Twain, Mark: Selected Obituaries Read online

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  Pawtucket Obituary Notice

  "MARK TWAIN."

  From The (Pawtucket, R.I.) Evening Times

  23 April 1910

  [Anonymous]

  There is scarcely in this wide land a person of any acquaintance with contemporaneous literature who does not mourn sincerely the passing of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known more frequently by his pen name of "Mark Twain." Among his admirers, also, we may freely reckon those who do not ordinarily read much and may never have enjoyed a book or story by this gifted author. Mark Twain had become in his later years a national character, famed for his broad philosophy, his interviews on public questions and his great kindness of heart and his sweetness of disposition. His frequently expressed his humorous and apt opinions at a time when humor and liberality were needed, so that his outpourings acted upon the troubled public temper much as oil upon the raging waters. He could at times be terribly severe, as in his strictures upon Leopold and the Congo maladministration, but his customary view of life and its incidents was tolerant, though often whimsical. The subtle sense of humor and its companion justice never departed from him.

  Mr. Clemens was first of all a jester, just as some writers are satirists and others have gifts of poetic expression. He belonged to a school which developed a dozen or so of notable associates half a century ago. In pure genius as a humorist of the American type Mark Twain was little if any inferior to Artemus Ward, who was the father of them all. He had the same gift of seeing unerringly beneath the surface, of saying the totally unperceived, of adducing grotesque similarities and associations, and the same splendid humanness and optimism. His humor was not entirely "funny," it was not wit in the common sense, but was the produce of a mind working along unconventional and unique lines in delightful and refreshing ways. His point of view was ever surprising, but not the less readily grasped and after a little experience "reading Mark Twain" was as easy and restful as listening to the strains of a sweet and simple melody. We all remember how all the world burst into a simultaneous laugh when it learned that Clemens had shed pious tears at the grave of his ancestor Adam and when it read how he expressed ignorance of that celebrity to the guide who showed him the relics of Columbus. The western miner "Scott's" interview with the minister whose services were desired at a funeral was as rich and mirth-provoking as Artemus Ward's brief encounter with a maiden lady whom he disturbed when he went up onto his rooftop with a gun to celebrate the arrival of a new member in his family.

  In his more mature years, however, Mr. Clemens made frequent incursions into soberer literature, or fiction, and here such troubles as he ever had with the critics began. It has always seemed to us that some of these gentry were influenced by resentment because a humorist had dared to attempt novelism. His most famous work, "Pudd'nhead Wilson," "A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court," "Joan of Arc," "The Gilded Age," which he wrote in connection with Charles Dudley Warner, and several other pretentious compositions certainly to our mind entitle him to a real place in English literature. His humorous instinct often forced him from more magnificent construction, but not always, and in his really serious moments he showed another side to his literary powers that will be recognized when his detractor's lips are shut.

  Mr. Clemens was an usually [gentle?] and companionable man. He was an inveterate hater of fraud and hypocrisy, as his writings in and out of season testified. His private integrity, as in the case of Sir Walter Scott, impelled him in his old age to return to the lecture platform that he might repay a heavy obligation incurred by the collapse of a publishing venture in which he was interested. He made restitution to the last penny, although his health even then had begun to fail. It is particularly saddening in reflecting upon the life and character of this fine American to recall the poignant sorrows which fell to his lot in his latter years and probably shortened his days. But these he bore with a patient resignation that endeared him further to his fellow men.

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  Bookman Obituary Notice

  Mark Twain -- An Appreciation

  From Bookman

  June 1910

  By Henry Alden

  When it is a matter not of chance but of choice, it is interesting to note what book a great writer turns to in his last hours -- what Eminence of that vast company to which he belongs he, about to die, salutes.

  Tennyson breathed his last with Shakespeare's Cymbeline in his hand, open at the place of that spritely dirge beginning with the stanza:

  Fear not thou the heat o' the sun,

  Nor the furious winter's rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Homer hast gone and ta'en they wages.

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney sweeps, come to dust.

  It was this, we feel sure, rather than the drama itself, which especially engaged his dying eyes -- this lyric, with its strangely playful solemnity and with a touch of quaintness that he, the Master of lyrics, had somehow missed and therefore wistfully regarded, accepting its novel illumination of his final vision. The lighter play of fancy commends itself to the old in their waning days, however seriously they may have taken themselves at their full strength; it gives vivacity and grace, even gaiety, to the lengthening shadows. Isaac, the name Sara gave the child of her barren years, means laughter.

  Now Mark Twain, for forty years, personally and in letters, the chief provoker of the world's laughter, when he was about to die, turned to Carlyle's French Revolution, not by way of reaction, but straightforwardly following the course of a passion that had ruled his life. He loved to regard men and women in the open, in action prompted by strong impulses. The characters which most strongly appealed to him were developed in this large atmosphere, and Carlyle was a master in the portrayal of such characters -- the inside as well as the outside of them. Doubtless, too, Mark admired the master's vivid and picturesque description and narration as well as the complexity of expression which was so foreign to his own.

