Mark Twain.
by Archibald Henderson.
PREFACE
There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe a debt of almost personal grat.i.tude to Mark Twain for the joy of his humour and the charm of his personality. In the future they will, I doubt not, seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt. My own experience with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional.
From the days of early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived first solely from acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm and, as it were, personal affection. With limitless interest and curiosity, I used to hear the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one of our old family servants, a negro to whom I was devotedly attached.
These stories were narrated to me in the negro dialect with such perfect naturalness and racial gusto that I often secretly wondered if the narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in disguise. I was thus cunningly prepared, "coached" shall I say, for the maturer charms of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. With Uncle Remus and Mark Twain as my preceptors, I spent the days of my youth--excitedly alternating, spell-bound, between the inexhaustible attractions of Tom, Huck, Jim, Indian Joe, the Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers on the one hand; and Brer Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a thousand other fantastic, but very real creatures of the animal kingdom on the other.
I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him.
It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me, then a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow never dared to utter!
My personal a.s.sociation with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it was--an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a guest in his home--gave me at last the justification for paying the debt which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently obligatory. I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to pay that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work.
It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark Twain"s works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens. It is an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own country and his own age as no American has so completely done before him; a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; const.i.tutionally a reformer who, heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a philosopher and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret springs of human motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that intuition in works which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and went straight to the human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius who lived to know and enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great man who saw life steadily and saw it whole.
ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
LONDON, August 5, 1910.
NOTE.--The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn. All the ill.u.s.trations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr.
Coburn.
"I"ve a theory that every author, while living, has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies, this phantom fades away, not caring to continue business at the old stand. Then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature; this impression may grow sharper or fainter according to the fashions and new conditions of the time."
Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS of date December 23, 1901.
INTRODUCTORY
In the past, the att.i.tude of the average American toward Mark Twain has been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America, the colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from the "Wild and Woolly West." Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world. It would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of "Literature." They were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all.
The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of the supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully dawned upon the American consciousness. The literatures of England and Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain.
It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic, and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great artist. It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain"s appeal to posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the supreme and imperishable glories of American literature.
At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can be attributed what a Frenchman would call _mondial eclat_ is surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling, with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned t.i.tle of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has suffered eclipse in the pa.s.sage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the British Isles. His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy const.i.tuted the literary hierarchy of the world--according to popular verdict. Since Zola and Ibsen have pa.s.sed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the world. This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his life, less from his intellect than from his conscience. The _literati_ bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to "What is Art?" The whole world pays tribute to the pa.s.sionate integrity of Tolstoy"s moral aspiration.
[While this book was going through the press, news has come of the death of Tolstoy.]
Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world. In a sense not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts of the great ma.s.s of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is without a parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends many an inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy"s works are Russia"s greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal mysticism of his unrealizable hopes.
If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal, it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour.
That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently "gone about in near and distant places," everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The French have a way of speaking of an author"s public as if it were a select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects, there is some reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author appeals to many different "publics" or cla.s.ses of readers--in proportion to the many-sidedness of the reader"s human interests and the catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young, provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth. The navvy may rejoice in "Life on the Mississippi". Youth and age may share without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of "Huckleberry Finn". True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly narrative of "Tom Sawyer". The artist may bestow his critical meed of approval upon the beauty of "Joan of Arc". The moralist may heartily validate the ethical lesson of "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg".
Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the horse-play of "Roughing It", the colossal extravagance of "The Innocents Abroad", the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in the spontaneity and refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom. The stevedore on the dock, the motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the riverman on the Mississippi--all speak with exuberant affection in memory of that quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of silvery hair. In one day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an emperor and a _portier_ vied with each other in tributes of admiration and esteem for this man and his works. It is Mark Twain"s imperishable glory, not simply that his name is the most familiar of that of any author who has lived in our own times, but that it is remembered with infinite irrepressible zest.
"We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we knew and loved," said Dr. Van d.y.k.e in his Memorial Address. "We remember the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and natural manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his affections, his laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing.
"Those who know the story of Mark Twain"s career know how bravely he faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to provide not only things honest, but things "honourable in the sight of all men."
"Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know that he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and irrepressible humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of serious thoughts and n.o.ble affections and desires.
"Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible says: "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall hold them in derision." But the mark of this higher humour is that it does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.
"Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift, not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world"s false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world"s false witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories, coloured with his own experiences, he touched the absurdities of life with penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life"s realities. No one can say that he ever failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the little children, of whom Christ said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven."
"Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud.
We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, happy in the fuller light.
""Rest after toil, port after stormy seas, Death after life doth greatly please.""
""We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime--the thin air stifles"--I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry continually, "O Beautiful! My country!" Yet, in the long dull interspans between these sacred moments we need some one to remind us that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the years insidious foes are lurking--anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant fraud and corruption. When our countrymen migrate because we have no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us what we can count on. When they complain that our soil lacks the humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer no harm."
STUART P. SHERMAN: "MARK TWAIN."
The Nation, May 12, 1910.
THE MAN
American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as the example of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the United States, as did Grant and Johnson. But a.s.sa.s.sination began for Lincoln an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and adulation. Grant was one of the great failures in American public life; and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his career. From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be taken as symbolic of the romance of American life.
With a sort of mock--pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral glories of his house--the judge who condemned Charles I., and all those other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed l.u.s.tre upon the name of Clemens. Yet he claimed that he had not examined into these traditions, chiefly because "I was so busy polishing up this end of the line and trying to make it showy." His mother, a "Lambton with a p," of Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed with means, and their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as Judge Hawkins is said to have done in "The Gilded Age", settling at Florida, Missouri. Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months after their arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he stated that he had increased by one per cent. the population of this village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man in history had ever done for any other town.
Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life, and survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the rescue. He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she hadn"t been uneasy about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about him the whole time. But when he inquired further if she was afraid he would not live, she answered after a reflective pause--as if thinking out the facts--that she had been afraid he would!
His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was intimately a.s.sociated with him in life and found a place in his writings.
In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all the dignity of a local autocrat. His forum was a "dingy" office, furnished with "a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a puncheon bench." The solemnity of his manner in administering the law won for him, among his neighbours, the t.i.tle of Judge.
One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn.
"Sam was always a good-hearted boy," his mother once remarked, "but he was a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and sober-minded as they were." At school, he "excelled only in spelling"; outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn, mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity afforded. "Often his father would start him off to school," his mother once said, "and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his whereabouts. There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and Sam would take his position behind that, and as his father went past would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight.
Finally, his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn. But I never gave up. He was always a great boy for history, and could never get tired of that kind of reading; but he hadn"t any use for schoolhouses and text books."
Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a "loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town." Young Clemens accepted the inst.i.tution of slavery as a matter of course, for his father was a slave-owner; and his mother"s wedding dowry consisted in part of two or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like so many other slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery. To his children, especially to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however, a stern taskmaster. Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality. If at times this neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them --his father doing the breaking and he the suffering! Sam claimed to be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy. But this modest estimate is subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to pry into the result--as it was of no consequence to any one but himself!
The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam"s favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky Thatcher of Tom"s admiration. "Sam was always up to some mischief,"
this lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood.