The innocents abroad, or, The new Pilgrim's progress : being some account of the steamship "Quaker City's" pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land

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I

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was bom November 30, 1835, at Florida, Missouri. His father was a merchant who had come from Tennessee and who removed soon after his son's birth to Hannibal, a little town on the Mississippi. What Hannibal was like and what were the circumstances of Mr. Clemens's boyhood we can see for out selves in the convincing pages of *Tom Sawyer.' Mr. Howdls has called Hannibal ** a loafing, oi«t-at*elbows, down-atthe-heels, stave-holding Mississippi town;" and vffl Biograi^iical Critidsm

Mr. Clemens was himself a slave owner, who silently abhorred slavery.

When the future author Was but twelve his father died 9 and the son had to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got little and of book-learning still less ; but life itself is not a bad teacher for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his chances. He spent three years in the printing office of the little local paper, •—for, like not a few others on the list of American authors that stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began his connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer the lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as New York.

When he was seventeen he went back to the home of his boyhood resolved to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learnt the river he has told us in ^Life on the Mississippi/ wherein his adventures, his experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub-pilot are recorded with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of autobiography. The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and

Biographical Criiidsm ix

divined during the years- when he wa^ going up and down the mighty river we may read in the pages of •Huckleberry Finn' and * Pttdd'nhead Wilson/ But toward the end of the fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy as a carrier ; and in the beginning of the sixties the civil war broke out and the Mississippi no longer went unvexed to the sea. The skill, slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling. As a border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting, not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the Northwest with his brother, who had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Nevada. Thus the man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone East as a jour-printer, who had been again and again up and down the Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and impressionable ; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate knowledge of American life and American character which is one of the most precious of his possessions.

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While still on the river be had written a satiric letter or two signed "Mark Twain "-^- taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead and who cries ' ' By the mark, three^ " " Mark

twain/' and so on. In Nevada he went to tlie mines and lived the life he has described in ' Roughing It/ but when he failed to ** strike it rich," he naturally drifted into journalism and back into a newspaper office again. . The Virginia City Enterprise was not overmanned, and the newcomer did all sorts of odd jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important enough to permit of his signature. The name of Mark Twain soon began to be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual employment on the Morning Call^ and where he joined himself to a little group of aspiring iterators which included Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. Noah Brooks, Mr. Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard.

It was in 1867 that Mr. Webb published Mark Twain's first book, * The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras ' ; and it was in 1867 that the proprie* tors of the Alta California supplied him with the funds necessary to enable him to become one of the

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passengers on the steamer Quaker City^ which had been chartered to take a select party on what is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly let* tersy in which he set forth what befel him on this journey, were printed in the Alta Sunday after Sun« day, and were copied freely by the other Callfornian papers. These letters served as the foundation of a bobk published in 1 869 and called ' The Innocents Abroad/ a book which Instantly brought to the author celebrity and cash.

Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step, his appearance on the lecture platform. Mr. Noah Brooks, who was present at his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain's *' method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences, the surprise that spread over his face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind they had ever known." In the thirty years since that first appearance the method has not changed, although it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one of the most effective of platform-speakers and one of the most artistic, xfl Biographical Criticism

with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in spite of its seeming simplicity.

Although he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and although he was the author of the most widelycirculated book of the decade* Mark Twain stili thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West for the East he became an editor of the Buffalo Express^ in which he had bought an interest. In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which there have been so many in the annals of American authorship. In 1 87 1 he removed to Hartford, where his home has been ever since ; and at the same time he gave up newspaper work.

In 1872 he wrote 'Roughing It/ and in the following year came his first sustained attempt at fiction, *The Gilded Age/ written in collaboration with Mr, Charles Dudley Warner. The character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers Mark Twain soon took out of this book to make it the central figure of a play, which the late John T. Raymond acted hundreds of times throughout the United States, the playgoing public pardoning the inexpertness of the dramatist in favor of the delicious humor and the compelling veracity with which the chief character

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was presented. So universal was this type and so broadly recognizable its traits that there were few towns wherein the play was presented in which some* one did not accost the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful schemer to declare, ** I'm the original of Sellers I Didn't Mark ever tell you? Well, he took the Colonel from me I "

Encouraged by the welcome accorded to this first attempt at fiction, Mark Twain turned to the days of his boyhood and wrote 'Tom Sawyer,' pub* lished in 1875. He also collected his sketches, scattered here and there in newspapers and magazines Toward the end of the seventies he went to Europe again with his family ; and the result of this journey is recorded in *A Tramp Abroad,' published in i88o. Another volume of sketches, "The Stolen White Elephant,' was put forth in 1882; and in the same year Mark Twain first came forward as a historical novelist— if * The Prince and the Pauper' can fairly be called a historical novel. The year after, he sent forth the volume describing his 'Life on the Mississippi ' ; and in 1884 he followed this with the story in which that life has been crystallized forever, •Huckleberry Finn,' the finest of his books, the deepest in its insight, and the widest in its appeal.

