Delphi complete works of.., p.565
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 565
Following that came a trip to Bermuda with Twitchell largely done incognito, Mark now falling back on a privilege confined to royalty and the criminal class.
All the next summer (1877) he was busy with the idea of a story in which a little child of the people changes places with a king’s son — but the story had to wait three years for its completion as The Prince and the Pauper. There was another idea of the same period which he started and threw aside as of no great value — a sort of wandering tale about Huckleberry Finn, who had already appeared as the satellite of Tom Sawyer. This, the greatest idea that he ever had, Mark Twain seems to have valued little. ‘I like it only tolerably well,’ he said, ‘and I may burn the manuscript when it is done.’ For years the ‘Huck’ book lay around as neglected as Huck himself. But let the curious compare the author’s fulsome praise of his Joan of Arc.
But Huckleberry Finn and much else had to wait while Mark Twain and his family sailed away on a sort of grand tour of Europe. They left in April of 1878, visited Germany, passed down to Italy, where they visited in especial Venice and Florence and Rome; then back to Germany to winter in Munich; then came Paris, England (in August of 1879), and home to America (September 3, 1879). It was in the earlier part of the tour that Mark Twain took his walking tour in Germany and Switzerland with Twitchell, immortalized as A Tramp Abroad, in which Twitchell is cast for the part of ‘Harris.’ It goes without saying that the book is not as good as the Innocents. No one can be born twice. But the book is the real thing, and parts of it are inimitable: the vividness of the word-pictures, the tourists, the waiters, the Alpine climbing, the incidents of history, the excursions into facts and, above all, the play of an interesting mind that illuminates everything that it touches. Mark Twain could do this kind of thing as no one else.
Here begins also his inexhaustible interest in the German language, a source of mingled wonder, fascination and annoyance. The family set themselves to learn German. Having had no schooling, linguistic study was a novelty to Mark Twain. He could take as much fun out of the interminable German nouns and the inverted sentences as a schoolboy out of a parody of Latin. Later on, in his King Arthur book, when he wants words to use as magic spells he finds them in such glorious compounds as Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackmachersgesellschaft, a much more imposing compound than the humble English — Bagpipe Manufacturers Company of Constantinople.
It would be as tedious as it would be purposeless to follow all the comings and doings of Mark Twain and his family in the years that followed their return from Europe. Among the more notable peregrinations was a trip to the Mississippi, down the river from St. Louis to New Orleans and up again to St. Paul. Mark renewed his experiences as a pilot, fraternized again with Horace Bixby, dropped in at Hannibal for three days to see the boys and girls — in short, the return of the hero, enjoyed as much as it was earned.
The trip helped him to prepare, from his Atlantic articles, his work Life on the Mississippi — his pilot life already recounted — which appeared in 1883. It was published partly at his own expense and risk — the beginning of the new finance that was to ruin him. But he had got into his head that the previous publishers had been cheating him — like the Alta thieves and the copyright pirates. As literature, the book ranks high; as a commercial venture, low. ‘It cost me fifty thousand dollars to make,’ so its author said. He was dealing in big sums now.
Other episodes of the period were Mark Twain’s brief pilgrimages to Canada. They were made to ‘acquire copyright,’ a sort of purification necessary under the existing law, but they turned into social and public triumphs. There was a great dinner at Montreal (1880), and on the next trip (1883) an invitation to stay at Rideau Hall, Ottawa, where resided the Marquis of Lorne and his wife, the Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria. Mr. Paine, the biographer, writes of this: ‘It is a good deal like a fairy tale . . . the bare-footed boy of Hannibal who had become a printer, a pilot, a rough-handed miner, being summoned by royalty as one of America’s foremost men of letters.’
It takes an American democrat to see these things in their proper light.
Meantime The Prince and the Pauper had already appeared (1880), meeting with a reception in which approval mingled with disappointment. It is told that a certain great classical scholar of the eighteenth century said to Alexander Pope, when his Iliad and Odyssey appeared, ‘It’s a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but it is not Homer.’ Many readers felt this way about The Prince and the Pauper; it was a very pretty story, but it wasn’t Mark Twain; at least not the Mark Twain who made frogs jump and conducted innocents abroad. In other words, it wasn’t funny (except in lapses). Its author could have answered the indictment by saying that it wasn’t meant to be, and could have drawn attention to the beauty of description of old London and its bridges.
Human nature being as discontented as it is, ‘funny’ writers are never content with their cap and bells. They would like to write sermons. From this time on Mark Twain showed a desire to redeem himself from the charge of being ‘funny.’ As a result we have The Prince and the Pauper and, later on, Joan of Arc, which — whatever they may be — are not Mark Twain. There are books that he wrote in which he tried to be Mark Twain and failed; such as Tom Sawyer Abroad or Pudd’nhead Wilson, a Mississippi story of 1892, at best an attempt to recapture a tune also sung. But in the historical books he is trying to do something else altogether.
For serious historical writing he was not fitted. His view of the present is like a photograph; his view of the past is made of fierce lights and shadows thrown by firelight on a dark wall. His history is too elemental: for King read tyrant; for priest read bigot; for justice read torture; and for anything called Louis read putrefaction. Mark Twain was too much impressed by the cruelty, the bigotry and the tyranny of the past to see it in its true light. Strange that a man writing in the days of the Homestead strikes and the Haymarket riots, with hideous lynchings in the South, murder walking the streets in Chicago, and on the horizon the tyranny of the prohibitionist, the gangster, the hi-jacker and the racketeer, could see so little to regret in the vanished past.
But when Mark Twain turned from the Thames of 1550 to the Mississippi of 1850, that was another story. The appearance in print of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn marks the highest reach of his achievement.
All the world has read the story of the ragged little outcast, Huckleberry Finn, floating down the Mississippi on a raft, his companion the runaway Nigger Jim. Every reader has felt the wonderful charm of the scenery and setting — the broad flood of the river, the islands tangled with wild vines, the sand-bars and the current swirling past the sunken snags: the stillness of the night with voices coming from the lumber rafts far over the water: the fascination of the passing steamboat, its lighted windows and its trail sparks breaking the black night; and then the dawn and the sun clearing the mist from the waters.
The writer seems to have groped his way into the book like a treasure-seeker. It opens to a wrong start — Tom Sawyer and his boy-chums and pirate games — that would never have gone far. Then it drifts to Huck Finn and his drunken, dissolute, unkempt father, ‘pap’ (‘His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines’); Huck a prisoner in a hut in the hands of the drunkard; his escape; the raft; the finding of Nigger Jim, and with that we float away on the bosom of the river. There are tragic episodes of the river, the feud, the murder, the false claim of the inheritance, the bag of money in the coffin. The story pushes hard against burlesque here and there, as when the raft is invaded by the down-and-out bummers, the ‘King’ and the ‘Duke.’ Artistically it almost breaks here — yet oddly enough this is the very part that readers who care nothing for art like best — the sheer roaring fun of it. The Duke getting ready a performance to be given in passing a town and furbishing up his recollections of Shakespeare in the form of— ‘To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin,’ is as typically and triumphantly Mark Twain as anything he ever wrote.
In the end the raft floats to Arkansas; Huck is cast up at Silas Phelps’s farm and Tom Sawyer gets back into the book — and spoils it. As soon as he comes all the depth of meaning, all the breadth of the picture is lost. It is just backyard stuff — the kind of thing they make ‘comic strips’ of.
But the bulk of the book is marvellous. The vision of American institutions — above all, of slavery — as seen through the unsullied mind of little Huck; the pathos and charm of the Negro race shining through the soul of Nigger Jim — the western scene, the frontier people — it is the epic of a vanished America.
