MARK TWAIN
With Mark Twain, American literature became for the first time really
national. He was the first man of letters of any distinction to be
born west of the Mississippi. He spent his boyhood and young manhood
near the heart of the continent, along the great river during the
vital era when it was the boundary line between known and unknown
America, and when it resounded from end to end with the shouts and the
confusion of the first great migration from the East; he lived for six
thrilling years in the camps and the boom towns and the excited cities
of Nevada and California; and then, at thirty-one, a raw product of
the raw West, he turned his face to the Atlantic Coast, married a rare
soul from one of the refined families of New York State, and settled
down to a literary career in New England, with books and culture and
trips abroad, until in his old age Oxford University could confer upon
him--"Tom Sawyer," whose schooling in the ragged river town had ended
before he was twelve--the degree that had come to America only as borne
by two or three of the Brahmins of New England. Only America, and
America at a certain period, could produce a paradox like that.
Mark Twain interpreted the West from the standpoint of a native. The
group of humorists who had first brought to the East the Western
spirit and the new laughter had all of them been reared in the older
sections. John Phoenix and Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were born in
New England, and Nasby and many of the others were natives of New York
State. All of them in late boyhood had gone West as to a wonderland and
had breathed the new atmosphere as something strange and exhilarating,
but Mark Twain was native born. He was himself a part of the West; he
removed from it so as to see it in true perspective, and so became its
best interpreter. Hawthorne had once expressed a wish to see some part
of America "where the damned shadow of Europe has never fallen." Mark
Twain spent his life until he was thirty in such unshadowed places.
When he wrote he wrote without a thought of other writings; it was as
if the West itself was dictating its autobiography.
I
The father of Mark Twain, John Clemens, a dreamer and an idealist,
had left Virginia with his young wife early in the twenties to join
the restless tide that even then was setting strongly westward. Their
first settlement was at Gainsborough, Tennessee, where was born their
first son, Orion, but they remained there not long. Indeed, like all
emigrants of their type, they remained nowhere long. During the next
ten or eleven years five other children were born to them at four
different stations along the line of their westward progress. When
the fifth child arrived, to be christened Samuel Langhorne, they were
living at Florida, Missouri, a squalid little hamlet fifty miles west
of the Mississippi. That was November 30, 1835. Four years later they
made what proved to be their last move, settling at Hannibal, Missouri,
a small river town about a hundred miles above St. Louis. Here it
was that the future Mark Twain spent the next fourteen years, those
formative years between four and eighteen that determine so greatly the
bent of the later life.
The Hannibal of the forties and the fifties was hardly a town one
would pick deliberately for the education of a great man of letters.
It lay just a few miles above the northern line of Pike County--that
Pike County, Missouri, that gave name to the shiftless, hand-to-mouth,
ague-shaken type of humanity later to be celebrated so widely as
the Pike. Hannibal was not a Pike community, but it was typically
southwestern in its somnolent, slave-holding, care-free atmosphere. The
one thing that forever rescued it from the commonplace was the River,
the tremendous Mississippi, source of endless dreams and romance. Mark
Twain has given us a picture, perfect as an etching, of this river and
the little town that nestled beside it:
After all these years I can picture that old time to myself
now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the
sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty
nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water
Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back
against the wall, chins on breast, hats slouched over their
faces, asleep--with shingle shavings enough around to show
what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along
the sidewalk, doing a good business in water-melon rinds and
seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered
around the "levee"; a pile of "skids" on the slope of the
stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in
the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the
wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the
wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic,
the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along,
shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side;
the "point" above the town, and the "point" below, bounding the
river glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal
a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film
of dark smoke appears above one of these remote "points";
instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and
prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, "S-t-e-a-m boat a-comin'!"
