IV

Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all

Mark Twain’s other writings (although 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 fellow man. 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

apologues 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 various 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 unerring, and now and again he has

failed to exercise it; but there is in his prose none of 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, although 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, although life had pressed 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 liken 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 prophecy of a masterpiece like _Huckleberry Finn_, so

Molière was at first the author only of semiacrobatic 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.

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