Mark Twain as an Interpreter of American Character

MARK TWAIN, as we all prefer to call the writer whose real name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens has still a less familiar sound in our ears, was born in the town of Florida, in Missouri, on the 30th of November, 1835. His father, who belonged to a Virginian family, had moved there only a little time before from Tennessee, where, like his prototype in The Gilded Age, he owned much land. But it was in Hannibal, then “ a loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi River town,” now “ a flourishing little city,” to which the family presently removed, that Mark Twain spent those boyhood days of which Tom Sawyer is the diverting chronicle. It was not a very attractive place. “ The morality ” — the quotation is from a gentle criticism by Mr. Howells — “ was the morality of a slaveholding community, fierce, arrogant, one-sided ; the religion was Calvinism in various phases, with its predestinate aristocracy of saints and its rabble of hopeless sinners. His [Twain’s] people, like the rest, were slaveholders, but his father, like so many other slaveholders, abhorred slavery, — silently, as he must in such a time and place.” The home of the Clemenses was — to quote from an ephemeral biography by Mr. Will Clemens — “ a twostory brick, with a large tree in front; ” and in the village, in a “ dingy ” office, the furniture of which was “ a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a puncheon bench,” the head of the family, “ a stern, unbending man,” held court as justice of the peace.

Amid these surroundings, which were curiously American, if not especially apt to nourish literary genius, Mark Twain, “ a good-hearted boy,” says his mother, but one who, although “ a great boy for history,” could never be persuaded to go to school, spent a boyhood which, it appears, was “ a series of mischievous adventures.” When he was twelve years old his father died, and the circumstances of his mother were such that he had to go to work as printer’s apprentice in the office of the Hannibal Weekly Courier. “ I can see,” he said once at a printers’ banquet in New York, “that printingoffice of prehistoric times yet, with its horse-bills on the walls; its ‘d’ boxes clogged with tallow, because we always stood the candle in the ‘ k ’ box nights ; its towel, which was never considered soiled until it could stand alone.” For three years he worked in this delectable establishment, and then, at the age of fifteen, ran away from home, apparently without a penny of money. Until he was twenty or thereabouts he seems to have wandered through the eastern half of the country as a tramp printer. Then suddenly changing his vocation, he became a pilot on the Mississippi River. Five years later, the railroads and the Civil War having made piloting an impossible occupation, he enlisted as a three months’ volunteer in the Confederate array, and was captured, but succeeded in escaping from the tobacco warehouse in St. Louis where he was held prisoner. He fled to the West, the West of Bret Harte, swarming with adventurers, with whom the fashionable ornaments of the day were “ an eight-inch revolver, an Arkansas toothpick, and jack-boots.”As miner, journalist, and lecturer he led a rough and impecunious life in Nevada and California, until in 1867 he published his first book, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras, and sailed by way of Panama to New York. A little later he found the opportunity to go to Europe and the Holy Land as a newspaper correspondent, and so obtained the material for his Innocents Abroad. After many difficulties and with much misgiving, the book was finally published. The next morning, Mark Twain, then thirty-four years old. awoke like Byron to find himself famous.

There is no need to pursue his career further. Brief and incomplete as the sketch is, it is long enough to explain much in his writings. The horrid little town, with its poverty of intellectual life, its complete barrenness of all the means for æsthetic cultivation, is hardly the place in which to expect the birth of a refined literary genius. There is a deal of truth in Mr. Barrie’s remark that “ nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much.” And these early years, impressionable as a photographic plate, were those which supplied him with the vivid memories upon which he based his strongest works, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. One piece of singular good fortune was indeed his : by his home flowed the mighty Mississippi. The river was the one thing which he knew in all his early days that could appeal to his imagination and uplift it. Its fascination was upon all the boys in the village. They had passing ambitions, he says, — such, for example, as that “if they lived and were good, God would permit them to become pirates ; ” but the one unchanging desire of their hearts was to be “ steamboat men.”Any one who can remember his boyhood can easily understand how their young thoughts were always of the river, which, huge and sombre, flowed out of the land of mystery, by their commonplace doors, into the land of promise, and how they envied the river-men to whom both lands were as familiar as the streets of Hannibal. Poor lads, they doubtless found out in after-life that the river touched neither of these enchanting countries, but simply flowed on, not bored only because it was an insensate thing, past thousands of doors little if any less tedious than their own ! But fact is unimportant in the training of a sensitive imagination, and the influence of the river upon that of Mark Twain can hardly be exaggerated. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it is that through whichever of his books the Mississippi flows, it fills them with a certain portion of its power and beauty. To it is owing all that in his work which is large and fine and eloquent. The river is what makes Huckleberry Finn his most vivid story, and Life on the Mississippi his most impressive autobiographic narrative.

