Twain, Mark: Selected Obituaries Read online

  The present is not, however, the best occasion for dwelling upon Mark Twain's limitations, or for emphasizing the ephemeral character of a considerable part of his work. A fair share of that work, at least, stands upon a level so high as to be in no danger of passing out of sight. Up to an advanced point in his career, he grew steadily in power and wisdom; his sympathies became ever broader and deeper, and his expressive faculty kept pace with the larger demands that were made upon it. From the exuberant journalist who gave us entertainment in his earlier days he developed into something like a sage to whom we came to look no less for counsel than for amusement. We learned to detect in his homely speech the movings of a fine spirit, instinct with the nobler promptings of democracy, hating shams and ostentatious vulgarity, gentle and gracious in its quieter moods, but fanned to burning indignation when facing some monstrous wickedness, such as the corruption of our political life, or the dastardly act of the American soldier in the Philippines who betrayed his rescuer and shamelessly boasted of the shameful deed, or the infamy of the royal libertine who distilled a fortune from the blood of the miserable natives of the Congo. Even more than by his strictly literary work, he earned our gratitude for the brave words which he spoke upon such themes as these, words that cleared the moral atmosphere and made us see things in the light of naked truth.

  Nor should we, in our tribute to the man, forget the silent heroism with which he endured loss of fortune in his advancing years, and shouldered the burden of a debt incurred by the rascality of his associates, a debt for which he was only indirectly responsible, and which he might have evaded without serious impairment of his reputation. The strenuous labors of the years of lecturing and writing which enabled him to discharge in full the shadowy obligations which he then assumed took their toll of his vitality, but won for him an esteem higher than is ever the reward of the artist alone. This action ranks with the similar examples set by Scott and Curtis; it is one of those shining deeds that reveal the man himself, in contradistinction to the works by which most men of creative genius are contented to be known.

  The attitude of criticism toward Mark Twain as a writer has undergone a slow but complete change during the past thirty years. From being thought of simply as a "funny man," of the kin of Josh Billings and Artemus Ward, he has gradually come to be recognized as one of our foremost men of letters. This is a profoundly significant transformation of opinion, and to account for it fully would require a more careful analysis than we here have space to undertake. The recognition has been unduly delayed, partly because so much of his output has been utterly unworthy of his best self, and partly because his work in its totality is of so nondescript a character. The conventional way to distinction in literature is by the fourfold path of the poem, the play, the novel, and the essay. Occasionally, also, an historian compels literary recognition. But Mark Twain was neither a poet nor a playwright nor an historian. he was hardly a novelist, either, for his share in "The Gilded Age" does not seriously count, and his work in the form of fiction is not remarkable as story-telling pure and simple. If we are to group him at all, it must be with the essayists, using that term elastically enough to include with him our own Irving, and such Englishmen as Swift and Carlyle. We must either do this, of fall back upon the sui generis solution of the problem. Again, if we make a subdivision of the essayist class for the humorists alone, we encounter the difficulty offered by our obstinate association of that term with mere fun-making and the appeal to the lighter interests of human nature. Obviously, our subdivision must take yet another step, and admit that, on the one hand, there are humorists who make us laugh and have hardly any other influence over us, and humorists who are also creative artists, and critics of life in the deeper sense, and social philosophers whose judgments are of weight and import. If we are to classify Mark Twain at all, it must be with the latter distinguished company; and his title to kinship with the three English writers above mentioned, and even with such alien prototypes as Aristophanes and Rabelais and Cervantes, is at least not scornfully to be put aside.

  * * *

  The Death of Mark Twain

  From Chautauquan, 59

  June, 1910

  [Anonymous]

  Samuel L. Clemens died on April 21 alter a brief illness at the age of seventy-four. A great career, characteristically American, was then closed. Literature, humor, humanitarianism, intellectual and moral progress suffered a severe loss.

  Many glowing tributes have been paid to Mark Twain since his death by men and women of distinction, both of Europe and America. It is a source of satisfaction to know that in his rather sad old age, a period of personal bereavement and loneliness, Mark Twain knew that he had the affection, gratitude, admiration of legions of readers, young and old. He had been signally honored by Oxford and English literary and educated bodies; he had won ample recognition not as a "mere humorist" but as one of the most original and gifted men of letters of America.

  Mark Twain's humor, rich and delicious as it was, was always fundamentally serious. It was the humor of a deep thinker, a gentle but penetrating observer, a philosopher who loved mankind while seeing all its weaknesses. Mark Twain was racy, playful, whimsical, extravagant; but he was never guilty of deliberate coarseness, and as President Taft has remarked, "he never wrote a line that a father could not read to a daughter." And this in spite of the fact that he wrote much about rough men, hard and primitive conditions, pioneering, the taming of nature and the lower elements in man. He was breezy, vital, candid, colloquial, "western;" but the civilization, ideas and manners he expressed and expounded were essentially sound. Geniality, charity, unselfishness, informed and inspired every utterance.

