Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines
of contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served
his apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism. Like
his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free
play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal
for the masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective
only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece
of his own invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native
flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more
sophisticated refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost
the ruddy glow of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end,
remained as it began--journalistic, untamed, primitive.
Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved
comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving
the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic
apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his
journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That
trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened
verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the
new journalism. “The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which
are 'not for an age, but for all time,'” says Bernard Shaw, “has his
reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes
trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare
peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire
hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a
Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as
if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and
at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of
academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and
art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar
obsession with the ephemeral.” Mark Twain began his career by studying
the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown,
Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic,
uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life
and live again in the pages of his books. Colonel Sellers, in the main
correct but “stretched a little” here and there; Tom Sawyer, the
“magerful” hero of boyhood; the shrewd and kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from
his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the gentle
heart--these and many another were drawn from the very life. In writing
of his time _a propos_ of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the
truth about humanity in general and for any time.
In the main--though there are noteworthy exceptions--Mark Twain's works
originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life. He is a master
humorist--which is only another way of saying that he is a master
psychologist with the added gift of humour--because he looked upon
himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of universally
human characteristics. _Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi alienum est_
--this might well have served for his motto. It was his conviction that
the American possessed no unique and peculiar human characteristics
differentiating him from the rest of the world. In the same way, he
regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human
characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race.
Like Omar he might have said “I myself am Heaven and Hell”----for within
himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power, every
feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is
capable. The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his
Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study
of the human race. His knowledge came from minute self-examination--for
he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together. It was
by concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself
the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing
works of such pure naturalness and utter verity. A humour which is at
bottom good humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more
universal appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation
of the human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'.
It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of
America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual
life of Europe derives from history. If American literature be really
“Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions,” as defined by
the Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical
product of American literature. A certain modicum of truth may rest in
this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted
liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the
future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy
past. Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself,
and so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living
present. He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of
the ranks of American journalism. Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as
his early writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its
face the fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.
To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be
placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely
unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less
arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour
because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly
comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British
critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they
would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay. The
New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the
futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for
extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth
in America eternally gives to old age. “America has produced great
artists,” admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains that “that
fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the
end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are
not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave,
barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with
the spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and
startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.” This sweet
and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr.
Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two
American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the
art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost
touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the
ongoing rush and progress of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr.
James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only
very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid _diablerie_, was
wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That
other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles
Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic
senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case
in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter
is--Mark Twain!
To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the
humorist--with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the
colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering,
ludicrous contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within
himself a “certain surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a
sense of conquest” which typified the youth of America. It is memorable
that he breathed in his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the
collective ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western
adventure, and expressed the crude and manly energy of navigation,
exploration, and the daring hazard for new fortune. To those who knew
him in personal intimacy, the quality that was outstanding, omnipresent
and eternally ineradicable from his nature was--paradoxical as it may
sound--not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that
might be associated with his name, but--the spirit of eternal youth. It
is comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her
death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright
nickname--“Youth.” Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller
of tales, pungent as stylist. But he has achieved another sort of
eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans. “They distinguish
in his writings,” says an acute French critic, “exalted and sublimated
by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force
and of faith; they love his philosophy, at once practical and high
--minded. They are fond of his simple style, animated with verve and
spice, thanks to which his work is accessible to every class of readers.
They think he describes his contemporaries with such an art of
distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to
create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for
Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France
for Balzac.”
Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which
has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a
commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only,
that the world seems to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his
early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the “philosophy of
the Broad Grin.” Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that “American
humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and
sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply
the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and
mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending
it to the end of the world.” This partial and somewhat conventional
foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the
cumulative and “sky-breaking” humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no
exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax
too extreme.
The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a
lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but
one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of
argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature.
In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic
and sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed
effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously
at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's
plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their
hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and
the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided
themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning
bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence.
What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in
native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first
heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in
the life of Angel's Camp. It was Mark Twain who “created” the story: he
endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization
of _une chose vue_, which went round the world. The humour of rustic
shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in 'The
Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the
early journalistic days in San Francisco. In 'The Golden Era' an
excellent example is found in the following observations upon a
celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San
Francisco:
“Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at
the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or
the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it
the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No,
sir. The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet.