Unfortunately, there was nothing else in the boy’s early surroundings winch could help him to become a literary artist, for the river, however it might dominate and uplift his imagination, could not teach him the most delicate and beautiful art of writing well. For that the child must at least have books, good works of the imagination, from which he may unconsciously learn the modest secret of good taste, the value of the apt word, the mysteries of the rise and fall of the rhythm of lovely prose. When one recalls the lack of æsthetic advantages which was so plentiful in his boyhood, in that " loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-theheels, slaveholding ” village, in his wandering, unprosperous youth in cis-Mississippi printing-offices, and in his impecunious journalistic young manhood in the rough and lawless West, one cannot wonder that he is so imperfectly an artist. He has a rude native gift for firm and vigorous narration. He has, too, an inborn eloquence which sometimes rises superior to his faulty periods, and at its best carries the critical reader out of the mood of fastidious objection. But his style, — which he has improved steadily, — even when correct, is technically without distinction.

He fails no less in the handling of large masses of composition: he is singularly devoid of any aptitude for construction. The narrative in which incidents of about an even value succeed each other is the highest variety of literary form in which he has attained good measure of success. Such are Huckleberry Finn, and that picturesque failure as an historical novel, The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Such, still more frankly, are his earlier successes, Roughing It, Innocents Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi. And in spite of highly colored incidents thrown in at the end with a delusive air of forming the climax which denotes a plot, Tom Sawyer, also, and The Connecticut Yankee belong in the same group. The Gilded Age, The Prince and the Pauper, and Pudd’nhead Wilson are more pretentious ; but it is from the passages wherein the author, forgetful of weaving the incidents into a pattern, is content to chronicle them with a broidery of his own shrewd and humorous thought that they have their merit.

No, he is not a great or a skillful writer. The influences of his early years were not such as would make him one. What a disadvantage they were to him may be illustrated by contrasting him, for a moment, with another American writer, — like him, a humorist. That other had little, if any, more natural power, — perhaps not so much ; he had his greatest successes, as Mark Twain had his more popular ones, in the form of the humorous, half-dramatic monologue; but as he had the best training of intellect and taste, he attained a firm place among the semigreat who alone as yet form the most distinguished group of American authors. That writer is Dr. Holmes.