and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake
up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store
pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the
dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go
hurrying to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the
people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder
they are seeing for the first time.... The furnace doors are
open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black
with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm,
imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke
are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys--a husbanded
grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving
at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad
stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand
stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in
his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gage-cocks;
the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then
they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is
at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to
get ashore, and to take in freight, and to discharge freight,
all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as
the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer
is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black
smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the
town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids
once more.[25]
It was the romance of this river, the vastness and the mystery of it,
the great unknown world which lay beyond those "points" where all
things disappeared, that made of the boy a restless soul, a dreamer
and an idealist--that made of him indeed the Mark Twain of the later
years. His books nowhere rise into the pure serene of literature unless
touched at some point by this magic stream that flowed so marvelously
through his boyhood. The two discoverers of the Mississippi were De
Soto and Mark Twain.
The first crisis in the boy's life came in his twelfth year, when the
death of his father sent him as an apprentice to a country newspaper
office, that most practical and most exacting of all training schools
for youth. Two years on the Missouri _Courier_, four years on the
Hannibal _Journal_, then the restlessness of his clan sent him
wandering into the East even as it had sent Artemus Ward and Nasby
into the West. For fifteen months he served as compositor in New York
City and Philadelphia, then a great homesickness for the river came
upon him. From boyhood it had been his dream to be the pilot of a
Mississippi steamboat; all other professions seemed flat and lifeless
compared with that satisfying and boundless field of action; and it
is not strange that in April, 1857, we find him installed as Horace
Bixby's "cub" at the beginning of a new career.
During the next four years he gave himself heart and soul to the almost
superhuman task of committing to memory every sandbar and point and
landmark in twelve hundred miles of a shifting, treacherous river.
The difficulties he has explained fully in his book. It was a college
course of four years, and no man ever had a better one. To quote his
own words:
In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly
acquainted with all the different types of human nature that
are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find
a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally
take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I
have known him before--met him on the river.[26]
It taught him far more than this. The pilot of a great Mississippi boat
was a man with peculiar responsibilities. The lives of the passengers
and the safety of the cargo were absolutely in his hands. His authority
was above even the captain's. Only picked men of courage and judgment
with a self-reliance that never wavered in any crisis were fit material
for pilots. To quote Horace Bixby, the most noted of them all:
There were no signal lights along the shore in those days,
and no searchlights on the vessels; everything was blind, and
on a dark, misty night in a river full of snags and shifting
sand-bars and changing shores, a pilot's judgment had to be
founded on _absolute certainty_.[27]
Under such conditions men were valued only for what they actually could
do. There was no entrance into the inner circle of masters of the
river save through genuineness and real efficiency. Sentimentalizing
and boasting and sham died instantly in that stern atmosphere. To live
for four years in daily contact with such men taught one coarseness of
speech and an appalling fluency in the use of profanity, but it taught
one at the same time to look with supreme contempt upon inefficiency
and pretense.
The "cub" became at length a pilot, to be entrusted after a time
with some of the finest boats on the river. He became very efficient
in his hard-learned profession so conspicuously so that he won the
commendation even of Bixby, who could say in later years, "Sam Clemens
never had an accident either as a steersman or as a pilot, except once
when he got aground for a few hours in the _bagasse_ (cane) smoke,
with no damage to any one."[28] But the war put a sudden end to the
piloting. The river was closed, and in April, 1861, he went reluctantly
back to Hannibal. "I loved the profession far better than any I have
ever followed since," he declared in his later years, "and I took a
measureless pride in it." It is very possible that but for the war
and the change which it wrought upon the river, Mark Twain might have
passed his whole life as a Mississippi pilot.
II
After a few weeks in a self-recruited troop that fell to pieces before
it could join the Confederate army, the late pilot, now twenty-six
years old, started by stage coach across the Plains with his brother
Orion, who had just been appointed secretary to the new Governor of
Nevada. It was Mark Twain's entry upon what, in college terms, may be
called his graduate course. It was six years long and it covered one of
the most picturesque eras in the history of Western America.
