The Complete Novels of Mark Twain and the Complete Biography of Mark Twain (420 page)

I recall an incident in connection with the writing of his Autobiography. On more than one occasion, he declared that the Autobiography was going to be something awful—as caustic, fiendish, and devilish as he could make it. Actually, he was in the habit of jotting on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization or diabolic joke: "Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years after my death." One day I heard him vent his pent-up rage, in bitter and caustic words, upon a certain strenuous, limelight American politician. I could not resist the temptation to ask him if this, too, were going into the Autobiography. "Oh yes," he replied, decisively. "Everything goes in. I make no exceptions. But," he added reflectively, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, "I shall make a note beside this passage: 'Not to be published until one hundred and fifty years after my death'!"

Mark Twain had numerous "doubles" scattered about the world. The number continually increased; once a month on an average, he would receive a letter from a new "double," enclosing a photograph in proof of the resemblance. Mark once wrote to one of these doubles as follows:

MY DEAR SIR—

Many thanks for your letter, with enclosed photograph. Your resemblance to me is remarkable. In fact, to be perfectly honest, you look more like me than I look like myself. I was so much impressed by the resemblance that I have had your picture framed, and am now using it regularly, in place of a mirror, to shave by.

Yours gratefully,
S. L. CLEMENS.

Although not generally recognized, it is undoubtedly true that Mark Twain was a wit as well as a humorist. He was the author of many epigrams and curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases in conversation, quoted in all classes of society wherever the English language is spoken. His phrasing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing none of the polished brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard Shaw; but Mark Twain's sayings "stick" because they are rooted in shrewdness and hard commonsense.

Mark Twain's warning to the two burglars who stole his silverware from "Stormfield" and were afterwards caught and sent to the penitentiary, is very amusing, though not highly complimentary to American political life:

"Now you two young men have been up to my house, stealing my tinware, and got pulled in by these Yankees up here. You had much better have stayed in New York, where you have the pull. Don't you see where you're drifting. They'll send you from here down to Bridgeport jail, and the next thing you know you'll be in the United States Senate. There's no other future left open to you."

The sign he posted after the visitation of these same burglars was a prominent ornament of the billiard room at "Stormfield ":

NOTICE

To the next Burglar

There is nothing but plated-ware in this house, now
and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing
in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of
kittens. If you want the basket, put the kittens in
the brass thing.

Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family.

You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing
which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I think
they call it, or pergola, or something like that.

Please close the door when you go away!

Very truly yours,

S. L. CLEMENS.

Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour, American humour, such as we are accustomed to expect from Mark Twain—humour not unmixed with a strong spice of wit. But Mark Twain was capable of wit, pure and unadulterated, curt and concise. I once saw him write in a young girl's birthday book an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites "Truth is our most valuable possession. Let us economize it." The advice he once gave me as to the proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical operation has always remained in my memory: "Console yourself with the reflection that you are giving the doctor pleasure, and that he is getting paid for it." Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum that the statue which advertises its modesty with a fig-leaf brings its modesty under suspicion. His business motto—unfortunately, a motto that he never followed—has often been attributed, because of its canny shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew Carnegie. The idea was to put all your eggs in one basket—and then—watch that basket! His anti-Puritanical convictions find concrete expression in his assertion that few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. Truly classic, in usage if not in form, is his happy saying that faith is believing what you know ain't so. His definition of a classic as a book which people praise but don't read, is as frequently heard as are Biblical and Shakespearian tags.

Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed between two and three hundred maxims during his life. Many of them, especially those from the old and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the individual and peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's phraseology and outlook upon life—quaint, genial, and shrewd. In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief in the omnipotent power of training, he remarked that the peach was once a bitter almond, the cauliflower nothing but cabbage with a college education. He himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which he defined as disrespect for another man's god. Women took an almost unholy delight in describing some of their undesirable acquaintances, in Mark Twain's phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite unrefined, but just the kind of person that keeps a parrot!

At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying power of illusions in a world of harsh realities; for he asserted that when illusions are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depressing sense of world-weariness sometimes overbore the native joyousness of his temperament; and he expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the race—because he had brought death into the world. A funeral always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual uplift, a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had been set free. He thought it was far harder to live than to die.

In one of his early sketches, there was admirable wit in the suggestion to the organist for a hymn appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son:

"Oh! we'll all get blind drunk
When Johnny comes marching home!"

And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort of brilliant wit in the mad logic of his innocent query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's heart was so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs: "I was curious to know what Philip had for dinner." Mark Twain was capable of epigrams worthy, in their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said "Humour there is in almost every scene and every page; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies—on the deep melancholy of Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear." The greatest ironic achievements of Mark Twain, in brief compass, are the two stories: 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and 'Was it Heaven or Hell'? They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an ironic humorist—or shall we rather say, ironic wit? For they range all the way from the most mordant to the most pathetic irony—from Mephistophelean laughter to warm, human tears:

"
Sunt lachrymae rerum.
"

"Make a reputation first by your more solid achievements," counselled Oliver Wendell Holmes. "You can't expect to do anything great with Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's umbrella." Mark Twain has had to pay in full the penalty of comic greatness. The world is loth to accept a popular character at any rating other than its own. Whosoever sets himself the task of amusing the world must realize the almost insuperable difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a serious thinker. Says Moliere—

