Not without wide significance in its bearing upon the general outlines of contemporary literature is the circumstance that Mark Twain served his apprenticeship to letters in the high school of journalism. Like his contemporaries, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free play for his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of the journal for the masses. Brilliant as he was, Artemus Ward seemed most effective only when he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque mouthpiece of his own invention. Bret Harte sacrificed more and more of the native flavour of his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the more sophisticated refinements of the purely literary. Mark Twain never lost the ruddy glow of his first inspiration, and his style, to the very end, remained as it began—journalistic, untamed, primitive.
Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who like Mark Twain have achieved comprehensive international reputations, have succeeded in preserving the early vigour and telling directness acquired in journalistic apprenticeship. It was by the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his journalese that Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start. That trenchant and forthright style which imparts such an air of heightened verisimilitude to his plays, Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new journalism. “The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are 'not for an age, but for all time,'” says Bernard Shaw, “has his reward in being unreadable in all ages; whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of many thousands of academic, punctilious, most archaeologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the ephemeral.” Mark Twain began his career by studying the people and period he knew in relation to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic, uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and gulch start to life and live again in the pages of his books. Colonel Sellers, in the main correct but “stretched a little” here and there; Tom Sawyer, the “magerful” hero of boyhood; the shrewd and kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from his own mother; Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the gentle heart—these and many another were drawn from the very life. In writing of his time a propo of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the truth about humanity in general and for any time.
In the main—though there are noteworthy exceptions—Mark Twain's works originated fundamentally in the facts of his own life. He is a master humorist—which is only another way of saying that he is a master psychologist with the added gift of humour—because he looked upon himself always as a complete and well-rounded repository of universally human characteristics. Humanus sum; et nil humanum mihi alienum est—this might well have served for his motto. It was his conviction that the American possessed no unique and peculiar human characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the world. In the same way, he regarded himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human characteristics differentiating him from the rest of the human race. Like Omar he might have said “I myself am Heaven and Hell”——for within himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or lower power, every feature, trait, instinct, characteristic of which a human being is capable. The last half century of his life, as he himself said in his Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully devoted to the study of the human race. His knowledge came from minute self-examination—for he regarded himself as the entire human race compacted together. It was by concentrating his attention upon himself, by recognizing in himself the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded in producing works of such pure naturalness and utter verity. A humour which is at bottom good humour is always contagious; but there is a deeper and more universal appeal which springs from genial and unaffected representation of the human species, of the universal 'Genus Homo'.
It has been said, by foreign critics, that the intellectual life of America in general takes its cue from the day, whilst the intellectual life of Europe derives from history. If American literature be really “Journalism under exceptionally favourable conditions,” as defined by the Danish critic, Johannes V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical product of American literature. A certain modicum of truth may rest in this startling and seemingly uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted liberally, it may be taken to mean that America finds her key to the future in the immediate vital present, rather than in a remote and hazy past. Mark Twain was a great creative genius because he saw himself, and so saw human nature, in the strong, searching light of the living present. He is the greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of the ranks of American journalism. Crude, rudimentary and boisterous as his early writing was, at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon its face the fresh stamp of contemporary actuality.
To the American of to-day, it is not a little exasperating to be placidly assured by our British critics that America is sublimely unconscious that her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is less arresting than the asseveration that America is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony in this commiseration with us, on the part of our British critics, for our failure joyously to realize our old age, which they would have us believe is a sort of premature senescence and decay. The New World is pitied for her failure to know without illusion the futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth, of the passion for extravagant opulence and inordinate display, of all the hostages youth in America eternally gives to old age. “America has produced great artists,” admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet he maintains that “that fact most certainly proves that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all things. Whatever the American men of genius are, they are not young gods making a young world. Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy and headlong? Does Mr. Henry James infect us with the spirit of a schoolboy? . . . Out of America has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable as the cry of a dying man.” This sweet and startling cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that Mr. Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous paradox, the two American geniuses who have lived outside their own country, absorbed the art ideals of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and lost touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost barbaric violence, the ongoing rush and progress of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr. James has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable of amusing only very primitive persons; and Whistler, with his acid diablerie, was wholly alien in spirit to the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That other brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American life, Mr. Charles Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter is—Mark Twain!
To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost and exclusively, the humorist—with his shrieking Philistinism, his dominant sense for the colossally incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering, ludicrous contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twain subsumed within himself a “certain surcharge and overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a sense of conquest” which typified the youth of America. It is memorable that he breathed in his youth the bracing air of the prairie, shared the collective ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of Western adventure, and expressed the crude and manly energy of navigation, exploration, and the daring hazard for new fortune. To those who knew him in personal intimacy, the quality that was outstanding, omnipresent and eternally ineradicable from his nature was—paradoxical as it may sound—not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other terms that might be associated with his name, but—the spirit of eternal youth. It is comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright nickname—“Youth.” Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller of tales, pungent as stylist. But he has achieved another sort of eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans. “They distinguish in his writings,” says an acute French critic, “exalted and sublimated by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, of force and of faith; they love his philosophy, at once practical and high—minded. They are fond of his simple style, animated with verve and spice, thanks to which his work is accessible to every class of readers. They think he describes his contemporaries with such an art of distinguishing their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France for Balzac.”
Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that humour is a subject which has never had much interest for him, it is nothing more than a commonplace to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist only, that the world seems to persist in regarding him. The philosophy of his early life was what George Meredith has aptly termed the “philosophy of the Broad Grin.” Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once said that “American humour, neither unfathomably absurd like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination. It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.” This partial and somewhat conventional foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the cumulative and “sky-breaking” humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax too extreme.
The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature. In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic and sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence. What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in the life of Angel's Camp. It was Mark Twain who “created” the story: he endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization of une chose vue, which went round the world. The humour of rustic shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in 'The Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the early journalistic days in San Francisco. In 'The Golden Era' an excellent example is found in the following observations upon a celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San Francisco:
“Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No, sir. The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet. Them scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them days—by a d—-d sight.”
That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just proportion of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the cannibals consume their food—if only some lady would lend him a live baby. There is the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious anecdote of Higgins.