Mark Twain by Archibald Henderson
page 108 of 140 (77%)
page 108 of 140 (77%)
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The influence of the West upon the character and genius of Mark Twain is
momentous and unmistakable. Mark Twain found room for development and expansion in the primitive freedom of the West. It was here, I think, that there were bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment and that hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to end. In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood--or fell--by force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled for fortune, for competence--or for existence. It was a case of the survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature--the burning alkali desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,--all men were free and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the humbug soon went to the wall, exposed in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour is a salutary aid in the struggle of the individual with the contrasts of life; indeed it may be said to be born of the perception of those contrasts. In a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river life, the life of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable --vaster perhaps, and more significant. There was the incessant contrast of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was infinite play for the comic _expose_ of the credulous "tenderfoot" at the hands of the pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac wiles of his tormentors. The West was one vast theatre for the practice of the "practical joke." Behind everything, menacing, foreboding, tragic, lay the stupendous contrast between Man and Nature; and though the miner, the granger, the cowboy laughed defiantly at civilization and at Nature, there crept into the consciousness of each the conviction that, in the long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in order to win success, Nature must be conquered and subdued. In such an |
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