MARK TWAIN. T HE fashion in humour changes with the generations,
and no man could say whether posterity will hold the late S. L. Clemens, who made himself famous as Mark Twain, to be greater as a humorist or as a painter of phases of " the American scene " which have already passed away. The present generation itself is in some doubt. But whatever the relative values of Mark Twain's genius may be, there can be no doubt about this : that in the exercise of all his functions as a writer he was a man of princely honour and of abounding generosity, who was always on the side of the angels, and who hated nothing so much as meanness and hypocrisy.
When "The Innocents Abroad" first fell into the hands of the English reader there was found to be a perfectly irre- sistible piquancy and drollery in its solemn exaggerations, and it was inevitable that the fruit should seem to lose some of its flavour when the taste of it became familiar. That is bound to happen with all fruit which has a strong and unmistakable character of its own. We have used the word "solemn" of Mark Twain's method of exaggeration because in point of fact this sort of exaggeration has to be offered in such a way that you can imagine the author speaking it
without the movement of a muscle. If he appeared to be conscious of anything fantastic in the performance, its virtue would be gone. But in its effect there is of course nothing whatever solemn about the humour of Mark Twain. It rollioks. In this respect his humour differs from what a distinguished Frenchman has called the " gay melancholy " of our typical English humour. We all know what that means : the wistfulness of a humorist like Charles Lamb. The comparison must not be pressed very far, however, for we always have "The Pickwick Papers " rising up to controvert a general proposition. Let us say that the difference between English and American humour is no more than that which Mr. F. W. H. Myers detected between English and American girls. English humour, like the English girl, is the natural product of the country " whose old-world heart more gravely feels." Much time might be wasted on comparing two contrary theories when it might be profitably spent in enjoying them. We all know specimens of Mark Twain's characteristic extravagance and whimsicality of phrase which so often seem to be challenging the criticism that they are flippant, but which are nearly always saved from going over on to the wrong side of the line by the chivalry and ample sanity of the man. His telegram to an American newspaper which had announced his death that the report was " greatly exaggerated" is famous. So is his comment when a per- former on the American stage gave an imitation of him as a lecturer : " There's no doubt one of us must be wrong." Only a few weeks ago when his last illness was taking hold of him he admitted that it was serious, but remarked that it was not such as to "excite an undertaker." It has been said that no man confidently believes in his religion who cannot afford sometimes to laugh about it. The necessary confidence appears in Mark Twain's belief that human life is an admirable thing, and that human foibles are lovable things.
In " The Innocents. Abroad" he ridiculed to the top of his bent what many of his countrymen and countrywomen who tour Europe gaze upon with a reverent but dull stupefaction. He was a satirist ; and yet his satire often escaped the definition because it was not his practice—indeed he was incapable of it—to lunge with a rapier or rub acid into a wound. He was not savage like Swift, or terribly compact and trenchant like Juvenal. If the reader felt that he was being satirised at all, he had, after reading many pages of Mark Twain, only a very vague image of himself as an ass. And somehow the portrait caused no animosity against the painter. Perhaps the best example of the manner in which Mark Twain could never smother or put out of sight his just sympathies and chivalry is his "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc," though we are by no means recommending the book as a fair example of his genius. He was most unfortunate, and most nearly approached positive offence, in his "A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." To the prig Mark Twain probably appeared to be an incurable Philistine. He was never in the narrow and restricted sense a man of letters ; he was not a student. A reader of " A Tramp Abroad" will notice that his literary equipment—at all events, his one but sufficient source of inspiration—is "Baedeker," and that his gift of fun and his close observation do the rest. There are things in that book which will always be an integral part of American humour, however much the fashion in humour may change. There is the account of the voyage on a glacier ; there is the description of French duelling ; there is the masterly narrative of the blue jay which tried to fill a house with acorns ; and there is the appendix on the technicalities of the German language. The following brief sentences in which Mark Twain introduces his reader to the city of Frankfort are characteristic of him in every way :—
"Frankfort is one of the sixteen cities which have the distinction of being the place where the following incident occurred. Charle- magne, while chasing the Saxons (as he said), or being chased by them (as they said), arrived at the bank of the river at dawn, in a fog. The enemy were either before him or behind him; but in any case he wanted to get across, very badly. He would have given anything for a guide, but none was to be had. Presently he saw a deer, followed by her young, approach the water. He watched her, judging that she would seek a ford, and he was right. She waded over, and the army followed. So a great Frankish victory or defeat was gained or avoided; and in order to commemorate the episode, Charlemagne commanded a city to be built there, which he named Frankfort—the ford of the Franks. None of the other cities where this event happened were named from it. This is good evidence that Frankfort was the first place it occurred at." The account of an imaginary duel fought by Gambetta is inimitable with its mock-heroics, the invention of the dying remark, " I die that France may live!" the studied attitude of the great man, "which for sublimity has never been approached by man and has seldom been surpassed by statues," and the dinoilment in which the rotund Gambetta, gasping out a portion of the misremembered message to his country, falls heavily backwards upon Mark Twain and crushes him to the ground, so that the latter is the only person injured in the encounter. The present writer is much attached to the account of the climbing of the Rigi, and the repeated attempts to see the sunrise, always rendered abortive by the heavy sleep of the exhausted mountaineers, who sleep well into the hours of daylight. In the culmination they leap from their beds and rush out into the open air attired in blankets, according to the fashion of the hotel, only to find to their astonishment that the glorious orb, touching the tops of the snowy peaks with radiance, is somehow moving in the wrong direction. They are, in fact, just in time for the sun- set. Mark Twain was a master of the honest laugh. And he could have said of his writings as Sir Walter Scott humbly said of his own, that he thanked God that no one was ever the worse for reading them. No one who knew the man from the style was surprised when Mark Twain declared with an ultra, sensitive scrupulosity that the failure of a publishing company in which he was concerned laid a personal obligation on him to pay all its debts. He worked day and night at writing and lecturing till within five years by his own labour he had paid to every one of the creditors a hundred cents in the dollar.
There is perhaps even more reason why Mark Twain should be remembered as a describer of life and character than as a humorist. It is impossible to read any of his books without noticing how the experiences of his early life, spent in navi- gating the Mississippi, had laid hold of his soul. The pilotage of the river required that he should see through, as it were, the opaqueness of the water and know every flat, snag, hillock, cranny, and swatchway which lay beneath. And this habit of marine clairvoyance made him ever a close and almost microscopic observer. The trade of the Mississippi as he knew it was killed by the Civil War, and " The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and its still greater sequel, " Huckleberry Finn," have all the value of a history of those dead days. No reader who has beheld the swamp blossom at the bidding of Mark Twain's art could ever feel that the miseries of Martin Chuzzlewit's Eden, vivid and telling as they are, represent more than one aide of the truth. The books about the Mississippi have a grasp which is equalled by their reach ; they have tolerance, fertility, and, above all, a wonderful understanding of a boy's character. They embody a faithful reproduction of the Missouri negro dialect, the dialect of the South-Western backwoods, and the "Pike County" dialect. Having just delved in these books again, we feel as certain as we can feel of anything that they will live always in the first rank of American literature. They are great because they are simple. It should never be forgotten that great works of literature are not always produced by " literary " men. The directness, sincerity, and simplicity of Moller° and Cervantes will always appeal to the human heart more than the faultless wit of Voltaire or the witty learning of Rabelais.
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