Our Mark Twain
THE WORLD OF BOOKS
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
FROM my earlier years there arises in my mind's eye a double exposure: an image of Mark Twain in the famous portrait, all in white, with a kitten in his lap; and superimposed upon that an image of my uncle, with hair equally snow-white, equally unruly, striding up and down the kitchen and reciting "Who's - got - my - golden - arm?" or "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning." (Hal Holbrook's brilliant impersonation recently revivified these images for me.) My father and my uncle, at odds on most points, were at one in their adoration for Mark Twain. It was my father who introduced me to Tom Sawyer.
I came to Huckleberry Finn later. I recall reading aloud to my elders, as much amused at my choking hilarity, I imagine, as at Mark Twain, the exploits of the Royal Nonesuch, the artistic efforts of Emmeline Grangerford, and her "Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd." I almost think that immortal ballad, along with "Snowbound," "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Jabberwocky," and
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world, was my somewhat eclectic introduction to poetry. It was very much later that I realized the consummate artistry with which Huck, just a few pages after the sentimentality of poor Emmeline's 'tributes' (and the spidery young woman in white on the bridge), expressed his genuine grief at Buck's death in the famous feud with utter simplicity: "I cried a little when I was covering up Buck's face, for he was mighty good to me."
It was not that I was unaware of the power of Mark Twain's deceptively simple prose. For long before I came to the realization of Mark Twain as an artist, I had read in Harper's Magazine, the year after his own death, "The Death of Jean," which, he had instructed his literary executor, was to be published only when he was dead, as the last chapter of his autobiography. That account of the old man,. walking disconsolately in the dead of night through the empty rooms at Stormfield, recalling the death of Susy, years ago, recalling the death of his beloved Livy in Florence, five years before; he there alone, Clara and her husband far off across the ocean, alone except for the faithful Katie and the French butler and Jean's dog ("I do not like dogs, because they bark when there is no occasion for it"; but this dog belonged to Jean and never barked except when there was occasion); strolling through the empty rooms, remembering the young woman who, just yesterday, was gaily going about her Christmas preparations - that account, marked here and there as it is with touches of his irrepressible humor even in sadness, is one of the most moving-expressions of private grief that I know; one that only a supreme artist in words could have written.
His own death in 1910 made a profoundly greater impression upon us than the deaths of President McKinley, Queen Victoria, and Leo XIII some years before. But it was not for Mark Twain the artist my father and my uncle grieved: to them he was Mark Twain the 'philosopher'; for they knew then, as I did not, that our greatest humorist was a pessimist, who found himself more in tune with the world of Jude the Obscure than with the world of Pollyanna. I had discovered Hardy before I read What Is Man? and The Mysterious Stranger. Yet they did not come wholly as a surprise to me. Some critic has dismissed the latter book as sophomoric. (Doubtless it is; at any rate, as a sophomore I kept an illuminated motto - from Pudd'nhead Wilson, I think - above my desk: "Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party didn't miss the boat.") The Mysterious Stranger, however, expresses a vision of life; and Satan's final word to Theodor: "It is all a dream.... And you are but a thought a vagrant thought, a useless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!" is as old as Pindar's "Man is the dream of a shadow"; and scarcely differs from Shakespeare's.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Adoration is not too strong a word for the feeling of my father and my uncle for Mark Twain. For them his irreverent laughter completed the process Voltaire, Byron, Tom Paine began (and Bob Ingersoll continued): their liberation from the boredom of a two-service Sunday and the fear of a Calvinist hell. I can understand their feeling of liberation. Coming upon Captain Stormfield's Visit toHeaven shortly after I had stumbled upon the eschatological speculations of TheGates Ajar and upon Intra Muros or Within the Walls, the story of a woman who, in a state of coma, had had a preview of Heaven (its gates are of pearl and its streets are of gold) I felt a lift from the ennui of a lapidary Paradise comparable to their sense of release from a sulphurous hell.
