Delphi complete works of.., p.626
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 626
More than this, Mark Twain was born a little prolix, or at least never had a chance to say all he wanted to. This prolixity grew upon him, and in his old age, with the license of a crowned sovereign, it became appalling. So it comes that the younger people, reading the wrong things of Mark Twain, very often “don’t care for him” or at times “can’t stand for him.” But Mark Twain’s real books, namely Tom Sawyer, Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur s Court, and, above all, Huckleberry Finn, are among the world’s great books; are as much a part of our literary heritage from the past as Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Let those who think otherwise think otherwise.
Yet even here Mark Twain’s work suffers a detraction from the fact that much of the mere technique of it — the formed methods of being funny — have since become common property. Like Josh Billings’ Answers to Correspondents and Artemus Ward’s bad spelling they seem hopelessly stale, whereas in their time they were as fresh as the colors of the morning.
* * * * *
Mark Twain was born as Samuel Clemens in Missouri, 1835, and spent his childhood in the river town of Hannibal in the old days of slavery and national expansion, with the Mississippi steamboat as the symbol of its rising splendor, and with the hidden frontier and the vast illimitable West as the background. Mark Twain was as restless in his youth as he was in his old age. He left home to work as a journeyman printer in the cities of “the East,” and drifted back to the Mississippi to become a river pilot. The Civil War closed the great river, and Mark Twain, like Othello, found his occupation gone. He went west across the plains, on a stagecoach, as the unpaid secretary of his brother Orion Clemens, who had become the slightly paid secretary of the new Territory of Nevada.
There Mark Twain came into his own. A failure as an official and as a miner, he turned into a Western local journalist, and there, in exactly the right soil at exactly the right season, his genius flourished like a tree. What he wrote, the basis on which it rested, all depended on one thing: to see things as they are and have the art of language to say what they are. It would be a paradox to say that anything sufficiently truthful is funny. But there is a great deal in the thought just the same. Our world gets so overgrown with conventional points of view, with accepted interpretations, with standardized judgments, that it is necessary every now and then for someone with the original innocence of genius to challenge and reexamine our canons of art and our code of admiration.
Mark Twain looked across at Europe with the eye of innocence from the altitude of the Nevada mountains and saw it in a new light.
The travel trip to write up Europe on the Quaker City in 1867, that rewarded Mark Twain’s efforts as a journalist of the West and a discoverer of the Sandwich Islands, gave to the world The Innocents Abroad. Its immediate and spectacular success on both sides of the Atlantic transplanted its author to an editorial chair in Buffalo, 1870 (an uncongenial seat), and then to a chair at large at Hartford, Connecticut. Henceforth his life was spent in lectures, journeys, periodic trips to Europe — everywhere in a thick haze of cigar smoke. In him was already stored up the material for a lifetime of writing. He didn’t need “the East.” That supplied only an audience and the applause. To write, he half closed his eyes in the tobacco smoke and called up the vision of the Mississippi and the plains and the mountains. This gave the world Roughing It (1872) and presently Tom Sawyer (1875), a sort of autobiography that led him unconsciously to the larger and loftier picture of Huckleberry Finn. With these were the European books, The Tramp Abroad (1880) and the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889). This last book was a denunciation of aristocracy, privilege, medievalism and clericalism — all supposed by Mark Twain to be as alive and as wicked as ever. Mark Twain was elemental in his judgments, incapable of relativity in his thinking; he started with a fierce passion for righteousness, a hatred of tyranny, and fitted his history to match it. To him every king called Louis was a tyrant, every noble a dungeon keeper, every monk a bigot and every bishop a torturer. The Connecticut Yankee aroused a passing bitterness in England, but fortunately most people read it for the sheer fun of it without bothering to come to the rescue of the Middle Ages. Huckleberry Finn is far and away Mark Twain’s best book. It seems, so to speak, to have written itself. He threw the manuscript aside and left it, like a deserted child, to be salvaged later. But it is a great book. It elevates humor to that high reach, beyond the comic and the accidental, in which our human lot itself invites at once our tears and our smiles. After Huck Finn, the outcast, came Joan of Arc (1896), the petted child of an author’s vanity. In Mark Twain’s old age came a work of necessity (Following the Equator): an account of his round-the-world lecture trip made to lift the debt piled up by business incompetence and overfaith in inventions and patents. The debt cleared, Mark Twain for the last ten years of his life sat on a golden throne as a crowned King of Humor. But it was no better than such thrones are. Around it was an altered world, a bereft home, behind it the call of distant memories in the sunset from the West, and beyond it — nothing.
