IV. THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS
"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."
TOLSTOY: What is Art?
Some years ago a group of Mark Twain"s friends, in a spirit of fun, addressed a letter to:
MARK TWAIN G.o.d KNOWS WHERE.
Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the letter went unerringly to its goal; and it was not long before the senders of that letter received the laconic, but triumphant reply: "He did." They now turned the tables on the jubilant author, who equally as quickly received a letter addressed:
MARK TWAIN THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.
It seemed that "he" did, too!
In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide --a fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted theological characters. From very humble beginnings--he used facetiously to speak of coming up from the "very dregs of society"!
--Mark Twain achieved international eminence and repute. This accomplishment was due to the power of brain and personality alone. In this sense, his career is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of American literature.
It is a mark of the democratic independence of America that she has betrayed a singular indifference to the appraisal of her literature at the hands of foreign criticism. Upon her writers who have exhibited derivative genius--Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow--American criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums. The three geniuses who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who have either embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American democracy, or who have had the widest following of imitators and admirers in foreign countries, still await their final and just deserts at the hands of critical opinion in their own land. The genius of Edgar Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe; yet in America his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated a "self-made man" in literature, these men are justly ent.i.tled to such characterization. They owe nothing to European literature--their genius is supremely original, native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain, which is our present concern, is a literary phenomenon which imposes upon criticism, peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct obligation of tracing the steps in his unhalting climb to an eminence that was international in its character, and of defining those signal qualities, traits, characteristics--individual, literary, social, racial, national--which compa.s.sed his world-wide fame. For if it be true that the judgment of foreign nations is virtually the judgment of posterity, then is Mark Twain already a cla.s.sic.
Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first received notable recognition in France at the hands of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who devoted so much of her energies to the popularization of American literature in Europe. That one of her series of essays upon the American humorists which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" in 1872; in it appeared her admirable translation of "The Jumping Frog". There is no cause for surprise that a scholarly Frenchwoman, reared on cla.s.sic models and confined by rigid canons of art, should stand aghast at this boisterous, barbaric, irreverent jester from the wilds of America. When it is remembered that Mark Twain began his career as one of the sage-brush writers and gave free play to his pa.s.sion for horseplay, his desire to "lay a mine" for the other fellow, and his defiance of the traditional and the cla.s.sic, it is not to be wondered at that Mme. Blanc, while honouring him with recognition in the most authoritative literary journal in the world, could not conceal an expression of amazement over his enthusiastic acceptance in English-speaking countries.
"Mark Twain"s "Jumping Frog" should be mentioned in the first place as one of his most popular little stories--almost a type of the rest. It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand, while reading this story, the "roars of laughter" that it excited in Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous editions of it which appeared; the epithet of "inimitable" that the critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it.
"We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire, even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much more wisely about European civilization than an American of San Francisco. The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or even natural taste, in order to appreciate works of art.
"It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself apparent. . . . In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against the pagan worship of broken marble statues--the democrat denies that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages. The sublime ruins of the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of America, which punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for the benefit of the State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw from the punishments which it inflicted the pa.s.sing pleasure of a spectacle.
"In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain, we at length discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent ingenuousness, faults which we should never have expected. He has in the highest degree that fault of appearing astonished at nothing--common, we may say, to all savages. He confesses himself that one of his great pleasures is to horrify the guides by his indifference and stupidity. He is, too, decidedly envious. . . .
We could willingly pardon him his patriotic self-love, often wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in what concerns the New World, if only that national pride were without mixture of personal vanity; but how comes it that Mark Twain, so severe upon those poor Turks, finds scarcely anything to criticize in Russia, where absolutism has nevertheless not ceased to flourish? We need not seek far for the cause of this indulgence: the Czar received our ferocious republicans; the Empress, and the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Mary, spoke to them in English.
"Taking the Pleasure Trip on the Continent altogether, does it merit the success it enjoys? In spite of the indulgence that we cannot but show to the judgments of a foreigner; while recollecting that those amongst us who have visited America have fallen, doubtless, under the influence of prejudices almost as dangerous as ignorance, into errors quite as bad--in spite of the wit with which certain pages sparkle--we must say that this voyage is very far below the less celebrated excursions of the same author in his own country."
Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the discussion of Mark Twain, in an essay in the "Revue des Deux Mondes", ent.i.tled "L"age Dore en Amerique"--an elaborate review and a.n.a.lysis of The Gilded Age. The savage charm and real simplicity of Mark Twain are not lacking in appeal, even to her sophisticated intelligence; and she is inclined to infer that jovial irony and animal spirits are qualities sufficient to amuse a young nation of people like the Americans who do not, like the French, pique themselves upon being blase. According to her judgment, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner are lacking in the requisite mental grasp for the "stupendous task of interpreting the great tableau of the American scene." Nor does she regard their effort at collaboration as a success from the standpoint of art. The charm of Colonel Sellers wholly escapes her; she cannot understand the almost loving appreciation with which this cheaply gross forerunner of the later American industrial brigand was greeted by the American public. The book repels her by "that mixture of good sense with mad folly--disorder"; but she praises Mark Twain"s accuracy as a reporter. The things which offend her sensibilities are the wilful exaggeration of the characters, and the jests which are so elaborately constructed that "the very theme itself disappears under the ma.s.s of embroidery which overlays it." "The audacities of a Bret Harte, the grosser temerities of a Mark Twain, still astonish us," she concludes; "but soon we shall become accustomed to an American language whose savoury freshness is not to be disdained, awaiting still more delicate and refined qualities that time will doubtless bring."
In translating "The Jumping Frog" into faultless French (giving Mark Twain the opportunity for that delightful retranslation into English which furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with elaboration and long citations "The Innocents Abroad" and "The Gilded Age", Mme.
Blanc introduced Mark Twain to the literary public of France; and Emile Blemont, in his "Esquisses Americaines de Mark Twain" (1881), still further enhanced the fame of Mark Twain in France by translating a number of his slighter sketches. In 1886, Eugene Forgues published in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" an exhaustive review (with long citations) of "Life on the Mississippi", under the t.i.tle "Les Caravans d"un humoriste"; and his prefatory remarks in regard to Mark Twain"s fame in France at that time may be accepted as authoritative. He pointed out the praiseworthy efforts that had been made to popularize these "transatlantic gaieties," to import into France a new mode of comic entertainment. Yet he felt that the peculiar twist of national character, the type of wit peculiar to a people and a country, the specialized conception of the _vis comica_ revealed in Mark Twain"s works, confined them to a restricted milieu. The result of all the efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain"s pleasantry appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess. By some, indeed, his exaggerations were regarded as symptoms of mental alienation; and the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving a pa.s.sport to the incoherence of his conceptions. "It has been said,"
remarked M. Forgues, with keen perception, "that an academician slumbers in the depths of every Frenchman; and it was this which prevented the success of Mark Twain in France. Humour, in France, has its laws and its restrictions. So the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross jester, incessantly beating upon a tom-tom to attract the attention of the crowd. They were tenacious in resisting all such blandishments . . . . As a humorist, Mark Twain was never appreciated in France.
The appreciation he ultimately secured--an appreciation by no means inconsiderable, though in no sense comparable to that won in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic countries--was due to his sagacity and penetration as an observer, and to his marvellous faculty for calling up scenes and situations by the clever use of the novel and the _imprevu_. There was, even to the Frenchman, a certain lively appeal in an intelligence absolutely free of convention, sophistication, or reverence for traditionary views _qua_ traditionary." Though at first the salt of Mark Twain"s humour seemed to the French to be lacking in the Attic flavour, this new mode of comic entertainment, the leisurely exposition of the genially naive American, in time won its way with the _blase_ Parisians. Travellers who could find no copy of the Bible in the street bookstalls of Paris, were confronted everywhere with copies of "Roughing It". When the authoritative edition of Mark Twain"s works appeared in English, that authoritative French journal, the "Mercure de France", paid him this distinguished tribute: "His public is as varied as possible, because of the versatility and suppleness of his talent which addresses itself successively to all cla.s.ses of readers. He has been called the greatest humorist in the world, and that is probably the truth; but he is also a charming and attractive story-teller, an alert romancer, a clever and penetrating observer, a philosopher without pretensions, and therefore all the more profound, and finally, a brilliant essayist."
Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is just and authentic--the Attic flavour of _l"esprit Gaulois_ is alien to the loosely articulated structure of American humour. The noteworthy criticism which Mark Twain directed at Paul Bourget"s "Outre Mer", and the subsequent controversy incident thereto, forced into light the racial and temperamental dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American _Ausschauung_. Mr.
Clemens once remarked to me that, of all continental peoples, the French were most alien to the spirit of his humour. In "Le Figaro", at the time of Mark Twain"s death, this fundamental difference in taste once more comes to light: "It is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand Mark Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine. At first sight, there is nothing in common between that highly specialized faculty which the Anglo-Saxons of the old and the new world designate under the name of humour, and that quality with us which we call wit (esprit). And yet, at bottom, these two manifestations of the human genius, so different in appearance, have a common origin and reach the same result: they are, both of them, the glorification of good sense presented in pleasing and unexpected form. Only, this form must necessarily vary with peoples who do not speak the same language and whose skulls are not fashioned in the same way."
In Italy, as in France, the peculiar _timbre_ of Mark Twain"s humour found an audience not wholly sympathetic, not thoroughly _au courant_ with his spirit. "Translation, however accurate and conscientious," as the Italian critic, Raffaele Simboli, has pointed out, "fails to render the special flavour of his work. And then in Italy, where humorous writing generally either rests on a political basis or depends on risky phrases, Mark Twain"s sketches are not appreciated because the spirit which breathes in them is not always understood. The story of "The Jumping Frog", for instance, famous as it is in America and England, has made little impression in France or Italy."
It was rather among the Germanic peoples and those most closely allied to them, the Scandinavians, that Mark Twain found most complete and ready response. At first blush, it seems almost incredible that the writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional slang, their colloquialisms and their local peculiarities of dialect, should have borne translation so well into other languages, especially into German.
It must, however, be borne in mind that, despite these peculiar features of his writings, they are couched in a style of most marked directness, simplicity and native English purity. The ease with which his works were translated into foreign, especially the Germanic and allied tongues, and the eager delight with which they were read and comprehended by all cla.s.ses, high and low, const.i.tute perhaps the most signal conceivable tribute, not only to the humanity of his spirit, but to the genuine art of his marvellously forthright and natural style.
It need be no cause for surprise that as early as 1872 he had secured Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental agent. German translations soon appeared of "The Jumping Frog and Other Stories" (1874), "The Gilded Age" (1874), "The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim"s Progress" (1875), "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876). A few years later his sketches, many of them, were translated into virtually all printed languages, notably into Russian and modern Greek; and his more extended works gradually came to be translated into German, French, Italian, and the languages of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula.
The elements of the colossally grotesque, the wildly primitive, in Mark Twain"s works, the underlying note of melancholy not less than the lawless Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation among the Germanic races. George Meredith has likened the functionings of Germanic humour to the heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear. Mark Twain"s stories of the Argonauts, the miners and desperadoes, with their primitive, orgiastic existence; his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on the Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters--all appealed to the pa.s.sion for the fantastic and the grotesque innate in the Germanic consciousness. To the Europeans, this wild genius of the Pacific Slope seemed to function in a sort of unexplored fourth dimension of humour--vast and novel--of which they had never dreamed.
It is noteworthy that Schleich, in his "Psychopathik des Humors", reserved for American humour, with Mark Twain as its leading exponent, a distinct and unique category which he denominated _phantastischen, grossdimensionalen_.
