Literary Giant: Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
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Some critics complain that Twain wrote well only when he was writing about young people. They say that his psychology was really only child psychology. This may be true. But in his greatest novel. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain gives the national heart. Most agree , however, that it抯 from even deeper currents. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is Twain’s best book because, for whatever reasons, he brought together in it, with the highest degree of artistic balance, those most fundamental dualities running through his work and life from start to finish.
In his later novels, Twain seems less hopeful about democracy. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), the hero is the boss of a factory. He is hit on the head and wakes up in sixth-century England. Because he is a nineteenth-century inventor, he begins to modernize this world, and because he knows so much, he becomes a kind of dictator, called "the Boss". In many ways, Twain seems to be praising both the technology and the leadership of the bosses of American business during the "Gilded Age". Like Twain Twain’s hero, these bosses thought they knew more than the ordinary people of society.
By 1890, Twain’s financial fortunes were crumbling, mostly owing to bad investment in a publishing firm and in the Paige typesetter. In 1891,Twain closed the Hartford mansion, sold the furniture, and went to Europe to economize. While he was lecturing in Europe, his daughter Susy died, and his wife, Livy, shortly afterward suffered a nervous collapse from which she never recovered. Twain blamed him for bringing on his beloved family the circumstances that led to both tragedies. Twain’s pessimism grew deeper and deeper. His abiding skepticism about human natrue deepened to cynicism and found expression in those dark stories of his last years, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" and "The Mysterious Stranger". In the former, Twain describes a town that had been famous for its honesty". In the end, everybody in town has lied in order to get a big bag of gold. In the latter, published in 1916 after Twain’s death, an angel visits three boys in an English village in the Middle Ages. He becomes their friend and shows them evil of mankind. After destroying their innocent happiness, he finally announces that he is Satan. Twain saw human nature as a kind of machine; "I see no great difference between a man and a watch, except that a man is conscious and a watch is not. "Human evil comes from something being wrong with that machine. Throughout all of Twain’s writing, we see the conflict between the ideals of Americans and their desire for money. But Twain never tried to solve the conflict. He is like a newspaperman who reports what he sees. His humor was often rather childish. This may bespeak why the critic P. Abel said: "Twain was ably and an old man, but never was he a man. "
His literature explored questions of freedom, independence, and identity. In a steady evolution, lie moved from the confidence and self-reliance of the brash westerner to the questioning and contradictory stance of the agnostic, until he could write in his notebook in the last years of the century, "The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be-damned." It could be argued that, almost single-handedly, he liberated American fiction from the rigid conventions of the mid nineteenth century-its stilted dialogue, its stereotyped characters, its didactic impulse, its optimistic impetus. At the same time, lie lowered ’American literature to the plane of the mass audience and elevated it to a distinct, in digamous height which no one else has reached.
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