“Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward
towards a summit where you will find your chiefest
pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will
be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the
community.”
MARK TWAIN: 'What is Man?'
“The humorous writer,” says Thackeray, “professes to awaken and direct
your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension,
and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed,
the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all
the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself
to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and
speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him--sometimes
love him.” This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark
Twain in mind. In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of
Mark Twain's humour. Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing
it, is a fund of human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and
a universality of interests which argue real power and greatness. These
qualities, now to be discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to
be regarded as a real moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be
regarded as, in spirit, a true sociologist and reformer.
It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no
great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of
humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that
humour may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more
serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product.
Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a “sound and
capacious mind, which is always a grave one.” There is always a breadth
of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very
greatest humorists. Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective
dreamers; Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking
the bubble of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in
his position, he could do no better than attack the vices of his time
with ridiculous likenesses. Though exhibiting little of the melancholy
of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and
expression, showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with the
strong but pungent flavour of the soil. Though expressing distaste for
Franklin's somewhat cold and almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain
nevertheless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock
common sense. Beneath and commingled with all his boyish and exuberant
fun is a note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which rings true
beside the forced and extravagant pathos of Dickens. His Southern
hereditament of chivalry, his compassion for the oppressed and his
defence of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from the beginning
of his career to the very end. Like Joel Chandler Harris, that genial
master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such absorbing
interest as human nature. Like Fielding, he wrote immortal narratives
in which the prime concern is not the “story,” but the almost scientific
revelation of the natural history of the characters. The corrosive and
mordant irony of many a passage in Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to
scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite, the
sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift. That “disposition
for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction it,” which George
Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British humour, is Mark
Twain's unmistakable hereditament. It is, perhaps, because he relates
us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that Mark
Twain is the foremost of American humorists.
In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as far back as 1867, Mark
Twain was dubbed, not only “the wild humorist of the Pacific slope,” but
also “the moralist of the Main.” The first book which brought him great
popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious
ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of
that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour.
How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that “benefit”
performance he witnessed in Italy!
The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which perhaps more than any other
won the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow Americans, was this: he
always had the courage of his convictions. He writes of things, classic
and hallowed by centuries, with a freshness of viewpoint, a total
indifference to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous respect
for his courage, even when one's own convictions are not engaged. The
“beautiful love story of Abelard and Heloise” will never, I venture to
say, recover its pristine glory--now that Mark Twain has poured over
Abelard the vials of his wrath.
Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep,
underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and
truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker
and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of
mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave
carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: “I never
wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely
responsible--to her should go the credit--for any deeply serious or
moral influence my subsequent work may exert. After my marriage, she
edited everything I wrote. And what is more--she not only edited my
works, she edited ME! After I had written some side-splitting story,
something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax,
she would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to
impart here. Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy
the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity.
Be yourself! Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please,
but--without farcical commentary. Don't destroy your purpose with an
ill-timed joke.' I learned from her that the only right thing was to
get in my serious meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let
them really feel the underlying moral that gave body and essence to my
jest.”
The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals,
upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the
humorist always--never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness of
the philosopher. He observes all human traits, whether of moral
sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of
his kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist. And
yet at times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly
pathos, unmistakable, irresistible. One has only to read the beautiful,
tender tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and
the depth of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of
kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom.
In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of
'Huckleberry Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting
incidents, its omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper
significance of many a passage in that contemporary classic is likely to
escape notice. Sir Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most
completely satisfying and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately
as a book without a moral. Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” There never was
a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the
two farcical “hoboes,” Tom Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light
of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque
romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying
seriousness and conviction. Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike
and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the
narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only
a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive
from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of
his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim,
Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy for and
interest in the masses of the negro people.
Indeed, to the reflective mind--and it is to be presumed that by that
standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged--there is no more
significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck
struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral
responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is
needed to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of
human conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that,
with the “lights that he had,” Huck was justified in his courageous
decision.
Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent,
inoffending Miss Watson. He became consumed with horror and remorse to
hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their
masters wouldn't sell them. His conscience kept stirring him up hotter
than ever when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of
freedom. After awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson,
informing her of the whereabouts of her “runaway nigger.” After writing
that letter, he felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted. But he
could not forget all the goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had
shown himself so profoundly grateful. Though he faced the torments of
Puritanical damnation as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free.
