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The name of Mark Twain stands for American humour. More than that of any other writer, more than all names together, his name conveys the idea of American humour. For two generations his reputation and his fame have been carried all over the world with this connotation. He has become, as it were, an idea, a sort of abstraction, comparable to John Bull who represents England, or Sherlock Holmes who signifies an inexorable chain of logic.

The name, as all the world knows, is only a pen-name, selected after the conceited fashion of the day and taken from the river-calls of the Mississippi pilots. But its apt and easy sound rapidly obliterated the clumsy name of the writer who wore it. Samuel Langhorne Clemens died to the world, or rather, never lived for it. ‘Mark Twain’ became a household word for millions and came to signify not merely a particular person but an idea. Thus, side by side with Mr. Clemens, who is dead, there grew an imaginary person, Mark Twain, who became a legend and is living still.

American humour rose on the horizon of the nineteenth century as one of the undisputed national products of the new republic. Of American literature there was much doubt in Europe; of American honesty, much more; of American manners, more still. But American humour found a place alongside of German philosophy, Italian music, French wine, and British banking. No one denied its peculiar excellence and its distinctive national stamp.

Now Mark Twain did not create American humour nor the peculiar philosophy of life on which it rests. Before him were the Major Dowlings and the Sam Slicks, and in his own day the Petroleum Nasebys and the Orpheus C. Kerrs and others now resting as quietly as they do. But in the retrospect of retreating years nearly all the work of these sinks into insignificant dreariness or into a mere juggle of words, cheap and ephemeral. The name of only one contemporary, Artemus Ward, may be set in a higher light. Yet all that Ward ever wrote in words, as apart from his quaint and pathetic personality, is but a fragment. If Mark Twain did not create American humour, he at least took it over and made something of it. He did for it what Shakespeare did for the English drama, and what Milton did for Hell. He ‘put it on the map.’ He shaped it into a form of thought, a way of looking at things, and hence a mode or kind of literature.

Not that Mark Twain did all this consciously. A deliberate humorist, seeking his effect, is as tiresome as a conscientious clown working by the week. His humour lay in his point of view, his angle of vision and the truth with which he conveyed it. This often enabled people quite suddenly to see things as they are, and not as they had supposed them to be—a process which creates the peculiar sense of personal triumph which we call humour. The savage shout of exultation modified down to our gurgling laugh greets the overthrow of the thing as it was. Mark Twain achieved this effect not by trying to be funny, but by trying to tell the truth. No one really knew what the German Kaiser was like till Mark Twain dined with him. No one really saw the painted works of the old masters till Mark Twain took a look at them. The absurd multiplicity of the saints was never appreciated till Mark Twain counted them by the gross. The futility of making Egyptian mummies was never realized till he measured them by the cord as firewood. People who had tried in vain to rise to the dummy figures and the sentimental unreality of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King got set straight on chivalry and all its works when they read The Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. ‘The boys went grailing,’ says the Yankee, in reference to the pursuit of the Holy Grail by the Knights of the Round Table. ‘The boys went grailing.’ Why not?

Readers who had tried in vain to feel impressed and reverent over Tennyson’s impossible creations felt an infinite relief in seeing them reduced to this familiar footing. Thus in a score of books and in a thousand of anecdotes and phrases there was conveyed to the world something and somebody which it knew as Mark Twain.

All the rest of the man, the other aspects of his mind and personality, was left out of count. The flaming enthusiasms, the fierce elemental passion against tyranny, against monarchy, against hell, against the God of the Bible—all this was, and is, either unknown or forgotten. It has to be. The composite picture, filled in line by line, would leave a new person to be called Samuel L. Clemens. The ‘Mark Twain’ of the legend would crumble into dust.

In any case, Mark Twain only half-expressed himself. Of the things nearest to his mind he spoke but low or spoke not at all. He would have liked to curse England for the Boer War, to curse America for the Philippine conquest, to curse the Roman Catholic Church for its past, and the Czar of Russia for his present. Instinct told him that had he done so, the Mark Twain legend that had filled the world would pass away. The kindly humorist, with a corn-cob pipe would also be a rebel, an atheist, an anti-clerical.

So it was that Mark Twain’s nearest and dearest thoughts were spoken only in a murmur, and the world laughed, thinking this some new absurdity; or were left unspoken, and the world never knew; or were published after he was dead, when no one could catch him. The kindly conspiracy was played out to the end.

It is better that it should be so. It leaves the legendary Mark Twain and his work and his humour as one of the great things of nineteenth-century America.

American he certainly was. He had the advantage, or disadvantage, of being brought up solely in his own country, remote from its coasts, with no contact with the outside world, in the days when America was still America. He lived, and died, before the motion picture had flickered the whole world with similarity, and before rapid transport had enabled every country to live on the tourists of all the others. His childhood was spent in an isolation from the outside world now beyond all conception. Nor was the isolation much relieved by mental contact. Like Shakespeare and Dickens, young Sam Clemens had little school and no college. He thus acquired that peculiar sharpness of mind which comes from not going to school, and that power of independent thought obtained by not entering college. It was this youthful setting which enabled him to become what he was.

Here are some of the essential facts about his early life which need to be mentioned even in a biography.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on the thirtieth of November in 1835 in a frontier settlement which he himself called the ‘almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri.’ His father and mother were people as impoverished and as undistinguished as one could wish. Both came of plain pioneer stock, the father originally from Virginia, the mother from Kentucky. Mark Twain’s father, John Clemens, seems to have been a kindly but shiftless person, succeeding at nothing, but dreaming always of a wonderful future. At intervals in an impoverished youth he had picked up an education and for a time attended a frontier law school. But he turned his hand to store-keeping, to house-building, to anything; and his mind to dreaming. He and his wife Jane went and settled in the mountain wilderness of East Tennessee. The older brothers and sisters of the family, ‘the first crop of children,’ were born there. Then John Clemens, with the restlessness of the frontiersman, moved from one habitat to another, and presently passed on to the new State of Missouri just beginning its existence. But he had meantime managed to raise four hundred dollars and with it to buy a vast tract of land, of about a hundred thousand acres. For the rest of his life the elder Clemens was inspired by visions of his Tennessee land and what it would mean for the future of his descendants. These dreams he passed on to his descendants as their chief legacy.

The Tennessee land contained great forests of yellow pine, beds of oil, deposits of coal and iron and copper, an El Dorado of wealth as we see it now. But in those days the timber was unsaleable for lack of transport, coal was unusable, and petroleum a mere curiosity of the marshes. Yet Clemens managed, with a wrench, to pay his five dollars a year in taxes, and dreamed of wealth to come. After his death the land was muddled away and parted with for next to nothing, till the last ten thousand acres were sold in 1894 for two hundred dollars. But the inspiration of the Tennessee land served as the background of The Gilded Age and helped to fashion the cheery optimism of Colonel Sellers; converted into literature and the drama it earned a fortune.

Side by side with the legend of the Tennessee land and the golden future still to come went another family legend, a very frequent one with impoverished families of unknown origin in America. This was the tradition of noble descent from a collateral branch of a great English family. Mark Twain’s mother, being a Lampton of Kentucky, could be converted by the mere change of a letter into a Lambton of the noble family of the earldom of Durham. The Clemenses, with a similar twist, could descend from or ascend to Geoffrey Clement, the regicide judge of Oliver Cromwell’s day. But there is no need to linger over the Clemenses’ claim to noble birth. It is shared by all of us in North America who can give no exact account of our remote origin. At any rate it served, along with the Tennessee dream, as the basis of the story to be called The American Claimant.

The Clemens family left the log village of Florida when little Sam was not yet four years old (1839). But his connection with the locality did not end there. An uncle and aunt and cousins lived on a farm about four miles from Florida, and he spent some part of every year there till he was twelve years old. Many of his most vital impressions and many of his fondest recollections centred around this Missouri farm. Even in old age he could recall ‘the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smell, the faint odours of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of wood-peckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest.’ Beyond the woods again was ‘the prairie and its loneliness and peace with a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky.’

From the setting and surrounding of this farm of his uncle was drawn much of Mark Twain’s literary inspiration. Here was ‘Uncle Daniel,’ a middle-aged negro slave, converted later into ‘Nigger Jim’ of Huckleberry Finn. Indeed the whole farm, as Mark Twain himself explains in his autobiography, was adopted into the story; his uncle, John Quarles, becomes ‘Silas Phelps,’ and the farm is moved, uncle, aunt and all, down to Arkansas. ‘It was all of six hundred miles,’ he tells us proudly, ‘but it was no trouble. It was not a very large farm—five hundred acres, perhaps—but I could have done it if it had been twice as large.’

Note how typical of Mark Twain’s humour, on its mechanical side, is this wilful confusion between the form of words and the facts conveyed.

