Christopher Flannery is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. With the publication of Ron Chernow’s new biography, this is once again the season of Mark Twain. Chris reviewed Chernow’s biography for the Claremont Review of Books in “Pure gold” and drew on it for the American Mind column “To absquatulate.” I asked Chris if he had any stray thoughts left for us. It turned out that he did. “The art of the pause” was the first installment. River romance” was the second. This is the third:
Mark Twain had found it hard all his life to enjoy the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Being bedridden in the winter of 1902, he tried again. He read some Rob Roy and a bit of Guy Mannering, and still failed to find what could account for Scott’s popularity and critical standing.
He wrote his friend, literary critic and Columbia University professor of literature Brander Matthews, to sound him out on the question. Albert Bigelow Paine records the full letter in his biography (1912). It is entertaining:
DEAR BRANDER,—I haven’t been out of my bed for 4 weeks, but-well, I have been reading a good deal, & it occurs to me to ask you to sit down, some time or other when you have 8 or 9 months to spare, & jot me down a certain few literary particulars for my help & elevation. Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you can make Columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a good turn.
1. Are there in Sir Walter’s novels passages done in good English—English which is neither slovenly nor involved?
2. Are there passages whose English is not poor & thin & commonplace, but is of a quality above that?
3. Are there passages which burn with real fire—not punk, foxfire, make-believe?
4. Has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses?
5. Has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their characters as described by him?
6. Has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires—admires and knows why?
7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous?
8. Does he ever chain the reader’s interest & make him reluctant to lay the book down?
9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere & in earnest?
10. Did he know how to write English, & didn’t do it because he didn’t want to?
11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn’t think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn’t know the right one when he saw it?
12. Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day—an era of sentimentality & sloppy romantics—but land! can a body do it today?
Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or take my nourishment. Lord, it’s all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-&-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a situation—elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you live to get to it, you don’t believe in it when it happens.
I can’t find the rest of Rob Roy, I, can’t stand any more Mannering—I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, & not quit this great study rashly….
My, I wish I could see you & Leigh Hunt!
Sincerely yours,
S. L. CLEMENS.
According to Paine, “a few days later he experienced a revelation. It came when he perseveringly attacked still a third work of Scott—Quentin Durward. Hastily he wrote to Matthews again:
I’m still in bed, but the days have lost their dullness since I broke into Sir Walter & lost my temper. I finished Guy Mannering — that curious, curious book, with its mob of squalid shadows gibbering around a single flesh-&-blood being—Dinmont; a book crazily put together out of the very refuse of the romance artist’s stage properties—finished it & took up Quentin Durward & finished that.
It was like leaving the dead to mingle with the living; it was like withdrawing from the infant class in the college of journalism to sit under the lectures in English literature in Columbia University. I wonder who wrote Quentin Durward?—
Paine adds: “[This letter, enveloped, addressed, and stamped, was evidently mislaid. It was found and mailed seven years later, June, 1910 message from the dead.]” Twain Died on April 21, 1910.
Matthews never had a chance to respond to Twain’s letters, pre-humous or posthumous. But he did review in the New York Times the collection of Mark Twain’s letters edited by Albert Bigelow Paine and published in 1917. There he remarks on Twain’s letters to him and quotes the first one at length. He allows that Twain had strong opinions about literature. In one letter, Twain expressed so “violently his distaste” for the novels of Jane Austen, “that Mr. Paine has decorously edited out the most picturesque of its phrases.” But Paine does leave in a passage in which Twain wonders “why the contemporaries of Jane Austen ‘allowed her to die a natural death.’”
Matthews likens Twain’s appreciation of Sir Walter Scott’s works to Twain’s hilarious and devastating essay on “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which explicitly challenges “Professor Matthews’s” assessment of Cooper’s literary art. Matthews dared to disagree with his good friend on these and many things, and he appreciated that “He has no reverence for a classic which cannot prove its right to be received as a classic.”