For a few restive months he remained at Carson City as his brother's
assistant, then in characteristic fashion he broke away to join
the excited tide of gold seekers that was surging through all the
mountains of Nevada. During the next year he lived in mining camps with
prospectors and eager claim-holders. Luck, however, seemed against
him; at least it promised him little as a miner, and when the Virginia
City _Enterprise_, to which he had contributed letters, offered him a
position on its staff of reporters, he jumped at the opportunity.
Now for two years he lived at the very heart of the mining regions of
the West, in Virginia City, the home of the Comstock lode, then at
its highest boom. Everything about him--the newness and rawness of
things, the peculiar social conditions, the atmosphere of recklessness
and excitement, the money that flowed everywhere in fabulous
quantities--everything was unique. Even the situation of the city was
remarkable. Hingston, who visited it with Artemus Ward while Mark
Twain was still a member of the _Enterprise_ staff, speaks of it as
"perched up on the side of Mt. Davidson some five or six thousand feet
above sea level, with a magnificent view before us of the desert....
Nothing but arid rocks and sandy plains sprinkled with sage brush. No
village for full two hundred miles, and any number of the worst type of
Indians--the Goshoots--agreeably besprinkling the path."[29] Artemus
Ward estimated its population at twelve thousand. He was impressed
by its wildness, "its splendid streets paved with silver ore," "its
unadulterated cussedness," its vigilance committee "which hangs the
more vicious of the pestiferous crowd," and its fabulous output of
silver which is "melted down into bricks the size of common house
bricks, then loaded into huge wagons, each drawn by eight and twelve
mules, and sent off to San Francisco."[30]
It was indeed a strange area of life that passed before the young
Mississippi pilot. For two winters he was sent down to report the new
legislature of the just-organized territory, and it was while engaged
in this picturesque gala task that he sent back his letters signed for
the first time Mark Twain. That was the winter of 1863. It was time
now for him to seek a wider field. Accordingly, the following May he
went down to San Francisco, where at length he found employment on the
_Morning Call_.
Now for the first time the young reporter found himself in a literary
atmosphere. Poets and sketch-writers and humorists were everywhere.
There was at least one flourishing literary journal, the _Golden Era_,
and its luxuriously appointed office was the literary center of the
Pacific Coast. "Joaquin Miller recalls from an old diary, kept by him
then, having seen Adah Isaacs Menken, Prentice Mulford, Bret Harte,
Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mark Twain, Orpheus C. Kerr,
Artemus Ward, Gilbert Densmore, W. S. Kendall, and Mrs. Hitchcock
assembled there at one time."[31] Charles Henry Webb was just starting
a literary weekly, the _Californian_, and when, a year later, Bret
Harte was made its editor, Mark Twain was added to the contributing
staff. It was the real beginning of his literary career. He received
now helpful criticism. In a letter written in after years to Thomas
Bailey Aldrich he says:
Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until
he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness
to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a
certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest
people in the land.[32]
To the _Californian_ and the _Era_ he now contributed that series
of sketches which later was drawn upon for material for his first
published book. But the old restlessness was upon him again. He struck
out into the Tuolumne Hills with Jim Gillis as a pocket miner and for
months lived as he could in shacks and camps, panning between drenching
showers worthless gravel, expecting every moment to find gold. He found
no gold, but he found what was infinitely richer. In later years in a
letter to Gillis he wrote:
It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days.
Still it shouldn't, for right in the depths of their poverty
and their pocket-hunting vagabondage lay the germ of my coming
good fortune. You remember the one gleam of jollity that shot
across our dismal sojourn in the rain and mud of Angel's
Camp--I mean that day we sat around the tavern and heard that
chap tell about the frog and how they filled him with shot.
And you remember how we quoted from the yarn and laughed over
it out there on the hillside while you and dear old Stoker
panned and washed. I jotted the story down in my note-book that
day, and would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars
for it--I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up. I
published that story, and it became widely known in America,
India, China, England, and the reputation it made for me has
paid me thousands and thousands of dollars since.[33]
The publication in New York, May 1, 1867, of _The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches_ and the delivery a week
later by the author of _The Jumping Frog_ of a lecture on the Sandwich
Islands marks the end of the period of preparation in Mark Twain's
life. A new American author had arrived.
