Mark Twain Part 6

And he had that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly expressive, phraseology of the actors in those wild events. The secret of his style is directness of thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance, and a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual expression. He had a remarkable feeling for words and their uses; and his language is the unspoiled, expressive language of the people. At times he is primitive and coa.r.s.e; but it is a Falstaffian note, the mark of universality rather than of limitation. His art was, in Tolstoy's phrase, "the art of a people--universal art"; and his style was rich in the locutions of the common people, rich and racy of the soil. A signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to the theme. The personages of his novels always speak "in character"--with perfect reproduction, not only of their natural speech, but also of their natural thoughts. Though Mr.

Henry James may have said that one must be a very rudimentary person to enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue in a rudimentary style in treatment of rudimentary or,--as I should prefer to phrase it, --fundamental things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put into the mouth of a "rudimentary" person like Huck, so vivid and graphic a description of a storm with its perfect reproduction of the impression caught by the "rudimentary" mind. "Writers of fiction," says Sir Walter Besant in speaking of this book, "will understand the difficulty of getting inside the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them, writing as he would have written, and acting as he would have acted; and presenting to the world true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy.

The feat has been accomplished; there is no character in fiction more fully, more faithfully, presented than the character of Huckleberry Finn. . . . It may be objected that the characters are extravagant.

Not so. They are all exactly and literally true; they are quite possible in a country so remote and so primitive. Every figure in the book is a type; Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none. We see the life --the dull and vacuous life--of a small towns.h.i.+p upon the Mississippi River forty years ago. So far as I know, it is the only place where we can find that phase of life portrayed."

Mark Twain impressed one always as writing with utter individuality --untrammelled by the limitations of any particular sect of art. In his books of travel, he reveals not only the instinct of the trained journalist for the novel and the effective, but also the feeling of the artist for the beautiful, the impressive, and the sublime. His descriptions, of striking natural objects, such as the volcano of Mount Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of memorable architecture, such as the cathedral at Milan, show that he possessed the "stereoscopic imagination" in rare degree. The picture he evokes of Athens by moonlight, in the language of simplicity and restraint, ineffaceably fixes itself in the fancy.

Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remarkable "impressionist" and praised by the critics for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his delineation. Kipling frankly acknowledged the great debt that he owed him. Tennyson spoke in high praise of his finesse in the choice of words, his feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were, visualize the precise shade of meaning desired. In truth, Mark Twain was an impressionist, rather than an imaginative artist. That pa.s.sage in 'A Yankee in King Arthur's Court' in which he describes an early morning ride through the forest, pictorially evocative as it is, stands self-revealed--a confusedly imaginative effort to create an image he has never experienced.

If we set over beside this the remarkable descriptions of things seen, as minutely evocative as instantaneous photographs--such, for example, as the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the picture of dawn on the Mississippi, both from Huckleberry Finn--pictures Mark Twain had seen and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the striking superiority of the realistic impressionist over the imaginative artist.

I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life--the influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and thought--is portrayed in that cla.s.sic and memorable pa.s.sage in which he portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his youth, the great river.

To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful book. For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came to feel that there had never been so wonderful a book written by man. To its haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly --drinking it in like one bewitched. But a day came when he began to cease from noting its marvels. Another day came when he ceased altogether to note them.

In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty were gone forever from the river. If the early rapture was gone, in its place was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy. He had learned the ultimate secrets of the river--learned them with a knowledge, so searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring invest.i.ture of art.

Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence. He was a master of the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience. At times, his insight into the mysterious springs of humour, of pa.s.sion, and of pathos seemed almost like divination. All these qualities appeared in full flower in the written expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice to his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction or elegance. At times his judgment was at fault; his const.i.tutional humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not seldom he was long--winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities--descriptive pa.s.sages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty, dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness.

Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently impossible. But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has nothing to do with style. Mark Twain's humour--for humour is his prevalent mood--has international range since, constructed out of a deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human relations.h.i.+p and human failing, it successfully surmounts the difficulties of translation into alien tongues.

Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he was America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true cosmopolitan in the Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was "at home even in his own country." He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan sense; for his was "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." His spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.

Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any overtopping eminence of intellect. "Many so-called American humorists,"

he once remarked to me, "have been betrayed by their preoccupation with the local. Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races of men. Realism is nothing more than close observation. But observation will never give you the inside of the thing. The life, the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of absorption." Mr. Clemens a.s.severated that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human humorist--to discover in Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could safely be labelled "American"--not a single human detail, inside or outside. Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain learned to discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.

Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface veneer the universal traits of that nation's humanity. He expressly disclaimed in my presence any "att.i.tude" toward the world, for the very simple reason that his relation toward all peoples had been one of effort at comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in feeling. He disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed prejudices--maintaining that he could stand any society. All that he cared to know was that a man was a human being--that was bad enough for him! It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any other nation. Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to his j.a.panese students by freeing it from all artificial and local restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight to the heart and soul of man. His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry'

is the most signal ill.u.s.tration of his profoundly suggestive mode of interpretation. In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the highest common factor of all nations. "My secret--if there is any secret--," Mr. Clemens once said to me, "is to create humour independent of local conditions. In studying humanity as exhibited in the people and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out the enc.u.mbrance of the local." And he significantly added--musingly--"

Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities."

To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;

'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well be regarded as the supreme American morality--play of youth, 'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases of a civilization now vanished forever. It is gratifying to Americans to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America. It is gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades. It is more gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain, America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe--a man who will be remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, "with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his equal in humanity."

V. PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST

"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."

MARK TWAIN: 'What is Man?'

"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 pa.s.sions 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 p.r.i.c.king 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 d.i.c.kens. His Southern hereditament of chivalry, his compa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sage 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 p.r.o.nounces 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, cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.sion 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 kins.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sage in that contemporary cla.s.sic 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral responsibility for compa.s.sing Jim's emanc.i.p.ation. 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 n.i.g.g.e.r." 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 d.a.m.nation as a consequence, he resolved to let Jim go free.

Humanity triumphed over conscience--and with an "All right, then, I'll go to h.e.l.l," 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton and himself, redounding immeasurably to his own glory, and demonstrating his complete superiority to Was.h.i.+ngton as a moral character, is cla.s.sic: "George Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Were you with Was.h.i.+ngton," 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 Ma.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sed currency with the ma.s.ses whose fancy it tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp of the cla.s.sic aphorism. These epigrams were frequently pseudo-moral in their nature; and their humour usually lay in the a.s.sumption 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 ill.u.s.trated, I think, by a comparison of his anecdote of the theft of the green water-melon and the cla.s.sic 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 cla.s.s, is to make rest.i.tution. It is his duty to restore it to its rightful owner. So rising up, spiritually strengthened and refreshed by his n.o.ble 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 n.o.bly 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 paris.h.i.+oners, 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 const.i.tuted 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 n.o.ble 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 grat.i.tude 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 compa.s.sion for the weak and the defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the n.o.blest 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 n.o.bility. 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 att.i.tude 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 ent.i.tled 'Was it Heaven or h.e.l.l?' 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 h.e.l.l of fire and brimstone, for her innocently trivial transgression. The essay on Harriet Sh.e.l.ley, the novel of 'Joan of Arc', and the story 'Was it Heaven or h.e.l.l?' 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 h.e.l.l?' 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 publis.h.i.+ng 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 absurdum_ 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 cla.s.sic 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 inst.i.tution"; 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.