THE WEST AND MARK TWAIN
There is a valid parallel between the beginnings of American literature
and the early stages of its development in the West, for in both
instances it followed on the wave of pioneer settlement. The earliest
writers came from the East and were only temporary sojourners in the
new country, Bret Harte and Mark Twain corresponding in different
degrees to colonists like John Smith and Nathaniel Ward. A more
permanent allegiance developed in a second group who lived out their
lives in the land of their adoption, such, for example, as Joaquin
Miller and Increase Mather. And the final stage is fulfilled by those
whose whole lives belonged to the maturing frontier, like most of the
second generation. The parallel exists too in the fact that the early
authors wrote usually with one eye on the older community, eager for
approval and half resentful of criticism--an attitude of West toward
East which still survives in the timider element along the chain from
London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Honolulu. The obvious
contrasts between the motives for settlement, the character of the
settlers, and the nature of their writings only serve to emphasize the
underlying similarities. Manners change, but human nature changes so
much more slowly that it seems almost a constant.
Bret Harte (1839-1902) is the outstanding writer who lived for a
while in the far West, turned it to literary account, failed in any
deep sense either to sympathize with its spirit or to represent it,
and left it permanently and with apparent relief. He was an Eastern
town-bred boy of cultured parentage who aspired to become a poet. At
eighteen he went to California where, before he was twenty-one, he
saw life as tutor, express messenger, typesetter, teacher, and drug
clerk. During half of the next fourteen years in San Francisco he
was secretary of the California mint, and during all of them he was
primarily interested in authorship. He wrote for periodicals East and
West and had a manuscript accepted by the _Atlantic_ as early as 1863.
With the founding of the _Overland Monthly_ in 1868 he became editor,
and with the publication of "The Luck of Roaring Camp" in the second
number he jumped into fabulous popularity. In 1871 he went to New York,
and in 1878 he went abroad, where he lived till his death in complete
estrangement from all his old associates. These latter facts deserve
mention only as they stress the lightness of his contact with the
West. He found fresh material there which he used with great narrative
adroitness, contributing definitely to the progress of short-story
technique. But his tales are deftly melodramatic, built on a sort of
paradox formula, and greatly indebted in detail and mannerisms to
the example of Charles Dickens. Harte was beyond any question a good
craftsman; his wares would still find a ready magazine market, for they
would be modern in execution, but there is no soul in what he wrote.
He was a reporter with a gift for rapid-moving, close-knit narrative.
He was greatly interested in facts, but very little concerned with the
truth. He wrote some clever stories, but he seems like a trinket shop
at the foot of Pike's Peak as Mark Twain looms above him.
The life of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) probably
touches American life at more points than that of any other author.
The first half has been very definitely written into his books, and
the whole has been told with his help in one of the best of American
biographies.[34] It involves indirectly his Virginia parentage and
the pioneer experiences of his father and mother in the Tennessee
mountains; his own residence in the Mississippi valley and on both
seacoasts; his activities as printer, river-pilot, journalist,
lecturer, and publisher; his friendships with all sorts and conditions
of men from California miners to the crowned heads of Europe; the
joys and sorrows of a beautiful family life; the making and losing of
several fortunes; and an old age crowded with honors and popularity,
yet overshadowed by a tragic cloud of doubts and griefs.
[34] "Mark Twain, a Biography," by Albert Bigelow Paine. 3 vols. 1912.
His parents, who had been dissatisfied with their attempted settlement
in a Tennessee mountain town, left it in 1835 with four children for
Florida, Missouri, allured to the move by the optimism of a relative,
as it worked on their own pioneer restlessness. The conditions they
left are vividly described in the first eleven chapters of "The Gilded
Age." In a little town of twenty-one dwellings the boy was born in
the autumn of 1835. When he was four years old the family moved to
Hannibal, a river town. Sam Clemens was an irresponsible, dreamy,
rather fragile child, a problem to parents and teachers and given to
associating with the boys presented in "Tom Sawyer," the most notable
of whom was Tom Blankenship, the original of "Huckleberry Finn." His
father, consistently unsuccessful, was made justice of the peace and
finally was elected clerk of the circuit court, only to die in 1847
from exposure in the campaign. For the next ten years young Clemens
was engaged in the printing business, first under his brother Orion
on a Hannibal journal (see "My First Literary Venture," in "Sketches,
New and Old," pp. 110-114); then during fifteen months in New York,
Philadelphia, and Washington, and next in Keokuk, Illinois, and
Cincinnati, Ohio.
