Mark Twain — The Man-Part Two

When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved to follow the example of Stoddard and Mulford, and “enter the lecture field.

” The “extraneous matter” in his letters to the Sacramento Union had made him “notorious”;

and, as he put it, “San Francisco invited me to lecture.

” The historic account of that lecture, in 'Roughing It', is found elsewhere in this book.

Noah Brooks, editor of the Alta California, who was present at this lecture, has written the following graphic piece of description: “Mark Twain's method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel.

His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, and, above all, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known.

All this was original; it was Mark Twain.

” Employing D. E.

McCarthy as his agent, Mark gave a number of lectures at various places on the Pacific Coast.

From this time forward we recognize in Mark Twain one of the supreme masters of the art of lecturing in our time.

In December, 1866, he set out for New York, preparatory to the grand tour around the world.

His own account of the circular describing the projected trip is famous.

He had proposed, for twelve hundred dollars in gold,--at the rate of twenty dollars apiece, to write a series of letters for the 'Alta California'.

Brooks, the editor, fortified the grave misgivings of the proprietors over this proposition; but Colonel John McComb (then on the editorial staff) argued vehemently for Mark, and turned the scale in his favour.

While Mark was in New York, he was urged by Frank Fuller, whom he had known as Territorial Governor of Utah, to deliver a lecture--in order to establish his reputation on the Atlantic coast.

Fuller, an enthusiastic admirer of Mark Twain, overcame all objections, and engaged Cooper Union for the occasion.

Though few tickets were sold, Fuller cleverly succeeded in packing the hall by sending out a multitude of complimentary tickets to the school-teachers of New York City and the adjacent territory.

That lecture proved to be a supreme success--Mark's reputation as a lecturer on the Atlantic coast was assured.

On June 10, 1867, the Quaker City set sail for its Oriental tour.

It bore on board a comparatively unknown person of the name of Clemens, who, in applying for passage, represented himself to be a Baptist minister in ill-health from San Francisco!

It brought back a celebrity, destined to become famous throughout the world.

Prior to sailing he arranged to contribute letters to the 'New York Tribune' and the 'New York Herald', as well as to the 'Alta California'.

“His letters to the 'Alta California',” says Noah Brooks, “made him famous.

It was my business to prepare one of these letters for the Sunday morning paper, taking the topmost letter from a goodly pile that was stacked in a pigeon-hole of my desk.

Clemens was an indefatigable correspondent, and his last letter was slipped in at the bottom of a tall stack.

“It would not be quite accurate to say that Mark Twain's letters were the talk of the town; but it was very rarely that readers of the paper did not come into the office on Mondays to confide to the editors their admiration of the writer, and their enjoyment of his weekly contributions.

The California newspapers copied these letters, with unanimous approval and disregard of the copyrights of author and publisher.

” It was the Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public.

It was a virgin field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the playground of America.

It was rather a _terra incognita_, regarded with a sort of reverential ignorance by the average American tourist.

By the range of his humour, the pertinency of his observation, and the vigour of his expression he awoke immediate attention.

And he aroused a deeply sympathetic response in the hearts of Americans by his manly and outspoken expression--his respect for the worthy, the admirable, the praiseworthy, his scorn and detestation for the spurious, the specious and the fraudulent.

In this book, for the first time, he strikes the key-note of his life and thought, which sounds so clearly throughout all his later works.

It is the true beginning of his career.

On his return to the United States in November, he resumed his newspaper work, this time at the National Capital.

On his arrival there he found a letter from Elisha Bliss, of the 'American Publishing Company', proposing a volume recounting the adventures of the “Excursion,” to be elaborately illustrated, and sold by subscription on a five per cent.

royalty.

He eagerly accepted the offer and set to work on his notes.

“I knew Mark Twain in Washington,” says Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, in his reminiscences 'A Senator of the Sixties', “at a time when he was without money.

He told me his condition, and said he was very anxious to get out his book.

He showed me his notes, and I saw that they would make a great book, and probably bring him in a fortune.

