The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Read Free Page B

is a
man
, unique and great, honest, noble, in some ways sublime.
    His best books, with the exception of his travel books, are those with a western scene; and his travel books largely owe their humor, their geniality, and their wisdom to his western orientation. The sentimentality of the frontier, which ranged all the way from an exaggerated regard for females to the most deadly sort of sadism; the lack of form in social behavior, together with certain codes of behavior which smack of juvenile delinquents; the relative contempt for the written as against the spoken word; the racy language; the attitudes toward dudes and the East, the two being almost synonymous; the impatience with the ways and principles of law—all these characteristics of the American frontier are to be found in Twain’s best work, and they are the motor of that work. They are also to be found, in somewhat more disguised form, in the work of Twain’s star descendant, Ernest Hemingway.
    A man from Missouri, Twain said “Show me” skeptically to Europe and the world. This was a novel concept to the East, where reverence for Europe among literary men was in vogue, as it is today. Paris, Rome, London are still considered the seats of literary learning; or if not learning, of literary practice; or if not practice, of literary conscience. Twain knew better. To the westerner Europe seems remote, and its concerns—its stale, very stale concerns—seem almost perversely imagined, or at any rate like a long-forgotten but still-remembered dream, a bitterness on the tongue, a haunting disquiet in some dim corner of the mind. The climate and the great spaces speak eloquently of today and tomorrow. Europe, like the East, is a pallid yesterday.
    Twain could be sardonic in turning the tables and exposing a bluff. It had been fashionable, up to his time, for Europeans, some of them prominent literary figures like Dickens, to write sarcastic reports on the “raw” United States. Twain, a self-appointed ambassador, returned the compliment with interest, offering a tongue-in-cheek view of the American as progressive, the European as a piece of baroque humanity. The salt in the wound was that there was much truth in this view, as Hawthorne had already hinted in his
English Notebooks
. Twain never struck upon a happier symbol than the German language, which he satirized so penetratingly and with such wit that even many Germans laughed and appreciated the truth of what he implied. Twain has a wonderful wisdom. He is so essentially sane that it is exhilarating to be in his company. By his way of life he seemed to say, “I am of the tribe of writers but I am saner than they. I know how to savor life.” You expect a man like that to live a long life. Twain did, like Tolstoy, and like Tolstoy he managed very often to write without contrived effects.
    It has happened in other countries that what was once looked upon condescendingly as being unworthy of art became, almost overnight, the body and soul of the highest art. It happened in Germany and in Russia early in the last century. I believe it will happen in our own country when western legends and myths, western folklore, become the basis of a sophisticated art. There is no lack of snobbism among eastern intellectuals toward western materials. Some academic writers and critics, who enjoy western films, deride the notion that in the more serious realm of the novel the same materials can be used to good and true effect. The frontier may be closed, finished; no doubt it is—the geographical one. But there are other frontiers—the frontier of a cultural
tone
, for example. These are important also. They contain elements which the geographical frontier created or inspired. The frontier has gone underground, and if this is a calamity to the adventurer it is not necessarily so to the artist, in particular the writer. There is a free-swinging sense of things in the West which has long been missing in the East. The ghost of