Mark Twain

Excerpt

INTRODUCTORY

In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America, the colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from the "Wild and Woolly West." Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world. It would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of "Literature." They were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all.

The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of the supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully dawned upon the American consciousness. The literatures of England and Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain. It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic, and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great artist. It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the supreme and imperishable glories of American literature.

At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can be attributed what a Frenchman would call mondial ecla is surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling, with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned title of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has suffered eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the British Isles. His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola, Ibsen and, Tolstoy constituted the literary hierarchy of the world—according to popular verdict. Since Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy experts unchallenged the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the world. This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his life, less from his intellect than from his conscience. The literati bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?' The whole world pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration.

[While this book was going through the press, news has come of the death of Tolstoy.]

Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world....