And yet, after all, Mark Twain"s supreme t.i.tle to distinction as a great writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and even humour, which we call sociology. When I first advanced this view, it was taken up on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain "from a new angle"; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of Europe; and the author of the essay was invited "to explain Mark Twain to the German public"! There are still many people, however, who resent any demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and humorous entertainer. Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support of the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as America"s greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of Mark Twain primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist. "Of course,"
he added, "Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him, believe he is joking."
Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn"t strength of mind enough to believe it. "Custom is a petrifaction," he a.s.serted; "nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century." Mr. W.
D. Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that "the ludicrous incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration of Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so." However that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion, Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and indefensible. The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills. The slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by their owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their spiritual welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress of the house.
In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery. He wasn"t even aware that there was anything wrong about it. He never heard it condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers. And as for the preachers, they taught that G.o.d approved slavery, and cited Biblical pa.s.sages in support of that view. If the slaves themselves were averse to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject. He seldom saw a slave misused--on the farm, never. But when he was brought face to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family, it made a deep impression upon his consciousness. It was this deplorable evil of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible separation of the members of the same family, the one from the other, that convinced him of the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as has been pointed out by Mr. Howells, did not come to him "till after his liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far West." Yet it found its way into his books--into Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim"s pathetic longing to buy back his wife and children; and in Pudd"nhead Wilson with its moving picture of the poor slave"s agony when she suddenly realizes in the way the water is flowing around the snag that she is being "sold down the river." In Uncle Tom"s Cabin, as Professor Phelps has pointed out, "the red--hot indignation of the author largely nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . . Mrs. Stowe"s astonishing work is not really the history of slavery; it is the history of abolition sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows us the beautiful side of slavery--for it had a wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side--and he also shows us the horror of it." Mark Twain has declared that the only way to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and people with which the story is concerned, through years of "unconscious absorption" of the facts of the life to be portrayed. When his stories were written, slavery was a thing of the past--he was competent to judge of the situation impartially, through direct personal contact throughout his boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object was not the object of the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by animosity. He saw clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic. Hence it is, I believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in fundamentals, a remarkable sociologist. Certain pa.s.sages in his books on the subject of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the truest things that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a continent and plunged a nation in b.l.o.o.d.y, fratricidal strife.
Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind the most vivid pictures--pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his scathing remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds of those Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, shooting each other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of race; the lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of the river--all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as Huck"s raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides his boat through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is a "sort of contemporaneous posterity" which has registered its verdict that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare say, cla.s.s Mark Twain as America"s greatest, most human sociologist in letters. He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has pa.s.sed forever. And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and unparalleled doc.u.ments in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane, boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.
Mark Twain"s genius of social comprehension and sociologic interpretation went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an "inst.i.tution"
blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial pa.s.sion that periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad "carnivals of crime." The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality which gives his profession its power and validity as an effective instrumentality in the advancement of civilization, is the faculty of penetrating national and racial disguises, and going directly to the heart of the human problem. Mark Twain possessed this faculty in supreme degree. As a literary critic he was ba.n.a.l and futile; but as a social and racial critic he was remarkable and profound. His essay "Concerning the Jews" is a masterpiece of impartial interpretation; his comprehension of French and German racial traits, as revealed in his works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and his magnificent a.n.a.lysis of the situation in South Africa, in the concluding chapters of "Following the Equator", rings clear with the accents of truth and mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy. Deeper far, more comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark Twain"s interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the national ideals. His "defence" of General Funston is a scorching and devastating blast, red with the fires of patriotism. Whatever be one"s convictions, one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain"s berserker-like rage over the att.i.tude of Europe in China, the barbarities of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America"s methods in the Philippines, copied after Weyler"s _reconcentrado_ policy in Cuba. His study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified common-sense, a sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive in psychological a.n.a.lysis of national and racial traits.
In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that "divine average"
of common life which is the dream of American democracy. "The Prince and the Pauper" is a beautiful child"s tale, vivid in narrative and rich in human interest. It is something deeper far than this; for the very crucial motive of the story, the successful subst.i.tution of the commoner for the king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the equality of man. Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution, and frankly expressed his regret over Napoleon"s failure to invade England and thus destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal paraphernalia of the British monarchy. Despite its note of Yankee blatancy, "A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur" is a remarkable brief for democracy and the brotherhood of man. So eminent a publicist as Mr.
William T. Stead p.r.o.nounced it, at the time of its first appearance, one of the most significant books of our time; and cla.s.sed it (with Henry George"s "Progress and Poverty" and Edward Bellamy"s "Looking Backward") as the third great book from America to give tremendous impetus to the social democratic movement of the age. Mark Twain abandoned all hope of a future life; found more of sorrow than of joy in life"s balances; and even, in his latter years, lost faith in humanity itself. But amid the wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American optimism: he never lost faith in democracy, and fought valiantly to the end in behalf of equality and the welfare of the average man.
Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship, Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club to which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the religiously orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking, heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club. "I did not read that paper," Mr. Clemens said to me, "but I put it away, resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time. Every now and then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it, to compare its views with my own later views. From time to time I added something to it. But I never found, during that quarter of a century, that my views had altered in the slightest degree. I had a few copies published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the book to indicate its authorship." A few days later he gave me a copy, and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the prefatory note:
"Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as una.s.sailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other."
"What is Man?" propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that "Beliefs are acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change; nothing whatever can change temperament." He enunciates the theory, which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such person as a permanent seeker after truth.
"When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth, with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." "All training," he avers, "is one form or another of outside influences, and a.s.sociation is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him upward--but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time."
Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of "What is Man?": "Oh, he is real. He"s all the boy that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circ.u.mstances that drive a man.
Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer"s life, and gave a little joggle to the circ.u.mstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel." It was what he called Kismet.
It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal G.o.d. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced, the human race remained "indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud." He never had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs never tended to warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because he saw in it supreme truth. His ultimate philosophy of life, which he sums up in "What is Man?", is healthy and right-minded. It is best embodied in the lofty injunction: "Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the community." La.s.salle once said: "History forgives mistakes and failures, but not want of conviction."
In Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to forgive any want of conviction.