To the biographer belongs the task of describing, in detail, the lavish entertainment and open-hearted homage which were bestowed upon Mark Twain in German Europe. In writing of Mark Twain and his popularity in Germanic countries, Carl von Thaler unhesitatingly a.s.serts that Mark Twain was feted, wined and dined in Vienna, the Austrian metropolis, in an unprecedented manner, and awarded unique honours. .h.i.therto paid to no German writer. In Berlin, the young Kaiser bestowed upon him the most distinguished marks of his esteem; and praised his works, in especial "Life on the Mississippi", with the intensest enthusiasm. When Mark Twain received a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his young daughter exclaimed that if it kept on like this, there soon wouldn"t be anybody left for him to become acquainted with but G.o.d! Mark said that it seemed uncomplimentary to regard him as unacquainted in that quarter; but of course his daughter was young, and the young always jump to conclusions without reflection. After hearing the Kaiser"s eulogy on "Life on the Mississippi", he was astounded and touched to receive a similar tribute, the same evening, from the portier of his lodging-house. He loved to dwell upon this, in later years--declaring it the most extraordinary coincidence of his life that a crowned head and a portier, the very top of an empire and the very bottom of it, should have expressed the very same criticism, and delivered the very same verdict, upon one of his books, almost in the same hour and the same breath.
The German edition of his works, in six volumes, published by Lutz of Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe, contained an introduction in which he was hailed as the greatest humorist in the world. Among German critics he was regarded as second only to d.i.c.kens in drastic comic situation and depth of feeling. Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a limited power of imagination in comparison with the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom Sawyer. At times the German critics confessed their inability to discover the dividing line between astounding actuality and fantastic exaggeration. The descriptions of the barbaric state of Western America possessed an indescribable fascination for the sedate Europeans. At times Mark Twain"s b.l.o.o.d.y jests froze the laughter on their lips; and his "revolver-humour" made their hair stand on end. Though realizing that the scenes and events described in "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn", "Roughing It", and "Life on the Mississippi" could not have been duplicated in Europe, the German critics revelled in them none the less that "such adventures were possible only in America--perhaps only in the fancy of an American!" "Mark Twain"s greatest strength," says Von Thaler, "lies in the little sketches, the literary snap-shots. The shorter his work, the more striking it is. He draws directly from life.
No other writer has learned to know so many different varieties of men and of circ.u.mstances, so many strange examples of the Genus h.o.m.o, as he; no other has taken so strange a course of development." The deeper elements of Mark Twain"s humour did not escape the attention of the Germans, nor fail of appreciation at their hands. In his aphorisms, embodying at once genuine wit and experience of life, they discovered not merely the American author, but the universal human being; these aphorisms they found worthy of profound and lasting admiration.
Sintenis found in Mark Twain a "living symptom of the youthful joy in existence"--a genius capable at will, despite his "boyish extravagance,"
of the virile formulation of fertile and suggestive ideas. His latest critic in Germany wrote at the time of his death, with a genuine insight into the significance of his work: "Although Mark Twain"s humour moves us to irresistible laughter, this is not the main point in his books; like all true humorists, _ist der Witz mit dem Weltschmerz verbunden_, he is a witness to higher thoughts and higher emotions, and his purpose is to expose bad morals and evil circ.u.mstances, in order to improve and enn.o.ble mankind." The critic of the "Berliner Zeitung" a.s.serted that Mark Twain is loved in Germany more than all other humorists, English or French, because his humour "turns fundamentally upon serious and earnest conceptions of life." It is a tremendously significant fact that the works of American literature most widely read in Germany are the works of--striking conjunction!--Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain.
The "Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" fired the laugh heard round the world. Like Byron, Mark Twain woke one morning to find himself famous.
A cla.s.sic fable, which had once evoked inextinguishable laughter in Athens, was unconsciously re-told in the language of Angel"s Camp, Calaveras County, where history repeated itself with a precision of detail startling in its miraculous coincidence. Despite the international fame thus suddenly won by this little fable, Mark Twain had yet to overcome the ingrained opposition of insular prejudice before his position in England and the colonies was established upon a sure and enduring footing. In a review of "The Innocents Abroad" in "The Sat.u.r.day Review" (1870), the comparison is made between the Americans who "do Europe in six weeks" and the most nearly a.n.a.logous cla.s.s of British travellers, with the following interesting conclusions: "The American is generally the noisier and more actively disagreeable, but, on the other hand, he often partially redeems his absurdity by a certain naivete and half-conscious humour. He is often laughing in his sleeve at his own preposterous brags, and does not take himself quite so seriously as his British rival. He is vulgar, and even ostentatiously and atrociously vulgar; but the vulgarity is mixed with a real shrewdness which rescues it from simple insipidity. We laugh at him, and we would rather not have too much of his company; but we do not feel altogether safe in despising him." The lordly condescension and gross self-satisfaction here betrayed are but preliminaries to the ludicrous density of the subsequent reflections upon Mark Twain himself: "He parades his utter ignorance of Continental languages and manners, and expresses his very original judgments on various wonders of art and nature with a praiseworthy frankness. We are sometimes left in doubt whether he is speaking in all sincerity or whether he is having a sly laugh at himself and his readers"! It is quite evident that the large ma.s.s of English readers, represented by The Sat.u.r.day Review, had not caught Mark Twain"s tone; but even the reviewer is more than half won over by the infectiousness of this new American humour. "Perhaps we have persuaded our readers by this time that Mr. Twain (sic) is a very offensive specimen of the vulgarest kind of Yankee. And yet, to say the truth, we have a kind of liking for him. There is a frankness and originality about his remarks which is (sic) pleasanter than the mere repet.i.tion of stale raptures; and his fun, if not very refined, is often tolerable in its way. In short, his pages may be turned over with amus.e.m.e.nt, as exhibiting more or less consciously a very lively portrait of the uncultivated American tourist, who may be more obtrusive and misjudging, but is not quite so stupidly un.o.bservant as our native product. We should not choose either of them for our companions on a visit to a church or a picture--gallery, but we should expect most amus.e.m.e.nt from the Yankee as long as we could stand him." It was this review which gave Mark Twain the opening for his celebrated parody--a parody which, I have always thought, went far to opening the eyes of the British public to the true spirit of his humour. Such irresistible fun could not fail of appreciation at the hands of a nation which regarded d.i.c.kens as their representative national author.
Two years later, Mark Twain received in England an appreciative reception of well-nigh national character. Whilst the literary and academic circles of America withheld their unstinted recognition of an author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain received him with open arms. He was a welcome guest at the houses of the exclusive; the highest dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals, the leaders of fashion, of thought, and of opinion openly rejoiced in the breezy unconventionality, the fascinating daring, and the genial personality of this new variety of American genius. His English publisher, John Camden Hotten, wrote in 1873: "How he dined with the Sheriff of London and Middles.e.x; how he spent glorious evenings with the wits and literati who gather around the festive boards of the Whitefriars and the Savage Clubs; how he moved in the gay throng at the Guildhall conversazione; how he feasted with the Lord Mayor of London; and was the guest of that ancient and most honourable body--the City of London Artillery--all these matters we should like to dwell upon." His public lectures, though not so popular as those of Artemus Ward, won him recognition as a master in all the arts of the platform. Mr. H. R.
Haweis, who heard him once at the old Hanover Square Rooms, thus describes the occasion: "The audience was not large nor very enthusiastic. I believe he would have been an increasing success had he stayed longer. We had not time to get accustomed to his peculiar way, and there was nothing to take us by storm, as in Artemus Ward. . . . .
He came on and stood quite alone. A little table, with the traditional water-bottle and tumbler, was by his side. His appearance was not impressive, not very unlike the representation of him in the various pictures in his "Tramp Abroad". He spoke more slowly than any other man I ever heard, and did not look at his audience quite enough. I do not think that he felt altogether at home with us, nor we with him. We never laughed loud or long; no one went into those irrepressible convulsions which used to make Artemus pause and look so hurt and surprised. We sat throughout expectant and on the _qui vive_, very well interested, and gently simmering with amus.e.m.e.nt. With the exception of one exquisite description of the old Magdalen ivy--covered collegiate buildings at Oxford University, I do not think there was one thing worth setting down in print. I got no information out of the lecture, and hardly a joke that would wear, or a story that would bear repeating.
There was a deal about the dismal, lone silver--land, the story of the Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never came off, and another duel in which no one was injured; and we sat patiently enough through it, fancying that by and by the introduction would be over, and the lecture would begin, when Twain suddenly made his bow and went off! It was over. I looked at my watch; I was never more taken aback. I had been sitting there exactly an hour and twenty minutes. It seemed ten minutes at the outside. If you have ever tried to address a public meeting, you will know what this means. It means that Mark Twain is a consummate public speaker. If ever he chose to say anything, he would say it marvellously well; but in the art of saying nothing in an hour, he surpa.s.ses our most accomplished parliamentary speakers."
