summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/old/files/relative.htm
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      MARK TWAIN, by Archibald Henderson
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      MARK TWAIN, by Archibald Henderson
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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson

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Title: Mark Twain

Author: Archibald Henderson

Release Date: July 14, 2004 [EBook #6873]
Last Updated: October 31, 2012

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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</pre>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="titlepage.jpg (62K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="frontpiece.jpg (54K)" src="images/frontpiece.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      MARK TWAIN
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
    </p>
    <h3>
      By Archibald Henderson<br /><br /> With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn
    </h3>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <table summary="">
      <tr>
        <td>
          <i> "Haply&mdash;who knows?&mdash;somewhere<br /> In Avalon, Isle of
          Dreams,<br /> In vast contentment at last,<br /> With every grief done
          away,<br /> While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,<br /> And Moliere hangs
          on his words,<br /> And Cervantes not far off<br /> Listens and smiles
          apart,<br /> With that incomparable drawl<br /> He is jesting with
          Dagonet now."</i>
          <p>
            BLISS CARMAN.
          </p>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      PREFACE
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it
      was&mdash;an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a
      guest in his home&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
    </p>
    <p>
      LONDON, August 5, 1910.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      NOTE.&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      CONTENTS
    </h2>
    <table summary="">
      <tr>
        <td>
          I.
        </td>
        <td>
          <a href="#introductory">INTRODUCTORY</a><br />
        </td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>
          II.
        </td>
        <td>
          <a href="#man">THE MAN</a><br />
        </td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>
          III.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
        </td>
        <td>
          <a href="#humorist">THE HUMORIST</a><br />
        </td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>
          IV.
        </td>
        <td>
          <a href="#genius">WORLD-FAMED GENIUS</a><br />
        </td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>
          V.
        </td>
        <td>
          <a href="#philosopher">PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST</a>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          <i> "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."</i>
        </p>
        <p>
          Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS of date
          December 23, 1901.
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="pp003.jpg (29K)" src="images/pp003.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      <a name="introductory" id="introductory">INTRODUCTORY</a>
    </h2>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can
      be attributed what a Frenchman would call <i>mondial ecla</i> 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&mdash;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 <i>literati</i> 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.
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          [While this book was going through the press, news has come of the
          death of Tolstoy.]
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;a compact of good humour, robust
      sanity, and large-minded humanity&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>portie</i> 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      "'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,<br /> Death after life doth
      greatly please."'
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          <i> "'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime&mdash;the
          thin air stifles'&mdash;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&mdash;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."</i>
        </p>
        <p>
          STUART P. SHERMAN: "MARK TWAIN." The Nation, May 12, 1910.
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="pp015.jpg (53K)" src="images/pp015.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      <a name="man" id="man">THE MAN</a>
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      With a sort of mock&mdash;pride, Clemens referred at times to the
      ancestral glories of his house&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;as if thinking out the facts&mdash;that she
      had been afraid he would!
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;as it was of
      no consequence to any one but himself!
    </p>
    <p>
      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!"
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      The death of Judge Clemens was the first link in the long chain of
      circumstance&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;I think that's what they
      called him&mdash;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&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;l" (Hannibal). Mark added a
      "snappy foot&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;burlesques, as a rule, of local characters and conditions&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      One evening in 1858, the boy, consumed with wanderlust, asked his mother
      for five dollars&mdash;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"&mdash;New York, where a
      little World's Fair was in progress. He was somewhat better off than was
      Benjamin Franklin when he entered Philadelphia&mdash;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 &amp; 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      For long the ambition for river life had remained with him&mdash;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&mdash;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 &amp; 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&mdash;realizing his
      boyhood dream, unable to contain himself for joy. At last he saw himself
      as that hero of his boyish fancy&mdash;a traveller.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      "'Good mawnin, sir. Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and teach
      'im how to be er pilot?'