Them scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them
days--by a d---d sight.”
That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just
proportion of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during
his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the
cannibals consume their food--if only some lady would lend him a live
baby. There is the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious
anecdote of Higgins.
Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul rock; and on the day
Judge Bagley fell down the court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins
was commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the house of Mrs.
Bagley and break the news to her as gently as possible. When he
arrived, he shouted until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then
tactfully inquired if the Widder Bagley lived there! When she
indignantly replied in the negative, he gently humoured her whim; and
inquired next if Judge Bagley lived there. When she replied that he
did, Higgins offered to bet that he didn't; and delicately inquired if
the Judge were in. On being assured that he was not in at present,
Higgins triumphantly exclaimed that he expected as much. Because he had
the old Judge curled up out there in the wagon; and when Mrs. Bagley saw
him, she would doubtless admit that about all that could comfort the
Judge now would be an inquest!
Mark Twain was so fond of this bloody and ghastly humour that, on one
occasion, he utterly overreached himself and suffered serious
consequences. In the words of his fellow-journalist, Dan De Quille:
Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible style,
but on one occasion he overdid this business, and the disease
worked its own cure. He wrote an account of a terrible murder,
supposed to have occurred at “Dutch Nick's,” a station on the
Carson River, where Empire City now stands. He made a man cut his
wife's throat and those of his nine children, after which
diabolical deed the murderer mounted his horse, cut his own throat
from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a distance of three and a
half miles) and fell dead in front of Peter Hopkins' saloon.
All the California papers copied the item, and several made
editorial comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence of
the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast. Of course rival Virginia
City papers at once denounced the item as a “cruel and idiotic
hoax.” They showed how the publication of such “shocking and
reckless falsehoods” disgraced and injured the State, and they made
it as “sultry” as possible for the 'Enterprise' and its “fool
reporter.”
When the California papers saw all this and found they had been
sold, there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego. Some papers
demanded the immediate discharge of the author of the item by the
'Enterprise' proprietors. They said they would never quote another
line from that paper while the reporter who wrote the shocking item
remained on its force. All this worried Mark as I had never before
seen him worried. Said he: “I am being burned alive on both sides
of the mountains.” We roomed together, and one night, when the
persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not
sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud. So I set to work to
comfort him. “Mark,” said I, “never mind this bit of a gale, it
will soon blow itself out. This item of yours will be remembered
and talked about when all your other work is forgotten. The murder
at Dutch Nick's will be quoted years from now as the big sell of
these times.”
Said Mark: “I believe you are right; I remember I once did a thing
at home in Missouri, was caught at it, and worried almost to death.
I was a mere lad, and was going to school in a little town where I
had an uncle living. I at once left the town and did not return to
it for three years. When I finally came back I found I was only
remembered as 'the boy that played the trick on the schoolmaster.'”
Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that
moment “ceased to groan.” He was not discharged, and in less than
a month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the
“murder at Dutch Nick's.”
Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of
fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched
poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was
evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as altitudinous as the
conditions which gave it birth. Mark Twain may be said to have created,
and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its
exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of
humorous narration. At times it seemed little more than a sort of
infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all
the calculation of detail and elaboration. There was something in it
of the volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of
primitive nature. It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the
structure toppled over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian
crash of laughter which echoed among the stars. Whenever Mark Twain
conceived a humorous idea, he seemed capable of extracting from it
infinite complications of successive and cumulative comedy. This humour
seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical
jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance,
until reason itself tired and gave over. Such explosive stories as 'How
I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine Mexican Plug', the
deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The Facts in the Case
of the Great Beef Contract', and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has
pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art. “The
excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a
tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The rack, tragic or comic,
goes round until something breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his
heart, or perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite know what it
is--perhaps his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly
cracked.” Mark Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never
contains the element of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected,
the _imprevu_. We know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and
more to the mood of the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until
laughter, no longer to be restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of
undignified and explosive mirth. Perhaps no better example can be given
than the description of the sad fate of the camel in 'A Tramp Abroad'.