Humanity triumphed over conscience--and with an “All right, then, I'll
go to hell,” he tore up the letter.
One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the display of his humour was
the subject of prevarication. He seemed never to tire of ringing the
changes upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its
consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is
generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities--a fault
which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to.
The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the
basis for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations
innumerable, from the epigram to the anecdote. His distinction between
George Washington and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory,
and demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington as a moral
character, is classic: “George Washington couldn't tell a lie. I can;
but I won't.” Perhaps his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same
story, is in connection with the exceedingly old “darky” he once met in
the South, who claimed to have crossed the Delaware with Washington.
“Were you with Washington,” asked Mark Twain mischievously, “when he
took that hack at the cherry tree?” This was a poser for the old
darkey; his pride was appealed to, his very character was at stake.
After an awkward hesitation, the old darkey spoke up, a gleam of
simulated recollection (and real gratification for his convenient
memory) overspreading his countenance: “Lord, boss, I was dar. In
cose I was. I was with Marse George at dat very time. In fac--I done
druv dat hack myself”!
Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular humorist was to strike
out some comic epigram, that passed currency with the masses whose fancy
it tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the classic
aphorism. These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature;
and their humour usually lay in the assumption that everybody is
habitually addicted to prevarication--which is just precisely true
enough and reprehensible enough to validate the epigram. His method was
humorous inversion; and he told a story whose morals are so ludicrously
twisted that the right moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to
light. “Never tell a lie--except for practice,” is less successful than
the more popularly known “When in doubt, tell the truth.” Out of the
latter maxim he succeeded in extracting a further essence of humour. He
admitted inventing the maxim, but never expected it to be applied to
himself. His advice, he said, was intended for other people; when he
was in doubt himself, he used more sagacity! Mark Twain has made no
more delightful epigram than that one in which he recognizes that a lie,
morally reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an ever present help
in time of need: “Never waste a lie. You never know when you may need
it.”
Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly serious way, Mark Twain
was fond of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical
morals. Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort you get on
your mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit. You get them
into your head, not into your heart. Only by the commission of crime
can anyone acquire real morals. Commit all the crimes in the decalogue,
take them in rotation, persevere in this stern determination--and after
awhile you will thereby attain to moral perfection! It is not enough to
commit just one crime or two--though every little bit helps. Only by
committing them all can you achieve real morality! It is interesting to
note this distinction between Mark Twain, the humorous moralist, and
Bernard Shaw, the ethical thinker. Each teaches precisely the same
thing--the one not even half seriously, the other with all the sharp
sincerity of conviction. Shaw unhesitatingly declares that trying to be
wicked is precisely the same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the
discovery of character.
The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the ludicrous anecdote with
comically mixed morals to the profound parable with grimly ironic
conclusion, takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man. It can
best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the
theft of the green water-melon and the classic fable of 'The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Mark stole a water-melon out of a farmer's
wagon, while he wasn't looking. Of course stole was too harsh a term
--he withdrew, he retired that water-melon. After getting safely away to
a secluded spot, he broke the water-melon open--only to find that it was
green, the greenest water-melon of the year.
The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry. He
began to reflect--for reflection is the beginning of reform. It is only
by reflecting on some crime you have committed, that you are
“vaccinated” against committing it again.
So Mark began to reflect. And his reflections were of this nature: What
ought a boy to do who has stolen a green water-melon? What would George
Washington, who never told a lie, have done? He decided that the only
real, right thing for any boy to do, who has stolen a water-melon of
that class, is to make restitution. It is his duty to restore it to its
rightful owner. So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by
his noble resolution, Mark restored the water--melon--what there was
left of it--to the farmer and--made the farmer give him a ripe one in
its place! Thus he clinched the “moral” of this story, so quaint and so
ingenious; and concluded that only in some such way as this could one be
fortified against further commission of crime. Only thus could one
become morally perfect!
Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical
suggestion--a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his
literal words--the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity,
fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is
a serious meaning that, like murder, will out. If demonstration were
needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is
amply supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention,
construction, and originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.
