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Mark Twain
By Willa Cather
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If there is anything which should make an American sick
and disgusted at the literary taste of his country, and almost
swerve his allegiance to his flag it is that controversy
between Mark Twain and Max ORell, in which the Frenchman
proves himself a wit and a gentleman and the American
shows himself little short of a clown and an all around tough.
The squabble arose apropos of Paul Bourgets new book on
America, Outre Mer, a book which deals more fairly and
generously with this country than any book yet written in a
foreign tongue. Mr. Clemens did not like the book, and like
all men of his class, and limited mentality, he cannot criticise
without becoming personal and insulting. He cannot be
scathing without being a blackguard. He tried to demolish a
serious and well considered work by publishing a scurrilous,
slangy and loosely written article about it. In this article Mr.
Clemens proves very little against Mr. Bourget and a very
great deal against himself. He demonstrates clearly that he is
neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters and very little of
a gentleman. His ignorance of French literature is something
appalling. Why, in these days it is as necessary for a literary
man to have a wide knowledge of the French masterpieces as
it is for him to have read Shakespeare or the Bible. What man
who pretends to be an author can afford to neglect those
models of style and composition. George Meredith, Thomas
Hardy and Henry James excepted, the great living novelists
are Frenchmen.
Mr. Clemens asks what the French sensualists can possibly
teach the great American people about novel writing or morality?
Well, it would not seriously hurt the art of the classic
author of Puddin Head Wilson to study Daudet, De Maupassant,
Hugo and George Sand, whatever it might do to his
morals. Mark Twain is a humorist of a kind. His humor is
always rather broad, so broad that the polite world can justly
call it coarse. He is not a reader nor a thinker nor a man who
loves art of any kind. He is a clever Yankee who has made a
good thing out of writing. He has been published in the
North American Review and in the Century, but he is not
and never will be a part of literature. The association and
companionship of cultured men has given Mark Twain a sort
of professional veneer, but it could not give him fine instincts
or nice discriminations or elevated tastes. His works are pure
and suitable for children, just as the work of most shallow and
mediocre fellows. House dogs and donkeys make the most
harmless and chaste companions for young innocence in the
world. Mark Twains humor is of the kind that teamsters use
in bantering with each other, and his laugh is the gruff haw-haw
of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward,
good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands on the river
steamer and chewed uncured tobacco when he was three years
old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a
man of letters. It is an unfortunate feature of American literature
that a hostler with some natural cleverness and a great
deal of assertion receives the same recognition as a standard
American author that a man like Lowell does. The French
academy is a good thing after all. It at least divides the sheep
from the goats and gives a sheep the consolation of knowing
that he is a sheep.
It is rather a pity that Paul Bourget should have written
Outre Mer, thoroughly creditable book though it is. Mr.
Bourget is a novelist, and he should not content himself with
being an essayist, there are far too many of them in the world
already. He can develop strong characters, invent strong situations,
he can write the truth and he should not drift into
penning opinions and platitudes. When God has made a man
a creator, it is a great mistake for him to turn critic. It is
rather an insult to God and certainly a very great wrong to
man.
Nebraska State Journal, May 5, 1895
I got a letter last week from a little boy just half-past seven
who had just read Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
He said: If there are any more books like them in the world,
send them to me quick. I had to humbly confess to him that
if there were any others I had not the good fortune to know
of them. What a red-letter-day it is to a boy, the day he first
opens Tom Sawyer. I would rather sail on the raft down the
Missouri again with Huck Finn and Jim than go down the
Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in May. Certainly
Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his Missouri
boys than when he makes sickley romances about Joan
of Arc. And certainly he never did a better piece of work than
Prince and Pauper. One seems to get at the very heart of old
England in that dearest of childrens books, and in its pages
the frail boy king, and his gloomy sister Mary who in her day
wrought so much woe for unhappy England, and the dashing
Princess Elizabeth who lived to rule so well, seem to live
again. A friend of Mr. Clemens once told me that he said he
wrote that book so that when his little daughters grew up
they might know that their tired old jester of a father could be
serious and gentle sometimes.
The Home Monthly, May 1897
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