"
C'est une etrange entreprise que celle
de faire rire les honnetes gens.
"

The strangeness of the undertaking is no less pronounced than the rigour of its obligations. Mark Twain began his career as a professional humorist and fun-maker; he frankly donned the motley, the cap and bells. The man-in-the-street is not easily persuaded that the basis of the comic is, not uncommon nonsense, but glorified common-sense. The French have a fine-flavoured distinction in
ce qui remu
from
ce qui emeut
; and if
remuag
is the defining characteristic of 'A Tramp Abroad', 'Roughing It', and 'The Innocents Abroad', there is much of deep seriousness and genuine emotion in 'Life on the Mississippi', 'Tom Sawyer', 'Huckleberry Finn', and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson'. In the course of his lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker into a masterly humorist, from a sensational journalist into a literary artist. In explanation of this, let us recall the steps in that evolution. In his youth, this boy had no schooling worth speaking of; he lived in an environment that promised only stagnation and decay. As the young boy, barefooted and dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass upon the surface of that great inland deep, the Mississippi, he conceived the ambition and the ideal of learning to know and to master that mysterious water. His dream, in time, was realized; he not only became a pilot, but—which is infinitely more significant—he changed from a callow, indolent, unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a man, a master of the river, with a knowledge which, in its accuracy and minuteness, was, for its purpose, all-sufficient and complete.

I have always felt that, had it not been for this training in the great university of the Mississippi, Mark Twain might never have acquired that trained faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration without which his works, full of flaws as they are, might never have revealed the very real art which they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the art of taking infinite pains—the art of exactitude, precision and detail. Humour per se is as ephemeral as the laugh—dying in the very moment of its birth. Art alone can give it enduring vitality. Mark Twain's native temperament, rich with humour and racy of the soil, drank in the wonder of the river and unfolded through communication with all its rude human devotees; the quick mind, the eager susceptibility, developed and matured through rigorous education in particularity and detail; and before his spirit the very beauties of Nature herself disappeared in face of a consuming sense of the work of the world that must be done.

Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty that his reputation as a humorist compelled him to pay. He became more than popular novelist, more than a jovial entertainer: he became a public institution, as unmistakable and as national as the Library of Congress or the Democratic Party. Even in the latest years of his life, though long since dissociated in fact from the category of Artemus Ward, John Phoenix, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain could never be sure that his most solemn utterance might not be drowned in roars of thoughtless laughter.

"It has been a very serious and a very difficult matter," Mr. Clemens once said to me, "to doff the mask of humour with which the public is accustomed, in thought, to see me adorned. It is the incorrigible practice of the public, in this or in any country, to see only humour in the humorist, however serious his vein. Not long ago I wrote a poem, which I never dreamed of giving to the public, on account of its seriousness; but on being invited to address the women students of a certain great university, I was persuaded by a near friend to read this poem. At the close of my lecture I said 'Now, ladies, I am going to read you a poem of mine'—which was greeted with bursts of uproarious laughter. 'But this is a truly serious poem,' I asseverated—only to be greeted with renewed and, this time, more uproarious laughter. Nettled by this misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket, saying, 'Well, young ladies, since you do not believe me to be serious, I shall not read the poem'—at which the audience almost went into convulsions of laughter."

Humour is a function of nationality. The same joke, as related by an American, a Scotchman, an Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a distinctive racial flavour and individuality of approach. Indeed, it is open to question whether most humour is not essentially local in its nature, requiring some specialized knowledge of some particular locality. It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his native heath to understand that great political satirist, "Mr. Dooley," on the Negro Problem, for example. After reading George Ade's Fables in Slang, Mr. Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate conclusion that humour varies with the parallels of latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle in London.

If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark Twain's world-wide popularity as a humorist, he would find that secret, primarily, in the universality and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a master in the art of broad contrast; incongruity lurks on the surface of his humour; and there is about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But these are mere surface qualities, more or less common, though at lower power, to all forms of humour. Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to be attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of knowledge, or even to any depth of intellectuality. His hold upon the world is due to qualities, not of the head, but of the heart. I once heard Mr. Clemens say that humour is the key to the hearts of men, for it springs from the heart; and worthy of record is his dictum that there is far more of feeling than of thought in genuine humour.

Mark Twain succeeded in "tickling the midriff of the English-speaking races" with a single story; and in time he showed himself to be, not only a man of letters, but also a man of action. His humour has been defined as the sunny break of his serious purpose. Horace Walpole has said that the world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy to the man of feeling. To the great humorist—to Mark Twain—the world was a tragi-comedy. Like Smile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief is the most real and important thing in the world—because it separates us from happiness. He was an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest humour, perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition: "If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you expose, it is the spirit of Humour that is moving you." Mark Twain's fun was light-hearted and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound. "He is, above all," said that oldest of English journals, 'The Spectator', "the fearless upholder of all that is clean, noble, straightforward, innocent, and manly. . . . If he is a jester, he jests with the mirth of the happiest of the Puritans; he has read much of English knighthood, and translated the best of it into his living pages; and he has assuredly already won a high degree in letters in having added more than any writer since Dickens to the gaiety of the Empire of the English language."