A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
abuse me because I am a little prejudiced against the old masters."
Here we have a note that was to become more and more emphatic in Mark Twain's work with every year he lived: his indignation at oppression and insincerity. The cathedrals of Italy lost their beauty for him when he saw the misery of the population. He stood before the Grand Duomo of Florence. "Like all other men I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said 'O sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?' Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that cathedral."
Everywhere he strikes out at sentimentality. When he learns how Abelard deliberately sacrificed Héloïse to his own selfish ideals, he bursts out: "The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my ignorance! I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled to any tearful attentions or not." He is eager to see a French "grissette," but having seen one, bursts out in true Artemus Ward fashion: "Aroint thee, wench! I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him. Thus topples to the earth another idol of my infancy." The story of Petrarch's love for Laura only fills him with pity for the outrageously treated "Mr. Laura," the unknown husband of the heroine, who bore the burden but got none of the glory, and when they tell the thrilling legend of the old medieval castle, he makes only the comment, "Splendid legend—splendid lie—drive on!"
It was a blow at the whole school of American travel writers; it marked the passing of an era. Bret Harte in the first volume of the Overland Monthly (1868), was the first to outline the Western standpoint:
The days of sentimental journeyings are over. The dear old book of travel … is a thing of the past. Sentimental musings on foreign scenes are just now restricted to the private diaries of young and impressible ladies and clergymen with affections of the bronchial tubes. … A race of good humored, engaging iconoclasts seem to have precipitated themselves upon the old altars of mankind, and like their predecessors of the eighth century, have paid particular attention to the holy church. Mr. Howells has slashed one or two sacred pictorial canvases with his polished rapier; Mr. Swift has made one or two neat long shots with a rifled Parrott, and Mr. Mark Twain has used brickbats on stained glass windows with damaging effect. And those gentlemen have certainly brought down a heap of rubbish.[34]
It was the voice of the new West and of the new era. With The Innocents Abroad begins the new period in American literature. The book is full of the new after-the-war Americanism that did its own thinking, that saw with its own eyes, that put a halo upon nothing save genuineness and substantial worth. It must not be forgotten that America even in the new seventies was still mawkish with sentimentality. The very year The Innocents Abroad appeared, Gates Ajar sold twenty editions. Mark Twain came into the age like the Goths into Rome. Stand on the solid earth, he cried. Look with your own eyes. Worship nothing but truth and genuineness. Europe is no better than America. Como is beautiful, but it is not so beautiful as Tahoe. Why this eternal glorification of things simply and solely because it is the conventional thing to glorify them? "The critic," he wrote in later years to Andrew Lang, "has actually imposed upon the world the superstition that a painting by Raphael is more valuable to the civilizations of the earth than is a chromo; and the august opera more than the hurdy gurdy and the villagers' singing society; and the Latin classics than Kipling's far-reaching bugle note; and Jonathan Edwards than the Salvation Army."[35] The new American democracy was speaking. To the man who for four years had learned in the school of Horace Bixby there was no high and no low save as measured, not by appearances or by tradition, but by intrinsic worth.
IV
It has been customary in libraries to place the earlier works of Mark Twain on the same shelf as those of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings. To the thousands who laughed at him as he lectured from year to year he was a mere maker of fun. The public that bought such enormous editions of The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It bought them as books to laugh over. What shall we say to-day of Mark Twain's humor? A generation has arisen to whom he is but a tradition and a set of books; what is the verdict of this generation?
First of all, it is necessary that we examine the man himself. Nature seems to have forced him into the ranks of the comedians. From his mother he inherited a drawl that was inexpressibly funny; he had a laughable personality, and a laughable angle from which he looked at life. He could no more help provoking mirth than he could help being himself. Moreover, he had been thrown during his formative years into a veritable training school for humorists. On the river and in the mines and the raw towns and cities of the West, he had lived in a gale of high spirits, of loud laughter, of practical jokes, and droll stories that had gone the rough round of the boats or the camps. His humor, therefore, was an echo of the laughter of elemental men who have been flung into conditions full of incongruities and strange contrasts. It is the humor of exaggeration run wild, of youthful high spirits, of rough practical jokes, of understatement, of irreverence, and gross absurdity.
But the personality of Mark Twain no longer can give life to his humor; the atmosphere in which it first appeared has gone forever; the man himself is becoming a mere legend, shadowy and more and more distorted; his humor must be judged now like that of Cervantes and Shakespeare, apart from author and times. How does it stand the test? Not at all well. There are the high spirits of the new West in it—that element has not evaporated—and there is in it a personal touch, a drollery that was his individual contribution to humor. There was a certain drawl in his pen as well as in his tongue. It is this alone that saves much of his humorous work from flatness. Concerning The Jumping Frog, for instance, Haweis asks in true British way, "What, I should like to know, is the fun of saying that a frog who has been caused to swallow a quantity of shot cannot jump so high as he could before?" The answer is that there is no fun save in the way the story is told; in other words, save in the incomparable drawl of Mark Twain's pen. One can only illustrate:
The feller … give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, "Well, I don't see no pints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."
"May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand frogs, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may be you ain't, only a amature, as it were. Any ways I've got my opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that he can out-jump any frog in Calaveras county."
And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you!"
Or take this episode from The Innocents Abroad where he tells of his sensations one night as a boy upon awakening and finding the body of a murdered man on the floor of his room:
I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of a hurry, but I simply went—that is sufficient. I went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it. I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.
All this and the hundreds of pages like it in The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It and the later books is excellent drollery, but had Mark Twain written nothing else than this he would be as dead now as an author as even "Doesticks." His drollery is best in the work that lies nearest to the source of his first inspiration. As the Western days faded from his memory, his comedy became more and more forced, until it could reach at last the inane flatness of Adam's Diary and flatter still, Eve's Diary.
The humor that lives, however, is not drollery; it must be embodied in a humorous character like Falstaff, for instance, or Don Quixote. The most of Mark Twain's fun comes from exaggerated situations with no attempt at characterization, and therein lies his weakness as a humorist. Huckleberry Finn and Colonel Sellers come the nearest to being humorous creations, but Huckleberry Finn is but a bit of genre,