Mark Twain was of course a late child of the Enlightenment; his limitations are the limitations of the Enlightenment. Yet we may forgive the Connecticut Yankee for a lack of insight into the world of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (not much later in time than the world of King Arthur's court) because of his Jeffersonian hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man. (The Yankee came from a state whose Constitution reserved to the people their "undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient" - a right the twentieth century, even in the United States, seems to forget.) The Enlightenment was sometimes deficient in imagination. Was it Limited imagination, I wonder, or was it intellectual snobbery which led Mark Twain to plump for the Baconian theory? This aberrancy on the part of a Missouri ragamuffin, with even less formal education than Shakespeare's, who yet became a writer of vigorous, supple and sensitive prose is a little hard to understand. Yet he was honest in his literary tastes - "a good library may be started by leaving Jane Austen out"; he detested plays, Howells wrote, and took little pleasure in poetry, though he had at one time "a great Browning passion."
My Mark Twain remains still the greatest tribute to his genius, because written out of the love which gives insight. And Howells, I think, is right: "Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature." For like Lincoln, with his Hamlet-like complexity beneath the rough frontier humor, he embraces the welter of contradictions that is America: our energy, our flamboyance and braggadocio, our materialism and our idealism, our sentimentality and our barbaric yawp, our Emersonian optimism and our Jeffersonian dream, interwoven with dark strains of pessimism and violence. He remains still our most popular and representative writer, in range if not in depth. He covered our continent from the mining camps of Nevada and California to the Boston of the Whittier dinner. He wrote of our greatest river as no one else has written of it. In his drawl was the music of the South, for which he fought very briefly in a campaign that failed; and whose corruption by the jejune romanticism of Sir Walter Scott as much as by slavery he deplored. He celebrated our emancipation from Europe yet lived several years abroad.
His chivalric devotion to Olivia Clemens, his idealization of girlhood and womanhood (at one here with Howells and James in their breathlessness before the shrine of 'la jeune fille') reflects our matriarchal culture. His Joan of Arc may be, as Shaw complained, skirted to the ground, and with as many petticoats as Noah's wife in a toy ark; but this is rather the fault of the genteel tradition and his own romanticism than of Howells and Olivia Clemens, as Van Wyck Brooks once thought. Yet if his masculinity was sometime muted it was indubitable. His Connecticut Yankee might object to the indecency of the talk in King Arthur's court, but Howells could not quite bear to look at some of his letters after the first reading. On the other hand neither John Hay nor the Rev. Joseph Twitchell flinched from the lusty "1601," with its four-letter words: they evidently accepted him as he was - a product of the frontier, of a society of men without women.
He excoriated our materialism yet worshipped the bitch-goddess success and hunted her down in those fantastic business ventures which almost always failed, though his literary career brought him both riches and the scarlet and gray of an Oxford gown. And at the core of his being was a solid integrity such as all of us like to think we too possess, that high sense of honor which led him to assume the liabilities of his bankrupt publishing firm, though he had no legal responsibility for them. An act which he minimized in a manner which we also like to think characteristic of our modesty, glossing it over with the wry remark about the generosity of his creditors: all except one or two, to be mentioned in his autobiography - "it can never wound them for I have every confidence they will be in hell before it is printed."
'Youth' was Olivia Clemens's name for him. It is often held as evidence of our 'adult-infantilism' that our most popular classic is a boy's book. It is true that Mark Twain is a symbol of our buoyant youthful confidence before two world wars, a great revolution, and a great depression sobered us into a degree of maturity. But underlying that flight of Huck and Jim down the river is an adult sense of reality, an honesty, an encompassing humanism as well as humanitarianism which expresses us, too. He is not, it is true, our Shakespeare; it is not necessarily written in the stars that we shall ever have a Shakespeare. Let it be enough that he is our Mark Twain.
Stearns Morse, who teaches courses in American fiction, was Dean of Freshmen for ten years, from 1946 to 1956. He has been a member of the English faculty since 1923, and after his administrative interlude he returned to his first love, teaching. Mark Twain, about whom Professor Morse writes with perception and deep affection, died fifty years ago this spring.