    </p>
    <p>
      "'No sir; there is more bother about it than it's worth.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "'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.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "'What makes you pull your words that way?'
    </p>
    <p>
      "'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?'
    </p>
    <p>
      "'The only way is for money.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "'How much are you going to charge?
    </p>
    <p>
      "'Well, I'll teach you the river for $500.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "'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.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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'.
    </p>
    <p>
      The story of the derivation of the famous <i>nom de guerr</i> 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 <i>nom de guerr</i> 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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;strange
      omission!&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;the
      fear of being recognized by Union soldiers and shot for breaking his
      parole still haunting him&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;years' apprenticeship as a
      printer for nothing. In the process of setting up tons of good and bad
      literature, he had learned&mdash;half unconsciously&mdash;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&mdash;awake newspapers in the West.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      When he heard his name called by some one, Clemens called out:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Pass the gentleman into my den. The noble animal is here."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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:
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          "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&mdash;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&mdash;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."
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      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"&mdash;for he hated facts and figures
      requiring absolute accuracy&mdash;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 <i>coup
      de grac</i> 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,"&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;for I was certain to be the occasion of some questions of
      privilege&mdash;'Mark Twain' than 'the unprincipled and lying
      Parliamentary Reporter of the 'Territorial Enterprise'.'"
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;"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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          "His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and
          even the aquiline eye&mdash;an eye so eagle-like that a second lid
          would not have surprised me&mdash;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.'"
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San Francisco&mdash;on one
      occasion he was reduced to a solitary ten&mdash;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'&mdash;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&mdash;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:
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          "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&mdash;just like a thousand of brick.
        </p>
        <p>
          "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.
        </p>
        <p>
          "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."
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry another pail of water.
      In slow, drawling tones he protested decisively:
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just taken out.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Bring just one more pail, Sam," he urged.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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!"
    </p>
    <p>
      Moved by Sam's dejected appearance&mdash;blue nose and humped back&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret
      Harte, and told him this story. As Harte records:
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          "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."
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864,
      Mark Twain regaled him&mdash;as he regaled all worthy acquaintances&mdash;with
      his favourite story, 'The Jumping Frog'. Ward was delighted with it.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;twenty dollars a week for general correspondence,
      and one hundred dollars a column for the Hornet story&mdash;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"!
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;Mark's
      reputation as a lecturer on the Atlantic coast was assured.
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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'.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>terra incognita</i>, 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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      It was during this winter that Mark wrote a number of humorous articles
      and sketches&mdash;'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&mdash;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&mdash;a "bestseller"
      for forty years!
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;notably 'By Rail through France' (later
      incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)&mdash;because of their perfect
      gravity. At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'&mdash;a story which has been said
      to contain the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of
      mediaevalism&mdash;won the enthusiastic approval of Bret Harte.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;up early
      experiences, acquired through grappling with life in many a rude
      encounter.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;shall I say?&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;circles of
      America and Europe&mdash;New England, New York, Berlin, Vienna, London,
      Glasgow; the academic degrees&mdash;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&mdash;and accomplished one year sooner than he expected&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="pp065.jpg (82K)" src="images/pp065.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of the
      man than that he was a good citizen. He possessed in 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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".
    </p>
    <p>
      The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and
      normality. The homeliest virtues of life were his the 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="pp069.jpg (50K)" src="images/pp069.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      <a name="humorist" id="humorist">THE HUMORIST</a>
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <blockquote>
          <blockquote>
            <p>
              <i> "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."</i><br /> GILBERT K. CHESTERTON:
              Charles Dickens.
            </p>
          </blockquote>
        </blockquote>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;journalistic, untamed, primitive.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;these and many another were drawn
      from the very life. In writing of his time <i>a propo</i> of himself, Mark
      Twain succeeded in telling the truth about humanity in general and for any
      time.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the main&mdash;though there are noteworthy exceptions&mdash;Mark
      Twain's works originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life. He is
      a master humorist&mdash;which is only another way of saying that he is a
      master psychologist with the added gift of humour&mdash;because he looked
      upon himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of
      universally human characteristics. <i>Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi
      alienum est</i>&mdash;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"&mdash;&mdash;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&mdash;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'.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>diablerie</i>, 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&mdash;Mark Twain!
