when Mrs. Bagley saw +him, she would doubtless admit that about all that could comfort the +Judge now would be an inquest! + +Mark Twain was so fond of this bloody and ghastly humour that, on one +occasion, he utterly overreached himself and suffered serious +consequences. In the words of his fellow-journalist, Dan De Quille: + + Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style, + but on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease + worked its own cure. He wrote an account of a terrible murder, + supposed to have occurred at “Dutch Nick's,” a station on the + Carson River, where Empire City now stands. He made a man cut his + wife's throat and those of his nine children, after which + diabolical deed the murderer mounted his horse, cut his own throat + from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a distance of three and a + half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter Hopkins' saloon. + + All the California papers copied the item, and several made + editorial comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of + the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast. Of course rival Virginia + City papers at once denounced the item as a “cruel and idiotic + hoax.” They showed how the publication of such “shocking and + reckless falsehoods” disgraced and injured the State, and they made + it as “sultry” as possible for the 'Enterprise' and its “fool + reporter.” + + When the California papers saw all this and found they had been + sold, there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego. Some papers + demanded the immediate discharge of the author of the item by the + 'Enterprise' proprietors. They said they would never quote another + line from that paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item + remained on its force. All this worried Mark as I had never before + seen him worried. Said he: “I am being burned alive on both sides + of the mountains.” We roomed together, and one night, when the + persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not + sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud. So I set to work to + comfort him. “Mark,” said I, “never mind this bit of a gale, it + will soon blow itself out. This item of yours will be remembered + and talked about when all your other work is forgotten. The murder + at Dutch Nick's will be quoted years from now as the big sell of + these times.” + + Said Mark: “I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing + at home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death. + I was a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I + had an uncle living. I at once left the town and did not return to + it for three years. When I finally came back I found I was only + remembered as 'the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.'” + + Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that + moment “ceased to groan.” He was not discharged, and in less than + a month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the + “murder at Dutch Nick's.” + +Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of +fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched +poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was +evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as altitudinous as the +conditions which gave it birth. Mark Twain may be said to have created, +and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its +exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of +humorous narration. At times it seemed little more than a sort of +infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all +the calculation of detail and elaboration. There was something in it +of the volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of +primitive nature. It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the +structure toppled over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian +crash of laughter which echoed among the stars. Whenever Mark Twain +conceived a humorous idea, he seemed capable of extracting from it +infinite complications of successive and cumulative comedy. This humour +seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical +jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance, +until reason itself tired and gave over. Such explosive stories as 'How +I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine Mexican Plug', the +deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The Facts in the Case +of the Great Beef Contract', and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has +pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art. “The +excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a +tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The rack, tragic or comic, +goes round until something breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his +heart, or perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite know what it +is--perhaps his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly +cracked.” Mark Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never +contains the element of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected, +the _imprevu_. We know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and +more to the mood of the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until +laughter, no longer to be restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of +undignified and explosive mirth. Perhaps no better example can be given +than the description of the sad fate of the camel in 'A Tramp Abroad'. + +In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of +his overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of +apparel, he began to inspect it as an article of diet. In his +inimitable manner, Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that +camel as it devoured his overcoat piecemeal--first one sleeve, then the +other, velvet collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the +camel struck a batch of manuscript--containing some of Mark's humorous +letters for the home papers. Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy +on the camel's stomach: the jokes shook him until he began to gag and +gasp, and finally he struck statements that not even a camel could +swallow with impunity. He died in horrible agony; and Mark found on +examination that the camel had choked to death on one of the mildest +statements of fact that he had ever offered to a trusting public! Here +Mark gradually works up to an anticipated climax by piling on effect +after effect. Our risibility is excited almost as much by the +anticipation of the climax as by the recital. + +Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of the nonsensical +recital, are found in the scene in 'Huckleberry Finn' dealing with the +performance of the King's Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the address on +the occasion of the dinner in honour of the seventieth anniversary of +John Greenleaf Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath in +'The Innocents Abroad'. + +In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant sat him down by a tank +of hot water and began to polish him all over with a coarse mitten. +Soon Mark noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that the more he +was polished the worse he smelt. He urged the attendant to bury him +without unnecessary delay, as it was obvious that he couldn't possibly +“keep” long in such warm weather. But the phlegmatic attendant paid no +attention to Mark's commands and continued to scrub with renewed vigour. +Mark's consternation changed to alarm when he discovered that little +cylinders, like macaroni, began to roll from under the mitten. They +were too white to be dirt. He felt that he was gradually being pared +down to a convenient size. Realizing that it would take hours for the +attendant to trim him down to the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered +him to bring a jackplane at once and get the matter over. To all his +protests the attendant paid no attention at all. + +In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark Twain, which +appeared in 'Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and Art' for July +4,1874, Mr. G. T. Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour. +“Of humour in its highest phase,” he says, “perhaps Bret Harte may be +accounted the most puissant master among our contemporary American +writers. Of wit, we see next to none. Mark Twain, while lacking the +subtilty and pathos of the other, has more breadth, variety, and ease. +His sketches of life are arabesque in their strange combinations. Bits +of bright, serious description, both of landscape and society, carry us +along till suddenly we stumble on some master-stroke of grotesque and +irresistible fun. He understands the value of repose in art. One tires +of a page where every sentence sparkles with points, and the author is +constantly attitudinizing for our amusement. We like to be betrayed +into laughter as much in books as in real life. It is the unconscious, +easy, careless gait of Mark Twain that makes his most potent charm. He +seems always to be catering as much to his own enjoyment as to that of +the public. He strolls along like a great rollicking schoolboy, bent on +having a good time, and determined that his readers shall have it with +him.” + +Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists. He takes his courage in his +hands for the wildest flights of fancy. His humour is the caricature of +situations, rather than of individuals; and he is not afraid to risk his +characters in colossally ludicrous situations. His art reveals itself +in choosing ludicrous situations which contain such a strong colouring +of naturalness that one's sense of reality is not outraged, but +titillated. Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not +lend itself readily to quotation. His early humour is not epigrammatic, +but cumulative and extensive. Each scene is a unit and must appear as +such. Andrew Lang not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier +manner, when he speaks of his “almost Mephistophelean coolness, an +unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the +mean possibilities of the sublime--these with a native sense of +incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration.” + +Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker. +He discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American +forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas. +He offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of +fun. “If he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current; it does +not require the mint stamp of the schools of humour. He is never +afraid of being laughed at.” Indeed, that is a large part of his +stock-in-trade; for throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give +him so much pleasure--though it is one of the lowest forms of humour--as +making fun of himself. In describing two monkeys that got into his room +at Delhi, he said that when he awoke, one of them was before the glass +brushing his hair, and the other one had his notebook, and was reading a +page of humorous notes and crying. He didn't mind the one with the +hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He +never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of +Adam--only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric +indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who “never bored, +but he struck water”--is an admirable example of the mechanical fooling +of self-ridicule. + +In his penetrating study, 'Mark Twain a Century Hence', published at the +time of Mr. Clemens' death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation: +“We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote +rather than by the more dubious productions, in which we fail to see at +every moment the winning qualities and the characteristic form of this +very interesting American. As one would not judge of Tennyson by his +dramas, nor Thackeray by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter +Scott by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity had been +exhausted, so we must not judge Mark Twain by the dozen or more +specimens which belong to the later period, when he was ill at ease and +growing old. Let us rather go back with a sort of joy to what he wrote +when he did so with spontaneity, when his fun was as natural to him as +breathing, and when his humour was all American humour--not like that of +Juvenal or Hierocles--acrid, or devoid of anything individual--but +brimming over with exactly the same rich irresponsibility which belonged +to Steele and Lamb and Irving. It may seem odd to group a son of the +New World and of the great West with those earlier classic figures who +have been mentioned here; yet upon analysis it will be discovered that +the humour of Mark Twain is at least first cousin to that which produced +Sir Roger de Coverley and Rip Van Winkle and The Stout Gentleman.” + +The details of the Gambetta-Fourtou duel, in which Mark played a +somewhat frightened second, have furnished untold amusement to +thousands. And his description of the inadvertent _faux pas_ he +committed at his first public lecture is humorous for any age and +society. The sign announcing the lecture read--“Doors open at 7. The +Trouble will begin at 8.” For three days, Mark had been in a state of +frightful suspense. Once his lecture had seemed humorous; but as the +day approached, it seemed to him to be but the dreariest of fooling, +without a vestige of real fun. He was so panic-stricken that he +persuaded three of his friends, who were giants in stature, genial and +stormy voiced, to act as claquers and pound loudly at the faintest +suspicion of a joke. He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk man, who had a +laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to get off, naturally and easily during +the course of the evening, as many laughs as he could. He begged a +popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous seat in a box, so +that everybody could see them. He explained that when he needed help, +he would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had given birth +to an obscure joke. Then, if ever, was her time--not to investigate, +but to respond! + +The fateful night found him in the depths of dejection. But heartened +up by a crowded house, full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and +proceeded to capture the house. His claquers hammered madly whenever +the very feeblest joke showed its head. Sawyer supported their +herculean efforts with bursts of stentorian laughter. As Mark +explained, not without a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared so +royally before. But his hour of humiliation was at hand. On delivering +a bit of serious matter with impressive unction, to which the audience +listened with rapt interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if for her +approval, at his friend in the box. He remembered the compact, but it +was too late--he smiled in spite of himself. Forth came her ringing +laugh, peal after peal, which touched off the whole audience: the +explosion was immense! Sawyer choked with laughter, and the bludgeons +performed like pile-drivers. The little morsel of pathos was ruined; +but what matter, so long as the audience took it as an intentional joke, +and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm. Mark wisely let it go at +that! + +Reading through 'The Innocents Abroad' after many years, I find that it +has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and +the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator', +which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and +restraint. His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had +been curious all his literary life. He never could tell a lie that +anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Could +there be a more accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his +writings, in especial of his travel notes? Like his mother, he too +never used large words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones +do effective work. How delightfully human is his comment on the +vagaries of woman's shopping! Human nature he found very much the same +all over the world; and he felt that it was so much like his dear native +home to see a Venetian lady go into a store, buy ten cents' worth of +blue ribbon, and then have it sent home in a scow. It was such little +touches of nature as this which, as he said, moved him to tears in those +far-off lands. In speaking of Palestine, he says that its holy places +are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them. Indeed, he +asserts that if one be calm and resolute, he can look on their beauty +and live! He bequeathed his rheumatism to Baden-Baden. It was little, +but it was all he had to give. His only regret was that he could not +leave something more catching. + +There is nothing better in all of 'The Innocents Abroad' than his +analysis of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. +Disclaiming all intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he +solemnly declared that his observations had taught him the real way the +Holy Personages were ranked in Rome. “The Mother of God,” otherwise the +Virgin Mary, comes first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and +some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and Martyrs. Last of all came +Jesus Christ the Saviour--but even then, always as an infant in arms! + +Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for +his mother's sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so +struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on +one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs, and +found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and +rubbish of two thousand years ago! + +Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a +single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive +character known as “Mark Twain.” At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw +achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic +wit known as “G. B. S.” To the composition of “Mark Twain” went all the +wild humour of ignorance--the boisterously comic admixture of the +sanguinary and the stoical. The humour of 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The +Innocents Abroad' is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not +the sophisticated humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme. +Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the _nil admirari_ +attitude of “Mark Twain” no more enlightening nor suggestive than the +stoicism of the North American Indian. This mirthful and mock-innocent +naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found +instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples. +The English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in +this gay fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but +half-concealed shrewdness. They laughed at this unsophisticated _naif_, +gazing in wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the +consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching +intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen +perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life. The note of this +early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy. +Deliberately assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and +his companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide +--one of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name +of Ferguson. After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended +ignorance, they finally asked him if the mummy was dead. When Ferguson +glibly replied that he had been dead three thousand years, he was +dumbfounded at the fury of the “doctor” for being imposed upon with vile +second-hand carcases. The poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't +bring out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him! No wonder +that, later, when he was asked for a description of the party, Ferguson +laconically remarked that they were lunatics! + +In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once remarked: “We have made +a fiasco both in the heroic and the lover roles. The only parts in +which we have shown a little talent, are the naively comic; but with our +more highly developed self-consciousness we shall no longer be fitted +even for that.” With time and “our more highly developed self +--consciousness” have largely passed the novelty and the charm of this +early naively comic humour of Mark Twain. But it is as valid still, as +it was in 1867, to record honestly the impressions directly communicated +to one by the novelties, peculiarities, individual standards and ideals +of other peoples and races. Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter +disregard for other people's opinions, the dicta of criticism or the +authoritative judgment of the schools. 'The Innocents Abroad' is +eminently readable, not alone for its humour, its clever journalism, its +remarkably accurate and detailed information, and its fine descriptions. +The rare quality, which made it “sell right along--like the Bible,” is +that it is the vital record of a keen and searching intelligence. Mark +Twain found so many of the “masterpieces of the world” utterly +unimpressive and meaningless to him, that he actually began to distrust +the validity of his own impressions. Every time he gloried to think +that for once he had discovered an ancient painting that was beautiful +and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave him was an infallible +proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in any sense worthy of +commendation! He pours out the torrents of his ridicule, not +indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters themselves--though he +regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old masters--but upon those +half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an art they do not +understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by mouthings full +of cheap and meaningless tags. As potent and effective as ever, in its +fine comic irony, is that passage in which he expresses his “envy” of +those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of art which +their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor understand. +He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand critics +who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave over +“beauty,” “soul,” “character,” “expression” and “tone” in wretched, +dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation +such people--whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of +knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of +inexpressive technical terms of art criticism. + +There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of +foreign travel. To the things which he personally reverenced, he was +always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of +prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless. Grant as we may +the humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes +of his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments, +however forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms. One's +enjoyment of his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making +is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the +faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is, +in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of +real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the +multitude. “The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid,” + says Mr. S. P. Sherman, “refuses to sink his identity in the object +contemplated--that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humour of +it. He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why +you went abroad. He turns the Old World into a laughing stock by +shearing it of its storied humanity--simply because there is nothing in +him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was +Rome--simpler because nothing is holier to him than a joke. He does not +throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm; he laughs at art, +history, and antiquity from the point of view of one who is ignorant of +them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance.” This picture +reminds us of the foreign critics of 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'A +Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': it is too partial and +restricted. The whole point of Mark Twain's humour, as exhibited in +these travel notes, is missed in the statement that “he does not throw +the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm”--for this might almost be +taken as the “philosophy” of his books of foreign travel. And yet Mr. +Sherman's dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the question +whether, as he intimates, the “overwhelming majority” of his +fellow-citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point of +view, and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not +at him, but with him. + +In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his +humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: “I +succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings +failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being +funny. The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had +to live down my past. When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier +writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw +and heard. My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people +laugh. I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else +--eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some +extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days, +Tom Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens, +your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never +in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of +descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin--the +unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed +a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to +a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax +which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced. My dear +Clemens, whatever you do, never sell your audience.' And that,” + continued Mr. Clemens, “was my first really profitable lesson.” + +It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance--Fitch's precept not +to “sell” his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their +endurance of the irreverent too far--that had a markedly salutary effect +upon Mark Twain's humorous writings. There can be no doubt that the +deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as +occasion demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence +upon Mark Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong +exaggeration. In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation--the +humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car, +so to speak--and turned to fiction. Now at last the long pent-up flood +of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full +vent. 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are the romances of eternal +youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. They are freighted, +however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that +have made of them contemporary classics. From ethical sophistication +and moral truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour. +The revolt of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern +limitations of formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he +carried with him to the grave. “There are no more vital passages in his +fiction,” says Mr. Howells, “than those which embody character as it is +affected for good as well as for evil by the severity of the local +Sunday-schooling and church-going.” Out of the pangs of conscience, the +ingenious sedatives of sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he +won a wholesome humour that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the +moral involved. Knowledge of human nature finds expression in forms +made permanently effective through the arresting permeation of humour. +The incident of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of the fence is the sort +of thing over which boy and man alike can chuckle with satisfaction--for +Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of human action without knowing +it, namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only +necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. Huck's reasoning about +chicken stealing--the exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality +to expediency--is a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain's +humour. Following his father's example, Huck would occasionally “lift” + a chicken that wasn't roosting comfortable; for had his father not told +him that even if he didn't want the chicken himself, he could always +find somebody that did want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot? +Huck confesses that he had never seen his Pap when he didn't want the +chicken himself! + +The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is found, from 'The +Innocents Abroad' to 'The Connecticut Yankee' and 'Captain Stormfield's +Visit to Heaven', is found in the mental reactions resulting from +stupendous and glaring contrasts. First it is the Wild Western +humorist, primitive and untamed, running amuck through the petrified +formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic +juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic +irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and +provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its +mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness. How many +have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings +toward that classic damsel of the sixth century? At first he got along +easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for her a sort +of mysterious and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to unwind one +of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he could +never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful presence of +the Mother of the German Language! + +Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries, +savage and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous +contrast; and he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire, +as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types +thirteen centuries apart. Not even heaven was safe from the +comprehensive survey of his satire; and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to +Heaven' is a remarkable document,--a forthright lay sermon,--the +conventional idea of heaven, the theologic conception of eternity, as +heedlessly taught from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly +significant, relief against the background of the common-sense of a +deeply human, thoroughly modern intelligence. + +Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love. +Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later +development of his humour; the love was there all the time. Mark Twain +has not been recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and +only secondarily a wit. But the passion for brief and pungent +formulation of an idea grew upon him; and Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar +is a mine of homely and memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction. + +According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic story is English, +the witty story French, the humorous story American. While the other +two depend upon matter, the humorous story depends for its effect upon +the manner of telling. The witty story and the comic story must be +concise and end with a “point”; but the humorous story may be as +leisurely as you please and have no particular destination. Mark Twain +always maintained that, while anyone could tell effectively a comic or a +witty story, it required a person skilled in an art of a rare and +distinctive character to tell a humorous story successfully. Mark Twain +was himself the supreme exemplar of the art of telling a humorous story. +Take this little passage, for example, which convulsed one of his London +audiences. He was speaking of a high mountain that he had come across +in his travels. “It is so cold that people who have been there find it +impossible to speak the truth; I know that's a fact (here a pause, a +blank stare, a shake of the head, a little stroll across the platform, a +sigh, a puff, a smothered groan), because--I've--(another pause)--been +--(a longer pause)--there myself.” Who could equal Mark Twain as a +humorous narrator, in his recital of the alarums and excursions, +criminations and recriminations, over the story of somebody else's dog +he sold to General Miles for three dollars? He delighted numerous +audiences with his story of inveighing Mrs. Grover Cleveland at a White +House reception into writing blindly on the back of a card “He didn't.” + When she turned it over she discovered that it bore on the other side, +in Mrs. Clemens' handwriting, the startling words: “Don't wear your +arctics in the White House.” I shall never forget his recital of the +story of how his enthusiasm oozed away at a meeting in behalf of foreign +missions. So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter that, +after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a blank cheque with him, he +would gladly have turned it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out +for any amount. But it was a very warm evening, the eloquence of the +minister was inexhaustible--and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign +missions slowly oozed away--one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even +lower still--so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put +in ten cents and took out a quarter! + +I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907, of the vast, +spontaneous, national reception which Mark Twain received from the +English people. One incident of that memorable visit is a perfect +example of that masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity, +with which Mark Twain was endowed. At the banquet presided over by the +Lord Mayor of Liverpool, which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell +to the English people, his peroration was as follows: + +“Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's Two Years Before +the Mast. A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop +in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every +vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk and air his small +grandeurs. One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by, with course +on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming +with sailors, with macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange and +romantic creatures populating her rigging, and thereto her freightage of +precious spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of +the Orient. Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the +shrouds and squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy! What ship is that, and whence +and whither?' In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back, +through a speaking trumpet: The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and +twenty-three days out from Canton homeward bound! What ship is that?' +The little captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, and most humbly +he squeaked back: 'Only the Mary Ann--fourteen hours from Boston, bound +for Kittery Point with--with nothing to speak of!' That eloquent word +'only' expressed the deeps of his stricken humbleness. + +“And what is my case? During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four +--not more than that--I stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am +properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann' +--fourteen hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all +the other twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the +stately Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and +laden with a rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken +to a wandering alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days +multiplied by five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and +twenty-three days out from Canton--homeward bound!” + +Says “Charles Vale,” in describing the scene “The audience sat +spellbound in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no +longer; and when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out +the words: 'I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days +out from Canton,' there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the +room to the other. It seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it +upset the orator: yet it was felicitous in opportuneness. Slowly, after +a long pause, came the last two words--like that curious, detached and +high note in which a great piece of music suddenly ends--'Homeward +bound.' Again there was a cheer: but this time it was lower; it was +subdued; it was the fitting echo to the beautiful words--with their +double significance--the parting from a hospitable land, the return to +the native land. . . . Only a great litterateur could have conceived +such a passage: only a great orator could have so delivered it.” + +Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote this generation has +known. He claimed the humorous story as an American invention, and one +that has remained at home. His public speeches were little mosaics in +the finesse of their art; and the intricacies of inflection, +insinuation, jovial innuendo which Mark Twain threw into his gestures, +his implicative pauses, his suggestive shrugs and deprecative nods--all +these are hopelessly volatilized and disappear entirely from the printed +copy of his speeches. He gave the most minute and elaborate study to +the preparation of his speeches--polishing them dexterously and +rehearsing every word, every gesture, with infinite care. Yet his +readiness and fertility of resource in taking advantage, and making +telling use, of things in the speeches of those immediately preceding +him, were striking evidences of the rapidity of his thought-processes. +In Boston, when asked what he thought about the existence of a heaven or +a hell, he looked grave for a moment, and then replied: “I don't want to +express an opinion. It's policy for me to keep silent. You see, I have +friends in both places.” His speech introducing General Hawley of +Connecticut to a Republican meeting at Elmira, New York, is an admirable +example of his laconic art: “General Hawley is a member of my church at +Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful Snow.' Maybe he will deny that. +But I am only here to give him a character from his last place. As a +pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years, I have the +warmest regard for him; as a neighbour, whose vegetable garden adjoins +mine, why--why, I watch him. As the author of 'Beautiful Snow,' he has +added a new pang to winter. He is a square, true man in honest +politics, and I must say he occupies a mighty lonesome position. +So broad, so bountiful is his character that he never turned a tramp +empty-handed from his door, but always gave him a letter of introduction +to me. Pure, honest, incorruptible, that is Joe Hawley. Such a man in +politics is like a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory--it may modify +the stench, but it doesn't destroy it. I haven't said any more of him +than I would say of myself. Ladies and gentlemen, this is General +Hawley.” + +Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a wit rather than a +humorist--perhaps something more than a humorist. “Wit,” he explains, +“requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic. A +wit must have something of the same running, working, and staying power +as a mathematician or a metaphysician. Moreover, wit is a fighting +thing and a working thing. A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he +may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid +it. But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as +well as see it. All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit. +Not a few dishonest people felt it.” The epigram, “Be virtuous, and you +will be eccentric,” has become a catchword; and everyone has heard Mark +Twain's reply to the reporter asking for advice as to what to cable his +paper, which had printed the statement that Mark Twain was dead “Say +that the statement