Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as
we are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain--humour not unmixed with a
strong spice of wit. But Mark Twain was capable of wit, pure and
unadulterated, curt and concise. I once saw him write in a young girl's
birthday book an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites “Truth
is our most valuable possession. Let us economize it.” The advice he
once gave me as to the proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical
operation has always remained in my memory: “Console yourself with the
reflection that you are giving the doctor pleasure, and that he is
getting paid for it.” Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum
that the statue which advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf brings its
modesty under suspicion. His business motto--unfortunately, a motto
that he never followed--has often been attributed, because of its canny
shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The idea was to put all your eggs
in one basket--and then--watch that basket! His anti-Puritanical
convictions find concrete expression in his assertion that few things
are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. Truly
classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy saying that faith is
believing what you know ain't so. His definition of a classic as a book
which people praise but don't read, is as frequently heard as are
Biblical and Shakespearian tags.
Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed between two and three
hundred maxims during his life. Many of them, especially those from the
old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and
peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life
--quaint, genial, and shrewd. In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in
the omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a
bitter almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college
education. He himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he
defined as disrespect for another man's god. Women took an almost
unholy delight in describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in
Mark Twain's phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but
just the kind of person that keeps a parrot!
At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a
world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone
you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depressing sense of
world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his
temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the
first great benefactor of the race--because he had brought death into
the world. A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual
uplift, a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set
free. He thought it was far harder to live than to die.
In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion
to the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son:
“Oh! we'll all get blind drunk
When Johnny comes marching home!”
And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in
the mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's
heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: “I was
curious to know what Philip had for dinner.” Mark Twain was capable of
epigrams worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of
Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said “Humour there is in almost
every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam
on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies--on the deep melancholy of
Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear.” The greatest ironic achievements of
Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the
power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist--or shall we rather
say, ironic wit? For they range all the way from the most mordant to
the most pathetic irony--from Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human
tears:
“_Sunt lachrymae rerum._”
“Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements,” counselled
Oliver Wendell Holmes. “You can't expect to do anything great with
Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella.” Mark
Twain has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness. The world
is loth to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own.
Whosoever sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the
almost insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a
serious thinker. Says Moliere--
“_C'est une etrange entreprise que celle
de faire rire les honnetes gens._”
The strangeness of the undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour
of its obligations. Mark Twain began his career as a professional
humorist and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells.
The man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the
comic is, not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense. The French
have a fine-flavoured distinction in _ce qui remue_ from _ce qui emeut_;
and if _remuage_ is the defining characteristic of 'A Tramp Abroad',
'Roughing It', and 'The Innocents Abroad', there is much of deep
seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom
Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. In the course of
his lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly
humorist, from a sensational journalist into a literary artist. In
explanation of this, let us recall the steps in that evolution. In his
youth, this boy had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an
environment that promised only stagnation and decay. As the young boy,
barefooted and dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the
surface of that great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the
ambition and the ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious
water. His dream, in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot,
but--which is infinitely more significant--he changed from a callow,
indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a
master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and
minuteness, was, for its purpose, all-sufficient and complete.
I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great
university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that
trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without
which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed
the very real art which they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the
art of taking infinite pains--the art of exactitude, precision and
detail. Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh--dying in the very
moment of its birth. Art alone can give it enduring vitality. Mark
Twain's native temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank
in the wonder of the river and unfolded through communication with all
its rude human devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility,
developed and matured through rigorous education in particularity and
detail; and before his spirit the very beauties of Nature herself
disappeared in face of a consuming sense of the work of the world that
must be done.
Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty that his reputation as a
humorist compelled him to pay. He became more than popular novelist,
more than a jovial entertainer: he became a public institution, as
unmistakable and as national as the Library of Congress or the
Democratic Party. Even in the latest years of his life, though long
since dissociated in fact from the category of Artemus Ward, John
Phoenix, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never
be sure that his most solemn utterance might not be drowned in roars of
thoughtless laughter.
“It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter,” Mr. Clemens
once said to me, “to doff the mask of humour with which the public is
accustomed, in thought, to see me adorned. It is the incorrigible
practice of the public, in this or in any country, to see only humour in
the humorist, however serious his vein. Not long ago I wrote a poem,
which I never dreamed of giving to the public, on account of its
seriousness; but on being invited to address the women students of a
certain great university, I was persuaded by a near friend to read this
poem. At the close of my lecture I said 'Now, ladies, I am going to
read you a poem of mine'--which was greeted with bursts of uproarious
laughter. 'But this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated--only to be
greeted with renewed and, this time, more uproarious laughter. Nettled
by this misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket, saying, 'Well,
young ladies, since you do not believe me to be serious, I shall not
read the poem'--at which the audience almost went into convulsions of
laughter.”
Humour is a function of nationality. The same joke, as related by an
American, a Scotchman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a
distinctive racial flavour and individuality of approach. Indeed, it is
open to question whether most humour is not essentially local in its
nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular
locality. It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native
heath to understand that great political satirist, “Mr. Dooley,” on the
Negro Problem, for example. After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang,
Mr. Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour
varies with the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle
in London.
If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark Twain's world-wide
popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the
universality and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a master in the
art of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour;
and there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But these
are mere surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power,
to all forms of humour. Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to
be attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or
even to any depth of intellectuality. His hold upon the world is due to
qualities, not of the head, but of the heart. I once heard Mr. Clemens
say that humour is the key to the hearts of men, for it springs from the
heart; and worthy of record is his dictum that there is far more of
feeling than of thought in genuine humour.
Mark Twain succeeded in “tickling the midriff of the English-speaking
races” with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not
only a man of letters, but also a man of action. His humour has been
defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has
said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the
man of feeling. To the great humorist--to Mark Twain--the world was a
tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief
is the most real and important thing in the world--because it separates
us from happiness. He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest
humour, perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition: “If you laugh
all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a
tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare
him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the
spirit of Humour that is moving you.” Mark Twain's fun was
light-hearted and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound. “He is,
above all,” said that oldest of English journals, 'The Spectator', “the
fearless upholder of all that is clean, noble, straightforward, innocent,
and manly. . . . If he is a jester, he jests with the mirth of the
happiest of the Puritans; he has read much of English knighthood, and
translated the best of it into his living pages; and he has assuredly
already won a high degree in letters in having added more than any writer
since Dickens to the gaiety of the Empire of the English language.”
Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the heart. He enjoyed to the
utmost those two inalienable blessings: “laughter and the love of
friends.” He woke the laughter of an epoch and numbered a world for his
friends. “He is the true consolidator of nations,” said Mr. Augustine
Birrell. “His delightful humour is of the kind which dissipates and
destroys national prejudices. His truth and his honour, his love of
truth and his love of honour, overflow all boundaries. He has made the
world better by his presence.”