Twain, Mark: Selected Obituaries Read online

  Mark Twain From the Baltimore Sun

  April 22, 1910

  [Anonymous]

  It will be many a day before the people of the United States forget Mark Twain, the man. Since far back in the 70's he had been one of our national celebrities, and perhaps the greatest of the clan, beaming, expansive and kindly: a star at all great public feasts; the friend of Presidents and millionaires, of archbishops and actors, welcome everywhere and always in good humor, a fellow of infinite jest. As the years passed his picturesque figure grew more and more familiar and lovable. Every town of any pretensions knew him. He was in ceaseless motion, making a speech here, taking a degree there, and always dripping fun. The news that he was to be present was enough to make a success of anything, from a bacchanal of trust magnates to a convocation of philologists.

  So much for the Mark Twain of banquet hall and popular fancy. He will recede slowly, but recede he must, for there is something pitifully insubstantial about fame of that sort. The new generation will have its own philosophers and its own comedians, and their pressing reality will make poor Mark's white dress suit, his chrysanthemum of white hair and his eternal cigar grow faint and wavering. Oldsters will chuckle and wag their heads when they think of him, but as a living figure he will sink into the past. In that human certainty, however, there is no need for mourning, for there remains the Mark Twain of literature, in stature vastly above the post-prandial wit -- a Mark Twain whose place among the immortals is generally conceded -- a Mark Twain whose life work as satirist, humorist and philosopher is measured in the estimation of many critics by that of Cervantes, Thackeray and Fielding, Aristophanes and Molière.

  There is great temptation, of course, to overestimate a man in the presence of his death, but here, we believe, there is no such extravagance. More than 15 years ago the true rank of Samuel Langhorne Clemens began to impress itself upon the more discerning of his contemporaries. It was the late Sir Walter Besant who first made earnest and effective protest against the popular tendency to regard him as a funny man, and as a funny man only. To show the absurdity of this error, Sir Walter entered upon an elaborate analysis of "Huckleberry Finn," as one who might claim expert knowledge of the literary craft and its problems, pointing out its marvelously accurate characterizations, its vivid picture of a civilization, its Homeric sweep and throb. Here, said Sir Walter, was a literary feat of the first magnitude, for a grown man had entered into the soul of a boy and looked at the world through that boy's eyes. The result, he thought, was the greatest novel ever written by an American, if not the greatest ever written in English.

  Enthusiasm seemed to color this revolutionary judgment, but it won unexpected support and in unexpected places. The English critics, strangely enough, were the first to say aye with hearty good will. While we were still roaring over "The Jumping Frog," as over some masterpiece of empty clowning, they were comparing "A Connecticut Yankee" to "Don Quixote" and "Gulliver's Travels," and setting up "A Tramp Abroad" as unique and incomparable. The Germans followed the English and the French came after, and then at last we Americans began to realize that a truly great man was among us -- a man who would be remembered when some of our Presidents were forgotten. In 1891, when Yale University made Mr. Clemens a doctor of letters, this turn of the tide was publicly marked. He lost, after that, nothing of his popular vogue, but he began to gain the less noisy but more lasting fame of an artist of world rank. Honors came thick and fast, and in 1907, when he was called to Oxford to receive the doctorate of that ancient university, England received him with almost royal pomp.

  The Mark Twain of the last phase was little more than a shadow of the Mark Twain who wrote "Huckleberry Finn." There was still abundant foolery in him, but his old Rabelaisian joy in the human comedy seemed to be gone. He no longer got beneath the surface; he was no longer the universal satirist, dealing with broad types and touching the heart as well as the midriff. He was old, and maybe a bit weary. But the world will not take account of these weak echoes of his former self when it comes to reckon his worth, any more than it considers "Lovell the Widower" when it judges Thackeray. He must be estimated by his best, as Cervantes and the others are estimated. And that best will give delight so long as the English of today remains a living tongue.

