Mark Twain: The Complete Novels + A Biography of the Author E-Book

Mark Twain

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels of Mark Twain in the chronological order of their original publication:- The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer- The Prince and the Pauper- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court- The American Claimant- Tom Sawyer Abroad- The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson- Tom Sawyer, Detective- Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc- A Double Barrelled Detective Story- A Horse's Tale- The Mysterious Stranger

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Mark Twain

THE COMPLETE NOVELS

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Table of Contents

Mark Twain — An Extensive Biography

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Prince and the Pauper

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

The American Claimant

Tom Sawyer Abroad

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson

Tom Sawyer, Detective

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

A Double Barrelled Detective Story

A Horse’s Tale

The Mysterious Stranger

Mark Twain — An Extensive Biography

by Archibald Henderson

Chapter 1 — Introductory

Chapter 2 — The Man

Chapter 3 — The Humorist

Chapter 4 — The World-Famed Genius

Chapter 5 — Philosopher, Moralist, Sociologist

Chapter 1 — Introductory

In the past, the attitude of the average American toward Mark Twain has been most characteristically expressed in a sort of complacent and chuckling satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that America, the colossal, had produced a superman of humour. The national vanity was touched when the nations of the world rocked and roared with laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of the funny man from the “Wild and Woolly West.” Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an international comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world. It would be a mis-statement to affirm that the works of Mark Twain were reckoned as falling within the charmed circle of “Literature.” They were not reckoned in connexion with literature at all.

The fingers of one hand number those who realized in Mark Twain one of the supreme geniuses of our age. Even in the event of his death, when the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown emptily wide, there is room for grave doubt whether a realization of the unique and incomparable position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters has fully dawned upon the American consciousness. The literatures of England and Europe do not posit an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as the work of Mark Twain. It is for American criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic, and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain is the work of a great artist. It would be absurd to maintain that Mark Twain’s appeal to posterity depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It would be absurd to deny that upon America rests the task of demonstrating, to a world willing enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one of the supreme and imperishable glories of American literature.

At any given moment in history, the number of living writers to whom can be attributed what a Frenchman would call mondial éclat is surprisingly few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard Kipling, with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for himself the unquestioned title of militant spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has suffered eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard Shaw has a fame more world-wide than that of any other literary figure in the British Isles. His dramas are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from Buda-Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg, from Berlin to Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola, Ibsen, and Tolstoy constituted the literary hierarchy of the world — according to popular verdict. Since Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy exerts unchallenged the profoundest influence upon the thought and consciousness of the world. This is an influence streaming less from his works than from his life, less from his intellect than from his conscience. The literati bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to What is Art? The whole world pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy’s moral aspiration.

Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for the place of most widely read and most genuinely popular author in the world. In a sense not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts of the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is without a parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends many an inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression upon the upper strata of society; his legendary character, moreover, is perpetually standing in the light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy’s works are Russia’s greatest literary contribution to posterity; and yet his literary fame has suffered through his extravagant ideals, the magnificent futility of his inconsistency, and the almost maniacal mysticism of his unrealizable hopes.

If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more comprehensively popular appeal, it is doubtless because he makes use of the universal solvent of humour. That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks — a compact of good humour, robust sanity, and large-minded humanity — has diligently “gone about in near and distant places,” everywhere making warm and lifelong friends of folk of all nationalities who have never known Mark Twain in the flesh. The French have a way of speaking of an author’s public as if it were a select and limited segment of the conglomerate of readers; and in a country like France, with its innumerable literary cliques and sects, there is some reason for the phraseology. In reality, the author appeals to many different “publics” or classes of readers — in proportion to the many-sidedness of the reader’s human interests and the catholicity of his tastes. Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a boy to the power of the great human book, warm with the actuality of experience and the life-blood of the heart. By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral and vivifies the right principle for the youth to whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a “good example” and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the growing body of reformers in all countries who would remedy the ills of democratic government with the knife of publicity. The wisdom of human experience and of sagacious tolerance informing his books for the young, provokes the question whether these books are not more apposite to the tastes of experienced age than to the fancies of callow youth. The navvy may rejoice in Life on the Mississippi. Youth and age may share without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive naturalness of Huckleberry Finn. True lovers of adventure may revel in the masterly narrative of Tom Sawyer. The artist may bestow his critical meed of approval upon the beauty of Joan of Arc. The moralist may heartily validate the ethical lesson of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg. Anyone may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of laughter to the horse-play of Roughing It, the colossal extravagance of The Innocents Abroad, the irreverence and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in the spontaneity and refreshment of truth; spiritually co-operate in forthright condemnation of fraud, peculation, and sham; and breathe gladly the fresh and bracing air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom. The stevedore on the dock, the motor-man on the street car, the newsboy on the street, the river-man on the Mississippi — all speak with exuberant affection in memory of that quaint figure in his white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths of tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of silvery hair. In one day, as Mark Twain was fond of relating, an emperor and a portier vied with each other in tributes of admiration and esteem for this man and his works. It is Mark Twain’s imperishable glory, not simply that his name is the most familiar of that of any author who has lived in our own times, but that it is remembered with infinite and irrepressible zest.

