They are not artistic books. The author had little skill in construction. He excelled in brilliant dashes, not in long-continued effort. He was his own Colonel Sellers, restless, idealistic, Quixotic. What he did he did with his whole soul without restraint or sense of proportion. There is in all he wrote a lack of refinement, kept at a minimum, to be sure, by his wife, who for years was his editor and severest critic, but likely at any moment to crop out. His books, all of them, are monotones, a running series of episodes and descriptions all of the same value, never reaching dramatic climax. The episodes themselves, however, are told with graphic intensity; some of them are gems well-nigh perfect. Here is a picture of the famous pony express of the Plains:
The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness—just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could hardly get the ghost of a look.
We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that had passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and we would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims:
"Here he comes!"
Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling—sweeping toward us nearer and nearer—growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined—nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm.
The steamboat race and the explosion in chapter four of The Gilded Age have few equals in any language for mere picturing power. He deals largely with the out-of-doors. His canvases are bounded only by the horizon: the Mississippi, the great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Mono Lake, the Alkali Deserts, and the Sierras—he has handled a continent. Only Joaquin Miller and John Muir have used canvases as vast. Huckleberry Finn's floating journey down the river on his raft has in it something of the spirit of The Odyssey and Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote. Had Mark Twain's constructive skill and his ability to trace the growth of a human soul been equal to his picturing power, his Defoe-like command of detail and situation, and his mastery of phrase and of narrative, he might have said the last word in American fiction. He was a product of his section and of his education. College and university would have made of him an artist like Holmes, brilliant, refined, and messageless. It would have robbed him of the very fountain-head of his power. It was his to work not from books but from life itself, to teach truth and genuineness of life, to turn the eyes of America from the romance of Europe to her own romantic past.
VI
If Artemus Ward is Touchstone, Mark Twain is Lear's Fool. He was a knightly soul, sensitive and serious, a nineteenth-century knight errant who would protect the weak of the whole world and right their wrongs. The genuineness and honesty that had been ground into his soul on the river and in the mines where a man was a man only when he could show true manliness, were a part of his knightly equipment. When financial disaster came to him, as it had come to Scott, through no fault of his own, he refused to repudiate the debt as he might have done with no discredit to himself, and, though old age was upon him, he set out to earn by his own efforts the whole enormous amount. And he discharged the debt to the full. He had, moreover, the true knight's soul of romance. The Morte d'Arthur and the chronicles of Joan of Arc, his favorite reading, contained the atmosphere that he loved. He fain would have given his generation "pure literature," but they bade him back to his cap and bells. Richardson, as late as 1886, classed him with the purveyors of "rude and clownish merriment" and advised him to "make hay while the sun shines."[36]
So he jested and capered while his heart was heavy with personal sorrows that came thick upon him as the years went by, and with the baseness and weakness and misery of humanity as the spectacle passed under his keen observation. Yet in it all he was true to himself. That sentence in the preface tells the whole story: "I have written at least honestly." His own generation bought his books for the fun in them; their children are finding now that their fathers bought not, as they supposed, clownish ephemeræ, but true literature, the classics of the period.
And yet—strange paradox!—it was the cap and bells that made Mark Twain and that hastened the coming of the new period in American literature. The cap and bells it was that made him known in every hamlet and in every household of America, north and south and east and west, and in all lands across all oceans. Only Cooper and Mrs. Stowe of all our American authors are known so widely. This popularity it was that gave wings to the first all-American literature and that inspired a new school of American writers. After Mark Twain American literature was no longer confined to Boston and its environs; it was as wide as the continent itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mark Twain. (1835–1910.) The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, 1867; The Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner), 1873; Old Times on the Mississippi (Atlantic Monthly), 1875; Tom Sawyer, 1876; Life on the Mississippi, in book form, 1882; Huckleberry Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889; Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896; Following the Equator, 1897; Christian Science, 1907; Writings of Mark Twain, 25 vols., 1910; My Mark Twain, by W. D. Howells, 1911; Mark Twain, a Biography, by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1912.