I

promised that I would 'stake' him until he had the book written.

I made him a clerk to my committee in the senate, which paid him six dollars per day; then I hired a man for one hundred dollars per month to do the work!

” His mischievously extravagant description of Mark Twain at this time is eminently worthy of record: “He was arrayed in a seedy suit which hung upon his lean frame in bunches, with no style worth mentioning.

A

sheaf of scraggly, black hair leaked out of a battered, old, slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth.

He had a very sinister appearance.

He was a man I had known around the Nevada mining camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens.

” It was during this winter that Mark wrote a number of humorous articles and sketches--'The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract', the account of his resignation as clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology, and 'Riley--Newspaper Correspondent'.

His time was chiefly devoted to preparing the material for his book; but finding Washington too distracting, he returned to San Francisco and completed the manuscript therein July, 1868. For a year the publication of the book was delayed, as recorded in the Autobiography; but it finally appeared in print following Mark's indignant telegram to Bliss that, if the book was not on sale in twenty-four hours, he would bring suit for damages.

Mark Twain records that in nine months the book had taken the publishing house out of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-five to two hundred, and left seventy thousand dollars clear profit.

Eighty-five thousand copies were sold within sixteen months, the largest sale of a four dollar book ever achieved in America in so short a time up to that date.

It is, miraculous to relate, still the leader in its own special field --a “bestseller” for forty years!

The proprietors of the 'Alta California' were exceeding wroth when they heard that Clemens was preparing for publication the very letters which they had commissioned him to write and had printed in their own paper.

They prepared to publish a cheap paper-covered edition of the letters, and sent the American Publishing Co. a challenge in the shape of an advance notice of their publication.

Clemens hurried back to San Francisco from the East, and soon convinced the proprietors of the 'Alta California' of the authenticity of his copyright.

The paper-covered edition was then and there abandoned forever.

Before leaving the West to settle permanently in the East, Mark Twain was associated for a short time with the 'Overland Monthly', edited by Bret Harte.

In his review of 'The Innocents Abroad', Harte asserted that Clemens deserved “to rank foremost among Western humorists”; but he was grievously disappointed in the first few contributions from Clemens to the Overland Monthly--notably 'By Rail through France' (later incorporated in The Innocents Abroad)--because of their perfect gravity.

At last, 'A Mediaeval Romance'--a story which has been said to contain the germ of 'A Connecticut Yankee', because of its burlesque of mediaevalism--won the enthusiastic approval of Bret Harte.

From this time forward, Samuel L. Clemens is seen in a new environment, in association with new ideas and a new civilization.

The history of this second period does not fall within the scope of the present work.

It has just been narrated with brilliancy and charm by his close associate and most intimate friend, Mr. William Dean Howells, in his admirable book 'My Mark Twain'.

In the subsequent portion of the present work attention will be directed solely to those features of Mark Twain's life which have a direct bearing upon his career as a man of letters, and which throw into relief the progressive development of his genius.

The South and the West contributed to Mark Twain's development, and added to his store of vital experience, in greater measure than all the other influences of his life combined.

From the inexhaustible well of those experiences he drew ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction of the world.

His mind was stocked with the rich, crude ore of early experience--the romance and the reality of a life full of prismatic variations of colour.

The civilization of the East, its culture and refinement, tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity with the indispensable criteria of classic art.

Under the broadening influence of its persistent nationalism, he became more deeply, more profoundly, imbued with the comprehensive ideals of American democracy.

He never lost the first fine virginal spontaneity of his native style, never weakened in the vigour of his thought or in the primitiveness of his expression.

His contact with the East compassed the liberation of that vast fund of stored--up early experiences, acquired through grappling with life in many a rude encounter.

Out of its own life, the East never contributed to Mark Twain's works, in any appreciably momentous way, either volume or immensity of fertile, suggestive human experience.

If we eliminate from the list of Mark Twain's works those books which have their roots deep set in the soil of South and West, we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art.

