In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has
been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and
chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America,
the colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity
was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with
laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from
the “Wild and Woolly West.” Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an
international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world. It
would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were
reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of “Literature.” They
were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all.
The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of
the supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when
the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there
is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and
incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully
dawned upon the American consciousness. The literatures of England and
Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive
crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain.
It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic,
and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great
artist. It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to
posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be
absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a
world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the
supreme and imperishable glories of American literature.
At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can
be attributed what a Frenchman would call _mondial eclat_ is
surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling,
with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned
title of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has
suffered eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a
fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the
British Isles. His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from
Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to
Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the
literary hierarchy of the world--according to popular verdict. Since
Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged
the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the
world. This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his
life, less from his intellect than from his conscience. The _literati_
bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?' The whole world
pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration.
[While this book was going through the press, news has come of the
death of Tolstoy.]
Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most
widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world. In a sense
not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts
of the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if
measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is
without a parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the
defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends
many an inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent
wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon
the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is
perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's
works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet
his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the
magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal
mysticism of his unrealizable hopes.
If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal,
it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour.
That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust
sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently “gone about in near
and distant places,” everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The
French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a
select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a
country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects,
there is some reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author
appeals to many different “publics” or classes of readers--in proportion
to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the
catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a
boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of
experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he
points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to
whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real
psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid
irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid
Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that
innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the
omnipresent influence of a “good example” and stilled the painless pangs
of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill
condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the
equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the
growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of
democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human
experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young,
provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the
tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth. The
navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the Mississippi'. Youth and age may share
without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of
'Huckleberry Finn'. True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly
narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. The artist may bestow his critical meed of
approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'. The moralist may heartily
validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.
Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the
horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents
Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the
hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in the spontaneity and
refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation
of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing
air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom. The stevedore on the dock, the
motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the riverman on
the Mississippi--all speak with exuberant affection in memory of that
quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths
of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of silvery hair. In one
day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an emperor and a _portier_ vied
with each other in tributes of admiration and esteem for this man and
his works. It is Mark Twain's imperishable glory, not simply that his
name is the most familiar of that of any author who has lived in our own
times, but that it is remembered with infinite irrepressible zest.
“We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we
knew and loved,” said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address. “We
remember the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and
natural manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his
affections, his laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and
faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing.
“Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he
faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet
a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to
provide not only things honest, but things 'honourable in the sight of
all men.'
“Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know
that he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those
who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and
irrepressible humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of
serious thoughts and noble affections and desires.
“Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour
means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the
unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world
which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible
says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall
hold them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humour is that it
does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only
at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.
“Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his
humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift,
not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and
wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's
false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false
witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories,
coloured with his own experiences, he touched the absurdities of life
with penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow
the infinite pathos of life's realities. No one can say that he ever
failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the
little children, of whom Christ said, 'Of such is the kingdom of
heaven.'
“Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud.
We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of
the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left
such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own
sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust,
happy in the fuller light.
“'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,
Death after life doth greatly please.”'
“'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime--the
thin air stifles'--I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush
always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor
remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry
continually, 'O Beautiful! My country!' Yet, in the long dull
interspans between these sacred moments we need some one to remind
us that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the
years insidious foes are lurking--anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan
decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the
cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant
fraud and corruption. When our countrymen migrate because we have
no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us
what we can count on. When they complain that our soil lacks the
humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for
the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark
Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use
words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with
prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on
all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by
Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the
Republic shall suffer no harm.”
STUART P. SHERMAN: “MARK TWAIN.”
The Nation, May 12, 1910.