A History of American Literature

Traubel, H. L. With Walt Whitman in Camden, p. 473. 1906. (This is Vol. I of Traubel’s diary notes made during Whitman’s life. Vol. II, 1908; Vol. III, 1914. Vol. IV is announced for early publication, and the whole work, when completed, will fill eight or ten volumes.)

Walling, W. E. Whitman and Traubel. 1916.

TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

Select and discuss poems and stanzas in Whitman which are written in conventional rhythms.

Select and discuss passages in which he employs changing rhythms adjusted to the persons or objects in hand.

Study Whitman’s diction with reference to his use of the average man’s speech and to his occasional use of foreign words, corrupted words (whether foreign or English), and coined words.

List and discuss poems which are clearly autobiographical. Does this list include any personal lyrics?

List and discuss poems written in the first person but intended as poems of “the divine average.”

Select and discuss poems and passages on the theme of companionship.

Select and discuss poems and passages which express his sense of universal law.

Read his longer poems for passages on the subject of the state, the rulers, and public opinion.

Read and discuss his utterances on poetry and the poet, noting especially “The Song of the Banner at Daybreak” and “As I sat by Blue Ontario’s Shore.”

Read and discuss Whitman’s utterances on war and nationalism.

Read for an estimate of his feeling for the beauties of nature.

CHAPTER XXV

THE WEST AND MARK TWAIN

There is a valid parallel between the beginnings of American literature and the early stages of its development in the West, for in both instances it followed on the wave of pioneer settlement. The earliest writers came from the East and were only temporary sojourners in the new country, Bret Harte and Mark Twain corresponding in different degrees to colonists like John Smith and Nathaniel Ward. A more permanent allegiance developed in a second group who lived out their lives in the land of their adoption, such, for example, as Joaquin Miller and Increase Mather. And the final stage is fulfilled by those whose whole lives belonged to the maturing frontier, like most of the second generation. The parallel exists too in the fact that the early authors wrote usually with one eye on the older community, eager for approval and half resentful of criticism – an attitude of West toward East which still survives in the timider element along the chain from London to New York to Chicago to San Francisco to Honolulu. The obvious contrasts between the motives for settlement, the character of the settlers, and the nature of their writings only serve to emphasize the underlying similarities. Manners change, but human nature changes so much more slowly that it seems almost a constant.

Bret Harte (1839–1902) is the outstanding writer who lived for a while in the far West, turned it to literary account, failed in any deep sense either to sympathize with its spirit or to represent it, and left it permanently and with apparent relief. He was an Eastern town-bred boy of cultured parentage who aspired to become a poet. At eighteen he went to California where, before he was twenty-one, he saw life as tutor, express messenger, typesetter, teacher, and drug clerk. During half of the next fourteen years in San Francisco he was secretary of the California mint, and during all of them he was primarily interested in authorship. He wrote for periodicals East and West and had a manuscript accepted by the Atlantic as early as 1863. With the founding of the Overland Monthly in 1868 he became editor, and with the publication of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in the second number he jumped into fabulous popularity. In 1871 he went to New York, and in 1878 he went abroad, where he lived till his death in complete estrangement from all his old associates. These latter facts deserve mention only as they stress the lightness of his contact with the West. He found fresh material there which he used with great narrative adroitness, contributing definitely to the progress of short-story technique. But his tales are deftly melodramatic, built on a sort of paradox formula, and greatly indebted in detail and mannerisms to the example of Charles Dickens. Harte was beyond any question a good craftsman; his wares would still find a ready magazine market, for they would be modern in execution, but there is no soul in what he wrote. He was a reporter with a gift for rapid-moving, close-knit narrative. He was greatly interested in facts, but very little concerned with the truth. He wrote some clever stories, but he seems like a trinket shop at the foot of Pike’s Peak as Mark Twain looms above him.

The life of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) probably touches American life at more points than that of any other author. The first half has been very definitely written into his books, and the whole has been told with his help in one of the best of American biographies.34 It involves indirectly his Virginia parentage and the pioneer experiences of his father and mother in the Tennessee mountains; his own residence in the Mississippi valley and on both seacoasts; his activities as printer, river-pilot, journalist, lecturer, and publisher; his friendships with all sorts and conditions of men from California miners to the crowned heads of Europe; the joys and sorrows of a beautiful family life; the making and losing of several fortunes; and an old age crowded with honors and popularity, yet overshadowed by a tragic cloud of doubts and griefs.