  Let us take leave of him here. The time is not one for elaborate essays. He had the great human qualities. Reading him, one came to love him, as one loves Chaucer, Fielding and Ben Jonson. For all his war upon shams and frauds, there was a vast benevolence in him, a genial tolerance, a deep human note. Truly a great man has gone from among us.

  * * *

  Chief of American Men of Letters

  MARK TWAIN IS DEAD.

  From the New York American

  April 22, 1910

  [Anonymous]

  It would be hard to frame four other words that could carry a message of personal bereavement to so many Americans.

  He was easily the chief of our writers, by the only valid test. He could touch the emotional centre of more lives than any other.

  He was curiously and intimately American. No other author has such a tang of the soil -- such a flavor of the average national mind.

  Europeans who complain that we denied Walt Whitman, misunderstood Emerson and have admired only those who write in old world fashions should be satisfied at least with Mark Twain, and with our unwavering taste for him.

  He was our very own, and we gathered him to our hearts.

  In ages to come, if historians and archaeologists would know the thoughts, the temper, the characteristic psychology of the American of the latter half of the nineteenth century, he will need only to read "Innocents Abroad," "Tom Sawyer," and "Huckleberry Finn."

  Mr. Clemens's books were the transcripts of his life. And that life was the kind of life that the average American man of his time has believed in and admired.

  He was the man that rose from the ranks without envy or condescension.

  The man that hated dogmas and philosophies and loved a flash of intellectual light.

  He was the man that cared much to get rich, yet would sweat blood to pay his debts.

  The man of boundless optimism, who has never troubled to understand the great tragedies of nations.

  The deepening sense of the twentieth century -- with its feeling that there are social problems that cannot be resolved by pleasantries -- has somehow left our dear prophet, with all his delicate and tender ironies and his merry quips, a little in the rear.

  Mark Twain was never fortunate in his polemics. He was not effective as the champion of a cause. What he wrote of the Congo was hardly more creditable or convincing than his crusade against Mrs. Eddy.

  He had no natural acerbity, and consequently no real talent for satire.

  His genius was full of bravery and brightness and the joy of life.

  And in the strength of his serene and laughing spirit generations of Americans will go forth to do deeds that he himself could never have conceived.

  * * *

  Mark Twain: An American Pioneer in Man's Oldest Art From Collier's, 45

  April 30, 1910

  [Anonymous]

  Note

  [Both these appreciations appeared in the April 30th edition of Collier's, the first on the magazine's editorial page, the second among the articles.]

  Mark Twain

  A Gentle Man, if that abused title may have any significance restored to it, was Mark Twain. Good and ill fortune made trial of his finely tempered spirit, and success could not spoil nor adversity embitter him. His humor might play like summer lightning over the range of human weakness, but his compassion was warm and universal as the rain. America has lost as much in the man as in the writer.


  His pen knew neither fear nor reverence, yet he dipped it tenderly in the heart of childhood. He asked for no exceptions from human hardship, and he gave out in the last year of his life, when a great sorrow came to him, a glow as of a spirit about to be released.

  To call Mark Twain a humorist merely would be to describe Shakespeare as a strolling player. More than one generation has drunk at the well-head of his tonic and sane philosophy.

  A letter written a few weeks before his death showed him notwithstanding his courage to have felt that darkness was closing in. He wrote from Bermuda: "There is not another orphan who is so wrecked, so ruined, so forsaken, as I am. Just a battered old derelict washing about the wastes of the great seas, with nobody on the bridge."

  America is poorer, in Mr. Clemen's death, by the loss of great and gracious personality: there is a void, not to be filled, in the hearts of those whom he surrounded with his friendship: but who shall say he has not earned that honorable and anxiously awaited resting-place beside Jean and Susie and their mother? He has left to those he loved a stainless memory and to this nation a lasting heritage of smiles and tears.

  Mark Twain: An American Pioneer in Man's Oldest Art,

  Whose Death Is Mourned by the World at Large

  Happy among creative artists is the humorist. He strikes as deep into life as his neglected brothers who deal in pain and tragedy. But he alone carries the people with him. He has their good will, while he interprets their life to them. And only at his death is there sadness because of him. The more he made them merry, the richer the grief. And there are few peoples to-day on the earth where there is no sense of loss because MARK TWAIN died. He would have been seventy-five years old in November, and in the final months had suffered much pain.