Strange that anyone could imagine that such a book as Joan of Arc — conventional, imitative, unnatural — could compare with this. Yet Mark Twain supposed it far superior, and the pundits and stodges, belly-heavy with culture, all agreed. Yet there are those, there must be, who considered the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the greatest book ever written in America.
An outstanding feature of the book is that it is American literature. Whatever the works of Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper and Longfellow were, there is no doubt about Huckleberry Finn. Every now and then the dispute breaks out in the colleges and spills over into the press as to what American literature was and is, and when it began. Like all controversies, the dispute is bottomless and involves a hopeless number of definitions of terms. But by American literature in the proper sense we ought to mean literature written in an American way, with an American turn of language and an American cast of thought. The test is that it couldn’t have been written anywhere else. When we read the books of O. Henry we know that they were not written in England; they couldn’t have been. Longfellow may have written about America, but the form of his language and his thought was the same as that of his English contemporaries. He shared in their heritage, and added to the common stock. Judged in this sense — in order to make the point clear and rob it of all venom — there is as yet no Canadian literature, though many books have been written in Canada, including some very bad ones.
But Huckleberry Finn was triumphantly obvious and undeniably American.
But the writing of books and of incidental sketches for the Atlantic, and presently for the Century, Harper’s, and other magazines, was only the chief part and by no means the whole of Mark Twain’s activity during these busy years. There were dinners and banquets and reunions to attend, with speeches to make. There was, alas, an increasing interest in the business of publishing. His earlier books were published by canvass and subscription, with a royalty to the author, who took no risk. The cost of sale under this system is high, the royalty low (five to seven per cent was fair enough), but Mark Twain felt that he could improve on this. He first took half the risk and half the profits, then presently launched into the publishing business itself. It seems that many authors feel a desire to be publishers, just as an English butler wants to run a public house and an American bar-tender aspires — or used to, when he existed — to ‘keep hotel.’ The results are usually unfortunate. So it was to be in this instance. But for the time all was optimism and rosy calculation worthy of Colonel Sellers.
Another feature of this period was lecturing, including a notable tour in the season of 1884-1885 managed by the admirable Major J. B. Pond, of worthy and illustrious memory, and carried out with George W. Cable as partner on the platform.
The lectures were a huge success for all except Mark Twain, to whom they were a mere labour of necessity.
The truth is that Mark Twain never liked lecturing. Indeed, apart from the initial joys of triumph, he grew to abominate it. Nearly all lecturers hate lecturing, whether from nervousness of appearing in public, on account of need of working up a fixed emotion at a fixed hour, or because of the fatigues of travel or the effort demanded by social entertainment. No one likes lecturing except those who can’t do it. A dull lecturer enjoys his own performance immensely.
Mark Twain hated lecturing for all the above reasons — even nervousness, in the sense of nervous intensity. And he added a special reason of his own, that he felt as if lecturing to make people laugh turned him into a buffoon. This, of course, was sheer ingratitude. But he wanted to be a man of letters, a philosopher, a character — he didn’t want to be a comic man. ‘Oh, Cable!’ he moaned to his lecture-mate one night, ‘I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It’s ghastly. I can’t endure it any longer.’ No doubt he was contrasting himself with the solemn little Cable, who didn’t smoke, drank water, read the Bible in the hotel bedroom, and drew tears from the audience.
In other words, Mark Twain wanted it both ways, coming and going. He wanted to have the world laugh when he said the ‘reports of his death had been grossly exaggerated,’ he wanted to write a comic account of Noah’s Ark and a comic life of Adam, he wanted to set King Arthur’s knights to playing baseball — but he didn’t want to take the consequences and have people think him ‘funny’; or rather, he wanted them to understand that he was also — as he was — a man of intense and passionate ideals, capable of righteous indignation against iniquity. About this the mass of the public cared nothing at all. Mark Twain to them was Mark Twain. That was all. When he said that he was a Chinese ‘Boxer’ — meaning that the Chinese nationalists were right — they laughed. ‘Have you heard Mark Twain’s latest?’ they said.