    </p>
    <p>
      To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
      humorist&mdash;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&mdash;paradoxical as it may sound&mdash;not humour, not
      wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that might be associated with
      his name, but&mdash;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&mdash;"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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>une chose vue</i>, 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:
    </p>
    <p>
      "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&mdash;by
      a d&mdash;-d sight."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;if only some lady would lend him a live baby. There is
      the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious anecdote of
      Higgins.
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          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.
        </p>
        <p>
          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."
        </p>
        <p>
          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."
        </p>
        <p>
          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.'"
        </p>
        <p>
          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."
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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 <i>imprevu</i>. 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'.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;first one sleeve, then the other, velvet
      collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the camel struck a
      batch of manuscript&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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'.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;these with a native sense of incongruities and a glorious
      vein of exaggeration."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;though
      it is one of the lowest forms of humour&mdash;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&mdash;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"&mdash;is an
      admirable example of the mechanical fooling of self-ridicule.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;not like that of Juvenal or Hierocles&mdash;acrid,
      or devoid of anything individual&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>faux pa</i> he committed at his first
      public lecture is humorous for any age and society. The sign announcing
      the lecture read&mdash;"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&mdash;not to investigate, but to
      respond!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;but
      even then, always as an infant in arms!
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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 <i>nil admirari</i>
      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 <i>naif</i>, 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&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;though he regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old
      masters&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;simply
      because there is nothing in him to respond to the glory that was Greece,
      to the grandeur that was Rome&mdash;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 "&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance&mdash;Fitch's precept
      not to "sell" his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their
      endurance of the irreverent too far&mdash;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&mdash;the
      humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car, so
      to speak&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;the
      exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality to expediency&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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,&mdash;a
      forthright lay sermon,&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="pp105.jpg (59K)" src="images/pp105.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;I've&mdash;(another pause)&mdash;been&mdash;(a longer pause)&mdash;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&mdash;and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign missions
      slowly oozed away&mdash;one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even lower
      still&mdash;so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put in
      ten cents and took out a quarter!
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <p>
      "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&mdash;fourteen hours from Boston, bound for Kittery Point with&mdash;with
      nothing to speak of!' That eloquent word 'only' expressed the deeps of his
      stricken humbleness.
    </p>
    <p>
      "And what is my case? During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four&mdash;not
      more than that&mdash;I stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am
      properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann'&mdash;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&mdash;homeward bound!"
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;like that curious, detached and high note in which a great
      piece of music suddenly ends&mdash;'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&mdash;with their double significance&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a wit rather than a humorist&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;he always felt that they hadn't said enough!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;"; 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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'!"
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          MY DEAR SIR&mdash;
        </p>
        <p>
          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.
        </p>
        <p>
          Yours gratefully,<br /> S. L. CLEMENS.
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      The sign he posted after the visitation of these same burglars was a
      prominent ornament of the billiard room at "Stormfield ":
    </p>
    <blockquote>
            <p>
              NOTICE
            </p>
            <p>
              To the next Burglar
            </p>
            <p>
              There is nothing but plated-ware in this house, now<br /> and
              henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing<br /> in the
              dining-room over in the corner by the basket of<br /> kittens. If
              you want the basket, put the kittens in<br /> the brass thing.
            </p>
            <p>
              Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family.
            </p>
            <p>
              You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing<br /> which
              has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think<br /> they call it,
              or pergola, or something like that.
            </p>
            <p>
              Please close the door when you go away!