  Printer's devil and Mississippi pilot, cub reporter, pioneer, miner, and tramp royal, he knew life, and got the rough stuff out of which to spin his cloth of gold from reality itself. He had lived the life from nocessity, and then wrote it out.

  His sense of the vast innate humor of things was beaten into the fiber of him by the Nevada years, when he was territorial secretary in the State of Nevada. Those were great days. It was a life that couldn't stand the swiftest theatrical show for ten minutes running, but in its panting restlessness clamored for poker and drink and dancing and barbaric music. Partly a glorified picnic, full of easy nuggets and dramatic high lights, and then again tragic and bitter, where sweat and blood dropped free.

  A Western man has said of him: "A good many people think MARK TWAIN is a natural-born humorist. He isn't. He simply described the things he saw in Nevada and got the habit."

  The tumult of that life never forsook him. It passed into the color and startling suddenness of his prose. A land that was unexpected and vast, and men who were irreverent, ironic, fearless and sincere, what was left to do but hive the honey from those unreaped fields?

  In the teeth of the schools, he broke away from the gentle reminiscent New England tradition, and struck out a trail as new and sure as that of ABRAHAM LINCOLN in statecraft. He was an American in every line of his mirthful copy, and it was a generation before the critics caught up and knew it for literature, and ANDREW LANG called it Homeric.

  Leaping into the public eye with the overburdened life of the Calaveras frog who couldn't jump because of his meal of buckshot, he hit his public yet harder with "Innocents Abroad," which showed the ignorant and unashamed American tourist thrust upon the shrines of Europe, who forthwith dramatizes his own innocence, and is unaware of COLUMBUS, but weeps at the grave of ADAM. He finds the old masters a clutter of paint, and refuses to be moved by the cant of embryo Cookists. He turns a fresh, untroubled face on Europe, and asks that it make its own impression sincerely and first-hand.

  That manhandling of the holy places and hoar traditions was the key to MARK TWAIN, who faced life itself in the same naked way. Background, and atmosphere and the accumulations of convention were nonexistent for him, who asked them only to give up their reality and what of vital spark they still possessed for him. This trait of the unabashed accounted for some of his more doubtful ventures, as when he entered the lists of the Shakespeare controversy.

  The books which will safeguard his fame longer than a library of solemn and academic tomes are "Tom Sawyer" and its greater sequel "Huckleberry Finn," wherein the boy in literature is first discovered and celebrated. All the Boytowns and Bad Boys since owe a goodly debt to the clean sweep of those adventures, where boys whitewash fences, run away from home, and exhibit their naked souls in a leaping narrative, brimmed with undying laughter, and poignant with such touches of pathos as the unsuspected deafness of poor black Jim's little girl. The humor of those early books persists through many languages, and is little time-worn by forty years.

  To see things with fresh eyes, and find nothing sacred simply because other men had removed their shoes -- it was in this spirit that he invaded the medieval realm, and plucked the comic out of the forest rides of knights and ladies and the renowned jousts. He called it "A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." He had already written "The Prince and the Pauper" to show that tenderness and reverence could be accorded.

  In his "Joan of Arc" he dealt tenderly with the lovely lady in proof that he knew how to kneel as well as strike.

  He made a few swift sorties into literary criticism in the same masculine, forthright way -- notably in his bitter attack on SHELLEY for the treatment of the poor drowned HARRIET, and in the paper on COOPER, whom he pilloried for committing the 57 varieties of literary sin in plot construction and style.

  He did not flinch from facing the popular good will, which was so largely his, and attacked the national policy of imperialism in his eloquent "To Them That Sit in Darkness," and the acrid drive at General FUNSTON. FUNSTON thought of replying, and the author in the pride of conscious power, advised him to beware or he would hand him out some "man-talk."

  He was free of prejudices, and wrote a fine, strong article on the Jews, where the unfailing sympathy of it included some earnest criticism.

  The external facts are few after the early hard years which grounded him in reality. The books sold like "The Pilgrim's Progress." His lectures were always thronged.

  In old age he met a sudden financial loss to himself -- and to those who had invested with him in a publishing house of his founding -- by a recurrence of energy on the lecture platform, which cleared every cent of the indebtedness. He exactly repeated the intrepid and honorable feat of WALTER SCOTT, which had enriched literary history for a hundred years.

  In his later years he was moved by the pathos of life -- the ceaseless striving game. His manner was affectionate and playful, and the impression of him on the spirit was tender and pathetic. He was simple and offhand, never forcing the note. His conversation was made up of short, easy words, never aiming at wit or cleverness. Sometimes, too, there was music on his lips, as when, on his birthday celebration, he spoke of Pier 70, and the laughter and songs of the young men in the streets at midnight, no more to be heard.

  With the fearless poise of the head of white hair, he would be watched by a theater audience more closely than the star actor on the stage. Ten thousand men rose to their feet when he entered the open-air auditorium at the Yale bicentennial.

  * * *

  Mark Twain

  From Dial, 48

  May 1, 1910

  [Anonymous]

  The report of Mark Twain's death on the 21st of April, this time not "greatly exaggerated" but sadly and literally true, was the occasion of heart-felt grief to the entire nation, we may almost say to the whole world. No American of our time was more widely known; no other American writer lately among the living had endeared himself to so large and cosmopolitan an audience. His life, ended midway in its seventy-fifth year, had been rich in human experience, had fulfilled the season of mellow fruitfulness, and had given literary expression, as few other lives have done, to the qualities of buoyancy and independence so characteristic of the typical American temp
erament. It was also a life which, in its personal aspects, revealed the qualities of manliness and sympathy, was admirable in its public and private relations, and bore with fortitude the buffets of ill-fortune. These are tests of character which few men can suffer without some show of weakness; his character they served only to sweeten and strengthen.

  Mark Twain's life may be divided into two nearly equal parts. Of the first part, which includes his boyhood days, his experiences as a journeyman printer and editor, his brief career as a Mississippi pilot, his briefer career as a Confederate soldier, and his adventures in the mining-camps and rude settlements of the West, we have the most vivid of records in his books -- in "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" and "Roughing It," and in the countless short stories and sketches which began with "The Jumping Frog" and are probably not yet at an end, for only a part of the work which he humorously styles his "Autobiography" has been put into print. Those early days left him with a fund of recollections upon which his drafts were honored -- as was similarly the case with Bret Harte -- for long years after the experiences themselves had become old (although not unhappy) far off things. As the recorder of these phases of pioneer life which he knew at first hand, and of which he almost alone has preserved for us the very form and pressure, we are immeasurably in his debt. There are few things that we know as well as what it was to be a bay in a Missouri country town, a futile skirmisher in the early days of the Civil War, and a traveller on the lower Mississippi, few bygone types that are as real to us as the miners and stage-coach drivers and politicians and barroom loafers of the untutored West of the midcentury. The writings in which these things have been preserved for us are Mark Twain's best, because they are his raciest and least self-conscious.

  The next best group of his books is provided by "The Innocents Abroad," "A Tramp Abroad," and "Following the Equator," the three extensive records of unconventional travel. Yet in these the touch of sophistication is seen, and becomes progressively pronounced with each succeeding narrative. The second is not as good as the first, and the third is distinctly weaker than the second, more artificial in its conception and more forced in its humor. When the author transplanted himself to the East for permanent residence in the seventies, he abandoned the primal sources of his inspiration, and never developed others of comparable importance. Going farther and farther afield in search of fresh material, he illustrated anew the myth of Antaeus, and displayed a pitiable weakness. Over some of his later flounderings in the alien elements of literary criticism, history, and metaphysics, it were best discreetly to draw a veil. There was in him a streak of the Philistine which might have remained undetected had he "kept to his last," but which was sharply revealed when he infringed upon the domain of intellectual and scholarly concerns.