Chapter 7
The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with Whistler is quaintly illustrative of one phase of his broader humour. Mark Twain was taken by a friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting the finishing touches to one of his fantastic studies. Confident of the usual commendation, Whistler inquired his guest's opinion of the picture. Mark Twain assumed the air of a connoisseur, and approaching the picture remarked that it did very well, but “he didn't care much for that cloud--”; and suiting the action to the word, appeared to be on the point of rubbing the cloud with his gloved finger. In genuine horror, Whistler exclaimed: “Don't touch it, the paint's wet!” “Oh, that's all right,” replied Mark with his characteristic drawl: “these aren't my best gloves, anyhow!” Whereat Whistler recognized a congenial spirit, and their first hearty laugh together was the beginning of a friendly and congenial relationship.
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was in the habit of jotting on the margin of the page, opposite to some startling characterization or diabolic joke: “Not to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years after my death.”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 But,” he added reflectively, with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, “I shall make a note beside this passage: 'Not to be published until one hundred and fifty years after my death'!”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 remue_ from _ce qui emeut_; and if _remuage_ 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.”
Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the heart. He enjoyed to the utmost those two inalienable blessings: “laughter and the love of friends.” He woke the laughter of an epoch and numbered a world for his friends. “He is the true consolidator of nations,” said Mr. Augustine Birrell. “His delightful humour is of the kind which dissipates and destroys national prejudices. His truth and his honour, his love of truth and his love of honour, overflow all boundaries. He has made the world better by his presence.”
IV. THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS
“Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world the art of common life--the art of a people --universal art.” TOLSTOY: What is Art?
Some years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in a spirit of fun, addressed a letter to:
MARK TWAIN GOD KNOWS WHERE.
Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the letter went unerringly to its goal; and it was not long before the senders of that letter received the laconic, but triumphant reply: “He did.” They now turned the tables on the jubilant author, who equally as quickly received a letter addressed:
MARK TWAIN THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.
It seemed that “he” did, too!
In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was literally world-wide --a fame, indeed, which seemed to extend to realms peopled by noted theological characters. From very humble beginnings--he used facetiously to speak of coming up from the “very dregs of society”! --Mark Twain achieved international eminence and repute. This accomplishment was due to the power of brain and personality alone. In this sense, his career is unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of American literature.
It is a mark of the democratic independence of America that she has betrayed a singular indifference to the appraisal of her literature at the hands of foreign criticism. Upon her writers who have exhibited derivative genius--Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow--American criticism has lavished the most extravagant eulogiums. The three geniuses who have made permanent contributions to world-literature, who have either embodied in the completest degree the spirit of American democracy, or who have had the widest following of imitators and admirers in foreign countries, still await their final and just deserts at the hands of critical opinion in their own land. The genius of Edgar Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe; yet in America his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated a “self-made man” in literature, these men are justly entitled to such characterization. They owe nothing to European literature--their genius is supremely original, native, democratic. The case of Mark Twain, which is our present concern, is a literary phenomenon which imposes upon criticism, peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct obligation of tracing the steps in his unhalting climb to an eminence that was international in its character, and of defining those signal qualities, traits, characteristics--individual, literary, social, racial, national--which compassed his world-wide fame. For if it be true that the judgment of foreign nations is virtually the judgment of posterity, then is Mark Twain already a classic.
Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first received notable recognition in France at the hands of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc (Th. Bentzon), who devoted so much of her energies to the popularization of American literature in Europe. That one of her series of essays upon the American humorists which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes' in 1872; in it appeared her admirable translation of 'The Jumping Frog'. There is no cause for surprise that a scholarly Frenchwoman, reared on classic models and confined by rigid canons of art, should stand aghast at this boisterous, barbaric, irreverent jester from the wilds of America. When it is remembered that Mark Twain began his career as one of the sage-brush writers and gave free play to his passion for horseplay, his desire to “lay a mine” for the other fellow, and his defiance of the traditional and the classic, it is not to be wondered at that Mme. Blanc, while honouring him with recognition in the most authoritative literary journal in the world, could not conceal an expression of amazement over his enthusiastic acceptance in English-speaking countries.
“Mark Twain's 'Jumping Frog' should be mentioned in the first place as one of his most popular little stories--almost a type of the rest. It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to understand, while reading this story, the 'roars of laughter' that it excited in Australia and in India, in New York and in London; the numerous editions of it which appeared; the epithet of 'inimitable' that the critics of the English press have unanimously awarded to it.
“We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire, even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much more wisely about European civilization than an American of San Francisco. The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or even natural taste, in order to appreciate works of art.
“It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still common sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to make itself apparent. . . . In Mark Twain the Protestant is enraged against the pagan worship of broken marble statues--the democrat denies that there was any poetic feeling in the middle ages. The sublime ruins of the Coliseum only impressed him with the superiority of America, which punishes its criminals by forcing them to work for the benefit of the State, over ancient Rome, which could only draw from the punishments which it inflicted the passing pleasure of a spectacle.
“In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain, we at length discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent ingenuousness, faults which we should never have expected. He has in the highest degree that fault of appearing astonished at nothing--common, we may say, to all savages. He confesses himself that one of his great pleasures is to horrify the guides by his indifference and stupidity. He is, too, decidedly envious. . . . We could willingly pardon him his patriotic self-love, often wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in what concerns the New World, if only that national pride were without mixture of personal vanity; but how comes it that Mark Twain, so severe upon those poor Turks, finds scarcely anything to criticize in Russia, where absolutism has nevertheless not ceased to flourish? We need not seek far for the cause of this indulgence: the Czar received our ferocious republicans; the Empress, and the Grand Duchess Mary, spoke to them in English.