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“Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward |
“The humorous writer,” says Thackeray, “professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension, and imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him—sometimes love him.” This definition is apt enough to have been made with Mark Twain in mind. In an earlier chapter, is displayed the comic phase of Mark Twain's humour. Beneath that humour, underlying it and informing it, is a fund of human concern, a wealth of seriousness and pathos, and a universality of interests which argue real power and greatness. These qualities, now to be discussed, reveal Mark Twain as serious enough to be regarded as a real moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be regarded as, in spirit, a true sociologist and reformer.
It must be recognised that the history of literature furnishes forth no great international figure, whose fame rests solely upon the basis of humour, however human, however sympathetic, however universal that humour may be. Behind that humour must lurk some deeper and more serious implication which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product. Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, requires a “sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one.” There is always a breadth of philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of pathos in the very greatest humorists. Both Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective dreamers; Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real in pricking the bubble of Spanish chivalry; and Moliere declared that, for a man in his position, he could do no better than attack the vices of his time with ridiculous likenesses. Though exhibiting little of the melancholy of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled in the same directness of thought and expression, showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with the strong but pungent flavour of the soil. Though expressing distaste for Franklin's somewhat cold and almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain nevertheless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness, and bed-rock common sense. Beneath and commingled with all his boyish and exuberant fun is a note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which rings true beside the forced and extravagant pathos of Dickens. His Southern hereditament of chivalry, his compassion for the oppressed and his defence of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from the beginning of his career to the very end. Like Joel Chandler Harris, that genial master of African folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such absorbing interest as human nature. Like Fielding, he wrote immortal narratives in which the prime concern is not the “story,” but the almost scientific revelation of the natural history of the characters. The corrosive and mordant irony of many a passage in Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to scorn the fraudulent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite, the sensualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift. That “disposition for hard hitting with a moral purpose to sanction it,” which George Meredith pronounces the national disposition of British humour, is Mark Twain's unmistakable hereditament. It is, perhaps, because he relates us to our origins, as Mr. Brander Matthews has suggested, that Mark Twain is the foremost of American humorists.
In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as far back as 1867, Mark Twain was dubbed, not only “the wild humorist of the Pacific slope,” but also “the moralist of the Main.” The first book which brought him great popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour. How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that “benefit” performance he witnessed in Italy!
The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which perhaps more than any other won the enthusiastic admiration of his fellow Americans, was this: he always had the courage of his convictions. He writes of things, classic and hallowed by centuries, with a freshness of viewpoint, a total indifference to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous respect for his courage, even when one's own convictions are not engaged. The “beautiful love story of Abelard and Heloise” will never, I venture to say, recover its pristine glory—now that Mark Twain has poured over Abelard the vials of his wrath.
Those who know only the Mark Twain of the latter years, with his deep, underlying seriousness, his grim irony, and his passion for justice and truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier days, the joker and the buffoon were almost solely in evidence. In answer to a query of mine as to the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and gave carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens frankly replied: “I never wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely responsible—to her should go the credit—for any deeply serious or moral influence my subsequent work may exert. After my marriage, she edited everything I wrote. And what is more—she not only edited my works, she edited ME! After I had written some side-splitting story, something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax, she would say to me: 'You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to impart here. Don't give way to your invincible temptation to destroy the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity. Be yourself! Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as you please, but—without farcical commentary. Don't destroy your purpose with an ill-timed joke.' I learned from her that the only right thing was to get in my serious meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let them really feel the underlying moral that gave body and essence to my jest.”
The quality with which Mark Twain invests his disquisitions upon morals, upon conscience, upon human foibles and failings, is the charm of the humorist always—never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness of the philosopher. He observes all human traits, whether of moral sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of his kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist. And yet at times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly pathos, unmistakable, irresistible. One has only to read the beautiful, tender tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and the depth of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom.
In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of 'Huckleberry Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting incidents, its omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper significance of many a passage in that contemporary classic is likely to escape notice. Sir Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most completely satisfying and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately as a book without a moral. Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” There never was a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the two farcical “hoboes,” Tom Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying seriousness and conviction. Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim, Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy for and interest in the masses of the negro people.