is greatly exaggerated.” He has admirably taken off +humanity's enduring self-conceit in the statement that there isn't a +Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had +had its rights. There is something peculiarly American in his warning +to young girls not to marry--that is, not to excess! His remarks on +compliments have a delightful and naive freshness. He points out how +embarrassing compliments always are. It is so difficult to take them +naturally. You never know what to say. He had received many +compliments in his lifetime, and they had always embarrassed him--he +always felt that they hadn't said enough! + +The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with Whistler is quaintly +illustrative of one phase of his broader humour. Mark Twain was taken +by a friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting the finishing +touches to one of his fantastic studies. Confident of the usual +commendation, Whistler inquired his guest's opinion of the picture. +Mark Twain assumed the air of a connoisseur, and approaching the picture +remarked that it did very well, but “he didn't care much for that +cloud--”; and suiting the action to the word, appeared to be on the +point of rubbing the cloud with his gloved finger. In genuine horror, +Whistler exclaimed: “Don't touch it, the paint's wet!” “Oh, that's all +right,” replied Mark with his characteristic drawl: “these aren't my +best gloves, anyhow!” Whereat Whistler recognized a congenial spirit, +and their first hearty laugh together was the beginning of a friendly +and congenial relationship. + +I recall an incident in connection with the writing of his +Autobiography. On more than one occasion, he declared that the +Autobiography was going to be something awful--as caustic, fiendish, and +devilish as he could make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting +on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization +or diabolic joke: “Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) +years after my death.” One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in +bitter and caustic words, upon a certain strenuous, limelight American +politician. I could not resist the temptation to ask him if this, too, +were going into the Autobiography. “Oh yes,” he replied, decisively. +“Everything goes in. I make no exceptions. But,” he added +reflectively, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, “I shall make +a note beside this passage: 'Not to be published until one hundred and +fifty years after my death'!” + +Mark Twain had numerous “doubles” scattered about the world. The number +continually increased; once a month on an average, he would receive a +letter from a new “double,” enclosing a photograph in proof of the +resemblance. Mark once wrote to one of these doubles as follows: + +MY DEAR SIR-- + +Many thanks for your letter, with enclosed photograph. Your resemblance +to me is remarkable. In fact, to be perfectly honest, you look more +like me than I look like myself. I was so much impressed by the +resemblance that I have had your picture framed, and am now using it +regularly, in place of a mirror, to shave by. + + Yours gratefully, + S. L. CLEMENS. + +Although not generally recognized, it is undoubtedly true that Mark +Twain was a wit as well as a humorist. He was the author of many +epigrams and curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases in +conversation, quoted in all classes of society wherever the English +language is spoken. His phrasing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing +none of the polished brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard Shaw; but +Mark Twain's sayings “stick” because they are rooted in shrewdness and +hard commonsense. + +Mark Twain's warning to the two burglars who stole his silverware from +“Stormfield” and were afterwards caught and sent to the penitentiary, is +very amusing, though not highly complimentary to American political +life: + +“Now you two young men have been up to my house, stealing my tinware, +and got pulled in by these Yankees up here. You had much better have +stayed in New York, where you have the pull. Don't you see where you're +drifting. They'll send you from here down to Bridgeport jail, and the +next thing you know you'll be in the United States Senate. There's no +other future left open to you.” + +The sign he posted after the visitation of these same burglars was a +prominent ornament of the billiard room at “Stormfield “: + + NOTICE + + To the next Burglar + + There is nothing but plated-ware in this house, now + and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing + in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of + kittens. If you want the basket, put the kittens in + the brass thing. + + Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family. + + You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing + which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think + they call it, or pergola, or something like that. + + Please close the door when you go away! + + Very truly yours, + + S. L. CLEMENS. + +Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as +we are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain--humour not unmixed with a +strong spice of wit. But Mark Twain was capable of wit, pure and +unadulterated, curt and concise. I once saw him write in a young girl's +birthday book an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites “Truth +is our most valuable possession. Let us economize it.” The advice he +once gave me as to the proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical +operation has always remained in my memory: “Console yourself with the +reflection that you are giving the doctor pleasure, and that he is +getting paid for it.” Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum +that the statue which advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf brings its +modesty under suspicion. His business motto--unfortunately, a motto +that he never followed--has often been attributed, because of its canny +shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The idea was to put all your eggs +in one basket--and then--watch that basket! His anti-Puritanical +convictions find concrete expression in his assertion that few things +are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. Truly +classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy saying that faith is +believing what you know ain't so. His definition of a classic as a book +which people praise but don't read, is as frequently heard as are +Biblical and Shakespearian tags. + +Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed between two and three +hundred maxims during his life. Many of them, especially those from the +old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and +peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life +--quaint, genial, and shrewd. In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in +the omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a +bitter almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college +education. He himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he +defined as disrespect for another man's god. Women took an almost +unholy delight in describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in +Mark Twain's phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but +just the kind of person that keeps a parrot! + +At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a +world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone +you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depressing sense of +world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his +temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the +first great benefactor of the race--because he had brought death into +the world. A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual +uplift, a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set +free. He thought it was far harder to live than to die. + +In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion +to the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son: + + “Oh! we'll all get blind drunk + When Johnny comes marching home!” + +And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in +the mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's +heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: “I was +curious to know what Philip had for dinner.” Mark Twain was capable of +epigrams worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of +Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said “Humour there is in almost +every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam +on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies--on the deep melancholy of +Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear.” The greatest ironic achievements of +Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that +Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the +power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist--or shall we rather +say, ironic wit? For they range all the way from the most mordant to +the most pathetic irony--from Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human +tears: + + “_Sunt lachrymae rerum._” + +“Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements,” counselled +Oliver Wendell Holmes. “You can't expect to do anything great with +Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella.” Mark +Twain has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness. The world +is loth to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own. +Whosoever sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the +almost insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a +serious thinker. Says Moliere-- + + “_C'est une etrange entreprise que celle + de faire rire les honnetes gens._” + +The strangeness of the undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour +of its obligations. Mark Twain began his career as a professional +humorist and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells. +The man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the +comic is, not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense. The French +have a fine-flavoured distinction in _ce qui remue_ from _ce qui emeut_; +and if _remuage_ is the defining characteristic of 'A Tramp Abroad', +'Roughing It', and 'The Innocents Abroad', there is much of deep +seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom +Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. In the course of +his lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly +humorist, from a sensational journalist into a literary artist. In +explanation of this, let us recall the steps in that evolution. In his +youth, this boy had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an +environment that promised only stagnation and decay. As the young boy, +barefooted and dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the +surface of that great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the +ambition and the ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious +water. His dream, in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot, +but--which is infinitely more significant--he changed from a callow, +indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a +master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and +minuteness, was, for its purpose, all-sufficient and complete. + +I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great +university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that +trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without +which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed +the very real art which they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the +art of taking infinite pains--the art of exactitude, precision and +detail. Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh--dying in the very +moment of its birth. Art alone can give it enduring vitality. Mark +Twain's native temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank +in the wonder of the river and unfolded through communication with all +its rude human devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility, +developed and matured through rigorous education in particularity and +detail; and before his spirit the very beauties of Nature herself +disappeared in face of a consuming sense of the work of the world that +must be done. + +Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty that his reputation as a +humorist compelled him to pay. He became more than popular novelist, +more than a jovial entertainer: he became a public institution, as +unmistakable and as national as the Library of Congress or the +Democratic Party. Even in the latest years of his life, though long +since dissociated in fact from the category of Artemus Ward, John +Phoenix, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never +be sure that his most solemn utterance might not be drowned in roars of +thoughtless laughter. + +“It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter,” Mr. Clemens +once said to me, “to doff the mask of humour with which the public is +accustomed, in thought, to see me adorned. It is the incorrigible +practice of the public, in this or in any country, to see only humour in +the humorist, however serious his vein. Not long ago I wrote a poem, +which I never dreamed of giving to the public, on account of its +seriousness; but on being invited to address the women students of a +certain great university, I was persuaded by a near friend to read this +poem. At the close of my lecture I said 'Now, ladies, I am going to +read you a poem of mine'--which was greeted with bursts of uproarious +laughter. 'But this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated--only to be +greeted with renewed and, this time, more uproarious laughter. Nettled +by this misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket, saying, 'Well, +young ladies, since you do not believe me to be serious, I shall not +read the poem'--at which the audience almost went into convulsions of +laughter.” + +Humour is a function of nationality. The same joke, as related by an +American, a Scotchman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a +distinctive racial flavour and individuality of approach. Indeed, it is +open to question whether most humour is not essentially local in its +nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular +locality. It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native +heath to understand that great political satirist, “Mr. Dooley,” on the +Negro Problem, for example. After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang, +Mr. Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour +varies with the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle +in London. + +If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark Twain's world-wide +popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the +universality and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a master in the +art of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour; +and there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But these +are mere surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power, +to all forms of humour. Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to +be attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or +even to any depth of intellectuality. His hold upon the world is due to +qualities, not of the head, but of the heart. I once heard Mr. Clemens +say that humour is the key to the hearts of men, for it springs from the +heart; and worthy of record is his dictum that there is far more of +feeling than of thought in genuine humour. + +Mark Twain succeeded in “tickling the midriff of the English-speaking +races” with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not +only a man of letters, but also a man of action. His humour has been +defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has +said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the +man of feeling. To the great humorist--to Mark Twain--the world was a +tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief +is the most real and important thing in the world--because it separates +us from happiness. He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest +humour, perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition: “If you laugh +all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a +tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare +him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the +spirit of Humour that is moving you.” Mark Twain's fun was +light-hearted and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound. “He is, +above all,” said that oldest of English journals, 'The Spectator', “the +fearless upholder of all that is clean, noble, straightforward, innocent, +and manly. . . . If he is a jester, he jests with the mirth of the +happiest of the Puritans; he has read much of English knighthood, and +translated the best of it into his living pages; and he has assuredly +already won a high degree in letters in having added more than any writer +since Dickens to the gaiety of the Empire of the English language.” + +Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the heart. He enjoyed to the +utmost those two inalienable blessings: “laughter and the love of +friends.” He woke the laughter of an epoch and numbered a world for his +friends. “He is the true consolidator of nations,” said Mr. Augustine +Birrell. “His delightful humour is of the kind which dissipates and +destroys national prejudices. His truth and his honour, his love of +truth and his love of honour, overflow all boundaries. He has made the +world better by his presence.” + + + + + + IV. THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS + + + “Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, + but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the + whole world the art of common life--the art of a people + --universal art.” + TOLSTOY: What is Art? + + + +Some years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in a spirit of fun, +addressed a letter to: + + MARK TWAIN + GOD KNOWS WHERE. + +Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the letter went unerringly to +its goal; and it was not long before the senders of that letter received +the laconic, but triumphant reply: “He did.” They now turned the tables +on the jubilant author, who equally as quickly received a letter +addressed: + + MARK TWAIN + THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE. + +It seemed that “he” did, too! + +In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide +--a fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted +theological characters. From very humble beginnings--he used +facetiously to speak of coming up from the “very dregs of society”! +--Mark Twain achieved international eminence and repute. This +accomplishment was due to the power of brain and personality alone. In +this sense, his career is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history +of American literature. + +It is a mark of the democratic independence of America that she has +betrayed a singular indifference to the appraisal of her literature at +the hands of foreign criticism. Upon her writers who have exhibited +derivative genius--Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow--American +criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums. The three +geniuses who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who +have either embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American +democracy, or who have had the widest following of imitators and +admirers in foreign countries, still await their final and just deserts +at the hands of critical opinion in their own land. The genius of Edgar +Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe; +yet in America his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in +a so-called Hall of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great +interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme +contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is +legitimate for anyone to be denominated a “self-made man” in literature, +these men are justly entitled to such characterization. They owe +nothing to European literature--their genius is supremely original, +native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain, which