MARK TWAIN’S NEW BOOK.1explanatory note

In the natural disgust of a creative
mind for the following that vulgarizes
and cheapens its work, Mr. Tennyson
spoke in parable concerning his verse:

But this bad effect is to the final loss
of the rash critic rather than the poet,
who necessarily survives imitation, and
appeals to posterity as singly as if no­-
body had tried to ape him; while those
who rejected him, along with his copy-­
ists, have meantime thrown away a great
pleasure. Just at present some of us
are in danger of doing ourselves a like
damage. “Thieves from over the wall”
have got the seed of a certain drollery,
which sprouts and flourishes plentifully
in every newspaper, until the thought
of American Humor is becoming terri-­
ble; and sober-minded people are be-­
ginning to have serious question whether
we are not in danger of degenerating
into a nation of wits. But we ought to
take courage from observing, as we may,
that this plentiful crop of humor is not
racy of the original soil; that in short
the thieves from over the wall were not
also able to steal Mr. Clemens’s garden­
plot. His humor springs from a certain
intensity of common sense, a passionate
love of justice, and a generous scorn of
what is petty and mean; and it is these
qualities which his “school” have not
been able to convey. They have never
been more conspicuous than in this last
book of his, to which they may be said to
give its sole coherence. It may be claim-
ing more than a humorist could wish to
assert that he is always in earnest; but
this strikes us as the paradoxical charm
of Mr. Clemens’s best humor. Its wild-
est extravagance is the break and fling
from a deep feeling, a wrath with some
folly which disquiets him worse than
other men, a personal hatred for some
humbug or pretension that embitters
him beyond anything but laughter. It
must be because he is intolerably weary
of the twaddle of pedestrianizing that he
conceives the notion of a tramp through
Europe, which he operates by means of
express trains, steamboats, and private
carriages, with the help of an agent and
a courier; it is because he has a real
loathing, otherwise inexpressible, for
Alp-climbing, that he imagines an ascent
of the Riffelberg, with “half a mile of
men and mules” tied together by rope.
One sees that affectations do not first
strike him as ludicrous, merely, but as
detestable. He laughs, certainly, at an
abuse, at ill manners, at conceit, at cruel-
ty, and you must laugh with him; but
if you enter into the very spirit of his
humor, you feel that if he could set these
things right there would be very little
laughing. At the bottom of his heart
he has often the grimness of a reformer;
his wit is turned by preference not upon
human nature, not upon droll situations
and things abstractly ludicrous, but upon
matters that are out of joint, that are
unfair or unnecessarily ignoble, and cry
out to his love of justice for discipline.
Much of the fun is at his own cost where
he boldly attempts to grapple with some
hoary abuse, and gets worsted by it, as
in his verbal contest with the girl at the
medicinal springs in Baden, who returns
“that beggar’s answer” of half Europe,
“What you please,” to his ten-times-
repeated demand of “How much?” and
gets the last word. But it is plain that
if he had his way there would be a fixed
price for those waters very suddenly,
and without regard to the public amuse-
ment, or regret for lost opportunities of
humorous writing.

It is not Mr. Clemens’s business in
Europe to find fault, or to contrast
things there with things here, to the per-
petual disadvantage of that continent;
but sometimes he lets homesickness and
his disillusion speak. This book has not
the fresh frolicsomeness of the Innocents
Abroad; it is Europe revisited, and seen
through eyes saddened by much experi-
ence of tables d’hôte, old masters, and
traveling Americans,—whom, by the
way, Mr. Clemens advises not to travel
too long at a time in Europe, lest they
lose national feeling and become traveled
Americans. Nevertheless, if we have
been saying anything about the book, or
about the sources of Mr. Clemens’s hu-
mor, to lead the reader to suppose that
it is not immensely amusing, we have
done it a great wrong. It is delicious,
whether you open it at the sojourn in
Heidelberg, or the voyage down the
Neckar on a raft, or the mountaineering
in Switzerland, or the excursion beyond
Alps into Italy. The method is that
discursive method which Mark Twain
has led us to expect of him. The story
of a man who had a claim against the
United States government is not imper-
tinent to the bridge across the river
Reuss; the remembered tricks played
upon a printer’s devil in Missouri are
the natural concomitants of a walk to
Oppenau. The writer has always the
unexpected at his command, in small
things as well as great: the story of the
raft journey on the Neckar is full of
these surprises; it is wholly charming.
If there is too much of anything, it is
that ponderous and multitudinous ascent
of the Riffelberg; there is probably too
much of that, and we would rather have
another appendix in its place. The ap-
pendices are all admirable; especially
those on the German language and the
German newspapers, which get no more
sarcasm than they deserve.

One should not rely upon all state-
ments of the narrative, but its spirit is
the truth, and it honestly breathes Amer-
ican travel in Europe as a large minority
of our forty millions know it. The ma-
terial is inexhaustible in the mere Amer-
icans themselves, and they are rightful
prey. Their effect upon Mr. Clemens
has been to make him like them best at
home; and no doubt most of them will
agree with him that “to be condemned
to live as the average European family
lives would make life a pretty heavy
burden to the average American fam-
ily.” This is the sober conclusion which
he reaches at last, and it is unquestion-
able, like the vastly greater part of the
conclusions at which he arrives through-
out. His opinions are no longer the
opinions of the Western American newly
amused and disgusted at the European
difference, but the Western American’s
impressions on being a second time con-
fronted with things he has had time to
think over. This is the serious under-
current of the book, to which we find
ourselves reverting from its obvious com-
icality. We have, indeed, so great an
interest in Mr. Clemens’s likes and dis-
likes, and so great respect for his pref-
erences generally, that we are loath to
let the book go to our readers without
again wishing them to share these feel-
ings. There is no danger that they will
not laugh enough over it; that is an
affair which will take care of itself; but
there is a possibility that they may not
think enough over it. Every account
of European travel, or European life,
by a writer who is worth reading for
any reason, is something for our reflec-
tion and possible instruction; and in this
delightful work of a man of most orig-
inal and characteristic genius “the av-
erage American” will find much to en-
lighten as well as amuse him, much to
comfort and stay him in such Ameri-
canism as is worth having, and nothing
to flatter him in a mistaken national
vanity or a stupid national prejudice.