Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 604
The fact is that the basis of Mark Twain’s work was utterly different from that of Dickens. He found it in the contrast of an old civilization with a new. It was the Far West of Nevada and the Rockies and California that inspired Mark Twain. He was able to look back from the altitude of Virginia City and see the older world as it was; presently he went off to Europe on the Quaker City, and the trip and the point of view which it gave him inspired all his later work. He was able to turn on Europe — on its forms and ceremonies, its monuments and its mummies (dead and living), its hauteur and its humbug — the “eye of innocence” of the Westerner. And to this eye, contrasts and incongruities are revealed never suspected before. Hence the kings and the mummies and the knights and the medieval pictures and such become “funny.” The previous ideas of the significance of such things are dissolved in the prism of this mode of thought and break into their contrasting and incongruous elements. A knight in armor becomes a man in hardware, a monk pictured in a stained glass window with uplifted eyes is “trying to think of a word.” The killing of Julius Cæsar is “localized” — as done in Nevada journalism. The form of it all is irreverent, but the effect as wholesome as the sweeping of a fresh wind through a dank swamp. This is the true “American” humor.
There is nothing of this in Dickens except perhaps when he applies the cheery ignorance of a British cockney to the interpretation of France and Italy. In his Pen Pictures and in his odd sketches of his life in France, he finds the French a “funny” people, with a most amusing language, and a most laughable politeness and a way of calling foreign gentlemen “monsieur” which is quite ridiculous. But there is no depth in Dickens’s picture. He is not “interpreting” Europe as Mark Twain is. Mark Twain, as the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, is profound in the satire — right or wrong — of his observation. Dickens as the Cockney at the Court of Versailles is just sniggering — as a cockney would.
The broad basis of the humorous writing of Dickens is that of character. When the Pickwick Papers were first planned the fun in them was to be that of incident. A group of abstractions called Cockney Sportsmen were to have various misadventures while attempting to ride balky horses, to shoot rooks to the great danger of “beaters” and spectators, to get mixed up with the charging ranks of a sham fight and such things as that. As a matter of fact this kind of stuff was wearing pretty thin already before Dickens ever began to write.
But Dickens, by the instinct of the artist, changed the theme. “I thought,” he said “of Mr. Pickwick.” That means that there flashed upon his mind the conception not of incidents but of a character. Mr. Pickwick, once created, led to the creation of others, of Alfred Jingle, old Mr. Wardle, and, triumphantly, of Sam Weller. The Pickwick Papers, opening as mere incident, almost missed the mark of public interest — with a circulation of only 400 copies — but rose as the humor of character replaced the initial idea to the most phenomenal success ever known in the world of letters. Dickens had come into his own. Henceforth, for years, the characters were created as from a magician’s hand; what they did was nothing, what they were was everything. So came into the world the Bumbles and the Micawbers and the Gamps, the glorious company still undimmed by time.
What is a humorous, a “funny” character, and how can it be analyzed? All are aware, in actual life, of queer people, funny people, from the pathetic queerness of the halfwit — funny only to children — to the higher range of funny old gentlemen, odd cranks, queer professors. To analyze is often to destroy. A biologist knows too much about a flower. A zoölogist has no illusions about a skylark. A physicist sees nothing in a rainbow. And so perhaps a “funny character” broken apart and analyzed is like a broken toy; it won’t go together again. If the study of humor is ever taken seriously, we must handle it carefully, lest it work its own undoing.
“Funny” characters are made so by presenting, whether we are conscious of it or not, the same destructive contrasts and incongruities that are the basis of humor itself. Here is Mr. Pickwick — with all the dignity and decorum of affluent middle age as contrasted with its physical limitations; with a highly scientific desire for information contrasted with an utter inability to measure its truth; with a chivalrous and unwearied courtesy which makes him an easy mark — expecting truth and finding deception; seeing the world through roseate spectacles which presently turn a bad world rosy. Mr. Pickwick walks through life conveying with him the contrast between life as it might be and life as it is.
Such are the characters of Dickens. Here is Mr. Micawber with the brisk decisiveness of competence, the manners of the firm reliable man of business concealing the utter incompetence within. Here is Mrs. Gamp combining the tenderest and most sacred functions of human life — the care of maternity, the vigil of the dead — with a complete indifference to their meaning. What a horror she could have been as drawn by another hand! But Dickens suffused her in a soft atmosphere of gin, and saved her.
Dickens thus chiefly depicts and depends upon the humor of character. Even when he is satirizing institutions, it is always done through the medium of characters — real characters, not abstractions or impossibilities like so many of Mark Twain’s, but real ones. Thus the denunciation of indiscriminate foreign charities conducted by people who neglect their duties at home is effected through the humor of Mrs. Jellaby (Bleak House) sitting in her untidy house and writing reams of letters about the natives of Borrio-boola-Gha, while neglected children fall up and down stairs. The denunciation of the Court of Chancery in the same book is more direct, with less of humor and more of pathos and stern tragedy, but it carries with it the humor, if one can find it so, of the little crackbrained Miss Flyte, and of the ghastly Mr. Vholes. Similarly in Oliver Twist the satire on the poor law and the work house is effected through the character of Mr. Bumble. This, on analysis, turns on the grim contrast between the pious care of orphan children and Mr. Bumble’s operations carried on under that name. To decry and expose the brutality of the Yorkshire schools, Dickens creates the hideous but half comic character of Mr. Squeers. The contrast lies between the kindly labor of the schoolmaster and Mr. Squeers’s method. “W-i-n-d-e-r-s, winders,” says Squeers, “go and clean them,” and he emphasizes his instructions with a crack of the cane. The treatment of the wretched little boys by Mr. and Mrs. Squeers is a similar hideous incongruity as set beside parental care.
All through Dickens’s monumental work, the method of humor is the same. At times it is replaced by that of pathos, as in the imprisonment of Mr. Dorrit in the Marshalsea, which is poignant in its distress. Compare the similar confinement of Mr. Pickwick (both of them for debt) in the Fleet. Here the social purpose is the same, but the means adopted is humor, not pathos.
I — MR. PICKWICK IN THE FLEET
“Oh,” replied Mr. Pickwick, looking down a dark and filthy staircase, which appeared to lead to a range of damp and gloomy stone vaults, beneath the ground, “and those, I suppose, are the little cellars where the prisoners keep their small quantities of coals. Unpleasant places to have to go down to, but very convenient, I dare say.”
“Yes, I shouldn’t wonder if they was convenient,” replied the gentlemen [Mr. Tom Roker, the turnkey], “seeing that a few people live there, pretty snug.”
“Live! Live down there!” exclaimed Mr. Pickwick.
· · · · · · · ·
“There,” said Mr. Roker [holding open the door of the uninviting room in which he proposed to lodge Mr. Pickwick during his stay in the prison], looking triumphantly round at Mr. Pickwick, “there’s a room!”
Mr. Pickwick’s face, however, betokened such a trifling portion of satisfaction at the appearance of his lodging, that Mr. Roker looked for a reciprocity of feeling into the countenance of Samuel Weller, who, until now, had observed a dignified silence.
“There’s a room, young man,” observed Mr. Roker.
“I see it,” replied Sam, with a placid nod of the head.
“You wouldn’t think to find such a room as this in the Farringdon Hotel, would you?” said Mr. Roker, with a complacent smile.
To this Mr. Weller replied with an easy and unstudied closing of one eye.
II — MR. DORRIT IN THE MARSHALSEA
(Extracts from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit)
There had been taken to the Marshalsea, long before, a debtor with whom this narrative has some concern. He was at that time a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman, who was going out again directly, because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a debtor who was not. . . . He was a shy, retiring man . . . with fingers which wandered to his trembling lip a hundred times during the first half hour of his acquaintance with the jail. His principal anxiety was about his wife.
And with that follows the pathetic chronicle of Edward Dorrit — the Marshalsea prison, the “home” of his wife and children (as it had been for the child Charles Dickens); the birth of his youngest daughter in the prison; the death of his wife; and the long years, a quarter century, of his incarceration. After that, his liberation, rich, in old age, his temporary and pathetic magnificence and his collapse, his dying intelligence wandering back to the scenes of his imprisonment.
