Mark Twains Americanism | Page 2

of art. No wonder the pious critic of _The New York
Times_, horrified by its doctrine, was forced to take refuge behind the theory that Mark
intended it as a joke.
In The Mysterious Stranger there is a step further. _What Is Man?_ analyzes the concept
of man; The Mysterious Stranger boldly analyzes the concept of God. What, after all, is
the actual character of this Being we are asked to reverence and obey? How is His mind
revealed by His admitted acts? How does His observed conduct toward man square with
those ideals of human conduct that He is said to prescribe, and whose violation He is said
to punish with such appalling penalties?
These are the questions that Mark sets for himself. His answers are, in brief, a complete
rejection of the whole Christian theory -- a rejection based upon a wholesale reductio ad
absurdum. The thing is not mere mocking; it is not even irreverent; but the force of it is
stupendous. I know of no agnostic document that shows a keener sense of essentials or a
more deft hand for making use of the indubitable. A gigantic irony is in it. It glows with a
profound conviction, almost a kind of passion. And the grotesque form of it -- a child's
story -- only adds to the sardonic implacability of it.
As I say, there are more to come. Mark in his idle moments was forever at work upon
some such riddling of the conventional philosophy, as he was forever railing at the
conventional ethic in his private conversation. One of these pieces, highly characteristic,
is described in Albert Bigelow Paine's biography. It is an elaborate history of the
microbes inhabiting a man's veins. They divine a religion with the man as God; they
perfect a dogma setting forth his desires as to their conduct; they engaged in a worship
based upon the notion that he is immediately aware of their every act and jealous of their
regard and enormously concerned about their welfare. In brief, a staggering satire upon
the anthropocentric religion of man -- a typical return to the favorite theme of man's

egoism and imbecility.
All this sort of thing, to be sure, has its dangers for Mark's fame. Let his executors print a
few more of his unpublished works -- say, the microbe story and his sketch of life at the
court of Elizabeth -- and Dr. Taft, I dare say, will withdraw his prominciamento that "he
never wrote a line that a father could not read to his daughter." Already, indeed, the lady
reviewers of the newspapers sound an alarm against him, and the old lavish praise of him
begins to die down to whispers. In the end, perhaps, the Carnegie libraries will put him to
the torture, and The Innocents Abroad will be sacrificed with _What Is Man?_
But that effort to dispose of him is nothing now. Nor will it succeed. While he lived he
was several times labeled and relabeled, and always inaccurately and vainly. At the start
the national guardians of letters sought to dismiss him loftily as a hollow buffoon, a
brother to josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby. This enterprise failing, they made him a
comic moralist, a sort of chautauquan in motley, a William Jennings Bryan armed with a
slapstick. Foiled again, they promoted him to the rank of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and
William Dean Howells, and issued an impertinent amnesty for the sins of his youth. Thus
he passed from these scenes -- ratified at last, but somewhat heavily patronized.
Now the professors must overhaul him again, and this time, I suppose, they will
undertake to pull him down a peg. They will succeed as little as they succeeded when
they tried to read him out of meeting in the early '80s. The more they tackle him, in fact,
the more it will become evident that he was a literary artist of the very first rank, and
incomparably the greatest ever hatched in these states.
One reads with something akin to astonishment of his superstitious reverence for
Emerson -- of how he stood silent and bare-headed before the great transcendentalist's
house at Concord. One hears of him, with amazement, courting Whittier, Longfellow and
Holmes. One is staggered by the news, reported by Traubel, that Walt Whitman thought
"he mainly misses fire." The simple fact is that Huckleberry Finn is worth the whole
work of Emerson with two-thirds of the work of Whitman thrown in for make-weight,
and that one chapter of it is worth the whole work of Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes.
Mark was not only a great artist; he was pre-eminently a great American artist. No other
writer that we have produced has ever been more extravagantly national. Whitman
dreamed of an America