III
Send this Mississippi pilot, printer, adventurer, miner in rough camps
of the Sierras, to Paris, Italy, Constantinople, and the Holy Land, and
what will be his impressions? For an answer we must read _The Innocents
Abroad_. It will be no _Outre Mer_, we are certain of that, and no
_Pencillings by the Way_. Before a line of it was written an atmosphere
had been created unique in American literature, for where, save in the
California of 1867, was there ever optimism, nay, romanticism, that
could reply instantly to the young reporter who asked to be sent on a
Don Quixote pilgrimage to Europe and the Orient, "Go. Twelve hundred
and fifty dollars will be paid for you before the vessel sails, and
your only instructions are that you will continue to write at such
times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style
that heretofore secured you the favor of the readers of the _Alta
California_"?
It was not to be a tour of Europe, as Longfellow and Willis and Taylor
had made it, the pilgrimage of a devotee to holy shrines; it was to
be a great picnic with sixty-seven in the picnic party. Moreover, the
recorder of it was bound by his instructions to report it in the style
that had won him California fame. It was to be a Western book, written
by a Westerner from the Western standpoint, but this does not imply
that his Western readers expected an illiterate production full of
coarseness and rude wit. California had produced a school of poets and
romancers; she had serious literary journals, and she was proud of
them. The letters, if California was to set her stamp of approval upon
them, must have literary charm; they must have, moreover, freshness
and originality; and they must sparkle with that spirit of humor which
already had begun to be recognized as a native product.
We open the book and linger a moment over the preface:
Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic, it has a
purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how _he_ would be
likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with
his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in
those countries before him. I make small pretence of showing
any one how he _ought_ to look at objects of interest beyond
the sea--other books do that, and therefore, even if I were
competent to do it, there is no need.
I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of
travel-writing that may be charged against me--for I think I
have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at
least honestly, whether wisely or not.
Let us read the book straight through. We are impressed with the fact
that, despite the supposition of its first readers, it is not primarily
a humorous work. It is a genuine book of travels. It is first of all an
honest record, even as its author averred. In the second place it is
the book of a young man, a young man on a lark and full of the highest
spirits. The world is good--it is a good show, though it is full of
absurdities and of humbugs that should be exposed. The old stock jokes
of the grand tour--the lack of soap, the charge for candles, the
meeting of supposed foreigners who break unexpectedly into the best of
English, and all the well-known others--were new to the public then and
they came with freshness. Then it is the book of one who saw, even as
he claimed, with his own eyes. This genuine American, with his training
on the river and the wild frontier where men and things are what they
_are_, no more and no less, will be impressed only with genuineness. He
will describe things precisely as he sees them. Gibraltar "is pushed
out into the sea on the end of a flat, narrow strip of land, and is
suggestive of a 'gob' of mud on the end of a shingle"; of the Coliseum:
"everybody recognizes at once that 'looped and windowed' bandbox with a
side bitten out"; and of a famous river: "It is popular to admire the
Arno. It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and
some scows floating around. It would be a very passable river if they
would pump some water into it." That was not written for a joke: it
was the way the Arno honestly impressed the former Mississippi pilot.
He is not always critical. Genuineness and real worth never fail to
impress him. Often he stands before a landscape, a city, a cathedral,
as enthusiastic as any of the older school of travelers. The book is
full of vivid descriptions, some of them almost poetic in their spirit
and diction. But things must be what they pretend to be, or they will
disgust him. Everywhere there is scorn for the mere echoer of the
enthusiasm of others. He will not gush over an unworthy thing even if
he knows the whole world has gushed over it. Da Vinci's "Last Supper,"
painted on a dilapidated wall and stained and scarred and dimmed, may
once have been beautiful, he admits, but it is not so now. The pilgrims
who stand before it "able to speak only in catchy ejaculations of
rapture" fill him with wrath. "How can they see what is not visible?"