is our present +concern, is a literary phenomenon which imposes upon criticism, +peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct obligation of tracing +the steps in his unhalting climb to an eminence that was international +in its character, and of defining those signal qualities, traits, +characteristics--individual, literary, social, racial, national--which +compassed his world-wide fame. For if it be true that the judgment of +foreign nations is virtually the judgment of posterity, then is Mark +Twain already a classic. + +Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first received notable +recognition in France at the hands of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc +(Th. Bentzon), who devoted so much of her energies to the popularization +of American literature in Europe. That one of her series of essays upon +the American humorists which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the +'Revue des Deux Mondes' in 1872; in it appeared her admirable +translation of 'The Jumping Frog'. There is no cause for surprise that +a scholarly Frenchwoman, reared on classic models and confined by rigid +canons of art, should stand aghast at this boisterous, barbaric, +irreverent jester from the wilds of America. When it is remembered that +Mark Twain began his career as one of the sage-brush writers and gave +free play to his passion for horseplay, his desire to “lay a mine” for +the other fellow, and his defiance of the traditional and the classic, +it is not to be wondered at that Mme. Blanc, while honouring him with +recognition in the most authoritative literary journal in the world, +could not conceal an expression of amazement over his enthusiastic +acceptance in English-speaking countries. + + “Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog' should be mentioned in the first place + as one of his most popular little stories--almost a type of the + rest. It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand, + while reading this story, the 'roars of laughter' that it excited + in Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous + editions of it which appeared; the epithet of 'inimitable' that the + critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it. + + “We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire, + even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much + more wisely about European civilization than an American of San + Francisco. The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or + even natural taste, in order to appreciate works of art. + + “It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common + sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself + apparent. . . . In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against + the pagan worship of broken marble statues--the democrat denies + that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages. The sublime + ruins of the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of + America, which punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for + the benefit of the State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw + from the punishments which it inflicted the passing pleasure of a + spectacle. + + “In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain, we at + length discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent + ingenuousness, faults which we should never have expected. He has + in the highest degree that fault of appearing astonished at + nothing--common, we may say, to all savages. He confesses himself + that one of his great pleasures is to horrify the guides by his + indifference and stupidity. He is, too, decidedly envious. . . . + We could willingly pardon him his patriotic self-love, often + wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in what concerns + the New World, if only that national pride were without mixture of + personal vanity; but how comes it that Mark Twain, so severe upon + those poor Turks, finds scarcely anything to criticize in Russia, + where absolutism has nevertheless not ceased to flourish? We need + not seek far for the cause of this indulgence: the Czar received + our ferocious republicans; the Empress, and the Grand Duchess Mary, + spoke to them in English. + + “Taking the Pleasure Trip on the Continent altogether, does it + merit the success it enjoys? In spite of the indulgence that we + cannot but show to the judgments of a foreigner; while recollecting + that those amongst us who have visited America have fallen, + doubtless, under the influence of prejudices almost as dangerous as + ignorance, into errors quite as bad--in spite of the wit with which + certain pages sparkle--we must say that this voyage is very far + below the less celebrated excursions of the same author in his own + country.” + +Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the discussion of Mark Twain, +in an essay in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes', entitled 'L'age Dore en +Amerique'--an elaborate review and analysis of The Gilded Age. The +savage charm and real simplicity of Mark Twain are not lacking in +appeal, even to her sophisticated intelligence; and she is inclined to +infer that jovial irony and animal spirits are qualities sufficient to +amuse a young nation of people like the Americans who do not, like the +French, pique themselves upon being blase. According to her judgment, +Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner are lacking in the requisite mental +grasp for the “stupendous task of interpreting the great tableau of the +American scene.” Nor does she regard their effort at collaboration as a +success from the standpoint of art. The charm of Colonel Sellers wholly +escapes her; she cannot understand the almost loving appreciation with +which this cheaply gross forerunner of the later American industrial +brigand was greeted by the American public. The book repels her by +“that mixture of good sense with mad folly--disorder”; but she praises +Mark Twain's accuracy as a reporter. The things which offend her +sensibilities are the wilful exaggeration of the characters, and the +jests which are so elaborately constructed that “the very theme itself +disappears under the mass of embroidery which overlays it.” “The +audacities of a Bret Harte, the grosser temerities of a Mark Twain, +still astonish us,” she concludes; “but soon we shall become accustomed +to an American language whose savoury freshness is not to be disdained, +awaiting still more delicate and refined qualities that time will +doubtless bring.” + +In translating 'The Jumping Frog' into faultless French (giving Mark +Twain the opportunity for that delightful retranslation into English +which furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with elaboration +and long citations 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'The Gilded Age', Mme. +Blanc introduced Mark Twain to the literary public of France; and Emile +Blemont, in his 'Esquisses Americaines de Mark Twain' (1881), still +further enhanced the fame of Mark Twain in France by translating a +number of his slighter sketches. In 1886, Eugene Forgues published in +the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' an exhaustive review (with long citations) +of 'Life on the Mississippi', under the title 'Les Caravans d'un +humoriste'; and his prefatory remarks in regard to Mark Twain's fame in +France at that time may be accepted as authoritative. He pointed out +the praiseworthy efforts that had been made to popularize these +“transatlantic gaieties,” to import into France a new mode of comic +entertainment. Yet he felt that the peculiar twist of national +character, the type of wit peculiar to a people and a country, the +specialized conception of the _vis comica_ revealed in Mark Twain's +works, confined them to a restricted milieu. The result of all the +efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an +almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry +appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess. By +some, indeed, his exaggerations were regarded as symptoms of mental +alienation; and the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving a +passport to the incoherence of his conceptions. “It has been said,” + remarked M. Forgues, with keen perception, “that an academician slumbers +in the depths of every Frenchman; and it was this which prevented the +success of Mark Twain in France. Humour, in France, has its laws and +its restrictions. So the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross +jester, incessantly beating upon a tom-tom to attract the attention of +the crowd. They were tenacious in resisting all such blandishments +. . . . As a humorist, Mark Twain was never appreciated in France. +The appreciation he ultimately secured--an appreciation by no means +inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to that won in Anglo-Saxon +and Germanic countries--was due to his sagacity and penetration as an +observer, and to his marvellous faculty for calling up scenes and +situations by the clever use of the novel and the _imprevu_. There was, +even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an intelligence +absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence for +traditionary views _qua_ traditionary.” Though at first the salt of +Mark Twain's humour seemed to the French to be lacking in the Attic +flavour, this new mode of comic entertainment, the leisurely exposition +of the genially naive American, in time won its way with the _blase_ +Parisians. Travellers who could find no copy of the Bible in the street +bookstalls of Paris, were confronted everywhere with copies of 'Roughing +It'. When the authoritative edition of Mark Twain's works appeared in +English, that authoritative French journal, the 'Mercure de France', +paid him this distinguished tribute: “His public is as varied as +possible, because of the versatility and suppleness of his talent which +addresses itself successively to all classes of readers. He has been +called the greatest humorist in the world, and that is probably the +truth; but he is also a charming and attractive story-teller, an alert +romancer, a clever and penetrating observer, a philosopher without +pretensions, and therefore all the more profound, and finally, a +brilliant essayist.” + +Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is just and authentic--the +Attic flavour of _l'esprit Gaulois_ is alien to the loosely articulated +structure of American humour. The noteworthy criticism which Mark Twain +directed at Paul Bourget's 'Outre Mer', and the subsequent controversy +incident thereto, forced into light the racial and temperamental +dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American _Ausschauung_. Mr. +Clemens once remarked to me that, of all continental peoples, the French +were most alien to the spirit of his humour. In 'Le Figaro', at the +time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental difference in taste once +more comes to light: “It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand +Mark Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine. At first +sight, there is nothing in common between that highly specialized +faculty which the Anglo-Saxons of the old and the new world designate +under the name of humour, and that quality with us which we call wit +(esprit). And yet, at bottom, these two manifestations of the human +genius, so different in appearance, have a common origin and reach the +same result: they are, both of them, the glorification of good sense +presented in pleasing and unexpected form. Only, this form must +necessarily vary with peoples who do not speak the same language and +whose skulls are not fashioned in the same way.” + +In Italy, as in France, the peculiar _timbre_ of Mark Twain's humour +found an audience not wholly sympathetic, not thoroughly _au courant_ +with his spirit. “Translation, however accurate and conscientious,” as +the Italian critic, Raffaele Simboli, has pointed out, “fails to render +the special flavour of his work. And then in Italy, where humorous +writing generally either rests on a political basis or depends on risky +phrases, Mark Twain's sketches are not appreciated because the spirit +which breathes in them is not always understood. The story of 'The +Jumping Frog', for instance, famous as it is in America and England, has +made little impression in France or Italy.” + +It was rather among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied +to them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and +ready response. At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the +writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their +colloquialisms and their local peculiarities of dialect, should have +borne translation so well into other languages, especially into German. +It must, however, be borne in mind that, despite these peculiar features +of his writings, they are couched in a style of most marked directness, +simplicity and native English purity. The ease with which his works +were translated into foreign, especially the Germanic and allied +tongues, and the eager delight with which they were read and +comprehended by all classes, high and low, constitute perhaps the most +signal conceivable tribute, not only to the humanity of his spirit, but +to the genuine art of his marvellously forthright and natural style. +It need be no cause for surprise that as early as 1872 he had secured +Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental agent. German translations +soon appeared of 'The Jumping Frog and Other Stories' (1874), 'The +Gilded Age' (1874), 'The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim's +Progress' (1875), 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876). A few years +later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually all +printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more +extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French, +Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula. + +The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark +Twain's works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the +lawless Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic +races. George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour +to the heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear. Mark Twain's stories of +the Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive, +orgiastic existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on +the Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters--all appealed +to the passion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the +Germanic consciousness. To the Europeans, this wild genius of the +Pacific Slope seemed to function in a sort of unexplored fourth +dimension of humour--vast and novel--of which they had never dreamed. +It is noteworthy that Schleich, in his 'Psychopathik des Humors', +reserved for American humour, with Mark Twain as its leading exponent, +a distinct and unique category which he denominated _phantastischen, +grossdimensionalen_. + +To the biographer belongs the task of describing, in detail, the lavish +entertainment and open-hearted homage which were bestowed upon Mark +Twain in German Europe. In writing of Mark Twain and his popularity in +Germanic countries, Carl von Thaler unhesitatingly asserts that Mark +Twain was feted, wined and dined in Vienna, the Austrian metropolis, in +an unprecedented manner, and awarded unique honours hitherto paid to no +German writer. In Berlin, the young Kaiser bestowed upon him the most +distinguished marks of his esteem; and praised his works, in especial +'Life on the Mississippi', with the intensest enthusiasm. When Mark +Twain received a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his young +daughter exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn't be +anybody left for him to become acquainted with but God! Mark said that +it seemed uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter; +but of course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to +conclusions without reflection. After hearing the Kaiser's eulogy on +'Life on the Mississippi', he was astounded and touched to receive a +similar tribute, the same evening, from the portier of his +lodging-house. He loved to dwell upon this, in later years--declaring it +the most extraordinary coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a +portier, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should have +expressed the very same criticism, and delivered the very same verdict, +upon one of his books, almost in the same hour and the same breath. + +The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of +Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was +hailed as the greatest humorist in the world. Among German critics he +was regarded as second only to Dickens in drastic comic situation and +depth of feeling. Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power +of imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom +Sawyer. At times the German critics confessed their inability to +discover the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic +exaggeration. The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America +possessed an indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans. At +times Mark Twain's bloody jests froze the laughter on their lips; and +his “revolver-humour” made their hair stand on end. Though realizing +that the scenes and events described in 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry +Finn', 'Roughing It', and 'Life on the Mississippi' could not have been +duplicated in Europe, the German critics revelled in them none the less +that “such adventures were possible only in America--perhaps only in the +fancy of an American!” “Mark Twain's greatest strength,” says Von +Thaler, “lies in the little sketches, the literary snap-shots. The +shorter his work, the more striking it is. He draws directly from life. +No other writer has learned to know so many different varieties of men +and of circumstances, so many strange examples of the Genus Homo, as he; +no other has taken so strange a course of development.” The deeper +elements of Mark Twain's humour did not escape the attention of the +Germans, nor fail of appreciation at their hands. In his aphorisms, +embodying at once genuine wit and experience of life, they discovered +not merely the American author, but the universal human being; these +aphorisms they found worthy of profound and lasting admiration. +Sintenis found in Mark Twain a “living symptom of the youthful joy in +existence”--a genius capable at will, despite his “boyish extravagance,” + of the virile formulation of fertile and suggestive ideas. His latest +critic in Germany wrote at the time of his death, with a genuine insight +into the significance of his work: “Although Mark Twain's humour moves +us to irresistible laughter, this is not the main point in his books; +like all true humorists, _ist der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz verbunden_, +he is a witness to higher thoughts and higher emotions, and his purpose +is to expose bad morals and evil circumstances, in order to improve and +ennoble mankind.” The critic of the 'Berliner Zeitung' asserted that +Mark Twain is loved in Germany more than all other humorists, English or +French, because his humour “turns fundamentally upon serious and earnest +conceptions of life.” It is a tremendously significant fact that the +works of American literature most widely read in Germany are the works +of--striking conjunction!--Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain. + +The 'Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' fired the laugh heard round the +world. Like Byron, Mark Twain woke one morning to find himself famous. +A classic fable, which had once evoked inextinguishable laughter in +Athens, was unconsciously re-told in the language of Angel's Camp, +Calaveras County, where history repeated itself with a precision of +detail startling in its miraculous coincidence. Despite the +international fame thus suddenly won by this little fable, Mark Twain +had yet to overcome the ingrained opposition of insular prejudice before +his position in England and the colonies was established upon a sure and +enduring footing. In a review of 'The Innocents Abroad' in 'The +Saturday Review' (1870), the comparison is made between the Americans +who “do Europe in six weeks” and the most nearly analogous class of +British travellers, with the following interesting conclusions: “The +American is generally the noisier and more actively disagreeable, but, +on the other hand, he often partially redeems his absurdity by a certain +naivete and half-conscious humour. He is often laughing in his sleeve +at his own preposterous brags, and does not take himself quite so +seriously as his British rival. He is vulgar, and even ostentatiously +and atrociously vulgar; but the vulgarity is mixed with a real +shrewdness which rescues it from simple insipidity. We laugh at him, +and we would rather not have too much of his company; but we do not feel +altogether safe in despising him.” The lordly condescension and gross +self-satisfaction here betrayed are but preliminaries to the ludicrous +density of the subsequent reflections upon Mark Twain himself: “He +parades his utter ignorance of Continental languages and manners, and +expresses his very original judgments on various wonders of art and +nature with a praiseworthy frankness. We are sometimes left in doubt +whether he is speaking in all sincerity or whether he is having a sly +laugh at himself and his readers”! It is quite evident that the large +mass of English readers, represented by The Saturday Review, had not +caught Mark Twain's tone; but even the reviewer is more than half won +over by the infectiousness of this new American humour. “Perhaps we +have persuaded our readers by this time that Mr. Twain (sic) is a very +offensive specimen of the vulgarest kind of Yankee. And yet, to say the +truth, we have a kind of liking for him. There is a frankness and +originality about his remarks which is (sic) pleasanter than the mere +repetition of stale raptures; and his fun, if not very refined, is often +tolerable in its way. In short, his pages may be turned over with +amusement, as exhibiting more or less consciously a very lively portrait +of the uncultivated American tourist, who may be more obtrusive and +misjudging, but is not quite so stupidly unobservant as our native +product. We should not choose either of them for our companions on a +visit to a church or a picture--gallery, but we should expect most +amusement from the Yankee as long as we could stand him.” It was this +review which gave Mark Twain the opening for his celebrated parody--a +parody which, I have always thought, went far to opening the eyes of the +British public to the true spirit of his humour. Such irresistible fun +could not fail of appreciation at the hands of a nation which regarded +Dickens as their representative national author. + +Two years later, Mark Twain received in England an appreciative +reception of well-nigh national character. Whilst the literary and +academic circles of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an +author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open +arms. He was a welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the +highest dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals, the +leaders of fashion, of thought, and of opinion openly rejoiced in the +breezy unconventionality, the fascinating daring, and the genial +personality of this new variety of American genius. His English +publisher, John Camden Hotten, wrote in 1873: “How he dined with the +Sheriff of London and Middlesex; how he spent glorious evenings with the +wits and literati who gather around the festive boards of the +Whitefriars and the Savage Clubs; how he moved in the gay throng at the +Guildhall conversazione; how he feasted with the Lord Mayor of London; +and was the guest of that ancient and most honourable body--the City of +London Artillery--all these matters we should like to dwell upon.” His +public lectures, though not so popular as those of Artemus Ward, won him +recognition as a master in all the arts of the platform. Mr. H. R. +Haweis, who heard him once at the old Hanover Square Rooms, thus +describes the occasion: “The audience was not large nor very +enthusiastic. I believe he would have been an increasing success had he +stayed longer. We had not time to get accustomed to his peculiar way, +and there was nothing to take us by storm, as in Artemus Ward. . . . . +He came on and stood quite alone. A little table, with the traditional +water-bottle and tumbler, was by his side. His appearance was not +impressive, not very unlike the representation of him in the various +pictures in his 'Tramp Abroad'. He spoke more slowly than any other man +I ever heard, and did not look at his audience quite enough. I do not +think that he felt altogether at home with us, nor we with him. We +never laughed loud or long; no one went into those irrepressible +convulsions which used to make Artemus pause and look so hurt and +surprised. We sat throughout expectant and on the _qui vive_, very well +interested, and gently simmering with amusement. With the exception of +one exquisite description of the old Magdalen ivy--covered collegiate +buildings at Oxford University, I do not think there was one thing worth +setting down in print. I got no information out of the lecture, and +hardly a joke that would wear, or a story that would bear repeating. +There was a deal about the dismal, lone silver--land, the story of the +Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never came off, and another +duel in which no one was injured; and we sat patiently enough through +it, fancying that by and by the introduction would be over, and the +lecture would begin, when Twain suddenly made his bow and went off! It +was over. I looked at my watch; I was never more taken aback. I had +been sitting there exactly an hour and twenty minutes. It seemed ten +minutes at the outside. If you have ever tried to address a public +meeting, you will know what this means. It means that Mark Twain is a +consummate public speaker. If ever he chose to say anything, he would +say it marvellously well; but in the art of saying nothing in an hour, +he surpasses our most accomplished parliamentary speakers.” + +The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony +of Swift, the _gros sel_ of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was +ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain. +They recognized in him not only “the most successful and original wag of +his day,” but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman “the +honour of being the most strictly American writer of what is called +American literature.” We read in a review of 'A Tramp Abroad', +published in The Athenaeum in 1880: “Mark Twain is American pure and +simple. To the eastern motherland he owes but the rudiments, the +groundwork, already archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to +write; in his turn of art, his literary method and aims, his +intellectual habit and temper, he is as distinctly national as the +Fourth of July.” Mark Twain was admired because he was “a literary +artist of exceptional skill”; and it was ungrudgingly acknowledged that +“he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in presenting it +dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the +anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of episodic +narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade +himself.” Indeed, from the early days of 'The Innocents Abroad', the +“first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the +hearing of the mass of English people”; during the period of 'Tom +Sawyer', “the completest boy in fiction,” the immortal 'Huckleberry +Finn', “the standard picaresque novel of America--the least trammelled +piece of literature in the language,” and 'Life on the Mississippi', +vastly appreciated in England as in Germany for its _cultur-historisch_ +value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted +honour of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their +hearts with fervour and abandon--during this long period of almost four +decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the +imagination of the English people and, like Charles Dickens before him, +may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon +race. “The vast majority of readers here regard him,” said Mr. Sydney +Brooks in 1907, “to a degree in which they regard no other living +writer, as their personal friend, and love him for his tenderness, his +masculinity, his unfailing wholesomeness even more than for his humour.” + To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words in which he was +welcomed to England in 1907 should stand as a symbol of that racial +bond, that _entente cordiale_ of blood and heart, which he did so much +to strengthen and secure. “A compliment paid to Mark Twain is something +more than a compliment to a great man, a great writer, and a great +citizen. It is a compliment to the American people, and one that will +come home to them with peculiar gratification. . . . The feeling for +Mark Twain among his own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir +Walter eighty odd years ago, or like that of our fathers for Charles +Dickens. There is admiration in it, gratitude, pride, and, above all, +an immense and intimate tenderness of affection. To writers alone it is +given to win a sentiment of this quality--to writers and occasionally, +by the oddness of the human mind, to generals. Perhaps one would best +take the measure of the American devotion to Mark Twain by describing it +as a compound of what Dickens enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of +what Lord Roberts enjoys to-day, and by adding something thereto for the +intensity of all transatlantic emotions. The 'popularity' of statesmen, +even of such a statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and +flickering light by the side of this full flame of personal affection. +It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the +clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command +of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to +read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and +afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave +and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and +abroad; but also because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other +men, the incarnation of the American spirit.” + +Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative +national author which is without a parallel in the history of American +literature. This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the +great mass of the people, despite the _dicta_ of the _literati_. At a +time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain, +the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting +condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern. Boston regarded him +with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found +little in him to admire or approve. There were notable exceptions, as +Mr. Howells has recently pointed out--Charles Eliot Norton, Professor +Francis J. Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in +general it is true that “in proportion as people thought themselves +refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but +which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude.” + The professors of literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose +works were essentially ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture +against the barbaric invasion of primitive Western Barbarism. Professor +W. P. Trent was, I believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's +American Literature (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the +position of literary culture in regard to Mark Twain. “But there is a +class of writers,” we read in that work, “authors ranking below Irving +or Lowell, and lacking the higher artistic or moral purpose of the +greater humorists, who amuse a generation and then pass from sight. +Every period demands a new manner of jest, after the current fashion +. . . . The reigning favourites of the day are Frank R. Stockton, +Joel Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers, and 'Mark Twain.' +[Note the damning position!] But the creators of `Pomona' and 'Rudder +Grange,' of `Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,' and `Innocents +Abroad,' clever as they are, must make hay while the sun shines. Twenty +years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some higher +literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the privileged +comedians of the republic. Humour alone never gives its masters a place +in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must usually +be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or +Holmes.” This passage stands in the 1892 edition of that work, though +'Tom Sawyer' had appeared in 1876, 'The Prince and the Pauper' in 1882, +'Life on the Mississippi' in 1883, 'Huckleberry Finn' in 1884, and 'A +Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889. Opinions analogous +to those expressed in the passage just cited have found frequent +expression among leaders of critical opinion in America; and only +yesterday 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The Innocents Abroad' were seriously +put forward, by a clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's +most enduring claims upon posterity! A bare half-dozen men in the ranks +of American literary criticism have recognized and eloquently spoken +forth in vindication of Mark Twain's title as a classic author, not +simply of American literature, but of the literature of the world. + +It is, even now, perhaps not too early to attempt some sort of inquiry +into the causes contributory to Mark Twain's recognition as the prime +representative of contemporary American literature. One of the cheap +catchwords of Mark Twain criticism is the statement that he is “American +to the core,” and that his popular appreciation in his own country was +due to the fact that he most completely embodied the national genius. +How many of those who confidently advance this vastly significant +statement, one curiously wonders, have seriously endeavoured to make +plain to others--or even to themselves--the reasons therefor? Perhaps +in seeking the causes for Mark Twain's renown in his own country one may +discover the causes for his world-wide fame. + +A map of the United States, upon which were marked the localities and +regions made famous by the writings of Mark Twain, would show that, +geographically, he has known and studied this vast country in all the +grand divisions of its composition. Bred from old Southern stock, born +in the Southwest, he passed his youth upon the bosom of that great +natural division between East and West, the Mississippi River, which +cleaves in twain the very body of the nation. In the twenties he lost +the feeling of local attachment in the vast democracy of the West, and +looked life--a strangely barbaric and primitive life--straight in the +face. This is the first great transformation in his life--behold the +Westerner! After enriching his mind through contact with civilizations +so diverse as Europe and the Sandwich Islands, he settled down in +Connecticut, boldly foreswore the creeds and principles of his native +section, and underwent a new transformation--behold the Yankee! Once +again, travel in foreign lands, association with the most intellectual +and cultured circles of the world, broadened his vision; yet this +cosmopolitan experience, far from diminishing his racial consciousness, +tended still further to accentuate the national characteristics. In +this new transformation, we behold the typical American! The later +years, of cosmopolitan renown, of world-wide fame, throw into high +relief the last transformation--behold the universally human spirit! +Under this crude catalogue, the main lines of Mark Twain's development +stand out in sharp definition. The catalogue, however, is only too +crude--it is impossible to say with precision just when such and such +a transformation actually took place. It is only intended to be +suggestive; for we must bear in mind that Mark Twain never changed +character. His spirit underwent an evolutionary process--broadening, +deepening, enlarging its vision with the passage of the years. + +The part which the South played in the formation of the character and +genius of Mark Twain has been little noted heretofore. It was in the +South and Southwest that the creator of the humour of local eccentrics +first appeared in full flower; and “Ned Brace,” “Major Jones,” and “Sut +Lovengood” have in them the germs of that later Western humour that was +to come to full fruition in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. The +stage coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for +disseminating far and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant +stories, the oddities of speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from +the clash of diverse and oddly-assorted types. The jarring contrasts, +the incongruities and surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river +life unquestionably stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour +in the young cub-pilot, Sam Clemens. Through Mark Twain's greatest +works flows the stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some +indefinable share of its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its +immensity; and there is no exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the +greatest natural influence which his works betray. Reared in a +slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people +of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to +cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and +bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry--young +Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and +the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such +beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier. Not even his most enthusiastic +biographers have attempted to palliate, save with half-hearted +facetiousness, his inglorious desertion of the cause which he had +espoused. Mark Twain is the most speedily “reconstructed rebel” on +record. Is it broad-minded--or even accurate!--for Mr. Howells to say of +Mark Twain: “No one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, +Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?” Mark Twain +never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern “ideal.” But +in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he +properly pokes fun at the “wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' +romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter Scott,” of the +Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years +Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which +bespoke the “Southern ideal” of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy +of instinct in matters of right and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait +of Mark Twain's is a symptom of that “moral elegance” which Mr. Owen +Wister has pronounced to be one of the defining characteristics of the +Southern American. “No American of Northern birth or breeding,” Mr. +Howells pertinently observes, “could have imagined the spiritual struggle +of Huck Finn in deciding to help the negro Jim to his freedom, even +though he should be for ever despised as a negro thief in his native +town, and perhaps eternally lost through the blackness of his sin. No +Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and +revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its +carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic +comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping +magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's +daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes to lynch +him.” + +The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is +momentous and unmistakable. Mark Twain found room for development and +expansion in the primitive freedom of the West. It was here, I think, +that there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that +hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to +end. In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood--or fell--by +force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled +for fortune, for competence--or for existence. It was a case of the +survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature--the burning alkali +desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,--all men were free +and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive +democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. +The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the +wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a +salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of +life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those +contrasts. In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life, +the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable +--vaster perhaps, and more significant. There was the incessant contrast +of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was +infinite play for the comic _expose_ of the credulous “tenderfoot” at +the hands of the pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook +the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac +wiles of his tormentors. The West was one vast theatre for the practice +of the “practical joke.” Behind everything, menacing, foreboding, +tragic, lay the stupendous contrast between Man and Nature; and though +the miner, the granger, the cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and +at Nature, there crept into the consciousness of each the conviction +that, in the long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in order to +win success, Nature must be conquered and subdued. In such an +environment, with its spirit of primitive democracy, its atmosphere of +wild and ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its perpetually +recurring incongruities, and behind all the solemn, perhaps tragic, +presence of inexorable Nature--in such an environment were sharpened and +whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real democracy +bred of competitive effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and +imposture. + +It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and, +as he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable +fixture among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete +confidence in himself and his powers. That passion for successful +self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main +ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's +life. Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that +in that brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly +acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are +to be found in fiction, biography or history. In the West he had still +further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand +knowledge of human nature. In rotation he had been tramping jour +printer, river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer. +He now turns to literature in real earnest, and begins to display that +vast store of knowledge derived from actual contact with the infinitely +diversified realities of American life. Mark Twain takes on more and +more of the characteristics of the Yankee--those characteristics which +constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the +practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common--sense. It is +the last phase in the formation of the national type. + +It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came +to assume in the eyes of his countrymen an embodiment of the national +spirit. He was the self--made man in the self--made democracy. He was +at once his own creation and the creation of a democracy. There were +humorists in America before Mark Twain; there are humorists in America +still. But Mark Twain succeeded not merely in captivating the great +mass of the people; he achieved the far more difficult and unique +distinction of convincing his countrymen of his essential fellowship, +his temperamental affinity, with them. This miracle he wrought by the +frankest and most straightforward revelation of the actual experiences +in his own life and the lives of those he had known with perfect +intimacy. It is true that he wrote a few books dealing with other +times, other scenes, than our own in the present and in America. But I +daresay that his popularity with the mass of his countrymen would not +have been in any degree lessened had he never written these few books. +Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that his books were successful in the +ratio of their autobiographic nature. For the character he revealed in +those books of his which are essentially autobiographic, is the +character dear to the American heart; and the experiences, vicissitudes, +and hardships, shot through and irradiated with a high boisterousness of +humour, found a joyous sympathy in the minds and hearts of men who had +all “been there” themselves. In Mark Twain the American people +recognized at last the sturdy democrat, independent of foreign +criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas and +judgments; believing loyally in his country's institutions, and +upholding them fearlessly before the world; fundamentally serious and +self-reliant, yet with a practicality tempered by humane kindliness, +warmth of heart, and a strain of persistent idealism; rude, boisterous, +even uncouth, yet withal softened by sympathy for the under-dog, a +boundless love for the weak, the friendless, the oppressed; lacking in +profound intellectuality, yet supreme in the possession of the simple +and homely virtues--an upright and honourable character, a good citizen, +a man tenacious of the sanctity of the domestic virtues. America has +produced finer and more exalted types--giants in intellectuality, +princes in refinement and delicacy of spirit, savants in culture, +classics in authorship. An American type combining culture +with picturesqueness, refinement with patriotism, suavity with +self-reliance, desire it as we may, still awaits the imprimatur +of international recognition. America has sufficient cause for +gratification in the memory of that quaint and sturdy figure so +conspicuously bearing the national stamp and superscription. Perhaps no +American has equalled Mark Twain in the quality of subsuming and +embodying in his own character so many elements of the national spirit +and genius. In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American _par +excellence_. + +Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a +composite American type, lay something deeper still--that indefinable +_je ne sais quoi_ which procured him international fame. Humour alone +is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result--though humour +ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal. As a matter of fact, +vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist of +remarkable force and power. From the days when he came under the +tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic +superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to +subject himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism. While it is +true that he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's +phrase, “the responsibility of the artist to his materials,” he +assuredly disciplined himself to make the most, in his own way, of the +rude and volcanic power which he possessed. It is fortunate that Mark +Twain never subjected himself to the refinements of academic culture; a +Harvard might well have spoiled a great author. For Mark Twain had a +memorable tale to tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote +scenes and circumstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising +all its cunning in circumventing circumstance and mastering a calling. +And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive, +phraseology of the actors in those wild events. The secret of his style +is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and +a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression. He had a +remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the +unspoiled, expressive language of the people. At times he is primitive +and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality +rather than of limitation. His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, “the art +of a people--universal art”; and his style was rich in the locutions of +the common people, rich and racy of the soil. A signal merit of his +style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The personages of his +novels always speak “in character”--with perfect reproduction, not only +of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts. Though Mr. +Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to +enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style +in treatment of rudimentary or,--as I should prefer to phrase it, +--fundamental things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into +the mouth of a “rudimentary” person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a +description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression +caught by the “rudimentary” mind. “Writers of fiction,” says Sir Walter +Besant in speaking of this book, “will understand the difficulty of +getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them, +writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have acted; and +presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy. +The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction more +fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry +Finn. . . . It may be objected that the characters are extravagant. +Not so. They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite +possible in a country so remote and so primitive. Every figure in the +book is a type; Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none. We see the life +--the dull and vacuous life--of a small township upon the Mississippi +River forty years ago. So far as I know, it is the only place where we +can find that phase of life portrayed.” + +Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality +--untrammelled by the limitations of any particular sect of art. In his +books of travel, he reveals not only the instinct of the trained +journalist for the novel and the effective, but also the feeling of the +artist for the beautiful, the impressive, and the sublime. His +descriptions, of striking natural objects, such as the volcano of Mount +Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of memorable architecture, such as the +cathedral at Milan, show that he possessed the “stereoscopic +imagination” in rare degree. The picture he evokes of Athens by +moonlight, in the language of simplicity and restraint, ineffaceably +fixes itself in the fancy. + +Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable “impressionist” and +praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his +delineation. Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed +him. Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of +words, his feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize +the precise shade of meaning desired. In truth, Mark Twain was an +impressionist, rather than an imaginative artist. That passage in +'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning +ride through the forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands +self-revealed--a confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has +never experienced. + +If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen, +as minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs--such, for example, +as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on +the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn--pictures Mark Twain had +seen and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the striking +superiority of the realistic impressionist over the imaginative artist. + +I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life--the +influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and +thought--is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which he +portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his +youth, the great river. + +To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful +book. For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the +young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came to feel that +there had never been so wonderful a book written by man. To its +haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly +--drinking it in like one bewitched. But a day came when he began to +cease from noting its marvels. Another day came when he ceased +altogether to note them. + +In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty +were gone forever from the river. If the early rapture was gone, in its +place was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy. He had learned +the ultimate secrets of the river--learned them with a knowledge, so +searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring +investiture of art. + +Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence. He was a master of +the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience. At times, his insight +into the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed +almost like divination. All these qualities appeared in full flower in +the written expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice to +his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction +or elegance. At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional +humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not seldom he +was long--winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To +offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine +qualities--descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty, +dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic +incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness. + +Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently +impossible. But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has +nothing to do with style. Mark Twain's humour--for humour is his +prevalent mood--has international range since, constructed out of a +deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human +relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the +difficulties of translation into alien tongues. + +Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an +American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he +was America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true cosmopolitan in the +Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was “at home +even in his own country.” He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan +sense; for his was “art transmitting the simplest feelings of common +life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world +--the art of common life--the art of a people--universal art.” His +spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it. + +Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of +style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any +overtopping eminence of intellect. “Many so-called American humorists,” + he once remarked to me, “have been betrayed by their preoccupation with +the local. Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to +impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races +of men. Realism is nothing more than close observation. But +observation will never give you the inside of the thing. The life, +the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of +absorption.” Mr. Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great +American humorist was to be a great human humorist--to discover in +Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all +nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he +declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could +safely be labelled “American”--not a single human detail, inside or +outside. Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain learned to +discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human +peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there +in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found. + +Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to +admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface +veneer the universal traits of that nation's humanity. He expressly +disclaimed in my presence any “attitude” toward the world, for the very +simple reason that his relation toward all peoples had been one of +effort at comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in +feeling. He disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed +prejudices--maintaining that he could stand any society. All that he +cared to know was that a man was a human being--that was bad enough for +him! It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has +made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any +other nation. Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to +his Japanese students by freeing it from all artificial and local +restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight +to the heart and soul of man. His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry' +is the most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive mode of +interpretation. In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the +highest common factor of all nations. “My secret--if there is any +secret--,” Mr. Clemens once said to me, “is to create humour independent +of local conditions. In studying humanity as exhibited in the people +and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out +the encumbrance of the local.” And he significantly added--musingly-- +“Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities.” + +To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has +contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the +Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank +with the very best examples of picaresque fiction; + +'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might +well be regarded as the supreme American morality--play of youth, +'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of +such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory +parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and +all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases +of a civilization now vanished forever. It is gratifying to Americans +to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America. It is +gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the +pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades. It is more +gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain, +America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of +Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe--a man who will be +remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, “with the great humorists of all +time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; +none of them was his equal in humanity.” + + + + + + + V. PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST + + “Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward + towards a summit where you will find your chiefest + pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will + be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the + community.” + MARK TWAIN: 'What is Man?' + + +“The humorous writer,” says Thackeray, “professes to awaken and direct +your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension, +and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, +the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all +the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself +to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and +speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him--sometimes +love him.” This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark +Twain in mind. In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of +Mark Twain's humour. Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing +it, is a fund of human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and +a universality of interests which argue real power and greatness. These +qualities, now to be discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to +be regarded as a real moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be +regarded as, in spirit, a true sociologist and reformer. + +It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no +great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of +humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that +humour may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more +serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product. +Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a “sound and +capacious mind, which is always a grave one.” There is always a breadth +of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very +greatest humorists. Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective +dreamers; Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking +the bubble of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in +his position, he could do no better than attack the vices of his time +with ridiculous likenesses. Though exhibiting little of the melancholy +of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and +expression, showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with the +strong but pungent flavour of the soil. Though expressing distaste for +Franklin's somewhat cold and almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain +nevertheless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock +common sense. Beneath and commingled with all his boyish and exuberant +fun is a note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which rings true +beside the forced and extravagant pathos of Dickens. His Southern +hereditament of chivalry, his compassion for the oppressed and his +defence of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from the beginning +of his career to the very end. Like Joel Chandler Harris, that genial +master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such absorbing +interest as human nature. Like Fielding, he wrote immortal narratives +in which the prime concern is not the “story,” but the almost scientific +revelation of the natural history of the characters. The corrosive and +mordant irony of many a passage in Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to +scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite, the +sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift. That “disposition +for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction it,” which George +Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British humour, is Mark +Twain's unmistakable hereditament. It is, perhaps, because he relates +us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that Mark +Twain is the foremost of American humorists. + +In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as far back as 1867, Mark +Twain was dubbed, not only “the wild humorist of the Pacific slope,” but +also “the moralist of the Main.” The first book which brought him great +popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious +ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of +that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour. +How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that “benefit” + performance he witnessed in Italy! + +The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which perhaps more than any other +won the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow Americans, was this: he +always had the courage of his convictions. He writes of things, classic +and hallowed by centuries, with a freshness of viewpoint, a total +indifference to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous respect +for his courage, even when one's own convictions are not engaged. The +“beautiful love story of Abelard and Heloise” will never, I venture to +say, recover its pristine glory--now that Mark Twain has poured over +Abelard the vials of his wrath. + +Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep, +underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and +truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker +and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of +mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave +carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: “I never +wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely +responsible--to her should go the credit--for any deeply serious or +moral influence my subsequent work may exert. After my marriage, she +edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my +works, she edited ME! After I had written some side-splitting story, +something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax, +she would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to +impart here. Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy +the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity. +Be yourself! Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please, +but--without farcical commentary. Don't destroy your purpose with an +ill-timed joke.' I learned from her that the only right thing was to +get in my serious meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let +them really feel the underlying moral that gave body and essence to my +jest.” + +The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals, +upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the +humorist always--never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness of +the philosopher. He observes all human traits, whether of moral +sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of +his kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist. And +yet at times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly +pathos, unmistakable, irresistible. One has only to read the beautiful, +tender tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and +the depth of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of +kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom. + +In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of +'Huckleberry Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting +incidents, its omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper +significance of many a passage in that contemporary classic is likely to +escape notice. Sir Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most +completely satisfying and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately +as a book without a moral. Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword: +“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be +prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; +persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” There never was +a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the +two farcical “hoboes,” Tom Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light +of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque +romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying +seriousness and conviction. Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike +and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the +narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only +a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive +from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of +his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim, +Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy for and +interest in the masses of the negro people. + +Indeed, to the reflective mind--and it is to be presumed that by that +standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged--there is no more +significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck +struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral +responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is +needed to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of +human conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that, +with the “lights that he had,” Huck was justified in his courageous +decision. + +Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent, +inoffending Miss Watson. He became consumed with horror and remorse to +hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their +masters wouldn't sell them. His conscience kept stirring him up hotter +than ever when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of +freedom. After awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson, +informing her of the whereabouts of her “runaway nigger.” After writing +that letter, he felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted. But he +could not forget all the goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had +shown himself so profoundly grateful. Though he faced the torments of +Puritanical damnation as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free. +Humanity triumphed over conscience--and with an “All right, then, I'll +go to hell,” he tore up the letter. + +One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the display of his humour was +the subject of prevarication. He seemed never to tire of ringing the +changes upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its +consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is +generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities--a fault +which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to. +The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the +basis for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations +innumerable, from the epigram to the anecdote. His distinction between +George Washington and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory, +and demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington as a moral +character, is classic: “George Washington couldn't tell a lie. I can; +but I won't.” Perhaps his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same +story, is in connection with the exceedingly old “darky” he once met in +the South, who claimed to have crossed the Delaware with Washington. +“Were you with Washington,” asked Mark Twain mischievously, “when he +took that hack at the cherry tree?” This was a poser for the old +darkey; his pride was appealed to, his very character was at stake. +After an awkward hesitation, the old darkey spoke up, a gleam of +simulated recollection (and real gratification for his convenient +memory) overspreading his countenance: “Lord, boss, I was dar. In +cose I was. I was with Marse George at dat very time. In fac--I done +druv dat hack myself”! + +Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular humorist was to strike +out some comic epigram, that passed currency with the masses whose fancy +it tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the classic +aphorism. These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature; +and their humour usually lay in the assumption that everybody is +habitually addicted to prevarication--which is just precisely true +enough and reprehensible enough to validate the epigram. His method was +humorous inversion; and he told a story whose morals are so ludicrously +twisted that the right moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to +light. “Never tell a lie--except for practice,” is less successful than +the more popularly known “When in doubt, tell the truth.” Out of the +latter maxim he succeeded in extracting a further essence of humour. He +admitted inventing the maxim, but never expected it to be applied to +himself. His advice, he said, was intended for other people; when he +was in doubt himself, he used more sagacity! Mark Twain has made no +more delightful epigram than that one in which he recognizes that a lie, +morally reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an ever present help +in time of need: “Never waste a lie. You never know when you may need +it.” + +Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly serious way, Mark Twain +was fond of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical +morals. Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort you get on +your mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit. You get them +into your head, not into your heart. Only by the commission of crime +can anyone acquire real morals. Commit all the crimes in the decalogue, +take them in rotation, persevere in this stern determination--and after +awhile you will thereby attain to moral perfection! It is not enough to +commit just one crime or two--though every little bit helps. Only by +committing them all can you achieve real morality! It is interesting to +note this distinction between Mark Twain, the humorous moralist, and +Bernard Shaw, the ethical thinker. Each teaches precisely the same +thing--the one not even half seriously, the other with all the sharp +sincerity of conviction. Shaw unhesitatingly declares that trying to be +wicked is precisely the same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the +discovery of character. + +The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the ludicrous anecdote with +comically mixed morals to the profound parable with grimly ironic +conclusion, takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man. It can +best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the +theft of the green water-melon and the classic fable of 'The Man that +Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Mark stole a water-melon out of a farmer's +wagon, while he wasn't looking. Of course stole was too harsh a term +--he withdrew, he retired that water-melon. After getting safely away to +a secluded spot, he broke the water-melon open--only to find that it was +green, the greenest water-melon of the year. + +The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry. He +began to reflect--for reflection is the beginning of reform. It is only +by reflecting on some crime you have committed, that you are +“vaccinated” against committing it again. + +So Mark began to reflect. And his reflections were of this nature: What +ought a boy to do who has stolen a green water-melon? What would George +Washington, who never told a lie, have done? He decided that the only +real, right thing for any boy to do, who has stolen a water-melon of +that class, is to make restitution. It is his duty to restore it to its +rightful owner. So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by +his noble resolution, Mark restored the water--melon--what there was +left of it--to the farmer and--made the farmer give him a ripe one in +its place! Thus he clinched the “moral” of this story, so quaint and so +ingenious; and concluded that only in some such way as this could one be +fortified against further commission of crime. Only thus could one +become morally perfect! + +Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical +suggestion--a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his +literal words--the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity, +fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is +a serious meaning that, like murder, will out. If demonstration were +needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is +amply supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention, +construction, and originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. +Here is a pure morality, daring in the extreme and incredibly original +in a world perpetually reiterating a saying already thousands of years +old, to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun. It is a +deliberate emendation of that invocation in the Lord's Prayer “Lead us +(not) into temptation.” The shrieking irony of this trenchant parable, +its cynicism and heartlessness, would make of it an unendurable +criticism of human life--were it accepted literally as a representation +of society. In essence it is a morality pure and simple, animated not +only by its brilliantly original ethical suggestion, but also by its +illuminating reflection of human nature and its graciously relieving +humour. In that exultant letter which the _Diabolus ex machina_ wrote +to the betrayed villagers, he sneers at their old and lofty reputation +for honesty--that reputation of which they were so inordinately proud +and vain. The weak point in their armour was disclosed so soon as he +discovered how carefully and vigilantly they kept themselves and their +children out of temptation. For he well knew that the weakest of all +weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire. The +familiar distinction between innocence and virtue springs to mind. And +it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche, and Shaw after him, both +point out that virtue consists, not in resisting evil, but in not +desiring it! 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a masterpiece, +eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift. It proclaims Mark Twain not +only as a supreme artist, but also as eminently and distinctively a +moralist. + +It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his maturer development as +other than a moralist. My personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens +convinced me--had I needed to be convinced--that in his later years he +had striven to grapple nobly with many of the deeper issues of life, +character and morality, public, religious and social, as well as +personal and private. I never knew anyone who thought so “straight,” + or who expressed himself with such simple directness upon questions +affecting religion and conduct. He was absolutely fearless in his +condemnation of those subsidized “ministers” of the Gospel in +cosmopolitan centres, who, through self-interest, cut their moral +disquisitions to fit the predilections of their wealthy parishioners, +many of whom were under national condemnation as “malefactors of great +wealth.” Animated by love for all creatures, the defenceless wild +animal as well as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in his indictment +of those big-game hunters who shamelessly described their feelings of +savage exultation when some poor animal served as the target for their +skill, and staggered off wounded unto death. His sympathy for the +natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic against +King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention of +the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern +civilization. His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his +inhumanity to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble +determination to throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of +suffering and oppressed humanity. Some years before his death, he told +me that he never intended to speak in public again save in behalf of +movements, humanitarian and uplifting, which gave promise of effecting +civic betterment and social improvement. + +I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark +Twain for three events--for the publication of such works can be +dignified with no less eminent characterization. When Mr. Edward Dowden +tried to make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the +sacrifice of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook. That +ingrained chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the +Southerner, the sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak +and the defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions +of his career. For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more +than a work, it is an act--an act of high courage and nobility. With +words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully +insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and +her waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six +times repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married +woman who read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the night +with him--because he saw visions when he was alone! Again, in his 'Joan +of Arc', Mark Twain erected a monument of enduring beauty to that simple +maid of Orleans, to whom the Roman Catholic Church has just now paid the +merited yet tardy tribute of canonization. It is a sad commentary upon +the popular attitude of frivolity towards the professional humorist that +Mark Twain felt compelled to publish this book anonymously, in order +that the truth and beauty of that magic story might receive its just +meed of respectful and sympathetic attention. + +The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain +is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story +entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' It contains, I believe, the moral +that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life--the +bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human +nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead +of wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law. No one doubts that +Mark Twain--as who would not?--believed, aye, knew, that this sweet, +human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of +fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay +on Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it +Heaven or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King +Leopold, the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications +of the moral principle. 