“We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities, but as the man whom we knew and loved,” said Dr. Van Dyke in his Memorial Address. “We remember the realities which made his life worth while, the strong and natural manhood that was in him, the depth and tenderness of his affections, his laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long and faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing.

“Those who know the story of Mark Twain’s career know how bravely he faced hardships and misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the New Testament, to provide not only things honest, but things ‘honourable in the sight of all men.’

“Those who know the story of his friendships and his family life know that he was one who loved, much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and irrepressible humour which was his gift, there was a foundation of serious thoughts and noble affections and desires.

“Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humour means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world which must seem humorous even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible says: ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall hold them in derision.’ But the mark of this higher humour is that it does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.

“Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his humour was infallible; but we say without doubt that he used his gift, not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world’s false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world’s false witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories, coloured with his own experiences, he touched the absurdities of life with penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life’s realities. No one can say that he ever failed to reverence the purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the little children, of whom Christ said, ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven.’

“Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, happy in the fuller light.

“‘Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,

Death after life doth greatly please.’”

Chapter 2 — The Man

American literature, indeed I might say American life, can exhibit no example of supreme success from the humblest beginnings, so signal as the example of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the United States, as did Grant and Johnson. But assassination began for Lincoln an apotheosis which has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and adulation. Grant was one of the great failures in American public life; and Johnson, brilliant but unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting a progressive development, a deepening and broadening of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual powers from the beginning to the end of his career. From the standpoint of the man of letters, the evolution of Mark Twain from a journeyman printer to a great author, from a merry-andrew to a world-humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy navigator on the vast and uncharted seas of human experience, may be taken as symbolic of the romance of American life.

With a sort of mock-pride, Clemens referred at times to the ancestral glories of his house — the judge who condemned Charles I, and all those other notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed lustre upon the name of Clemens. Yet he claimed that he had not examined into these traditions, chiefly because “I was so busy polishing up this end of the line and trying to make it showy.” His mother, a “Lambton with a p,” of Kentucky, married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a man of determination and force, in Lexington, in 1823; but neither was endowed with means, and their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown, in the mountain solitudes of East Tennessee, they removed in 1829, much as Judge Hawkins is said to have done in The Gilded Age, settling at Florida, Missouri. Here was born, on November 30, 1835, a few months after their arrival, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he stated that he had increased by one per cent, the population of this village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby doing more than the best man in history had ever done for any other town.

Although weak and sickly, the child did not suffer from the hard life, and survived two other children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different times his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming to the rescue. He once asked his mother, after she had reached old age, if she hadn’t been uneasy about him. She admitted she had been uneasy about him the whole time. But when he inquired further if she was afraid he would not live, she answered after a reflective pause — as if thinking out the facts — that she had been afraid he would!

His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother of Samuel E. Moffett, the writer; and his brother Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was intimately associated with him in life and found a place in his writings.

In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the unpromising life of Florida and removed to Hannibal, Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a lawyer by profession, a merchant by vocation; after his removal to Hannibal he became a Justice of the Peace, an office he filled with all the dignity of a local autocrat. His forum was a “dingy” office, furnished with “a dry-goods box, three or four rude stools, and a puncheon bench.” The solemnity of his manner in administering the law won for him, among his neighbours, the title of Judge.

One need but recall the scenes in which Tom Sawyer was born and bred to realize in its actuality the model from which these scenes were drawn. “Sam was always a good-hearted boy,” his mother once remarked, “but he was a very wild and mischievous one, and, do what we would, we could never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much in the world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and sober-minded as they were.” At school, he “excelled only in spelling”; outside of school he was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn, mischievous and prankish, playing truant whenever the opportunity afforded. “Often his father would start him off to school,” his mother once said, “and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his whereabouts. There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and Sam would take his position behind that, and as his father went past would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight. Finally, his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn. But I never gave up. He was always a great boy for history, and could never get tired of that kind of reading; but he hadn’t any use for schoolhouses and text books.”

Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a “loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town.” Young Clemens accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his father was a slave-owner; and his mother’s wedding dowry consisted in part of two or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere man; like so many other slave-holders, he silently abhorred slavery. To his children, especially to Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however, a stern taskmaster. Mark Twain has described the terms on which he and his father lived as a sort of armed neutrality. If at times this neutrality was broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between them — his father doing the breaking and he the suffering! Sam claimed to be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy. But this modest estimate is subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to pry into the result — as it was of no consequence to any one but himself!

The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer, was one of Sam’s favourite haunts; and his first sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky Thatcher of Tom’s admiration. “Sam was always up to some mischief,” this lady once remarked in later life, when in reminiscential mood. “We attended Sunday-school together, and they had a system of rewards for saying verses after committing them to memory. A blue ticket was given for ten verses, a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red, and a Bible for ten yellow tickets. If you will count up, you will see it makes a Bible for ten thousand verses. Sam came up one day with his ten yellow tickets, and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but had just got them by trading with the boys. But he received his Bible with all the serious air of a diligent student!”

Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has never pretended that his success was due to any marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable industry, any innate energy and perseverance. I have good reason to recall his favourite theory, which he was fond of expounding, to the effect that circumstance is man’s master. He likened circumstance to the attraction of gravity; and declared that while it is man’s privilege to argue with circumstance, as it is the honourable privilege of the falling body to argue with the attraction of gravity, it does no good: man has to obey. Circumstance has as its working partner man’s temperament, his natural disposition. Temperament is not the creation of man, but an innate quality; over it he has no authority; for its acts he cannot be held responsible. It cannot be permanently changed or even modified. No power can keep it modified. For it is inherent and enduring, as unchanging as the lines upon the thumb or the conformation of the skull. Throughout his life, circumstance seemed like a watchful spirit, switching his temperament into those channels of experience and development leading unerringly to the career of the author.

The death of Judge Clemens was the first link in the long chain of circumstance — for his son was at once taken from school and apprenticed to the editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier. He was allowed the usual emolument of the office of apprentice, “board and clothes, but no money”; and even at that, though the board was paid, the clothes rarely materialized. Several weeks later his brother Orion returned to Hannibal, and in 1850 brought out a little paper called the Hannibal Journal. He took Sam out of the Courier office and engaged him for the Journal at $3,50 a week — though he was never able to pay a cent of the wages. One of Mark’s fellow-townsmen once confessed: “Yes, I knew him when he was a boy. He was a printer’s devil — I think that’s what they called him — and they didn’t miss it.” At a banquet some years ago, Mark Twain aptly described at length his experiences as a printer’s apprentice. There were a thousand and one menial services he was called upon to perform. If the subscribers paid at all, it was only sometimes — and then the town subscribers paid in groceries, the country subscribers in cabbages and cordwood. If they paid, they were puffed in the paper; and if the editor forgot to insert the puff, the subscriber stopped the paper! Every subscriber regarded himself as assistant editor, ex officio; gave orders as to how the paper was to be edited, supplied it with opinions, and directed its policy. Of course, every time the editor failed to follow his suggestions, he revenged himself by stopping the paper!

After some financial stress, the paper was moved into the Clemens home, a “two -story brick”; and here for several years it managed to worry along, spasmodically hovering between life and death. Life was easy with the editors of that paper; for if they pied a form, they suspended until the next week. They always suspended anyhow, every now and then, when the fishing was good; and always fell back upon the illness of the editor as a convenient excuse. Mark admitted that this was a paltry excuse, for the all-sufficing reason that a paper of that sort was just as well off with a sick editor as a well one, and better off with a dead one than with either of them. At the age of fifteen he considered himself a skilled journeyman printer; and his faculty for comedic portrayal had already betrayed itself in occasional clumsy efforts. In My First Literary Venture, he narrates his experiences, amongst others how greatly he increased the circulation of the paper, and incensed the “inveterate woman-killer,” whose poetry for that week’s paper read, “To Mary in H—l” (Hannibal). Mark added a “snappy foot-note” at the bottom, in which he agreed to let the thing pass, for just that once; but distinctly warning Mr. J. Gordon Runnels that the paper had a character to sustain, and that in future, when Mr. Runnels wanted to commune with his friends in h—l, he must select some other medium for that communication! Many were the humorous skits, crudely illustrated with cuts made from wooden blocks hacked out with his jack-knife, which the mischievous young “devil” inserted in his brother’s paper. Here we may discern the first spontaneous outcroppings of the genuine humorist. “It was on this paper, the Hannibal Journal,” says his biographer, Mr. Albert B. Paine, “that young Sam Clemens began his writings — burlesques, as a rule, of local characters and conditions — usually published in his brother’s absence, generally resulting in trouble on his return. Yet they made the paper sell, and if Orion had but realized his possession he might have turned his brother’s talent into capital even then.” One evening in 1853, the boy, consumed with wanderlust, asked his mother for five dollars — to start on his travels. He failed to receive the money, but he defiantly announced that he would go “anyhow.” He had managed to save a tiny sum, and that night he disappeared and fled to St. Louis. There he worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a time, and then started out “to see the world” — New York, where a little World’s Fair was in progress. He was somewhat better off than was Benjamin Franklin when he entered Philadelphia — for he had two or three dollars in pocket-change, and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the lining of his coat. For a time he sweltered in a villainous mechanics’ boarding-house in Duane Street, and worked at starvation wages in the printing-office of Gray & Green. Being recognized one day by a man from Hannibal, he fled to Philadelphia where he worked for some months as a “sub” on the Inquirer and the Public Ledger, Next came a flying trip to Washington “to see the sights there,” and then back he went to the Mississippi Valley. This journey to the “vague and fabled East” really opened his eyes to the great possibilities that the world has in store for the traveller.

Meantime, Orion had gone to Muscatine, Ohio, and acquired a small interest there; and, after his marriage, he and his wife went to Keokuk and started a little job printing-office. Here Sam worked with his brother until the winter of 1856-7, when circumstance once again played the part of good fairy. As he was walking along the street one snowy evening, his attention was attracted by a piece of paper which the wind had blown against the wall. It proved to be a fifty-dollar bill; and after advertising for the owner for four days, he stealthily moved to Cincinnati in order “to take that money out of danger.” Now comes the second crucial event in his life!

For long the ambition for river life had remained with him — and now there seemed some possibility of realizing these ambitions. He first wanted to be a cabin boy; then his ideal was to be a deck hand, because of his splendid conspicuousness as he stood on the end of the stage plank with a coil of rope in his hand. But these were only day-dreams — he didn’t admit, even to himself, that they were anything more than heavenly impossibilities. But as he worked during the winter in the printing-office of Wrightson & Company of Cincinnati, he whiled away his leisure hours reading Lieutenant Herndon’s account of his explorations of the Amazon, and became greatly interested in his description of the cocoa industry. Now he set to work to map out a new and thrilling career. The expedition sent out by the government to explore the Amazon had encountered difficulties and left unfinished the exploration of the country about the head-waters, thousands of miles from the mouth of the river. It mattered not to him that New Orleans was fifteen hundred miles away from Cincinnati, and that he had only thirty dollars left. His mind was made up: he would go on and complete the work of exploration. So in April, 1857, he set sail for New Orleans on an ancient tub, called the Paul Jones. For the paltry sum of sixteen dollars, he was enabled to revel in the unimagined glories of the main saloon. At last he was under way — realizing his boyhood dream, unable to contain himself for joy. At last he saw himself as that hero of his boyish fancy — a traveller.

When he reached New Orleans, after the prolonged ecstasy of two weeks on a tiny Mississippi steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving for Pará, that there never had been one leaving for Pará, and that there probably would not be one leaving for Pará that century. A policeman made him move on, threatening to run him in if he ever caught him reflecting in the public street again. Just as his money failed him, his old friend circumstance arrived, with another turning-point in his life — a new link. On his way down the river he had met Horace Bixby; he turned to him in this hour of need. It has been charged against Mark Twain that he was deplorably lazy — apocryphal anecdotes are still narrated with much gusto to prove it. Think of a lazy boy undertaking the stupendous task of learning to know the intricate and treacherous secrets of the great river, to know every foot of the route in the dark as well as he knew his own face in the glass! And yet he confesses that he was unaware of the immensity of the undertaking upon which he had embarked.

“In 1852,” says Bixby, “I was chief pilot on the Paul Jones, a boat that made occasional trips from Pittsburg to New Orleans. One day a tall, angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs appeared to be fastened with leather hinges, entered the pilot-house, and in a peculiar, drawling voice, said —

“‘Good mawnin, sir. Don’t you want to take er piert young fellow and teach ‘im how to be er pilot?’

“‘No sir; there is more bother about it than it’s worth.’

“‘I wish you would, mister. I’m er printer by trade, but it don’t ‘pear to ‘gree with me, and I’m on my way to Central America for my health. I believe I’ll make a tolerable good pilot, ‘cause I like the river.’

“‘What makes you pull your words that way?’

“‘I don’t know, mister; you’ll have to ask my Ma. She pulls hern too. Ain’t there some way that we can fix it, so that you’ll teach me how to be er pilot?’

“‘The only way is for money.’

“‘How much are you going to charge?’

“‘Well, I’ll teach you the river for $500.’

“‘Gee whillikens! he! he! I ain’t got $500, but I’ve got five lots in Keokuk, Iowa, and 2000 acres of land in Tennessee that is worth two bits an acre any time. You can have that if you want it.’

“I told him I did not care for his land, and after a while he agreed to pay $100 in cash (borrowed from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett, of Virginia), $150 in twelve months, and the balance when he became a pilot. He was with me for a long time, but sometimes took occasional trips with other pilots.” And he significantly adds: “He was always drawling out dry jokes, but then we did not pay any attention to him.”

It cannot be thought accidental that Sam Clemens became a pilot. Bixby became his mentor, the pilot-house his recitation-room, the steamboat his university, the great river the field of knowledge. In that stupendous course in nature’s own college, he “learned the river” as schoolboy seldom masters his Greek or his mathematics. With the naïve assurance of youth, he gaily enters upon the task of “learning” some twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi. Long afterwards, he confessed that had he really known what he was about to require of his faculties, he would never have had the courage to begin.

His comic sketches, published in the Hannibal Weekly Courier in his brother’s absence, furnish the first link, his apprenticeship to Bixby the second fink in the chain of circumstance. For two years and a half he sailed the river as a master pilot; his trustworthiness secured for him the command of some of the best boats on the river, and he was so skilful that he never met disaster on any of his trips. He narrowly escaped it in 1861, for when Louisiana seceded, his boat was drafted into the Confederate service. As he reached St. Louis, having taken passage for home, a shell came whizzing by and carried off part of the pilot-house. It was the end of an era: the Civil War had begun. The occupation of the pilot was gone; but the river had given up to him all of its secrets. He was to show them to a world, in Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn.

The story of the derivation of the famous nom de guerre has often been narrated — and as often erroneously. As the steamboat approaches a sandbank, snag, or other obstruction, the man at the bow heaves the lead and sings out, “By the mark, three,” “Mark twain,” etc. — meaning three fathoms deep, two fathoms, and so on. The thought of adopting Mark Twain as a nom de guerre was not original with Clemens; but the world owes him a debt of gratitude for making forever famous a name that, but for him, would have been forever lost. “There was a man, Captain Isaiah Sellers, who furnished river news for the New Orleans Picayune, still one of the best papers in the South,” Mr. Clemens once confessed to Professor Wm. L. Phelps. “He used to sign his articles Mark Twain. He died in 1863. I liked the name, and stole it. I think I have done him no wrong, for I seem to have made this name somewhat generally known.” The inglorious escapade of his military career, at which he himself has poked unspeakable fun, and for which not even his most enthusiastic biographers have any excuse, was soon ended. Had his heart really been enlisted on the side of the South, he would doubtless have stayed at his post. In reality, he was at that time lacking in conviction; and in after life he became a thorough Unionist and Abolitionist. In the summer of 1861, Governor Jackson of Missouri called for fifty thousand volunteers to drive out the Union forces. While visiting in the small town where his boyhood had been spent, Hannibal, Marion County, young Clemens and some of his friends met together in a secret place one night, and formed themselves into a military company. The spirited but untrained Tom Lyman was made captain; and in lieu of a first lieutenant — strange omission! — young Clemens was made second lieutenant. These fifteen hardy souls proudly dubbed themselves the Marion Rangers. No one thought of finding fault with such a name — it sounded too well. All were full of notions as high-flown as the name of their company. One of their number, named Dunlap, was ashamed of his name, because it had a plebeian sound to his ear. So he solved the difficulty and gratified his aristocratic ambitions by writing it d’Unlap. This may serve as a sample of the stuff of which the company was made. Dunlap was by no means useless; for he invented hifalutin names for the camps, and generally succeeded in proposing a name that was, as his companions agreed, “no slouch.”

There was no real organization, nobody obeyed orders, there was never a battle. They retreated, according to the tale of the humorist, at every sign of the enemy. In truth, this little band had plenty of stomach for fighting, despite its loose organization; and quite a number fought all through the war. Mark Twain is doubtless correct in the main, in his assertion that he has not given an unfair picture of the conditions prevailing in many of the militia camps in the first months of the war between the states. The men were raw and unseasoned, and even the leaders were lacking in the rudiments of military training and discipline. The situation was strange and unprecedented, the terrors were none the less real that they were imaginary. As Mark says, it took an actual collision with the enemy on the field of battle to change them from rabbits into soldiers. Young Clemens, according to his nephew’s account, was first detailed to special duty on the river because of his knowledge acquired as a pilot; it was not long before he was captured and paroled. Again he was captured, this time sent to St. Louis, and imprisoned there in a tobacco warehouse. Fearing recognition and tragic consequences, perhaps court-martial and death, should he, during the formalities of exchange, be recognized by the command in Grant’s army which first captured him, he made his escape, abandoned the cause which he afterwards spoke of as “the rebellion,” and went west as secretary to his brother Orion, lately appointed Territorial Secretary of Nevada by the President.

A very credible and interesting biography of Mark Twain might be compiled from his own works; and Roughing It is full of autobiography of a coloured sort, though in the main correct. His joy in the prospect of that trip, the exciting details of the long journey, are all narrated with gusto and fine effect. In the “unique sinecure” of the office of private secretary, he found he had nothing to do and no salary; so after a short time — the fear of being recognized by Union soldiers and shot for breaking his parole still haunting him — he, and a companion, went off together on a fishing jaunt to Lake Tahoe. Everywhere he saw fortunes made in a moment. He fell a prey to the prevailing excitement and went mad like all the rest. Little wonder over the wild talk, when cartloads of solid silver bricks as large as pigs of lead were passing by every day before their very eyes. The wild talk grew more frenzied from day to day. And young Clemens yielded to no one in enthusiasm and excitement. For vividness or picturesqueness of expression none could vie with him. With three companions, he began “prospecting,” with the most indifferent success; and soon tiring of their situation, they moved on down to Esmeralda (now Aurora), on the other side of Carson City. Here new life seemed to inspire the party. What mattered it if they were in debt to the butcher — for did they not own thirty thousand feet apiece in the “richest mines on earth”! Who cared if their credit was not good with the grocer, so long as they revelled in mountains of fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied cant of the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous riches! But at last the practical necessities of living put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm. Clemens was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to work as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten dollars a week and board — after flour had soared to a dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money had gone to eight per cent, a month. This work was very exhausting, and after a week Clemens asked his employer for an advance of wages. The employer replied that he was paying Clemens ten dollars a week, and thought that all he was worth. How much did he want? When Clemens replied that four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was all he could reasonably ask, considering the hard times, he was ordered off the premises! In after days, Mark only regretted that, in view of the arduous labours he had performed in that mill, he had not asked seven hundred thousand for his services!

After a time, Mark and his friend Higbie established their claim to a mine, became mad with excitement, and indulged in the wildest dreams for the future. Under the laws of the district, work of a certain character must be done upon the claim within ten days after location in order to establish the right of possession. Mark was called away to the bedside of a sick friend, Higbie failed to receive Mark’s note, and the work was never done — each thinking it was being properly attended to by the other. On their return, they discovered that their claim was “re-located,” and that millions had slipped from their grasp! The very stars in their courses seemed to fight to force young Clemens into literature. Had Samuel Clemens become a millionaire at this time, it is virtually certain that there would have been no Mark Twain.