In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of
his overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of
apparel, he began to inspect it as an article of diet. In his
inimitable manner, Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that
camel as it devoured his overcoat piecemeal--first one sleeve, then the
other, velvet collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the
camel struck a batch of manuscript--containing some of Mark's humorous
letters for the home papers. Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy
on the camel's stomach: the jokes shook him until he began to gag and
gasp, and finally he struck statements that not even a camel could
swallow with impunity. He died in horrible agony; and Mark found on
examination that the camel had choked to death on one of the mildest
statements of fact that he had ever offered to a trusting public! Here
Mark gradually works up to an anticipated climax by piling on effect
after effect. Our risibility is excited almost as much by the
anticipation of the climax as by the recital.
Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of the nonsensical
recital, are found in the scene in 'Huckleberry Finn' dealing with the
performance of the King's Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the address on
the occasion of the dinner in honour of the seventieth anniversary of
John Greenleaf Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath in
'The Innocents Abroad'.
In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant sat him down by a tank
of hot water and began to polish him all over with a coarse mitten.
Soon Mark noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that the more he
was polished the worse he smelt. He urged the attendant to bury him
without unnecessary delay, as it was obvious that he couldn't possibly
“keep” long in such warm weather. But the phlegmatic attendant paid no
attention to Mark's commands and continued to scrub with renewed vigour.
Mark's consternation changed to alarm when he discovered that little
cylinders, like macaroni, began to roll from under the mitten. They
were too white to be dirt. He felt that he was gradually being pared
down to a convenient size. Realizing that it would take hours for the
attendant to trim him down to the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered
him to bring a jackplane at once and get the matter over. To all his
protests the attendant paid no attention at all.
In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark Twain, which
appeared in 'Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science and Art' for July
4,1874, Mr. G. T. Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour.
“Of humour in its highest phase,” he says, “perhaps Bret Harte may be
accounted the most puissant master among our contemporary American
writers. Of wit, we see next to none. Mark Twain, while lacking the
subtilty and pathos of the other, has more breadth, variety, and ease.
His sketches of life are arabesque in their strange combinations. Bits
of bright, serious description, both of landscape and society, carry us
along till suddenly we stumble on some master-stroke of grotesque and
irresistible fun. He understands the value of repose in art. One tires
of a page where every sentence sparkles with points, and the author is
constantly attitudinizing for our amusement. We like to be betrayed
into laughter as much in books as in real life. It is the unconscious,
easy, careless gait of Mark Twain that makes his most potent charm. He
seems always to be catering as much to his own enjoyment as to that of
the public. He strolls along like a great rollicking schoolboy, bent on
having a good time, and determined that his readers shall have it with
him.”
Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists. He takes his courage in his
hands for the wildest flights of fancy. His humour is the caricature of
situations, rather than of individuals; and he is not afraid to risk his
characters in colossally ludicrous situations. His art reveals itself
in choosing ludicrous situations which contain such a strong colouring
of naturalness that one's sense of reality is not outraged, but
titillated. Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not
lend itself readily to quotation. His early humour is not epigrammatic,
but cumulative and extensive. Each scene is a unit and must appear as
such. Andrew Lang not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier
manner, when he speaks of his “almost Mephistophelean coolness, an
unwearying search after the comic sides of serious subjects, after the
mean possibilities of the sublime--these with a native sense of
incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration.”
Mark Twain began his career as a wag; he rejoiced in being a fun-maker.
He discarded the weird spellings and crude punning of his American
forerunners; his object was not play upon words, but play upon ideas.
He offered his public, as Frank R. Stockton pointed out, the pure ore of
fun. “If he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current; it does
not require the mint stamp of the schools of humour. He is never
afraid of being laughed at.” Indeed, that is a large part of his
stock-in-trade; for throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to give
him so much pleasure--though it is one of the lowest forms of humour--as
making fun of himself. In describing two monkeys that got into his room
at Delhi, he said that when he awoke, one of them was before the glass
brushing his hair, and the other one had his notebook, and was reading a
page of humorous notes and crying. He didn't mind the one with the
hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He
never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of
Adam--only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric
indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who “never bored,
but he struck water”--is an admirable example of the mechanical fooling
of self-ridicule.
