The Complete Novels of Mark Twain and the Complete Biography of Mark Twain (423 page)

Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme eminence as a representative national author which is without a parallel in the history of American literature. This position he achieved directly by his appeal to the great mass of the people, despite the
dict
of the
literati
. At a time when England and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark Twain, the culture of his own land was regarding him with slighting condescension, or with mildly quizzical unconcern. Boston regarded him with fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and Lowell found little in him to admire or approve. There were notable exceptions, as Mr. Howells has recently pointed out—Charles Eliot Norton, Professor Francis J. Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells himself; but in general it is true that "in proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude." The professors of literature regarded Mark Twain as an author whose works were essentially ephemeral; and stood in the breach for Culture against the barbaric invasion of primitive Western Barbarism. Professor W. P. Trent was, I believe, the first to cite Professor Richardson's American Literature (published in 1886) as a typical instance of the position of literary culture in regard to Mark Twain. "But there is a class of writers," we read in that work, "authors ranking below Irving or Lowell, and lacking the higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater humorists, who amuse a generation and then pass from sight. Every period demands a new manner of jest, after the current fashion . . . . The reigning favourites of the day are Frank R. Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers, and 'Mark Twain.' [Note the damning position!] But the creators of `Pomona' and 'Rudder Grange,' of `Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,' and `Innocents Abroad,' clever as they are, must make hay while the sun shines. Twenty years hence, unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some higher literary achievement, their unknown successors will be the privileged comedians of the republic. Humour alone never gives its masters a place in literature; it must coexist with literary qualities, and must usually be joined with such pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or Holmes." This passage stands in the 1892 edition of that work, though 'Tom Sawyer' had appeared in 1876, 'The Prince and the Pauper' in 1882, 'Life on the Mississippi' in 1883, 'Huckleberry Finn' in 1884, and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in 1889. Opinions analogous to those expressed in the passage just cited have found frequent expression among leaders of critical opinion in America; and only yesterday 'The Jumping Frog' and 'The Innocents Abroad' were seriously put forward, by a clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's most enduring claims upon posterity! A bare half-dozen men in the ranks of American literary criticism have recognized and eloquently spoken forth in vindication of Mark Twain's title as a classic author, not simply of American literature, but of the literature of the world.

It is, even now, perhaps not too early to attempt some sort of inquiry into the causes contributory to Mark Twain's recognition as the prime representative of contemporary American literature. One of the cheap catchwords of Mark Twain criticism is the statement that he is "American to the core," and that his popular appreciation in his own country was due to the fact that he most completely embodied the national genius. How many of those who confidently advance this vastly significant statement, one curiously wonders, have seriously endeavoured to make plain to others—or even to themselves—the reasons therefor? Perhaps in seeking the causes for Mark Twain's renown in his own country one may discover the causes for his world-wide fame.

A map of the United States, upon which were marked the localities and regions made famous by the writings of Mark Twain, would show that, geographically, he has known and studied this vast country in all the grand divisions of its composition. Bred from old Southern stock, born in the Southwest, he passed his youth upon the bosom of that great natural division between East and West, the Mississippi River, which cleaves in twain the very body of the nation. In the twenties he lost the feeling of local attachment in the vast democracy of the West, and looked life—a strangely barbaric and primitive life—straight in the face. This is the first great transformation in his life—behold the Westerner! After enriching his mind through contact with civilizations so diverse as Europe and the Sandwich Islands, he settled down in Connecticut, boldly foreswore the creeds and principles of his native section, and underwent a new transformation—behold the Yankee! Once again, travel in foreign lands, association with the most intellectual and cultured circles of the world, broadened his vision; yet this cosmopolitan experience, far from diminishing his racial consciousness, tended still further to accentuate the national characteristics. In this new transformation, we behold the typical American! The later years, of cosmopolitan renown, of world-wide fame, throw into high relief the last transformation—behold the universally human spirit! Under this crude catalogue, the main lines of Mark Twain's development stand out in sharp definition. The catalogue, however, is only too crude—it is impossible to say with precision just when such and such a transformation actually took place. It is only intended to be suggestive; for we must bear in mind that Mark Twain never changed character. His spirit underwent an evolutionary process—broadening, deepening, enlarging its vision with the passage of the years.

