The Critics View Mark Twain
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
The Critics View Mark Twain Mark Twain: Selected Criticism. Ed. by Arthur L. Scott. Southern Methodist. 289 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman. Department of English,...
...The earliest item is Charles H. Webb's preface to the Jumping Frog volume of 1867...
...Where this collection is freshest is in its gathering of diverse opinions stated in Mark Twain's lifetime...
...And the audience before him snouted it...
...Most of the major critics of this century are represented in skillfully chosen selections...
...Up to the end of the nineteenth century, to be sure, academic writers were inclined to lump him with Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, and to dismiss the whole group in a paragraph or two...
...Nine years later, an English- man named H. R. Haweis observed that Mark "distills his fun drop by drop through a whole page, instead of condensing it into a sentence...
...A decade later still...
...Mark Twain gave up...
...And then...
...Some are general evaluations of Twain's work: some are Freudian analyses of his character: some are close inspections of his literary practices...
...Some are friendly, some hostile...
...And here is Waldo Frank recording one of Mark's last appearances as a public speaker: "His words were diffident and sad...
...97-per-cent impartiality should be enough...
...Ever since Mark Twain became a national figure, the tides of criticism have ebbed and flowed, but there has been far more flood than ebb...
...For years he spoiled for me some of the greatest sources of relief and joy...
...Scott's anthology includes writers who excelled in other things than self-portraiture...
...Consequently the waters have reached such depth and extent as to make it difficult for the unpiloted student to find his way across them...
...But the book includes 34 items, and the reviewer can speak dispassionately of 33 of them...
...Bernard deVoto and Lewis Mumford...
...the latest is a chapter from Henry S. Canby's Turn West, Turn East, of 1051...
...In between come commentators as different as Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Van Wyck Brooks...
...For five minutes, the sad soul struggled with the reality about him-this reality that would laugh...
...He relaxed...
...Vernon Parrington and Granville Hicks...
...But everybody laughed...
...Much of the subsequent comment on Mark Twain is merely confirmatory of Lang's judgment...
...Scott has had the happy idea of compiling a sort of nautical almanac for navigating Twainians: "The selections support no special attitude toward Mark Twain...
...Much of the criticism reveals more of the critic than it does of the author...
...Andrew Lang roundly asserted that the critics who were looking for the great American novel had been asleep...
...But Howells was far from being the only reader who saw deeper...
...roared with delight...
...He launched into an anecdote...
...Charles Whibley, for instance, saw in the Connecticut Yankee "such a masterpiece of vulgarity as the world has never seen...
...Few readers are likely to feel that such comments as these shed floods of new light on Mark Twain...
...As early as 1874, one George T. Ferris praised "the unconscious, easy, careless gait" of Mark's style, and added that many of his Western characters "seem to have stepped right out of life into the printed page...
...The views expressed are as diverse as their authors, and often tend to cancel each other out...
...His hook gives you the same sort of impression which you might receive from a beautiful picture over which a poisonous slug had crawled...
...The great American novel had been written, and its name was Huckleberry Finn...
...guzzled it...
...Department of English, Brooklyn College It may be invidious to review a book when the reviewer is among its contributors-even though he didn't know it until he looked at the table of contents...
...The audience settled back, wreathed in smiles that somehow suggested to me the folds of an obese body...
...After all...
...For Gamaliel Bradford, "it took years to shake off the withering blight which Mark's satire cast for me over the whole art of Europe...
...Fortunately, Mr...
...I hated this noble- looking fool...
...And Mark Twain rambled on . . . and dropped the ungainly humor from his mouth...
...But anyone who is at all familiar with current criticism has some notion of the points of view expressed by such moderns as Constance Rourke...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 2