Finally, in April, 1857, he began to "learn the river" from Horace
Bixby, pilot of the _Paul Jones_. His experience on the river, the
basis for "Life on the Mississippi," was early marked by the tragic
destruction of the _Pennsylvania_, on which his younger brother, Henry,
suffered a fearful death, the first of the personal sorrows which were
deeply scored into his life. His career as pilot was ended by the
closing of river traffic in the spring of 1861, but it gave him, with
many other bequests, his pen name, derived from one of the calls used
in sounding the depth of the ever-shifting channel. Piloting during
war times did not appeal to him. "I am not very anxious to get up into
a glass perch and be shot at by either side. I'll go home and reflect
on the matter." And after reflection he chose the better part of valor
and stayed on land. In the next three months there followed his amusing
adventures recorded in "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed"
(see "The American Claimant," pp. 243-265); and in July, 1861, he went
with his brother Orion to serve with J. W. Nye, territorial governor
of Nevada. The life of the next months went into "Roughing It," first
at Carson City, then at Humboldt, until, in August, 1862, he began his
journalistic work in California on _The Virginia City Enterprise_. At
twenty-five he had secured his first view of the country from coast
to coast and all down the central artery, he had been schooled in the
exacting discipline of the printer's trade (see pp. 47, 48) and in the
still more rigorous responsibilities of river piloting, and he had
begun to write for a living. Two more steps remained in the growth of
his acquaintance with the external world, and these followed after
five years of shifting fortunes on California newspapers. The first
was his trip to Honolulu as correspondent for the _Sacramento Union_,
on the new steamer _Ajax_, and the second, in 1867, was his trip to
the Holy Land on the steamship _Quaker City_ for the tour which was to
be immortalized in "Innocents Abroad," first as a series of newspaper
letters and then in book form.
With the publication of "The Innocents" in the summer of 1869 Mark
Twain came to the halfway point. Out of his wide experience he had
developed the habits of an observer and he had learned how to write.
He had earned a reputation as a newspaper man, and he had published
his most famous short story, "The Jumping Frog," using his talent
in spinning a yarn[35] after his own fashion. His lecturing had
met with unqualified success; the new book was selling beyond all
expectation--67,000 copies in the first year; and he was happily
married to Olivia Langdon, his balance wheel, his severest critic, and
the friend of all his closest friends.
[35] See his essay "How to Tell a Story" in "The Man that Corrupted
Hadleyburg," pp. 225-230.
The story of the rest of his life is a record of varied and spectacular
fortunes. His home from 1871 to 1891 was in Hartford, Connecticut,
where he was a neighbor of Charles Dudley Warner and an intimate of
the Reverend Joseph Twitchell (the original of Harris in "A Tramp
Abroad"), and where William Dean Howells, his friend of over forty
years, often visited him. There was a kind of lavishness in everything
he did. He built a mansion, made money with ease, spent it profusely,
and invested it with the care-free optimism of Colonel Sellers himself.
New inventions fascinated him and made him an easy victim for the
fluent promoter, so that what was left from his ventures with the
_Buffalo Express_ and the Webster Publishing Company went into other
enterprises, of which the Paige typesetting machine was the most
disastrous for this ex-printer. After his failure for a large amount,
a later friend, Henry H. Rogers, took his affairs in hand and by good
management enabled Mark Twain to meet all debts and enjoy a very
handsome income during his later years.
The ups and downs of business distracted him but did not baffle him. He
traveled extensively, living abroad during most of the decade between
1891 and 1901. He made cordial friends wherever he went, but he was
not weaned by them away from the old cronies of the Mississippi Valley
and the Pacific coast. He accepted honors from Yale twice and from the
University of Missouri, and in 1907 was the subject of a four-weeks'
ovation from all England when he went over to receive the degree
of Doctor of Letters from Oxford. His opinion was sought on public
questions and he was importuned for speeches on every sort of occasion;
but his last years were shadowed by a succession of bereavements. In
1903 Mrs. Clemens died. Two children died in childhood, a third under
tragic circumstances in 1909, and the surviving daughter was married
and far away most of the time. His chief personal solace was found in
his friendships with several schoolgirls.
