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(This “Biographical Criticism” was prepared by Prof. Brander Matthews,
as an introduction to the Uniform Edition of Mark Twain’s Works,
published in 1899).
It is a common delusion of those who discuss contemporary literature
that there is such an entity as the “reading public,” possessed 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 youth 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,
and which respects shrewdness and wisdom and sanity and 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 sagebrush 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. Clemen’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 Mr. Clemens, who
silently abhorred slavery, was of a slave-owning family.
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 six 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 nineteen he went back to the home of his boyhood and
presently resolved to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learned
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 unvexed 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 Territorial Secretary 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 which
found their way into print. 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
newcomer did all sorts of odd jobs, finding time now and then to write a
sketch which seemed important enough to permit of his signature. He now
began to sign himself Mark Twain, taking the name from a call of the man
who heaves the lead on a Mississippi River steamboat, and who cries, “By
the mark, three,” “Mark Twain,” and so on. 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 Mr. Bret Harte,
Mr. Noah Brooks, Mr. Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren
Stoddard.
It was in 1867 that Mr. 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. Mr. 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 surprise that
spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or
rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word painting, were
unlike anything of the kind they had ever known.” In the thirty years
since that first appearance the method has not changed, although 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.
Although he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and although 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, where his home has been ever since; 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 Mr. 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
throughout 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 few towns wherein the play was presented in which some one
did not accost the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful schemer to
declare: “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_ at sixty
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 has 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.