Mark Twain — The World-Famed Genius-Part Two

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-assorted 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 class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his passion 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 passage 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 noble 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 pronounced 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 succumbed 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 competitive 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 passion 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 constitute 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 assume 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 mass 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 mass 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 sturdy democrat, independent of foreign criticism; confident in the validity and value of his own ideas and judgments; believing loyally in his country's institutions, 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 sanctity 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, classics 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 sturdy 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 constituted the burden of the appeal.

As a matter of fact, vehemently as the professors may deny it, Mark Twain was an artist of remarkable force and power.

From the days when he came under the tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to prune away his stylistic superfluities of the grosser sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to subject himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism.

While it is true that he never learned to realize in full measure, to use Pater's phrase, “the responsibility of the artist to his materials,” he assuredly disciplined himself to make the most, in his own way, of the rude and volcanic power which he possessed.

It is fortunate that Mark Twain never subjected himself to the refinements of academic culture; a Harvard might well have spoiled a great author.

For Mark Twain had a memorable tale to tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote scenes and circumstances; of truant and resourceful boyhood exercising all its cunning in circumventing circumstance and mastering a calling.

And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive, phraseology of the actors in those wild events.

The secret of his style is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression.

He had a remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the unspoiled, expressive language of the people.

At times he is primitive and coarse; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality rather than of limitation.

His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, “the art of a people--universal art”; and his style was rich in the locutions of the common people, rich and racy of the soil.

A signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to the theme.

The personages of his novels always speak “in character”--with perfect reproduction, not only of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts.

Though Mr. Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style in treatment of rudimentary or,--as I should prefer to phrase it, --fundamental things.

Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into the mouth of a “rudimentary” person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression caught by the “rudimentary” mind.

“Writers of fiction,” says Sir Walter Besant in speaking of this book, “will understand the difficulty of getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them, writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have acted; and presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy.

The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction more fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry Finn.

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It may be objected that the characters are extravagant.

Not so.

They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite possible in a country so remote and so primitive.

Every figure in the book is a type; Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none.

We see the life --the dull and vacuous life--of a small township upon the Mississippi River forty years ago.

So far as I know, it is the only place where we can find that phase of life portrayed.

” Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality --untrammelled by the limitations of any particular sect of art.

In his books of travel, he reveals not only the instinct of the trained journalist for the novel and the effective, but also the feeling of the artist for the beautiful, the impressive, and the sublime.

His descriptions, of striking natural objects, such as the volcano of Mount Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of memorable architecture, such as the cathedral at Milan, show that he possessed the “stereoscopic imagination” in rare degree.

The picture he evokes of Athens by moonlight, in the language of simplicity and restraint, ineffaceably fixes itself in the fancy.

Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable “impressionist” and praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his delineation.

Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed him.

Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of words, his feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize the precise shade of meaning desired.

In truth, Mark Twain was an impressionist, rather than an imaginative artist.

That passage in 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning ride through the forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands self-revealed--a confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has never experienced.

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

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

To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful book.

For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets.

He came to feel that there had never been so wonderful a book written by man.

To its haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly --drinking it in like one bewitched.

But a day came when he began to cease from noting its marvels.

Another day came when he ceased altogether to note them.

In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty were gone forever from the river.

If the early rapture was gone, in its place was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy.

He had learned the ultimate secrets of the river--learned them with a knowledge, so searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring investiture of art.

Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence.

He was a master of the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience.

At times, his insight into the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed almost like divination.

All these qualities appeared in full flower in the written expression of his art.

It would be doing a disservice to his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction or elegance.

At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense.

Not seldom he was long--winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect.

To offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities--descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty, dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness.

Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently impossible.

But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has nothing to do with style.

Mark Twain's humour--for humour is his prevalent mood--has international range since, constructed out of a deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the difficulties of translation into alien tongues.

Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he was America's greatest cosmopolitan.

He was a true cosmopolitan in the Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was “at home even in his own country.

” He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan sense; for his was “art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world --the art of common life--the art of a people--universal art.

” His spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.

Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any overtopping eminence of intellect.

“Many so-called American humorists,” he once remarked to me, “have been betrayed by their preoccupation with the local.

Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races of men.

Realism is nothing more than close observation.

But observation will never give you the inside of the thing.

The life, the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of absorption.

” Mr. Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human humorist--to discover in Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all nationalities.

In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could safely be labelled “American”--not a single human detail, inside or outside.

Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain learned to discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.

Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface veneer the universal traits of that nation's humanity.

He expressly disclaimed in my presence any “attitude” toward the world, for the very simple reason that his relation toward all peoples had been one of effort at comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in feeling.

He disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed prejudices--maintaining that he could stand any society.

All that he cared to know was that a man was a human being--that was bad enough for him!

It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any other nation.

Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to his Japanese students by freeing it from all artificial and local restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight to the heart and soul of man.

His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry' is the most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive mode of interpretation.

In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the highest common factor of all nations.

“My secret--if there is any secret--,” Mr. Clemens once said to me, “is to create humour independent of local conditions.

In studying humanity as exhibited in the people and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out the encumbrance of the local.

” And he significantly added--musingly-- “Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities.

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

'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well be regarded as the supreme American morality--play of youth, 'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases of a civilization now vanished forever.

It is gratifying to Americans to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America.

It is gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades.

It is more gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain, America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe--a man who will be remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, “with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company;

none of them was his equal in humanity.

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