His parents, who had been dissatisfied with their attempted settlement in a Tennessee mountain town, left it in 1835 with four children for Florida, Missouri, allured to the move by the optimism of a relative, as it worked on their own pioneer restlessness. The conditions they left are vividly described in the first eleven chapters of “The Gilded Age.” In a little town of twenty-one dwellings the boy was born in the autumn of 1835. When he was four years old the family moved to Hannibal, a river town. Sam Clemens was an irresponsible, dreamy, rather fragile child, a problem to parents and teachers and given to associating with the boys presented in “Tom Sawyer,” the most notable of whom was Tom Blankenship, the original of “Huckleberry Finn.” His father, consistently unsuccessful, was made justice of the peace and finally was elected clerk of the circuit court, only to die in 1847 from exposure in the campaign. For the next ten years young Clemens was engaged in the printing business, first under his brother Orion on a Hannibal journal (see “My First Literary Venture,” in “Sketches, New and Old,” pp. 110–114); then during fifteen months in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and next in Keokuk, Illinois, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Finally, in April, 1857, he began to “learn the river” from Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones. His experience on the river, the basis for “Life on the Mississippi,” was early marked by the tragic destruction of the Pennsylvania, on which his younger brother, Henry, suffered a fearful death, the first of the personal sorrows which were deeply scored into his life. His career as pilot was ended by the closing of river traffic in the spring of 1861, but it gave him, with many other bequests, his pen name, derived from one of the calls used in sounding the depth of the ever-shifting channel. Piloting during war times did not appeal to him. “I am not very anxious to get up into a glass perch and be shot at by either side. I’ll go home and reflect on the matter.” And after reflection he chose the better part of valor and stayed on land. In the next three months there followed his amusing adventures recorded in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (see “The American Claimant,” pp. 243–265); and in July, 1861, he went with his brother Orion to serve with J. W. Nye, territorial governor of Nevada. The life of the next months went into “Roughing It,” first at Carson City, then at Humboldt, until, in August, 1862, he began his journalistic work in California on The Virginia City Enterprise. At twenty-five he had secured his first view of the country from coast to coast and all down the central artery, he had been schooled in the exacting discipline of the printer’s trade (see pp. 47, 48) and in the still more rigorous responsibilities of river piloting, and he had begun to write for a living. Two more steps remained in the growth of his acquaintance with the external world, and these followed after five years of shifting fortunes on California newspapers. The first was his trip to Honolulu as correspondent for the Sacramento Union, on the new steamer Ajax, and the second, in 1867, was his trip to the Holy Land on the steamship Quaker City for the tour which was to be immortalized in “Innocents Abroad,” first as a series of newspaper letters and then in book form.

With the publication of “The Innocents” in the summer of 1869 Mark Twain came to the halfway point. Out of his wide experience he had developed the habits of an observer and he had learned how to write. He had earned a reputation as a newspaper man, and he had published his most famous short story, “The Jumping Frog,” using his talent in spinning a yarn35 after his own fashion. His lecturing had met with unqualified success; the new book was selling beyond all expectation – 67,000 copies in the first year; and he was happily married to Olivia Langdon, his balance wheel, his severest critic, and the friend of all his closest friends.

The story of the rest of his life is a record of varied and spectacular fortunes. His home from 1871 to 1891 was in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was a neighbor of Charles Dudley Warner and an intimate of the Reverend Joseph Twitchell (the original of Harris in “A Tramp Abroad”), and where William Dean Howells, his friend of over forty years, often visited him. There was a kind of lavishness in everything he did. He built a mansion, made money with ease, spent it profusely, and invested it with the care-free optimism of Colonel Sellers himself. New inventions fascinated him and made him an easy victim for the fluent promoter, so that what was left from his ventures with the Buffalo Express and the Webster Publishing Company went into other enterprises, of which the Paige typesetting machine was the most disastrous for this ex-printer. After his failure for a large amount, a later friend, Henry H. Rogers, took his affairs in hand and by good management enabled Mark Twain to meet all debts and enjoy a very handsome income during his later years.

The ups and downs of business distracted him but did not baffle him. He traveled extensively, living abroad during most of the decade between 1891 and 1901. He made cordial friends wherever he went, but he was not weaned by them away from the old cronies of the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific coast. He accepted honors from Yale twice and from the University of Missouri, and in 1907 was the subject of a four-weeks’ ovation from all England when he went over to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford. His opinion was sought on public questions and he was importuned for speeches on every sort of occasion; but his last years were shadowed by a succession of bereavements. In 1903 Mrs. Clemens died. Two children died in childhood, a third under tragic circumstances in 1909, and the surviving daughter was married and far away most of the time. His chief personal solace was found in his friendships with several schoolgirls.

During those years after my wife’s death I was washing about on a forlorn sea of banquets and speech-making in high and holy causes, and these things furnished me intellectual cheer and entertainment; but they got at my heart for an evening only, then left it dry and dusty. I had reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.