            </p>
            <p>
              Very truly yours,
            </p>
            <p>
              S. L. CLEMENS.
            </p>
          </blockquote>
    <p>
      Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as we
      are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain&mdash;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&mdash;unfortunately, a motto that he never followed&mdash;has
      often been attributed, because of its canny shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew
      Carnegie. The idea was to put all your eggs in one basket&mdash;and then&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Oh! we'll all get blind drunk<br /> When Johnny comes marching home!"
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they
      range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony&mdash;from
      Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human tears:
    </p>
    <p>
      "<i>Sunt lachrymae rerum.</i>"
    </p>
    <p>
      "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&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      "<i>C'est une etrange entreprise que celle<br /> de faire rire les honnetes
      gens.</i>"
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>ce qui remu</i> from <i>ce qui emeut</i>;
      and if <i>remuag</i> 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&mdash;which is
      infinitely more significant&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;the art of exactitude, precision and detail.
      Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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'&mdash;which was greeted with bursts of uproarious laughter. 'But
      this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated&mdash;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'&mdash;at which the audience almost went into convulsions of
      laughter."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;to Mark Twain&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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."
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="pp129.jpg (46K)" src="images/pp129.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      <a name="genius" id="genius">THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS</a>
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <blockquote>
          <blockquote>
            <p>
              <i> "Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life,<br />
              but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the<br /> whole
              world the art of common life&mdash;the art of a people&mdash;<br />
              universal art."<br /></i>
            </p>
            <p>
              TOLSTOY: What is Art?
            </p>
          </blockquote>
        </blockquote>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      Some years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in a spirit of fun,
      addressed a letter to:
    </p>
    <p>
      MARK TWAIN<br /> GOD KNOWS WHERE.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <p>
      MARK TWAIN<br /> THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.
    </p>
    <p>
      It seemed that "he" did, too!
    </p>
    <p>
      In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide&mdash;a
      fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted
      theological characters. From very humble beginnings&mdash;he used
      facetiously to speak of coming up from the "very dregs of society"!&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;individual, literary, social, racial,
      national&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <blockquote>
        <p>
          "Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog' should be mentioned in the first place as
          one of his most popular little stories&mdash;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.
        </p>
        <p>
          "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.
        </p>
        <p>
          "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&mdash;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.
        </p>
        <p>
          "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&mdash;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.
        </p>
        <p>
          "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&mdash;in spite of the wit with which certain pages
          sparkle&mdash;we must say that this voyage is very far below the less
          celebrated excursions of the same author in his own country."
        </p>
      </blockquote>
    <p>
      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'&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>vis comic</i> 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&mdash;an
      appreciation by no means inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to
      that won in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic countries&mdash;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 <i>imprevu</i>.
      There was, even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an
      intelligence absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence
      for traditionary views <i>qu</i> 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 <i>blase</i>
      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."
    </p>
    <p>
      Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is just and authentic&mdash;the
      Attic flavour of <i>l'esprit Gauloi</i> 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 <i>Ausschauung</i>.
      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."
    </p>
    <p>
      In Italy, as in France, the peculiar <i>timbr</i> of Mark Twain's humour
      found an audience not wholly sympathetic, not thoroughly <i>au courant</i>
      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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;vast
      and novel&mdash;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 <i>phantastischen, grossdimensionalen</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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"&mdash;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, <i>ist der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz
      verbunden</i>, 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&mdash;striking conjunction!&mdash;Ralph Waldo Emerson and
      Mark Twain.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;the
      City of London Artillery&mdash;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 <i>qui
      vive</i>, very well interested, and gently simmering with amusement. With
      the exception of one exquisite description of the old Magdalen ivy&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony
      of Swift, the <i>gros se</i> 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&mdash;the least trammelled piece of
      literature in the language," and 'Life on the Mississippi', vastly
      appreciated in England as in Germany for its <i>cultur-historisch</i>
      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&mdash;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 <i>entente cordial</i> 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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>dict</i> of the <i>literati</i>. 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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;or
      even to themselves&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;a
      strangely barbaric and primitive life&mdash;straight in the face. This is
      the first great transformation in his life&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;broadening,
      deepening, enlarging its vision with the passage of the years.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
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    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;or even
      accurate!&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;or fell&mdash;by
      force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled
      for fortune, for competence&mdash;or for existence. It was a case of the
      survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature&mdash;the burning alkali
      desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>expos</i> 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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
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    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;those characteristics which constitute the basis of his
      success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the practical efficiency, the
      shrewdness and the hard common&mdash;sense. It is the last phase in the
      formation of the national type.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;made man in the self&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>par
      excellence</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a
      composite American type, lay something deeper still&mdash;that indefinable
      <i>je ne sais quo</i> which procured him international fame. Humour alone
      is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result&mdash;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&mdash;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"&mdash;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,&mdash;as I should prefer
      to phrase it,&mdash;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&mdash;the dull and
      vacuous life&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;a
      confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has never experienced.