After one day more of heartless prospecting, Clemens “dropped in” at the wayside post-office. It was the hour of fate! A letter awaited him there. We cannot call it accident — it was the result of forces and events which had long been converging toward this end. Samuel Clemens began his career as an itinerant, tramping “jour” printer. He wrote for the papers on which he served as printer; and he actually read the matter he set up in type. By observation on his travels, by study of the writing of others, Clemens acquired information, knowledge of life, and ingenuity of expression. He hadn’t served his ten-years’ apprenticeship as a printer for nothing. In the process of setting up tons of good and bad literature, he had learned — half unconsciously — to appraise and to discriminate. In the same half-unconscious way, he was actually gaining some inkling of the niceties of style. After he began “learning the river,” Clemens once wrote a funny sketch about Captain Sellers which made a genuine “hit” with the officers on the boat. The sketch fell into the hands of the “river-editor” of the St. Louis Republican, found a place in that journal, and was widely copied throughout the West. On the strength of it, Clemens became a sort of river reporter, and from time to time published memoranda and comic squibs in the Republican. That passion which a French critic has characterized as distinctively American, the passion for “seeing yourself in print,” still burned in Clemens, even during all the hardships of prospecting and milling. At intervals he sent from the mining regions of “Washoe,” as all that part of Nevada was then called, humorous letters signed “Josh” to the Daily Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, at that time one of the most progressive and wide -awake newspapers in the West.

The fateful letter which I have mentioned, contained an offer to Clemens from the proprietor of the Enterprise, of the position of city editor, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. To Clemens at this time, this offer came as a perfect godsend. Twenty-five dollars a week was nothing short of wealth, luxury. His enthusiasm oozed away when he reflected over his ignorance and incompetence; and he gloomily recalled his repeated failures. But necessity faced him; and opportunity knocks but once at every door. His doubts were speedily resolved; and he afterwards confessed that, had he been offered at that time a salary to translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would unhesitatingly have accepted, despite some natural misgivings, and have tried to throw as much variety into it as he could for the money. It was to fill a vacancy, caused by the absence of Dan De Quille, the regular reporter, on a visit to “the States,” that Clemens was offered this position; but he retained it after De Quille returned. “Mark and I had our hands full,” relates De Quille, “and no grass grew under our feet. There was a constant rush of startling events; they came tumbling over one another as though playing at leap-frog. While a stage robbery was being written up, a shooting affray started; and perhaps before the pistol shots had ceased to echo among the surrounding hills, the firebells were banging out an alarm.” A record of the variegated duties of these two, found in an old copy of the Territorial Enterprise of 1863, bears the unmistakable hallmarks of Mark Twain. “Our duty is to keep the universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and street fights, and balls and theatres, and pack-trains, and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and city military affairs, and highway robberies, and Bible societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand other things which it is within the province of local reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue importance for the instruction of the readers of a great daily newspaper. Beyond this revelation everything connected with these two experiments of Providence must for ever remain an impenetrable mystery.” An admirable picture of Mark Twain on his native heath, in the latter part of 1863, is given by Edward Peron Hingston, author of The Genial Showman, in the introduction to the English edition of The Innocents Abroad.

The fame of the Western humorist had already reached the ears of Hingston; and as soon as he reached Virginia City, he went to the office of the Territorial Enterprise and asked to be presented to Mark Twain.

When he heard his name called by some one, Clemens called out:

“Pass the gentleman into my den. The noble animal is here.”

The noble animal proved to be “a young man, strongly built, ruddy in complexion, his hair of a sunny hue, his eyes light and twinkling, in manner hearty, and nothing of the student about him — one who looked as if he could take his own part in a quarrel, strike a smart blow as readily as he could say a telling thing, bluffly jolly, brusquely cordial, off-handedly good-natured.” The picture is detailed and vivid: —

Let it be borne in mind that from the windows of the newspaper office the American desert was visible; that within a radius of ten miles Indians were encamping amongst the sage-brush; that the whole city was populated with miners, adventurers, Jew traders, gamblers, and all the rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in a new territory collects together, and it will be readily understood that a reporter for a daily paper in such a place must neither go about his duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be fastidious about having gilt edges to his note-books. In Mark Twain I found the very man I had expected to see — a flower of the wilderness, tinged with the colour of the soil, the man of thought and the man of action rolled into one, humorist and hard-worker, Momus in a felt hat and jack-boots. In the reporter of the Territorial Enterprise I became introduced to a Californian celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy, quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization had allowed his humour to develop without restraint, and his speech to be rarely idiomatic.