This Odyssey of the Mississippi was published by jthr BiogtapUcal Critidsm

a new fiitn, in which the author was a chief partner, just as Sir Walter Scott had been an associate of BaUant)me and Constable. There was at first a period of prosperity in which the house issued the ' Personal Memoirs * of Grant, giving his widow checks for $350,000 in 18861 and in which Mark Twain himself published *A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court,' a volume of * Merry Tales/ and a story called * The American Claimant/ wherein Colonel Sellers reappears. Then there came a succession of hard years ; and at last the publishing house in which Mark Twain was a partner failed, as the pubh'sbing house in which Walter Scott was a partner had formerly failed. The author of * Huckleberry Finn ' was past sixty when he found himself suddenly saddled with a load of debt, just as the author of 'Waverley' had been burdened full threescore years earlier; and Mark Twain stood up stoutly under it as Scott had done before him« More fortunate than the Scotchman, the American has lived to pay the debt in fnll«

Since the disheartening crash came, he has given to the public a third Mississippi River tale, ' Pudd'nhead Wilson,' issued in 1894; and a third historical novel *Joan of Arc,' a reverent and sym* pathetic study of the bravest figure in all French

Biographical Critiosm n

history, printed anonymoudy in Harper's Magajsim and then in a volume acknowledged by the author in 1896. As one of the results of a kcturiog tour around the world he has prepared another volume of traveky * Following the Equator/ published toward the end of 1S97. Mention must also be made of a fantastic tale called *Tom Sawyer Abroad/ sent forth in 1894, of a volume of sketches, * The Mil* lion Pound Bank^Note,* assembled in 1893, and also of a collection of literary essays, * How to Tell a Story,' published in 1897.

This is but the barest outline of Mark Twain's life, — such a brief summary as we must have before us if we wish to consider the conditions under which the author has developed and the stages of his growth. It will serve, however, to show how various have been his forms of activity— printer, pilot, miner, journalist, traveler, lecturer, novelist, publisher — - and to suggest the width of his experience of life.

U

A humorist is often without honor in his own country. Perhaps this is partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity breeds contempt. Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason) we tend to despise those who make us

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hugh, whik we respect those who make us weep-^ forgetting that there are formulas for forcing teai5 quite as facile as the formulas for forcing smiles. Whatever the reason, the fact is indisputable that the humorist must pay the penalfy of his humor; he must run the risk of being tolerated as a mere fun* maker, not to be taken seriously, and unworthy of critical consideration. This penalty is being paid now by Mark Twain. In many of the discussions of American literature he is dismissed as though he were only a competitor of his predecessors, Artemus Ward and John Phoenix, instead of being, what he is really, a writer who is to be classed «> at whatever interval only time may decide «> rather with Cervantes and Moli^e.

Like the heroines of the problem-plays of the modem theater, Mark Twain has had to live down his past. His earlier writing gave but litde promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works. Mr. Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised if he wished to ** see genuine specimens of American humor, frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious/' to look up the sketches which the then almost unknown Mark Twain was printing in a Nevada newspaper. The humor of Mark Twain is still American, still frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious; but it

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is riper now and richer^ and it has taken unto itself other qualities existing only in germ in these firstlings of his muse. The sketches in ' The Jumping Frog' and the letters which made up *The Innocents Abroad ' are ** comic copy/' as the phrase is in newspaper offices — comic copy not altogether unlike what John Phoenix had written and Artemus Ward, better indeed than the work of these news*

paper humorists (for Mark Twain had it in him to de-

•

velop as they did not) , but not essentially dissimilar. And in tlie eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark Twain is only the author of these genuine specimens of American humor. For when the public has once made up its mind about any man's work, it does not relish any attempt to force it to unmake this opinion and to remake it. Like other juries, it does not like to be ordered to reconsider its verdict as contrary to the facts of the case. It is always sluggish in beginning the necessary readjustment, and not only sluggish, but somewhat grudging. Naturally it cannot help seeing the later works of a poj^ular writer from the point of view it bad to take to enjoy his earlier writings. And thus the author of * Huckleberry Finn ' and * Joan of Arc ' is forced to pay a high price for the early and abundant popularity of * The Innocents Abroad.'