Here is a pure morality, daring in the extreme and incredibly original
in a world perpetually reiterating a saying already thousands of years
old, to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun. It is a
deliberate emendation of that invocation in the Lord's Prayer “Lead us
(not) into temptation.” The shrieking irony of this trenchant parable,
its cynicism and heartlessness, would make of it an unendurable
criticism of human life--were it accepted literally as a representation
of society. In essence it is a morality pure and simple, animated not
only by its brilliantly original ethical suggestion, but also by its
illuminating reflection of human nature and its graciously relieving
humour. In that exultant letter which the _Diabolus ex machina_ wrote
to the betrayed villagers, he sneers at their old and lofty reputation
for honesty--that reputation of which they were so inordinately proud
and vain. The weak point in their armour was disclosed so soon as he
discovered how carefully and vigilantly they kept themselves and their
children out of temptation. For he well knew that the weakest of all
weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire. The
familiar distinction between innocence and virtue springs to mind. And
it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche, and Shaw after him, both
point out that virtue consists, not in resisting evil, but in not
desiring it! 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a masterpiece,
eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift. It proclaims Mark Twain not
only as a supreme artist, but also as eminently and distinctively a
moralist.
It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his maturer development as
other than a moralist. My personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens
convinced me--had I needed to be convinced--that in his later years he
had striven to grapple nobly with many of the deeper issues of life,
character and morality, public, religious and social, as well as
personal and private. I never knew anyone who thought so “straight,”
or who expressed himself with such simple directness upon questions
affecting religion and conduct. He was absolutely fearless in his
condemnation of those subsidized “ministers” of the Gospel in
cosmopolitan centres, who, through self-interest, cut their moral
disquisitions to fit the predilections of their wealthy parishioners,
many of whom were under national condemnation as “malefactors of great
wealth.” Animated by love for all creatures, the defenceless wild
animal as well as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in his indictment
of those big-game hunters who shamelessly described their feelings of
savage exultation when some poor animal served as the target for their
skill, and staggered off wounded unto death. His sympathy for the
natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic against
King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention of
the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern
civilization. His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his
inhumanity to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble
determination to throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of
suffering and oppressed humanity. Some years before his death, he told
me that he never intended to speak in public again save in behalf of
movements, humanitarian and uplifting, which gave promise of effecting
civic betterment and social improvement.
I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark
Twain for three events--for the publication of such works can be
dignified with no less eminent characterization. When Mr. Edward Dowden
tried to make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the
sacrifice of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook. That
ingrained chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the
Southerner, the sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak
and the defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions
of his career. For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more
than a work, it is an act--an act of high courage and nobility. With
words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully
insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and
her waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six
times repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married
woman who read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the night
with him--because he saw visions when he was alone! Again, in his 'Joan
of Arc', Mark Twain erected a monument of enduring beauty to that simple
maid of Orleans, to whom the Roman Catholic Church has just now paid the
merited yet tardy tribute of canonization. It is a sad commentary upon
the popular attitude of frivolity towards the professional humorist that
Mark Twain felt compelled to publish this book anonymously, in order
that the truth and beauty of that magic story might receive its just
meed of respectful and sympathetic attention.
The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain
is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story
entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' It contains, I believe, the moral
that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life--the
bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human
nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead
of wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law. No one doubts that
Mark Twain--as who would not?--believed, aye, knew, that this sweet,
human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of
fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay
on Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it
Heaven or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King
Leopold, the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications
of the moral principle. 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' in its simple pathos,
'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony,
present vital evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral
values which marks the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw.
In that amusing, naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that
he could make exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing;
but she maintains that he was more interested in earnest books and
earnest conversation than in humorous ones. She pronounced him to be as
much of a Pholosopher (sic) as anything. And she hazards the opinion
that he might have done a great deal in this direction if only he had
studied when he was a boy!
Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he called 'An Extract from
Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'. For long he desisted from
publishing it because of his fear that its outspoken frankness would
appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities of the public. While his
villa of “Stormfield” was in course of erection several years ago, he
discovered that half of it was going to cost what he had expected to
pay for the whole house. His heart was set on having a loggia or
sun-parlour; and when it seemed that he would have to sacrifice this
apple of his eye through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds,
hauled out Captain Stormfield and made the old tar pay the piper. His
fears as to its reception were wholly unwarranted; for it was generously
enjoyed for its shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and heaven
as popularly taught nowadays from the pulpits. This book is full of a
keen and bluff common sense, cannily expressed in the words of an old
sea-captain whom Mark Twain had known intimately. It is only another
link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove that Mark Twain had
thought long and deeply upon the problematical nature of a future life.
It is, in essence, a _reductio ad absurdum_ of those professors of
religion who still preach a heaven of golden streets and pearly gates, of
idleness and everlasting psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss.
Mark Twain wanted to point out the absurdity of taking the allegories and
the figurative language of the Bible literally. Of course everybody
called for a harp and a halo as soon as they reached heaven. They were
given the harps and halos--indeed nothing harmless and reasonable was
refused them. But they found these things the merest accessories. Mark
Twain's heaven was just the busiest place imaginable. There weren't any
idle people there after the first day. The old sea captain pointed out
that singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity was all
very pretty when you heard about it from the pulpit, but that it was a
mighty poor way to put in valuable time. He took no stock in a heaven of
warbling ignoramuses. He found that Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan,
was not as comforting as it sounds in the pulpit. Heaven is the merited
reward of service; and the opportunities for service were infinite. As
he said, you've got to earn a thing square and honest before you can
enjoy it. To Mark, this was “about the sensiblest heaven” he had ever
heard of. He mourned a little over the discovery that what a man mostly
missed in heaven was company. But he rejoiced in the information
vouchsafed by his friend the Captain--a valuable piece of information
that leaves him, and all who are so fortunate as to hear it, the better
for the knowledge--that happiness isn't a thing in itself, but only a
contrast with something that isn't pleasant! This view of heaven, seen
through the temperament of a humorist and a philosopher, is provocative
and thought-compelling more than it is amusing or ludicrous. I think it
inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand
dollar prize--a prize which Mr Shaw hurled back with indignation and
scorn!
Mark Twain was a great humorist--more genial than grim, more
good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to
intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy.
He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the
literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and
picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter,
never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be “frightened by the
venerableness of the institution”; and his sublimated journalism reveals
a mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic. He is
the most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly
shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited
that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and that faith in
the contemporary which stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible
youth. Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of high ethical
influence in our civilization, and the philosopher and the humanitarian
look out through the twinkling eyes of the humorist.
And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great
writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that
highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and
even humour, which we call sociology. When I first advanced this view,
it was taken up on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain “from
a new angle”; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of
Europe; and the author of the essay was invited “to explain Mark Twain
to the German public”! There are still many people, however, who resent
any demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and
humorous entertainer. Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support
of the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as
America's greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of
Mark Twain primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist. “Of course,”
he added, “Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to
put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang
him, believe he is joking.”
Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and
principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn't
strength of mind enough to believe it. “Custom is a petrifaction,” he
asserted; “nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.” Mr. W.
D. Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that “the ludicrous
incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration
of Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black
labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of
contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so.” However
that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion,
Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and
indefensible. The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this
conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern
men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills. The
slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by
their owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their
spiritual welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress
of the house.
In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery. He wasn't
even aware that there was anything wrong about it. He never heard it
condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers. And as for the
preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical
passages in support of that view. If the slaves themselves were averse
to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject. He seldom
saw a slave misused--on the farm, never. But when he was brought face
to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family,
it made a deep impression upon his consciousness. It was this
deplorable evil of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible
separation of the members of the same family, the one from the other,
that convinced him of the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as
has been pointed out by Mr. Howells, did not come to him “till after his
liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far West.” Yet it found its
way into his books--into Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's
pathetic longing to buy back his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead
Wilson with its moving picture of the poor slave's agony when she
suddenly realizes in the way the water is flowing around the snag that
she is being “sold down the river.” In Uncle Tom's Cabin, as Professor
Phelps has pointed out, “the red--hot indignation of the author largely
nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . . Mrs. Stowe's
astonishing work is not really the history of slavery; it is the history
of abolition sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows us the beautiful side
of slavery--for it had a wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side--and he
also shows us the horror of it.” Mark Twain has declared that the only
way to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and people with which
the story is concerned, through years of “unconscious absorption” of the
facts of the life to be portrayed. When his stories were written,
slavery was a thing of the past--he was competent to judge of the
situation impartially, through direct personal contact throughout his
boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object was not the object of
the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by animosity. He saw
clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic. Hence it is, I
believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in fundamentals,
a remarkable sociologist. Certain passages in his books on the subject
of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the truest things
that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a continent and
plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife.
Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind
the most vivid pictures--pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The
memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his
scathing remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds
of those Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords,
shooting each other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of
race; the lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and
unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the
variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of
the river--all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as
Huck's raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides
his boat through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a
great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a
sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely
more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is
a “sort of contemporaneous posterity” which has registered its verdict
that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there
is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare
say, class Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in
letters. He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and
unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has passed
forever. And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the
sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and
unparalleled documents in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane,
boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.
Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic
interpretation went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in
penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase
of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an “institution”
blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion
that periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad “carnivals of
crime.” The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality
which gives his profession its power and validity as an effective
instrumentality in the advancement of civilization, is the faculty of
penetrating national and racial disguises, and going directly to the
heart of the human problem. Mark Twain possessed this faculty in
supreme degree. As a literary critic he was banal and futile; but as
a social and racial critic he was remarkable and profound. His essay
'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece of impartial interpretation; his
comprehension of French and German racial traits, as revealed in his
works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and his magnificent analysis
of the situation in South Africa, in the concluding chapters of
'Following the Equator', rings clear with the accents of truth and
mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy. Deeper far, more
comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark Twain's
interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the national
ideals. His “defence” of General Funston is a scorching and devastating
blast, red with the fires of patriotism. Whatever be one's convictions,
one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's
berserker-like rage over the attitude of Europe in China, the barbarities
of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the
Philippines, copied after Weyler's _reconcentrado_ policy in Cuba. His
study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross
exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified
common-sense, a sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive
in psychological analysis of national and racial traits.
In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate
fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that “divine average”
of common life which is the dream of American democracy. 'The Prince
and the Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich
in human interest. It is something deeper far than this; for the very
crucial motive of the story, the successful substitution of the commoner
for the king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the
equality of man. Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution,
and frankly expressed his regret over Napoleon's failure to invade
England and thus destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal
paraphernalia of the British monarchy. Despite its note of Yankee
blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur' is a remarkable brief
for democracy and the brotherhood of man. So eminent a publicist as Mr.
William T. Stead pronounced it, at the time of its first appearance, one
of the most significant books of our time; and classed it (with Henry
George's 'Progress and Poverty' and Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward')
as the third great book from America to give tremendous impetus to the
social democratic movement of the age. Mark Twain abandoned all hope of
a future life; found more of sorrow than of joy in life's balances; and
even, in his latter years, lost faith in humanity itself. But amid the
wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American
optimism: he never lost faith in democracy, and fought valiantly to the
end in behalf of equality and the welfare of the average man.
Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship,
Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early
eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club
to which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose
deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the
religiously orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper
in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he
felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to
the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every
man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his
training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking,
heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club. “I did
not read that paper,” Mr. Clemens said to me, “but I put it away,
resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time. Every now and
then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it,
to compare its views with my own later views. From time to time I added
something to it. But I never found, during that quarter of a century,
that my views had altered in the slightest degree. I had a few copies
published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the
book to indicate its authorship.” A few days later he gave me a copy,
and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the
prefatory note:
“Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as
unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed,
kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and
could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I
not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find
no other.”
'What is Man?' propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue
between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that “Beliefs are
acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change;
nothing whatever can change temperament.” He enunciates the theory,
which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such
person as a permanent seeker after truth.
“When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth,
with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he
tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.” “All training,” he
avers, “is one form or another of outside influences, and association is
the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside
influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him
upward--but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time.”
Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another
story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of
writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to
high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling
protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer
was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is
Man?': “Oh, he is real. He's all the boy that I have known or
recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because,
when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education
avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man.
Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and
gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He
would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an
angel.” It was what he called Kismet.
It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the
days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all
faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or
theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced,
the human race remained “indestructibly content, happy, thankful,
proud.” He never had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs
never tended to warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because
he saw in it supreme truth. His ultimate philosophy of life, which he
sums up in 'What is Man?', is healthy and right-minded. It is best
embodied in the lofty injunction: “Diligently train your ideals upward
and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest
pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer
benefits upon your neighbour and the community.” Lassalle once said:
“History forgives mistakes and failures, but not want of conviction.”
In Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to forgive any want
of conviction.