In his penetrating study, 'Mark Twain a Century Hence', published at the
time of Mr. Clemens' death, Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation:
“We must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very best of all he wrote
rather than by the more dubious productions, in which we fail to see at
every moment the winning qualities and the characteristic form of this
very interesting American. As one would not judge of Tennyson by his
dramas, nor Thackeray by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter
Scott by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity had been
exhausted, so we must not judge Mark Twain by the dozen or more
specimens which belong to the later period, when he was ill at ease and
growing old. Let us rather go back with a sort of joy to what he wrote
when he did so with spontaneity, when his fun was as natural to him as
breathing, and when his humour was all American humour--not like that of
Juvenal or Hierocles--acrid, or devoid of anything individual--but
brimming over with exactly the same rich irresponsibility which belonged
to Steele and Lamb and Irving. It may seem odd to group a son of the
New World and of the great West with those earlier classic figures who
have been mentioned here; yet upon analysis it will be discovered that
the humour of Mark Twain is at least first cousin to that which produced
Sir Roger de Coverley and Rip Van Winkle and The Stout Gentleman.”
The details of the Gambetta-Fourtou duel, in which Mark played a
somewhat frightened second, have furnished untold amusement to
thousands. And his description of the inadvertent _faux pas_ he
committed at his first public lecture is humorous for any age and
society. The sign announcing the lecture read--“Doors open at 7. The
Trouble will begin at 8.” For three days, Mark had been in a state of
frightful suspense. Once his lecture had seemed humorous; but as the
day approached, it seemed to him to be but the dreariest of fooling,
without a vestige of real fun. He was so panic-stricken that he
persuaded three of his friends, who were giants in stature, genial and
stormy voiced, to act as claquers and pound loudly at the faintest
suspicion of a joke. He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk man, who had a
laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to get off, naturally and easily during
the course of the evening, as many laughs as he could. He begged a
popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous seat in a box, so
that everybody could see them. He explained that when he needed help,
he would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had given birth
to an obscure joke. Then, if ever, was her time--not to investigate,
but to respond!
The fateful night found him in the depths of dejection. But heartened
up by a crowded house, full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and
proceeded to capture the house. His claquers hammered madly whenever
the very feeblest joke showed its head. Sawyer supported their
herculean efforts with bursts of stentorian laughter. As Mark
explained, not without a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared so
royally before. But his hour of humiliation was at hand. On delivering
a bit of serious matter with impressive unction, to which the audience
listened with rapt interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if for her
approval, at his friend in the box. He remembered the compact, but it
was too late--he smiled in spite of himself. Forth came her ringing
laugh, peal after peal, which touched off the whole audience: the
explosion was immense! Sawyer choked with laughter, and the bludgeons
performed like pile-drivers. The little morsel of pathos was ruined;
but what matter, so long as the audience took it as an intentional joke,
and applauded it with unparalleled enthusiasm. Mark wisely let it go at
that!
Reading through 'The Innocents Abroad' after many years, I find that it
has not lost its power to provoke the most side-splitting laughter; and
the same may be said of 'A Tramp Abroad' and 'Following the Equator',
which, whilst not so boisterously comical, exhibit greater mastery and
restraint. His own luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion, had
been curious all his literary life. He never could tell a lie that
anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. Could
there be a more accurate or more concise definition of the effect of his
writings, in especial of his travel notes? Like his mother, he too
never used large words, but he had a natural gift for making small ones
do effective work. How delightfully human is his comment on the
vagaries of woman's shopping! Human nature he found very much the same
all over the world; and he felt that it was so much like his dear native
home to see a Venetian lady go into a store, buy ten cents' worth of
blue ribbon, and then have it sent home in a scow. It was such little
touches of nature as this which, as he said, moved him to tears in those
far-off lands. In speaking of Palestine, he says that its holy places
are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them. Indeed, he
asserts that if one be calm and resolute, he can look on their beauty
and live! He bequeathed his rheumatism to Baden-Baden. It was little,
but it was all he had to give. His only regret was that he could not
leave something more catching.
There is nothing better in all of 'The Innocents Abroad' than his
analysis of the theological hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
Disclaiming all intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous, he
solemnly declared that his observations had taught him the real way the
Holy Personages were ranked in Rome. “The Mother of God,” otherwise the
Virgin Mary, comes first, followed in order by the Deity, Peter, and
some twelve or fifteen canonized Popes and Martyrs. Last of all came
Jesus Christ the Saviour--but even then, always as an infant in arms!
Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed the Hawaiian stranger for
his mother's sake, the while robbing him of his small change; who was so
struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse that he hung his hat on
one of them; who rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs, and
found diverting programmes of the Roman Coliseum, in the dust and
rubbish of two thousand years ago!
Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and world-wide popularity at a
single bound by the creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive
character known as “Mark Twain.” At a somewhat later day, Bernard Shaw
achieved world-wide fame by the creation of a legendary and fantastic
wit known as “G. B. S.” To the composition of “Mark Twain” went all the
wild humour of ignorance--the boisterously comic admixture of the
sanguinary and the stoical. The humour of 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The
Innocents Abroad' is the savage and naive humour of the mining camp, not
the sophisticated humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme.
Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the _nil admirari_
attitude of “Mark Twain” no more enlightening nor suggestive than the
stoicism of the North American Indian. This mirthful and mock-innocent
naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found
instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples.
The English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in
this gay fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance and but
half-concealed shrewdness. They laughed at this unsophisticated _naif_,
gazing in wide-eyed wonderment at all he saw; and they delighted in the
consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an acute and searching
intelligence revelling in the humorous havoc wrought by his keen
perception of the contrasts and incongruities of life. The note of this
early humour is perfectly caught in the incident of the Egyptian mummy.
Deliberately assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark Twain and
his companions, had the most devastating effect upon the foreign guide
--one of that countless tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name
of Ferguson. After driving Ferguson nearly mad with pretended
ignorance, they finally asked him if the mummy was dead. When Ferguson
glibly replied that he had been dead three thousand years, he was
dumbfounded at the fury of the “doctor” for being imposed upon with vile
second-hand carcases. The poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't
bring out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him! No wonder
that, later, when he was asked for a description of the party, Ferguson
laconically remarked that they were lunatics!
In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once remarked: “We have made
a fiasco both in the heroic and the lover roles. The only parts in
which we have shown a little talent, are the naively comic; but with our
more highly developed self-consciousness we shall no longer be fitted
even for that.” With time and “our more highly developed self
--consciousness” have largely passed the novelty and the charm of this
early naively comic humour of Mark Twain. But it is as valid still, as
it was in 1867, to record honestly the impressions directly communicated
to one by the novelties, peculiarities, individual standards and ideals
of other peoples and races. Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter
disregard for other people's opinions, the dicta of criticism or the
authoritative judgment of the schools. 'The Innocents Abroad' is
eminently readable, not alone for its humour, its clever journalism, its
remarkably accurate and detailed information, and its fine descriptions.
The rare quality, which made it “sell right along--like the Bible,” is
that it is the vital record of a keen and searching intelligence. Mark
Twain found so many of the “masterpieces of the world” utterly
unimpressive and meaningless to him, that he actually began to distrust
the validity of his own impressions. Every time he gloried to think
that for once he had discovered an ancient painting that was beautiful
and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave him was an infallible
proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in any sense worthy of
commendation! He pours out the torrents of his ridicule, not
indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters themselves--though he
regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old masters--but upon those
half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an art they do not
understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by mouthings full
of cheap and meaningless tags. As potent and effective as ever, in its
fine comic irony, is that passage in which he expresses his “envy” of
those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of art which
their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor understand.
He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand critics
who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave over
“beauty,” “soul,” “character,” “expression” and “tone” in wretched,
dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation
such people--whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of
knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of
inexpressive technical terms of art criticism.
There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of
foreign travel. To the things which he personally reverenced, he was
always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of
prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless. Grant as we may
the humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes
of his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments,
however forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms. One's
enjoyment of his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making
is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the
faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is,
in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of
real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the
multitude. “The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid,”
says Mr. S. P. Sherman, “refuses to sink his identity in the object
contemplated--that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humour of
it. He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why
you went abroad. He turns the Old World into a laughing stock by
shearing it of its storied humanity--simply because there is nothing in
him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was
Rome--simpler because nothing is holier to him than a joke. He does not
throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm; he laughs at art,
history, and antiquity from the point of view of one who is ignorant of
them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance.” This picture
reminds us of the foreign critics of 'The Innocents Abroad' and 'A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': it is too partial and
restricted. The whole point of Mark Twain's humour, as exhibited in
these travel notes, is missed in the statement that “he does not throw
the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm”--for this might almost be
taken as the “philosophy” of his books of foreign travel. And yet Mr.