During those years after my wife's death I was washing about on a
forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes,
and these things furnished me intellectual cheer and entertainment;
but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry
and dusty. I had reached the grandfather stage of life without
grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.
He died of angina pectoris in 1910.
Mark Twain's reputation was built on his humor. He came to his maturity
in a fruitful decade just after the Civil War, when a crop of newspaper
men were coming out with a recklessly fresh, informal jocularity which
was related to the old American humor, but a great departure from
it. They were all unconscious of making any contribution to American
literature. They never could have written books which would have won
the attention of Irving's readers and the perusers of the old Annuals
and the admirers of the Knickerbocker courtliness. They wrote for the
world of Horace Greeley and the elder James Gordon Bennett, caring
nothing for beauty of style or for any kind of literary tradition. They
wrote under odd pen names like "John Phoenix," who preceded them by
ten years--"Petroleum V. Nasby," "Artemus Ward," "Orpheus C. Kerr,"
"Max Adler," and "M. Quad" serving as fancy dress for Locke, Browne,
Newell, Clark, and Lewis. They drew their material from the common
people, as Lincoln had done with all his anecdotes, putting it in the
idiom of the common people and frequently distorting it into illiterate
spelling, as Lowell had done in "The Biglow Papers." This disturbed
and shocked the lovers of a refined literature--men like Stedman, for
example, who wrote to Bayard Taylor, "The whole country, owing to
_contagion_ of our American newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded,
deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic
[bathos], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit." But it was an
irresistible tide that threw up on its waves something more than froth
or flotsam, in the shape of a few real treasures from the deep--and the
rarest was Mark Twain.
Had there been no such journalistic tide this original genius would
still have gone on his original way. What these other men did was much
more to put the public into a humor for Mark Twain than to lead Mark
Twain in his approach to the public. He started as the others did,
allowing an undercurrent of seriousness to appear now and then in the
flow of his extravagance. His platform experience taught him by the
immediate response of the audience what were the most effective methods.
All Tully's rules and all Quintilian's too,
He by the light of listening faces knew.
And his rapt audience, all unconscious, lent
Their own roused force to make him eloquent.[36]
He was quite deliberate in the employment of them. His essay on "How
to Tell a Story" is an evidence of what he knew about structure, and
his letter to the young London editorial assistant (see Paine's "Mark
Twain" pp. 1091-1093) is only the best of many passages which show his
scrupulous regard for diction. He did not indulge in the usual vagaries
of spelling; he had, to paraphrase his own words, "a singularly fine
and aristocratic respect for homely and unpretending English"; and he
treated punctuation as a "delicate art" for which he had the highest
respect. People who carelessly think of Mark Twain as a kind of
literary swashbuckler can disabuse themselves by an attentive reading
of any few pages.
[36] James Russell Lowell, "Ode on Agassiz."
While they are doing it, they can discover in addition to the points
just mentioned that he was essentially clean-minded. Vulgar he
was, to be sure, at times, in the sense of not indulging always
in drawing-room talk or displaying drawing-room manners, as, for
instance, in his repeated references to spitting,--to use the homely
and unpretending word,--but he never partook of the nature of his rough
and ready human subjects to quite the extent that Franklin or Lincoln
did. His pages are utterly free from filth. He drew a line, no doubt
assisted by Mrs. Clemens, between what he wrote for the public and his
private speech and correspondence. "He had," Mr. Howells wrote, "the
Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance,
which I suppose one ought not to call coarse, without calling one's
self prudish; and I was always hiding away in discreet holes and
corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on
rank suggestion; I could not quite bear to burn them, and I could not,
after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give
my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or
if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian."
His humor relied on his never-failing and often extravagant use of the
incongruous and the irrelevant. Often this came out in his similes and
metaphors. "A jay hasn't got any more principles than a Congressman."
