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Humor and the Thoughtful Philosopher
During his lifetime, Mark Twain's humor was the
chief cause of his well-nigh universal popularity. The public had never
before read a book exactly like his Innocents Abroad. Speaking of an
Italian town, he says, "It is well the alleys are not wider, because they
hold as much smell now as a person can stand, and, of course, if they were
wider they would hold more, and then the people would die." Incongruity, or
the association of dissimilar ideas, is the most frequent cause of laughter
to his readers. His famous cablegram from England that the report of his
death was much exaggerated is of this order, as is also the following
sentence from Roughing It:--
"Then he rode over and began to rebuke the stranger with a six-shooter,
and the stranger began to explain with another."
Such sentences convey something more than a humorous impression. They
surpass the usual historical records in revealing in an incisive way the
social characteristics of those pioneer days. His humor is often only a
means of more forcibly impressing on readers some phase of the philosophy
of history. Even careless readers frequently recognize that this statement
is true of much of the humor in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's
Court, which is one of his most successful exhibitions of humor based on
incongruity.
While his humor is sometimes mechanical, coarse, and forced, we must not
forget that it also often reveals the thoughtful philosopher. To confirm
this statement, one has only to glance at the humorous philosophy that
constitutes Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar.
Mark Twain's future place in literature will probably be due less to humor
than to his ability as a philosopher and a historian. Humor will
undoubtedly act on his writings as a preservative salt, but salt is
valuable only to preserve substantial things. If matter of vital worth is
not present in any written work, mere humor will not keep it alive.
One of his most humorous scenes may be found in the chapter where Tom
Sawyer succeeds in getting other boys to relieve him of the drudgery of
whitewashing a fence. That episode was introduced to enable the author to
make more impressive his philosophy of a certain phase of human action:--
"He had discovered a great law of human action without knowing
it--namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is
only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a
great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now
have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do,
and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
His statement about illusions shows that his philosophy does not always
have a humorous setting:--
"The illusions are the only things that are valuable, and God help the
man who reaches the time when he meets only the realities."
Hatred of hypocrisy is one of his emphatic characteristics. If Tom Sawyer
enjoyed himself more in watching a dog play with a pinch-bug in church than
in listening to a doctrinal sermon, if he had a better time playing hookey
than in attending the execrably dull school, Mark Twain is eager to expose
the hypocrisy of those who would misrepresent Tom's real attitude toward
church and school. While Mark Twain is determined to present life
faithfully as he sees it, he dislikes as much as any Puritan to see evil
triumph. In his stories, wrongdoing usually digs its own grave.
His strong sense of justice led him to write Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc (1896), to defend the Maid of Orleans. Because he loved to
protect the weak, he wrote A Dogs Tale (1904). For the same reason he
paid all the expenses of a negro through an eastern college.
Although he was self-taught, he gradually came to use the English language
with artistic effect and finish. His style is direct and energetic, and it
shows his determination to say a thing as simply and as effectively as
possible. One of the rules in Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar is, "As to the
Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out." He followed this rule. Some have
complained that the great humorist's mind, like Emerson's, often worked in
a disconnected fashion, but this trait has been exaggerated in the case of
both. Mark Twain has certainly made a stronger impression than many authors
whose "sixthly" follows more inevitably. It is true that his romances do
not gather up every loose end, that they do not close with a grand climax
which settles everything; but they reflect the spirit of the western life,
which also had many loose ends and left much unsettled.
His mingled humor and philosophy, his vivid, interesting, contemporary
history, which gives a broad and sympathetic delineation of important
phases of western life and development, fill a place that American
literature could ill afford to leave vacant.
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