Indeed, it may be doubted whether, were those works struck from the catalogue of his contributions, Mark Twain could justly rank as a great genius.

To his association with the South and the Southwest are due 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', and 'Life on the Mississippi'.

'The Jumping Frog' and 'Roughing It' belong peculiarly to the West, and even 'The Innocents Abroad' falls wholly within the period of Mark Twain's influence by the West, its standards, outlook, and localized viewpoint.

Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human type, the embodiment, laughably lovable, of a temperamental phase of American character in the course of the national development.

But 'The Gilded Age' has long since disappeared from that small but tremendously significant group of works which are tentatively destined to rank as classics.

Much as I enjoy the satiric comedy of 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court', I have always felt that it set before Europe an American type which is neither elevating nor inspiring--nor national.

It tends to the gratification of England and Europe, even in the face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity with the national stamp.

One must, nevertheless, confess with regret that this type is the embodiment of an “ideal” still only too commonly cherished in America.

The national type, I take it, is found in such characters as Lincoln and Phillips Brooks, in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W. Eliot and Edwin A. Alderman, and not in a provincial 'Connecticut Yankee', jovial and whole--hearted though he be.

I say this without forgetting or minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting the devastating and illimitably humorous contrast of a present with a remotely past civilization.

'Joan of Arc' has no local association, being a pure work of the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit.

'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', viewed from any standpoint, is a masterpiece; but its significance lies, not in the locality of its setting, but in the universality of its moral.

In a word, it was the East which broadened and universalized the spirit of Mark Twain.

We shall see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him a spirit of true nationalism and hardy democracy.

But it was the South and the West which lavishly gave him of their most priceless riches, and thereby created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable genius, the veritable type and embodiment of their inalienably individual life and civilization.

This first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so strongly stressed here, because the first half of his life has always seemed to me to have been a period of--shall I say?

--God-appointed preparation for the most significant and lastingly permanent work of the latter half, namely, the narration of the incidents of early experience, and the imaginative reminting of the gold of that experience.

One has only to read Mark Twain's works to learn the real history of his life.

There were momentous episodes in the latter half of his career;

but they were concerned with his life rather than with his art.

We cannot, indeed, say what or how profound is the effect of life and experience on art.

There was the happy marriage, the tragic losses of wife and children.

There were the associations with the culture and art circles of America and Europe--New England, New York, Berlin, Vienna, London, Glasgow; the academic degrees--Missouri, Yale; finally ancient Oxford for the first time conferring the coveted honour of its degree upon a humorist; the honours his own country delighted to bestow upon him.

And there too was that gallant struggle to pay off a tremendous debt, begun at sixty--and accomplished one year sooner than he expected--after the most spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in history.

The beautiful chivalric spirit of this great soul shone brightest in disaster.

He insisted that it was his wife who refused to compromise his debts for forty cents on the dollar--that it was she who declared it must be dollar for dollar; and when a fund was raised by his admirers to assist in lightening his burden, that it was his wife who refused to accept it, though he was willing enough to accept it as a welcome relief.

As an American, I can say nothing more significantly characteristic of the man than that he was a good citizen.

He possessed in rich measure the consciousness of personal responsibility for the standards, government, and ideals of his town, his city, and his country.

Civic

conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals.

Blind patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his popularity.

What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering, he gained in popularity by his honest and downright outspokenness!

He wielded the lash of his bitter scorn and fearful irony upon the wrong-doer, the hypocrite, the fraud; and aroused public opinion to impatience with public abuse, open offence, and official discourtesy.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the most complete and human individual I have ever known.

He was not a great thinker; his views were not “advanced”.

The glory of his temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and normality.

The homeliest virtues of life were his: republican virtue of simplicity; the domestic virtue of, personal purity and passionately simple regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond; the civic virtue of public honesty; the business virtue of stainless private honour.

Mark Twain was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his time.

But he was something even more than this.

He was not simply a great genius: he was a great man.