Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all
Mark Twain's other writings (altho with no lack of affection for those
also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about
them. After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish
in literature is this native aroma, pungent, homely, and abiding. Yet I
feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of
these three books only. They are the best of him, but the others are
good also, and good in a different way. Other writers have given us
this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly:
one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth
Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin; but who so well as Mark Twain has given
us the full spectrum of the Union? With all his exactness in reproducing
the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outlook; he
is national always. He is not narrow; he is not western or eastern; he
is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and
certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country so vast as
ours and a people so independent.
In Mark Twain we have "the national spirit as seen with our own eyes,"
declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain
seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism. Self-educated in
the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outlook as he has
grown older. Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other
nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith. Combining a
mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a
practical idealist. No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for
his fellowman. Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever
revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of reverence.
Unwilling to take pay in words, he is impatient always to get at the
root of the matter, to pierce to the center, to see the thing as it is.
He has a habit of standing upright, of thinking for himself, and of
hitting hard at whatsoever seems to him hateful and mean; but at the
core of him there is genuine gentleness and honest sympathy, brave
humanity and sweet kindliness. Perhaps it is boastful for us to think
that these characteristics which we see in Mark Twain are
characteristics also of the American people as a whole; but it is
pleasant to think so.
Mark Twain has the very marrow of Americanism. He is as intensely and as
typically American as Franklin or Emerson or Hawthorne. He has not a
little of the shrewd common-sense and the homely and unliterary
directness of Franklin. He is not without a share of the aspiration and
the elevation of Emerson; and he has a philosophy of his own as
optimistic as Emerson's. He possesses also somewhat of Hawthorne's
interest in ethical problems, with something of the same power of
getting at the heart of them; he, too, has written his parables and
apologs wherein the moral is obvious and unobtruded. He is
uncompromisingly honest; and his conscience is as rugged as his style
sometimes is.
No American author has to-day at his command a style more nervous, more
varied, more flexible, or more direct than Mark Twain's. His colloquial
ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric.
He may seem to disobey the letter of the law sometimes, but he is always
obedient to the spirit. He never speaks unless he has something to say;
and then he says it tersely, sharply, with a freshness of epithet and an
individuality of phrase always accurate, however unacademic. His
vocabulary is enormous, and it is deficient only in the dead words; his
language is alive always, and actually tingling with vitality. He
rejoices in the daring noun and in the audacious adjective. His instinct
for the exact word is not always assured, and now and again he has
failed to exercise it; but we do not find in his prose the flatting and
sharping he censured in Fenimore Cooper's. His style has none of the
cold perfection of an antique statue; it is too modern and too American
for that, and too completely the expression of the man himself, sincere
and straightforward. It is not free from slang, altho this is far less
frequent than one might expect; but it does its work swiftly and
cleanly. And it is capable of immense variety. Consider the tale of the
Blue Jay in 'A Tramp Abroad,' wherein the humor is sustained by unstated
pathos; what could be better told than this, with every word the right
word and in the right place? And take Huck Finn's description of the
storm when he was alone on the island, which is in dialect, which will
not parse, which bristles with double negatives, but which none the less
is one of the finest passages of descriptive prose in all American
literature.
V
After all, it is as a humorist pure and simple that Mark Twain is best
known and best beloved. In the preceding pages I have tried to point out
the several ways in which he transcends humor, as the word is commonly
restricted, and to show that he is no mere fun-maker. But he is a
fun-maker beyond all question, and he has made millions laugh as no
other man of our century has done. The laughter he has aroused is
wholesome and self-respecting; it clears the atmosphere. For this we
cannot but be grateful. As Lowell said, "let us not be ashamed to
confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest
satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity." There is no laughter
in Don Quixote, the noble enthusiast whose wits are unsettled; and there
is little on the lips of _Alceste_, the misanthrope of Molière; but for
both of them life would have been easier had they known how to laugh.
Cervantes himself, and Molière also, found relief in laughter for their
melancholy; and it was the sense of humor which kept them tolerantly
interested in the spectacle of humanity, altho life had prest hardly on
them both. On Mark Twain also life has left its scars; but he has bound
up his wounds and battled forward with a stout heart, as Cervantes did,
and Molière. It was Molière who declared that it was a strange business
to undertake to make people laugh; but even now, after two centuries,
when the best of Molière's plays are acted, mirth breaks out again and
laughter overflows.
It would be doing Mark Twain a disservice to compare him to Molière, the
greatest comic dramatist of all time; and yet there is more than one
point of similarity. Just as Mark Twain began by writing comic copy
which contained no prophesy of a masterpiece like 'Huckleberry Finn,' so
Molière was at first the author only of semi-acrobatic farces on the
Italian model in no wise presaging 'Tartuffe' and the 'Misanthrope.'
Just as Molière succeeded first of all in pleasing the broad public that
likes robust fun, and then slowly and step by step developed into a
dramatist who set on the stage enduring figures plucked out of the
abounding life about him, so also has Mark Twain grown, ascending from
the 'Jumping Frog' to 'Huckleberry Finn,' as comic as its elder brother
and as laughter-provoking, but charged also with meaning and with
philosophy. And like Molière again, Mark Twain has kept solid hold of
the material world; his doctrine is not of the earth earthy, but it is
never sublimated into sentimentality. He sympathizes with the spiritual
side of humanity, while never ignoring the sensual. Like Molière, Mark
Twain takes his stand on common-sense and thinks scorn of affectation of
every sort. He understands sinners and strugglers and weaklings; and he
is not harsh with them, reserving his scorching hatred for hypocrites
and pretenders and frauds.
At how long an interval Mark Twain shall be rated after Molière and
Cervantes it is for the future to declare. All that we can see clearly
now is that it is with them that he is to be classed,--with Molière and
Cervantes, with Chaucer and Fielding, humorists all of them, and all of
them manly men.
(1898.)