The work of the old masters fills him always with indignation. They
painted not Hebrews in their scriptural pieces, but Italians. "Their
nauseous adulation of princely patrons was more prominent to me and
claimed my attention more than the charms of color." "Raphael pictured
such infernal villains as Catherine and Marie de Medicis seated in
heaven conversing familiarly with the Virgin Mary and the angels (to
say nothing of higher personages), and yet my friends abuse me because
I am a little prejudiced against the old masters."
Here we have a note that was to become more and more emphatic in Mark
Twain's work with every year he lived: his indignation at oppression
and insincerity. The cathedrals of Italy lost their beauty for him
when he saw the misery of the population. He stood before the Grand
Duomo of Florence. "Like all other men I fell down and worshiped it,
but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too
striking, too suggestive, and I said 'O sons of classic Italy, _is_ the
spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead
within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your
church?' Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that
cathedral."
Everywhere he strikes out at sentimentality. When he learns how Abelard
deliberately sacrificed Heloise to his own selfish ideals, he bursts
out: "The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug
in my ignorance! I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about
this sort of people, until I have read them up and know whether they
are entitled to any tearful attentions or not." He is eager to see a
French "grissette," but having seen one, bursts out in true Artemus
Ward fashion: "Aroint thee, wench! I sorrow for the vagabond student
of the Latin Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him.
Thus topples to the earth another idol of my infancy." The story of
Petrarch's love for Laura only fills him with pity for the outrageously
treated "Mr. Laura," the unknown husband of the heroine, who bore the
burden but got none of the glory, and when they tell the thrilling
legend of the old medieval castle, he makes only the comment, "Splendid
legend--splendid lie--drive on!"
It was a blow at the whole school of American travel writers; it marked
the passing of an era. Bret Harte in the first volume of the _Overland
Monthly_ (1868), was the first to outline the Western standpoint:
The days of sentimental journeyings are over. The dear old book
of travel ... is a thing of the past. Sentimental musings on
foreign scenes are just now restricted to the private diaries
of young and impressible ladies and clergymen with affections
of the bronchial tubes.... A race of good humored, engaging
iconoclasts seem to have precipitated themselves upon the old
altars of mankind, and like their predecessors of the eighth
century, have paid particular attention to the holy church.
Mr. Howells has slashed one or two sacred pictorial canvases
with his polished rapier; Mr. Swift has made one or two neat
long shots with a rifled Parrott, and Mr. Mark Twain has used
brickbats on stained glass windows with damaging effect.
And those gentlemen have certainly brought down a heap of
rubbish.[34]
It was the voice of the new West and of the new era. With _The
Innocents Abroad_ begins the new period in American literature. The
book is full of the new after-the-war Americanism that did its own
thinking, that saw with its own eyes, that put a halo upon nothing
save genuineness and substantial worth. It must not be forgotten
that America even in the new seventies was still mawkish with
sentimentality. The very year _The Innocents Abroad_ appeared, _Gates
Ajar_ sold twenty editions. Mark Twain came into the age like the Goths
into Rome. Stand on the solid earth, he cried. Look with your own
eyes. Worship nothing but truth and genuineness. Europe is no better
than America. Como is beautiful, but it is not so beautiful as Tahoe.
Why this eternal glorification of things simply and solely because
it is the conventional thing to glorify them? "The critic," he wrote
in later years to Andrew Lang, "has actually imposed upon the world
the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the
civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more
than the hurdy gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the Latin
classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle note; and Jonathan Edwards
than the Salvation Army."[35] The new American democracy was speaking.
To the man who for four years had learned in the school of Horace Bixby
there was no high and no low save as measured, not by appearances or by
tradition, but by intrinsic worth.