Chapter Eleven . SELECTIONS FROM MARK TWAIN
FROM THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
IN THIS CONNECTION I wish to say one word about Michael Angelo Buonarotti. I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo — that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture — great in everything he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast — for luncheon — for dinner — for tea — for supper — for between meals. I like a change occasionally. In Genoa he designed everything; in Milan he or his pupils designed everything; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo? In Florence he painted everything, designed everything nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favourite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed everything but the old shot-tower, and they would have attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular. He designed the piers of Leghorn and the custom-house regulations of Civita Vecchia. But here — here it is frightful. He designed St. Peter’s; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope’s soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Capital, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima — the eternal bore designed the Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted everything in it! Dan said the other day to the guide, “Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!”
I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday, when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.
But we have taken it out of this guide. He has marched us through miles of pictures and sculpture in the vast corridors of the Vatican; and through miles of pictures and sculpture in twenty other places; he has shown us the great pictures in the Sistine Chapel, and frescoes enough to fresco the heavens — pretty much all done by Michael Angelo. So with him we have played that game which has vanquished so many guides for us — imbecility and idiotic questions. These creatures never suspect; they have no idea of a sarcasm.
He shows us a figure, and says: “Statoo Brunzo.” (Bronze statue.)
We look at it indifferently, and the doctor asks: “By Michael Angelo?”
“No — not know who.”
Then he shows us the ancient Roman Forum. The doctor asks: “Michael Angelo?”
A stare from the guide. “No — thousan’ year before he is born.”
Then an Egyptian obelisk. Again: “Michael Angelo?”
“Oh, mon Dieu, genteelmen! Zis is two thousan’ year before he is born!”
He grows so tired of the unceasing question sometimes, that he dreads to show us anything at all. The wretch has tried all the ways he can think of to make us comprehend that Michael Angelo is only responsible for the creation of a part of the world, but somehow he has not succeeded yet. Relief for overtasked eyes and brain from study and sight-seeing is necessary, or we shall become idiotic sure enough. Therefore this guide must continue to suffer. If he does not enjoy it, so much the worse for him. We do.
In this place I may as well jot down a chapter concerning those necessary nuisances, European guides. Many a man has wished in his heart he could do without his guide; but, knowing he could not, has wished he could get some amusement out of him as a remuneration for the affliction of his society. We accomplished this latter matter, and if our experience can be made useful to others they are welcome to it.
Guides know about enough English to tangle everything up so that a man can make neither head nor tail of it. They know their story by heart — the history of every statue, painting, cathedral, or other wonder they show you. They know it and tell it as a parrot would — and if you interrupt, and throw them off the track, they have to go back and begin over again. All their lives long they are employed in showing strange things to foreigners and listening to their bursts of admiration. It is human nature to take delight in exciting admiration. It is what prompts thildren to say “smart” things, and do absurd ones, and in other ways “show off” when company is present. It is what makes gossips turn out in rain and storm to go and be the first to tell a startling bit of news. Think, then, what a passion it becomes with a guide, whose privilege is every day to show to strangers wonders that throw them into perfect ecstasies of admiration! He gets so that he could not by any possibility live in a soberer atmosphere. After we discovered this, we never went into ecstasies any more — we never admired anything — we never showed any but impassible faces and stupid indifference in the presence of the sublimest wonders a guide had to display. We had found their weak point. We have made good use of it ever since. We have made some of those people savage at times, but we have never lost our own serenity.
The doctor asks the questions generally, because he can keep his countenance, and look more like an inspired idiot, and throw more imbecility into the tone of his voice than any man that lives. It comes natural to him.
The guides in Genoa are delighted to secure an American party, because Americans so much wonder, and deal so much in sentiment and emotion before any relic of Columbus. Our guide there fidgeted about as if he had swallowed a spring mattress. He was full of animation — full of impatience. He said —
“Come wis me, gentlemen! — come! I show you ze letter writing by Christopher Colombo! — write it himself! — write it wis his own hand! — come!”
He took us to the municipal palace. After much impressive fumbling of keys and opening of locks, the stained and aged document was spread before us. The guide’s eyes sparkled. He danced about us and tapped the parchment with his finger.
