The Complete Novels of Mark Twain and the Complete Biography of Mark Twain (424 page)

Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a composite American type, lay something deeper still—that indefinable
je ne sais quo
which procured him international fame. Humour alone is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result—though humour ostensibly constituted the burden of the appeal. As a matter of fact, vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist of remarkable force and power. From the days when he came under the tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to subject himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism. While it is true that he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's phrase, "the responsibility of the artist to his materials," he assuredly disciplined himself to make the most, in his own way, of the rude and volcanic power which he possessed. It is fortunate that Mark Twain never subjected himself to the refinements of academic culture; a Harvard might well have spoiled a great author. For Mark Twain had a memorable tale to tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote scenes and circumstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising all its cunning in circumventing circumstance and mastering a calling. And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive, phraseology of the actors in those wild events. The secret of his style is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression. He had a remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the unspoiled, expressive language of the people. At times he is primitive and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality rather than of limitation. His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, "the art of a people—universal art"; and his style was rich in the locutions of the common people, rich and racy of the soil. A signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The personages of his novels always speak "in character"—with perfect reproduction, not only of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts. Though Mr. Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style in treatment of rudimentary or,—as I should prefer to phrase it,—fundamental things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into the mouth of a "rudimentary" person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression caught by the "rudimentary" mind. "Writers of fiction," says Sir Walter Besant in speaking of this book, "will understand the difficulty of getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them, writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have acted; and presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy. The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction more fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry Finn. . . . It may be objected that the characters are extravagant. Not so. They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite possible in a country so remote and so primitive. Every figure in the book is a type; Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none. We see the life—the dull and vacuous life—of a small township upon the Mississippi River forty years ago. So far as I know, it is the only place where we can find that phase of life portrayed."

Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality—untrammelled by the limitations of any particular sect of art. In his books of travel, he reveals not only the instinct of the trained journalist for the novel and the effective, but also the feeling of the artist for the beautiful, the impressive, and the sublime. His descriptions, of striking natural objects, such as the volcano of Mount Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of memorable architecture, such as the cathedral at Milan, show that he possessed the "stereoscopic imagination" in rare degree. The picture he evokes of Athens by moonlight, in the language of simplicity and restraint, ineffaceably fixes itself in the fancy.

Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable "impressionist" and praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his delineation. Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed him. Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of words, his feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize the precise shade of meaning desired. In truth, Mark Twain was an impressionist, rather than an imaginative artist. That passage in 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning ride through the forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands self-revealed—a confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has never experienced.

If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen, as minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs—such, for example, as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn—pictures Mark Twain had seen and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the striking superiority of the realistic impressionist over the imaginative artist.

I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life—the influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and thought—is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which he portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his youth, the great river.

To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful book. For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came to feel that there had never been so wonderful a book written by man. To its haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly—drinking it in like one bewitched. But a day came when he began to cease from noting its marvels. Another day came when he ceased altogether to note them.

In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty were gone forever from the river. If the early rapture was gone, in its place was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy. He had learned the ultimate secrets of the river—learned them with a knowledge, so searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring investiture of art.

Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence. He was a master of the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience. At times, his insight into the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed almost like divination. All these qualities appeared in full flower in the written expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice to his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction or elegance. At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not seldom he was long—winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities—descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty, dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness.

Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently impossible. But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has nothing to do with style. Mark Twain's humour—for humour is his prevalent mood—has international range since, constructed out of a deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the difficulties of translation into alien tongues.

Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he was America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true cosmopolitan in the Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was "at home even in his own country." He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan sense; for his was "art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world—the art of common life—the art of a people—universal art." His spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.

Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any overtopping eminence of intellect. "Many so-called American humorists," he once remarked to me, "have been betrayed by their preoccupation with the local. Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races of men. Realism is nothing more than close observation. But observation will never give you the inside of the thing. The life, the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of absorption." Mr. Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human humorist—to discover in Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could safely be labelled "American"—not a single human detail, inside or outside. Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain learned to discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.

Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface veneer the universal traits of that nation's humanity. He expressly disclaimed in my presence any "attitude" toward the world, for the very simple reason that his relation toward all peoples had been one of effort at comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in feeling. He disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed prejudices—maintaining that he could stand any society. All that he cared to know was that a man was a human being—that was bad enough for him! It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any other nation. Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to his Japanese students by freeing it from all artificial and local restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight to the heart and soul of man. His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry' is the most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive mode of interpretation. In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the highest common factor of all nations. "My secret—if there is any secret—," Mr. Clemens once said to me, "is to create humour independent of local conditions. In studying humanity as exhibited in the people and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out the encumbrance of the local." And he significantly added—musingly—" Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities."

To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;

'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well be regarded as the supreme American morality—play of youth, 'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases of a civilization now vanished forever. It is gratifying to Americans to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America. It is gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades. It is more gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain, America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe—a man who will be remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his equal in humanity."

PART THREE: PHILOSOPHY

"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.