"His lectures on Mont Blanc ... made people as anxious to see it as if
it owed them money." It emerged in his impertinent personalities, as
in the instance of his first meeting with Grant, when he said after a
moment of awkwardness: "General, I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are
you?" or as in the case of his reply to a query as to why he always
carried a cotton umbrella in London, that it was the only kind he could
be sure would not be stolen there. It appeared too in his sober misuse
of historical facts with which he and his readers or auditors were well
acquainted. And it was developed most elaborately in "hoax" passages
where, in his violation of both fact and reason, the canny author
looked like the innocent flower but was the serpent under it.
A particular charm attached to his work because it was so apparently
uncalculated and spontaneous. What he wrote seemed to be for his own
delectation, and what he spoke to be the casual improvisation of the
moment. At times, of course, he did improvise--with all the art of a
musician whose mastery of technique is no less the result of great
labor because he has it completely in hand; but often the utterance
which his hearers took for an extempore speech had been composed to
the last syllable and then delivered with an art that concealed its
own artistry. No doubt for the multitudes who bought up the editions
of "Innocents Abroad" the salient feature of Mark Twain's writing was
its jovial extravagance. The first feeling of the public was that he
had out-Phoenixed "Phoenix" and beaten "Petroleum Nasby" at his
own game. Beyond question he literally "enjoyed himself" when he was
giving hilarious enjoyment to others; the free play of his antic fancy
was a kind of self-indulgence. The best evidence is offered in "Joan of
Arc." The story is approached, pursued, and concluded in a spirit of
admiration often amounting to reverence. Yet in the character of "The
Paladin," Edmond Aubrey, the old _miles gloriosus_ of Roman comedy, and
in Joan's uncle, the historian reverted to his broadest jocosities.
There are interpolated pages of pure farce. There are scenes in "Joan"
that are companion pieces with portions of the sardonic "Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg." On his seventy-third birthday he wrote, "I like
the 'Joan of Arc' best of all my books; and it _is_ the best; I know
it perfectly well." Yet this serious chronicle, with its occasional
outbursts of fun, was of a piece with his best-known book of nearly
thirty years earlier, the laugh-invoking "Innocents Abroad." The books
are not alien to each other; the difference is simply in the prevailing
moods.
For under all the frolicsome gayety and beneath the surface ironies of
this log of "The Quaker City" there is a solid sense of the realities
of human life. Over against the pure fun of such episodes as the
Fourth of July celebration on the high seas is a steady run of satire
at the traditionalized affectations of the American who pretended to
enjoy the things that he ought and attempted to shake off the manners
of Bird City when he registered in his Paris hotel. His gibes at
cultural insincerity, however, did not degenerate into a fusillade
of cheap cynicisms at everything old. Whatever contempt he felt for
the antiques of the tradesmen was overshadowed by the solemnity with
which the evidence of the passing centuries impressed him. He may not
have rendered the "old masters" their full deserts, but he entered a
cathedral with respect, walked in reverent silence among the ruins of
the Holy Land, and felt in the Alps the presence of the Most High.
"Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic," he wrote in the
preface, "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." So he wrote this book out of the fullness of his
heart as well as out of the abundance of his humor. There was in him a
natural acumen which for want of a better name we may call wisdom. His
instinctive perceptions were usually right.
The fundamental Mark Twain was an increasingly serious man. Before he
was fifty years old his precocious daughter had written in her journal,
"He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in
him that is earnest than that is humorous." And again: "Whenever we
are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very
earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal
more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is
as much a philosopher as anything, I think." There were many external
reasons for his turn of mind. His romantic passage through life from
obscure poverty to wealth and fame, with the depressing chapters of
his temporary business reverses, heightened his native respect for
the few blessings that are really worth while. His repeated travels,
culminating with his trip around the world, the honors that came to
him, the social distinctions that were showered on him, his friendships
with thinking men, his bereavements, all contributed to the same end of
making him consider the ways of the world and of the maker thereof. In
a further comment his astute little daughter went near to the heart of
the matter when she wrote quaintly, "I think he could have done a great
deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems
to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such
directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him
famous." "If he had studied while young" Mark Twain might have gained
a knowledge of the progressions in philosophic thought that would have
steadied him in his own thinking. Yet possibly it would have made
little difference, for his thinking was at the same time all his own
and altogether in the drift of nineteenth-century thought.