“What I tell you, genteelmen! Is it not so? See! handwriting Christopher Colombo! — write it himself!”
We looked indifferent — unconcerned. The doctor examined the document very deliberately, during a painful pause. — Then he said, without any show of interest— “Ah — Ferguson — what — what did you say was the name of the party who wrote this?”
“Christopher Colombo! ze great Christopher Colombo!” Another deliberate examination.
“Ah — did he write it himself, or — or how?”
“He write it himself! — Christopher Colombo, he’s own handwriting, write by himself!”
Then the doctor laid the document down and said— “Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that.”
“But zis is ze great Christo—”
“I don’t care who it is! It’s the worst writing I ever saw. Now you mustn’t think you can impose on us because we are strangers. We are not fools, by a good deal. If you have got any specimens of penmanship of real merit, trot them out! — and if you haven’t, drive on!”
We drove on. The guide was considerably shaken up, but he made one more venture. He had something which he thought would overcome us. He said —
“Ah, genteelmen, you come wis me! I show you beautiful, oh magnificent bust Christopher Colombo! — splendid, grand, magnificent!”
He brought us before the beautiful bust — for it was beautiful — and sprang back and struck an attitude.
“Ah, look, genteelmen! — beautiful, grand, — bust Christopher Colombo! — beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!” The doctor put on his eyeglass — procured for such occasions.
“Ah — what did you say this gentleman’s name was?”
“Christopher Colombo! — ze great Christopher Colombo!”
“Christopher Colombo — the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?”
“Discover America! — discover America. Oh, ze devil!”
“Discover America. No — that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo — pleasant name — is — is he dead?”
“Oh, corpo di Baccho! — three hundred year!”
“What did he die of?”
“I do not know! — I cannot tell.”
“Small-pox, think?”
“I do not know, genteelmen! — I do not know what he die of!”
“Measles, likely?”
“Maybe — maybe — I do not know — I think he die of somethings.”
“Parents living?”
“Im-posseeble!”
“Ah — which is the bust, and which is the pedestal?”
“Santa Maria! — zis ze bust! — zis ze pedestal!”
“Ah, I see, I see — happy combination — very happy combination, indeed. Is — is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust?”
That joke was lost on the foreigner — guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.
We have made it interesting to this Roman guide. Yesterday we spent three or four hours in the Vatican, again, that wonderful world of curiosities. We came very near expressing interest, sometimes — even admiration — it was very hard to keep from it. We succeeded though.
Nobody else ever did in the Vatican museums. The guide was bewildered — non-plussed. He walked his legs off nearly, hunting up extraordinary things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us but it was a failure; we never showed any interest in anything. He had reserved what he considered to be his greatest wonder till the last — a royal Egyptian mummy, the best preserved in the world perhaps. He took us there. He felt so sure this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to him —
“See, genteelmen! — Mummy! Mummy!”
The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever. “Ah — Ferguson — what did I understand you to say the gentleman’s name was?”
“Name? — he got no name! — Mummy!— ‘Gyptian mummy!”
“Yes, yes. Born here?”
“No!’Gyptian mummy!”
“Ah, just so. Frenchman, I presume?”
“No! — not Frenchman, not Roman! — born in Egypta!”
“Born in Egypta. Never heard of Egypta before. Foreign locality, likely. Mummy — mummy. How calm he is — how self-possessed. Is, ah — is he dead?”
“Oh, sacré bleu, been dead three thousan’ year!”
The doctor turned on him savagely —
“Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this! Playing us for Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn! Trying to impose your vile second-hand carcases on us! — thunder and lightning, I’ve a notion to — to — if you’ve got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out! — or by George we’ll brain you!”
We make it exceedingly interesting for this Frenchman. However, he has paid us back, partly, without knowing it. He came to the hotel this morning to ask if we were up, and he endeavoured as well as he could to describe us, so that the landlord would know which persons he meant. He finished with the casual remark that we were lunatics. The observation was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very good thing for a guide to say.
There is one remark (already mentioned), which never has failed to disgust these guides. We use it always, when we can think of nothing else to say. After they have exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out to us and praising the beauties of some ancient bronze image or broken-legged statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five, ten, fifteen minutes — as long as we can hold out, in fact — and then ask —
