Mark Twain - Archibald Henderson
MARK TWAIN
By Archibald Henderson
With Photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn
"Haply--who knows?--somewhere
In Avalon, Isle of Dreams,
In vast contentment at last,
With every grief done away,
While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,
And Moliere hangs on his words,
And Cervantes not far off
Listens and smiles apart,
With that incomparable drawl
He is jesting with Dagonet now."
BLISS CARMAN.
PREFACE
There are to-day, all over the world, men and women and children who owe
a debt of almost personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his
humour and the charm of his personality. In the future they will, I
doubt not, seek and welcome opportunities to acknowledge that debt. My
own experience with the works of Mark Twain is in no sense exceptional.
From the days of early childhood, my feeling for Mark Twain, derived
first solely from acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm
and, as it were, personal affection. With limitless interest and
curiosity, I used to hear the Uncle Remus stories from the lips of one
of our old family servants, a negro to whom I was devotedly attached.
These stories were narrated to me in the negro dialect with such perfect
naturalness and racial gusto that I often secretly wondered if the
narrator were not Uncle Remus himself in disguise. I was thus cunningly
prepared, "coached" shall I say, for the maturer charms of Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn. With Uncle Remus and Mark Twain as my preceptors,
I spent the days of my youth--excitedly alternating, spell-bound,
between the inexhaustible attractions of Tom, Huck, Jim, Indian Joe, the
Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers on the one hand; and Brer
Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a thousand other fantastic, but very real creatures
of the animal kingdom on the other.
I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal attachment, for Mark
Twain during all the years before I came into personal contact with him.
It was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to the effect that
Huckleberry Finn was a literary masterpiece, which first awoke in me,
then a mere boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism; for here was
expressed an opinion which I had long secretly cherished, but somehow
never dared to utter!
My personal association with Mr. Clemens, comparatively brief though it
was--an ocean voyage, meetings here and there, a brief stay as a guest
in his home--gave me at last the justification for paying the debt
which, with the years, had grown greater and more insistently
obligatory. I felt both relief and pleasure when he authorized me to
pay that debt by writing an interpretation of his life and work.
It is an appreciation originating in the heart of one who loved Mark
Twain's works for a generation before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens. It
is an interpretation springing from the conviction that Mark Twain was a
great American who comprehensively incorporated and realized his own
country and his own age as no American has so completely done before
him; a supreme humorist who ever wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and
bonhomie; a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the poison of
cynicism, misanthropy, or despair; constitutionally a reformer who,
heedless of self, boldly struck for the right as he saw it; a
philosopher and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret
springs of human motive and impulse, and empirically demonstrated that
intuition in works which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and
went straight to the human, beneath the disguise of the racial; a genius
who lived to know and enjoy the happy rewards of his own fame; a great
man who saw life steadily and saw it whole.
ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.
LONDON,
August 5, 1910.
NOTE.--The author esteems himself in the highest degree fortunate in
having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn. All the
illustrations, both autochrome and monochrome, are the work of Mr.
Coburn.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. THE MAN
III. THE HUMORIST
IV. WORLD-FAMED GENIUS
V. PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST
"I've a theory that every author, while living, has a projection of
himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant
places, and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never
knew him in the flesh. When the author dies, this phantom fades
away, not caring to continue business at the old stand. Then the
dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature;
this impression may grow sharper or fainter according to the
fashions and new conditions of the time."
Letter of THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
of date December 23, 1901.
INTRODUCTORY
In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has
been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and
chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America,
the colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity
was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with
laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from
the "Wild and Woolly West." Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an
international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world. It
would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were
reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of "Literature." They
were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all.
The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of
the supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when
the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there
is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and
incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully
dawned upon the American consciousness. The literatures of England and
Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive
crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain.
It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic,
and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great
artist. It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to
posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be
absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a
world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the
supreme and imperishable glories of American literature.
At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can
be attributed what a Frenchman would call _mondial eclat_ is
surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling,
with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned
title of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has
suffered eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a
fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the
British Isles. His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from
Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to
Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the
literary hierarchy of the world--according to popular verdict. Since
Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged
the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the
world. This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his
life, less from his intellect than from his conscience. The _literati_
bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?' The whole world
pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration.
[While this book was going through the press, news has come of the
death of Tolstoy.]
Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most
widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world. In a sense
not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts
of the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if
measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is
without a parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the
defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends
many an inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent
wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon
the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is
perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's
works are Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet
his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the
magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal
mysticism of his unrealizable hopes.
If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal,
it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour.
That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks--a compact of good humour, robust
sanity, and large-minded humanity--has diligently "gone about in near
and distant places," everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk
of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The
French have a way of speaking of an author's public as if it were a
select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a
country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects,
there is some reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author
appeals to many different "publics" or classes of readers--in proportion
to the many-sidedness of the reader's human interests and the
catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a
boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of
experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he
points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to
whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real
psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid
irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid
Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that
innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the
omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs
of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill
condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the
equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the
growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of
democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human
experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young,
provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the
tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth. The
navvy may rejoice in 'Life on the Mississippi'. Youth and age may share
without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of
'Huckleberry Finn'. True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly
narrative of 'Tom Sawyer'. The artist may bestow his critical meed of
approval upon the beauty of 'Joan of Arc'. The moralist may heartily
validate the ethical lesson of 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg'.
Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the
horse-play of 'Roughing It', the colossal extravagance of 'The Innocents
Abroad', the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the
hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in the spontaneity and
refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation
of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing
air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom. The stevedore on the dock, the
motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the riverman on
the Mississippi--all speak with exuberant affection in memory of that
quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths
of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of silvery hair. In one
day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an emperor and a _portier_ vied
with each other in tributes of admiration and esteem for this man and
his works. It is Mark Twain's imperishable glory, not simply that his
name is the most familiar of that of any author who has lived in our own
times, but that it is remembered with infinite irrepressible zest.
"We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we
knew and loved," said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address. "We
remember the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and
natural manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his
affections, his laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and
faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing.
"Those who know the story of Mark Twain's career know how bravely he
faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet
a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to
provide not only things honest, but things 'honourable in the sight of
all men.'
"Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know
that he was one who loved much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those
who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and
irrepressible humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of
serious thoughts and noble affections and desires.
"Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour
means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the
unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world
which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible
says: 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall
hold them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humour is that it
does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only
at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.
"Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his
humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift,
not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and
wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's
false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false
witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories,
coloured with his own experiences, he touched the absurdities of life
with penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow
the infinite pathos of life's realities. No one can say that he ever
failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the
little children, of whom Christ said, 'Of such is the kingdom of
heaven.'
"Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud.
We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of
the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left
such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own
sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust,
happy in the fuller light.
"'Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,
Death after life doth greatly please."'
"'We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime--the
thin air stifles'--I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush
always with the high ardour of the signers of the Declaration, nor
remain at the level of the address at Gettysburg, nor cry
continually, 'O Beautiful! My country!' Yet, in the long dull
interspans between these sacred moments we need some one to remind
us that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the
years insidious foes are lurking--anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan
decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the
cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant
fraud and corruption. When our countrymen migrate because we have
no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us
what we can count on. When they complain that our soil lacks the
humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for
the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark
Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use
words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with
prairie fire and Western clay, and shows us that we are at one on
all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by
Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the
Republic shall suffer no harm."
STUART P. SHERMAN: "MARK TWAIN."
The Nation, May 12, 1910.
THE MAN
American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no
example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as
the example of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the United
States, as did Grant and Johnson. But assassination began for Lincoln
an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and
adulation. Grant was one of the great failures in American public life;
and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark
Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive
development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of
intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his
career. From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of
Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a
merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy
navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be
taken as symbolic of the romance of American life.
With a sort of mock--pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral
glories of his house--the judge who condemned Charles I., and all those
other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre upon the
name of Clemens. Yet he claimed that he had not examined into these
traditions, chiefly because "I was so busy polishing up this end of the
line and trying to make it showy." His mother, a "Lambton with a p," of
Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of
determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed
with means, and their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown, in the
mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as
Judge Hawkins is said to have done in 'The Gilded Age', settling at
Florida, Missouri. Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months
after their arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he
stated that he had increased by one per cent. the population of this
village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man
in history had ever done for any other town.
Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life,
and survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different
times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the
rescue. He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she
hadn't been uneasy about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about
him the whole time. But when he inquired further if she was afraid he
would not live, she answered after a reflective pause--as if thinking
out the facts--that she had been afraid he would!
His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the
writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was
intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his
writings.
In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida
and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a
lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to
Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all
the dignity of a local autocrat. His forum was a "dingy" office,
furnished with "a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a
puncheon bench." The solemnity of his manner in administering the law
won for him, among his neighbours, the title of Judge.
One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to
realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn.
"Sam was always a good-hearted boy," his mother once remarked, "but he
was a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could
never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me
dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much
in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and
sober-minded as they were." At school, he "excelled only in spelling";
outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn,
mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity
afforded. "Often his father would start him off to school," his mother
once said, "and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his
whereabouts. There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and
Sam would take his position behind that, and as his father went past
would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight.
Finally, his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to
teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn. But I never
gave up. He was always a great boy for history, and could never get
tired of that kind of reading; but he hadn't any use for schoolhouses
and text books."
Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a "loafing, out-at-elbows,
down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town." Young Clemens
accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his
father was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted in
part of two or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like
so many other slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery. To his
children, especially to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however,
a stern taskmaster. Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and
his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality. If at times this
neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the
suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them
--his father doing the breaking and he the suffering! Sam claimed to
be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy. But this modest
estimate is subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off
a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco,
and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he
pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every
original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to
pry into the result--as it was of no consequence to any one but himself!
The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam's
favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky
Thatcher of Tom's admiration. "Sam was always up to some mischief,"
this lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood.
"We attended Sunday-school together, and they had a system of rewards
for saying verses after committing them to memory. A blue ticket was
given for ten verses, a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red,
and a Bible for ten yellow tickets. If you will count up, you will see
it makes a Bible for ten thousand verses. Sam came up one day with his
ten yellow tickets, and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but had
just got them by trading with the boys. But he received his Bible with
all the serious air of a diligent student!"
Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has never pretended that his
success was due to any marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable
industry, any innate energy and perseverance. I have good reason to
recall his favourite theory, which he was fond of expounding, to the
effect that circumstance is man's master. He likened circumstance to
the attraction of gravity; and declared that while it is man's privilege
to argue with circumstance, as it is the honourable privilege of the
falling body to argue with the attraction of gravity, it does no good:
man has to obey. Circumstance has as its working partner man's
temperament, his natural disposition. Temperament is not the creation
of man, but an innate quality; over it he has no authority; for its acts
he cannot be held responsible. It cannot be permanently changed or even
modified. No power can keep it modified. For it is inherent and
enduring, as unchanging as the lines upon the thumb or the conformation
of the skull. Throughout his life, circumstance seemed like a watchful
spirit, switching his temperament into those channels of experience and
development leading unerringly to the career of the author.