Indeed, to the reflective mind—and it is to be presumed that by that standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged—there is no more significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is needed to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of human conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that, with the “lights that he had,” Huck was justified in his courageous decision.
Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to escape from the innocent, inoffending Miss Watson. He became consumed with horror and remorse to hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and children, if their masters wouldn't sell them. His conscience kept stirring him up hotter than ever when he heard Jim talking to himself about the joys of freedom. After awhile, Huck decided to write a letter to Miss Watson, informing her of the whereabouts of her “runaway nigger.” After writing that letter, he felt washed clean of sin, uplifted, exalted. But he could not forget all the goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had shown himself so profoundly grateful. Though he faced the torments of Puritanical damnation as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free. Humanity triumphed over conscience—and with an “All right, then, I'll go to hell,” he tore up the letter.
One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the display of his humour was the subject of prevarication. He seemed never to tire of ringing the changes upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience, and its consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble in falsehood because it is generally winked at as the most venial of all moral obliquities—a fault which is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh is heir to. The incident of George Washington and the cherry tree furnished the basis for countless of his anecdotes; he wrung from it variations innumerable, from the epigram to the anecdote. His distinction between George Washington and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory, and demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington as a moral character, is classic: “George Washington couldn't tell a lie. I can; but I won't.” Perhaps his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same story, is in connection with the exceedingly old “darky” he once met in the South, who claimed to have crossed the Delaware with Washington. “Were you with Washington,” asked Mark Twain mischievously, “when he took that hack at the cherry tree?” This was a poser for the old darkey; his pride was appealed to, his very character was at stake. After an awkward hesitation, the old darkey spoke up, a gleam of simulated recollection (and real gratification for his convenient memory) overspreading his countenance: “Lord, boss, I was dar. In cose I was. I was with Marse George at dat very time. In fac—I done druv dat hack myself”!
Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular humorist was to strike out some comic epigram, that passed currency with the masses whose fancy it tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the classic aphorism. These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature; and their humour usually lay in the assumption that everybody is habitually addicted to prevarication—which is just precisely true enough and reprehensible enough to validate the epigram. His method was humorous inversion; and he told a story whose morals are so ludicrously twisted that the right moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to light. “Never tell a lie—except for practice,” is less successful than the more popularly known “When in doubt, tell the truth.” Out of the latter maxim he succeeded in extracting a further essence of humour. He admitted inventing the maxim, but never expected it to be applied to himself. His advice, he said, was intended for other people; when he was in doubt himself, he used more sagacity! Mark Twain has made no more delightful epigram than that one in which he recognizes that a lie, morally reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an ever present help in time of need: “Never waste a lie. You never know when you may need it.”
Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly serious way, Mark Twain was fond of drawing the distinction between theoretical and practical morals. Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort you get on your mother's knee, in good books, and from the pulpit. You get them into your head, not into your heart. Only by the commission of crime can anyone acquire real morals. Commit all the crimes in the decalogue, take them in rotation, persevere in this stern determination—and after awhile you will thereby attain to moral perfection! It is not enough to commit just one crime or two—though every little bit helps. Only by committing them all can you achieve real morality! It is interesting to note this distinction between Mark Twain, the humorous moralist, and Bernard Shaw, the ethical thinker. Each teaches precisely the same thing—the one not even half seriously, the other with all the sharp sincerity of conviction. Shaw unhesitatingly declares that trying to be wicked is precisely the same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the discovery of character.
The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the ludicrous anecdote with comically mixed morals to the profound parable with grimly ironic conclusion, takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man. It can best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the theft of the green water-melon and the classic fable of 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Mark stole a water-melon out of a farmer's wagon, while he wasn't looking. Of course stole was too harsh a term—he withdrew, he retired that water-melon. After getting safely away to a secluded spot, he broke the water-melon open—only to find that it was green, the greenest water-melon of the year.
