A humorist is often without honor in his own country. Perhaps this is
partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity breeds
contempt. Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason) we tend
to despise those who make us laugh, while we respect those who make us
weep--forgetting that there are formulas for forcing tears quite as
facile as the formulas for forcing smiles. Whatever the reason, the fact
is indisputable that the humorist must pay the penalty of his humor; he
must run the risk of being tolerated as a mere fun maker, not to be
taken seriously, and unworthy of critical consideration. This penalty
has been paid by Mark Twain. In many of the discussions of American
literature he is dismissed as though he were only a competitor of his
predecessors, Artemus Ward and John Phœnix, instead of being, what he is
really, a writer who is to be classed--at whatever interval only time
may decide--rather with Cervantes and Molière.
Like the heroines of the problem plays of the modern theater, Mark Twain
has had to live down his past. His earlier writing gave but little
promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works. Mr.
Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised, if he wished to “see genuine
specimens of American humor, frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious,” to
look up the sketches which the then almost unknown Mark Twain was
printing in a Nevada newspaper. The humor of Mark Twain is still
American, still frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious; but it is riper
now and richer, and it has taken unto itself other qualities existing
only in germ in these firstlings of his muse. The sketches in _The
Jumping Frog_ and the letters which made up _The Innocents Abroad_ are
“comic copy,” as the phrase is in newspaper offices--comic copy not
altogether unlike what John Phœnix had written and Artemus Ward, better
indeed than the work of these newspaper humorists (for Mark Twain had it
in him to develop as they did not), but not essentially dissimilar.
And in the eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark Twain is
only the author of these genuine specimens of American humor. For when
the public has once made up its mind about any man’s work, it does not
relish any attempt to force it to unmake this opinion and to remake it.
Like other juries, it does not like to be ordered to reconsider its
verdict as contrary to the facts of the case. It is always sluggish in
beginning the necessary readjustment, and not only sluggish, but
somewhat grudging. Naturally it cannot help seeing the later works of a
popular writer from the point of view it had to take to enjoy his
earlier writings. And thus the author of _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Joan of
Arc_ is forced to pay a high price for the early and abundant popularity
of _The Innocents Abroad_.
No doubt, a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their
elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of earlier
funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his predecessors.
No doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and highly colored, and
may even be called forced, not to say violent. No doubt, also, they did
not suggest the seriousness and the melancholy which always must
underlie the deepest humor, as we find it in Cervantes and Molière, in
Swift and in Lowell. But even a careless reader, skipping through the
book in idle amusement, ought to have been able to see in _The Innocents
Abroad_ that the writer of that liveliest of books of travel was no mere
merry-andrew, grinning through a horse collar to make sport for the
groundlings; but a sincere observer of life, seeing through his own eyes
and setting down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also
with profound respect for the eternal verities.
George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes
“debasers of the moral currency.” Mark Twain is always an advocate of
the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm an affectation
with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things
that really deserve reverence. It is not at the Old Masters that he
scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip service to things which
they neither enjoy nor understand. For a ruin or a painting or a legend
that does not seem to him to deserve the appreciation in which it is
held he refuses to affect an admiration he does not feel; he cannot help
being honest--he was born so. For meanness of all kinds he has a burning
contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a
quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is
no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he
stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the
glamour of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his
feet: but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is
never a hint of irreverence in his attitude.
_A Tramp Abroad_ is a better book than _The Innocents Abroad_; it is
quite as laughter-provoking, and its manner is far more restrained. Mark
Twain was then master of his method, sure of himself, secure of his
popularity; and he could do his best and spare no pains to be certain
that it was his best. Perhaps there is a slight falling off in
_Following the Equator_; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of
disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly
humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author’s possession of a
pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest
predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in
his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him;
the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is
not all laughter, but whose eye is as clear as ever and whose tongue is
as plain-spoken.
These three books of travel are like all other books of travel in that
they relate in the first person what the author went forth to see.
Autobiographic also are _Roughing It_ and _Life on the Mississippi_, and
they have always seemed to me better books than the more widely
circulated travels. They are better because they are the result of a
more intimate knowledge of the material dealt with. Every traveler is of
necessity but a bird of passage; he is a mere carpetbagger; his
acquaintance with the countries he visits is external only; and this
acquaintanceship is made only when he is a full-grown man. But Mark
Twain’s knowledge of the Mississippi was acquired in his youth; it was
not purchased with a price; it was his birthright; and it was internal
and complete. And his knowledge of the mining camp was achieved in early
manhood when the mind is open and sensitive to every new impression.
There is in both these books a fidelity to the inner truth, a certainty
of touch, a sweep of vision, not to be found in the three books of
travels. For my own part I have long thought that Mark Twain could
securely rest his right to survive as an author on those opening
chapters in _Life on the Mississippi_ in which he makes clear the
difficulties, the seeming impossibilities, that fronted those who wished
to learn the river. These chapters are bold and brilliant, and they
picture for us forever a period and a set of conditions, singularly
interesting and splendidly varied, that otherwise would have had to
forego all adequate record.