  But my object in alluding to the books selected by authors for reading in their last hours is to call attention to another instance which seems very significant. All my mature readers will easily recall the stories written for boys and girls by Juliana Horatio Ewing, some thirty years ago, showing a rarely delicate sense of humour and pathos. This author, in the face of death, turned to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn for delight and satisfaction. That is enough, it seems to me, to define Mark Twain's place in our modern humanism. The spiritual kinship which determined this selection is an infallible test, in the case of such a woman and at such a time, as to certain essential quality in this man's work that is of everlasting value. Huckleberry Finn appealed to Mrs. Ewing's sensibility as Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi would have done, because it was a creative illumination of frank, genuine, red-blooded boyhood. It was a quality as native as Nature, spontaneous, expansive, with Nature's excesses; but it was humanly embodied, mightily self-conscious, imperatively demanding attention, after the haughty manner of buoyant youth. We are reminded of Rabelais's Gargantua entering Paris for his university course, on a mare as big as six elephants, the whisking of whose tail laid low a whole forest.

  The effectiveness of this quality of Mark Twain's imagination does not always depend upon external grandeurs and striking surprises. He wrote out of a living experience -- that of a boyhood nourished in open spaces and stimulated by rough adventure, and of a manhood which, in all its contacts and world-wide wanderings, kept alive that boyhood. But he had also mental adventure, not subtly or complexly, yet widely, speculative.

  There was the same directness and openness here as in his regard of external things. He relished the autobiography of men who, like Benvenuto Cellini and Montaigne, frankly and boldly disclosed their most intimate dispositions and tempers, and he undertook one himself on so expansive a scheme that it could never have been completed, since the longer he lived the less were the chances of any conclusion of the ever-widening vista.

  The art wh
ich premeditatively determines the scope of its venture so that one sees at every step the curvature of its rounding up -- in a word the literary art -- was foreign to Mark Twain's nature. Some stories are self-limited and wind up themselves. Mark sometimes told such stories, but generally we note no conscious organisation of the material he has in hand, no literary method. Whatever art of expression was developed in his maturer work was an art which Nature made, not the result of syntatic discipline. In his Joan of Arc -- the ripest fruit of his genius -- the historic sequence gave him a constructive plan not apparent in work of his that was wholly inventive. He could not have written a play depending wholly upon invention, meeting the requirements of the art, to save his life, but he would have contributed to one made by an expert playwright out of his material just those features which would be indispensable to a great popular success.

  He always wanted room -- the whole open sky -- for his action. The requirement of literary and of the specially dramatic art, as generally understood, because of the concentration demanded, imposed a constraint he could not tolerate. But he was master of the eccentric drama, with limitless expansion and projection

  In his early career he drove hard and with Icarian boldness. So gigantic were some of his practical journalistic jokes when he was connected with the Virginia City Enterprise that he fled temporarily from the scene of his exploits to escape their reaction upon himself. There was much in his Innocents Abroad which appealed to only crude taste; but the book promised richer vintages of humour, and it won for him a world-wide popularity, which stimulated him to greater earnestness in a more natural use of experiences which were real, with however much of grotesquery and extravagance he invested them. It may seem strange to use such a word as "earnestness" in connection with a humorist's writings, as it would not be in the case of Charles Lamb. Mark Twain was not a humorist in the sense that Lamb was -- the two were at antipodes. Mark inherited from nobody, but, if not as purposeful, he was as masterful as Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift were. He was not learned or literary as those men, and had not their kind of conscious purpose, but there was a strain of earnestness in all his work -- a Western strain. Walt Whitman got one year's big whiff of the West and it transformed him, made him vastly panoramic and megaphonic. Mark Twain, like Lincoln, was a native of the West, and, like him, though in so different a vein, was gigantically in earnest. What stern stuff was in him was shown in the wreck of his personal fortunes, like that shown in Lincoln when the fortunes of the nation were at stake.

  Lincoln passed away before Mark Twain became famous. He found his greatest relaxation and relief from the stress of grave responsibilities during the war in the writings of professional humourists like Artemus Ward and Petroleum Nasby. Did he miss something in not having Mark Twain's humour? For the purposes served by those other writers, possibly not. Mark, with all his drollery, might have borne down too heavily upon him at such a time, however much he might have enjoyed him at another. The two men had too much in common, in their natural mood and strain.

  If in the main course of his writings -- those which have had the widest appreciation -- he so far retained boyhood himself, and embodied it in his characters, regardless of age or sex, for Colonel Sellers was a boy in one way and Joan of Arc in another -- yet his was not a case of arrested development. He did a man's work manfully. The mature attitude toward life became apparent in his own maturity -- a deepened spiritual sensibility; and a considerable proportion of his work is the outcome of this riper growth.

  In his maturer work, Mark Twain showed a finer and gentler touch, grotesquery yielding to grace. This was apparent in his personality as well as in his work. Misfortune, though repaired, did its work in him.

  His griefs, which were irreparable, subdued his spirit. His loneliness after the death of his wife was inconsolable, but the absent sweetness dwelt in his nature to the end. What the loneliness meant for him I could see, on a well-remembered occasion, when, at a luncheon given to a friend and his wife on their departure for Europe, Mark "toasted" them, expressing the hope that if either should be drowned in shipwreck that fate might be shared by the other!

