Kitabı oku: «A History of American Literature», sayfa 27

Mark Twain’s reputation was built on his humor. He came to his maturity in a fruitful decade just after the Civil War, when a crop of newspaper men were coming out with a recklessly fresh, informal jocularity which was related to the old American humor, but a great departure from it. They were all unconscious of making any contribution to American literature. They never could have written books which would have won the attention of Irving’s readers and the perusers of the old Annuals and the admirers of the Knickerbocker courtliness. They wrote for the world of Horace Greeley and the elder James Gordon Bennett, caring nothing for beauty of style or for any kind of literary tradition. They wrote under odd pen names like “John Phœnix,” who preceded them by ten years – “Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Artemus Ward,” “Orpheus C. Kerr,” “Max Adler,” and “M. Quad” serving as fancy dress for Locke, Browne, Newell, Clark, and Lewis. They drew their material from the common people, as Lincoln had done with all his anecdotes, putting it in the idiom of the common people and frequently distorting it into illiterate spelling, as Lowell had done in “The Biglow Papers.” This disturbed and shocked the lovers of a refined literature – men like Stedman, for example, who wrote to Bayard Taylor, “The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper ‘exchange’ system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic [bathos], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit.” But it was an irresistible tide that threw up on its waves something more than froth or flotsam, in the shape of a few real treasures from the deep – and the rarest was Mark Twain.

Had there been no such journalistic tide this original genius would still have gone on his original way. What these other men did was much more to put the public into a humor for Mark Twain than to lead Mark Twain in his approach to the public. He started as the others did, allowing an undercurrent of seriousness to appear now and then in the flow of his extravagance. His platform experience taught him by the immediate response of the audience what were the most effective methods.

 
All Tully’s rules and all Quintilian’s too,
He by the light of listening faces knew.
And his rapt audience, all unconscious, lent
Their own roused force to make him eloquent.³⁶
 

He was quite deliberate in the employment of them. His essay on “How to Tell a Story” is an evidence of what he knew about structure, and his letter to the young London editorial assistant (see Paine’s “Mark Twain” pp. 1091–1093) is only the best of many passages which show his scrupulous regard for diction. He did not indulge in the usual vagaries of spelling; he had, to paraphrase his own words, “a singularly fine and aristocratic respect for homely and unpretending English”; and he treated punctuation as a “delicate art” for which he had the highest respect. People who carelessly think of Mark Twain as a kind of literary swashbuckler can disabuse themselves by an attentive reading of any few pages.

While they are doing it, they can discover in addition to the points just mentioned that he was essentially clean-minded. Vulgar he was, to be sure, at times, in the sense of not indulging always in drawing-room talk or displaying drawing-room manners, as, for instance, in his repeated references to spitting, – to use the homely and unpretending word, – but he never partook of the nature of his rough and ready human subjects to quite the extent that Franklin or Lincoln did. His pages are utterly free from filth. He drew a line, no doubt assisted by Mrs. Clemens, between what he wrote for the public and his private speech and correspondence. “He had,” Mr. Howells wrote, “the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse, without calling one’s self prudish; and I was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not quite bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.”

His humor relied on his never-failing and often extravagant use of the incongruous and the irrelevant. Often this came out in his similes and metaphors. “A jay hasn’t got any more principles than a Congressman.” “His lectures on Mont Blanc … made people as anxious to see it as if it owed them money.” It emerged in his impertinent personalities, as in the instance of his first meeting with Grant, when he said after a moment of awkwardness: “General, I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?” or as in the case of his reply to a query as to why he always carried a cotton umbrella in London, that it was the only kind he could be sure would not be stolen there. It appeared too in his sober misuse of historical facts with which he and his readers or auditors were well acquainted. And it was developed most elaborately in “hoax” passages where, in his violation of both fact and reason, the canny author looked like the innocent flower but was the serpent under it.