The part which the South played in the formation of the character and genius of Mark Twain has been little noted heretofore. It was in the South and Southwest that the creator of the humour of local eccentrics first appeared in full flower; and "Ned Brace," "Major Jones," and "Sut Lovengood" have in them the germs of that later Western humour that was to come to full fruition in the works of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. The stage coach and the river steamboat furnished the means for disseminating far and wide the gross, the ghastly, the extravagant stories, the oddities of speech, the fantastic jests which emerged from the clash of diverse and oddly-assorted types. The jarring contrasts, the incongruities and surprises daily furnished by the picturesque river life unquestionably stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of humour in the young cub-pilot, Sam Clemens. Through Mark Twain's greatest works flows the stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them some indefinable share of its beauty, its variety, its majesty, its immensity; and there is no exaggeration in the conclusion that it is the greatest natural influence which his works betray. Reared in a slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry—young Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier. Not even his most enthusiastic biographers have attempted to palliate, save with half-hearted facetiousness, his inglorious desertion of the cause which he had espoused. Mark Twain is the most speedily "reconstructed rebel" on record. Is it broad-minded—or even accurate!—for Mr. Howells to say of Mark Twain: "No one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?" Mark Twain never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern "ideal." But in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the "Southern ideal" of his Virginia forbears; and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right and wrong which is so conspicuous a trait of Mark Twain's is a symptom of that "moral elegance" which Mr. Owen Wister has pronounced to be one of the defining characteristics of the Southern American. "No American of Northern birth or breeding," Mr. Howells pertinently observes, "could have imagined the spiritual struggle of Huck Finn in deciding to help the negro Jim to his freedom, even though he should be for ever despised as a negro thief in his native town, and perhaps eternally lost through the blackness of his sin. No Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes to lynch him."

The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is momentous and unmistakable. Mark Twain found room for development and expansion in the primitive freedom of the West. It was here, I think, that there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to end. In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood—or fell—by force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled for fortune, for competence—or for existence. It was a case of the survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature—the burning alkali desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,—all men were free and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those contrasts. In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life, the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable—vaster perhaps, and more significant. There was the incessant contrast of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was infinite play for the comic
expos
of the credulous "tenderfoot" at the hands of the pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac wiles of his tormentors. The West was one vast theatre for the practice of the "practical joke." Behind everything, menacing, foreboding, tragic, lay the stupendous contrast between Man and Nature; and though the miner, the granger, the cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and at Nature, there crept into the consciousness of each the conviction that, in the long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in order to win success, Nature must be conquered and subdued. In such an environment, with its spirit of primitive democracy, its atmosphere of wild and ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its perpetually recurring incongruities, and behind all the solemn, perhaps tragic, presence of inexorable Nature—in such an environment were sharpened and whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour, the spirit of real democracy bred of competitive effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and imposture.

It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to live in Connecticut and, as he expressed it, became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England, that he developed complete confidence in himself and his powers. That passion for successful self-expression, which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined as the main ambition of the American, became the dominant motive of Mark Twain's life. Of his experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has said that in that brief, sharp schooling he got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography or history. In the West he had still further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible store of first-hand knowledge of human nature. In rotation he had been tramping jour printer, river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer. He now turns to literature in real earnest, and begins to display that vast store of knowledge derived from actual contact with the infinitely diversified realities of American life. Mark Twain takes on more and more of the characteristics of the Yankee—those characteristics which constitute the basis of his success: inventiveness and ingenuity, the practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard common—sense. It is the last phase in the formation of the national type.

It was, I venture to say, in some such way as this that Mark Twain came to assume in the eyes of his countrymen an embodiment of the national spirit. He was the self—made man in the self—made democracy. He was at once his own creation and the creation of a democracy. There were humorists in America before Mark Twain; there are humorists in America still. But Mark Twain succeeded not merely in captivating the great mass of the people; he achieved the far more difficult and unique distinction of convincing his countrymen of his essential fellowship, his temperamental affinity, with them. This miracle he wrought by the frankest and most straightforward revelation of the actual experiences in his own life and the lives of those he had known with perfect intimacy. It is true that he wrote a few books dealing with other times, other scenes, than our own in the present and in America. But I daresay that his popularity with the mass of his countrymen would not have been in any degree lessened had he never written these few books. Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that his books were successful in the ratio of their autobiographic nature. For the character he revealed in those books of his which are essentially autobiographic, is the character dear to the American heart; and the experiences, vicissitudes, and hardships, shot through and irradiated with a high boisterousness of humour, found a joyous sympathy in the minds and hearts of men who had all "been there" themselves. In Mark Twain the American people recognized at last the sturdy democrat, independent of foreign criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas and judgments; believing loyally in his country's institutions, and upholding them fearlessly before the world; fundamentally serious and self-reliant, yet with a practicality tempered by humane kindliness, warmth of heart, and a strain of persistent idealism; rude, boisterous, even uncouth, yet withal softened by sympathy for the under-dog, a boundless love for the weak, the friendless, the oppressed; lacking in profound intellectuality, yet supreme in the possession of the simple and homely virtues—an upright and honourable character, a good citizen, a man tenacious of the sanctity of the domestic virtues. America has produced finer and more exalted types—giants in intellectuality, princes in refinement and delicacy of spirit, savants in culture, classics in authorship. An American type combining culture with picturesqueness, refinement with patriotism, suavity with self-reliance, desire it as we may, still awaits the imprimatur of international recognition. America has sufficient cause for gratification in the memory of that quaint and sturdy figure so conspicuously bearing the national stamp and superscription. Perhaps no American has equalled Mark Twain in the quality of subsuming and embodying in his own character so many elements of the national spirit and genius. In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the American
par excellence
.