Under the influence of the example of the proprietors of the Enterprise, strict stylistic disciplinarians of the Dana school of journalism, Clemens learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style which characterizes his writing. As a reporter, he was really industrious in matters that met his fancy; but “cast-iron items” — for he hated facts and figures requiring absolute accuracy — got from him only “a lick and a promise.” He was much interested in Tom Fitch’s effort to establish a literary journal, The Weekly Occidental. Daggett’s opening chapters of a wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs. Fitch, J. T. Goodman, Dan De Quille, and Clemens were to write successive instalments, gave that paper the coup de grâce in its very first issue. Of this wonderful novel, at the close of each instalment of which the “hero was left in a position of such peril that it seemed impossible he could be rescued, except through means and wisdom more than human”; of the Bohemian days of the “Visigoths,” — Clemens, De Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich, and their confrères; of the practical jokes played on each other, particularly the incident of the imitation meerschaum (“mere sham”) pipe, solemnly presented to Clemens by Steve Gillis, C. A. V. Putnam, D. E. McCarthy, De Quille and others — all these belong to the fascinating domain of the biographer. When Clemens was sent down to Carson City to report the meetings of the first Nevada Legislature, he began for the first time to sign his letters “Mark Twain.” In his Autobiography he has explained that his function as a legislative correspondent was to dispense compliment and censure with impartial justice. As his disquisitions covered about half a page each morning in the Enterprise, it is easy to understand that he was an “influence.” Questioned by Carlyle Smith in regard to his choice of “Mark Twain,” Mr. Clemens replied: “I chose my pseudonym because to nine hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning, and also because it was short. I was a reporter in the Legislature at the time, and I wished to save the Legislature time. It was much shorter to say in their debates — for I was certain to be the occasion of some questions of privilege — ‘Mark Twain’ than ‘the unprincipled and lying Parliamentary Reporter of the Territorial Enterprise.’”

Already his name was known the whole length of the Pacific Coast; the Enterprise published many things from his pen which gave him local, and afterwards national, fame; such sketches as The Undertaker’s Chat, The Petrified Man and The Marvellous ‘Bloody Massacre’ had attracted favourable and wide notice east of the Rocky Mountains. But his career in Carson City came to a sudden close when he challenged the editor of the Virginia Union to a duel, the bloodless conclusion of which is narrated in the Autobiography. But even a challenge to a duel was against the new law of Nevada; and obeying the warning of Governor North, the duellists crossed the border without ceremony, and stood not upon the order of their going.

While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise, he was in the habit of reserving all his “sketches” for the San Francisco newspapers, the Golden Era and the Morning Call. He now turns his steps to that storied city of “Frisco,” and was not long in extending his fame on that coast. He was incorrigibly lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the Call, soon discovered; and Kipling was told when he was in San Francisco that Mark was in the habit of coiling himself into a heap and meditating until the last minute, when he would produce copy having no relationship to the subject of his assignment — “which made the editor swear horribly, and the readers of The Call ask for more.” His love for practical joking during the California days brought him unpopularity; and one reads in a San Francisco paper of the early days: “There have been moments in the lives of various kind-hearted and respectable citizens of California and Nevada, when, if Mark Twain were before them as members of a vigilance committee for any mild crime, such as mule-stealing or arson, it is to be feared his shrift would have been short. What a dramatic picture the idea conjures up, to be sure! Mark, before these honest men, infuriated by his practical jokes, trying to show them what an innocent creature he was when it came to mules, or how the only policy of fire insurance he held had lapsed, how void of guile he was in any direction, and all with that inimitable drawl, that perplexed countenance and peculiar scraping of the left foot, like a boy speaking his first piece at school.” If he just escaped disaster, he likewise just escaped millions; on one occasion, for the space of a few moments, he owned the famous Comstock Lode, which was, though he never suspected it, worth millions. His trunkful of securities, which were eminently saleable at one time, proved to be of fictitious value when “the bottom dropped out” of the Nevada boom; and that silver mine, which he was commissioned to sell in New York, was finally sold for three million dollars! It was, as Mark says, the blind lead over again. Mark Twain had the true Midas touch; but the mine of riches he was destined to discover was a mine, not of gold or silver, but the mine of intellect and rich human experience.

To The Golden Era, Mark Twain, like Prentice Mulford and Joaquin Miller, contributed freely; and after a time he became associated with Bret Harte on The Californian, Harte as editor at twenty dollars a week, and Mark receiving twelve dollars for an article. Here forgathered that group of brilliant writers of the Pacific Slope, numbering Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles Henry Webb, and Prentice Mulford among its celebrities; two of that remarkable coterie were soon destined to achieve world-wide fame. “These ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of gifted people,” says Mr. Howells, “had established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly co-operated in its early extinction.” Of his first meeting with Mark Twain, Bret Harte has left a memorable picture: —

His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye — an eye so eagle-like that a second lid would not have surprised me — of an unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner was one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circumstances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number of newspaper articles contributed over the signature of ‘Mark Twain.’

Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San Francisco — on one occasion he was reduced to a solitary ten-cent piece; and General John McComb wooed him back to journalism just as he was on the point of returning to his old work on the Mississippi River, this time as a Government pilot. During the earlier years in San Francisco, he was in the habit of writing weekly letters to the Territorial Enterprise — personals, market-chat, and the like. But when he criticized the police department of San Francisco in the most scathing terms, the officials “found means for bringing charges that made the author’s presence there difficult and comfortless.” So he welcomed the opportunity to join Steve Gillis in a pilgrimage to the mountain home of Jim Gillis, his brother — a “sort of Bohemian infirmary.” Mark Twain revelled in the delightful company of the original of Bret Harte’s “Truthful James,” and he enjoyed the mining methods of Jackass Hill, like the true Bohemian that he was. Soon after his arrival, Mark and Jim Gillis started out in search of golden pockets. As De Quille says: —

They soon found and spent some days in working up the undisturbed trail of an undiscovered deposit. They were on the ‘golden bee-line’ and stuck to it faithfully, though it was necessary to carry each sample of dirt a considerable distance to a small stream in the bed of a canon in order to wash it. However, Mark hungered and thirsted to find a big rich pocket, and he pitched in after the manner of Joe Bowers of old — just like a thousand of brick.

