IV

Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all Mark Twain’s other writings (altho with no lack of affection for those also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about them.  After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish in literature is this native aroma, pungent, homely, and abiding.  Yet I feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of these three books only.  They are the best of him, but the others are good also, and good in a different way.  Other writers have given us this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly:  one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin; but who so well as Mark Twain has given us the full spectrum of the Union?  With all his exactness in reproducing the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outlook; he is national always.  He is not narrow; he is not western or eastern; he is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country so vast as ours and a people so independent.

In Mark Twain we have “the national spirit as seen with our own eyes,” declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism.  Self-educated in the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outlook as he has grown older.  Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith.  Combining a mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a practical idealist.  No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for his fellowman.  Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of reverence.  Unwilling to take pay in words, he is impatient always to get at the root of the matter, to pierce to the center, to see the thing as it is.  He has a habit of standing upright, of thinking for himself, and of hitting hard at whatsoever seems to him hateful and mean; but at the core of him there is genuine gentleness and honest sympathy, brave humanity and sweet kindliness.  Perhaps it is boastful for us to think that these characteristics which we see in Mark Twain are characteristics also of the American people as a whole; but it is pleasant to think so.

Mark Twain has the very marrow of Americanism.  He is as intensely and as typically American as Franklin or Emerson or Hawthorne.  He has not a little of the shrewd common-sense and the homely and unliterary directness of Franklin.  He is not without a share of the aspiration and the elevation of Emerson; and he has a philosophy of his own as optimistic as Emerson’s.  He possesses also somewhat of Hawthorne’s interest in ethical problems, with something of the same power of getting at the heart of them; he, too, has written his parables and apologs wherein the moral is obvious and unobtruded.  He is uncompromisingly honest; and his conscience is as rugged as his style sometimes is.