xviii Biographical Criticism

No doubts a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of earlier funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his predeces* sors. No .doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and highly colored, and may even be called forced, not to say violent. No doubt, also, they did not suggest the seriousness and the melancholy which always must underUe the deepest humor, as we find it in Cervantes and Moli^e, in Swift and in Lowell, But even a careless reader, skipping through the book in idle amusement, ought to have been able to see in *The Innocents Abroad,' that the writer of that liveliest of books of travel was no mere merryandrew, grinning through a horse-coUar to make sport for the groundlings ; but a sincere observer of life, seeing through his own eyes and setting down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also with profound respect for the eternal verities.

George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes "debasers of the moral currency/' Mark Twain is always an advocate of the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm an affectation with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things that really deserve

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reverence. It 19 not kt the Old Masters that h« scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip-service to things which they neither enjoy nor understand. For a ruin or a painting or a legend that does not seem to him to deserve the appreciation in which it is held he refuses to affect an admiration he does not feel; he cannot help being honest — he was born so. For meanness of all kinds he has a burning contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them ; but there is no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the glamour of Palestine ; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet; but he knows that he is standing on holy ground ; and there is never a hint of irreverence in his attitude.

* A Tramp Abroad ' is a better book than * The Innocents Abroad * ; it is quite as laughter-provok* ing, and its manner is far more restrained. Mark Twain was then master of his method, sure of himself, secure of his popularity; and he could do his best and spare no pains to be certain that it was his best. Perhaps there is a slight falling off in * Following the Equator * ; a trace of fatigue, of weari*

B*

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ness, of disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author's possession of a pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him ; the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is not all laughter, but whose eye is as clear as ever and whose tongue is as plainspoken.

These three books of travel are like all other books of travel in that they relate in the first person what the author went forth to see. Autobiographic also are * Roughing It' and "Life on the Mississippi/ and they have always seemed to me better books than the more widely circulated travels. They are better because they are the result of a more intimate knowledge of the material dealt with . Every traveler is of necessity but a bird of passage ; he is a mere carpet-bagger; his acquaintance with the countries he visits is external only ; and this acquaintanceship is made only when he is a full-grown man. But Mark Twain's knowledge of the Mississippi was acquired in his youth ; it was not purchased with a price ; it was his birthright ; and it was internal and

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complete. And his knowledge of the mining-camp was achieved in early manhood when the mind is open and sensitive to every new impression. There is in both these books a fidelity to the inner truth, a certainty of touch, a sweep of vision, not to be found in the three books of travels. For my own part I have long thought that Mark Twain could securely rest his right to survive as an author on those opening chapters in * Life on the Mississippi ' in which he makes clear the difficulties, the seeming impossibilities, that fronted those who wished to learn the river. These chapters are bold and brilliant; and they picture for us forever a period and a set of conditions* singularly interesting and splendidly varied, that otherwise would have had to forego

all adequate record.

III

It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark Twain showed in * Life on the Mississippi,* and when he has the masculine grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in * Roughing It,' he must needs sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a stoty-teller. The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into |wo divisions, — first, those of xxii « Biographical Critldsm

which the scene is laid in the present, in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley» and second, those of which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe.

As my own liking is a little less for tlie latter group, there is no need for me now to linger over them. In writing these tales of the past Mark Twain was making up stories in his head ; personally I pre-* fer the tales of his in which he has his foot firm on reality, *The Prince and the Pauper' has the essence of boyhood in it ; it has variety and vigor ; it has abundant humor and plentiful pathos ; and yet I for one would give the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets, the contract for whitewashing his aunt's fence.

Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes almost equally well, — **a real novel and a pure romance; " and he joytvMy accepts •A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court' as **one of the greatest romances ever imagined." It is a humorous romance overflowing with stalwart fun ; and it is not irreverent but iconoclastic, in that it breaks not a few disestablished idols. It is in« tensely American and intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic -«- in the best sense of that abused adjective. The British critics were greatly

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displeased with the book; — and we are reminded of the faM:t that the Spanish stiH somewhat resent * Don Quixote * because it brings out too truthfully the fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real. So much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain's merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an insult to the present.

But no critic, British or American, has ventured to discover any irreverence in * Joan of Arc/ wherein mdeed the tone is almost devout and the humor almost too much subdued. Perhaps it is my own distrust of the so-called historical novel, my own disbelief that it can ever be anything but an inferior form of art, which makes me care less for this worthy effort to honor a noble figure. And elevated and dignified as is the *Joan of Arc/ I do not think that it shows us Mark Twain at his best; although it has many a passage that only he could have written, it is perhaps the least characteristic of his works. Yet it may well be that the certain measure of success he has achieved in handling a subject so lofty and so serious, will help to open the eyes of the public to see the solid merits of his other stories, in which his humor has fuller play and in which his natural gifts are more abundantly displayed.

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Of these other stories three are ** real novels/' to use Mr. Howells's phrase; they are novels as real as any in any literature. *Tom Sawyer' and •Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'tthead Wilson' are invaluable contributions to American literature — for American literature is nothing if it is not a true picture of American life and if it does not help us to understand ourselves. * Huckleberry Finn ' is a very amusing volume, and a generation has read its pages and laughed over it immoderately ; but it is very much more than a funny book; it is a marvelously accurate portrayal of a whole civilization. Mr. Ormsby, in an essay which accompanies his translation of * Don Quixote/ has pointed out that for a full century after its publication that greatest of novels was enjoyed chiefly as a tale of humorous misadventure, and that three generations had laughed over it before anybody suspected that it was more than a mere funny book. It is perhaps rather with the picaresque romances of Spain that * Huckleberry Finn ' is to be compared than with the masterpiece of Cervantes ; but I do not think it will be a century or take three generations before we Americans gen* erally discover how great a book * Huckleberry Finn* really is, how keen ?ts vision of character, how close its observation of life, how sound its

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phflosophy, and how it records for us once and for all certain phases of Southwestern society which it is most important for us to perceive and to understand. The influence of slavery, the prevalence of feuds, the conditions and the circumstances that make lynching possible — all these things are set before us clearly and without comment. It is for us to draw our own moral, each for himself, as we do when we see Shakespeare acted.

* Huckleberry Finn,* in its art, for one thing, and also in its broader range, is superior to * Tom Sawyer' and to * Pudd'nhead Wilson,* fine as both these are in their several ways. In no book in our language, to my mind, has the boy, simply as a boy, been better realized than in *Tom Sawyer.* In some respects * Pudd'nhead Wilson * is the most dramatic of Mark Twain's longer stories, and also the most ingenious ; like * Tom Sawyer * and * Huckleberry Finn,' it has the full flavor of the Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from contact with the soil of which he always rises reinvigorated*

It is by these three stories, and especially by •Huckleberry Finn,* that Mark Twain is likely to live longest. Nowhere else is the life of the Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded. Nowhere else zxvl Bipgraphical Critidsm

can we find a gallery of Southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those Hack Finn met in his wanderings. The histories of literature all praise the ' Gil Bias ' of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty ; and the praise is deserved. But in every one of these qualities * Huckleberry IHnn ' is superior to * Gil Bias.' Le Sage set the model of the picaresque novel, and Mark Twain followed his exa^nple; but the American book is richer than the French — deeper, finer, stronger. It would be hard to find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain's account of die Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of Boggs by Sherbum and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherburn afterward.

These scenes, fine as tfiey are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in their restraint, can be matched in the two other books. In •Tom Sawyer' they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girt are lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance, discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he has in the

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vorld. In * Fodd'nhead Wilson * the great passages of * Hucklebeny Finn ' are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak son willing to sell his own mother as a slave ** down the riven" Although no one of the books is sustained throughout on this high level, and although, in truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we find them), I have no hesitation in express^ ing here my own conviction that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared with the masters of literature ; and that he can abide the comparison with equanimity*

IV

Perhaps 1 myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all Mark Twain's other writings (although with no lack of affection for those also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about them. After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish in literature is this native aro^ia, pungent, homely, and abiding. Yet I feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of these three books only. They are the best of him, but the others are good also, and good in a different way. Other writers have xxvBi Biographical Crifidsm

l^ven us this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly: one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin ; but who so well as Mark Twain has given us the full spectrum of the Union? With all his exactness in reproducing the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outiook ; he is national always. He is not narrow ; he is not Western or Eastern ; he is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country 80 vast as ours and a people so independent.

In Mark Twain we have ** the national spirit as seen with our own eyes/' declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism. Self-educated in the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outiook as he has grown older. Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith. Combining a mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a practical idealist. No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for his fellow man. Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of rever-