Mark Twain and the West

Abstract

0 OTHER writer took so active part in American life in the last N century as did Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the most famous pen name in the world, certainly since Voltaire. His life makes the careers of literary men in Boston and Concord and New York resemble the flowering of talents that blossomed in too retired shade-to borrow phrase from one of the most cloistered, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mark Twain knew the greatest river of the continent as Melville knew the high seas. He saw the epic of America, the westward tide at its full, with vision keener than the shallow appraisals of Bret Harte or Joaquin Miller. When in his Autobiography Mark Twain recalls after forty years the tragedy of an emigrant lad stabbed to death by drunken comrade, and adds, I saw the red life gush from his breast, we are reminded of Whitman's affirmation, I was there-with the difference that Walt's immediacy was imaginative, Mark's actual. Also in old age, Mark let fall the mysterious remark that he had once bought revolver and traveled twelve hundred miles with the grim intention of killing man; it is almost certain that he was once, quite briefly, in jail. Can we imagine James Russell Lowell anywhere near the boiling point of homicide, or Henry Longfellow, however fleetingly, behind the bars? Here, in Mark Twain-from youth to old age-an enormous and turbulent variety of experience was gathered and compressed. Here was no Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., or Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. In old age his incurably Calvinist mind saw all the events of his life, from birth on November 30, i835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, as chain of causation forged by some power outside his will. Like his Connecticut Yankee, Mark was led to reflect upon the whole sequence of the race, a procession of ancestors that stretches back billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or