Sherman's dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the question
whether, as he intimates, the “overwhelming majority” of his
fellow-citizens also were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point of
view, and whether they did not enjoy themselves hugely in laughing, not
at him, but with him.
In commenting on the reasons for the broadening and deepening of his
humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: “I
succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings
failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being
funny. The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had
to live down my past. When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier
writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw
and heard. My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people
laugh. I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else
--eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some
extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days,
Tom Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens,
your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never
in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of
descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin--the
unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed
a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to
a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax
which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced. My dear
Clemens, whatever you do, never sell your audience.' And that,”
continued Mr. Clemens, “was my first really profitable lesson.”
It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance--Fitch's precept not
to “sell” his audience, Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their
endurance of the irreverent too far--that had a markedly salutary effect
upon Mark Twain's humorous writings. There can be no doubt that the
deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as
occasion demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence
upon Mark Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong
exaggeration. In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation--the
humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car,
so to speak--and turned to fiction. Now at last the long pent-up flood
of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full
vent. 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are the romances of eternal
youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. They are freighted,
however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that
have made of them contemporary classics. From ethical sophistication
and moral truantry Mark Twain evolves an inexhaustible supply of humour.
The revolt of mischievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern
limitations of formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a principle that he
carried with him to the grave. “There are no more vital passages in his
fiction,” says Mr. Howells, “than those which embody character as it is
affected for good as well as for evil by the severity of the local
Sunday-schooling and church-going.” Out of the pangs of conscience, the
ingenious sedatives of sophistry, the numerous variations of the lie, he
won a wholesome humour that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the
moral involved. Knowledge of human nature finds expression in forms
made permanently effective through the arresting permeation of humour.
The incident of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of the fence is the sort
of thing over which boy and man alike can chuckle with satisfaction--for
Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of human action without knowing
it, namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only
necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. Huck's reasoning about
chicken stealing--the exquisitely comic shifting of ground from morality
to expediency--is a striking example of the best type of Mark Twain's
humour. Following his father's example, Huck would occasionally “lift”
a chicken that wasn't roosting comfortable; for had his father not told
him that even if he didn't want the chicken himself, he could always
find somebody that did want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot?
Huck confesses that he had never seen his Pap when he didn't want the
chicken himself!
The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is found, from 'The
Innocents Abroad' to 'The Connecticut Yankee' and 'Captain Stormfield's
Visit to Heaven', is found in the mental reactions resulting from
stupendous and glaring contrasts. First it is the Wild Western
humorist, primitive and untamed, running amuck through the petrified
formulas and encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the fantastic
juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut Yankee, with his comic
irreverence and raucous sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and
provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur, with its
mediaevalism, its primitive rudeness and social narrowness. How many
have delighted in the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings
toward that classic damsel of the sixth century? At first he got along
easily with the girl; but after a while he began to feel for her a sort
of mysterious and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to unwind one
of those long sentences of hers, and got it well under way, he could
never suppress the feeling that he was standing in the awful presence of
the Mother of the German Language!
Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his own day, all countries,
savage and civilized, for the display of effective and ludicrous
contrast; and he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing satire,
as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition of sociologic types
thirteen centuries apart. Not even heaven was safe from the
comprehensive survey of his satire; and 'Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven' is a remarkable document,--a forthright lay sermon,--the
conventional idea of heaven, the theologic conception of eternity, as
heedlessly taught from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly
significant, relief against the background of the common-sense of a
deeply human, thoroughly modern intelligence.
Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a combination of wit and love.
Certain it is that, in the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later
development of his humour; the love was there all the time. Mark Twain
has not been recognized as a wit; for he was primarily a humorist, and
only secondarily a wit. But the passion for brief and pungent
formulation of an idea grew upon him; and Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
is a mine of homely and memorable aphorism, epigram, injunction.
