During the past two years I have been reading through a group of writers who seem to me to represent about the best we have--Sir Thomas Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Boswell, Carlyle, Le Sage.In thinking over one and then another, and then all of them together, it was plain to see why they were great men and writers: each brought to his time some new blood, new ideas,--turned a new current into the stream.I suppose there have always been the careful, painstaking writers, the men who are always taken so seriously by their fellow craftsmen.It seems to be the unconventional man who is so rare--I mean the honestly unconventional man, who has to express himself in his own big way because the conventional way isn't big enough, because ne needs room and *******.
We have a group of the more or less conventional men now--men of dignity and literary position.But in spite of their influence and of all the work they have done, there isn't one of them to whom one can give one's self up without reservation, not one whose ideas seem based on the deep foundation of all true philosophy,--except Mark Twain.
I hope this letter is not an impertinence.I have just been turning about, with my head full of Spenser and Shakespeare and "Gil Blas,"looking for something in our own present day literature to which I could surrender myself as to those five gripping old writings.And nothing could I find until I took up "Life on the Mississippi," and "Huckleberry Finn," and, just now, the "Connecticut Yankee." It isn't the first time I have read any of these three, and it's because I know it won't be the last, because these books are the only ones written in my lifetime that claim my unreserved interest and admiration and, above all, my feelings, that I've felt I had to write this letter.
I like to think that "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" will be looked upon, fifty or a hundred years from now, as the picture of buoyant, dramatic, human American life.I feel, deep in my own heart, pretty sure that they will be.They won't be looked on then as the work of a "humorist" any more than we think of Shakespeare as a humorist now.
I don't mean by this to set up a comparison between Mark Twain and Shakespeare: I don't feel competent to do it; and I'm not at all sure that it could be done until Mark Twain's work shall have its fair share of historical perspective.But Shakespeare was a humorist and so, thank Heaven! is Mark Twain.And Shakespeare plunged deep into the deep, sad things of life; and so, in a different way (but in a way that has more than once brought tears to my eyes) has Mark Twain.But after all, it isn't because of any resemblance for anything that was ever before written that Mark Twain's books strike in so deep: it's rather because they've brought something really new into our literature--new, yet old as Adam and Eve and the Apple.And this achievement, the achievement of putting something into literature that was not there before, is, I should think, the most that any writer can ever hope to do.It is the one mark of distinction between the "lonesome" little group of big men and the vast herd of medium and small ones.Anyhow, this much I am sure of--to the young man who hopes, however feebly, to accomplish a little something, someday, as a writer, the one inspiring example of our time is Mark Twain.
Very truly yours, SAMUEL MERWIN.
Mark Twain once said he could live a month on a good compliment, and from his reply, we may believe this one to belong in, that class.
To Samuel Merwin, in Plainfield, N.J.:
Aug.16, '03.
DEAR MR.MERWIN,--What you have said has given me deep pleasure--indeed Ithink no words could be said that could give me more.
Very sincerely yours, S.L.CLEMENS.