Neither is Mark Twain — bold as the assertion may seem—a great humorist or a great wit. The soul of a jest is immortal. If it defies definition and analysis, experience seems to show that when it leaves its envelope of words standing cold and insignificant, dead upon the page, it usually does so only for the brief space which must elapse before its next incarnation. If the soul of one’s grandam may haply inhabit a bird, the soul of the dear lady’s favorite jest may more than haply inhabit a sentence — none too sprightly, one may fear — in the corner of the latest comic paper. Rarely indeed is that perfectly crystallized phrase created which can withstand, like a diamond, the wear and tear of time, and eternally imprison the bright sparkle of wit that it contains. In other words, the special incongruities of circumstance change, and the jests change with them: only that humor lives which is expressed in perfect, limpid phrases that take no color from temporary things. Wit lives on from age to age when given form by such a masterly cutter of sentences as La Rochefoucauld; humor survives when embodied in some unchanging type of character such as that to which Cervantes gave the finest time-resisting form. La Rochefoucauld may be considered the type of the great wit, Cervantes the type of the great humorist. Mark Twain has shaken the sides of the round world with laughter ; but after all, has he, in the mass of his writings, uttered any witticism which touches intimately, much less radiantly expresses, some eternal truth of life ? Has he ever created any character bearing so plainly a lasting relationship to human nature that it will live on to be hailed brother by future men? Unless indeed some of the clever sayings of Pudd’nhead Wilson have greater depth and reach of meaning than they now seem to have, the answer to the first question is plainly “ No.” Not many of Mark Twain’s witticisms will appear in the Familiar Quotations of the coming century. The answer to the second question is perhaps susceptible of a moment’s debate. But probably not more than two characters will rise in the memory of any one who may wish to answer it otherwise than also by a “ No.” These will be Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And surely Tom Sawyer is only one presentment more of the general idea — boy —added to the thousands which any one familiar with the commercial industry of writing books for boys can name only too readily. Quite in the line of Mark Twain’s variation of the standard type, and its superior as a human portrait, stands the Bad Boy of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Huck, however, is not so easily brushed aside. He is at his best, not in the book which wears for title the name of his chief youthful friend, but in the astonishing volume which is named after himself. For he, the best of Mark Twain’s creations, has the good fortune — which is not that of the best character of many an author — of being the hero of his originator’s best book. In that wild, youthful, impossible Odyssey, the record of his voyage on a frail raft down the strong Mississippi, he assumes in a manner epic proportions. Still, if a sensitive and candid reader were somewhat carefully to analyze his impressions, perhaps these are the conclusions at which, with a tempered enthusiasm, he would ultimately arrive: that Huck gains in apparent stature by being kept clear of taller rivals in the centre of the stage ; that he gains enormously in picturesqueness through his surroundings, — the incredibly fantastic scamps who impose themselves upon him, and who, by contrast, make him seem so honest; the childlike negro whom he befriends, and who, by contrast, makes him seem so much more the man; the wild and solemn and beautiful stretches of the huge river, which make him seem, by contrast, so pitiful a waif; that the story is, a few exceptions granted, a tale of what happened to him rather than of what he did, and consequently is not a presentation of character, is not dramatic. What Huck really is, the sensitive and candid reader would conclude, is simply the usual vagabond boy, with his expected shrewdness and cunning, his rags, his sharp humor, his practical philosophy. The only difference between him and his type would be found in his essential honesty, his strong and struggling moral nature, so notably Anglo-Saxon. The most delightful thing in the portrait, from the point of view of characterdrawing, would be seen to be the interminable debate and puzzle in which he is, to reconcile his respect for the law that declares him a criminal for aiding a runaway slave and his instinctive honest perception that his ward is a man, not a chattel. It the literary critic had a field-book, like the botanist, — may he some day be so lucky! — in which to trace any unfamiliar specimen, he would find, if engaged in the present search, his finger fall at last upon some such line as this: “Huckleberry Finn: species, Gavroche. Locally found in the Mississippi Valley, in the United States, and by some authorities erected ” — such is the word of the men of science ! —“into a separate variety.”

Now, if Mark Twain has neither uttered memorable witticisms nor created any finely humorous character, it will not be as a great humorist that he will survive. Nor is the reason for his failure hard to find. His lack of mastery of form, his constant offense against taste, is, of course, a large part of it, but not all. The humor which finds in him its chief source of expression is that of a shifting and evanescent semi-civilization, the humor of new men in new circumstances in a suddenly developing country, wherein the ups and downs of life, immensely exaggerated both in speed and in span, made a grotesque appeal to the sense of incongruity of a naturally humorous people. The society of the West is not yet settled into its final form, as that of the East may be considered to be ; but already it, and we who know it, have traveled far from the possibility of appreciating fully its special humor. A few years more, and most of its fun will seem to all, as it seems to many now, the merest extravagance, as hard to understand as the spirit which prompted the gargoyle on the mediæval church. A humor based upon the transient conditions of such a life can hardly be more permanent than the life itself.

