Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Allegheny Mountains a swaggering extravagance of speech had been a
hallmark of the Westerner. In part this swagger was an unconscious
defense-mechanism against the drabness of frontier life; and in part
it was the spontaneous expression of new experiences in an untrammeled
world, the spirit of wilderness-leveling. Its procreative source would
seem to have been the Ohio River where the rough flatboatmen bequeathed
the Mike Fink legend to literature; and it expanded in the huge
Davy Crockett hoax--a hoax that would have tickled the ribs of Mark
Twain had he traced its genesis and progress, as a colossal example
of how the damned human race loves to be humbugged. It developed
further in Gus Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_ with its grotesque Ransy
Sniffle--sorriest of backwoods heroes, too mean-spirited to ruffle like
Canebrake Davy; and in Joseph Baldwin’s _Flush Times of Alabama and
Mississippi_, with its greasy frontier blackguard, Colonel Simon Suggs.
This earliest backwoods humor had been done in realistic colors and
bears the impress of authenticity. But the school that succeeded--John
Phoenix, Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby--quickly conventionalized
its technique, relying on burlesque, tall lying, distorted spelling,
genial philosophy. The picaresque strain was softened and perverted by
deliberate human-interest touches--a better case must be made out for
the untutored children of nature. It was this humor that Mark Twain
inherited, and he enriched it with a wealth dug from his own large and
generous nature. An incorrigible idealist, as all great humorists must
be, he recreated some of the earlier types, translating Colonel Simon
Suggs into Colonel Sellers, and Ransy Sniffle into Huck Finn. It was a
glorious transformation, but the result lacked something of the soiled
reality of the earlier blackguards. Yet underneath his idealism was a
generous deposit of the common mud of life. The spirit of Mike Fink was
never far from Mark Twain. It haunted him like an evil genius, refusing
to be exorcised by Olivia Clemens, and it found vent in sly literary
sprees that begot offspring to be handed about furtively and chuckled
over by the sons of Adam; but for the most part it was kept in strict
subjection to the proprieties of Elmira and Hartford.
_Roughing It_ and _The Gilded Age_ are brilliant complementary pictures
of the gaudy frontier spirit that was washing in upon the staid realm
of the genteel, to the vast concern of such genteelists as Thomas
Bailey Aldrich. The former is a buoyant chronicle of the West of
Captain Carver and Wild Bill Hickok, the West of the Pony Express,
the Comstock lode, the bad man and the lynch law, a land of young
men in red flannel shirts, heavy boots, and six-shooters, who feared
neither God nor the devil. Bret Harte in San Francisco first realized
the literary possibilities of this picturesque world, and his tales
of life in the mining-camps were received with a shout of approval.
But Bret Harte had never been a miner. He was not realist enough, nor
honest enough, to portray the West in its stark, grotesque reality. He
was only a literary middleman who skillfully purveyed such wares as
his eastern readers wanted. In consequence he coated his tales with a
sentimental picaresque--pandered to the common taste by discovering
nuggets of pure gold in the dregs and outcasts of the mining-camps.
But Mark Twain was too honest for that. He had been a part of the
flush times and had seen the economic process work itself out. He had
seen the grub-stake prospector succeeded by the wild-cat speculator,
and him in turn followed by the eastern capitalist. He had seen
the mining frontier become a thing of the past in a single decade,
with the Comstock lode in the hands of competent exploiters and the
pick-and-shovel miners plunging deeper into the mountains to pursue
their feverish hopes. From that experience he had learned a lesson he
was to carry East with him. “Because we judged that we had learned,” he
said, “the real secret of success in silver mining, which was, not to
mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of
our hands, but to _sell_ the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let
them do the mining.”[577]
It was the great lesson of his generation, and thus instructed he
proposed to sell his brains in the best market. Exploitation was the
royal road to wealth and he was eager to exploit both himself and
his fellows. Yet not all of Mark Twain was thus eager. Deep in his
heart was another Mark Twain, the artist, the chivalrous lover of
justice, the simple child puzzled at life--and this Mark Twain was
already plotting treason against the exploiting Mark Twain. For the
first time this deeper self got out of hand in _The Gilded Age_. As he
contemplated the common scoundrelism at Washington and elsewhere, his
anger exuded in scathing satire. He hated the dirty thing, yet he seems
never to have realized that such scoundrelism was only the backwash of
the spirit of exploitation and that he himself was riding on its waves.
With the soap-bubble dreams of Colonel Sellers he dealt lovingly, for
he was sketching his own origins; the Colonel and the Hawkinses were
his own flesh and blood and the Tennessee lands were an old investment
about which the family dreams of wealth had been woven for years. He
delighted in the Colonel’s childlike faith that prosperity only awaited
a vote of Congress--with adequate appropriations, of course. He asked
no questions about unearned increment; to question that would have been
treason to the frontier philosophy. So into Colonel Sellers he put all
that was naïve and lovable in the Gilded Age. But Senator Dillworthy
was another matter. Hypocrite and corruptionist, he was laying obscene
hands on sacred things, betraying his high trust for sordid ends. Mark
Twain hated graft--the word had not been coined but the ugly thing was
there--and with the innocence of his generation he damned the agent
and overlooked the principal. It was not his fault. The economics of
history was a closed book to Americans of the seventies, and even
Henry Adams in his analysis of the current corruption in his novel
_Democracy_ was no better than a mole nosing blindly underground.
He had opened another door to his genius and discovered the satirist.
There lay the real Mark Twain. But the wares of the satirist were not
in demand at the barbecue, so he closed the door and fell to purveying
what the public wanted. _Tom Sawyer_ was in part a malicious thrust
at the Sunday School tale, and in part a whimsical pronouncement
of the natural rights of the small boy. But it is in _Huckleberry
Finn_--the one great picaresque tale of the frontier--that the western
philosophy of Mark Twain, a philosophy that derives straight from the
old naturistic school, crops out most sharply. It is a drama of the
struggle between the individual and the village _mores_, set in a loose
picturesque framework, and exemplifying the familiar thesis that the
stuff of life springs strong and wholesome from the great common stock.
Huck Finn is a child of nature who has lived close to the simple facts
of life, unperverted by the tyrannies of the village that would make
a good boy of him. He had got his schooling from the unfenced woods,
from the great river that swept past him as he idly fished, from the
folk-tales of negroes and poor whites, from queer adventures with Tom
Sawyer; and from such experiences he had got a code of natural ethics.
Then he found himself on the raft with Jim the runaway nigger, and
his little pagan soul felt the stirrings of the problem of right and
wrong. The village code and the natural code clashed and the conflict
was terrifying. The village code warned him that hell yawned for one
who helped a slave escape, and the human code warned him that betrayal
was a blackguardly thing. With the fear of hell upon him he wrote to
Miss Watson, and then his sense of the kindliness of Jim, the honest
humanity under the black skin, rose up in fierce protest.
It was a close place. I took [the letter] up, and held it in my
hands. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever,
betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied for a minute, sort
of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll _go_ to hell”--and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let
them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.[578]
It was a triumph over the sacred tribal law of conformity--the
assertion of the individual will in opposition to society--and it
reveals the heart of Mark Twain’s philosophy. The rebel Huck is no
other than the rebel Mark Twain whose wrath was quick to flame up
against the unrighteous customs and laws of caste. If men were only
honest realists--that is, if they were men and not credulous fools--how
quickly the stables might be cleansed and life become decent and
humane. If only the good brains could be segregated and trained in a
real “man-factory,” the history of civilization might become something
the angels need not weep over as they read it. It all comes back to an
honest realism that in accepting fact will clear away the superstitious
fogs in which men have floundered and suffered hitherto. The one sacred
duty laid on every rational being is the duty of rebellion against
sham--to deny the divinity of clothes, to thrust out quack kings and
priests and lords, to refuse a witless loyalty to things. This creed of
the rebel is written all through Mark Twain’s later work, edging his
satire and lending an Emersonian note to his individualism. In such a
passage as this it emerges sharply:
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to
its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real
thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing
to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are
extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear
out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the
body from winter, disease, death. To be loyal to rags, to shout
for rags, to worship rags--that is a loyalty to unreason, it is
pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy;
let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution
declares “that all political power is inherent in the people, and
all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted
for their benefit; and that they have _at all times_ an undeniable
and indefeasible right to _alter their form of government_ in such
manner as they may think expedient.”
Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the
commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his
peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a
traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay,
does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is
the duty of others to vote him down if they do not see the matter
as he does.[579]
In the Middle Ages clothes-worship had been exalted to a religion,
he believed, and he turned with gusto to reply to the aristocratic
romanticism of Sir Walter, who, delighting in the picturesque company
gathered in the great hall, forgot to penetrate to the _oubliettes_--is
not the word commentary enough on the ways of the seigneur?--where
nameless wretches were rotting under the walls of the castle. He had
small patience with the cult of medievalism that was turning such
men as Henry Adams and William Morris back to the Middle Ages as to
their lost home. He had the frontier contempt for medieval ways, and
for the _ancien régime_ that was the last rags of the Middle Ages.