The moment he saw that the water-melon was green, he felt sorry. He began to reflect—for reflection is the beginning of reform. It is only by reflecting on some crime you have committed, that you are “vaccinated” against committing it again.
So Mark began to reflect. And his reflections were of this nature: What ought a boy to do who has stolen a green water-melon? What would George Washington, who never told a lie, have done? He decided that the only real, right thing for any boy to do, who has stolen a water-melon of that class, is to make restitution. It is his duty to restore it to its rightful owner. So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by his noble resolution, Mark restored the water—melon—what there was left of it—to the farmer and—made the farmer give him a ripe one in its place! Thus he clinched the “moral” of this story, so quaint and so ingenious; and concluded that only in some such way as this could one be fortified against further commission of crime. Only thus could one become morally perfect!
Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical suggestion—a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his literal words—the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity, fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is a serious meaning that, like murder, will out. If demonstration were needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is amply supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph of invention, construction, and originality, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'. Here is a pure morality, daring in the extreme and incredibly original in a world perpetually reiterating a saying already thousands of years old, to the effect that there is nothing new under the sun. It is a deliberate emendation of that invocation in the Lord's Prayer “Lead us (not) into temptation.” The shrieking irony of this trenchant parable, its cynicism and heartlessness, would make of it an unendurable criticism of human life—were it accepted literally as a representation of society. In essence it is a morality pure and simple, animated not only by its brilliantly original ethical suggestion, but also by its illuminating reflection of human nature and its graciously relieving humour. In that exultant letter which the Diabolus ex machina wrote to the betrayed villagers, he sneers at their old and lofty reputation for honesty—that reputation of which they were so inordinately proud and vain. The weak point in their armour was disclosed so soon as he discovered how carefully and vigilantly they kept themselves and their children out of temptation. For he well knew that the weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire. The familiar distinction between innocence and virtue springs to mind. And it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche, and Shaw after him, both point out that virtue consists, not in resisting evil, but in not desiring it! 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a masterpiece, eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift. It proclaims Mark Twain not only as a supreme artist, but also as eminently and distinctively a moralist.
It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his maturer development as other than a moralist. My personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens convinced me—had I needed to be convinced—that in his later years he had striven to grapple nobly with many of the deeper issues of life, character and morality, public, religious and social, as well as personal and private. I never knew anyone who thought so “straight,” or who expressed himself with such simple directness upon questions affecting religion and conduct. He was absolutely fearless in his condemnation of those subsidized “ministers” of the Gospel in cosmopolitan centres, who, through self-interest, cut their moral disquisitions to fit the predilections of their wealthy parishioners, many of whom were under national condemnation as “malefactors of great wealth.” Animated by love for all creatures, the defenceless wild animal as well as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in his indictment of those big-game hunters who shamelessly described their feelings of savage exultation when some poor animal served as the target for their skill, and staggered off wounded unto death. His sympathy for the natives of the Congo was profound and intense; and his philippic against King Leopold for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention of the whole world to conditions that constituted a disgrace to modern civilization. His diatribe against the Czar of Russia for his inhumanity to the serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble determination to throw the whole weight of his influence in behalf of suffering and oppressed humanity. Some years before his death, he told me that he never intended to speak in public again save in behalf of movements, humanitarian and uplifting, which gave promise of effecting civic betterment and social improvement.
I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt of gratitude to Mark Twain for three events—for the publication of such works can be dignified with no less eminent characterization. When Mr. Edward Dowden tried to make out the best case for Shelley that he could, it was at the sacrifice of the reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook. That ingrained chivalry which is the defining characteristic of the Southerner, the sympathy for the oppressed, the compassion for the weak and the defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the noblest actions of his career. For his defence of Harriet Westbrook is something more than a work, it is an act—an act of high courage and nobility. With words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain tabulated the six pitifully insignificant charges against Harriet, such as her love for dress and her waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against them the six times repeated name of Cornelia Turner, that fascinating young married woman who read Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the night with him—because he saw visions when he was alone! Again, in his 'Joan of Arc', Mark Twain erected a monument of enduring beauty to that simple maid of Orleans, to whom the Roman Catholic Church has just now paid the merited yet tardy tribute of canonization. It is a sad commentary upon the popular attitude of frivolity towards the professional humorist that Mark Twain felt compelled to publish this book anonymously, in order that the truth and beauty of that magic story might receive its just meed of respectful and sympathetic attention.
