SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (1835-1910)

His Life. Samuel L. Clemens, universally known as Mark Twain, was born at the village of Florida, Missouri, in 1835, of Virginia ancestry. Before he was three years old his father moved to Hannibal, a Missouri town on the Mississippi thirty miles from his birthplace. In this place were spent his boyhood years. He attended the public school at Hannibal until he was twelve, when, owing to the death of his father, he went to work in a printing office. During the next seven or eight years he followed the printer's trade, going East meanwhile and working in New York and Philadelphia. At twenty-one he began an apprenticeship on a Mississippi River steamboat, and in less than two years he was a licensed pilot at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month.

War broke out in 1861 and Clemens served for a short while in the Confederate army; that same year his brother was appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada. The war had interfered with commerce, his occupation as steamboat pilot was gone, and the lure of the frontier westward was strong. Accordingly in 1861 he went along with his brother to Nevada; the journey and many subsequent experiences are related in Roughing It. In the six or seven years spent in the far West he tried mining, reporting, and editorial work on papers in Nevada and San Francisco. In the latter city he met Bret Harte and other earlier writers of the Pacific slope. After an experience of several months as a newspaper reporter in the Hawaiian Islands, and after he had been on the lecture platform a little while, he made an extended journey through Europe and the Holy Land. The letters written for a newspaper on this trip were later worked over into Innocents Abroad, his first book. Previous to this, however, Clemens had contributed humorous sketches to periodicals under the pen name1 by which he is everywhere known.

In 1871 he settled in Hartford, Connecticut, whither he had gone from Buffalo, New York, where for two or three years he had edited a paper and where he had married. In Hartford, New York City, and Redding, Connecticut, he spent the rest of his life. In 1884 he became a partner in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster & Co.; in the failure of this firm some years later he lost all his money. Like Sir Walter Scott under similar circumstances, he went to work with a right good will; he traveled, wrote, lectured; he succeeded in paying the firm's indebtedness, and at his death left a considerable estate. Three years before his

1 The name "Mark Twain" (a river phrase for two fathoms of water) had been used as a signature by an old pilot on the Mississippi, named Sellers, in articles to newspapers. Clemens wrote a burlesque of these articles to a New Orleans paper over this pen name, which he thereafter appropriated.

death he was given an honorary degree by the University of Oxford. He made many trips abroad and was regarded almost as a world figure. The death of his wife and daughter, to whom he was tenderly attached, brought sadness to his last years. He died in 1910 at Redding, Connecticut.

His Personality.-Mark Twain had a somewhat picturesque personality. His clear-cut features, his heavy shock of hair, his drawling speech, his white serge suit, are familiar to this generation. There was an element of coarseness mingled with his artistic sensibility, such as one finds, for instance, in the Elizabethans and other writers of great vitality. His early associations with rough primitive folk on the Mississippi and in the new West will partly account for his proneness to profanity and broad jesting. Though he lived much of his life in the East, he was unmistakably a western product.

In him were to be found the contradictory traits common to humorists. On the one hand were his generous enthusiasms for the weak and oppressed, his hatred of shams, his warm friendships with sincere and manly men; on the other, his childish prejudices, his bitter dislikes of certain persons and institutions shown in many unreasoning attacks, as, for example, his belief that Scott's novels gave rise to certain feudal ideals in the South. There was a vein of deep tenderness in him, of unsuspected seriousness, occasionally expressing itself in poetic prose as in his tribute to his daughter Jean-and in his chivalric defense of Joan of Arc. He had the temperament of the idealist with its attendant streak of mental irresponsibility; but in assuming and paying the debts of the publishing firm of which he was a member, he gave the world a fine practical evidence of his high sense of honor.

His Works. The first writing of Mark Twain to attract general attention was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras," published in a New York paper in 1867; before this he had edited and contributed to western papers and had won local renown as a humorist. The account of the

vain efforts at jumping of the shot-filled frog, the incongruity of naming him Daniel Webster, and the absurdity of the remark that he shrugged his shoulders like a Frenchman when he tried to raise himself from the ground, struck the reader as exceedingly funny. Two years later Innocents Abroad was published and enjoyed a wide popularity; the American public had never seen such a book, and they wanted more. In 1872 Roughing It appeared. This is a narrative of Mark Twain's early experiences in the West and is a vivid transcript of contemporary life in that picturesque region. Other important works in the order of publication are: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), Following the Equator (1897). Besides these he wrote many sketches of one kind and another, but the works enumerated are his main contributions to the literature of personal reminiscence, humor, and satire. The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, contains one famous character, Col. Mulberry Sellers, promoter of big schemes. His favorite remark was: "There's millions in it!"

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi-demand special comment. These books are more or less autobiographical; they record youthful experiences and observations in the Mississippi Valley. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are two of the best boys' books ever written. The first depicts the life of a healthy boy in a Missouri town on the Mississippi River when the author was living there; Tom Sawyer, he tells us, is "a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew." He says, furthermore, that "most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my

own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine." The story's faithfulness to boy nature indicates that it was largely based on fact and that Mark Twain was himself the main boy in it. The whitewashing of the fence has become a classic incident in American literature. Huckleberry Finn is the story of the adventures along the Mississippi of a friend of Tom Sawyer. This is a maturer book than Tom Sawyer, with more unity and a deeper underlying philosophy, and is regarded by many as Mark Twain's masterpiece. Boy nature is shown in contact with great outdoor natural forces-of which the mighty river is chief-and the spirit of the story in its larger aspects is almost epic. "It is a permanent picture," says Professor Phelps, "of a certain period of American history, and this picture is made complete, not so much by the striking portraits of individuals placed on the huge canvas, as by the vital unity of the whole composition."

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Mark Twain considered Life on the Mississippi his greatest work. The best part of it is a record of his impressions when he was journeying up and down the river in the pilot-house. No other such graphic picture exists of the varied and interesting life on and along the Mississippi in the middle of the nineteenth century. These experiences profoundly influenced the great humorist; there are passages in this book which border on poetry; the humor is more subdued and the style more finished than is usual with Mark Twain. Evidently he was writing out of his heart about a memorable bit of personal history. Along with Life on the Mississippi should be mentioned a later work, Pudd'nhead Wilson. This is the last 'of the four books on the Mississippi Valley, ingenious but less powerful than the others.

Of the other works of Mark Twain the satire on medieval chivalry, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and the historical novel, Joan of Arc, merit brief mention. In the first he takes off the romantic treatment of the middle

1William Lyon Phelps: Essays on Modern Novelists, p. 110.