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' in its simple pathos, +'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony, +present vital evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral +values which marks the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw. +In that amusing, naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that +he could make exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing; +but she maintains that he was more interested in earnest books and +earnest conversation than in humorous ones. She pronounced him to be as +much of a Pholosopher (sic) as anything. And she hazards the opinion +that he might have done a great deal in this direction if only he had +studied when he was a boy! + +Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he called 'An Extract from +Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'. For long he desisted from +publishing it because of his fear that its outspoken frankness would +appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities of the public. While his +villa of “Stormfield” was in course of erection several years ago, he +discovered that half of it was going to cost what he had expected to +pay for the whole house. His heart was set on having a loggia or +sun-parlour; and when it seemed that he would have to sacrifice this +apple of his eye through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds, +hauled out Captain Stormfield and made the old tar pay the piper. His +fears as to its reception were wholly unwarranted; for it was generously +enjoyed for its shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and heaven +as popularly taught nowadays from the pulpits. This book is full of a +keen and bluff common sense, cannily expressed in the words of an old +sea-captain whom Mark Twain had known intimately. It is only another +link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove that Mark Twain had +thought long and deeply upon the problematical nature of a future life. +It is, in essence, a _reductio ad absurdum_ of those professors of +religion who still preach a heaven of golden streets and pearly gates, of +idleness and everlasting psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss. +Mark Twain wanted to point out the absurdity of taking the allegories and +the figurative language of the Bible literally. Of course everybody +called for a harp and a halo as soon as they reached heaven. They were +given the harps and halos--indeed nothing harmless and reasonable was +refused them. But they found these things the merest accessories. Mark +Twain's heaven was just the busiest place imaginable. There weren't any +idle people there after the first day. The old sea captain pointed out +that singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity was all +very pretty when you heard about it from the pulpit, but that it was a +mighty poor way to put in valuable time. He took no stock in a heaven of +warbling ignoramuses. He found that Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan, +was not as comforting as it sounds in the pulpit. Heaven is the merited +reward of service; and the opportunities for service were infinite. As +he said, you've got to earn a thing square and honest before you can +enjoy it. To Mark, this was “about the sensiblest heaven” he had ever +heard of. He mourned a little over the discovery that what a man mostly +missed in heaven was company. But he rejoiced in the information +vouchsafed by his friend the Captain--a valuable piece of information +that leaves him, and all who are so fortunate as to hear it, the better +for the knowledge--that happiness isn't a thing in itself, but only a +contrast with something that isn't pleasant! This view of heaven, seen +through the temperament of a humorist and a philosopher, is provocative +and thought-compelling more than it is amusing or ludicrous. I think it +inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand +dollar prize--a prize which Mr Shaw hurled back with indignation and +scorn! + +Mark Twain was a great humorist--more genial than grim, more +good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to +intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy. +He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the +literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their +likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and +picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter, +never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be “frightened by the +venerableness of the institution”; and his sublimated journalism reveals +a mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic. He is +the most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly +shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited +that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and that faith in +the contemporary which stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible +youth. Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of high ethical +influence in our civilization, and the philosopher and the humanitarian +look out through the twinkling eyes of the humorist. + +And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great +writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that +highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and +even humour, which we call sociology. When I first advanced this view, +it was taken up on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain “from +a new angle”; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of +Europe; and the author of the essay was invited “to explain Mark Twain +to the German public”! There are still many people, however, who resent +any demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and +humorous entertainer. Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support +of the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as +America's greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of +Mark Twain primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist. “Of course,” + he added, “Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to +put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang +him, believe he is joking.” + +Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and +principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn't +strength of mind enough to believe it. “Custom is a petrifaction,” he +asserted; “nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.” Mr. W. +D. Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that “the ludicrous +incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration +of Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black +labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of +contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so.” However +that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion, +Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and +indefensible. The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this +conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern +men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills. The +slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by +their owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their +spiritual welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress +of the house. + +In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery. He wasn't +even aware that there was anything wrong about it. He never heard it +condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers. And as for the +preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical +passages in support of that view. If the slaves themselves were averse +to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject. He seldom +saw a slave misused--on the farm, never. But when he was brought face +to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family, +it made a deep impression upon his consciousness. It was this +deplorable evil of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible +separation of the members of the same family, the one from the other, +that convinced him of the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as +has been pointed out by Mr. Howells, did not come to him “till after his +liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far West.” Yet it found its +way into his books--into Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's +pathetic longing to buy back his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead +Wilson with its moving picture of the poor slave's agony when she +suddenly realizes in the way the water is flowing around the snag that +she is being “sold down the river.” In Uncle Tom's Cabin, as Professor +Phelps has pointed out, “the red--hot indignation of the author largely +nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . . Mrs. Stowe's +astonishing work is not really the history of slavery; it is the history +of abolition sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows us the beautiful side +of slavery--for it had a wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side--and he +also shows us the horror of it.” Mark Twain has declared that the only +way to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and people with which +the story is concerned, through years of “unconscious absorption” of the +facts of the life to be portrayed. When his stories were written, +slavery was a thing of the past--he was competent to judge of the +situation impartially, through direct personal contact throughout his +boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object was not the object of +the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by animosity. He saw +clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic. Hence it is, I +believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in fundamentals, +a remarkable sociologist. Certain passages in his books on the subject +of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the truest things +that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a continent and +plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife. + +Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind +the most vivid pictures--pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The +memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his +scathing remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds +of those Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, +shooting each other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of +race; the lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and +unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the +variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of +the river--all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as +Huck's raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides +his boat through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a +great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a +sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely +more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is +a “sort of contemporaneous posterity” which has registered its verdict +that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there +is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare +say, class Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in +letters. He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and +unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has passed +forever. And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the +sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and +unparalleled documents in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane, +boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain. + +Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic +interpretation went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in +penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase +of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an “institution” + blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion +that periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad “carnivals of +crime.” The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality +which gives his profession its power and validity as an effective +instrumentality in the advancement of civilization, is the faculty of +penetrating national and racial disguises, and going directly to the +heart of the human problem. Mark Twain possessed this faculty in +supreme degree. As a literary critic he was banal and futile; but as +a social and racial critic he was remarkable and profound. His essay +'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece of impartial interpretation; his +comprehension of French and German racial traits, as revealed in his +works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and his magnificent analysis +of the situation in South Africa, in the concluding chapters of +'Following the Equator', rings clear with the accents of truth and +mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy. Deeper far, more +comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark Twain's +interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the national +ideals. His “defence” of General Funston is a scorching and devastating +blast, red with the fires of patriotism. Whatever be one's convictions, +one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's +berserker-like rage over the attitude of Europe in China, the barbarities +of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the +Philippines, copied after Weyler's _reconcentrado_ policy in Cuba. His +study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross +exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified +common-sense, a sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive +in psychological analysis of national and racial traits. + +In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate +fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that “divine average” + of common life which is the dream of American democracy. 'The Prince +and the Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich +in human interest. It is something deeper far than this; for the very +crucial motive of the story, the successful substitution of the commoner +for the king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the +equality of man. Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution, +and frankly expressed his regret over Napoleon's failure to invade +England and thus destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal +paraphernalia of the British monarchy. Despite its note of Yankee +blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur' is a remarkable brief +for democracy and the brotherhood of man. So eminent a publicist as Mr. +William T. Stead pronounced it, at the time of its first appearance, one +of the most significant books of our time; and classed it (with Henry +George's 'Progress and Poverty' and Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward') +as the third great book from America to give tremendous impetus to the +social democratic movement of the age. Mark Twain abandoned all hope of +a future life; found more of sorrow than of joy in life's balances; and +even, in his latter years, lost faith in humanity itself. But amid the +wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American +optimism: he never lost faith in democracy, and fought valiantly to the +end in behalf of equality and the welfare of the average man. + +Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship, +Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early +eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club +to which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose +deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the +religiously orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper +in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he +felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to +the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every +man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his +training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking, +heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club. “I did +not read that paper,” Mr. Clemens said to me, “but I put it away, +resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time. Every now and +then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it, +to compare its views with my own later views. From time to time I added +something to it. But I never found, during that quarter of a century, +that my views had altered in the slightest degree. I had a few copies +published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the +book to indicate its authorship.” A few days later he gave me a copy, +and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the +prefatory note: + +“Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as +unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, +kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and +could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I +not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find +no other.” + +'What is Man?' propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue +between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that “Beliefs are +acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change; +nothing whatever can change temperament.” He enunciates the theory, +which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such +person as a permanent seeker after truth. + +“When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth, +with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he +tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.” “All training,” he +avers, “is one form or another of outside influences, and association is +the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside +influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him +upward--but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time.” + Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another +story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of +writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to +high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling +protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer +was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is +Man?': “Oh, he is real. He's all the boy that I have known or +recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because, +when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education +avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. +Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and +gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He +would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an +angel.” It was what he called Kismet. + +It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the +days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all +faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal +God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or +theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced, +the human race remained “indestructibly content, happy, thankful, +proud.” He never had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs +never tended to warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because +he saw in it supreme truth. His ultimate philosophy of life, which he +sums up in 'What is Man?', is healthy and right-minded. It is best +embodied in the lofty injunction: “Diligently train your ideals upward +and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest +pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer +benefits upon your neighbour and the community.” Lassalle once said: +“History forgives mistakes and failures, but not want of conviction.” + In Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to forgive any want +of conviction. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARK TWAIN *** + +***** This file should be named 6873-0.txt or 6873-0.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/6/8/7/6873/ + +Produced by David Widger + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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