Not in the technical sense a skillful writer, not a good novelist or story-teller, not a great wit or a great humorist, Mark Twain occupies a strangely conspicuous position in the world of contemporary letters. He has long been accepted of the people, never of the critics. Although his name is a household word in all places where the English language is spoken, and in many where it is not, he has never been accorded any serious critical notice. There have been, indeed, in various magazines, a few articles — mostly of no critical intention or pretension — about him, but almost the only fact which looks like a recognition of him as a real author, and not as an inconsequential buffoon, is the publication, now going forward, by Messrs. Harper and Brothers, of a uniform edition of his complete works. Yet a general sense of his importance may be found existing even among the critical who neglect him, and some natural, mild wonder why it has never found expression. The critics, with the disdain that comes easily to men, perhaps a bit ostentatiously preoccupied with what is earnest in thought and artistic in form, have let him write and win an unregarded popularity. The circus clown were as likely to attract the attention of the dramatic critic as Mark Twain that of the serious reviewers. But his enormous vogue should have won the notice of some inquiring mind, and led its possessor to ask if his popularity had not some deeper cause than the love of the crowd for the antics of one who professionally wears the cap and bells. If deeper cause there be, it may well prove something which throws light upon American life and character. Perhaps it were as well to attribute the popularity of Abraham Lincoln to his jokes as to ascribe that of Mark Twain to his extravagant foolery. In the conventional sense, Mark Twain is no more a literary artist than, in the conventional sense, Lincoln was a gentleman. But in spite of lack of polish Lincoln was great: may not Mark Twain, the writer, in spite of his crude literary manners, be great, also ? The mere possibility ought to be enough in itself to secure him sympathetic and thoughtful consideration.

Criticism is always concerned with the man behind the book. Veiled as the questioning may be, its object is always to determine if the personality of the author is one which has value, æsthetic or other, for the world. If an author is not able to justify himself on æsthetic grounds, criticism requires him to supply other and good ones. If he is not an artist, he can have no value for any intelligent human being except through his personality.

The remark is too sweeping: he can have a value for the student. And Mark Twain has this value abundantly. He has recorded the life of certain southwestern portions of our country, at one fleeting stage of their development, better than it is possible it will ever be done again. From his superficially frivolous pages much can be learned of the causes of the fierce family feuds which prevailed there, of lynching, of the effects of slavery. Under the humorist in Mark Twain lies the keen observer, the serious man, the ardent reformer, and he took note of all that was evil in the life he knew and proclaimed it indignantly to the world. His tenacious memory for detail, his microscopic imagination, and his real interest in the serious side of life make his pictures of the crude society in which he was born both absolutely accurate and surprisingly comprehensive. His writings cannot be neglected by any one who wishes to know that life, and it is one which is in many respects highly important for us to understand. But it is not for his historical value that an author is popular. To point to that of Mark Twain is not to account for his acceptance by the multitude. That must rest somehow on his character.

Like Dr. Holmes, Mark Twain belongs to the race of literary egotists. The narrations which are his best work are almost entirely autobiographic. Roughing It relates his experiences in the West. Innocents Abroad sets forth his own peculiarly American view of Europe. Life on the Mississippi is very Twain, and naught else. Tom Sawyer is less real than Huckleberry Finn, because — one cannot doubt — he is less the young Clemens than is Huck. Indeed, the rule may be laid down that the interest of Mark Twain’s books is in direct proportion to the amount of autobiographic matter in them. What he is gifted to express is plainly himself, his own thoughts, feelings, experiences. That was the gift of Dr. Holmes, also, and where the personality was so engaging, the taste so perfect, the success was easy to understand. But if one were to be told that another writer, born with a smaller gift of invention and with as little trace of constructive imagination, and having only such education as he might be able to pick up in a youth spent among rough surroundings, would take the same literary form and win an even greater popularity, he would scoff at the mere idea. Nevertheless this is what Mr. Clemens has done. This remarkable achievement is strong evidence of the charm of his character.

Perhaps it is possible to discover in what that charm consists. The comparison between Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain which was suggested a little while ago doubtless appeared fantastical enough. But after all, is not the feeling of kinship which the people had with the statesman the same which they have with the writer ? There is certainly no way to a nation’s heart more nearly direct than to make it feel that you are of one flesh and blood with it. It loves to see itself literally personified in the executive chair ; it likes best that writer who thoroughly expresses its own ideas, gives form to its own moral and mental nature. That is always the secret of success, — the one thing in common between popularly successful mediocrities and popularly successful great men.

