Mark Twain's renewed contact with life among the river towns quickened his sense of realism. For Huckleberry Finn, save in its passages about the peace and freedom of Jackson's Island, is no longer "simply a hymn," and so dim has grown the dream of adolescent romancing that Becky Tactic reappears but perfunctorily under the careless label of "Bessie" Thatcher essay Huck's voyage through the South reveals aspects of life darker than the occasional melodrama of Tom Sawyer. We are shown the and of poor white jack woods loafers with their plug tobacco and Barlow dogs on stray sows and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise," or drench a stray cur with turpentine and set him afire. We remark the cowardice of lynching "parties" the chicanery of patent medicine fakers, revivalists, and exploiters of rustic ribaldry; the senseless feedings of he gentry. In the background broods fear: not only a boy's apprehension of -hosts, African superstitions, and the terrors of the night, nor the adults' dread of black insurrection, but the endless implicated strands of robbery, floggings, drowning, and murder. Death by violence lurks at every bend of road or river. Self-preservation becomes the ruling motive, squaring perfectly with the role of the principal characters, Huck the foot-loose orphan and his friend Jim the fugitive--puny in all strengths save loyalty, as they wander among the boots of white adult supremacy. The pair belongs to the immortals of fiction.
"Never keen at self-criticism, Mark Twain passed without soundings from these depths to the adjacent shallows of burlesque and extravaganza. The last fifth of this superb novel, Huckleberry Finn, brings back the romantic Tom Sawyer, with a hilarious, intricate, and needless plot for rescuing Jim from captivity. The story thus closes upon the farcical note with which the Han-nibal cycle has begun, in the whitewashing episode. On the same note many years later Mark Twain tried to revive his most famous characters, in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), with Tom, Huck, and Jim as passengers of a mad balloonist and their subsequent adventures in Egypt. Though inferior to its great predecessors, this book does not lack humor, gusto, and rich character-ization. Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn M. Prosveshcheniye 1986 pp.13, 26, 78, 134, 145, 149 dishes up a melodrama of stolen dia-monds, double-crossing thieves, and that immortal device of Plaits and Shakespeare, identical twins, whose charm custom could not stale for Mark Twain. Here haste artifice, and creative fatigue grow painfully apparent.
Uneven quality appears in even though it came at the high tide of his powers. Chapters IV-XVII was written for the Atlantic after Twain's chance reminiscences led his friend twitchily to exclaim, "What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!" Fresh, vivid, humorous, they recall the great days of river traffic: the problems of navigation, the races, the pilots' association, the resourcefulness and glory of the old-time pilot. The addenda, which came after Twain's return to the river for "copy," sometimes attain the former standard--the description of Pilot Brown the scold, or the account of the Pennsylvania disaster and Henry Clemens' death--but more prove disappointing after the white heat of the book's inception. The two chapters on the history of the river are merely an afterthought; the later ones too often wander among irrelevant yarns, like the revenge of the Austrian, or vignettes of picturesque New Orleans. Sam Clemens' and a half as cub pilot are followed by almost no mention of his two years as a licensed skipper. Instead we are treated to such vagaries as Twain's famous theory about Sir Walter Scott, whose "Middle-Age sham civilization» he claimed, inspired the chivalry of the Old South, which in turn provoked the Civil War.
Yet with all its flaws of disunity and untidiness, Life on the remains a masterpiece. Its communicable delight in experience, its of the human comedy and tragedy on the river (which Melville alone among great artists had tried to bring into focus in The Confidence Man in 1857) lend it real durability. Howeils believed that the author long regarded it his greatest book -- pleased with assurance to that effect from the German Kaiser and also from a hotel porter, whose praise he accepted with equal satisfaction. In other moods, toward the end of his life, Twain favored Joan of Arc, in part because it cost him "twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation, & got none." Thus again he displayed the blindness of self-appraisal. The book that required probably least effort of all, drawn from a brimming native reservoir, Huckleberry Finn, unquestionably is his finest, with Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi as runners-up.
7.2 Later years of Mark Twain
Mark Twain's later years show a drift toward the remote in time and place, in a fitful quest for new themes, new magic--a search that proceeded apace with a growing sense of personal dissatisfaction, frustration, and heartbreak. While the aging artist began to lose much of his creative fire, Clemens the generous, erratic, moody, and vulnerable human being remained, standing at bay against the disillusions and disasters that gathered to ring him around and mock his fame as the world humorist of the century. The development of this last phase is worth tracing.
From recollections of his Hannibal boyhood he gravitated toward a new but distinctly artificial romanticism, "the pageant and fairy-tale" of lire 1° medieval Europe. His earliest treatment of the theme is, The Prince and the Pauper (i88i),history mainly for children, built upon the old plot to taffy. Here to a degree, and still more in Connecticut Yard in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Personal Recollections of Joan of An (1896), the romantic's fascination with knights and castles is counterbalance by the iconoclast's itch to shatter that world of sham and injustice, w crown and miter lorded it over the commons. The savage indignation w Twain so loved to unleash found hunting that gratified him: the prey some resemblance to the contemporary, without committing him to the consequences of a frontal attack upon modern authoritarianism, convention, and orthodoxy. A Connecticut Yankee, best of the cycle, shows just such an ingenious mechanic as Clemens must often have met on visits to the Hartford shops of Pratt & Whitney, a Yankee who is swept back in time to Camelot. With one hand he transforms Arthurian England into a going concern of steam and electricity; with the other, seeks to plant the seeds of equalitarian-ism. He remarks that in feudal society six men out of a thousand cracks the whip over their fellows' backs: "It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal." This passage, as the late President Roosevelt testified, furnished the most memorable phrase in modern American government. The Connecticut Yankee asserts that the mass of a nation can always produce "the material in abundance whereby to govern itself." Yet the medieval mob is shown collectively to be gullible, vicious, invincibly ignorant, like the populace of Hannibal or Hartford, so that the Yankee sets up not a true democracy but a benign dictatorship centering in himself and his mechanical skills--a kind of technocrat's Utopia. Dazzled by the wonders of applied science, Mark Twain always hoped for social as well as technological miracles from the dynamo.
Twain's apotheosis of the Virgin--in terms of Henry Adams' dilemma-- of spiritual forces in conflict with materialism and the stupid cruelty of organized society, appears in Joan of Arc. The Maid was his favorite character in history. But as Twain's imagination is better thankless knowledge of medieval life, the result at best is a tour de force.
Joan anonymously, in hope of giving this book a head start the-world had come synonymous with comedy. Indeed, most people continued to hail with uproarious mirth Mark Twain's explosive attacks upon power politics, imperialism, malefactors of great wealth, hypocrisy in morals and religion, and other manifestations of what he increasingly came to call "the damned human race." They refused to forget "The Celebrated Jumping Frog," or his reputation for convulsing any crowd whenever his mouth was opened. Meanwhile, as the satirist gained upper hand over the humorist in his nature, and age diminished his ebullience, Mark Twain not only earnest vainly for a serious nearing also came role of platform zany.
Lecturing, however, became a need more urgent than ever. For, beginning with the Panic of 1893, the tide of Mark Twain's luck suddenly changed. The famous writer, with ample cash in hand and enviable royalties rolling in, still vigorous in health and self-confidence, the adoring husband and beloved anther of three charming daughters--this self-made "jour" printer and river-Dustman whom the world delighted to honor--upon him fortune suddenly began to rain The first losses were financial. The Paige typesetting machine, brain child of an erratic inventor who came close to anticipating the fabulous success of Merge talker's linotype, failed after years of costly maintenance from Clemens1 pocket; instead of making millions, he lost hundreds of thousands. Then the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster (named for the son-in-law of Mark's sister, but backed by the author himself through suspicion of the big commercial publishers) crashed into bankruptcy. Twain's new friend Henry H. Rogers, Standard Oil magnate and by the lights of the muckraking age a robber baron, advised him that the ethics of literature were higher than those of business, and "you must earn the cent per cent." Mark's own conscience fully acquiesced. Even though his old exuberant energy was flagging, he set out in 1895 on a world lecture tour, after giving a statement to the press:
The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who has given up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start free again for himself. But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than 100 cents on the cellular and its debts never outlaw.
The profits, together with royalties and the astute management of Mr. Rogers, eventually enabled him to pay the last dollar to these creditors and add an American parallel to the case of Sir Walter Scott.
Twain's last notable book about American life, Muttonhead Wilson (1894), written on the brink of financial disaster but before the onset of deeper tragedies, is about a nonconformist who is too witty and wise for the backwoods community where his days are spent; miscalled "Muttonhead," he at last wins recognition by solving a murder mystery through his hobby of fingerprints. In so doing he also unravels a case of transposed identities for which the Regress Proxy--a character of magnificent vigor and realism--had been responsible. The novel is a daring, though inconclusive, study of miscegenation. Significant of Mark Twain's growing pessimism are the cynical chapter mottoes ascribed "Calendar," such as: "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." Or, still more typical to the aging Twain; "Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life » Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn M. Prosveshcheniye 1986 pp.13, 26, 78, 134, 145, 149knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great * factor of our race. He brought death into the world."
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