I have always felt that the most lasting influence of his life—the influence which has left the most pervasive impression upon his art and thought—is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage in which he portrays the marvellous spell laid upon him by that mistress of his youth, the great river.
To the young pilot, the face of the water in time became a wonderful book. For the uninitiated traveller it was a dead language, but to the young pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came to feel that there had never been so wonderful a book written by man. To its haunting beauty, its enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly—drinking it in like one bewitched. But a day came when he began to cease from noting its marvels. Another day came when he ceased altogether to note them.
In time, he came to realize that, for him, the romance and the beauty were gone forever from the river. If the early rapture was gone, in its place was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy. He had learned the ultimate secrets of the river—learned them with a knowledge, so searching and so profound, that he was enabled to give them the enduring investiture of art.
Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence. He was a master of the art of moving, touching, swaying an audience. At times, his insight into the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and of pathos seemed almost like divination. All these qualities appeared in full flower in the written expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice to his memory to deny that his style did not possess literary distinction or elegance. At times his judgment was at fault; his constitutional humour came near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not seldom he was long—winded and laborious in his striving after comic effect. To offset these manifest lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities—descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud less beauty, dramatic scenes depicted with virile and rugged eloquence, pathetic incidents touched with gentle and caressing tenderness.
Style bears translation ill; in fact, translation is not infrequently impossible. But Mr. Clemens once pointed out to me that humour has nothing to do with style. Mark Twain's humour—for humour is his prevalent mood—has international range since, constructed out of a deep comprehension of human nature and a profound sympathy for human relationship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the difficulties of translation into alien tongues.
Mark Twain became a great international figure, not because he was an American, paradoxical and unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he was America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true cosmopolitan in the Higginsonian sense, in that, unlike Mr. Henry James, he was “at home even in his own country.” He was a true cosmopolitan in the Tolstoyan sense; for his was “art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world—the art of common life—the art of a people—universal art.” His spirit grasped the true ideal of our time and reflected it.
Mr. Clemens attributed his international success not to qualities of style, not to allegiance to any distinctive school, not to any overtopping eminence of intellect. “Many so-called American humorists,” he once remarked to me, “have been betrayed by their preoccupation with the local. Their work never crossed frontiers because they failed to impart to their humour that universal element which appeals to all races of men. Realism is nothing more than close observation. But observation will never give you the inside of the thing. The life, the genius, the soul of a people are realized only through years of absorption.” Mr. Clemens asseverated that the only way to be a great American humorist was to be a great human humorist—to discover in Americans those permanent and universal traits common to all nationalities. In his commentary upon Bourget's 'Outre Mer', he declared that there wasn't a single human characteristic that could safely be labelled “American”—not a single human detail, inside or outside. Through years of automatic observation, Mark Twain learned to discover for America, to adapt his own phrase, those few human peculiarities that can be generalized and located here and there in the world and named by the name of the nation where they are found.
Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized with and found something to admire in the citizens of every nation, seeking beneath the surface veneer the universal traits of that nation's humanity. He expressly disclaimed in my presence any “attitude” toward the world, for the very simple reason that his relation toward all peoples had been one of effort at comprehension of their ideals, and identification with them in feeling. He disavowed any colour prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed prejudices—maintaining that he could stand any society. All that he cared to know was that a man was a human being—that was bad enough for him! It is a matter not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has made more damaging admissions concerning America than concerning any other nation. Lafcadio Hearn best succeeded in interpreting poetry to his Japanese students by freeing it from all artificial and local restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics which go straight to the heart and soul of man. His remarkable lecture on 'Naked Poetry' is the most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive mode of interpretation. In the same way, Mark Twain as humorist has sought the highest common factor of all nations. “My secret—if there is any secret—,” Mr. Clemens once said to me, “is to create humour independent of local conditions. In studying humanity as exhibited in the people and localities I best knew and understood, I have sought to winnow out the encumbrance of the local.” And he significantly added—musingly—“Humour, like morality, has its eternal verities.”
To the literature of the world, I venture to say, Mark Twain has contributed: his masterpiece, that provincial Odyssey of the Mississippi, 'Huckleberry Finn', a picaresque romance worthy to rank with the very best examples of picaresque fiction;
'Tom Sawyer', only little inferior to its pendent story, which might well be regarded as the supreme American morality—play of youth, 'Everyboy'; 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg', an ironic fable of such originality and dexterous creation that it has no satisfactory parallel in literature; the first half of 'Life on the Mississippi' and all of 'Roughing It', for their reflections of the sociological phases of a civilization now vanished forever. It is gratifying to Americans to recognize in Mark Twain the incarnation of democratic America. It is gratifying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and recapture the pleasure and delight his works have given them for decades. It is more gratifying still to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain, America has contributed to the world a genius sealed of the tribe of Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of Fielding, of Defoe—a man who will be remembered, as Mr. Howells has said, “with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his equal in humanity.”