  Mark Twain wrote in several styles and contributed to several forms of literature. He is best known, perhaps, for his earliest works, "Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "Huckleberry Finn," "Jumping Frog," etc., and certainly his studies of bay nature are wonderfully acute and entertaining. But he wrote excellent history, biography, criticism, disguised philosophy. "Is Shakespeare Dead?" the latest work, dealt with the controversy over the authorship of the plays attributed to "the immortal bard," and was keen and suggestive, if not original or scholarly. "Joan of Arc" and "Christian Science" were notable books of their respective kinds. It was impossible for Mark Twain not to be humorous, stimulating, inimitable, but in his most exuberant and irrepressible moments of mirth-making he was no boisterous jester.

  The cause of political morality, freedom, human equality, honest government, democracy had in him a staunch and courageous defender. He took a deep interest in the social and industrial reforms of the day, and supported children's theaters, social settlements and similar welfare work. He was an enemy of snobbery, solemn pedantry, cant and corruption in public and commercial life. His death removed a salutary, beneficent force, a rare, if not unique, personality.

  * * *

  Serious Humorists

  Note

  [The Nation published two obituary notices, six weeks apart. The second may have been intended as a kind of corrective of the first -- at least, in the first Stuart Sherman writes that Innocents Abroad seems to be "of appalling seriousness," while in the second Simeon Stransky says that he won't "attempt to classify the writer" who could offer such an assessment.]

  MARK TWAIN

  From Nation, 90

  May 12, 1910

  [Stuart P. Sherman]

  I.

  No American writer has ever enjoyed a more purely democratic reputation than Mark Twain. From village celebrity to international renown, he has been advanced stage after stage by popular suffrage. The plain, unbookish burgess holding both his sides at a public lecture has helped roar him into eminence. The freckled, brown-legged pirate who finds Tom Sawyer nearer to his business and his bosom than Robinson Crusoe has played no negligible part in the campaign. The vote of a retired merchant reading "A Tramp Abroad" in preparation for a European holiday told decisively in his favor before the tardy voice of the professional critic assented. Whe
n an overwhelming majority of his fellow countrymen had established his position, the universities recognized the fact, so that one day not long ago, he strolled into the Sheldonian Theatre, clad in scarlet, and, after a "very satisfactory hurrah" from the audience, was created doctor of letters by the University of Oxford.

  During the last few years of his life, he attained a still higher honor. It is to be hoped that no one will attempt to distinguish the customary "three periods" of his development, because, contrary to custom, he was essentially the same in all parts of his career. One may distinguish, however, three aspects of his reputation. Like a political orator making his maiden speech or invading hostile territory, he broke through the reserve of his audience with a string of irresistible stories. Handicapped by uproarious laughter, he produced two or three pieces of fiction which demanded serious attention; but his leonine head had grown gray before he lived down his reputation as a "platform humorist." At his seventieth birthday he obtained a reconsideration of his case, and the highest tribunals decided that he indubitably belonged in the history of literature, if, indeed, he was not "the foremost American man of letters." After that, national feeling about him crystallized rapidly. He appeared in white flannels in midwinter, declaring that white was the only wear for a man with seventy years behind him; we were significantly pleased. After our newspapers had made one of their little breaks, he sent word to us that reports of his death were "greatly exaggerated." It was a phrase that we all envied, from the President down; we saw that he was not mere literary man -- he was a public man. When he died, we abandoned the last reservation. We said with one voice: He was an American.

  To the foreign critic this ultimate tribute may seem perplexingly cheap and anticlimactic. That is, of course, due to the mistaken notion that we number some four score millions of Americans. As a matter of fact, we number our Americans on our ten fingers; the rest of us are merely citizens of the United States. Any one who will take a little pains with the alphabet may become a citizen; to become an American demands other talents. We are more than doubtful about Washington. Lowell said that Lincoln was the first American, but he forgot about Franklin. There have been one or two since Lincoln's time. From certain indications, it looks as if Mr. Roosevelt might turn out to be an American. Only the other day he sent us a message to this effect: "I know that the American people will agree that I could have acted in no other way than I did act." The American is a man of destiny. His word and deed flow inevitably out of the American character. On the one hand, he does a thing because it is right; on the other hand, the thing is right because he does it. Revising the thought of Henry V, we may say, Nice customs curtsy to great Americans.

  II.

  The point is strikingly illustrated by a story which Mark Twain tells on himself in one of the chapters of his autobiography. It was in 1877, before a company including all the leading geniuses of New England, banqueting in honor of Whittier's birthday. When Mark Twain's turn came, he rose and entered upon a fictitious "reminiscence." Out in southern California he had knocked at a miner's cabin and announced himself as a literary man. The miner replied with marked ill-humor that he had just got rid of three of them, "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes -- consound the lot. . . . Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red headed; Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon; he weighed as much as three hundred, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prizefighter. . . . They had been drinking, I could see that." And so on.