Thus for ten days after he was stricken Little Dorrit bent over the pillow, laying her cheek against his. Sometimes she was so worn out that for a few minutes they would slumber together; then she would awake, to recollect, with fast flowing silent tears, what it was that touched her face, and to see, stealing over the cherished face upon the pillow, a deeper shadow than the shadow of the Marshalsea Wall.
Quietly, quietly, all the lines of the plan of the great castle melted, one after the other. Quietly, quietly the ruled and cross-ruled countenance on which they were traced became fair and blank. Quietly, quietly the reflected marks of the prison bars and of the zig-zag iron on the wall-top, faded away. Quietly, quietly the face subsided into a far younger likeness of her own than she had ever seen under the grey hair, and sank to rest.
There can be no doubt of the effectiveness and the wonder of Dickens’s work thus done. He did as much as, or more than, all the Benthams and the Romillys and the Shaftesburys to sweep away the removable hardships, the cruelties and injustices of the England of his day. He led where legislation followed. The pen was mightier than the parliament. Others since Dickens have used the bitter denunciation of fiction to reform social evils, to clear up “the jungle” and cut asunder the “octopus.” But he did it with the laughter and the smiles that mingled even with anger as April sunshine glimmers through the rain. No one ever equaled, no one ever approached, Charles Dickens in this aspect.
Mark Twain, too, sought as a part of his work to uplift the world with laughter. But his mechanism and technique (if one can use such hard words of what is really intuition and instinct) were entirely indifferent. If Mark Twain had wished to blast the Court of Chancery out of existence he would have gone at it in an entirely different way. He would have imagined some vast fantastic and impossible theme connected with the Court of Chancery. Something like this perhaps: It is found from certain documents that an American millionaire has left all his land under the English Court of Chancery and that his land rightly appraised includes all of the State of Nevada. Hence the whole of Nevada falls under the rule of the Court of Chancery. The miners become, as did many little children in the old days, “wards in Chancery.” A group of Chancery officials in wigs and gowns come out to preside over Carson City and Dead Horse Gulch. The contrast afforded by their dignity, their delays and their formality when set against the life of a mining camp would form the basis of the humor. But the characters, with Mark Twain, would not be real people like the Tulkinghorns and the Jarndyces and the Carstones of Bleak House; they’d just be a set of stock abstractions with their legal attributes only — just as the Knights of the Connecticut Yankee are “knights” and nothing else.
For it is in that book — the Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur — that Mark Twain shows this method at its best. All his readers know the story. Many of them consider it his “funniest,” if not his best, work. But most of them, if not all, realize that it is meant to be something far more than a “funny” book; that it is as intense in its denunciation of aristocracy, privilege and inequality among mankind as Dickens’s book is intense in its social purpose.
The Yankee, who, by an easy literary device, finds himself thrown backward in time to the year 528 a. d., is meant to typify the spirit of modern American freedom, with a special knowledge of all things mechanical that stands for progress. In other words, although Mark Twain doesn’t know it, he is meant to be Mark Twain. Through him are thrown into a high light the cruelty and injustice of the past age into which he is projected; through him is shown the way in which the application of scientific knowledge and freedom and equality can enlighten and reform it. More than this — the injustice of this past age, as seen and recorded by the Yankee, and the dullness and indifference which permits it to exist, are not, for Mark Twain, things that have passed away. He sees them still in modern England, and it is modern England as well as the past which he is denouncing. To him every English “Lord” in a London drawing room is as unjust an institution as a Lord of a thousand years ago who threw his varlets into dungeons; an aristocracy is just a band of slaveholders; and a privileged church (meaning the present Church of England) is a sin against the light.
There is no need to discuss here the truth or falsehood of the Connecticut Yankee as history and as political thought. It is discussed only in connection with the technique of humor. Naturally its shortcomings are quite obvious. Mark Twain knew nothing of the lights and shadows of history. He drew from it only sudden fierce angers against the strong and poignant sympathies with the weak. He lumped together everything from the mythical Court of King Arthur to the Court of Louis the Sixteenth, combining all Europe and fifteen hundred years of history into what was called in a lump the Middle Ages. Against this was to be contrasted a highly imaginary place called America from which were conveniently omitted all the thugs, bandits, lynchers and slave owners, all the crooks, grafters, land grabbers, trust barons and railroad magnates, all the delays and complications of the law which hatched out criminals faster than did the tyrannies of Europe. Oddly enough those of us in America who read the book when it came out took it pretty much at Mark Twain’s own valuation. The idea of an evil past and an enlightened present, the idea that machinery and progress were synonymous and that democracy cured all evils, was still a mass idea of the time on this continent. The tradition of a “land of liberty” died hard; or better, is not yet dead.
In England, of course, the book gave great offense and called forth recrimination and contempt. The English critics, who had “discovered” Mark Twain as a literary man while Boston still thought him a Western “cut-up,” now felt that they had hatched a bad egg. But the effect of a stone thrown into a literary circle is small; it soon fades out as it spreads in the general pond. The English people soon forgave Mark Twain just as the Americans had forgiven Dickens. A humorist, if a great one, is a privileged person; even a small one has a fool’s license; the cap and bells turns him into a sacred idiot.
In any case Dickens didn’t understand America and Mark Twain didn’t understand England. It is amazing how restricted was the outlook of each. Dickens saw only London and saw everything from London; Mark Twain looked at the world all his life from the Mississippi, and the mountains. Dickens in his “palace” at Genoa wrote busily of London, the bells of the Italian churches waking on his ear only the “chimes” of his own city. He walked the streets of Paris with the narrative of Paul Dombey’s death still running in his mind, the tears upon his face, unconscious of his whereabouts. To him a revolution in Geneva was just a noise outside the window, and the Crimean War only a show in the winter streets of Paris.
So with Mark Twain. From the golden days of the Nevada camps he looked out on Europe and condemned it, his judgments formed for life. A few fierce elemental ideas about God and Kings and the Past was all he needed. Even the Eastern States of America could never claim him; he lived in Buffalo and never saw it. American history began for him with the Mississippi steamboat.
We have to remember that such a book as the Connecticut Yankee is not to be classed as burlesque in the limited sense of pure verbal fun-making. Yet it is an enormously funny book. The remembered pictures of such things as King Arthur’s Knights lined up for baseball are unsurpassed. The idea of “Sir Galahad on second base” is about as sharp and complete an incongruity as can be imagined. But behind it all is significance, at least in intention. That is what separates it from pure burlesque.
In this latter — pure, verbal burlesque — both Dickens and Mark Twain had great aptitude when they cared to use it. One interesting example exists, in which they both set down the same thing — namely in each case an imaginary biographical history of a family. Dickens in his opening chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit, quite unconnected with the book, records the family history of the Chuzzlewits. Mark Twain, as a newspaper “piece,” once wrote a similar biography of the Twains. One may with profit set some extracts side by side.
Dickens writes:
It has been rumored, and it is needless to say the rumor originated in the same base quarters, that a certain male Chuzzlewit, whose birth must be admitted to be involved in some obscurity, was of very mean and low descent. How stands the proof? When the son of that individual, to whom the secret of his father’s birth was supposed to have been communicated by his father in his lifetime, lay upon his deathbed, this question was put to him in a distinct, solemn and formal way: “Toby Chuzzlewit, who was your grandfather?” To which he, with his last breath, no less distinctly, solemnly, and formally replied — and his words were taken down at the time, and signed by six witnesses each with his name and address in full— “The Lord No Zoo.” It may be said — it has been said, for human wickedness has no limits — that there is no lord of that name, and that, among the titles which have become extinct, none at all resembling this, in sound even, is to be discovered. But what is the irresistible inference? Rejecting a theory broached by some well-meaning but mistaken persons, that this Mr. Toby Chuzzlewit’s grandfather, to judge from his name, must surely have been a mandarin (which is wholly insupportable, for there is no pretense of his grandmother ever having been out of this country, or of any mandarin having been in it within some years of his father’s birth, except those in the tea-shops, which cannot for a moment be regarded as having any bearing on the question, one way or other), rejecting this hypothesis, is it not manifest that Mr. Toby Chuzzlewit had either received the name imperfectly from his father, or that he had forgotten it, or that he had mispronounced it? and that even at the recent period in question, the Chuzzlewits were connected by a bend sinister, or kind of heraldic over-the-left, with some unknown noble and illustrious house?