He died of angina pectoris in 1910.

Mark Twain’s reputation was built on his humor. He came to his maturity in a fruitful decade just after the Civil War, when a crop of newspaper men were coming out with a recklessly fresh, informal jocularity which was related to the old American humor, but a great departure from it. They were all unconscious of making any contribution to American literature. They never could have written books which would have won the attention of Irving’s readers and the perusers of the old Annuals and the admirers of the Knickerbocker courtliness. They wrote for the world of Horace Greeley and the elder James Gordon Bennett, caring nothing for beauty of style or for any kind of literary tradition. They wrote under odd pen names like “John Phœnix,” who preceded them by ten years – “Petroleum V. Nasby,” “Artemus Ward,” “Orpheus C. Kerr,” “Max Adler,” and “M. Quad” serving as fancy dress for Locke, Browne, Newell, Clark, and Lewis. They drew their material from the common people, as Lincoln had done with all his anecdotes, putting it in the idiom of the common people and frequently distorting it into illiterate spelling, as Lowell had done in “The Biglow Papers.” This disturbed and shocked the lovers of a refined literature – men like Stedman, for example, who wrote to Bayard Taylor, “The whole country, owing to contagion of our American newspaper ‘exchange’ system, is flooded, deluged, swamped, beneath a muddy tide of slang, vulgarity, inartistic [bathos], impertinence, and buffoonery that is not wit.” But it was an irresistible tide that threw up on its waves something more than froth or flotsam, in the shape of a few real treasures from the deep – and the rarest was Mark Twain.

Had there been no such journalistic tide this original genius would still have gone on his original way. What these other men did was much more to put the public into a humor for Mark Twain than to lead Mark Twain in his approach to the public. He started as the others did, allowing an undercurrent of seriousness to appear now and then in the flow of his extravagance. His platform experience taught him by the immediate response of the audience what were the most effective methods.

All Tully’s rules and all Quintilian’s too,He by the light of listening faces knew.And his rapt audience, all unconscious, lentTheir own roused force to make him eloquent.36

He was quite deliberate in the employment of them. His essay on “How to Tell a Story” is an evidence of what he knew about structure, and his letter to the young London editorial assistant (see Paine’s “Mark Twain” pp. 1091–1093) is only the best of many passages which show his scrupulous regard for diction. He did not indulge in the usual vagaries of spelling; he had, to paraphrase his own words, “a singularly fine and aristocratic respect for homely and unpretending English”; and he treated punctuation as a “delicate art” for which he had the highest respect. People who carelessly think of Mark Twain as a kind of literary swashbuckler can disabuse themselves by an attentive reading of any few pages.

While they are doing it, they can discover in addition to the points just mentioned that he was essentially clean-minded. Vulgar he was, to be sure, at times, in the sense of not indulging always in drawing-room talk or displaying drawing-room manners, as, for instance, in his repeated references to spitting, – to use the homely and unpretending word, – but he never partook of the nature of his rough and ready human subjects to quite the extent that Franklin or Lincoln did. His pages are utterly free from filth. He drew a line, no doubt assisted by Mrs. Clemens, between what he wrote for the public and his private speech and correspondence. “He had,” Mr. Howells wrote, “the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse, without calling one’s self prudish; and I was always hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not quite bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.”

His humor relied on his never-failing and often extravagant use of the incongruous and the irrelevant. Often this came out in his similes and metaphors. “A jay hasn’t got any more principles than a Congressman.” “His lectures on Mont Blanc … made people as anxious to see it as if it owed them money.” It emerged in his impertinent personalities, as in the instance of his first meeting with Grant, when he said after a moment of awkwardness: “General, I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?” or as in the case of his reply to a query as to why he always carried a cotton umbrella in London, that it was the only kind he could be sure would not be stolen there. It appeared too in his sober misuse of historical facts with which he and his readers or auditors were well acquainted. And it was developed most elaborately in “hoax” passages where, in his violation of both fact and reason, the canny author looked like the innocent flower but was the serpent under it.