But though the Missouri farm supplied many of his fondest recollections in later life, the real boyhood home of Sam Clemens was the little town of Hannibal on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. It was a ‘steamboat town,’ half-asleep and half-awake, with slavery drudging in the sunlit streets, and manufacture trying to start into life, and with the great river and the river steamers as its glory.

Here John Clemens settled as a ‘merchant,’ that is, kept store, with a random pursuit of the law. His election (as in Florida) to be a local justice of the peace kept alive his title of ‘judge.’ But the circumstances of the family drifted and oscillated between a respectable competence and poverty, till the untimely death of the judge made poverty an anchorage.

Hannibal was a slave town in a slave state, with the daily sight and use and custom of slavery as a part and parcel of its life accepted and unquestioned. This was before the time when the soil was torn and riven with the Kansas-Nebraska quarrel, and before yet the ground trembled with the approaching conflict. The aspect of slavery was as familiar to that generation as the aspect of slums and pauperism to the generation that followed it. And it passed with as little protest. It was part of life as people knew it, and it drew its sanction, or at least its apology, from the fact that it was there.

It was scarcely possible for an unschooled boy of a Missouri village to surpass in outlook the people among whom he lived. Mark Twain himself has told later in his autobiography, in a chapter written in the middle ’nineties, how ‘natural’ slavery had seemed fifty years before.

‘In my school days,’ he writes, ‘I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.’

Yet he never liked slavery, never accepted it. It ran counter to the simple principles of right and wrong, of equality and fairness, on which his mentality was based. Mark Twain always tried to think in elementary terms, to reduce everything to a plain elementary form and to judge it so. By this process much of his humour was formed, and all of his philosophy. He knew nothing of relativity, of things right in one place and wrong in another, righteous in one day and wicked in another. Into such a code slavery could not be made to fit.

Not that Mark Twain ever came out as a champion or a protagonist against slavery. He never came out as a champion or protagonist against anything—or never for long. The mental fatigue of being a champion was contrary to the spirit of his genius. There are in his books none of the fierce diatribes of Charles Dickens against the ‘American institution.’ But he grew to dislike it, and then to hate even the memory of it, and the references to it in his books are all the more scathing from this matter-of-fact realism.

Readers of Huckleberry Finn will recall the passage where Huck is accounting for his turning up at the Arkansas farm.

‘It was the grounding of the steamer,’ he explains to Aunt Sally, ‘that kept us back. We blowed out a cylinder head.’

‘Good gracious, anybody hurt?’

‘No’m. Killed a nigger.’

‘Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.’

Pages of argument and volumes of history could not say more than this.

But the real feature of the life of little Sam Clemens and his playmates and fellow-citizens in Hannibal was the Mississippi River. It flowed past the town in a majestic stream, a mile wide from Missouri to the Illinois shore, coming from the unknown wilderness of the North and moving on to the infinite distance of the Gulf of Mexico. What the sea is to the English children of the Channel coast, the Mississippi was to the children of the river towns of the Middle West.

These were the great days of the river. The railroad was still unknown in the West, the high-road non-existent, the motor-car and the aeroplane mere dreams of the scientist. Transport was all by water, and on the Mississippi and its great tributaries there was developed a system of passenger steamboat navigation, unique in all the world. Mark Twain himself has described in numberless passages in his Life on the Mississippi and in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn the glories of the Mississippi steamboat.

Till his father died, little Samuel Langhorne Clemens lived in Hannibal somewhere between affluence and poverty, unaware of either. He had his full share of the careless happiness of childhood, and the fine, free adventure of boyhood on the frontier. There was the river, and the islands, the forests beyond, and above all, the great cave under the river bluff below the town. Sam Clemens was Tom Sawyer, and the adventurous fun of his childhood has passed into the world’s literature.

Of education he had but little. Till he was twelve years old he attended school in his native town. He learned to ‘read and write and cipher,’ as the phrase was, with a little elementary geography and history. Beyond that, nothing. High school he never saw; college he never knew. Nearly all that he acquired he picked up for himself. He seems to have carried in himself a native desire for information, in particular for facts and figures, which was perhaps increased and strengthened by the early cessation of his schooling. In the preface to one of his books (Roughing It), he tells us that ‘information stewed out of him naturally like the precious attar of roses from the otter.’ This may or may not have been true. But, at any rate, information all through his life ‘stewed into him.’ He was fond of facts and figures, guide-books and statistics. He liked to calculate how many feet and inches there would be in a ‘light year,’ and such things as that.