The nation which had been reared upon the wit of Sidney Smith, the irony of Swift, the _gros sel_ of Fielding, the extravagance of d.i.c.kens, was ripe for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts of Mark Twain.
They recognized in him not only "the most successful and original wag of his day," but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman "the honour of being the most strictly American writer of what is called American literature." We read in a review of "A Tramp Abroad", published in The Athenaeum in 1880: "Mark Twain is American pure and simple. To the eastern motherland he owes but the rudiments, the groundwork, already archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to write; in his turn of art, his literary method and aims, his intellectual habit and temper, he is as distinctly national as the Fourth of July." Mark Twain was admired because he was "a literary artist of exceptional skill"; and it was ungrudgingly acknowledged that "he has a keen sense of character and uncommon skill in presenting it dramatically; and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a power of episodic narrative that is scarcely equalled, if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade himself." Indeed, from the early days of "The Innocents Abroad", the "first transatlantic democratic utterance which found its way into the hearing of the ma.s.s of English people"; during the period of "Tom Sawyer", "the completest boy in fiction," the immortal "Huckleberry Finn", "the standard picaresque novel of America--the least trammelled piece of literature in the language," and "Life on the Mississippi", vastly appreciated in England as in Germany for its _cultur-historisch_ value; down to the day when Oxford University bestowed the coveted honour of its degree upon Mark Twain, and all England took him to their hearts with fervour and abandon--during this long period of almost four decades, Mark Twain progressively strengthened his hold upon the imagination of the English people and, like Charles d.i.c.kens before him, may be said to have become the representative author of the Anglo-Saxon race. "The vast majority of readers here regard him," said Mr. Sydney Brooks in 1907, "to a degree in which they regard no other living writer, as their personal friend, and love him for his tenderness, his masculinity, his unfailing wholesomeness even more than for his humour."
To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words in which he was welcomed to England in 1907 should stand as a symbol of that racial bond, that _entente cordiale_ of blood and heart, which he did so much to strengthen and secure. "A compliment paid to Mark Twain is something more than a compliment to a great man, a great writer, and a great citizen. It is a compliment to the American people, and one that will come home to them with peculiar gratification. . . . The feeling for Mark Twain among his own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir Walter eighty odd years ago, or like that of our fathers for Charles d.i.c.kens. There is admiration in it, grat.i.tude, pride, and, above all, an immense and intimate tenderness of affection. To writers alone it is given to win a sentiment of this quality--to writers and occasionally, by the oddness of the human mind, to generals. Perhaps one would best take the measure of the American devotion to Mark Twain by describing it as a compound of what d.i.c.kens enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of what Lord Roberts enjoys to-day, and by adding something thereto for the intensity of all transatlantic emotions. The "popularity" of statesmen, even of such a statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and flickering light by the side of this full flame of personal affection.
It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and abroad; but also because his countrymen feel him to be, beyond all other men, the incarnation of the American spirit."
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 ma.s.s of the people, despite the _dicta_ 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 mult.i.tude."
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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 d.a.m.ning 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.n.a.logous to those expressed in the pa.s.sage 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 t.i.tle as a cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sed 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, a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sage 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-a.s.sorted 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 cla.s.s; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragam.u.f.fins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.ble 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 _expose_ of the credulous "tenderfoot" at the hands of the pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succ.u.mbed 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 compet.i.tive 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 pa.s.sion 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 const.i.tute 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 a.s.sume 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 st.u.r.dy democrat, independent of foreign criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas and judgments; believing loyally in his country"s inst.i.tutions, 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 sanct.i.ty 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, cla.s.sics 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 st.u.r.dy 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_.
Underneath those qualities which combined to produce in Mark Twain a composite American type, lay something deeper still--that indefinable _je ne sais quoi_ which procured him international fame. Humour alone is utterly inadequate for achieving so momentous a result--though humour ostensibly const.i.tuted 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 a.s.suredly 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 circ.u.mstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising all its cunning in circ.u.mventing circ.u.mstance and mastering a calling.