    </p>
    <p>
      If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen, as
      minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs&mdash;such, for example,
      as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on
      the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life&mdash;the
      influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and
      thought&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;learned them with a knowledge, so
      searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring
      investiture of art.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;winded
      and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To offset these manifest
      lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;for humour is his prevalent
      mood&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;the
      art of common life&mdash;the art of a people&mdash;universal art." His
      spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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"&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;maintaining
      that he could stand any society. All that he cared to know was that a man
      was a human being&mdash;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&mdash;if there is any secret&mdash;," 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&mdash;musingly&mdash;" Humour, like morality, has its
      eternal verities."
    </p>
    <p>
      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;
    </p>
    <p>
      'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well
      be regarded as the supreme American morality&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <div class="fig" style="width:80%">
      <img alt="pp179.jpg (33K)" src="images/pp179.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
    </div>
    <p>
      > <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      <a name="philosopher" id="philosopher">PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST</a>
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <table summary="">
      <tr>
        <td>
          <p>
            "Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward<br /> towards a
            summit where you will find your chiefest<br /> pleasure in conduct
            which, while contenting you, will<br /> be sure to confer benefits
            upon your neighbour and the<br /> community."<br /> MARK TWAIN: 'What
            is Man?'
          </p>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <p>
      "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.&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;now that Mark Twain has poured over Abelard the vials of his
      wrath.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;to her should go the credit&mdash;for any deeply serious
      or moral influence my subsequent work may exert. After my marriage, she
      edited everything I wrote. And what is more&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      Indeed, to the reflective mind&mdash;and it is to be presumed that by that
      standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;and with an "All right, then, I'll go to hell," he tore
      up the letter.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;I done druv dat hack myself"!
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;and after awhile you
      will thereby attain to moral perfection! It is not enough to commit just
      one crime or two&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;he withdrew, he
      retired that water-melon. After getting safely away to a secluded spot, he
      broke the water-melon open&mdash;only to find that it was green, the
      greenest water-melon of the year.
    </p>
    <p>
      The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry. He began
      to reflect&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;melon&mdash;what there
      was left of it&mdash;to the farmer and&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical
      suggestion&mdash;a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his
      literal words&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>Diabolus ex machin</i> wrote to the betrayed villagers, he sneers
      at their old and lofty reputation for honesty&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;had I needed to be convinced&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark Twain
      for three events&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;as who would not?&mdash;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!
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>reductio
      ad absurdu</i> 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&mdash;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&mdash;a
      valuable piece of information that leaves him, and all who are so
      fortunate as to hear it, the better for the knowledge&mdash;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&mdash;a prize which Mr Shaw
      hurled back with indignation and scorn!
    </p>
    <p>
      Mark Twain was a great humorist&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;for it had a wonderfully beautiful,
      patriarchal side&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind the
      most vivid pictures&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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 <i>reconcentrad</i> 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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as
      unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men&mdash;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."
    </p>
    <p>
      '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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">





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