IV
It has been customary in libraries to place the earlier works of Mark
Twain on the same shelf as those of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings.
To the thousands who laughed at him as he lectured from year to year
he was a mere maker of fun. The public that bought such enormous
editions of _The Innocents Abroad_ and _Roughing It_ bought them as
books to laugh over. What shall we say to-day of Mark Twain's humor? A
generation has arisen to whom he is but a tradition and a set of books;
what is the verdict of this generation?
First of all, it is necessary that we examine the man himself. Nature
seems to have forced him into the ranks of the comedians. From his
mother he inherited a drawl that was inexpressibly funny; he had a
laughable personality, and a laughable angle from which he looked at
life. He could no more help provoking mirth than he could help being
himself. Moreover, he had been thrown during his formative years into a
veritable training school for humorists. On the river and in the mines
and the raw towns and cities of the West, he had lived in a gale of
high spirits, of loud laughter, of practical jokes, and droll stories
that had gone the rough round of the boats or the camps. His humor,
therefore, was an echo of the laughter of elemental men who have been
flung into conditions full of incongruities and strange contrasts. It
is the humor of exaggeration run wild, of youthful high spirits, of
rough practical jokes, of understatement, of irreverence, and gross
absurdity.
But the personality of Mark Twain no longer can give life to his humor;
the atmosphere in which it first appeared has gone forever; the man
himself is becoming a mere legend, shadowy and more and more distorted;
his humor must be judged now like that of Cervantes and Shakespeare,
apart from author and times. How does it stand the test? Not at all
well. There are the high spirits of the new West in it--that element
has not evaporated--and there is in it a personal touch, a drollery
that was his individual contribution to humor. There was a certain
drawl in his pen as well as in his tongue. It is this alone that saves
much of his humorous work from flatness. Concerning _The Jumping Frog_,
for instance, Haweis asks in true British way, "What, I should like to
know, is the fun of saying that a frog who has been caused to swallow
a quantity of shot cannot jump so high as he could before?" The answer
is that there is no fun save in the way the story is told; in other
words, save in the incomparable drawl of Mark Twain's pen. One can only
illustrate:
The feller ... give it back to Smiley, and says, very
deliberate, "Well, I don't see no pints about that frog that's
any better'n any other frog."
"May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand
frogs, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had
experience, and may be you ain't, only a amature, as it were.
Any ways I've got _my_ opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars
that he can out-jump any frog in Calaveras county."
And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad
like, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog;
but if I had a frog, I'd bet you!"
Or take this episode from _The Innocents Abroad_ where he tells of his
sensations one night as a boy upon awakening and finding the body of a
murdered man on the floor of his room:
I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any
sort of a hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient. I went
out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did
not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was
to leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was
considerably agitated.
All this and the hundreds of pages like it in _The Innocents Abroad_
and _Roughing It_ and the later books is excellent drollery, but had
Mark Twain written nothing else than this he would be as dead now as an
author as even "Doesticks." His drollery is best in the work that lies
nearest to the source of his first inspiration. As the Western days
faded from his memory, his comedy became more and more forced, until it
could reach at last the inane flatness of _Adam's Diary_ and flatter
still, _Eve's Diary_.
The humor that lives, however, is not drollery; it must be embodied
in a humorous character like Falstaff, for instance, or Don Quixote.
The most of Mark Twain's fun comes from exaggerated situations with
no attempt at characterization, and therein lies his weakness as a
humorist. Huckleberry Finn and Colonel Sellers come the nearest to
being humorous creations, but Huckleberry Finn is but a bit of _genre_,
the eternal bad boy in a Pike County costume, and Colonel Sellers is
but a preliminary study toward a character, a shadowy figure that we
feel constantly to be on the point of jumping into greatness without
ever actually arriving. Narrowly as he may have missed the mark in
these two characters, Mark Twain cannot be classed with the great
humorists.