  At the words "consound the lot," Twain had expected a peal of laughter, but to his amazement "the expression of interest in the faces turned to a sort of black frost." The whole story was a dismal failure; it was years before the author recovered from the shame of it. Speaking as a mere reader of Lamb, Jane Austen, Thackeray, O.W. Holmes, I am not in the least surprised at the New England frost. I know very well that Congreve or Addison or George Meredith would have agreed with the New England geniuses that Mark Twain's reminiscence was a piece of crude, heavy, intellectual horse-play -- an impudent affront offered to Puritan aristocracy by a rough-handed plebian jester from Missouri. But hear Mark Twain thirty years later:

  I have read it twice, and unless I am an idiot, it hasn't a single defect in it from the first word to the last. It is just as good as can be. It is smart; it is saturated with humor. There isn't a suggestion of coarseness or vulgarity in it anywhere. What could have been the matter with that house? . . . If I had those beloved and revered old literary immortals back here . . . I would melt them till they'd run all over that stage!

  In his mellow Indian summer Mark Twain himself grew conscious that he had become an American. He knew, therefore, that the speech was right, because he had made it. I confess to a doubt whether those "old literary immortals" would laugh at it even now; if they would not, as a countryman of Lincoln I should be ashamed of them. The man who cannot laugh with Twain must be either better or worse than the "overwhelming majority" of his fellow-citizens. To accept him is almost equivalent to accepting the American flag. When once you have sworn allegiance, you may find fault with both for the rest of your life without impeachment of your patriotism. "I paint myriads of heads," cried Walt Whitman, "but I paint no head without its nimbus of gold-colored light." He was prophesying the golden mean, which he called the "divine average," and which he knew was actually rarer than either extreme. He was prophesying Mark Twain. "Who are you, indeed," he exclaims, "who would talk or sing in America?" The antiphonal voice replies:

  I swear I will have each quality of my race in myself,

  Talk as you like, he only suits These States whose manners favor the audacity and sublime turbulence of The States.

  III.

  Humor, it is agreed, consists in contrasts and incongruities, and the essence of Mark Twain's most characteristic humor consists in contrasting this typical, nimbused American, compacted of golden mediocrities, against the world -- consists in showing the incongruity of the rest of the world with this nimbused American. It necessarily follows that the heights and depths of humor are beyond the reaches of Mark Twain's soul. It necessarily follows that his laughter is burly, not fine; broad, nor profound; national, not universal. When he that sitteth in the heavens laughs, he is not constrasting the year 1910 with the year 1300, nor the President of the United States with Louis XVI, nor the uncrowned sovereigns of Missouri with the serfs of Russia, Germany, or England. The comparison is intolerable -- let us mark a lowlier difference. When Puck, in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," looking out upon the bewildered lovers exclaims, "Lord, what fools these mortals be"; when Titania, waking from magical sleep, murmurs drowsily, "Methought I was enamoured of an ass" -- the mirth of these subtle creatures is kindled by the contrast between sentimental and bottom humanity, respectively, and the exquisite manners and passions of elfland. If Twain had written the play, he would have put Puck into overalls and Titania into a hoop-skirt. For he ignored the ethereal hunger which troubled the creator of Falstaff, and never entered into the secret laughter of the idealist. Let us descend once more. It is said that the last book Mark Twain read was Carlyle's "French Revolution." I suppose he loved it incidentally for its picturesque and savage energy, but mainly because it proclaims that a man's a man for all that. He shows traces both of its style and of its central thought in his own work. But so far as I know, he never shows a trace of its heart-searching irony, of that universal world-humor which arises when the upstart, red-blooded pageant of time's latest hour is confronted with the grim, dim phantasms of eternity --

  Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded, only fable expecting that he will waken. Charles the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships, but have sailed off on a longer voyage. The hair of Tow-head (Tete d'etoupes) now needs no combing; Iron-cutter (Taillefer) cannot cut a cobweb; shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda, have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silen
t, their hot life-frenzy cooled. . . . They are all gone; sunk -- down, down with the tumult they made; and the rolling and trampling of ever new generations passed over them; and they hear it not anymore forever.

  Carlyle makes ducks and drakes of Charlemagne and shrill Fredegonda, but he laughs with a by-gone eternity. When Whitman asks that stupendous question, "Whom have you slaughtered lately, European headsman?" millions of strange shadows tend on him. He, too, is a humorist, and a grave one. He makes ducks and drakes of the "old literary immortals," for he laughs with an eternity to come. Mark Twain cannot be persuaded that we are such stuff as dreams are made of; looking neither before nor after, he laughs with the present hour; and he cannot stand the comparison.