A particular charm attached to his work because it was so apparently uncalculated and spontaneous. What he wrote seemed to be for his own delectation, and what he spoke to be the casual improvisation of the moment. At times, of course, he did improvise – with all the art of a musician whose mastery of technique is no less the result of great labor because he has it completely in hand; but often the utterance which his hearers took for an extempore speech had been composed to the last syllable and then delivered with an art that concealed its own artistry. No doubt for the multitudes who bought up the editions of “Innocents Abroad” the salient feature of Mark Twain’s writing was its jovial extravagance. The first feeling of the public was that he had out-Phœnixed “Phœnix” and beaten “Petroleum Nasby” at his own game. Beyond question he literally “enjoyed himself” when he was giving hilarious enjoyment to others; the free play of his antic fancy was a kind of self-indulgence. The best evidence is offered in “Joan of Arc.” The story is approached, pursued, and concluded in a spirit of admiration often amounting to reverence. Yet in the character of “The Paladin,” Edmond Aubrey, the old miles gloriosus of Roman comedy, and in Joan’s uncle, the historian reverted to his broadest jocosities. There are interpolated pages of pure farce. There are scenes in “Joan” that are companion pieces with portions of the sardonic “Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.” On his seventy-third birthday he wrote, “I like the ‘Joan of Arc’ best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.” Yet this serious chronicle, with its occasional outbursts of fun, was of a piece with his best-known book of nearly thirty years earlier, the laugh-invoking “Innocents Abroad.” The books are not alien to each other; the difference is simply in the prevailing moods.

For under all the frolicsome gayety and beneath the surface ironies of this log of “The Quaker City” there is a solid sense of the realities of human life. Over against the pure fun of such episodes as the Fourth of July celebration on the high seas is a steady run of satire at the traditionalized affectations of the American who pretended to enjoy the things that he ought and attempted to shake off the manners of Bird City when he registered in his Paris hotel. His gibes at cultural insincerity, however, did not degenerate into a fusillade of cheap cynicisms at everything old. Whatever contempt he felt for the antiques of the tradesmen was overshadowed by the solemnity with which the evidence of the passing centuries impressed him. He may not have rendered the “old masters” their full deserts, but he entered a cathedral with respect, walked in reverent silence among the ruins of the Holy Land, and felt in the Alps the presence of the Most High. “Notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic,” he wrote in the preface, “it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East, if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him.” So he wrote this book out of the fullness of his heart as well as out of the abundance of his humor. There was in him a natural acumen which for want of a better name we may call wisdom. His instinctive perceptions were usually right.

The fundamental Mark Twain was an increasingly serious man. Before he was fifty years old his precocious daughter had written in her journal, “He is known to the public as a humorist, but he has much more in him that is earnest than that is humorous.” And again: “Whenever we are all alone at home nine times out of ten he talks about some very earnest subject (with an occasional joke thrown in), and he a good deal more often talks upon such subjects than upon the other kind. He is as much a philosopher as anything, I think.” There were many external reasons for his turn of mind. His romantic passage through life from obscure poverty to wealth and fame, with the depressing chapters of his temporary business reverses, heightened his native respect for the few blessings that are really worth while. His repeated travels, culminating with his trip around the world, the honors that came to him, the social distinctions that were showered on him, his friendships with thinking men, his bereavements, all contributed to the same end of making him consider the ways of the world and of the maker thereof. In a further comment his astute little daughter went near to the heart of the matter when she wrote quaintly, “I think he could have done a great deal in this direction if he had studied while young, for he seems to enjoy reasoning out things, no matter what; in a great many such directions he has greater ability than in the gifts which have made him famous.” “If he had studied while young” Mark Twain might have gained a knowledge of the progressions in philosophic thought that would have steadied him in his own thinking. Yet possibly it would have made little difference, for his thinking was at the same time all his own and altogether in the drift of nineteenth-century thought.

With an initial distrust of conventionalized thinking he came to his own analysis of the prevailing religious views. His reason was alert to challenge theology wherever it was at odds with science. He found nothing in the Bible to question the assumption that Man was the crowning triumph of his Creator, but everything in evolutionary doctrine to suggest that Man was only a link in a far-evolving succession of higher forms. He found a God in the Old Testament who was “an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master,” though in the ordering of the material universe he appeared to be steadfast, beneficent, and fair. His reason thus unseated his faith in the Scriptures and thereby his confidence in the creeds founded upon them. He lost the God of the Hebrews only to find his own “in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps,” … “a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of ages, upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million more – and still be there, watching unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation.”

For the after-life he could find no such assurance as he could for a Creator. For many men of his generation, and the one just before, the solution when they found themselves in such a quandary was to take refuge in the authority of the dogmas they had set out to question; many of the most radical came back with relief to the protection of the Roman Catholic faith; but Mark Twain could not find his way into the harbor, glad as he might have been for the anchorage. There is a deep pathos in the many passages of which the following is a type:

To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of finished education, an LL.D., M.A., and an archæological magnate, it sounds strangely enough. Still I would gladly change my unbelief for Neligan’s faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.

In spite of all his yearnings he never could achieve for himself the assurance “of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”; so that his most clearly formulated profession of faith was in reality a pathetic profession of doubts: