Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 28

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There are three Mark Twains: there is Mark Twain, the droll comedian, who wrote for the masses and made them laugh; there is Mark Twain, the indignant protester, who arose ever and anon to true eloquence in his denunciation of tyranny and pretense; and there is Mark Twain, the romancer, who in his boyhood had dreamed by the great river and who later caught the romance of a period in American life. The masterpiece of the first is The Jumping Frog, of the second The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, and of the third Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It.

It is this third Mark Twain that still lives and that will continue to live in American literature. He saw with distinctness a unique area of American life. As the brief and picturesque era faded away he caught the sunset glory of it and embodied it in romance—the steamboat days on the river in the slavery era, the old régime in the South, the barbarism of the Plains, the great buffalo herds, the wild camps in the gold fields of Nevada and California. In half a dozen books: Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded Age (a few chapters of it), Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson, he has done work that can never be done again. The world that these books depict has vanished as completely as the Bagdad of Haroun al Raschid. Not only has he told the story of this vanished world, illustrating it with descriptions and characterizations that are like Flemish portraits, but he has caught and held the spirit of it, and he has thrown over it all the nameless glow of romance. It is as golden a land that he leads us through as any we may find in Scott, and yet it was drawn from the life with painstaking care. Scott and Bulwer and Cooper angered Mark Twain. They were careless of facts, they were sentimental, they misinterpreted the spirit of the times they depicted and the men and women who lived in them, but these six books of Mark Twain may be placed among the source books of American history. Nowhere else can one catch so truly certain phases of the spirit of the mid-nineteenth century West. Over every page of them may be written those words from the preface of The Innocents Abroad, "I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not."

The books are six chapters of autobiography. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are recollections of that boyhood by the river after so long a time had elapsed that the day-dreams and boyish imaginings were recorded as real happenings; Life on the Mississippi records that romantic adventure of his young manhood as he recalled it in later days when the old piloting era had vanished like a dream of boyhood; The Gilded Age, a book of glorious fragments, has in it his uncle James Lampton drawn from life and renamed Colonel Sellers; Roughing It bubbles over with the joy and the high spirits and the excitement of those marvelous days when the author and the West were young together; and Pudd'nhead Wilson gives the tragedy of slavery as it passed before his boyish eyes. These books and The Innocents Abroad are Mark Twain's contribution to the library of American classics. The rest of his enormously large output, despite brilliant passages here and there, does not greatly matter.

They are not artistic books. The author had little skill in construction. He excelled in brilliant dashes, not in long-continued effort. He was his own Colonel Sellers, restless, idealistic, Quixotic. What he did he did with his whole soul without restraint or sense of proportion. There is in all he wrote a lack of refinement, kept at a minimum, to be sure, by his wife, who for years was his editor and severest critic, but likely at any moment to crop out. His books, all of them, are monotones, a running series of episodes and descriptions all of the same value, never reaching dramatic climax. The episodes themselves, however, are told with graphic intensity; some of them are gems well-nigh perfect. Here is a picture of the famous pony express of the Plains:

The pony-rider was usually a little bit of a man, brimful of spirit and endurance. No matter what time of the day or night his watch came on, and no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting, or whether his "beat" was a level straight road or a crazy trail over mountain crags and precipices, or whether it led through peaceful regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind. He rode fifty miles without stopping, by daylight, moonlight, starlight, or through the blackness of darkness—just as it happened. He rode a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman; kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mailbag was made in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the spectator could hardly get the ghost of a look.

We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that had passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along every moment, and we would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims:

"Here he comes!"

Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling—sweeping toward us nearer and nearer—growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined—nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm.

The steamboat race and the explosion in chapter four of The Gilded Age have few equals in any language for mere picturing power. He deals largely with the out-of-doors. His canvases are bounded only by the horizon: the Mississippi, the great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, Mono Lake, the Alkali Deserts, and the Sierras—he has handled a continent. Only Joaquin Miller and John Muir have used canvases as vast. Huckleberry Finn's floating journey down the river on his raft has in it something of the spirit of The Odyssey and Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote. Had Mark Twain's constructive skill and his ability to trace the growth of a human soul been equal to his picturing power, his Defoe-like command of detail and situation, and his mastery of phrase and of narrative, he might have said the last word in American fiction. He was a product of his section and of his education. College and university would have made of him an artist like Holmes, brilliant, refined, and messageless. It would have robbed him of the very fountain-head of his power. It was his to work not from books but from life itself, to teach truth and genuineness of life, to turn the eyes of America from the romance of Europe to her own romantic past.