Such is the conclusion that has been reached by the editors of our most popular periodicals ; the working theory by following which they have attained success. Such, again, is the conclusion that those writers who would be popular have arrived at after studying the works of writers who are popular. They have ever discovered the painful if flattering fact that they are not as common men are, and that therefore they cannot effectually appeal to the public taste. If lack of likeness and consequent lack of sympathy are indeed the secret of scant sales, then the average man should be the most popular writer. An eccentric friend of mine wholly accepts this doleful doctrine. Whatever is widely liked must, he says, appeal to the general public, which is a vulgar body with crude tastes, and, generally speaking, anything which satisfies it is bad. He therefore carefully avoids all greatly popular books, — and it must be confessed he escapes in this way the reading of an intolerable deal of writing which, charitably speaking, is not choice. He admits, however, that he misses some excellent authors,and the admission implies that the public does occasionally enjoy good literary work. He explains this by saying that the good book is liked for other than literary reasons. If it is conceivable that the master of a superb literary style should have, for instance, the mental and moral equipment of the late E. P. Roe, my friend avers that the crowd would read him in spite of his style. Mr. Henry James finds it easy to be artistic, The Duchess found it easy to be popular ; Mr. Kipling finds it easy to be both. In other words, the great writer is one who to generous artistic and intellectual gifts adds the further good fortune of being the type of a multitude. In the field of politics, the same theory will explain the common success among us of mediocrities, the very great success of some really great men like Lincoln. The same theory explains the vogue of Mark Twain.

If one were to summon his vague recollections of the figure set forth as that of the typical American by such various authorities as the playwright, the caricaturist, the story-teller, and the novelist, there would gradually emerge from the haze a certain quite definite figure of a man. Let us recall, quite at random, a few memories. There is the shrewd, humorous, resourceful, ill-bred Senator as played by Mr. Crane. There is Uncle Sam as he is shown us in the comic press. There is the American in Mr. Kipling’s ballad of the Imperial Rescript, whose ideal is a house of his own,

There is the ready and scheming Fulkerson in Mr. Howells’s Hazard of New Fortunes, who thinks of literature as a hardware dealer thinks of nails. There is his counterpart, Pinkerton, in Stevenson’s romance, The Wrecker. There is the uncouth Lincoln as he appears in Mr. Herndon’s Life. These figures which chance to come to mind blend easily — do they not ? — into a sort of composite personality, a shrewd, ready, practical, irreverent, humorous, uncultivated man, who is apt to jeer at art and the civilization of Europe, but for whom you have, nevertheless, a large affection and a high respect, partly because he has, to a striking degree, such excellent qualities as essential seriousness of character, selfreliance, courage, kindliness, honesty and simplicity of heart, the domestic virtues ; and still more, perhaps, because you are a good American yourself, and know him to be the man you would like to be were good manners and cultivation added to him. This is, after all, the type among the many that we recognize as American which is most generally found throughout the United States. It is a type with which, indeed, the American people are a little too well satisfied. Our public is too apt to be to his virtues very kind, and very blind to his faults, — a course of conduct admirable to adopt toward your friend, but not toward yourself if you aim to improve. And is it not this type which Mark Twain is continually drawing ? Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are certainly the typical American in little. Is not the view of Europe expressed in Innocents Abroad that of the same humorous, irreverent, uncultivated man ? The Connecticut Yankee who went to King Arthur’s court would undoubtedly have preferred to any castle in England that house in America

Pudd’nhead Wilson and the pilots in Life on the Mississippi conform perfectly to the type. They are all Americans, — raw, if you will, but real, native, typical. Essentially they and the others are one and the same man always. Now, let the reader recall that Mark Twain’s work is almost wholly autobiographic, and he will at once perceive the obvious corollary : this man, this typical American, is Mark Twain himself.

His life has been typically American. There is something delightfully national in that “ two-story brick with a large tree in front” in which it had its beginnings. To attain fame and fortune is supposed to be the special privilege of the poor, self-educated American boy. American versatility, which has been our doubtful boast, is strikingly exemplified in this man’s variety of occupation, — printer, pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter, lecturer, inventor (that is especially American ! ), author, publisher. It all recalls the biographies — not likely, one may guess, to be written in the future as they have been in the past — of the From the Towpath to the White House sort. It is American through and through. Having lived this life, how could Mark Twain fail to go straight to the hearts of his countrymen, attracting them to himself at first through their sense of humor, holding them afterwards through their sense of kinship ? If a man can thoroughly express the individuality of a nation, he may fairly be called great. We may lament the artist lost, but we may rejoice in the man. He has drawn the national type, interpreted the national character. For that service we may be grateful. And he has taught unobtrusively, but none the less powerfully, the virtues of common sense and honest manliness. If it comes to a choice, these are better than refinement.

Charles Miner Thompson.