There seem, indeed, to be two distinct means by which a man of native genius may succeed in life. The one is by receiving a sound and complete education; the other by not getting any at all. It is likely that if Mark Twain had attended college and learned to rehearse the wisdom of other men and to repeat the standardized judgments of the past, he would have been badly damaged by the process. It is the crowning triumph of his life that Oxford in his old age should have awarded him its honorary degree, doctor of literature. But if he had ever earned and received its B.A., it would probably have knocked all the ‘Mark Twain’ out of him.

When John Clemens died, school ended for his son and work began. He had a brother, Orion Clemens, ten years older than himself, who had already taken up the trade of a printer. Sam followed his example, became a printer’s apprentice ‘for his board and clothes,’ and for ten years—from 1847 till 1857—followed the trade. As far as the record goes, these seem to be the dreariest and least significant years of his life. He worked at first as an apprentice in his home town, then assisted his brother Orion (in 1850), in getting out a sheet called the Hannibal Journal. He even contributed two sketches to the Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia; they were accepted without pay and never identified. In 1853 he set out to see the world, printing as he saw it; worked on the Evening News in St. Louis; then visited New York and Philadelphia, working in both places; and so after two years back to join his brother in Keokuk (Iowa), printing still.

There is but little surviving intimate account of this youthful period of Mark Twain’s life. A few letters sent to his family from New York and elsewhere have been preserved. They seem to differ in nothing from any other letters written by any young man who had come to New York from the Far West and describes to the home folk such marvels of the Latting Observatory, ‘height about 280 feet,’ and the Croton Aqueduct, ‘which could supply every family in New York with a hundred barrels of water a day.’ Among such touches of rustic wonder one looks in vain for the signs of emerging genius. Yet at least they reflect industrious days of hard work at the printer’s case, and long evenings spent in devouring books from the free printers’ library. Meantime he is saving up money so that he may take his mother for a trip to Kentucky next spring. ‘Tell ma,’ he writes, ‘that my promises are faithfully kept.’ The ‘promises’ referred to a pledge which his mother had imposed, one might say inflicted, on him in the formula, ‘I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone.’

Thus early in Mark Twain’s life there entered a conflict between his natural ideas of conduct and belief and the pietistic code which he accepted from those he loved—his mother, his wife, his domestic circle. This conflict has been called by one of his most interesting critics the ‘ordeal’ of his life. It never left him, and he carried it, so to speak, beyond the grave in the works that he wrote for publication when he should be dead. Mark Twain never really believed in the creed and the code of those who dictated to him. But he preferred, as it were, to accept it and then to rebel against it. His was that characteristic American attitude, at least for the America of his day, of alternating between prayer and profanity, emotional belief and iconoclastic denial, asceticism and a spree, hard work and a bust, cold water and raw rum—with nowhere a happy medium, an accepted path and way. Out of this national phase of development has sprung much of the legislation of the United States, and most of the worst of it. Mark Twain was in this, as in all else, a true American.

The sturdy and robust intelligence of young Sam Clemens need not have fortified itself with an oath against the temptations of a king on cardboard. On the other hand, the fact remains that young Sam Clemens the printer lived straight and worked hard, and kept adding every day to his knowledge of the Croton Aqueduct and the Latting Observatory. No doubt he was not very distinguishable from other young printers also not ‘throwing’ a card. Jumping on and off the water waggon, getting religion and losing it, swearing off cards and swearing on again, are favourite American performances, unknown to older and duller civilizations.

But the printer’s trade was not destined to claim young Sam Clemens as its own, nor the cities of the East to contain his spirit. There seems to have been in him a certain restlessness calling him afar. As nearly as the boy could interpret it, the call was for South America—at that time a vague, almost fabulous land of gold-mines and revolutions. To get to the Amazon—his proposed destination—he left his job at Cincinnati (whither he had wandered again from Keokuk) and took ship on the river steamer Paul Jones, which brought him as far as New Orleans. Beyond that, fortune showed no means of attaining the Amazon. But in return it threw in his way, as he wandered about the levee and the wharves of New Orleans, an opportunity that he had coveted in vain for years—the chance to become a pilot’s apprentice on the great river. With that the first period of Mark Twain’s career—his servitude as a printer—came to an end, and gave place to the open life of the river and the Far West that was to fashion his genius and inspire his thought.