A particular charm attached to his work because it was so apparently uncalculated and spontaneous. What he wrote seemed to be for his own delectation, and what he spoke to be the casual improvisation of the moment. At times, of course, he did improvise – with all the art of a musician whose mastery of technique is no less the result of great labor because he has it completely in hand; but often the utterance which his hearers took for an extempore speech had been composed to the last syllable and then delivered with an art that concealed its own artistry. No doubt for the multitudes who bought up the editions of “Innocents Abroad” the salient feature of Mark Twain’s writing was its jovial extravagance. The first feeling of the public was that he had out-Phœnixed “Phœnix” and beaten “Petroleum Nasby” at his own game. Beyond question he literally “enjoyed himself” when he was giving hilarious enjoyment to others; the free play of his antic fancy was a kind of self-indulgence. The best evidence is offered in “Joan of Arc.” The story is approached, pursued, and concluded in a spirit of admiration often amounting to reverence. Yet in the character of “The Paladin,” Edmond Aubrey, the old miles gloriosus of Roman comedy, and in Joan’s uncle, the historian reverted to his broadest jocosities. There are interpolated pages of pure farce. There are scenes in “Joan” that are companion pieces with portions of the sardonic “Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.” On his seventy-third birthday he wrote, “I like the ‘Joan of Arc’ best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.” Yet this serious chronicle, with its occasional outbursts of fun, was of a piece with his best-known book of nearly thirty years earlier, the laugh-invoking “Innocents Abroad.” The books are not alien to each other; the difference is simply in the prevailing moods.

For under all the frolicsome gayety and beneath the surface ironies of this log of “The Quaker City” there is a solid sense of the realities of human life. Over against the pure fun of such episodes as the Fourth of July celebration on the high seas is a steady run of satire at the traditionalized affectations of the American who pretended to enjoy the things that he ought and attempted to shake off the manners of Bird City when he registered in his Paris hotel. His gibes at cultural insincerity, however, did not degenerate into a fusillade of cheap cynicisms at everything old. Whatever contempt he felt for the antiques of the tradesmen was overshadowed by the solemnity with which the evidence of the passing centuries impressed him. He may not have rendered the “old masters” their full deserts, but he entered a cathedral with respect, walked in reverent silence among the ruins of the Holy Land, and felt in the Alps the presence of the Most High. “Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic,” he wrote in the preface, “it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East, if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him.” So he wrote this book out of the fullness of his heart as well as out of the abundance of his humor. There was in him a natural acumen which for want of a better name we may call wisdom. His instinctive perceptions were usually right.

The fundamental Mark Twain was an increasingly serious man. Before he was fifty years old his precocious daughter had written in her journal, “He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous.” And again: “Whenever we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is as much a philosopher as anything, I think.” There were many external reasons for his turn of mind. His romantic passage through life from obscure poverty to wealth and fame, with the depressing chapters of his temporary business reverses, heightened his native respect for the few blessings that are really worth while. His repeated travels, culminating with his trip around the world, the honors that came to him, the social distinctions that were showered on him, his friendships with thinking men, his bereavements, all contributed to the same end of making him consider the ways of the world and of the maker thereof. In a further comment his astute little daughter went near to the heart of the matter when she wrote quaintly, “I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous.” “If he had studied while young” Mark Twain might have gained a knowledge of the progressions in philosophic thought that would have steadied him in his own thinking. Yet possibly it would have made little difference, for his thinking was at the same time all his own and altogether in the drift of nineteenth-century thought.

With an initial distrust of conventionalized thinking he came to his own analysis of the prevailing religious views. His reason was alert to challenge theology wherever it was at odds with science. He found nothing in the Bible to question the assumption that Man was the crowning triumph of his Creator, but everything in evolutionary doctrine to suggest that Man was only a link in a far-evolving succession of higher forms. He found a God in the Old Testament who was “an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master,” though in the ordering of the material universe he appeared to be steadfast, beneficent, and fair. His reason thus unseated his faith in the Scriptures and thereby his confidence in the creeds founded upon them. He lost the God of the Hebrews only to find his own “in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps,” … “a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million more – and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.”

For the after-life he could find no such assurance as he could for a Creator. For many men of his generation, and the one just before, the solution when they found themselves in such a quandary was to take refuge in the authority of the dogmas they had set out to question; many of the most radical came back with relief to the protection of the Roman Catholic faith; but Mark Twain could not find his way into the harbor, glad as he might have been for the anchorage. There is a deep pathos in the many passages of which the following is a type:

To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of finished education, an LL.D., M.A., and an archæological magnate, it sounds strangely enough. Still I would gladly change my unbelief for Neligan’s faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.

In spite of all his yearnings he never could achieve for himself the assurance “of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”; so that his most clearly formulated profession of faith was in reality a pathetic profession of doubts:

I believe in God the Almighty… I think the goodness, the justice and the mercy of God are manifested in his works; I perceive they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one.