Each step made sure by the finding of golden grains, they at last came upon the pocket whence these grains had trailed out down the slope of the mountain. It was a cold, dreary drizzling day when the ‘home deposit’ was found. The first sample of dirt carried to the stream and washed out yielded only a few cents. Although the right vein had been discovered, they had as yet found only the tail end of the pocket.

Returning to the vein, they dug a sample of the decomposed ore from a new place, and were about to carry it down to the ravine and test it, when the rain increased to a lively downpour.

Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry another pail of water. In slow, drawling tones he protested decisively:

“Jim, I won’t carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable. Let’s go to the house and wait till it clears up.”

Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just taken out.

“Bring just one more pail, Sam,” he urged.

“I won’t do it, Jim!” replied the now thoroughly disgusted Clemens. “Not a drop! Not if I knew there were a million dollars in that pan!”

Moved by Sam’s dejected appearance — blue nose and humped back — and realizing doubtless that it was futile to reason with him further, Jim yielded — and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the ground. They now started out for the nearest shelter, the hotel in Angel’s Camp, kept by Coon Drayton, formerly a Mississippi River pilot. Imagine the jests and shouts that went around as Mark and Coon vied with each other in narrating interesting experiences. For three days the rain and the stories held out; and among those told by Drayton was a story of a frog. He narrated this story with the utmost solemnity as a thing that had happened in Angel’s Camp in the spring of ‘49 — the story of a frog trained by its owner to become a wonderful jumper, but which failed to “make good” in a contest because the owner of a rival frog, in order to secure the winning of the wager, filled the trained frog full of shot during its owner’s absence. This story appealed irresistibly to Mark as a first-rate story told in a first-rate way; he divined in it the magic quality unsuspected by the narrator — universal humour. He made notes in order to remember the story, and on his return to the Gillis’ cabin, “wrote it up.” He wrote a number of other things besides, all of which he valued above the frog story; but Gillis thought it the best thing he had ever written.

Meantime the rain had washed off the surface soil from their last pan, which they had left in their hurry. Some passing miners were astonished to behold the ground glittering with gold; they appropriated it, but dared not molest the deposit until the expiration of the thirty-day claim-notice posted by Jim Gillis. They sat down to wait, hoping that the claimants would not return. At the expiration of the thirty days, the claim-jumpers took possession, and soon cleared out the pocket, which yielded twenty thousand dollars. It was one of the most fortunate accidents in Mark Twain’s career. He came within one pail of water of comparative wealth; but had he discovered that pocket, he would probably have settled down as a pocket-miner, and might have pounded quartz for the rest of his life. Had his nerve held out a moment longer, he would never have gone to Angel’s Camp, would never have heard The Story of the Jumping Frog, and would have escaped that sudden fame which this little story soon brought him.

On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one morning to see Bret Harte, and told him this story. As Harte records:

He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and they asked him to write it for The Californian. He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an Eastern reading. The story was ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras.’ It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first time, by the unknown Twain himself, on that morning in the San Francisco Mint.

When Artemus Ward passed through California on a literary tour in 1864, Mark Twain regaled him — as he regaled all worthy acquaintances — with his favourite story, The Jumping Frog. Ward was delighted with it.

“Write it out,” he said, “give it all the necessary touches, and let me use it in a volume of sketches I am preparing for the press. Just send it to Carleton, my publisher, in New York.”

It arrived too late for Ward’s book, and Carleton presented it to Henry Clapp, who published it in his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18, 1864. In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated how The Jumping Frog put a quietus on The Saturday Press, and was immediately copied in numerous newspapers in England and America. He was always proud of the celebrity that story achieved; but he never sought to claim the credit for himself. He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but the frog, that became celebrated. The author, alas, remained in obscurity!

Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost the chance of a life-time by giving The Jumping Frog away; but Mark Twain’s old friend, Charles Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published it. About four thousand copies were sold in three years; but the real fame of the story was in its newspaper and magazine notoriety. In 1872 it was translated into the Revue des Deux Mondes; and it was almost as widely read in England, India, and Australia as it was in America.

Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the rewards of journalism, and doing literary hack work of one sort or another. In 1866 the proprietors of the Sacramento Union employed him to write a series of letters from the Sandwich Islands. The purpose of these letters was to give an account of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar, but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It was the extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these months of “luxurious vagrancy” he described in the most vivid way many of the most notable features of the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would at once have been embodied in a volume. In his My Début as a Literary Person, Mark Twain has described in admirably graphic style his great “scoop” of the news of the Hornet disaster; how Anson Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried on a cot to the hospital, so that he could interview the half-dead sailors. His bill — twenty dollars a week for general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a column for the Hornet