Surely the line of the old poet was made for him,. He roved the Far West, tramped, traveled, mined, and speculated, was rich one day and miserably poor the next and all the time he cursed and jested alternately and filled others with laughter and amazement and affection, and passed into and out of their lives, like the shifting shadow of a dream. What contacts he had there, with good and evil, with joy and sorrow!īut even the Mississippi was not vast enough for his uneasy spirit. Piloting on the vast meanders of the Mississippi was better. He tried printing as a business but any indoor business was too tame, even though diversified by his thousand comic inventions. Born in the Middle West toward the middle of the century, he came into a moving world, and he never ceased to be a moving creature and to move everybody about him. Consider the nomadic irrelevance of his early days, before his position was established, if it was ever established. No man ever sprang more thoroughly from the people or was better qualified to interpret the people. The journalist, when inspired and touched with genius, is the nearest equivalent of the old epic singer, and most embodies the ideal of giving forth the life of his day and surroundings with as little intrusion as possible of his own personal, reflective consciousness.Īnd as Mark had the temperament to do this, so he had the training. Think of the mass of folk-lore in his best, his native books! Is it not just such material as we find in the spontaneous, elementary productions of an earlier age?īetter still, perhaps, we should speak of him as a journalist for a journalist he was, essentially and always, in his themes, in his gorgeous and unfailing rhetoric, even in his attitude toward life. Rather, there is something of the bard about him, of the old, epic, popular singer, who gathered up in himself, almost, unconsciously, the life and spirit of a whole nation, and poured it forth more as a voice, an instrument, than as a deliberate artist. Yet one cannot think of him as a professional writer. I do it without purpose and without ambition merely for the love of it.’ All the same, glory was sweet to him. In youth he wrote, ‘There is no satisfaction in the world’s praise anyhow, and it has no worth to me save in the way of business.’ Again, he says in age, ‘indifferent to nearly everything but work. One of his most striking productions is the account of the death of his daughter Jean yet no one but a born writer would have deliberately set down such experiences at such a moment, with publication in his thought. He had the writer’s sense of living for the public, too, instinctively made copy of his deepest personal emotions and experiences. He wrote and rewrote, revised his writing again and again, with patience and industry. He was capable of long, steady toil at the desk. He did a vast amount of literary work and did it, if one may say so, in a literary manner. He was something different - perhaps something bigger and deeper and more human at any rate, something different. This much is clear, to start with: that Mark is not to be defined or judged by the ordinary standards of mere writers or literary men. ![]() Now, leaping over that considerable gulf, reading and rereading old and new together, to distil the essence of his soul in this brief portrait, has been for me a wild revel, a riot of laughter and criticism and prejudice and anti-prejudice and revolt, and rapture, from which it seems as if no sane and reasoned judgment could ensue. The criticism of life, strong and personal, if crude, the frank, vivid comments on men and things, set me thinking as I had never thought, and for several years colored my maturing reflection in a way that struck deep and lasted long. I lay on t he rug before the fire in the long winter evenings, while my father read The Innocents Abroad and Old Times on the Mississippi, and Roughing It and I laughed till I cried. WHEN I was a boy of fourteen, Mark Twain took hold of me as no other writer had then and as few have since.
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