[This biographical criticism was written to serve as an introduction to
the complete edition of Mark Twain's Works.]
It is a common delusion of those who discuss contemporary literature
that there is such an entity as the "reading public," possest of a
certain uniformity of taste. There is not one public; there are many
publics,--as many in fact as there are different kinds of taste; and the
extent of an author's popularity is in proportion to the number of these
separate publics he may chance to please. Scott, for example, appealed
not only to those who relished romance and enjoyed excitement, but also
to those who appreciated his honest portrayal of sturdy characters.
Thackeray is preferred by ambitious youths who are insidiously flattered
by his tacit compliments to their knowledge of the world, by the
disenchanted who cannot help seeing the petty meannesses of society, and
by the less sophisticated in whom sentiment has not gone to seed in
sentimentality. Dickens in his own day bid for the approval of those who
liked broad caricature (and were, therefore, pleased with Stiggins and
Chadband), of those who fed greedily on plentiful pathos (and were,
therefore, delighted with the deathbeds of Smike and Paul Dombey and
Little Nell) and also of those who asked for unexpected adventure (and
were, therefore, glad to disentangle the melodramatic intrigues of Ralph
Nickleby).
In like manner the American author who has chosen to call himself Mark
Twain has attained to an immense popularity because the qualities he
possesses in a high degree appeal to so many and so widely varied
publics,--first of all, no doubt, to the public that revels in hearty
and robust fun, but also to the public which is glad to be swept along
by the full current of adventure, which is sincerely touched by manly
pathos, which is satisfied by vigorous and exact portrayal of character,
which respects shrewdness and wisdom and sanity and which appreciates a
healthy hatred of pretense and affectation and sham. Perhaps no one book
of Mark Twain's--with the possible exception of 'Huckleberry Finn'--is
equally a favorite with all his readers; and perhaps some of his best
characteristics are absent from his earlier books or but doubtfully
latent in them. Mark Twain is many-sided; and he has ripened in
knowledge and in power since he first attracted attention as a wild
Western funny man. As he has grown older he has reflected more; he has
both broadened and deepened. The writer of "comic copy" for a
mining-camp newspaper has developed into a liberal humorist, handling
life seriously and making his readers think as he makes them laugh,
until to-day Mark Twain has perhaps the largest audience of any author
now using the English language. To trace the stages of this evolution
and to count the steps whereby the sage-brush reporter has risen to the
rank of a writer of world-wide celebrity, is as interesting as it is
instructive.
I
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born November 30, 1835, at
Florida, Missouri. His father was a merchant who had come from Tennessee
and who removed soon after his son's birth to Hannibal, a little town on
the Mississippi. What Hannibal was like and what were the circumstances
of Mr. Clemens's boyhood we can see for ourselves in the convincing
pages of 'Tom Sawyer.' Mr. Howells has called Hannibal "a loafing,
out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town"; and
the elder Clemens was himself a slave-owner, who silently abhorred
slavery.
When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had
to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got little
and of book-learning still less; but life itself is not a bad teacher
for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his
chances. He spent three years in the printing office of the little local
paper,--for, like not a few others on the list of American authors that
stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began his
connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer the
lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as New York.
When he was seventeen he went back to the home of his boyhood resolved
to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learnt the river he has
told us in 'Life on the Mississippi,' wherein his adventures, his
experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub-pilot are recorded
with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes
the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of
autobiography. The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement
and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during
the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in
the pages of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson.' But toward the
end of the fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy
as a carrier; and in the beginning of the sixties the Civil War broke
out and the Mississippi no longer went unvext to the sea. The skill,
slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at
twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling. As a
border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union
and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting,
not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of
his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When
this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the northwest with his
brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Nevada. Thus the
man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone
East as a jour printer, who had been again and again up and down the
Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and
impressionable; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate
knowledge of American life and American character which is one of the
most precious of his possessions.
While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two signed
"Mark Twain"--taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead
and who cries "By the mark, three," "Mark twain," and so on. In Nevada
he went to the mines and lived the life he has described in 'Roughing
It,' but when he failed to "strike it rich," he naturally drifted into
journalism and back into a newspaper office again. The 'Virginia City
Enterprise' was not overmanned, and the new-comer did all sorts of odd
jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important
enough to permit of his signature. The name of Mark Twain soon began to
be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he
was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual
employment on the 'Morning Call,' and where he joined himself to a
little group of aspiring literators which included Bret Harte, Noah
Brooks, Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddart.
It was in 1867 that Webb published Mark Twain's first book, the
'Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras'; and it was in 1867 that the
proprietors of the 'Alta California' supplied him with the funds
necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the steamer
_Quaker City_, which had been chartered to take a select party on what
is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly letters, in which he
set forth what befell him on this journey, were printed in the 'Alta'
Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by the other Californian
papers. These letters served as the foundation of a book published in
1869 and called the 'Innocents Abroad,' a book which instantly brought
to the author celebrity and cash.
Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step,
his appearance on the lecture platform. Noah Brooks, who was present at
his first attempt, has recorded that 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, the surprize 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." In the many years since that first appearance the
method has not changed, altho it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one
of the most effective of platform-speakers and one of the most artistic,
with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in
spite of its seeming simplicity.
Altho he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and altho he was the author
of the most widely-circulated book of the decade, Mark Twain still
thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West
for the East, he became an editor of the 'Buffalo Express,' in which he
had bought an interest. In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not
indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which
there have been so many in the annals of American authorship. In 1871 he
removed to Hartford, which was to be his home for thirty years; and at
the same time he gave up newspaper work.
In 1872 he wrote 'Roughing It,' and in the following year came his first
sustained attempt at fiction, the 'Gilded Age,' written in collaboration
with Charles Dudley Warner. The character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers
Mark Twain soon took out of this book to make it the central figure of a
play, which the late John T. Raymond acted hundreds of times thruout the
United States, the playgoing public pardoning the inexpertness of the
dramatist in favor of the delicious humor and the compelling veracity
with which the chief character was presented. So universal was this type
and so broadly recognizable its traits that there were many towns in
which someone accosted the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful
schemer with the declaration: "I'm the original of _Sellers_! Didn't
Mark ever tell you? Well, he took the _Colonel_ from me!"
Encouraged by the welcome accorded to this first attempt at fiction,
Mark Twain turned to the days of his boyhood and wrote 'Tom Sawyer,'
published in 1875. He also collected his sketches, scattered here and
there in newspapers and magazines. Toward the end of the seventies he
went to Europe again with his family; and the result of this journey is
recorded in 'A Tramp Abroad,' published in 1880. Another volume of
sketches, the 'Stolen White Elephant,' was put forth in 1882; and in the
same year Mark Twain first came forward as a historical novelist--if the
'Prince and the Pauper' can fairly be called a historical novel. The
year after he sent forth the volume describing his 'Life on the
Mississippi'; and in 1884 he followed this with the story in which that
life has been crystallized forever, 'Huckleberry Finn,' the finest of
his books, the deepest in its insight, and the widest in its appeal.
This Odyssey of the Mississippi was published by a new firm, in which
the author was a chief partner, just as Sir Walter Scott had been an
associate of Ballantyne and Constable. There was at first a period of
prosperity in which the house issued the 'Personal Memoirs' of Grant,
giving his widow checks for $350,000 in 1886, and in which Mark Twain
himself published 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court,' a
volume of 'Merry Tales,' and a story called the 'American Claimant,'
wherein Colonel Sellers reappears. Then there came a succession of hard
years; and at last the publishing-house in which Mark Twain was a
partner failed, as the publishing-house in which Walter Scott was a
partner had formerly failed. The author of 'Huckleberry Finn' was past
sixty when he found himself suddenly saddled with a load of debt, just
as the author of 'Waverley' had been burdened full threescore years
earlier; and Mark Twain stood up stoutly under it as Scott had done
before him. More fortunate than the Scotchman, the American lived to pay
the debt in full.
Since the disheartening crash came, he has given to the public a third
Mississippi River tale, 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' issued in 1894; and a third
historical novel, 'Joan of Arc,' a reverent and sympathetic study of the
bravest figure in all French history, printed anonymously in 'Harper's
Magazine' and then in a volume acknowledged by the author in 1896. As
one of the results of a lecturing tour around the world he prepared
another volume of travels, 'Following the Equator,' published toward the
end of 1897. Mention must also be made of a fantastic tale called 'Tom
Sawyer Abroad,' sent forth in 1894, of a volume of sketches, the
'Million Pound Bank-Note,' assembled in 1893, and also of a collection
of literary essays, 'How to Tell a Story,' published in 1897.
This is but the barest outline of Mark Twain's life,--such a brief
summary as we must have before us if we wish to consider the conditions
under which the author has developed and the stages of his growth. It
will serve, however, to show how various have been his forms of
activity,--printer, pilot, miner, journalist, traveler, lecturer,
novelist, publisher,--and to suggest the width of his experience of
life.