According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic story is English,
the witty story French, the humorous story American. While the other
two depend upon matter, the humorous story depends for its effect upon
the manner of telling. The witty story and the comic story must be
concise and end with a “point”; but the humorous story may be as
leisurely as you please and have no particular destination. Mark Twain
always maintained that, while anyone could tell effectively a comic or a
witty story, it required a person skilled in an art of a rare and
distinctive character to tell a humorous story successfully. Mark Twain
was himself the supreme exemplar of the art of telling a humorous story.
Take this little passage, for example, which convulsed one of his London
audiences. He was speaking of a high mountain that he had come across
in his travels. “It is so cold that people who have been there find it
impossible to speak the truth; I know that's a fact (here a pause, a
blank stare, a shake of the head, a little stroll across the platform, a
sigh, a puff, a smothered groan), because--I've--(another pause)--been
--(a longer pause)--there myself.” Who could equal Mark Twain as a
humorous narrator, in his recital of the alarums and excursions,
criminations and recriminations, over the story of somebody else's dog
he sold to General Miles for three dollars? He delighted numerous
audiences with his story of inveighing Mrs. Grover Cleveland at a White
House reception into writing blindly on the back of a card “He didn't.”
When she turned it over she discovered that it bore on the other side,
in Mrs. Clemens' handwriting, the startling words: “Don't wear your
arctics in the White House.” I shall never forget his recital of the
story of how his enthusiasm oozed away at a meeting in behalf of foreign
missions. So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter that,
after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a blank cheque with him, he
would gladly have turned it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out
for any amount. But it was a very warm evening, the eloquence of the
minister was inexhaustible--and Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign
missions slowly oozed away--one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and even
lower still--so that when the plate was actually passed around, Mark put
in ten cents and took out a quarter!
I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907, of the vast,
spontaneous, national reception which Mark Twain received from the
English people. One incident of that memorable visit is a perfect
example of that masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity,
with which Mark Twain was endowed. At the banquet presided over by the
Lord Mayor of Liverpool, which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell
to the English people, his peroration was as follows:
“Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote in Dana's Two Years Before
the Mast. A frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop
in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was always hailing every
vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk and air his small
grandeurs. One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by, with course
on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming
with sailors, with macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange and
romantic creatures populating her rigging, and thereto her freightage of
precious spices lading the breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of
the Orient. Of course, the little coaster-captain hopped into the
shrouds and squeaked a hail: 'Ship ahoy! What ship is that, and whence
and whither?' In a deep and thunderous bass came the answer back,
through a speaking trumpet: The Begum of Bengal, a hundred and
twenty-three days out from Canton homeward bound! What ship is that?'
The little captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, and most humbly
he squeaked back: 'Only the Mary Ann--fourteen hours from Boston, bound
for Kittery Point with--with nothing to speak of!' That eloquent word
'only' expressed the deeps of his stricken humbleness.
“And what is my case? During perhaps one hour in the twenty-four
--not more than that--I stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am
properly meek, and for that little time I am 'only the Mary Ann'
--fourteen hours out, and cargoed with vegetables and tin-ware; but all
the other twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am the
stately Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under a cloud of sail, and
laden with a rich freightage of the kindest words that were ever spoken
to a wandering alien, I think; my twenty-six crowded and fortunate days
multiplied by five; and I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and
twenty-three days out from Canton--homeward bound!”
Says “Charles Vale,” in describing the scene “The audience sat
spellbound in almost painful silence, till it could restrain itself no
longer; and when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain sang out
the words: 'I am the Begum of Bengal, a hundred and twenty-three days
out from Canton,' there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the
room to the other. It seemed an inopportune cheer, and for a moment it
upset the orator: yet it was felicitous in opportuneness. Slowly, after
a long pause, came the last two words--like that curious, detached and
high note in which a great piece of music suddenly ends--'Homeward
bound.' Again there was a cheer: but this time it was lower; it was
subdued; it was the fitting echo to the beautiful words--with their
double significance--the parting from a hospitable land, the return to
the native land. . . . Only a great litterateur could have conceived
such a passage: only a great orator could have so delivered it.”
Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote this generation has
known. He claimed the humorous story as an American invention, and one
that has remained at home. His public speeches were little mosaics in
the finesse of their art; and the intricacies of inflection,
insinuation, jovial innuendo which Mark Twain threw into his gestures,
his implicative pauses, his suggestive shrugs and deprecative nods--all
these are hopelessly volatilized and disappear entirely from the printed
copy of his speeches. He gave the most minute and elaborate study to
the preparation of his speeches--polishing them dexterously and
rehearsing every word, every gesture, with infinite care. Yet his
readiness and fertility of resource in taking advantage, and making
telling use, of things in the speeches of those immediately preceding
him, were striking evidences of the rapidity of his thought-processes.
In Boston, when asked what he thought about the existence of a heaven or
a hell, he looked grave for a moment, and then replied: “I don't want to
express an opinion. It's policy for me to keep silent. You see, I have
friends in both places.” His speech introducing General Hawley of
Connecticut to a Republican meeting at Elmira, New York, is an admirable
example of his laconic art: “General Hawley is a member of my church at
Hartford, and the author of 'Beautiful Snow.' Maybe he will deny that.
But I am only here to give him a character from his last place. As a
pure citizen, I respect him; as a personal friend of years, I have the
warmest regard for him; as a neighbour, whose vegetable garden adjoins
mine, why--why, I watch him. As the author of 'Beautiful Snow,' he has
added a new pang to winter. He is a square, true man in honest
politics, and I must say he occupies a mighty lonesome position.
So broad, so bountiful is his character that he never turned a tramp
empty-handed from his door, but always gave him a letter of introduction
to me. Pure, honest, incorruptible, that is Joe Hawley. Such a man in
politics is like a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory--it may modify
the stench, but it doesn't destroy it. I haven't said any more of him
than I would say of myself. Ladies and gentlemen, this is General
Hawley.”
Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a wit rather than a
humorist--perhaps something more than a humorist. “Wit,” he explains,
“requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic. A
wit must have something of the same running, working, and staying power
as a mathematician or a metaphysician. Moreover, wit is a fighting
thing and a working thing. A man may enjoy humour all by himself; he
may see a joke when no one else sees it; he may see the point and avoid
it. But wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as
well as see it. All honest people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit.
Not a few dishonest people felt it.” The epigram, “Be virtuous, and you
will be eccentric,” has become a catchword; and everyone has heard Mark
Twain's reply to the reporter asking for advice as to what to cable his
paper, which had printed the statement that Mark Twain was dead “Say
that the statement is greatly exaggerated.” He has admirably taken off
humanity's enduring self-conceit in the statement that there isn't a
Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had
had its rights. There is something peculiarly American in his warning
to young girls not to marry--that is, not to excess! His remarks on
compliments have a delightful and naive freshness. He points out how
embarrassing compliments always are. It is so difficult to take them
naturally. You never know what to say. He had received many
compliments in his lifetime, and they had always embarrassed him--he
always felt that they hadn't said enough!
The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with Whistler is quaintly
illustrative of one phase of his broader humour. Mark Twain was taken
by a friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting the finishing
touches to one of his fantastic studies. Confident of the usual
commendation, Whistler inquired his guest's opinion of the picture.
Mark Twain assumed the air of a connoisseur, and approaching the picture
remarked that it did very well, but “he didn't care much for that
cloud--”; and suiting the action to the word, appeared to be on the
point of rubbing the cloud with his gloved finger. In genuine horror,
Whistler exclaimed: “Don't touch it, the paint's wet!” “Oh, that's all
right,” replied Mark with his characteristic drawl: “these aren't my
best gloves, anyhow!” Whereat Whistler recognized a congenial spirit,
and their first hearty laugh together was the beginning of a friendly
and congenial relationship.
I recall an incident in connection with the writing of his
Autobiography. On more than one occasion, he declared that the
Autobiography was going to be something awful--as caustic, fiendish, and
devilish as he could make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting
on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization
or diabolic joke: “Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty)
years after my death.” One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in
bitter and caustic words, upon a certain strenuous, limelight American
politician. I could not resist the temptation to ask him if this, too,
were going into the Autobiography. “Oh yes,” he replied, decisively.
“Everything goes in. I make no exceptions. But,” he added
reflectively, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, “I shall make
a note beside this passage: 'Not to be published until one hundred and
fifty years after my death'!”
Mark Twain had numerous “doubles” scattered about the world. The number
continually increased; once a month on an average, he would receive a
letter from a new “double,” enclosing a photograph in proof of the
resemblance. Mark once wrote to one of these doubles as follows: