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Book III (continued)
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, more widely known as
Mark Twain, was of the ‘bully breed’ which
Whitman had prophesied.
Writing outside ‘the genteel tradition,’ he avowedly sought to please the masses, and he was elected to his high place in American literature by a tremendous popular vote, which was justified even in the opinion of severe critics by his exhibition of a masterpiece or so not unworthy of
Le Sage or
Cervantes.
Time will diminish his bulk as it must that of every author of twenty-five volumes; but the great public which discovered him still cherishes most of his books; and his works, his character, and his career have now, and will continue to have, in addition to their strictly literary significance, a large illustrative value, which has been happily emphasized by
Albert Bigelow Paine's admirable biography and collection of letters.
Mark Twain is one of our great representative men. He is a fulfilled promise of American life.
He proves the virtues of the land and the society in which he was born and fostered.
He incarnates the spirit of an epoch of American history when the nation, territorially and spiritually enlarged, entered lustily upon new adventures.
In the retrospect he looms for us with
Whitman and
Lincoln, recognizably his countrymen, out of the shadows of the
Civil War, an unmistakable native son of an eager, westward-moving people—unconventional, self-reliant, mirthful, profane,
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realistic, cynical, boisterous, popular, tender-hearted, touched with chivalry, and permeated to the marrow of his bones with the sentiment of democratic society and with loyalty to American institutions.
By his birth at
Florida,
Missouri, 30 November, 1835, he was a Middle-Westerner; but by his inheritance from the restless, sanguine, unprosperous Virginian, his father, who had drifted with his family and slaves through
Kentucky and
Tennessee, he was a bit of a Southerner and still more of a migrant and a seeker of fortune.
His boyhood he spent in the indolent semi-Southern town of
Hannibal, Missouri, which, as he fondly represents it, slept for the most part like a cat in the sun, but stretched and rubbed its eyes when the
Mississippi steamboats called, teasing his imagination with hints of the unexplored reaches of the river.
When in 1847 his father died in poverty brightened by visions of wealth from the sale of his land in
Tennessee, the son was glad to drop his lessons and go to work in the office of the Hannibal
Journal.
There, mainly under his visionary brother Orion, he served as printer and assistant editor for the next six years, and in verse and satirical skits made the first trials of his humour.
In 1853, having promised his mother with hand on the Testament ‘not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor,’ he set out on an excursion into the world, and worked his way for three or four years as printer in
St. Louis, New York,
Philadelphia,
Keokuk, and
Cincinnati.
Through the winter of 1856-7 he pleased himself with a project for making his fortune by collecting cocoa at the headwaters of the
Amazon; and in the spring of 1857 he actually took passage on the
Paul Jones for New Orleans.
But falling into conversation with the pilot,
Horace Bixby, he engaged himself with characteristic impulsiveness as an apprentice to that exacting, admired, and, as it then seemed to him, magnificently salaried king of the river.
In return for five hundred dollars payable out of his first wages
Bixby undertook to teach him the
Mississippi from New Orleans to
St. Louis so that he should have it ‘by heart.’
He mastered his twelve hundred miles of shifting current, and became a licensed pilot.
In the process he acquired without the slightest consciousness of its uses his richest store of literary material.
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‘In that brief, sharp schooling,’ he wrote many years later, ‘I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history.
When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.’
This chapter of his experience was ended abruptly by the outbreak of the
Civil War and the closing of the river.
His brief and inglorious part in the ensuing conflict he has described, with decorations, in his
Private history of a campaign that failed, a little work which indicates that he rushed to the aid of the
Confederacy without much conviction, and that two weeks later he rushed away with still less regret.
Eventually, it should be remarked,
General Grant became his greatest living hero, and his attitude towards slavery became as passionately Northern as that of
Mrs. Stowe.
Meanwhile he went
West.
On 26 July, 1861, he was sitting on the mail-bags behind the six galloping horses of the overland stage headed for
Carson City, Nevada, as assistant to his brother Orion, who through the good offices of a friend in
Lincoln's cabinet had been appointed Territorial secretary.
On his arrival, finding himself without salary or duties, he explored the mining camps and caught the prevailing passion for huge quick wealth.
First he bought ‘wild-cat’ stock; then he located a vast timber claim on
Lake Tahoe; then he tried quartz mining in the silver regions; prospected for gold in the placer country; and, in daily expectation of striking it fabulously rich, sank his brother's salary in the most promising ‘leads.’
That his claims did not ‘pan out’ well is clear from his accepting in 1862 a position as local reporter for the
Virginia City Enterprise at twenty-five dollars a week, having commended himself to the editor by a series of letters signed ‘
Josh.’
Thus began his literary career.
In reporting for this paper the sessions of the Legislature at
Carson City he first employed the signature ‘
Mark Twain,’ a name previously used by a pilot-correspondent of the New Orleans
Picayune but ultimately commemorating the leadsman's cry on the
Mississippi.
His effervescent spirits, excited by the stirring and heroically convivial
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life of a community of pioneers, found easy outlet in the robust humour and slashing satire of frontier journalism.
In 1863
Artemus Ward1 spent three glorious weeks revelling with the newspaper men in
Virginia City, recognized the talent of
Mark Twain, and encouraged him to send his name eastward with a contribution to the New York Sunday
Mercury.
A duel occasioned by some journalistic vivacities resulted in his migration in 1864 to
San Francisco, where in 1864 and 1865 he wrote for
The morning call,
The Golden era, and
The Californian; and fraternized with the brilliant young coterie of which
Bret Harte2 was recognized as the most conspicuous light.
In a pocket-hunting excursion in January, 1865, he picked up a very few nuggets and the nucleus for the story of
Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog, which appeared in the New York
Saturday press in November and swiftly attained wide celebrity.
In the following spring he visited the
Sandwich Islands on a commission from the Sacramento
Union, called upon his first king, explored the crater of Kilauea, struck up a friendship with the
American ministers to
China and
Japan, and made a great ‘scoop’ by interviewing a group of shipwrecked sailors in the hospital at
Honolulu.
Later he wrote up the story for
Harper's magazine; his appearance there in 1866 he calls his
debut as a literary person.
Returning to
San Francisco, he made his first appearance as a humorous lecturer in a discourse on the
Sandwich Islands, delivered with his sober, inimitable, irresistible drawl to a crowded and applausive house on the evening of 2 October, 1866.
From this point his main course was determined.
Realizing that he had a substantial literary capital, he set out to invest it so that it would in every sense of the word yield the largest returns obtainable.
To the enterprise of purveying literary entertainment he, first in
America, applied the wide-ranging vision and versatile talents of our modern men of action and captains of industry: collecting his ‘raw material,’ distributing it around the world from the lecture platform, sending it to the daily press, reworking it into book form, inventing his own type-setting machinery, and controlling his own printing, publishing, and selling agencies.
He did not foresee this all in 1866; but it must have begun to dawn.
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By repeating his
Sandwich Islands lecture widely in
California and
Nevada he provided himself with means to travel, and revisited his home, returning by way of
Panama and New York.
In May, 1867, he published his first book,
The celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and other sketches, and lectured in Cooper Institute.
Then on 8 June he sailed on the,
Quaker City for a five months excursion through the Mediterranean to the
Holy Land, first reported in letters to
The Alta-California and the New York
Tribune, and immortalized by his book
Innocents abroad.
On 2 February, 1870, he married his most sympathetic reader and severest censor,
Olivia Langdon of
Elmira, New York, a sister of one of the
Quaker City pilgrims who had shown him her photograph in the
Bay of Smyrna.
After a brief unprofitable attempt to edit a newspaper in
Buffalo, he moved in 1871 to
Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1874 built there the home in which he lived for the next seventeen years.
He formed a close association with his neighbour