The third act for which I have always felt deeply grateful to Mark Twain is the apparently little known, yet beautiful and significant story entitled 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' It contains, I believe, the moral that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout his entire life—the bankruptcy of rigidly formal Puritanism in the face of erring human nature, the tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter, instead of wisely conforming to the spirit, of moral law. No one doubts that Mark Twain—as who would not?—believed, aye, knew, that this sweet, human child went to a heaven of forgiveness and mercy, not to a hell of fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay on Harriet Shelley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' are all, as decisively as the philippic against King Leopold, the diatribe against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications of the moral principle. 'Was it Heaven or Hell?' in its simple pathos, 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' in its morally salutary irony, present vital evidence of that same transvaluation of current moral values which marks the age of Nietzsche and Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw. In that amusing, naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that he could make exceedingly bright jokes and could be extremely amusing; but she maintains that he was more interested in earnest books and earnest conversation than in humorous ones. She pronounced him to be as much of a Pholosopher (sic) as anything. And she hazards the opinion that he might have done a great deal in this direction if only he had studied when he was a boy!
Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he called 'An Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'. For long he desisted from publishing it because of his fear that its outspoken frankness would appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities of the public. While his villa of “Stormfield” was in course of erection several years ago, he discovered that half of it was going to cost what he had expected to pay for the whole house. His heart was set on having a loggia or sun-parlour; and when it seemed that he would have to sacrifice this apple of his eye through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds, hauled out Captain Stormfield and made the old tar pay the piper. His fears as to its reception were wholly unwarranted; for it was generously enjoyed for its shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and heaven as popularly taught nowadays from the pulpits. This book is full of a keen and bluff common sense, cannily expressed in the words of an old sea-captain whom Mark Twain had known intimately. It is only another link in the chain of evidence which goes to prove that Mark Twain had thought long and deeply upon the problematical nature of a future life. It is, in essence, a reductio ad absurdu of those professors of religion who still preach a heaven of golden streets and pearly gates, of idleness and everlasting psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss. Mark Twain wanted to point out the absurdity of taking the allegories and the figurative language of the Bible literally. Of course everybody called for a harp and a halo as soon as they reached heaven. They were given the harps and halos—indeed nothing harmless and reasonable was refused them. But they found these things the merest accessories. Mark Twain's heaven was just the busiest place imaginable. There weren't any idle people there after the first day. The old sea captain pointed out that singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity was all very pretty when you heard about it from the pulpit, but that it was a mighty poor way to put in valuable time. He took no stock in a heaven of warbling ignoramuses. He found that Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan, was not as comforting as it sounds in the pulpit. Heaven is the merited reward of service; and the opportunities for service were infinite. As he said, you've got to earn a thing square and honest before you can enjoy it. To Mark, this was “about the sensiblest heaven” he had ever heard of. He mourned a little over the discovery that what a man mostly missed in heaven was company. But he rejoiced in the information vouchsafed by his friend the Captain—a valuable piece of information that leaves him, and all who are so fortunate as to hear it, the better for the knowledge—that happiness isn't a thing in itself, but only a contrast with something that isn't pleasant! This view of heaven, seen through the temperament of a humorist and a philosopher, is provocative and thought-compelling more than it is amusing or ludicrous. I think it inspired Bernard Shaw's Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand dollar prize—a prize which Mr Shaw hurled back with indignation and scorn!
Mark Twain was a great humorist—more genial than grim, more good-humoured than ironic, more given to imaginative exaggeration than to intellectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than to melancholy. He was a great story-teller and fabulist; and he has enriched the literature of the world with a gallery of portraits so human in their likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of classic comedy and picaresque romance. He was a remarkable observer and faithful reporter, never allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be “frightened by the venerableness of the institution”; and his sublimated journalism reveals a mastery of the naively comic thoroughly human and democratic. He is the most eminent product of our American democracy, and, in profoundly shocking Great Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he exhibited that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy of spirit, and that faith in the contemporary which stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible youth. Throughout his long life, he has been a factor of high ethical influence in our civilization, and the philosopher and the humanitarian look out through the twinkling eyes of the humorist.
