History of American Literature Part 39

It does not seem possible that the life of any other American author can ever closely resemble his. He had Elizabethan fullness of experience. Even Sir Walter Raleigh's life was no more varied; for Mark Twain was a printer, pilot, soldier, miner, newspaper reporter, editor, special correspondent, traveler around the world, lecturer, biographer, writer of romances, historian, publisher, and philosopher.

STORIES OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.--The works by which Mark Twain will probably be longest known are those dealing with the scenes of his youth.

He is the historian of an epoch that will never return. His works that reveal the bygone life of the Mississippi Valley are not unlikely to increase in fame as the years pa.s.s. He resembles Hawthorne in presenting the early history of a section of our country. New England was old when Hawthorne was a boy, and he imaginatively reconstructed the life of its former days. When Mark Twain was young, the West was new; hence his task in literature was to preserve contemporary life. He has accomplished this mission better than any other writer of the middle West.

_The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ (1876) is a story of life in a Missouri town on the Mississippi River. Tom Sawyer, the hero, is "a combination," says the author, "of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew." Probably Mark Twain himself is the largest part of this combination. The book is the record of a wide-awake boy's impression of the life of that day. The wretched common school, the pranks of the boys, the Sunday school, the preacher and his sermon, the task of whitewas.h.i.+ng the fence, the belief in witches and charms, the half-breed Indian, the drunkard, the murder scene, and the camp life of the boys on an island in the Mississippi,--are all described with a vividness and interest due to actual experience. The author distinctly says, "Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HUCKLEBERRY FINN (From "Huckleberry Finn," by Samuel L. Clemens)]

_Huckleberry Finn_ (1885) has been called the _Odyssey_ of the Mississippi.

This is a story of life on and along the great river, just before the middle of the nineteenth century. Huckleberry Finn, the son of a drunkard, and the friend of Tom Sawyer, is the hero of the book. The reader becomes deeply interested in the fortunes of Jim, a runaway slave, who accompanies Huck on a raft down the river, and who is almost hourly in danger of being caught and returned or again enslaved by some chance white man.

One of the strongest scenes in the story is where Huck debates with himself whether he shall write the owner where to capture Jim, or whether he shall aid the poor creature to secure his freedom. Since Huck was a child of the South, there was no doubt in his mind that punishment in the great hereafter awaited one who deprived another of his property, and Jim was worth eight hundred dollars. Huck did not wish to lose his soul, and so he wrote a letter to the owner. Before sending it, however, he, like Hamlet, argued the case with himself. Should he send the letter or forfeit human respect and his soul? The conclusion that Huck reached is thoroughly characteristic of Mark Twain's att.i.tude toward the weak. The thirty-first chapter of _Huckleberry Finn_, in which this incident occurs, could not have been written by one who did not thoroughly appreciate the way in which the South regarded those who aided in the escape of a slave. Another unique episode of the story is the remarkable dramatic description of the deadly feud between the families of the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords.

This story is Mark Twain's masterpiece, and it is not improbable that it will continue to be read as long as the Mississippi flows toward the Gulf.

Of Mark Twain's achievement in these two tales, Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale says: "He has done something which many popular novelists have signally failed to accomplish--he has created real characters. His two wonderful boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are wonderful in quite different ways. The creator of Tom exhibited remarkable observation; the creator of Huck showed the divine touch of imagination.... _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ are prose epics of American life."

Mark Twain says that he was reared to believe slavery a divine inst.i.tution.

This fact makes his third story of western life, _Pudd'nhead Wilson_.

interesting for its pictures of the negro and slavery, from a different point of view from that taken by Mrs. Stowe in _Uncle Tom's Cabin._

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--During his lifetime, Mark Twain's humor was the chief cause of his well-nigh universal popularity. The public had never before read a book exactly like his _Innocents Abroad_. Speaking of an Italian town, he says, "It is well the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person can stand, and, of course, if they were wider they would hold more, and then the people would die." Incongruity, or the a.s.sociation of dissimilar ideas, is the most frequent cause of laughter to his readers. His famous cablegram from England that the report of his death was much exaggerated is of this order, as is also the following sentence from _Roughing It:_--

"Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter, and the stranger began to explain with another."

Such sentences convey something more than a humorous impression. They surpa.s.s the usual historical records in revealing in an incisive way the social characteristics of those pioneer days. His humor is often only a means of more forcibly impressing on readers some phase of the philosophy of history. Even careless readers frequently recognize that this statement is true of much of the humor in _A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court_, which is one of his most successful exhibitions of humor based on incongruity.

While his humor is sometimes mechanical, coa.r.s.e, and forced, we must not forget that it also often reveals the thoughtful philosopher. To confirm this statement, one has only to glance at the humorous philosophy that const.i.tutes _Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar_.