With an initial distrust of conventionalized thinking he came to
his own analysis of the prevailing religious views. His reason was
alert to challenge theology wherever it was at odds with science. He
found nothing in the Bible to question the assumption that Man was
the crowning triumph of his Creator, but everything in evolutionary
doctrine to suggest that Man was only a link in a far-evolving
succession of higher forms. He found a God in the Old Testament who
was "an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful
master," though in the ordering of the material universe he appeared to
be steadfast, beneficent, and fair. His reason thus unseated his faith
in the Scriptures and thereby his confidence in the creeds founded
upon them. He lost the God of the Hebrews only to find his own "in
the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps," ... "a spirit
which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million
vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million
more--and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after
all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation."
For the after-life he could find no such assurance as he could for a
Creator. For many men of his generation, and the one just before, the
solution when they found themselves in such a quandary was to take
refuge in the authority of the dogmas they had set out to question;
many of the most radical came back with relief to the protection of the
Roman Catholic faith; but Mark Twain could not find his way into the
harbor, glad as he might have been for the anchorage. There is a deep
pathos in the many passages of which the following is a type:
To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages
would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it
is seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man
of finished education, an LL.D., M.A., and an archæological magnate,
it sounds strangely enough. Still I would gladly change my unbelief
for Neligan's faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he
pleased.
In spite of all his yearnings he never could achieve for himself the
assurance "of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"; so
that his most clearly formulated profession of faith was in reality a
pathetic profession of doubts:
I believe in God the Almighty.... I think the goodness, the justice
and the mercy of God are manifested in his works; I perceive they
are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is
that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there
should be one.
Here again, as in his discrimination between "antiques" and antiquity,
Mark Twain kept clear of a despairing cynicism and held to the
distinction between what Emerson called "historical Christianity" and
the ideals from which its adherents have fallen away. He judged the
religion of his countrymen by its social and national fruits, and he
was filled with wrath at the indignity of an Episcopal rector's refusal
to perform the burial service of the actor George Holland and at the
extortionate demands of the missionaries for indemnities after the
Boxer Rebellion in China. On the national ideals of Christendom he
spoke in bitter prophecy in 1908:
The gospel of peace is always making a deal of noise, always
rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish
statistics. There are no peaceful nations now. All Christendom is
a soldier camp. The poor have been taxed in some nations to the
starvation point to support the giant armaments which Christian
governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of
the Christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap
of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. King Leopold II of
Belgium, the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander
VI, that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom
in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has
reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder
and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless
natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home
in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest.
Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk
of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more
and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally,
a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in
Christ's earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill
more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the
Christian nations are at it. The more advanced they are, the bigger
and more destructive engines of war they create.
Such doubts as to the future and depression at surrounding events have
led many an inquirer to a relaxation in his moral standards and in
his personal conduct; but in Mark Twain his rectitude was as deeply
grounded as his humor--both, indeed, flowing from the same source.
Throughout his books he upheld the simple virtues--common honesty;
fidelity to the family; kindness to brutes, to the weak or suffering,
and to the primitive peoples. His ironies and his satires were always
directed at unworthy objects, the varied forms of selfishness and
insincerity; and his answer to "What is Happiness?" is contained in
the admonition, "Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward,
toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct
which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your
neighbor and the community."
Not until the last years of his life did readers begin to take Mark
Twain seriously; now they are coming to appreciate him. He has been
fortunate in his literary champions--biographers, critics, and
expositors--and incomparably so in the loving interpretation, "My Mark
Twain," by his intimate friend, William Dean Howells. This concludes:
"Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any that I have ever known,
the material given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves
him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility
upon a foundation of clear and solid truth.... It is in vain that I
try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the
heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed
the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then left
trying.... Next I saw him dead.... I looked a moment at the face I
knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen
in it; something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what
must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke
in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all--and all the rest of our
sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another
and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the
Lincoln of our literature."