Here again, as in his discrimination between “antiques” and antiquity, Mark Twain kept clear of a despairing cynicism and held to the distinction between what Emerson called “historical Christianity” and the ideals from which its adherents have fallen away. He judged the religion of his countrymen by its social and national fruits, and he was filled with wrath at the indignity of an Episcopal rector’s refusal to perform the burial service of the actor George Holland and at the extortionate demands of the missionaries for indemnities after the Boxer Rebellion in China. On the national ideals of Christendom he spoke in bitter prophecy in 1908:

The gospel of peace is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics. There are no peaceful nations now. All Christendom is a soldier camp. The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which Christian governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner. King Leopold II of Belgium, the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VI, that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest. Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ’s earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind. All the Christian nations are at it. The more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create.

Such doubts as to the future and depression at surrounding events have led many an inquirer to a relaxation in his moral standards and in his personal conduct; but in Mark Twain his rectitude was as deeply grounded as his humor – both, indeed, flowing from the same source. Throughout his books he upheld the simple virtues – common honesty; fidelity to the family; kindness to brutes, to the weak or suffering, and to the primitive peoples. His ironies and his satires were always directed at unworthy objects, the varied forms of selfishness and insincerity; and his answer to “What is Happiness?” is contained in the admonition, “Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward, toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.”

Not until the last years of his life did readers begin to take Mark Twain seriously; now they are coming to appreciate him. He has been fortunate in his literary champions – biographers, critics, and expositors – and incomparably so in the loving interpretation, “My Mark Twain,” by his intimate friend, William Dean Howells. This concludes: “Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any that I have ever known, the material given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth… It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then left trying… Next I saw him dead… I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it; something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes – I knew them all – and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”

BOOK LIST

Individual Authors

Bret Harte. Works. Standard Library Edition. 20 vols. During his lifetime his works were issued in forty-nine successive volumes between 1867 and 1902. Of these seven were poetry, and of the prose works two were novels. The remainder were made up of short units, mostly narrative.

Biographies

BOYNTON, H. W. Bret Harte. 1905.

MERWIN, H. C. The Life of Bret Harte, with some Account of the California Pioneers. 1911.

Pattee, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. iv. 1915.

Pemberton, T. E. Life of Bret Harte. 1903.

Mark Twain/ Works. Writings of Mark Twain. 1910. 25 vols. (These have been supplemented by various posthumous articles in Harper’s Magazine which have been published, and will doubtless be further added to, in supplementary volumes.) His works appeared in book form originally as follows: The Jumping Frog, 1867; The Innocents Abroad, 1869; Autobiography and First Romance, 1871; Roughing It, 1872; The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner), 1873; Sketches New and Old, 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; The Stolen White Elephant, 1878; A Tramp Abroad, 1880; The Prince and the Pauper, 1881; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, 1889; The American Claimant, 1891; Tom Sawyer Abroad, 1894; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894; Joan of Arc, 1896; Tom Sawyer Detective, and Other Stories, 1896; Following the Equator, 1897; Christian Science, 1907; Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, 1907; Is Shakespeare Dead, 1908.

Bibliography

A volume by M. Johnson. 1910.

Chronological list of Mark Twain’s work published and otherwise, Appendix X, Vol. III, of Mark Twain, by A. B. Paine (see below).

Biography and Criticism

The standard life is by Albert Bigelow Paine. 1912. 3 vols.

The following list does not attempt to represent the periodical material except for one symposium in The Bookman. See the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. The volume for 1910–1914 alone contains seventy-six items.

Clemens, W. M. Mark Twain: his Life and Work. 1892.

Henderson, Archibald. Mark Twain. 1912.

Howells, W. D. My Mark Twain. 1910.

Mark Twain’s Letters (edited by A. B. Paine). 1917.

Matthews, Brander. Inquiries and Opinions. 1907.

Paine, A. B. A Boy’s Life of Mark Twain. 1916.

Pattee, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. iii. 1915.

Phelps, W. L. Essays on Modern Novelists. 1910.

Sherman, Stuart. Fifty Years of American Idealism (edited by Gustav Pollak). 1915. Also in On Contemporary Literature. 1918.

Wallace, Elizabeth/ Mark Twain and the Happy Island. 1913.

The Bookman, Vol. XXXI, pp. 363–396: Mark Twain in San Francisco, by Bailey Millard; Mark Twain, an Appreciation, by Henry M. Alden. Best Sellers of Yesterday: The Innocents Abroad, by A. B. Maurice; Mark Twain in Clubland, by W. H. Rideing; Mark Twain a Century Hence, by Harry Thurston Peck; The Story of Mark Twain’s Debts, by F. A. King.