Mark Twain's future place in literature will probably be due less to humor than to his ability as a philosopher and a historian. Humor will undoubtedly act on his writings as a preservative salt, but salt is valuable only to preserve substantial things. If matter of vital worth is not present in any written work, mere humor will not keep it alive.

One of his most humorous scenes may be found in the chapter where Tom Sawyer succeeds in getting other boys to relieve him of the drudgery of whitewas.h.i.+ng a fence. That episode was introduced to enable the author to make more impressive his philosophy of a certain phase of human action:--

"He had discovered a great law of human action without knowing it--namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

His statement about illusions shows that his philosophy does not always have a humorous setting:--

"The illusions are the only things that are valuable, and G.o.d help the man who reaches the time when he meets only the realities."

Hatred of hypocrisy is one of his emphatic characteristics. If Tom Sawyer enjoyed himself more in watching a dog play with a pinch-bug in church than in listening to a doctrinal sermon, if he had a better time playing hookey than in attending the execrably dull school, Mark Twain is eager to expose the hypocrisy of those who would misrepresent Tom's real att.i.tude toward church and school. While Mark Twain is determined to present life faithfully as he sees it, he dislikes as much as any Puritan to see evil triumph. In his stories, wrongdoing usually digs its own grave.

His strong sense of justice led him to write _Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc_ (1896), to defend the Maid of Orleans. Because he loved to protect the weak, he wrote _A Dogs Tale_ (1904). For the same reason he paid all the expenses of a negro through an eastern college.

Although he was self-taught, he gradually came to use the English language with artistic effect and finish. His style is direct and energetic, and it shows his determination to say a thing as simply and as effectively as possible. One of the rules in _Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar_ is, "As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out." He followed this rule. Some have complained that the great humorist's mind, like Emerson's, often worked in a disconnected fas.h.i.+on, but this trait has been exaggerated in the case of both. Mark Twain has certainly made a stronger impression than many authors whose "sixthly" follows more inevitably. It is true that his romances do not gather up every loose end, that they do not close with a grand climax which settles everything; but they reflect the spirit of the western life, which also had many loose ends and left much unsettled.

His mingled humor and philosophy, his vivid, interesting, contemporary history, which gives a broad and sympathetic delineation of important phases of western life and development, fill a place that American literature could ill afford to leave vacant.

SUMMARY

Lincoln spoke to the common people in simple virile English, which serves as a model for the students of Oxford University. Bret Harte wrote stories filled with the humor and the pathos of the rough mining camps of the far West. Eugene Field's simple songs appeal to all children. The virtues of humble homes, the smiles and tears of everyday life, are presented in James Whitcomb Riley's poems. Mark Twain, philosopher, reformer of the type of Cervantes, and romantic historian, has, largely by means of his humor, made a vivid impression on millions of Americans. Every member of this group had an unusual development of humor. Each one was imbued with the democratic spirit and eager to present the elemental facts of life. For these reasons, the audiences of this group have been numbered by millions.

REFERENCES

Roosevelt's _The Winning of the West_.

Turner's _Rise of the New West_.

Hart's _National Ideals Historically Traced_.

Johnston's _High School History of the United States_ (612 pp.).

Clemens's _Life on the Mississippi_.

Clemens's _Roughing It_.

Schurz's _Abraham Lincoln_. (Excellent.)

Morse's _Abraham Lincoln_.

Chubb's _Selections from the Addresses, Inaugurals, and Letters of Abraham Lincoln, edited with an Introduction and Notes_. (Macmillan's Pocket Cla.s.sics.)

Boynton's _Bret Harte_.

Pemberton's _The Life of Bret Harte_.

Erskinels _Leading American Novelists_, pp. 325-379. (Harte.)

Canby's _The Short Story in English_, Chap. XIV. (Harte.)

Field's _The Eugene Field Book_, edited by Burt and Cable. (Contains autobiographical matter and Field's best juvenile poems and stories.)

Thompson's _Eugene Field_, 2 vols.

Field's _The Writings in Prose and Verse of Eugene Field_, Sabine Edition, 12 vols.

Garland's _A Dialogue between James Whitcomb Riley and Hamlin Garland_, in Me duress Magazine, February, 1894.

_In Honor of James Whitcomb Riley, with a Brief Sketch of his Life_, by Hughes, Beveridge, and Others, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1906.

Clemens's _Autobiography_.

Matthews's _Biographical Criticism of Mark Twain_, in the _Introduction_ to _The Innocents Abroad_.

Phelps's _Essays on Modern Novelists_. (Mark Twain; excellent.)

Henderson's _Mark Twain_, in _Harpers Magazine_, May, 1909.

Howells's _My Mark Twain_.