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Authors_=
BRET HARTE. Works. Standard Library Edition. 20 vols. During his
lifetime his works were issued in forty-nine successive volumes
between 1867 and 1902. Of these seven were poetry, and of the
prose works two were novels. The remainder were made up of short
units, mostly narrative.
=Biographies=
BOYNTON, H. W. Bret Harte. 1905.
MERWIN, H. C. The Life of Bret Harte, with some Account of the
California Pioneers. 1911.
PATTEE, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. iv. 1915.
PEMBERTON, T. E. Life of Bret Harte. 1903.
MARK TWAIN/ Works. Writings of Mark Twain. 1910. 25 vols. (These have
been supplemented by various posthumous articles in _Harper's
Magazine_ which have been published, and will doubtless be further
added to, in supplementary volumes.) His works appeared in book
form originally as follows: The Jumping Frog, 1867; The Innocents
Abroad, 1869; Autobiography and First Romance, 1871; Roughing It,
1872; The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner), 1873; Sketches New and
Old, 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; The Stolen White Elephant, 1878; A
Tramp Abroad, 1880; The Prince and the Pauper, 1881; Life on the
Mississippi, 1883; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee
in the Court of King Arthur, 1889; The American Claimant, 1891;
Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894; Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894; Joan of Arc,
1896; Tom Sawyer Detective, and Other Stories, 1896; Following the
Equator, 1897; Christian Science, 1907; Captain Stormfield's Visit
to Heaven, 1907; Is Shakespeare Dead, 1908.
=Bibliography=
A volume by M. Johnson. 1910.
Chronological list of Mark Twain's work published and otherwise,
Appendix X, Vol. III, of Mark Twain, by A. B. Paine (see
below).
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by Albert Bigelow Paine. 1912. 3 vols.
The following list does not attempt to represent the periodical
material except for one symposium in _The Bookman_. See the
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. The volume for
1910-1914 alone contains seventy-six items.
CLEMENS, W. M. Mark Twain: his Life and Work. 1892.
HENDERSON, ARCHIBALD. Mark Twain. 1912.
HOWELLS, W. D. My Mark Twain. 1910.
Mark Twain's Letters (edited by A. B. Paine). 1917.
MATTHEWS, BRANDER. Inquiries and Opinions. 1907.
PAINE, A. B. A Boy's Life of Mark Twain. 1916.
PATTEE, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. iii. 1915.
PHELPS, W. L. Essays on Modern Novelists. 1910.
SHERMAN, STUART. Fifty Years of American Idealism (edited by
Gustav Pollak). 1915. Also in On Contemporary Literature. 1918.
WALLACE, ELIZABETH/ Mark Twain and the Happy Island. 1913.
_The Bookman_, Vol. XXXI, pp. 363-396: Mark Twain in San
Francisco, by Bailey Millard; Mark Twain, an Appreciation,
by Henry M. Alden. Best Sellers of Yesterday: The Innocents
Abroad, by A. B. Maurice; Mark Twain in Clubland, by W. H.
Rideing; Mark Twain a Century Hence, by Harry Thurston Peck;
The Story of Mark Twain's Debts, by F. A. King.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Note, as you read any one of Mark Twain's longer stories, passages
which are evidently autobiographical. Do these throw any light on the
history of his neighborhoods and his period or are they purely personal
in their interest?
Read the essay "How to tell a Story" and test it by Mark Twain's method
in one of his shorter stories and in one of his after-dinner speeches
as printed in the appendix to Vol. III of A. B. Paine's "Life."
Read a few pages at random for observations on Mark Twain's diction. Is
it more like Emerson's or Lowell's, more like Whitman's or Longfellow's?
Does Mark Twain's consistent interest in history appear in his writing
through the use of allusion and comparison?
Read for the employment of unexpected humor. Are passages in which it
suddenly appears the result of forethought or merely the result of whim?
Read for Mark Twain's resort to serious satire. To what objects of
satire does he most frequently revert?
Do you find a distinction between Mark Twain's attitude toward religion
and his attitude toward religious people?
Mark Twain is held up as an example of Americanism. Do his writings
give evidence of patriotism in the usual sense of the word?