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Mark Twain: What's So Funny?
Mark Twain tells us, in "a loafing, down-at-the-heels town in Missouri"; he was
educated "on the river," and in most of his work he attempted to deal with
the rough-and-ready life which he knew intimately at first hand. His
Life on the Mississippi, a vivid delineation of river scenes and
characters, is perhaps his best work, or at least the most true to his aim
and his experience. Roughing It is another volume from his store of
personal observation, this time in the western mining camps; but here his
realism goes as far astray from truth as any old romance in that it
exaggerates even the sensational elements of frontier life.
The remaining works of Mark Twain are, with one or two exceptions, of very
doubtful value. Their great popularity for a time was due largely to the
author's reputation as a humorist,--a strange reputation it begins to
appear, for he was at heart a pessimist, an iconoclast, a thrower of
stones, and with the exception of his earliest work, The Celebrated
Jumping Frog (1867), which reflected some rough fun or horseplay, it is
questionable whether the term "humorous" can properly be applied to any of
his books. Thus the blatant Innocents Abroad is not a work of humor
but of ridicule (a very different matter), which jeers at travelers who
profess admiration for the scenery or institutions of Europe,--an
admiration that was a sham to Mark Twain because he was incapable of
understanding it. So with the grotesque capers of A Connecticut Yankee
at King Arthur's Court, with the sneering spirit of The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg, with the labored attempts to be funny of
Adam's Diary and with other alleged humorous works; readers of the
next generation may ask not what we found to amuse us in such works but how
we could tolerate such crudity or cynicism or bad taste in the name of
American humor.
The most widely read of Mark Twain's works are Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn. The former, a glorification of a liar and his
dime-novel adventures, has enough descriptive power to make the story
readable, but hardly enough to disguise its sensationalism, its
lawlessness, its false standards of boy life and American life. In
Huckleberry Finn, a much better book, the author depicts the life of
the Middle West as seen by a homeless vagabond. With a runaway slave as a
companion the hero, Huck Finn, drifts down the Mississippi on a raft,
meeting with startling experiences at the hands of quacks and imposters of
every kind. One might suppose, if one took this picaresque record
seriously, that a large section of our country was peopled wholly by knaves
and fools. The adventures are again of a sensational kind; but the
characters are powerfully drawn, and the vivid pictures of the mighty river
by day or night are among the best examples of descriptive writing in our
literature.
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