  It is not likely that the future estimate of Mark Twain's work will very greatly differ from that put upon it now by his most thoughtful readers, the products of his maturer genius -- I do not thereby mean his latest, but those in which his earnestness counts most for human meaning and value -- may come to have their just place in the general popular esteem.

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  The Public Obituary Notice

  From The Public

  29 April 1910

  [Anonymous]

  More than one popular jester has gained his reputation and been forgotten since Mark Twain's humor caught the public fancy and made the man famous. But his popularity has continued and will doubtless long survive his death. The reason for this cannot be found in any superior wit of his humor. Some humorists who were contemporaries of his but whose fame has long since perished, were perhaps more witty than he. It may be found, however, in the serious purposes that stirred his thought and vitalized so much of what he wrote. Mark Twain was witty, but he was more than a wit. He jested, but he was not a clown. His humor was funny, but if the fun of the comedian was in it so also was the humor of a sympathetic and earnest social philosopher. This was the touch that has raised Mark Twain's writings far above the joke books, and kept his fame fresh through several generations of readers. His writings have the democratic ring-the ring of the democracy of the Golden Rule. Read "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn," and you find democracy rooted in the shrewd thought and harum-scarum experiences of natural-minded boys in the presence of the conventional un-democracy of grown men. Read "The Yankee at King Arthur's Court" or "The Prince and the Pauper," and in democracy's struggle there with the rude selfishness and ignorance of a buried past, you find caricatures of the refined ignorance and polished selfishness with which democracy struggles now. The death of this man at his age calls for no tears of grief. He passes out of life normally, after doing a life's work so well that it will be a wholesome influence with many a generation to come.

  The democracy of Mark Twain was of the kind for which The Public stands. Like his sister who went before him, and like her distinguished son, the late Samuel E. Moffett (both of whom were devoted to the truth that Henry George taught), Mr. Clemens found for his democracy a lodgment in that gospel. One of the testimonials to its work which the Public cherishes is a letter from him in which he declares his faith. "The Ethics of Democracy," a unified collection of Public editorials had been sent to Mr. Clemens because it contained quotations from his pen, and in acknowledgment he wrote from Florence:

  Villa di Quarto, Firenze, Jan. 7, 1904

  Dear Mr. Post:

  I thank you very much for this book, which I prize for its lucidity, its sanity and its moderation, and because I believe its gospel.

  Very truly yours,

  S. L. CLEMENS

  "Because I believe its gospel." To all others who believe the same gospel we are confident that this assurance of Mark Twain's sympathy will add to their appreciation of the democracy strain that runs through nearly all his writings.

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  The Literary Digest Obituary Notice

  MARK TWAIN

  From The Literary Digest

  30 April 1910

  Anonymous

  The tributes called forth by Mark Twain's death show him to have been regarded not only as an American of the Americans, but as one of the foremost citizens of the world. "With the exception of Tolstoy," says The Morning Leader (London), "probably there is no writer whose death would rouse more universal emotions of respect and regret." Mr. Hamlin Garland is reported through the press as saying that he was "as distinctly American as Walt Whitman." "The work of most writers could be produced in any country," he adds, "but I think we, as well as everybody in foreign lands, will look upon Twain's work as being as closely related to this county as the Mississippi River itself."

  I
ndeed, the Mississippi seems somehow to symbolize him and he it. A dispatch from Paris voices one of the most poignant expressions of personal loss among the many that now fill the papers. Mr. C. B. M. Farthing, friend and schoolmate of Mark Twain, and the original Huckleberry Finn, said when told of his loss:

  "The old days are passing. The men who made them are gone, and even the long sweep of the majestic yellow river seems to have dwindled and lessened. The noise of its traffic, the music of its many deep-throated voices are practically no more. The man who caught them and froze them into human words for the delight of the world is dead."

  One of those upon whom the mantle of humor which we call "American" has fallen, George Ade says:

  "I read every line Twain wrote, for he was a kind of literary god to me. His influence has already worked itself into the literature of our day. We owe much of our cheerfulness, simplicity, and hope to him. Most of all, Twain grew old beautifully, showing his simple, childlike faith for ultimate success throughout all his adversities."

  Among the tributes of personal affection that of President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton, is especially appealing:

  "All the world knows that in Mark Twain it has lost a delightful humorist, a man able to interpret human life with a flavor all his own; but only those who had the privilege of knowing him personally can feel the loss to the full-the loss of a man of high and lovely character, a friend quick to excite and give affection; a citizen of the world, who loved every wholesome adventure of the mind or heart; an American who spoke much of the spirit of America in speaking his native thoughts."

  "He was one of the most ethical of humorist," says The Daily News (London), to which The Daily Chronicle (London) adds: "His aspect of things is in reality serious and his judgment often peculiarly wise." It is further noted that he had "the ironic gift of puzzling people and leaving them divided between seriousness and laughter." The Daily Express (London) thinks "Huckleberry Finn" his best work.