Even more successful than his public lectures, if that were possible, were Mark Twain’s after-dinner speeches. Here, of course, he was entirely himself. Here he could exploit to the full the natural drollery of his speech, the peculiar drawl, the assumption of innocence — all those arts and artifices which swept his auditors away on billows of tumultuous laughter. After-dinner speaking in those unredeemed days was an easier art in America than now. Indeed, the contrast of those days with the gloomy ‘banquet’ of to-day is pathetic. To-day the auditors sit in silence, their surreptitious cocktail, of three hours before, dead within them, chewing fiercely at celery and listening to an hour’s talk on such a thing as the Chicago Drainage Canal. But in those evil days a banquet was a real banquet. The audience came from the bar to the banquet, and gravitated from the banquet to the bar. Swimming in champagne in a haze of blue smoke they wanted fun, not information. And Mark Twain could give it to them as no one else could.
These years were the great years of Mark Twain’s public lecturing, in which he easily eclipsed all those who preceded and followed him. The only exception was Charles Dickens, whose crowded houses and breathless audiences at least equalled those of the great American humorist. But Dickens was different; his towering fame was the background; he ‘read,’ not lectured, though with intense dramatic effect and magnetic personal contact. What the audience saw was not Dickens but his characters — the death-bed of the dying child, the fury of the murderer Sykes, and the Homeric court-room of Bardell versus Pickwick. What Mark Twain’s audience saw was Mark Twain; what the audience heard was Mark Twain — not Tom Sawyer, nor Huck Finn, but Mark Twain. His thought and feeling, by the magic of his method, carried across.
Which was the higher art and which the lower, it is needless to enquire.
Many of the dinner speeches, such as that at the great Army dinner at Chicago (1879), became historic. For the rest of their lives those present recalled and magnified the wonder of Mark Twain. Once, once only, the magic failed utterly and dismally. One may recall, as an irony of personal history, Mark Twain’s greatest after-dinner success (done with a third-rate joke at the end of a speech of no merit), and his great and ignominious failure with a prepared speech that was as funny as it was subtle, accidentally derailed in transit. The great success was the dinner given in honour of General Grant by the Army of the Tennessee at Chicago on November 13, 1879. Grant was there, and Sherman and Sheridan and a galaxy of great soldiers. Colonel Robert Ingersoll carried the audience away in a real speech of patriotic oratory; and there was the usual tiresome speaker (still unhanged among us) who began for a minute and spoke for an hour. Mark Twain rose at 2 a.m. to talk not on the Ladies, as invited, but on the Babies. ‘We haven’t all the good fortune to be ladies,’ he said in opening, ‘we haven’t all been generals or poets or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies — we stand on common ground.’ We are told that the speaker ‘had to stop to let the tornado roar of laughter go by.’ The concluding paragraph of the speech is the most quoted part of all Mark Twain’s oratory. It runs:
‘And now in his cradle somewhere under the flag the future illustrious commander-in-chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeur and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind at this moment to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth, an achievement to which (meaning no disrespect) the illustrious guest of the evening also turned his attention some fifty-six years ago — —’
Here Mark Twain paused. What followed is thus related by his incomparable biographer Mr. Paine:
‘The vast crowd had a chill of fear. After all, he seemed likely to overdo it, to spoil it with a cheap joke at the end. He waited long enough to let the silence become absolute, until the tension was painful, and then . . . “and if the child is but the father of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”
‘The house came down with a crash.’
Now let us admit that a joke cannot be fully appreciated without the voice, the mood, the occasion; let us admit also that it is historically interesting to think of such a distinguished audience swept away on a gale of laughter. But after all, what does the joke amount to? Nothing much, and they had to wait for it. But the reader may judge for himself.