V
There are three Mark Twains: there is Mark Twain, the droll comedian,
who wrote for the masses and made them laugh; there is Mark Twain, the
indignant protester, who arose ever and anon to true eloquence in his
denunciation of tyranny and pretense; and there is Mark Twain, the
romancer, who in his boyhood had dreamed by the great river and who
later caught the romance of a period in American life. The masterpiece
of the first is _The Jumping Frog_, of the second _The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg_, and of the third _Life on the Mississippi_ and
_Roughing It_.
It is this third Mark Twain that still lives and that will continue
to live in American literature. He saw with distinctness a unique
area of American life. As the brief and picturesque era faded away
he caught the sunset glory of it and embodied it in romance--the
steamboat days on the river in the slavery era, the old regime in the
South, the barbarism of the Plains, the great buffalo herds, the wild
camps in the gold fields of Nevada and California. In half a dozen
books: _Roughing It_, _Life on the Mississippi_, _The Gilded Age_ (a
few chapters of it), _Tom Sawyer_, _Huckleberry Finn_, _Pudd'nhead
Wilson_, he has done work that can never be done again. The world
that these books depict has vanished as completely as the Bagdad of
Haroun al Raschid. Not only has he told the story of this vanished
world, illustrating it with descriptions and characterizations that
are like Flemish portraits, but he has caught and held the spirit of
it, and he has thrown over it all the nameless glow of romance. It is
as golden a land that he leads us through as any we may find in Scott,
and yet it was drawn from the life with painstaking care. Scott and
Bulwer and Cooper angered Mark Twain. They were careless of facts, they
were sentimental, they misinterpreted the spirit of the times they
depicted and the men and women who lived in them, but these six books
of Mark Twain may be placed among the source books of American history.
Nowhere else can one catch so truly certain phases of the spirit of the
mid-nineteenth century West. Over every page of them may be written
those words from the preface of _The Innocents Abroad_, "I am sure I
have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not."
The books are six chapters of autobiography. _Tom Sawyer_ and
_Huckleberry Finn_ are recollections of that boyhood by the river after
so long a time had elapsed that the day-dreams and boyish imaginings
were recorded as real happenings; _Life on the Mississippi_ records
that romantic adventure of his young manhood as he recalled it in later
days when the old piloting era had vanished like a dream of boyhood;
_The Gilded Age_, a book of glorious fragments, has in it his uncle
James Lampton drawn from life and renamed Colonel Sellers; _Roughing
It_ bubbles over with the joy and the high spirits and the excitement
of those marvelous days when the author and the West were young
together; and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ gives the tragedy of slavery as it
passed before his boyish eyes. These books and _The Innocents Abroad_
are Mark Twain's contribution to the library of American classics. The
rest of his enormously large output, despite brilliant passages here
and there, does not greatly matter.
They are not artistic books. The author had little skill in
construction. He excelled in brilliant dashes, not in long-continued
effort. He was his own Colonel Sellers, restless, idealistic, Quixotic.
What he did he did with his whole soul without restraint or sense of
proportion. There is in all he wrote a lack of refinement, kept at a
minimum, to be sure, by his wife, who for years was his editor and
severest critic, but likely at any moment to crop out. His books, all
of them, are monotones, a running series of episodes and descriptions
all of the same value, never reaching dramatic climax. The episodes
themselves, however, are told with graphic intensity; some of them are
gems well-nigh perfect. Here is a picture of the famous pony express of
the Plains:
The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of
spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night
his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or
summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether
his "beat" was a level straight road or a crazy trail over
mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through
peaceful regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be
always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind.
He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight,
starlight, or through the blackness of darkness--just as it
happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer
and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost
speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the
station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient
steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the
twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out
of sight before the spectator could hardly get the ghost of a
look.
We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a
pony-rider, but somehow or other all that had passed us and all
that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard
only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was
gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now
we were expecting one along every moment, and we would see him
in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims:
"Here he comes!"
Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider.
Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck
appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well,
I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and
rider, rising and falling, rising and falling--sweeping toward
us nearer and nearer--growing more and more distinct, more and
more sharply defined--nearer and still nearer, and the flutter
of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear--another instant a whoop
and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand,
but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces,
and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm.
The steamboat race and the explosion in chapter four of _The Gilded
Age_ have few equals in any language for mere picturing power. He deals
largely with the out-of-doors. His canvases are bounded only by the
horizon: the Mississippi, the great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Mono
Lake, the Alkali Deserts, and the Sierras--he has handled a continent.
Only Joaquin Miller and John Muir have used canvases as vast.
Huckleberry Finn's floating journey down the river on his raft has in
it something of the spirit of _The Odyssey_ and _Pilgrim's Progress_
and _Don Quixote_. Had Mark Twain's constructive skill and his ability
to trace the growth of a human soul been equal to his picturing power,
his Defoe-like command of detail and situation, and his mastery of
phrase and of narrative, he might have said the last word in American
fiction. He was a product of his section and of his education. College
and university would have made of him an artist like Holmes, brilliant,
refined, and messageless. It would have robbed him of the very
fountain-head of his power. It was his to work not from books but from
life itself, to teach truth and genuineness of life, to turn the eyes
of America from the romance of Europe to her own romantic past.
VI
If Artemus Ward is Touchstone, Mark Twain is Lear's Fool. He was a
knightly soul, sensitive and serious, a nineteenth-century knight
errant who would protect the weak of the whole world and right their
wrongs. The genuineness and honesty that had been ground into his
soul on the river and in the mines where a man was a man only when he
could show true manliness, were a part of his knightly equipment. When
financial disaster came to him, as it had come to Scott, through no
fault of his own, he refused to repudiate the debt as he might have
done with no discredit to himself, and, though old age was upon him, he
set out to earn by his own efforts the whole enormous amount. And he
discharged the debt to the full. He had, moreover, the true knight's
soul of romance. The _Morte d'Arthur_ and the chronicles of Joan of
Arc, his favorite reading, contained the atmosphere that he loved. He
fain would have given his generation "pure literature," but they bade
him back to his cap and bells. Richardson, as late as 1886, classed him
with the purveyors of "rude and clownish merriment" and advised him to
"make hay while the sun shines."[36]
So he jested and capered while his heart was heavy with personal
sorrows that came thick upon him as the years went by, and with the
baseness and weakness and misery of humanity as the spectacle passed
under his keen observation. Yet in it all he was true to himself. That
sentence in the preface tells the whole story: "I have written at least
honestly." His own generation bought his books for the fun in them;
their children are finding now that their fathers bought not, as they
supposed, clownish ephemerae, but true literature, the classics of the
period.
And yet--strange paradox!--it was the cap and bells that made Mark
Twain and that hastened the coming of the new period in American
literature. The cap and bells it was that made him known in every
hamlet and in every household of America, north and south and east and
west, and in all lands across all oceans. Only Cooper and Mrs. Stowe of
all our American authors are known so widely. This popularity it was
that gave wings to the first all-American literature and that inspired
a new school of American writers. After Mark Twain American literature
was no longer confined to Boston and its environs; it was as wide as
the continent itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
MARK TWAIN. (1835-1910.) _The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County and Other Sketches_, 1867; _The Innocents
Abroad_, 1869; _Roughing It_, 1872; _The Gilded Age_ (with C.
D. Warner), 1873; _Old Times on the Mississippi_ (_Atlantic
Monthly_), 1875; _Tom Sawyer_, 1876; _Life on the Mississippi_,
in book form, 1882; _Huckleberry Finn_, 1884; _A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court_, 1889; _Pudd'nhead Wilson_, 1894;
_Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc_, 1896; _Following the
Equator_, 1897; _Christian Science_, 1907; Writings of Mark
Twain, 25 vols., 1910; _My Mark Twain_, by W. D. Howells, 1911;
_Mark Twain, a Biography_, by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1912.