And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to distinction as a great writer inheres in his natural, if not wholly conscious, mastery in that highest sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy, morality and even humour, which we call sociology. When I first advanced this view, it was taken up on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain “from a new angle”; the essay was reviewed at length on the continent of Europe; and the author of the essay was invited “to explain Mark Twain to the German public”! There are still many people, however, who resent any demonstration that Mark Twain was anything more than a mirthful and humorous entertainer. Mr. Bernard Shaw once remarked to me, in support of the view here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain as America's greatest achievements in literature, and that he thought of Mark Twain primarily, not as humorist, but as sociologist. “Of course,” he added, “Mark Twain is in much the same position as myself: he has to put matters in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him, believe he is joking.”
Mark Twain once said that whenever he had diverged from custom and principle to utter a truth, the rule had been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it. “Custom is a petrifaction,” he asserted; “nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.” Mr. W. D. Howells has advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that “the ludicrous incongruity of a slave-holding democracy nurtured upon the Declaration of Independence, and the comical spectacle of white labour owning black labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark Twain) the sense of contrast which is the mountain of humour or is said to be so.” However that may be, Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion, Southern born though he was, that slavery was unjust, inhuman, and indefensible. The advanced thinkers in the South had reached this conclusion long before the beginning of the Civil War, and many Southern men had actually devised freedom to their slaves in their wills. The slaves were treated humanely, their material wants were cared for by their owners with a care that can only be called loving, and their spiritual welfare was the frequent concern in particular of the mistress of the house.
In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion to slavery. He wasn't even aware that there was anything wrong about it. He never heard it condemned by acquaintances or in the local papers. And as for the preachers, they taught that God approved slavery, and cited Biblical passages in support of that view. If the slaves themselves were averse to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on the subject. He seldom saw a slave misused—on the farm, never. But when he was brought face to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated from his family, it made a deep impression upon his consciousness. It was this deplorable evil of the system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible separation of the members of the same family, the one from the other, that convinced him of the injustice of slavery; though this vision, as has been pointed out by Mr. Howells, did not come to him “till after his liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far West.” Yet it found its way into his books—into Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's pathetic longing to buy back his wife and children; and in Pudd'nhead Wilson with its moving picture of the poor slave's agony when she suddenly realizes in the way the water is flowing around the snag that she is being “sold down the river.” In Uncle Tom's Cabin, as Professor Phelps has pointed out, “the red—hot indignation of the author largely nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . . Mrs. Stowe's astonishing work is not really the history of slavery; it is the history of abolition sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows us the beautiful side of slavery—for it had a wonderfully beautiful, patriarchal side—and he also shows us the horror of it.” Mark Twain has declared that the only way to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and people with which the story is concerned, through years of “unconscious absorption” of the facts of the life to be portrayed. When his stories were written, slavery was a thing of the past—he was competent to judge of the situation impartially, through direct personal contact throughout his boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object was not the object of the reformer, warped with prejudice and fired by animosity. He saw clearly; for his aim was not polemic, but artistic. Hence it is, I believe, that Mark Twain stands out as, in essence and in fundamentals, a remarkable sociologist. Certain passages in his books on the subject of slavery, as the historian Lecky has declared, are the truest things that have ever been expressed on the subject which vexed a continent and plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal strife.
Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi always call up to my mind the most vivid pictures—pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells the mob and his scathing remarks upon lynching; the reality and the pathos of the feuds of those Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, shooting each other down at sight in vindication of honour and pride of race; the lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent and unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his mastery of the river; the variegated colours of that lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of the river—all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic pictures as Huck's raft swings lazily down the tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides his boat through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain is primarily a great artist, only unconsciously a true sociologist. But his power as a sociologist is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely more real and human and verisimilar that it is not polemical. There is a “sort of contemporaneous posterity” which has registered its verdict that Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present era. But there is yet to come that greater posterity of the future which will, I dare say, class Mark Twain as America's greatest, most human sociologist in letters. He is the historian, the historian in art, of a varied and unique phase of civilization on the American continent that has passed forever. And it is inconceivable that any future investigator into the sociological phases of that civilization can fail to find priceless and unparalleled documents in the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane, boisterous yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.
Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and sociologic interpretation went even deeper than this. His mastery lay not alone in penetrative reflection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an “institution” blotted from the American escutcheon and a collective racial passion that periodically breaks forth from time to time in mad “carnivals of crime.” The defining quality of the true sociologist, that quality which gives his profession its power and validity as an effective instrumentality in the advancement of civilization, is the faculty of penetrating national and racial disguises, and going directly to the heart of the human problem. Mark Twain possessed this faculty in supreme degree. As a literary critic he was banal and futile; but as a social and racial critic he was remarkable and profound. His essay 'Concerning the Jews' is a masterpiece of impartial interpretation; his comprehension of French and German racial traits, as revealed in his works, is keen and pervasively pertinent; and his magnificent analysis of the situation in South Africa, in the concluding chapters of 'Following the Equator', rings clear with the accents of truth and mounts almost to the dignity of public prophecy. Deeper far, more comprehensive, and voiced with splendid courage, are Mark Twain's interpretations of American democracy and his mirroring of the national ideals. His “defence” of General Funston is a scorching and devastating blast, red with the fires of patriotism. Whatever be one's convictions, one cannot but respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's berserker-like rage over the attitude of Europe in China, the barbarities of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the Philippines, copied after Weyler's reconcentrad policy in Cuba. His study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified common-sense, a sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive in psychological analysis of national and racial traits.
In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realization the dim and inchoate fancies of Whitman; in his own person he realized that “divine average” of common life which is the dream of American democracy. 'The Prince and the Pauper' is a beautiful child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich in human interest. It is something deeper far than this; for the very crucial motive of the story, the successful substitution of the commoner for the king, transforms it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the equality of man. Mark Twain vehemently approved the French revolution, and frankly expressed his regret over Napoleon's failure to invade England and thus destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal paraphernalia of the British monarchy. Despite its note of Yankee blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur' is a remarkable brief for democracy and the brotherhood of man. So eminent a publicist as Mr. William T. Stead pronounced it, at the time of its first appearance, one of the most significant books of our time; and classed it (with Henry George's 'Progress and Poverty' and Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward') as the third great book from America to give tremendous impetus to the social democratic movement of the age. Mark Twain abandoned all hope of a future life; found more of sorrow than of joy in life's balances; and even, in his latter years, lost faith in humanity itself. But amid the wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American optimism: he never lost faith in democracy, and fought valiantly to the end in behalf of equality and the welfare of the average man.
Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship, Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club to which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the religiously orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking, heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club. “I did not read that paper,” Mr. Clemens said to me, “but I put it away, resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time. Every now and then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it, to compare its views with my own later views. From time to time I added something to it. But I never found, during that quarter of a century, that my views had altered in the slightest degree. I had a few copies published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the book to indicate its authorship.” A few days later he gave me a copy, and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the prefatory note:
“Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men—and concealed, kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other.”
'What is Man?' propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that “Beliefs are acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change; nothing whatever can change temperament.” He enunciates the theory, which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such person as a permanent seeker after truth.
“When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth, with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.” “All training,” he avers, “is one form or another of outside influences, and association is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him upward—but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time.” Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is Man?': “Oh, he is real. He's all the boy that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book—because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.” It was what he called Kismet.
It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced, the human race remained “indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud.” He never had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs never tended to warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because he saw in it supreme truth. His ultimate philosophy of life, which he sums up in 'What is Man?', is healthy and right-minded. It is best embodied in the lofty injunction: “Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the community.” Lassalle once said: “History forgives mistakes and failures, but not want of conviction.” In Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to forgive any want of conviction.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg