Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons
LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School
1972 Studies in Modes of Romantic Heroism With Special Reference to the Work of Mark Twain. James Darrell Wilson Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses
Recommended Citation Wilson, James Darrell, "Studies in Modes of Romantic Heroism With Special Reference to the Work of Mark Twain." (1972). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2259. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2259
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS
This dissertation was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph and reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted.
The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction.
1. The sign or “target'' for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is “Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity.
2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. You will find a good image of the page in the adjacent frame.
3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in “sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap. If necessary, sectioning is continued again — beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete.
4. The majority of users indicate that the textual content is of greatest value, however, a somewhat higher quality reproduction could be made from "photographs" if essential to the understanding of the dissertation. Silver prints of "photographs" may be ordered at additional charge by writing the Order Department, giving the catalog number, title, author and specific pages you wish reproduced.
University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 A Xerox Education Company I I 72-28,394
WILSON, James Darrell, 1946- STUDIES IN MODES OF ROMANTIC HEROISM WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORK OF MARK TWAIN.
The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1972 Language and Literature, general
University Microfilms, A XEROX Company. Ann Arbor, Michigan
THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED Studies in Modes of Romantic Heroism with Special R eference to th e Work o f Mark Twain
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The D epartm ent o f U nglish
by James Darrell Wilson B.A., Baldwin-Wallace College, 1968 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1970 May, 1972 PLEASE NOTE:
Some pages may have
indistinct print.
Filmed as received.
University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company Acknowledgment
I am indebted to Dr. Lewis P. Simpson for his valuable assistance, stimulation and guidance in the preparation of this dissertation. I should also like to thank Dr. Darwin H. Shrell, Dr. Thomas L. Y/atson,
Dr. Otis B. Y,'heeler, and Dr. John Hazard Y/ildman for their thoughtful reading of the manuscript and their helpful suggestions. I extend my appreciation to Dr.
Lilian R. Furst for the inspiration, encouragement and guidance she provided during my period of study in the department of Comparative Literary Studies at the
University of Manchester in 1970-1971. Special thanks are due to my wife, Mary Ann, for her many helpful suggestions and stimulating observations pertaining to the dissertation, and for her patience and encouragement during the writing of it.
ii Table of Contents
Acknowledgment ii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Section One "Antecedents of the I.Iark Twain Hero"
Chapter I "Modes of Romantic Heroism" 17 Chapter II "V/erther and Rene/: Prototypes 35 of the mal du si^cle Tradition
Chapter III "I'anfred, Ethan Brand and Ahab: 50 The Hero as Demonic Figure"
C hapter IV "F aust and Prom etheus: The 89 Hero as Redemptive Agent"
Afterword to SectionOne 113
Section Two "The LI ark Twain Hero"
Chapter V "The Innocents Abroad: The 117 American as Hero"
Chapter VI "The Light and Dark of Pluck Finn" 145
Chapter VII "Hank I.I organ: An American Faust" 176
Chapter VIII "Joan of Arc: Saint as Hero" 202
Chapter IX "The Mysterious Stranger and 224 Goethe's ffaust" C onclusion 248
Bibliography 251
Appendix 265
V ita 273
i i i A b stra c t
Despite Mark Twain's affinities to his native cul
ture, he was aware of European intellectual and literary
currents prevailing during the nineteenth century. One aspect of European intellectual history of the period which Mark Twain found fascinating was the concept of
the transcendent hero which developed out of modes of heroism associated with Romanticism. Familiar with tne work of Goethe, Byron, Carlyle, Shelley and Darwin, Mark
Twain adapts modes of heroism developed by these European and English artists to express his despair and disil lusionment with the course which American culture takes
in the late nineteenth century.
The "Romantic hero" i s a term in c lu d in g so many contradictory patterns of heroism that it has become meaninglessly ambiguous. Hence we must talk not of the
"Romantic hero" but of modes of Romantic heroism, of which there seem to be at least three operative in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature. The earliest Romantic heroes emerge from the sentimentality permeating eighteenth-century literature; Werther, Rene",
Childe Harold and Don Juan are melancholy figures whose sensitivity crushes them in a world seemingly toxic to any meaningful endeavor. Eventually heroes in Romanticism become demoniac; Manfred, Ethan Brand and Ahab defiantly iv V
alienate themselves from their fellows, embarked upon a
quest for permanence and superhuman knowledge. Koby-Dick
emerges as a significant novel in Romanticism because it
presents the descendant of the mal du siecle tradition—
Ishmael—and the demoniac—Ahab—then explores the
tension created between them. Ishmael achieves a tenuous
salvation because he renounces his part in Ahab's satanic mission and embraces—via Queequeg1s coffin—the redeeming virtues of religious faith and human love. Yet for many
Romantic artists Ishmael’s passive acceptance of faith and communal love is insufficient for heroism; Prometheus,
Faust and Carlyle's culture-heroes reflect the Romantic belief that the individual must surrender himself and actively struggle on behalf of his fellows to inaugurate a new world order. The hero ultimately reflects the
Romantic's desire not to affirm the self but to escape so lip sism .
In his first book, Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain creates a fictional persona embodying the essential hopes and prejudices of the American people; self-reliant, irreverent, modest yet proudly aware of his role as a symbol of American progress and moral purity on a con tinent beset by decay and moral decadence, the narrator of Innocents Abroad becomes an example of the American as hero. Yet the narrator of Innocents Abroad is a hero in search of a cultural and spiritual identity, and as such bears relation to Romantic heroes in the mal du siecle tradition. His dissatisfaction with his American co-travelers and the spiritual void that exists within him make I,lark T w ain's p ersona an embodiment o f l a t e n t misgivings about the nation he overtly celebrates. These misgivings emerge full force in Hark Twain's later fiction, and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut
Yankee, Hark Twain adapts specific modes of Romantic heroism—the mal du siecle in the first, the Faustian in the second—to express his dislike of and disil lusionment with the course which American civilization takes in the late nineteenth-century. Joan of Arc, an enigma in the Hark Twain canon, seems to offer a ray of hope, as it presents a Promethean figure who transcends the debilitating shackles of environment and affirms an essential nobility of spirit. But in The Mysterious
Stranger, begun the year Joan of Arc first appears in print, Mark Twain lapses back into despair, modifying the Faust legend to create a novel which denies America's fundamental premises about the value of civilization and the innate dignity of the individual. Introduction
An examination of the relationship of any nineteenth- century American author to the literary and intellectual development of Western Europe seams to run counter to established trends in American scholarship. There are, of course, certain movements, periods or individual figures whose affinities to European traditions have received some scholarly consideration; yet, by and large,
American authors are considered inextricably bound to their native land—its institutions, its myths, its intellectual and cultural heritage. Fostered by the necessarily provincial outlook of an "American Studies" approach to American literature, "the theory that
American literature and thought are fundamentally gov erned by a quest for nationality is," Lewis P. Simpson points out, "an almost axiomatic assumption by his torians of that literature."^
Of all American writers, Hark Twain is undoubtedly
^■"Literary Ecumenical ism of the American Enlighten ment," The Ibero-American Enlightenment, ed. A. Owen Aldridge (Urbana, 111., 1971), pp. 317-318. For a sustained discussion of the intimate relationship be tween American literature and American culture and history see, Spiller, Thorp, Johnson et al., Literary History of the United States. 3rd ed., rev. (llew York, 1963), pp. xvii-xxiv. 2
the one tied most closely to the American heritage. To
Henry Canby, Mark Twain is "essentially a Western demo- 2 cratic man"; to Bliss Perry he is "one of the most representative of American writers";^ to C. P. McClel land, the Missouri author is "the most characteristi cally American of all writers";^ to his official biographer, Albert Paine, Mark Twain is "the foremost
American-born author—the man most characteristically
American in every thought and word and action of his 5 life"; to his contemporary and fellow man-of-letters,
'William Dean Howells, the "incomparable" Mark Twain is
"the Lincoln of our literature."^ Bernard DeVoto, one of the central figures in Mark Twain scholarship, asserts with conviction that Mark Twain never desired to be anything but "a humorist, realist, and satirist of the frontier"; furthermore, all his inspiration came from
"books wl ich were a continent away from the damned
2 "Mark Twain Himself," Saturday Review of Literature, 9 (October 29, 1932), 202.
^The American Mind (Boston, 1912), p. 199. 4 "Mark Twain and Bret Ilarte," Methodist Review, 5th 3er., 22 (January, 1916), 75. 5 Mark Twain: A Biography. The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel LangTiorne Clemens, 1 (N'ew York, 1912), 12.
^My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticism (New York, TylO), p. 101. 3
7 shadow of Europe." Paine's edition of Mark Twain's
letters appears, one anonymous reviewer asserts, as "a
breath of the continent's heart, out of a generation
that knew not and cared not for the exotics, for Maeter
linck, V/ilde, Strindberg, Ibsen and the Russian gloom g artists." Roger Asselineau points out in his 1954
summary of Mark Twain scholarship that no major work
on Mark Twain has been written outside the United States;
indeed, Asselineau claims, "the work could be done only Q by American critics."
One reason for the identification of Mark Twain with
American culture is that the author consciously associated himself with his native land. Selecting his materials out of the heart of America, writing his major novel in a uniquely American idiom, and appearing in his first book as a representative of the "innocent" American repudiating the decay and injustices of the Old 7/orld, certain, Justin Kaplan says, "of the moral and material
superiority of the American present to the historical p ast,"^ Mark Twain provides us with a body of work
n Mark Twain1s America (Boston, 1932), p. 99. Q "Literature and Life Mirrored in Mark Twain's Letters," Current Opinion, 64 (January 1918), 50. n The Literary Reputation of Mark Twain: From 1910 to 1950 (Paris, l954), p.^ 7 .
1CW . Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, r9T>6), p .l5 4 . 4
which Henry Nash Smith claims affords the student of
American culture with "the best means of getting at
what happened when American writers turned their backs
on Europe."^- Van V/yck Brooks and Justin Kaplan have
ably demonstrated the uncertainties and dichotomies 12 plaguing Mark Twain's psyche; it is a virtual common
place in Mark Twain scholarship—Maxwell Geismar being an exception—that Mark Twain possessed a tortured, divided and mysterious soul. Yet innumerable attempts
have been made to discover the key to that soul, because, as Lev/is P. Simpson points out, the identity of "Samuel
L. Clemens—who pretended to be Mark Twain, or perhaps was Mark Twain, or perhaps was neither but someone else
still to be discovered—involves the identity of us all" as Americans.^ To his countrymen and to the rest of the world, Mark Twain represents the national heritage; his most popular novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ranks with W. C, Handy's "Saint Louis Blues" as the
■^"Origins of a Native American Literary Tradition," The American Writer and the European Tradition, ed. Mar- garet l)enny and William If. Gilman (1950; rpt. New York, 1964), p. 70. 12 The Ordeal of Mark Twain, rev. ed. (1933; rpt. Cleveland, 1955), and Mr." dlemens and Mark Twain.
^"I.Iark Twain: Critical Perspectives," Southern Review, NS 4 (April 1968), 491. 5
supreme expression, the artistic embodiment, of the
American soul.
Despite the close identification of Mark Twain and
his national heritage, certain scholars have nevertheless managed to demonstrate that even this most characteris
tically "American" of all writers owed a considerable debt to literary and intellectual developments in England and Western Europe. Reacting against the stereotyped notion of Mark Twain as an illiterate, uncouth "genius" flowering among the cactus from the desert soil of Middle
American culture—a notion perpetuated by critics as influential as Vernon Parrington—Olin Moore, as early as 1922, vigorously asserted that Mark Twain was in fact quite literate, and that he put to good use his intimate knowledge of European classics:
The popular notion is that Mark Twain's genius ".just grew," like Topsy; that he was peculiarly a "self-made" man, the term "self-made" being understood to mean "lack in book learning" .... It will there fore come as a rude shock to many readers ... to know their favorite drew much of his inspiration for his most American books from European models; that he was in earnest when he declared in a heated controversy that "there is not a single human characteristic which can be safely labeled as American." 14
A contemporary of Moore's, Friedrich Schoenemann, turned
^"Mark Twain and Don Quixote," FMLA., 37 (June 1922), 324-325. 6
out in Germany at the same time a series of articles
demonstrating Mark Twain's fam iliarity with and use of 15 German literature, and, twelve years after I-.Ioore' s
article appeared, Minnie Brashear released her famous
study, Hark Twain: Son of Missouri (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1934), devoting an entire chapter to illustrating I,lark
Twain's early and continuing knowledge of the best
literature in Europe, particularly eighteenth-century
Europe. Cyril Clemens, in a short article on his uncle's
reading, contended that Hark Twain did indeed read widely,
and that his favorites were the Bible, Robert Browning,
and Carlyle's French Revolution, which he read at least
twenty tim es.^ Such scholarship did a great deal to
elevate Hark Twain's literary reputation; it laid the
foundation for such studies as Bellamy's Hark Twain as
Literary A rtist (Norman, Okla., 1950) and Ferguson's
Hark Twain: I,lan and Legend (Indianapolis, 1943), both of which contend that Hark Twain was a highly skilled, conscious man-of-letters, well aware of literary tradi-
15 Mark Twain als Literarische Personlichkeit (Jena, Germany, 1529); ^lark Twains Weltanschauung,11 Englische Studien, 55 (1921), 53-84; "Hark Tv/ain and Adolpn ’Yil- brandt," I.Iodem Language Notes, 34 (June 1919) > 373-374. 16 "Hcrk T r a i n 's R eading," Commonweal, 24 (August 7, 1936), 363*364. 7
tions, and utilizing those traditions with great success in his work.
Never really assimilated into the literary main stream of hallowed Boston, doomed to failure in a number of sagging financial investments, and profoundly disil lusioned by the seeming decay of values and by the appar ent loss both of opportunity and innocence in late nineteenth-century America, the once staunchly "American"
Nark Twain became increasingly affiliated with the Old
Y/orld he had once so defiantljr repudiated in his early career. For a man coming directly out of America's heartland, and identified so intimately with his native land, Nark Twain spent a surprisingly large amount of his time in Europe. And, what is even more surprising,
T'ark Twain's regard for Europe grew in direct propor tion to his disillusionment with America. Y/hile abroad, he wrote on one occasion in a letter to his wife, Livy,
"I would rather live in England than America—which is 17 treason," and, on another occasion, while attending the Y/agner festival in Bayreuth, I,lark Twain expressed heartfelt admiration for Germany and her people: "What a paradise this land is, what clean clothes, what good faces, what tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what
17 as quoted by Kaplan, Hr. Clemens and Mark Twain, P. 153. 8
18 genuine freedom, what superb government 111 His in
creasing fascination with German culture led Mark Twain
to acquire a working knowledge of the language, to
familiarize himself with the country's literature and
music, and even to attempt to write a play, Meister- iq schaft, entirely in Gennan. ^ Furthermore, Europe
embraced Mark Twain so completely that it overwhelmed
a man whose work in his own country was considered
virtually sub-literary. In German-speaking countries,
sales of Hark Twain's books from 1874-1937 numbered more
than one million copies; in Russia, even after the
Revolution, sales of his work surpassed the three
million mark in just thirty years. And, the Prince and
the Pauper has been used in classes by Geman school 20 children since the lo90's.
A study of Mark Twain and his affinities to certain
European traditions is not, therefore, unwarranted.
Having familiarized himself with European literature,
-» O as quoted by Kaplan, p. 214. 19 See John Krumpelmann, Mark Twain and the German La £ (aaton Rouge, La., 1953). 20 Clarence Gohdes, "The Reception of Some Nineteenth- Century American Authors in Europe," The American Writer and the European Tradition, pp. 116-1T7T I*or further discussion of Mark Twain*s popularity in Europe, see Robert Michel, "The Popularity of Mark Twain in Austria," Hark Twain Quarterly, 8 (.Vinter 1950), 5-6; Kaplan, itr. Clemens~~and Mark Twain, pp. 214-215; 152-153. 9
traveled widely throughout the Continent, and conversed
with such influential men as Thomas Carlyle, Robert
Browning and Charles Darwin, Hark Twain was no doubt
well aware of the prevailing intellectual currents of
Europe in the nineteenth century. Yet, to examine Hark
Twain's relationship to the concept of the hero in
European Romanticism appears to present a special prob
lem, for of all European literary movements, Romanticism
seems to be the least favored of Mark Twain's, and thus
the one least likely to have been assimilated into his
art. His famous essay on "Penimore Cooper's Literary
Offenses," or his hilarious parody of graveyard poetry
in Huckleberry Finn, leaves little doubt as to Hark
Twain's distaste for the excessive sentimentality com monly equated with Romanticism; and, Mark Twain saw in
the "jejune romanticism of an absurd past" perpetuated
by v'/alter Scott a major portion of responsibility for
such awful nonsense as the Shepherdson-Grangerford
feud portrayed in Huckleberry Finn, and such a monumental 21 tragedy as the American civil war. Sven Lilijegren
in fact devotes a lengthy article to a consideration 22 of the anti-Romantic elements of Mark Twain's work.
21 Samuel L. Clemens, The Y/ritings of Mark Twain, ed. A lb e rt B. P a in e, 9 (New York, 1922-1925T7 376.
22 "The Revolt Against Romanticism in American Literature as Evidenced in the Works of S. L. Clemens," Studia Neophilologica, 17 (1945), 207-258. 10
Yet my examination of Mark Twain's work—especially
from Huckleberry Finn on—reveals his profound fascin
ation with concepts of heroism rising out of European
Romanticism and prevailing in Continental literary
circles throughout the nineteenth century. Certainly
there can no longer be any doubt of Mark Twain's famil
iarity with and fondness for the work of authors who were most significant in developing the brand of
heroism we now associate with the Romantic movement.
In his travels to Germany, for example, Mark Twain became
friends with Bayard Taylor, famed translator of Goethe's
Faust, and obviously read Taylor's work, for in a letter
to Charles '.Vebster, Clemens wrote: "I wish you would
buy and send to me an unbound copy of Bayard Taylor's translation of Gothe's "Faust"; I mean to divide it up
into 100-cage parts and bind each part in a flexible cover—to read in bed." J 7/e know that he did in fact own Taylor's translation, in addition to one by T. J.
Arnold, as well as the Moritz Retzsch illustrations of the play.^ Marvin Klotz has shown convincing evidence
27 as quoted by Franklin L. Jensen, "Mark Twain's Comments on Books and Authors," Emporia State Research Studies, 12 (June 1964), 23-24.
^Coleman 0. Parsons, "The Backgrounds of the 'Mysterious Stranger,'" American Literature, 32 (March I9 6 0 ), 59. 11
■that Mark Twain knew and used Goethe's Die Leiden des 25 ^ungen 7/erthers. Though he labels Byron, "a bad man;
as bad, perhaps, as a nan with a great intellect, a
passionate animal nature, intense egotism and selfish
ness and little or no moral principle to restrain or
govern either of these, could be," Mark Twain never
theless found Byron's work especially fascinating. He wrote in the margin of Greville's Journal of the Reigns
of George IV and William IV: " . . .what a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest
privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race
because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and
for the same reason." He thought enough of Byron's art
to give his beloved 3uzy an edition of the English poet's work, inscribed, "'Suzy Clemens, with the love of her 27 Papa,' Florence, Xmas, 1892." Paul Baender reveals
that while Mark Twain detested the sentimentality of
those who defended and cherished the dead Shelley, he nevertheless admired some of Shelley's work. Mark
Twain's love for Thomas Carlyle was especially strong.
When Albert Paine told Mark Tw-*in that Carlyle reminded
25 "Goethe and Mark Twain," Notes and Queries, 7 (April I960), 150-151.
? f i as quoted by Paul Baender, "Mark Twain and the Byron Scandal," American Literature, 30 (January 1959)* 469. 27 as quoted by Baender, p. 478. 12
him of a "...fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists
and went at his audience fiercely, determined to con
vince them," Mark Twain answered, "Yes, but he is the 28 best one that ever lived." Mark Twain’s love for
Carlyle's work seems to have lasted his lifetime; not
only did he read French Revolution at least twenty
times, but as Gladys Bellamy reports, copies of Carlyle oq were on his bed the day he died.
All of this is not intended to demonstrate con clusively that certain individual authors exerted direct
influence over Mark Twain's artistic vision. Mark Twain’s
fam iliarity with the work of Goethe, Byron, Shelley,
Carlyle and Darwin-^ does suggest, however, that Mark
Twain was more aware of developments in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Rurope than most scholars have been willing to admit. My concern in this dis
sertation is to examine Mark Twain's relationship to the concept of the Romantic, or transcendent, hero—a concept which, though it significantly shapes the work of the Americans Melville and Hawthorne, is fundamentally
28 as quoted by Jensen, p. 34.
2^I,!ark Twain as Literary A rtist (Norman, Okla., 1950), p7T3“
•^On Mark Twain's friendship with Darwin see, P. Richards, "Reminiscences," Library Review, No. 25 (1933), pp. 19-22. 13
European both in its origins and development. Such
a study affords us an excellent opportunity to examine
closely what Leon Howard calls "the process of natu
ralizing the European heritage or grafting it upon the
American tradition,for in his work Mark Twain
frequently adapts the concept of the Romantic hero
to express both his profound disillusionment over the disintegration of the American dream, and his growing contempt for the nature of man.
My study is divided into two large sections, each of which is subdivided into smaller chapters. The first
section, while conceding the impossibility of specifically defining the term "Romantic hero," nevertheless attempts to place the concept within a concrete context by con sidering at some length in the individual chapters heroic types which were fundamental to the development of various modes of heroism arising out of the Romantic movement. Because I want to recall characteristics of the various Romantic heroes in my later discussion of
Mark Twain's works, I have in the first section given rather extensive analyses of certain heroes who are crucial in the development of the elusive figure we now label the "Romantic hero." To the reader familiar v/ith
^"Americanization of the European Heritage," American V/riter and the European Tradition, p. 79. 14
European and English Romanticism, much of the detailed
analysis may seem a needless rehearsal of critical
approaches which perhaps by now have become commonplace.
Given the general confusion over terms like "mal du
siecle," the "Byronic hero," the "demoniac," however,
some justification for the detailed discussion of heroes
like 7/erther, Rene7, IJanfred or Ahab arises from the need
to provide a concrete referent for terms I use throughout
the dissertation. I have tried in the first section of
the dissertation to avoid excessive ingenuity or bizarre
approaches to a well-known literary figure; rather, my aim has been to provide substantial background for the
latter part of my dissertation through a clear, and I
hope sensible, explication of several texts fundamental
to the development of modes of heroism later adopted by hark Twain.
The second section of the dissertation focuses on
I.'ark Twain's adaptations and modifications of these nodes of Romantic heroism. Each of the individual chap
ters in this section coals with a specific work by Hark
Twain and examines it in the light of a particular mode of heroism. Innocents Abroad forms the basis of a general study of the idea of the "American" as hero.
Some attempt is made to relate the narrator of Mark
Twain's first book to Don Juan and Childe Harold, and 15
to reveal the undercurrents of the restlessness and dissatisfaction with American culture which foreshadow the more overt melancholy and despair of Huck Finn and
Hank Morgan. Then follows a consideration of Huck
Finn and the mal du siecle tradition, Hank Morgan and the demoniac impulse, Joan of Arc and Promethean idealism, and finally, of Philip Traum and satanic heroism. Each of the chapters in the serond section presupposes an acquaintance with certain heroes discussed in detail in the first section. V/erther, Rene^ and
Ishmael are fundamental to my essay on Huckleberry Finn, as I attempt to place Huck into the mode of Romantic heroism which they characterized. The extended dis cussion of Hoby-Hick in part one foreshadows the essay on Huckleberry Finn, as I analyze the two novels in similar terns, locating in them corresponding treatments of the theme of alienation. The discussion of Hank
Morgan is based on certain observations made in an earlier consideration of Faust, Manfred and Ahab, and the chapter on Joan of Arc presupposes the reader's paniliarity with my comments in the first section on
Promethean heroism. The last chapter, on The Mysterious
Stranger, analyzes Hark Twain's novel in the light of the earlier discussion of Goethe's Faust. 16
I am not attempting in this dissertation to account
fully for the many sides of Mark Twain's creative imag
ination. No doubt this study will frustrate many readers
familiar with Mark Twain's novels and the scholarship
regarding them, as it fails to give full consideration
to the indigenous element in Mark Twain1s work. Admit
tedly, Mark Twain is profoundly American in his assump
tions and background; he owes, in final analysis, more
to the backwoods humorists than to Goethe, more to
Artemus V/ard than to Byron or Carlyle. Mark Twain
scholarship abounds with excellent studies of the more
indigenous elements of the novelist's work; Kenneth
Lynn, Henry Nash Smith, 3emard DeVoto, Arlin Turner,
James Cox and others have contributed critical and
scholarly perspectives on Mark Twain which are difficult
to match and perhaps impossible to supersede. Yet this
dissertation is, I hope, useful, as it attempts to open up a perspective on Mark Twain's work which is badly
needed to counteract or complement the scholarly at
tention paid to the native elements in his writing. Section One
C hapter I
Modes of Romantic Heroism
In approaching a discussion of the cult of the
"Romantic" hero in late eighteenth and nineteenth-
century literature, we are from the outset plagued by
the insurmountable problem of defining our terms. A. 0.
Lovejoy asserted in his famous essay, "On the Discrim
ination of Romanticisms," that the term "'Romantic' has
cone to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a
verbal sign."^ Despite the considerable influence of
Love joy's 1924 essay there have appeared numerous attempts
to do what Lovejoy contended was impossible to do—define
Romanticism. Lovejoy was in fact one of the first to accept his own challenge, and in the last two chapters of his 1936 book, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge,
Mass., 1936), and later in a 1941 article, "The Meaning p of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas," he presents
1PI.ILA. 34 (1924), 232.
^Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941). 237- 278.
17 18
an extended analysis of the term he had once labeled meaningless. Rene'' Wellek attacks Lovejoy in a 1949 essay, "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," and demonstrates "that the major romantic movements form a unity of theories, philosophies, and style, and that these, in turn, form a coherent group of ideas each of which implicates the other.While illustrating that there existed among artists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an av/areness that they were part of a new movement in Western culture, Wellek is not very successful in defining exactly what it is that lies at the heart of Romanticism; he is forced, for example, to admit his inability to force Byron into a peg-hole definition and hence claims Byron is not Romantic at all. Morse Peckham is perhaps the most successful of those scholars in search of a common denominator linking the various expressions of Romanticism, as his
1951 essay, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism" seems the basis of most subsequent discussions of the term. Peck ham writes:
Whether philosophic, theologic, or aesthetic, it [Romanticism] is the revolution in the European mind against thinking in terms of static mechanism and the redirection of the
^Comparative Literature, 1 (1949), 1-23, 147- 172. 19
mind to thinking in terns of dynamic organicism. Its values are change, imperfection, growth, diversity, the creative imagination, the unconscious. 4
Certainly the distinction between a static mechanistic
view of the universe on the one hand and an organic
view on the other is a most helpful and generally valid approach to Romanticism; equally helpful i3 Peckham1s assertion that the movement in Sartor Resartus from despair and alienation to affirmation and assimilation
into vital life forces forms a prototype of the pro- 5 "•ression typically found in Romantic art.
Yet ultimately Peckham too fails to discover a
satisfactory definition accounting for all the varied expressions of Romanticism. He tries to explain the
Byronic hero by creating a new category, which he labels
"negative" Romanticism, though he insists that "negative"
Romanticism is a branch from the same tap-root as
"positive" Romanticism. "Negative" Romanticism applies to those artists who never progress beyond the state of Carlyle's "Everlasting Nay." Such a distinction is helpful and illuminates a branch of Romanticism ignored by most attempts to define the term. Yet Peckham fails
4PMLA, 66 (1951), 18.
^Peckham, pp. 16-20. 20
to convince one that Byron or other "negative" Roman ticists would have, or could have, made the progression to the "Everlasting Yea" which earlier Peckham had insisted was an inevitable part of Romanticism. Further,
Peckham's assertion that the major values of Romanticism are change, imperfection and diversity contradicts the assumptions behind two other excellent and equally convincing studies of Romanticism, David Perkins', The
Quest for Permanence and Geoffrey Hartman's "Romanticism and A ntiself-Consciousness.A survey of scholarly attempts to define Romanticism leads one back to Love-
,joy's 1924 essay; indeed, the sheer number and diversity of approaches to the subject suggest the impossibility of adequately defining the term.
The problems encountered in defining "Romantic" reappear when we attempt to discuss the nature of the hero in Romanticism. There are so many manifestations of this chameleon-like figure in V/estern literature that literary critics are by and large at a loss to provide a definition large enough to contain them all.
Ilario Praz, for example, equates the nature of the
"Romantic Agony" with a satanic, erotic sensibility,
^Perkins, The Quest for Permanence: The Symboljam of V/ordsworth, Shelley and Keats (Cambridge, "Mass., 1959); TTartman, "Romanticism andAntiself-Consciousness," Centennial Review, 6, No. 4 (Pall 1962), 553-565. 21
and in so doing focuses his discussion of Romanticism on figures who—like the Marquis de Sade, Monk Lewis or the members of the fin de si^cle groups—are only 7 bastard children of the Romantic movement in general.
Peter Thorslev, after denouncing Praz's narrowness of vision, presents us with a conception of the Byronic hero which is so limited that it excludes Byron's major hero, Don Juan. For Thorslev, the hero of
Byron's major work is not a Byronic hero because "he is, if anything, far more closely related to Tom Jones or to Candide than to any of the Romantic heroes...he has no Gothic coloring and little ...metaphysical g rebellion." The necessity of excluding Don Juan from Thorslev's definition—a definition which, if applied, would also exclude V/erther and Rene—perhaps suggests that it is Thorslev who is lacking and not
Byron. Ultimately, in discussing the Romantic hero, as in discussing Romanticism in general, we are forced not to define but to consider various and frequently contradictory modes through which the Romantic heroic impulse manifests itself.
The Romantic Agony, trans Davidson, 2nd ed. (1933; rpt. New York, 1956) O The B yronic H ero: Prototypes (Min neapolis, Minn., 1962), p 22
An inadequate definition of the "Romantic hero" seems
inevitable, for by his very nature each Romantic hero
is categorically different from all the others. Central
to the conception of a particular hero—most of whom
during the Romantic Age were hailed as extensions of the
personality of the artist—is a firm conviction that
the character revealed is unique. 7/hen, for example,
Rousseau in his Confessions proclaims his subject as the
self, he insists that the soul he exhibits in all its
naked glory is unlike any the reader is likely to en
counter elsewhere. Even if we hold each Romantic hero's
claim of originality suspect, even if it seems that there
is indeed a "family likeness" linking Rousseau, 7/erther,
Rene and Childe Harold, we are nevertheless thwarted in
our search for a common denominator linking the various
heroes by the sheer number and variety of heroes in
Romantic literature. The noble savage of James Fenimore
Cooper's novels, the innocent child of infinite moral
wisdom in ,/ordsworth's "7/e are Seven" or Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter, the rejected orphan wandering aimlessly
and hopelessly in a cruel and insensitive world who
emerges in various foims from Rousseau's Confessions,
Goethe's Lie Leiden des ,jungen 7/erthers, Chateaubriand's
Rene, o r I.Iark T w ain's A dventures o f H uckleberry F in n , 23
satanic figures embarked on monomaniac quests like
Manfred or Ahab, and redemptive figures struggling for the salvation of mankind like Prometheus and Joan of
Arc do not, in fact, make comfortable companions. And when v/e remember the fact that the creator of the two fundamental heroes of the Age—'.Verther and Faust—was considered by his countrymen as a Classicist hardly representative of the native Romantic movement, or try to distinguish characteristics isolating "Romantic" heroes from such predecessors as Marlowe's "scourge of
God" Tamburlaine, Shakespeare's melancholy Hamlet,
Moliere's Alceste or Dryden's Almanzor, we fall into a veritable maze of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions.
Thus, while undoubtedly the Romantic ideal of heroism has made an indelible mark on our consciousness, it would seem that we are not at all certain what this ideal is. There is some unanimity of scholarly opinion that the fundamental trait of the Romantic hero is his celebration of uncontrolled selfhood. Lilian R. Furst presents an appealing, wide-ranging analysis of V/elt- schmerz, mal du siecle or Byronism when she asserts that
"the crux of the Romantic hero's tragedy" is that "his egotism is such as to pervert all his feelings inwards on to himself till everything and everyone is evaluated only in relationship to that precious self, the focus of his 24
q e n ti r e energy.The hero of Romanticism, Morse Peckham writes, forces "value into the world through the self, which is not supported by any perceptible social or cosmic order, and the self projects upon the world an order which serves to symbolize that self-generated v a lu e .F ro m the melancholy wanderer to the satanic overreacher, Romantic heroes have in common what Irving
Babbitt calls an "almost unparalleled triumph ... of the sense of the individual (sens propre) over the general sense of mankind (sens commun). Fach o f the
Romantic heroes rejects established laws, norms and con ventions, and (as V/erther ad..'.its, "Ich kehre in mich selbst zuriick, un finde eine V/elt"), is forced to make the self the center of existence.
The ethical thought of Immanuel Kant provides valuable insight into the nature of the Romantic rebel lion. According to Kant, sin consisted precisely in willingly excepting oneself from universal ethical norms.
In other words, unless an individual wills that a pro posed course of action in a particular situation be
q Romanticism in Perspective: A Comparative Study o f A spects o f the TTomantic Movement in E ngland, France and GermanyTLondorTJ 1$69), p. 99.
"^Peckham, p. 19.
■^Rousseau and Romanticism (1919; rpt. Cleveland, 1955), p. 99. 25
universally applied in all such situations, then he can not morally follow that course of action. The rebellion against established norms manifested in the adultery of
7/erther, the incest of Rene and Manfred, the quest for
forbidden knowledge of Ahab, Manfred and Faust, the principle of civil disobedience espoused by Thoreau, and
the coldly methodical murder of a corrupt pawnbroker by the early Raskolnikov—all clear violations of Kantian principles—becomes in one sense a common denominator of all Romantic heroes.
There have of course appeared in the literature of all ages heroes who assert their personal will over the restraints of theological and social conventions. Richard
III, Almanzor or Moliere's Don Juan are three among a host of literary heroes who assert "the sense of the individual.. .over the general sense of mankind." Y/e can perhaps do as many critics do and call these figures
Romantic heroes, regardless of the age in which they appear. Yet there seems in the period after the French
Revolution to be a marked change in the nature of the hero's rebellion; to a greater degree than at any other time in Y/e stern literature characters who assert their individual ego over the demands of social order receive a decidedly sympathetic portrayal. Impatient and 26
disillusioned with his debased and philistine social
order, and imbued with a Rousseauistic faith in the
innate goodness of the natural man, the Romantic artist
frequently turns to the concept of the transcendent
hero to express both his disgust with existing civiliza
tion and hope for a future order based on the values
inherent in the nature of his hero. Northrop Frye
points out that the Romantic hero often "is placed out
side the structure of civilization and therefore repre
sents the force of physical nature, amoral or ruthless,
yet with a sense of power, and often of leadership, that 12 society has impoverished itself by rejecting."
It is perhaps in the development of the Don Juan
legend that this characteristic of the Romantic hero
becomes most readily apparent. When Don Juan makes his
first appearance in Western literature in Tirso de
Polina's theological drama El Burlador de Sevilla (1630),
he does so as a one-dimensional figure drawn to il
lustrate the vanity of relying on a last hour repentance.
Though he believes in God and the essential articles of
Catholic Christianity, Tirso's Don Juan is, as Arcadio
Banquero points out, "un caballero espanol, al que tan
solo le preoccupa seducir, enganar, poseer a las mujeres
■^A Study of English Romanticism (New York, 1968), p. 41. 27
que le gustan.""^ There is little satanic defiance in
Don Juan; rather, he seems determined only to indulge
his lust as often as possible and still achieve salvation
within a traditional Christian framework. Tirso's theme
is that the Libertine is mistaken; he cannot plot sin
with an eye open to eventual repentance. There is, in
the end, little doubt that Don Juan merits the punishment
he receives; as the statue says when he comes to drag
the hero off into Hell:
Bsta es justicia de Dios! quien tal hace, que tal pague.
Dona Blanca de los Dios claims that Tirso's drama aims
at presenting us with "un simbolo de maldad y rebeldia
creado para mostrar en accion' la justicia divina." 14-
In I.Ioliere's treatment of the Don Juan legend the hero emerges as less the Libertine and more the misanthropic, satanic egotist. Sganarelle, the hero's
servant, tells us at the play's outset that Don Juan is an aimless wanderer, bound only by the impulse of the
^Don Juan £ su Evolucion Dramatics: El Persona,je Teatral en seis comedias EspaTTolas, Y (l.IadrTcT, 1966), p. 45.
^ as quoted by Banquero, p. 4-9. After surveying the development of the Don Juan legend in Spanish drama, Banquero claims that there is little deviation from the character emerging from Tirso's play. See Banquero's discussion in Don Juan y su Evolucion Dramatica, pp. ! - 3 . 28
A v moment: "il se plait a se promener de liens en liens, /i ' 15 et n'aime gaere a deneurer en place." Emphasizing
this freedom from social restraint, the hero admits: ✓ "Pour moi la beaute me ravit partout ou je la trouve,
et t1e cede facilement a cette douce violence dont elle
A nous entraine." Thus cut off from the conventional ties
to civilization which furnish ordinary men a system of
moral and religious values, I'oliere's Don Juan serves only
one master—his own overactive ego. This ego is, in
fact, so profound that it reacts with satanic vengeance
whenever confronted by someone who values something more
than he values Don Juan. V/hen the hero meets a starving
hermit at prayer, he offers the man a gold coin if only
he v/ould deny his God and recognize Don Juan—dangling
the providential gold coin—as the only true deity.
The religious man fails to comply with the hero's con
ditions, and Don Juan disdainfully tosses him the coin,
after muttering sarcastically, "Tu es bien mal reconnu
de tes soins." Even Don Juan's love affairs seem prompted
more by a desire to inflate his ego than by any sincere
desire for love, or even sexual gratification. He
virtually admits to Elvire that he seduced her from the
cloisters in order that he might replace God as the
15 v All quotations from^this play are from Moliere, Oeuvres completres de I.Ioliere, Kouvelle ed., 2 (Paris, r g ? j y . ------29
nrimary object of her affection: "J'ai fait reflexion que, pour vous /pouser, je vous ai derobee a la cldture d'un convent, que vous avez rompu des voeux qui vous engageoient autre part, et que le Ciel est fort jaloux de ces sortes de choses." Wrapped up in his own ego,
Don Juan is unable to love; he is hardly a dynamic, creative force. The utter sterility of the hero's egotism becomes blatantly obvious in the last scene of the play when Sganarelle, watching Don Juan's descent into hell, expresses only a m aterialistic concern about his wages. The man closest to Ivloliere's hero, the one person we would assume to be impressed by Don Juan's cham, sees him only as a means to financial gain.
Lionel Gossman points out that for Moliere and for his public the true heroes were not those like Don Juan who selfishly served private ends but "men like Richelieu and Louis XIV who had imposed order on chaos and assured the unity of the French state.
Though Moliere's Don Juan differs from Tirso's prototype in his satanic egotism, the Frenchman and the
Spaniard nevertheless share an essential belief in Don
Juan's culpability; he is for both artists a villain who plays havoc with a social and religious order which, though at times less than ideal, is nevertheless
16 Men and Masks: A Study of Moliere (Baltimore, 1963), p. 53. 30
essentially just. This conception of Don Juan reflects the traditional neo-classical approach toward the individual who rejects conventional authority and serves only the dictates of a hyperactive ego. Y/ith the notable exception of Voltaire, the major artists of the seven teenth and eighteenth centuries seem of a decidedly con servative cast of mind; imbued with rationalistic opti mism, most artists of these centuries agreed with Pope’s assertion in An Essay on Kan, "One truth is clear,
Y/IIATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." The greatest literary heroes of the Age seem to be those, like Aureng-Zebe or Cato, who devote all their energies to the preservation of social and religious order. Those who deviate from an accepted, ordered pattern of social behavior—Sir Fopling Flutter,
Amolph, Sir Hudibras—are treated with satirical scorn; those who allow personal desires to triumph over their public and religious responsibilities—Morat, Achitophel,
Satan—become arch villains. Pope seems to express the sentiment of the Age when he writes in An Essay on Kan:
"And who but v/ishes to invert the laws/Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause"; for all men, "to reason right is to submit."
In Byron's handling of the Don Juan legend, however, we see manifested the ideological shift implicit in the 31
rise of the Romantic hero. Byron's hero is clearly the protagonist, struggling futilely to find beauty, love and value in a corrupt and artificial civilization. In the opening canto Byron makes it clear that he is turning the traditional Don Juan legend upside down. Trapped in an outmoded system of moral education, and seduced by a f r u s tr a te d o ld e r woman, B y ro n 's hero i s the pursued rather than the pursuer. And, unlike Moliere's hero,
Byron's Don Juan does not consciously reject social values and conventions; indeed, he becomes trapped in the hypocritical moral code of his society and is banished—left an orphan floundering to find his way in a world decidedly toxic to heroic action. The only place
Don Juan is aole to locate genuine love is with Haidee,
"nature's bride ... passion's child," free from the corrupting taint of a debased Europe. After leaving
Haidee, Don Juan finds only sterility and baseness; even with Catherine, the most glorious woman of Europe, Byron's hero can find nothing to fulfill him: "in royalty's vast arms he sigh'd for beauty." While Moliere and
Tirso portray the alienated Libertine to expose the destructive evil of defying traditional social and religious order, Byron tells us about the vicissitudes of his young hero in order to satirize the rank cor ruption and hypocrisy permeating that same order. Thus 32
to a large degree Byron reverses the pattern of satire com:ion in neo-classical literature; instead of ridiculing deviations from a revered order, the Romantic poet exposes the deficiencies of the order itself. This shift fore shadows the development of the Nietzschean Ubermenschen and Shavian hero—the ultimate Romantic road to salvation for a world dependent upon an antiquated and debased social order.
Yet the exaggerated egotism, the affirmation of the individual will over social and religious restraints, is but one aspect of the extremely complex Romantic hero.
Disillusioned with the aftermath of the French Revolution, and increasingly aware of the inadequacy of the alienated individual consciousness, Romantic artists began a search for a new sense of permanence to replace the outmoded order they had overturned. Byron scurries off to Greece to fight for the restoration of its Classical grandeur;
Chateaubriand turns to orthodox Catholicism in search of an order which w ill provide mear?'^^ to human existence;
Goethe, after denouncing V/erther1s excesses, gives us a vision of, as Valter Pater notices, "a union of the
Romantic spirit, in its adventure, its profound subjecti vity of soul, with Hellenism, in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty—that marriage of
Faust and Helena, of which the art of the nineteenth 33
17 century is the child...." In other words, acutely aware of the destructive power of V/eltschmerz, the
Romantic artist, after discovering the rich resources of the individual soul, longs to reach out of himself, to find something of significant meaning which will outlive the memory of Ozymandias. It is this tension between solipsism—the supreme affirmation of the in dividual will—and the intense desire to locate perma nence outside the self which gives the Romantic hero his complexity of character and accounts for our continued fascination with his dilemma.
While the dichotomy between solipsism and a search for permanence outside the individual ego lies at the heart of the various manifestations of the Romantic hero, there nevertheless seem to emerge several distinct stages in his development. The following discussion constitutes an analysis of this development by focusing on represent ative types of heroes who reflect the various masks which the Romantic hero assumes. The first Romantic heroes are the descendants of the strong tradition of senti mentality in eighteenth-century literature; laboring under V/eltschmerz or mal du siecle, heroes like Werther,
Rene or Childe Harold, while egocentric, nevertheless
^ The Renaissance (Cleveland, 1961), p. 215. On this subject see David Perkins, The Quest for Permanence. 34
command our compassion because their inability to cope with a calloused world results from an acute sensibility and delicate soul. Later Romantic heroes such as Man fred, Ethan Brand or Ahab elicit awe and fear rather than pity and compassion; emerging from a tradition of gothicism, these satanic figures epitomize the Romantic rebellious spirit in its most intense form. Eventually the Romantic hero becomes a redemptive agent; figures like Paust and Prometheus embody the Romantic hope for mankind as they realize the necessity of escaping the destructive power of solipsism and achieve salvation through self-sacrifice and human love. C hapter I I
Werther and Rene:
Prototypes of the mal du sifecle Tradition
The Romantic hero, when he first appears in Western literature, seems to emerge from the strong tradition of sentimentality permeating late eighteenth-century fiction and drama. Buffeted by ill-fortune, rejected and ignored by a calloused and repressive society, the first Romantic heroes are typically passive, introverted young men whose intense sensitivity and goodness of heart necessitate their own destruction. The prototype of this forlorn figure is the melancholy hero of Johann Goethe's 1774 novel, Die Leiden des ,j ungen Wert hers. Written by a young genius ill-fated in love and imbued with the enthusiasm of the Sturm und Drang movement, Goethe's novel generates a whole series of alienated figures suffering from V/elt schmerz in Germany, mal du siecle in Prance, and world weariness in England.^ Chateaubriand's Rene (1802) pro vides us in Prance with the most significant hero cast in Werther's image. While differences in the national
^For a discussion of the social, political and intellectual conditions contributing to the mal du siecle tradition see Karl Vietor, Goethe the PoeTT" (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), pp. 28-34.
35 36
temperament and personality of the two highly individual
istic authors account for a few significant deviations,
both Goethe and Chateaubriand create in their heroes
variations on the mal du siecle motif which fascinates
the young intellectuals of Europe for several generations,
and which gives the initial impetus to the rise of the
"Romantic hero" in European thought.
The hero of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers emerges
as a forlorn figure embodying all of the characteristics which would endear him to the readers of the sentimental
fiction of the Age: though unable to find avenues for
the expression of his idealism and sensitivity in civi lized society, Werther nevertheless enjoys an affinity with nature which gives him spiritual resiliency; re
jecting the 'cold, codified precepts of reason, Werther, like Rousseau's Madame de Warens, takes his moral guid ance from the impulses of the heart; condemning the neo classical fondness for rules and established authority in art, he reveres the heart-felt genius of Homer, Klop- stoclc and Ossian; abandoning the civilized town—which he considers "unertraglich"—Werther longs for a simple, pastoral existence among rural peasants with their abounding natural virtues of love, loyalty and passion.
Indeed, Goethe's brief prefatory remarks reflect a tacit anticipation of an audience for Die Leiden des 37
jungen Y/erthers who share the hero's sentimental inclin
a tio n s :
Y/as ich von der Geschichte des armen Y/erthers nur habe auffinden konnen, habe ich mit Fleiss gesannlet und lege es euch hier vor, und weiss dass ihr mir's danken werdet. Ihr konnt seinem Geiste und seinem Charakter eure Bewunderung^und Liebe, seinem Schicksale eure Thranen nicht versagen. 2
Despite these affinities to the sentimental tra dition, Y/erther is not just another sentimental hero.
Acutely sensitive, intelligent and talented, Goethe's hero is a man of exceptional genius; and, aware of his innate superiority to other men, Y/erther considers him self no longer subject to the restrictions binding his fellows. He acknowledges the validity of accepted religious practice for the mass of mankind, yet for himself he foreshadows the Emersonian heresy and demands an original and unique relationship to his God:
Ich ehre die Religion, das Y/eisst Du, ich fuhle, dass sie manchem Ermatteten Stab, manchem Versehmachtenden Erquickkung ist. Nur—kann sie denn, muss sie denn das
2 J. //, Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Y/erthers (Berlin, 1954). All references to Goexhe's novel will hereafter be made parenthetically in the text to this edition, which is part of the series, Y/erke Goethes published by Der Deutschen Akademie Der Y/issenschaften Zu Berlin. For an extended discussion of Y/erther and the cult of sentimentality see Hans Reiss, Goethe's Novels (Coral Gables, Fla., 1971), pp. 37-54, and Stuart Atkins, The Testament of Y/erther in Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, Hass., 1949*77 38
einem jeden seyn? . .. Sagt nicht selbst der Sohn Gottes: dass die am ihn seyn wurden, die ihm der Vater gegeben hat. '.Venn ich ihm nun nicht gegeben bin! V/enn mich nun der Vater fur sich behalten will, wie mir mein Hers sagtj (p.105).
Furthermore, V/erther, perhaps foreshadowing Huckleberry
Finn's monumental decision on the raft, defiantly dis obeys the religious laws governing mankind. In clear violation of Kantian ethics, he, like the Nietzschean
Ubermenschen, sees himself beyond good and evil:
Und was ist das? dass Albert^dein Mann i s t I Mann? —das ware denn fur diese Welt— und fur diese Welt Sunde, dass ich dich liebe, dass ich dich aus seinem Armen in die meinigen reissen mochte? Sunde? Gut! und ich strafe mich davor: Ich hab sie in ihrer ^anzen Himmelswonne geschmeht diese Siinde, habe Lebensbalsam und Kraft in mein Herz gesaugt, du bist von den Augenblikke meinj (p.148).
Despite his defiant sin Werther hopes for special con sideration, expecting God not only to forgive him but to reward him for adhering to a natural morality of the h e a r t :
Ich gehe vorani Geh zu meinem Vater, zu deinem Vater, dem will ich's klagen und er wird mich trosten biss du kommst, und ich fliege dir entgegen und fasse dich und bleibe bey dir vor dem Angesichte des Unendlichen in ewigen Umarmungen.
v/erther1 s comparison of himself to Christ is like wise a religious blasphemy which indicates the superior ity of the hero. Already resembling Christ in his alienation from mankind, distaste for and rejection 39
by materialistic civilization, appreciation for children,
peasants and pastoral life, and movement away from absolute, codified standards of morality, the hero makes
the reader conscious of the resemblances when, in a state of great internal chaos, he cries, "Mein Gotti Mein
Gotti warun hast du mich verlassen?" (p.106). And
Goethe continues the parallel drawn between V/erther and
Christ when, at his last supper, the hero has bread and wine brought to him.
Because V/erther finds the ordered civilization of his day toxic to his exceptional soul, he is forced to abandon ties with the outside world and turn in upon his naked soul for solace and moral guidance. "Ich kehre in -’ich selbst zuruck," Werther tells William, "und finde eine Welt." Unfortunately, the world Werther finds is not a particularly healthy one; buffeted by cir cumstance and ill-fate, the melancholy hero soon dis covers his soul unable to cope with reality. Eighteenth- century Europe, dominated by Alberts, is not fertile soil in which to cultivate the whims of natural, heart-felt genius; unlike the milieu of Richardson’s
Pamela or Cumberland's Belcour, V/erther's world is not one to reward an unwavering reliance on the virtues of the heart. The real tragedy of V/erther's plight seems to be a prodigious waste of talent, and for this, 40
society must shoulder a large portion of responsibility for failing to provide avenues through which men like
V/erther could channel their enormous spiritual resources.
Yet the primary impulse in hie Leiden des .jungen
V/erthera is not towards social criticism; instead,
Goethe's novel is a portrait of the devastating effects of uncontrolled solipsism. Though unable to find con ventional outlets to display the powers of his genius,
V/erther does not—like such later Romantic heroes as
Faust, Prometheus or Ahab—engage in a relentless quest to conform the world to his own desires. Telling
William, "...weil ich so viel nit nir selbst zu thun habe, und dieses Herz so stumisch ist, —ach ich lasse gem die andera ihres Pfades gehen, wenn sie r.iich nur auch konnten gehen lassen" (p.75), he is instead a passive, melancholy hero who turns his enormous energy of soul in upon itself until it becomes a destructive force devouring its own entrails. V/erther is, as
Lotte tells him, a sick man; and, it is this sickness which Goethe later claims he was trying to expose in
Die Leiden des .jungen V/erthers.
Though V/erther rejects his social milieu and seemingly revels in brooding solipsism, he nevertheless seeks something of enduring value outside his individual 41
consciousness -to which he can attach himself. V/erther
locates the cure for his melancholy in a meaningful love affair with Lotte—the visible embodiment of his
Romantic longings. 7/hen Lotte leaves him for Albert,
V/erther is forced to redirect his spiritual energy back into his own soul, and lapses into utter despair.
Yet, confident that after death he and Lotte will be reunited, gathered into an eternal, divine embrace with God, he can turn to suicide as a means of escaping despairing solipsism. In other words, suicide, which in traditional Christian terms amounts to a total negation of the value of life, becomes for V/erther an affirmative act. At one point in the novel Verther writes to V/illiam:
Han erzahlt von einer edlen Art Pferde, die wenn sie schreklich erhitzt und aufgejagt sind, sich selbst aus Instinct eine Ader aufbeissen und sich zum Athem zu helfen. So ist mir's oft, ich mochte mir eine Ader o'ffnen, die mir die ewig Preyheit schaffte (p.85).
The freedom which V/erther seeks is a release from the prison of his own self-destructive soul, which, like the herd of horses, is overheated and run wild; suicide opens the path to this freedom, for it enables him to escape the suffocating restraints of time and social conventions, and to capture for eternity the embraces o f L o tte . 42
If Goethe was honest when he told us he was trying through Werther to condemn the evil inherent in solip- sistic behavior, then he is subject to Samuel Johnson’s censure of those artists who in the process of condemning villainy portray it in such a favorable light as to endear the villain to the reader's heart. Indeed, V/erther is hardly a villain; his sensitivity of soul, lack of malice, and the tragic fate of his sincere love for
Lotte combine to render him an appealing, sympathetic figure. The V/eltschmerz which finally claims Werther's life is a disease which has afflicted sensitive men of all generations; and his frantic—though futile—attempt to escape the curse of solipsism through a regenerating love for Lotte captures the agony of the introverted man who searches for something of absolute value outside the self. Though V/erther dies and is condemned by his creator, he nevertheless leaves behind him a legacy which provides the impetus for the creation of scores of literary heroes in his image, and remains for sen sitive readers today a figure of enduring emotional a p p ea l.
Chateaubriand's Rene presents us with a hero who shows direct affinities to the melancholy Werther.
Admitting, "mon humeur etait impetueuse, mon caractere inegal," Rene is, like V/erther, a moody and exceptional individual who because of an overly sensitive heart 43
finds little in a cold world to satisfy him. He is
"une grande ame" (p.141)^ for whom, his angelic sister
Amelia tells him, "la terre n'offre rien" (p.153).
Early satiated with life, a life of which he says,
"j’avais deja devore des siecles" (p.144), Rene quickly becomes "un juene homme entete des chimeres, a qui tout deplait, et qui s'est soustrait aux charges de la societe pour se livrer a d’inutiles reveries" (p.167).
/ Rene’s dissatisfaction with life leads him, like
V/erther, to flee from conventional society and to seek fulfillment in the past or in primitive surroundings.
He finds in each, however, nothing to quell his mel ancholy. Getting forth like the later Childe Harold,
"plein d'ardeur ...seul sur cet orageux ocean du monde"
(p.137), to seek in the great historical monuments of the past some sense of permanence and stability, Rene^ finds amid crumbling rains only reminders of the vanity of our existence. "Que sont devenus ces personnages qui firent tant de bruit," he mourns amid the ruins of
Rome, "Le temps a fait un pas, et la face de la terre a ete renouvelee" (p.139). After concluding his fruitless ,‘ourney, Rene/ asks himself:
^All parenthetical references to Rene are to Chateaubriand, Atala; Rene', ed. Gilbert Chinard (Paris, 1930). 44
Cepenaant, qu'avois— je appris jusqu'alors avec tant de fatigue? Rien de certain pami lea anciens, rien de beau parmi les modemes, Le passe et le present sont deux statues incompldtes: l'une a ete retiree toute mutilee du debris des ages, 1 'autre n'a pas encore requ sa perfection de l'avenir (p.140).
Thus, unable to locate anything in Europe to
satisfy his profound need for pemanence, Rene sails
for America hoping to find solace for his troubled soul among the primitive Indians of Louisiana. Unfortunately, however, the hero's "penchant melancolique" leaves him a "sauvage pami les sauvages" (p. 131), agonizingly aware of the static pemanence of beautiful primitive life which, because of his melancholy, he cannot share:
Heureux sauvagesj Ohi que ne puis— je jouir de la paix qui vous accompagne toujoursl Tandis au'avec si, peu de fruit ~e parcourois tant de contre'es, vous, assis tranquillement sous vos chenes, vous laissiez couler^les ,iours sans les compter. Votre raison n'etoit que vos besoins, et vous arriviez mieux que moi, au resultat de la sagesse, comme 1'enfant, entre les ,ieux e t le son :e il (p. 141).
Rene's disillusionment and futile quest for sta bility in a chaotic and crumbling world inevitably result before long in the common Romantic fascination with death. Unable to find any cure for the strange wound of his heart, and expecting the grave to contain "quelque
/ / / grande vision de 1'etem ite," Rene pleads: "Levez-vous vite, orages desire's, qui devez emporter Rene dans les 45
espaces d'une autre vie!" (p.148). Later, watching
"les oiseaux de passage" flying overhead, Rene admits:
/ "Je me figurois les bords ignores, les clinats loin-
tains ou ils se rendent; j'aurois voulu etre sur leurs
ailes" (p.148). Even the hero's hopes of a premature
death are shattered, however, by the loving entreaties
of his saintly sister, who elicits from him a promise
not to take his own life. Able, therefore, to find in
the past only reminders of mutability, alienated from
the coveted primitivism of the Indians, and bound not
to commit suicide by allegiance to the only mortal for whom he feels love, the melancholy Rene' becomes, like
V/erther, a forlorn creature indeed.
Chateaubriand's use of the theme of incest in the
/ novel well illustrates that despite Rene's alienation, tie hero nevertheless seeks reconciliation with humanity, escape from the prison of solipsism. Indeed, the coveted relationship with his sister Amelia serves as the means for the hero's momentary spiritual regeneration. Amelia, who confesses, "j'ai toujours eu du penchant pour la vie religieuse," and abandons Rene only because "il est temp que /je mette a profit les avertissements du ciel" (p.153), is clearly a symbol of Christian faith
/ and love. Returning to Rene just as he "...se trouve quelquefois accable^ du fardeau de sa propre corruption, 46
et incapable de rien faire de grand, de noble, de
.juste" (p. 144), the saintly Amelia brings to Rend' the
companionship and inspiration he so sorely needs to
escape the vulture of melancholy feeding on his heart.
The hero, who once remarked, "...le calrne de la nature
autour de noi, me font rougir du trouble et de 1'agi
tation de mon ame" (p.133), is converted through his
sister’s love from his alienation from nature to a man whose soul is in perfect harmony with the elements.
/ Describing his adventures with Amelia, Rene remarks:
Tantot nous marchions en silence, pretant l'oreille au sourd mugissenent de l'automne ou au bruit des feuilles sechees que nous tramions tristement sous nos pas; tantot, dans nos jeux innocents, nous poursuivions l'hirondelle dans la prairie, l'arc en-ciel sur les collines pluvieuses; quelquefois aussi nous murmurions ies vers que nous inspirait le spectacle de la nature (p.134).
Amelia, who Rene says was sent by God "pour me sauver et pour me punir" (p.162), furthermore brings out the hero's tenderness and impresses upon him the beauty of concern for others. Though his soul is hardened with
/ thoughts of suicide, Rene thinks of Amelia and soon admits that tenderness overcomes his heart. Later, after Amelia leaves him to enter the convent, Rene^is upset that he has caused others sorrow: "On peut trouver \ des forces dans son ame contre un malheur personnel; nais devenir la cause involontaire du malheur d'un 47
autre, cela est tout-a-fait insupportable" (p.161).
/ Amelia leaves Rene, however, and the spiritual
regeneration which he enjoys in her company soon crumbier.
Her death is more than the pathetic hero can bear, and
bound by oath not to commit suicide, he satisfies him
self with lonely alienation, often going off into the
woods to sit quietly alone in the setting sun. Cir
cumstances (his sister's death) once again prove more
than the ill-adjusted Rene can bear, and thus he finds
himself unable to fulfill the injunctions delivered him
by both his sister and the Priest in the village. He
knows, as Amelia tells him, "II vaut mieux ...ressembler un peu plus au commun des hommes, et avoir un peu moins
de malheur" (pp.153-154), and he believes the theme of
the novel as the Priest states it:
La solitude est mauvaise a celui qui n'y vit pas avec^Dieu; elle redouble les puis sances de l'ame, en meme temps qu'elle leur 8 te tout sujet pour s'exercer. Quiconque a re^u des forces doit les consacrer au service des ses semblables; s'il les laisse inutiles, il en est d'abord puni par une secrete misere, et tot ou tard le ciel lui envoie un chrUinent effroyable (pp.167-168).
Despite the fact that he is disturbed and humiliated by
/ the Priest's words, the abandoned and forlorn Rene can never recapture the spiritual regeneration he had tem porarily known with his sister, and is left to wither away in a hostile v/orld. 48
Rene and V/erther thus share certain fundamental characteristics which establish them as prototypes of a similar tradition. This is not to say that there are no essential differences between the French and Geman heroes. Rene", having suffered an unnatural birth (he was drawn from his mother’s womb with an instrument),
"sans parents, sans amis, pour ainsi dire seul sur la terre, n'ayant point encore aime" (p.146), is decidedly more passive than V/erther, and in the end, more pathetic.
Though he searches as arduously, Rene'" fails to find even the tenuous sense of permanence ultimately dis covered by C-oethe’s hero in his V/agnerian association of love and violent death. Too, Chateaubriand's disdain
/ for Rene seems more convincing than Goethe's belated disavowal of sympathy with V/erther. The disappointing aftermath of the French Revolution behind him, Chateau briand perhaps can see more clearly than did the early
Goethe the void created by a complete disregard for social and religious traditions; at any rate, Chateau briand's Catholicism makes him portray more convincingly than does Goethe the destructive potentiality of solip- sistic behavior. V/erther's love for children and animals, his zest and intellectual vigor, render him a more appealing figure than the brooding, perpetually self-
t centered Piene. Still, their essential passivity of 49
character, their alienation by temperament—not defiant choice—from a philistine society, their proximity to the regenerating power of nature, their ardent quest for pemanence, and their ultimately self-inflicted destruction, establish Rene and V/erther as patterns for an entire tradition of heroes in Romantic literature, a tradition which includes, among others, Childe Harold,
Ishmael and I luck Finn. Chapter III
Manfred, Ethan Brand and Ahab:
The Hero as Demonic Figure
While the mal du siecle tradition colors heroes in
the Romantic literature in all European countries, in
England and in America the idea of the passive, melan
choly hero seems to give way to a conception of the
Romantic hero as a defiant, strong figure tinged with an unmistakable element of the demoniac. This is not
to imply that all the continental Romantic heroes are like Werther and Ren/, or that all of the English-
speaking heroes are akin to Milton's Satan. Faust and
Des Esseintes—the notorious hero of Huysman's A Rebours— are continental heroes exhibiting satanic tendencies, while Childe Harold, Ishmael and Huck Finn testify to the pervasive influence of the mal du siecle tradition in English literature. Yet, speaking generally, if one were told to choose the typical Romantic hero in German or French literature more than likely a figure like
S Werther or Rene would emerge as a probable selection; riven the same task in the Romantic literature of England or America one would perhaps turn to more satanic figures like Manfred or Ahab. At least it seems that when scholars like Lilian Furst, Stuart Atkins or Karl Vietor, whose primary interest is continental literature, discuss 50 51
the Romantic hero they portray him as the passive, self-
centered, melancholy figure laboring under Y/eltschmerz
or mal du siecle; yet when scholars whose central con
cern is with English or American Romanticism—Peter
Thorslev or P. 0. Matthiessen for example—refer to the
Romantic hero they usually have in mind figures char
acterized by metaphysical rebellion and satanic pride.^
There are several reasons which help to explain
why the Romantic hero in England or America seems as a
rule more satanic than his French, Italian or even
Herman counterparts. Ho doubt the popularity and abun
dance of Gothic fiction in late eighteenth-century
England contributed to the development of an intel
lectual atmosphere which seemed fascinated with the
demoniac; at any rate, the intense sympathy for Hilton's
Satan voiced by Blake and Shelley reflects an artistic
concern with the metaphysics of rebellion and evil.
Another factor of central importance is the cult which
developed around the magnetic personality of Byron. In
England, America, and indeed, all Europe, Byron repre
sented the incarnation of the Romantic spirit. "The
^Furst, Romanticism in Perpective; Atkins, The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama; Vietor, "La IVTaladie du Si^cleT”- Goethe the Poet; Thorslev, The Byronic Hero; I.Iatthiessen, ffhe American Renaissance; Ar^ and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman TTTewTork", T94T)':------52
greatest genius of the century," according to Goethe,
Byron was, C. II. Bowra a s s e r t s , "th e c h ie f exponent and most renowned figure of the whole Romantic move ment, the man who summed up in himself its essential 2 qualities." Though Byron creates heroes in the mal du siecle tradition, his notorious personal life and his heroes like Manfred give the concept of the "Byronic / hero" a satanic coloring missing in either Rene or
V/erther. Finally, though such considerations are necessarily speculative, no doubt the various religious and philosophical temperaments of the individual nations account in part for the differences in the proportion of the types of heroes that appear in their literature.
The peculiar combination of Protestantism and a funda mentally practical, pragmatic philosophical outlook makes Bngland and America more fertile soil for the demoniac hero than France, with its strong tradition of Catholicism, or Germany, with its intense philo sophical idealism. Des Grieux, the hero of Prevost's ✓ Manon Lescaut, Rousseau in his Confessions, Rene, the hero of Musset's Confession d'un enfant du siecle, Des
Bsseintes, or Marcel in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, all testify to the tendency in Catholic
2 The Romantic Imagination (1949; rpt. New York, 1961), p. T5T7 53
Prance to see evil more in terms of decadence than
satanic metaphysical rebellion. In Protestant Germany the thought of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche no doubt helps
to create a literary climate more concerned with philo
sophical idealism than with theological rebellion. Even
Goethe's Faust, especially the second part, is con
siderably less concerned with theological evil than,
say, Marlowe's Lr. Faustus or Hilton's Paradise Lost.
Of course, German philosophical idealism made quite an impact on English and American thought; Coleridge,
Shelley, Carlyle and Emerson all show direct affinities with an essentially German tradition of metaphysical idealism. Yet Byron, Hawthorne, Melville and Mark Twain, the English and American authors most concerned with the concept of the Romantic hero, emerge from an intellectual background considerably different from that created by
Kant and Ilegel. In America, especially, the Puritan metaphysic of evil exerted a profound influence on the artistic consciousness. M elville's satire on Emerson and the American transcendentalists in both Mardi and
The Confidence Man, Hawthorne's rejection of trans cendental idealism in "Earth's Holocaust" when a "dark- visaged stranger"—Satan—reminds potential social reformers that all reforas are futile because of the eternal presence of sin in the human heart, and Mark 54
Twain's profound pessimism in The Mysterious Stranger or "The Damned Human Race," all reflect the continued influence of Puritan ideology on the American conscious ness. To a people profoundly colored by the Puritan concept of evil, sin and moral deformity can never be // erased, not even by the emergence of the Ubermenschen.
Satan is always present, and as Manfred, Ethan Brand,
Chillingworth, Ahab, Claggart, the Mysterious Stranger illustrate, he is frequently embodied in human form.^
Whether or not we can with complete accuracy assert that the demoniac, powerful, rebellious hero is ’".ore characteristic of English and American liter ature than of Continental fiction, a study of Manfred,
Ethan Brand and Ahab nevertheless reveals that v/e can safely claim that the demoniac hero is indeed a type of "Romantic hero" distinct from those in the mal du siecle tradition. The differences between the two types are perhaps made most clearly evident in a com parison between the hero of Byron's 1817 dramatic poem,
Manfred, and Rene. The influence of Chateaubriand on
Byron is of course a matter of scholarly dispute. While direct borrowings are difficult to locate, such Byronic
^For a discussion of the American fascination with evil see Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness? Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (Hew York, 195b)# 55
heroes as Childe Harold and Don Juan bear strong af- / finities to Rene and his predecessor Werther. Manfred,
on the other hand, though exhibiting certain character-
/ istics in common with the melancholy Rene, appears to
emerge from a different tradition. Contemporary re
viewers saw in Byron's drama certain resemblances to
Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and the first part of Goethe's
Faust. Though denying the influence of Marlowe, Byron
wrote of Goethe in a letter to Murray, June 7, 1820:
"His Faust I never read, for I don't know German; but
Matthew 'Monk' Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me viva voce, and I was naturally much
struck with it."^ Hearing Faust filtered through the
imagination of Lewis—who was the primary exponent of gothic ism in England—Byron no doubt v/as well aware of
the diabolical elements of Goethe's hero. In any event,
Manfred, whose hero's name comes from Walpole's gothic
novel, The Castle of Otranto, brings to the Romantic
hero an element of the demoniac unknown to Chateaubriand.
The characteristics which Manfred shares with Rene are those typical of the introvert in Romantic literature.
^This information is contained in a footnote at the beginning of the edition of Manfred in English Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Russell Hoyes (New York, 195b)t p. 83l. All references to Manfred in this dissertation are to the edition in $yron, Poetic and Dramatic Corks, ed. P. E. More (Cambridge, 1905). 56
Admitting, "I am most sick at heart" (l,ii,113), Byron's hero suffers from profound melancholy; and, a man "of no common order" (II,iv,5l), Manfred is like his French predecessor a superior individual who soon exhausts the meaning of life. "...Good, or evil, life/Power, passions, all I see in other beings," Manfred mourns,
"Have been to me as rain unto the sands" (I ,i,21-23).
Later, Byron's hero again expresses his satiation with meaningless mortal existence, admitting, "...there is no fomn on earth/Hideous or beautiful to me..." (I,i,
184). As with Rene, Manfred's disillusionment with life leads him to a fascination with death. "AccursedI what have I to do with days," Manfred exclaims, "They are too long already..." (I,i,169-170); and, at his death the hero tells a priest, "Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die" (III,iii,151). Manfred also shares with Rene the shame of a solipsistic soul disjointed from nature. Reminding one of Renews confession, "...le calme de la nature de moi font rougir du trouble et de
1 'agitation de mon ame," Manfred mourns:
How beautiful is all this visible world! How glorious in its action and itself! But we, who name o u rse lv e s i t s so v e re ig n s, Y/e, half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make A conflict of its elements, and breathe The breath of degradation... (I,ii,37-43).
Despite this degree of kinship with the melancholy 57
/ Rene, Byron's hero emerges as a character of a very
different order. His contrast to Chateaubriand's for
lorn hero springs primarily from the source of his
alienation and the resulting satanic defiance. "The
Promethean spark" of I.Ianfred's being isolates him from
the realms of mortal men, leading him to the super
natural world of demons in quest of superhuman powers.
He wants first of all "Forgetfulness.../Of that which
is within me..." (I,i,136-137), the ability to erase an unforgivable sin, a sin which most nineteenth-century
readers familiar with Byron's own love affair with his half-sister Augusta would assume to be incest. Secondly,
Hanfred seeks knowledge normally denied human compre hension. Having tried alchemy, drawing "From wither'd
bones, and skulls, and heap'd up dust/Conclusions most
forbidden..." (II,ii,82-83), Manfred admits to the
spirits that his is "the quest of hidden knowledge"
(II,ii,110). These Faustian ambitions of course iso late Manfred from mere mortals who know little of the knowledge he is seeking. Thus Manfred's alienation
from his fellows results not from an inability to weather the tribulations of a harsh world, but from a satanic and awe-inspiring desire to transcend human limitations in search of the supernatural.
The satanic nature of Manfred's alienation is per- 58
haps best manifested in the Byronic hero's defiance. / While the pathetic Rene sits in the woods with tears flowing freely down his cheeks, Manfred, determined to be his own destroyer, loudly proclaims his defiance of all agents, human and non-human. He refuses, for example, the prayers of the Chamois Hunter, insisting, "I am not of thine order" (II,i,37). When asked if he would not be willing to change lots with the hunter, in effect to know human contact again, Manfred proudly responds:
...I would not wrong thee, nor exchange My lot with living being! I can bear— However wretchedly, 'tis still to bear— In life what others could not brook to dream, But perish in their slumber (II,i,75-79).
Later, while talking to the Witch of the Alps, Manfred most clearly and defiantly states his alienation, leaving no doubt that it is the result not of circumstance, but of his own choosing:
My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men, Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes; The thirst of their ambition was not mine; The aim of their existence was not mine; My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers, Made me a s tr a n g e r; though I wore the form, I had no sympathy with breathing flesh... (II,ii,51-57). Not only does Manfred repudiate all human bonds but he refuses to ally himself with evil spirits as well.
Deciding early in the play, "I lean no more on super human aid" (I,ii,4), Manfred adamantly refuses to enter any type of pact with the Devil. When taunted by the 59
7/itch, " ...If thou/v/ilt sv/ear obedience to my will, and
do/lviy bidding, it may help thee to thy wishes" (II,ii,
156-158), the satanic hero responds:
I will not swear—Obey! and whom? the spirits 7/hose presence I command, and be the slave Of those who served me—Never! (II,ii,157-159).
Later, when told by the spirits in the Hall of Arimanes
to "Bow down and worship" Arimanes, Uanfred refuses,
commanding Arimanes to bow instead "...to that which is
above him" (II,iv,45). In a final act of supreme egotism
Iianfred completely repels the demons at the hour of his
death, cursing:
...Back to thy hell! Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel! Thou never shalt possess me, that I know; 7/hat I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine: • • • Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me; I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey— But was my own destroyer, and will be I.Iy own hereafter—Back, ye baffled fiends! (Ill,iii,125-140).
It is therefore clear that Iianfred is determined to oe
his "own destroyer," and is satanically defiant in his
alienation from both humanity and the supernatural world.
I,lad with a desire for power, the Byronic hero's alienation
results from a defiant contempt for all other agents. / Unlike Rene, who suffers from a sickness of supersensi
tivity and is thus rejected by a harsh world, Iianfred 60
is the complete master of his fate and soul.
Byron's use of the theme of incest in Manfred departs
considerably from the way in which it is used in Rene, and in so doing provides a convenient means of contrasting the essential natures of the two heroes. While, as we have already seen, the theme of incest becomes in
Chateaubriand's novel a regenerative agent, illustrating the forlorn hero's desire for reconciliation with human ity, incest in Manfred serves as a means of sealing the hero's defiant alienation. Unlike the saintly Amelia, / a symbol to Rene of Christian faith and love, the woman of Manfred's forbidden relationship "had the same lone thoughts and wanderings" and "quest of hidden knowledge"
(II,ii,109-110) as the satanic hero. She therefore complements rather than negates Manfred's Faustian drives. In fact, the v/oman of Manfred's past so closely resembles the Byronic hero that she becomes to a certain extent a mere projection of himself, a Narcissus image so to speak. "She was like me in lineaments," Manfred reveals, "Her eyes,/Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone/Even of her voice, they said were like to mine" (II,ii,105-107). It is significant to remember as well that it is precisely the relationship with the forbidden woman which leads the egotistical Manfred away from mankind into a satanic quest for "forgetfulness" 61
and Faustian knowledge. Whereas Rene's incestuous
relationship serves as a means of temporary spiritual
regeneration, and its dissolution a further inducement to melancholic self-hatred, Manfred's incest results
in a self-imposed alienation and satanic defiance.
We find emerging in Rene"^ and Manfred, therefore,
introverted heroes of strikingly different natures. The / v melancholy Rene, prototype of the French mal du siecle tradition, is clearly a rejected orphan wandering aim lessly and hopelessly in a cruel world; suffering from hypersensitivity, the victim of ill circumstance, Rene" is a pathetic figure commanding the reader's sympathy and compassion. Manfred, on the other hand, demands and deserves little sympathy; his satanic quest for forgetfulness of "that which is within" and for "hidden knowledge" leads him to a defiant and self-imposed alienation which is both frightening and awe-inspiring.
It is clearly the tradition represented by Manfred that lies behind Hawthorne's conception of the Romantic hero in Ethan Brand. In this story Hawthorne gives us a portrait of a man who, having always led "a solitary 5 and meditative life," embarks upon a quest for knowledge
5 Hawthorne, "Ethan Brand," The Complete Works of Ijathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George P. Lathrop, 3 (Roston, lbfc>3)f 4-78^ All references to Ethan Brand are to this e d itio n . 62
of the "Unpardonable Sin." Y/ith eyes that "gleamed like fires within the entrance of a mysterious cavern" (p.481),
Ethan Brand exhibits direct affinities to both Faust and Llanfred. He "conversed with Satan himself in the lurid blaze" of a line-kiln, and according to legend, even
"before Ethan Brand departed on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from the hot furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in order to confer with him about the Unpardonable Sin" (p.483). Realizing, however, that Satan "busies himself" only with "half-way sinners," Brand, like llanfred, rejects the assistance of demons and seeks on his own "the only crime for which
Heaven could afford no mercy" (p.484).
Unlike Byron with Llanfred or Goethe with Faust, however, Hawthorne has little sympathy for his hero.
Ethan Brand represents the epitome of the Hawthorne villain; like Raopaccini, he unremorsefully sacrifices all human compassion and love to his monomaniac quest to satisfy a profound intellectual curiosity. Early in his quest Ethan Brand made a poor girl "the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process" (p.489).
And, towards the end of his life, he tells those who ask him to drink from a "black bottle": "Leave me, ye brute beasts, ...I have done with you. Years and years 63
ago, I groped into your hearts, and found nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gonel" (p.488). Brand becomes, in other words, a man who cuts himself off from "the magnetic chain of humanity" so well represented by the love between Bartram and his compassionate son; and it is this defiant severance which, Brand learns, is the sin he seeks:
'It is a sin that grew within my own breast,' replied Ethan Brand, standing erect, with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp, 'A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claimsI The only sin that deserves a recompense of inmortal agony] ( p .485).
Unfortunately, Brand's knowledge of his sin hardly sets him on the road to repentance. Indeed, like Manfred,
Hawthorne's hero becomes defiantly proud of his own evil: "Freely, were it to do again, would I incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution." Haw thorne's crucial delineation of the process of Ethan
Brand's increasingly satanic quest serves as an excel lent portrait of those heroes in the demoniac mode of heroism :
He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what 64
reverence he had looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in its pro gress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlet tered laborer to stand on a starlit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, indeed, had withered—had contracted,—had hardened,—had perished! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study (pp. 494-4 9 5).
Though Rappaccini, Ethan Brand and Chillingworth reflect Hawthorne's concern with the concept of the
Romantic hero, it is in the fiction of Hawthorne's friend and contemporary, Heman Melville, that we find the most concentrated analysis of the idea of the Romantic hero in American literature. Throughout the canon of his work, Melville presents us with a whole gallery of
1 65
individuals who, "because of birth or achievement or action or character," as R. E. Watters points out, are 6 alienated from normal human relationships. These "iso- latoes" generally fall into one of two categories of introverted Romantic heroes. There are first of all / those—like Rene—whose alienation is the result of cir cumstances beyond their control; that is, there are those who are cut off from humanity by accident rather than by choice. These involuntary isolatoes include: the narrator of Typee, alienated on board ship because he is by nature different from the "dastardly and mean-spirited" 7 crew, and isolated by color and national custom from the natives in the Typee valley; the narrator of Omoo, estranged because he is a nan of education; White-Jacket, whose very garment denotes the inexperienced hero's
/ detachment; Redburn, who in his naivete becomes "a sort of Ishmael in the ship" (V,79); Queequeg, a pagan prince in a Christian land; and Pierre's forlorn half-sister
Isabel, doomed "an outcast in the world" (VII,172). The second group of alienated individuals, composed of those who—like Manfred or Ethan Brand—defiantly choose to
6"I.:elville's 'Isolatoes,"' PM LA, 60 (1945), 1138. 7 M elville, The Works of Herman M elville, 1 (London, 1922), 25. All future references to tlelville's works are to this edition. 66
sever themselves from their fellows, includes: Taji, who leaves humanity behind in I,lardi1 s Serenia to quest alone for intellectual certainty; Pierre, who sacrifices family, friends, and fiancee in an ill-fated venture to establish justice in a topsy-turvy world; the exis tentialist hero, lartleby, alone in his passive resis tance to the rising commercial-industrial complex; and, of course, Ahab, who sees other human beings as mere instruments of his monomaniac quest for selfish revenge O and intellectual certainty.
'.Vhile representatives of one of these two groups of introverted heroes appear in most of M elville's major work, it is in Moby-Dick that the two types are most effectively worked against each other in an artistic effort to probe the implications of the Ishmael theme.
In this novel the wandering narrator, this time called
Ishmael, is able to view intimately two individuals who represent not only both the voluntary and involuntary isolato, but portray, as Daniel Hoffman suggests, the two conflicting impulses in the narrator's search for a
O Watters, p. 1139. I am indebted to 7/atters for some of these examples, though I disagree with his characterization of others. Those with v/hich I disagree I have shifted to correspond with my view of M elville's types of isolatoes. 67
g spiritual identity. The monomaniac Ahab thus not only
stands as what F. 0. Matthiessen calls "the free indi vidual will in extremis,11 ^ but comes to represent a projection of Ishmael's, and indeed man’s, Faustian restlessness to probe intellectually the secrets of man's role in the universe. Queequeg—a carry-over from the noble savage tradition—serves as a perfect example of the involuntary isolato who nevertheless affirms the essential Christian values of surrendering faith, love and brotherhood. In another dimension, however, he emerges as a projection of the other facet of Ishmael's developing identity, the need for a stable religious faith grounded in a spirit of communal love of life. A detailed examination of the causes and results of the alienation of Ahab and Queequeg, and the thematic relation ship of their alienation to Ishmael's quest for identity, reveals a developing tension between what these two characters represent. It is this tension which forms the crux of the introverted Romantic hero's dilemma.
The Pequod captain's defiant cry, "Ahab stands alone
q Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1961), pp. 240; 256.
"^American Renaissance, p. 447. 68
among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors" (VIII,341), is in itself sufficient to indicate that the "grand, ungodly, god-like man" (VII,
99) is indeed an "Isolato living on a separate continent of his own" (VII,149). Prompted by both a personal need to avenge a private insult and a desire to probe the divine secrets embodied in the great White Whale, Ahab's defiant alienation is, furthermore, self-imposed. This is not to say Ahab never regrets the cold isolation springing from his monomania. Indeed, there are rare occasions when looking out over the calm Pacific "the lovely aromas in the enchanted air" would "at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul" (VIII,327), and the lonely Ahab would make a futile attempt to re-enter the brotherhood of man. Recognizing his tragic alienation, for example, Ahab at one point cries: "Close] stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God" (VIII,329). However, though Ahab recognizes that "'tis sweet to lean sometimes"
(VIII,350), and even wishes "Old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has" (VIII, 350), such a recognition serves only tragically to remind him that he is "so far gone ... in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theo retic bright side, seems but uncertain tw ilight..." (VIII, 310). Considering himself "immortal on land 69
and on sea" (VIII,272), a god "that is lord over the
Pequod" (VIII,244), Ahab generally prefers his solitude, and absorbed in what Ishmael labels "all his fatal pride" (VIII,298), deliberately spurns "as far as pos
sible the assistance of other agents, human and non- hunan."^ The dual nature of Ahab's quest and the reasons he severs himself from humanity in order to pursue that quest are well illustrated by a brief exam ination of what it is that the whale represents to the mad captain.
There is first of all in Ahab's quest the element of personal revenge, revenge not only for his bodily woes but for the seeming malice in the universe respon sible for them as well. I'oby-Dick is both the whale to whom he lost his leg and "the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them..." (VII,229). As Ishmael puts it:
All that most maddens and toments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all
.Vatters, "Melville's 'Isolatoes'," p. 1141. There are several episodes in the novel which confirm Ahab's deteimined self-reliance. He destroys the Quadrant, for example, a representative of science which he finds "a vain toy," preferring to locate the whale by "the level ship's compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and line" (VIII,263). Likewise, when Pip beseeches Ahab to use him to replace his lost leg, the captain rejects Pip's affection calling it something "too curing to my malady" (VIII,316). 70
truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and calces the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evils, to crazy Ahab, were visibly per sonified, and made -Dractically assailable in I/ioby-Dick (VII, 229-230).
Thus on one level Ahab seems to belong among Perseus,
Theseus and Saint George, "a divinely endowed hero v/ho
in hand-to-hand combat" attempts to rid his people of
the evil monster that plagues them. In fact, however,
as Daniel Hoffman points out, Ahab is "a false culture-
hero, pursuing a private grievance (rather than a divine
“I O behest) at the expense of the mankind in his crew."
Crying to his crew, "Ye are not other men, but my aims and my legs; and so obey me" (VIII,361), Ahab fights not
in conjunction with or on behalf of his fellows, but uses them to accomplish his personal revenge.
The second element in Ahab's satanic quest is an
intellectual one. Equating "all his intellectual and
spiritual exasperations" (VII,229) with the Y/hite Whale,
Ahab is largely prompted by a Faustian desire to discover the inscrutable. "That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate," Ahab tells Starbuck, "And be the Y/hite
7/hale agent, or be the Y/hite 7/hale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him" (VII,204). As is the case
■^Hoffman, p. 234 71
with his quest for personal vengeance, Ahab likewise
sees human beings merely as tools to be utilised for
his purposes. Thus Queequeg, with his tattoos revealing
a "complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and
a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth" (VIII,
251), becomes for Ahab a "devilish tantalization of
the goes" (VIII,251). little Pip, who saw "God's foot
upon the treadle of the ]oor;" (VIII, 162) holds a similar
attraction for the kr0 w ledge-seeking Ahab. Looking at
the little black boy, the captain cries: "And who are
thou, boy? I sec not my reflection in the vacant pupils
of thy eyes. Oh God! that nan should be a thing for
in. ortal souls to sieve through! Who are thou, boy?"
(VIII,301). later, Ahab clearly admits his Faustian
fascination with Pip: "I do suck most wondrous philos
ophies fro:, thee! Come unknown conduits fro;:: the unknown
worlds must e pty into thee.'" (VIII,310). Thus, while
Ahab eventually befriends Pip "the omniscient gods
oblivious of suffering man" (VIII,302) have apparently
a bandoned him (an act which i t s e l f in d ic a tes satan ic
p rid e), he is drawn to the m ysterious boy prim arily
bucause of the secrets in "the vacant pupils" of his
eyes, secrets which Ahab later calls "too curing to my malady" (VIII,316). 72
Ahab's prolonged alienation results primarily in what Watters labels a "disequilibrium between head and heart, between thought (which is relatively solitary) and emotion (which is relatively social).Alienated
from normal human relationships, the demoniac captain can turn only to "his own burning thoughts,"^ or as he characterizes himself, "gifted with the high per ception, I lack the low, enjoying power" (VII,209). In
Ahab's "madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself" (VII,210), we learn that
"not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished.
That before living agent, now became the living instrument"
(VII,231). Aware of this, Ahab proclaims: "All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad" (VII,232). Thus like Chillingworth in the Scarlet Letter, Ahab utilizes all his great natural intellect to carry out a mission conceived in a depraved heart, a mission which once begun creates "a creature in thee; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates"
(VII,253). As F. 0. Matthiessen points out, Ahab's tragedy follows that of Ethan Brand, "whom M elville
^"Melville's 'Sociality'," American Literature, 17 (1945), 44. ^Matthiessen, p. 450. 73
regarded as typifying the man whose inordinate develop- 15 ment of w ill and brain 'eats out the heart.'"
There is abundant evidence in the novel illustrating how Ahab's intellect, a tool of his depraved heart, dwarfs any emotion or sympathy contrary to his selfish quest. Ahab, for example, has no sense of humor. Com pare the solemnity of Ahab's dinner table, where "solemn meals" were "eaten in awful silence" (VII,186), with
"the entire care-free license and ease" characteristic of the harpooners' m eals.^ Though his sin is venial when he refuses to hunt for oil, the expressed purpose of the voyage for all except Ahab, it becomes unfor givable when he selfishly carries the crew with him to destruction, ignoring the pleas of a desperate Starbuck.
Finally, when Ahab rejects the Christian admonition of the Rachel, "Do to me as you would have me to do to
15 Matthiessen reports of a letter from M elville to Hawthorne, written while M elville was working on the last chapters of Moby-Dick. This letter indicates the author's awareness of Ahab's dilemma, and clearly delineates his feelings on the matter: I stand for the heart1 To dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. p .4 50. ■^Hoffman, p. 239. 74
you in the like case" (VIII,314), he moves into the dimension of anti-Christ, abandoning forever the Christian doctrine of selfless love for his Faustian quest for knowledge and his satanic quest for selfish revenge.
The Ahab as anti-Christ motif runs throughout the novel, impressing upon the reader the depths of evil into which Ahab falls because of his defiantly self-imposed alienation. The voyage of vengeance begins on a "short, cold Christmas" (VII,128), with a captain named for the
King of Israel who "did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all that were before him" (I Kings 16:30). Soon
Ahab's defiant self-assertion emerges as the "linked antithesis" of the Christian gospel of submission preached 17 by Father Mapple. He is baptized in fire rather than water, by Fedallah, a Zoroastrian fire worshipper who is an obvious emissary of Satan. Finally, whereas Christ died for love, Ahab clearly gives his life for the op posite principle, hate. "Towards thee I roll," he yells to Moby-Dick, "thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart
I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath
17 Murray, "In Nomine Diaboli," New England Quarterly, 24 (1951), 439; Hofflnan, pp. 241-242; and Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (I960; rpt. Cleve- land, 1962), pp. 540-542. Murray and Hoffman discuss the Ahab as anti-Christ motif, and Fiedler develops the Faustian theme running throughout the novel. 75
at thee" (VIII,366).
It is through Ishmael's eyes that the voyage of the
Pequod becomes what C. Hugh Holman labels "an adventure 1 ft of the human soul"; therefore, Ahab's importance in the novel's thematic pattern of alienation rests largely on his role as a projection of the hero's restless intel lectual and spiritual desire to probe the mysterious nature of man's role in the universe. There are a number of elements which intimately link Ishmael to his mad c a p t a in 's F a u stia n q u e s t. The "damp, d r iz z ly Novem ber" (VII,1) in Ishmael's soul at the outset of the novel foreshadows Peleg's description of Ahab as "kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes" (VII,
1 0 0 ).^ Likewise, Ishmael early reveals that he, like
Ahab, is embarked on a quest for permanence or certainty, a search for "the ungraspable phantom of life" which is
"the key to it all" (VII,4). The hero admits a conscious affinity with Ahab from the outset:
I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him but I don't know for what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was not
1 ft "The Reconciliation of Ishmael: Moby-Dick and the Book of Job," South Atlantic Quarterly. 57 (1958), 482.
^ % a riu s B ew ley, The E c c e n tr ic D e sig n : Form in th e Classic American Novel (London, 1959). pT 110. 76
exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did not disincline me towards him (VII,100-101).
It is this sympathetic awe which finally leads Ishmael to confess that "because of the dread in my soul ...
Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine" (VII,222).
One facet of Ishmael is therefore closely aligned with Ahab's quest to discover "the ungraspable phantom of life." In the course of the search, however, Ishmael discovers "a deeper magic, a more potent source of supernatural energy" which, Hoffman maintains, enables him to avoid Ahab's "self-destructive moral nihilism of 20 selfhood uncontrolled." It is his relationship with the involuntary isolato Queequeg, the cannibal who comes to represent Ishmael's need for a stable religious faith based on a spirit of communal love of life, which plays the pivotal role in preventing the questing Ishmael from becoming like Ahab, irredeemably selfish and nih ilistic in a defiant alienation.
The involuntary isolato Queequeg is an isolato only because his race, color, religion and personal habits alienate him in a strange land. A prince among his own people, the uncorrupted noble savage, unlike Ahab, does not at all cherish his alienation from his fellows. The
^Hoffman, p. 235. 77
eagerness with which he draws Ishmael to his bosom, and the comradeship he enjoys among the other harpooners on board the Pequod in fact indicate a desire for human fellowship known to the satanic Ahab only on rare occasions. Possessing at all times engraved into his body "a complete theory on the art of attaining truth"
(VIII,251), Queequeg embodies and eventually passes on to Ishmael—via the coffin—the complete Christian teaching denied by the anti-Christ Ahab: love and 2 1 faith combined.
The Christ-like qualities of the cannibal Queequeg present an interesting counter-point to the essential anti-Christian madness of Ahab. There are several incidents which illustrate the fact that Queequeg acts instinctively from a divine law of love, assuming, often at the risk of his life, responsibility for his fellow man. He leaves home to wander in a strange land and on the dangerous high seas, not on a mission of selfish revenge as does Ahab, but in a sincere effort to "learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were" (VII,69). When an impudent
illiam Rosenfeld, "Uncertain Faith: Queequeg's Coffin and M elville's Use of the Bible," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 7 (Winter 1966), 320. 78
bumpkin who insults Queequeg fa lls overboard and almost
drowns, the savage in what seems "madness" jumps over
board to save the boy's life. Not only does this action
clearly illustrate the Christian doctrine of love and
forgiveness, but it serves as the first of a number of
incidents in which Queequeg, like Christ, becomes in his
love the agent of rebirth. Later, when Tashtego falls
overboard the Pequod, Queequeg again risks his life to draw another from the threshold of death. Likewise, he offers the coffin—prepared during his sickness—as a
life preserver with thirty life lines, enough for the entire crew. And finally, it is his coffin which saves
Ishmael's life at the end of the novel. Queequeg as an agent of rebirth provides a striking contrast to the
satanic ship captain who becomes, of course, an agent o f d e a th .
The second element of Christian doctrine, faith, is likewise closely identified with the noble Queequeg.
He deeply impresses Ishmael in his extreme religious devotion during Ramadan, and when the sceptical hero tries to appeal to the savage's reason, he is most unsuccessful. Ishmael admits:
I do not think that my remarks about religion made much impression upon Queequeg. Because in the first place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his own point of view...and 79
finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of con descending concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety (VII,108-109).
It must be remembered as well that Queequeg bears his tattoos representing "a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth" without once attempting to solve or intellectually comprehend them. As William Rosenfeld points out, "He is not at all so presumptuous as to at tempt to understand the message which he embodies; more over, he acts out his good deeds without hesitation as 22 also without question." The "art of attaining truth" is, therefore, carefully linked with faith.
Queequeg, and eventually his coffin, thus come to represent the Christian antithesis to Ahab’s satanic isolation. Embodying the principle of love and faith combined, this involuntary isolato is a projection of the portion of Ishmael searching for religious faith and human love. Indeed, it is the emergence of the Queequeg in Ishmael which qualifies him for the mercy of survival at the end of the novel.
From the beginning of Ishmael's relationship to
Rosenfeld, p. 320. 80
Queequeg it is obvious that the hero sees in the savage qualities which he finds soothing to the melancholy stemming from his early alienation. He is impressed at their first meeting by the cannibal's kindness and civility, and soon admits: "Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste— h is countenance yet had something in i t v/hich was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.
Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart" (VII,60). It is not long before Queequeg, whom Ishmael thought was
"George 'Washington c a n n ib a lis t ic a lly developed" (V II,61), is able to melt completely the harshness in the once forlorn hero's heart. "I began to be sensible of strange feelings," Ishmael reveals, "I felt a melting in me. ITo more my sp lin tered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it" (VII,62).
The intimate and harmonious relationship between
Queequeg and Ishmael further develops through the
"marriage" motif. The pair first wed the morning after they meet. Forced because of crowded conditions to share a bed at the 3pouter Inn, Ishmael reports that
"Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found
Queequeg’s aim thrown over me in the most loving and 81
affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been
his wife." They are married for a second time shortly
after Ishmael admits the savage has melted his heart.
Completing a shared smoke from the cannibal's tomahawk- pipe, Ishmael reveals: "He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that hence
forth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be" (VII,63). The two are finally wed for a third time during the dangerous Monkey-Rope operation, when the concept of human interdependence is most firmly impressed upon the young hero:
It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded that instead of cutting the cord, it would drag me down in his wake.. .Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I get rid of the dangerous liab ilities which the hempen bond entailed...Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I could, I only had the management of one end of it (VIII,48-49).
The result of the marriage bonds between Queequeg and Ishmael is the hero's awakening to the necessity of human interdependence, the exact opposite of Ahab's de fiant alienation. Thinking "metaphysically" of his 82
situation on the monkey-rope, Ishmael remarks:
I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free w ill had received a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. There fore, I saw that here was a sort of inter regnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have sanctioned so gross an injustice (VIII,48).
Despite his apparent reluctance to welcome human inter dependence, Ishmael here recognizes its necessity, as well as its virtual universality: "I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connection with a plurality of mortals." This recognition is a most significant step in his break from the bonds linking him to Ahab's s a ta n is m .
Ishmael's recognition of the necessity of human interdependence moves into an appreciation of its beauty in the chapter, "A Squeeze of the Hand." Sitting "crossed- legged on the deck...under a blue tranquil sky" Ishmael while squeezing the "gentle globules" of whale sperm joyously exclaims:
S q u e ez e I squeeze! squeeze! a ll the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it. 83
. ..ComeJ let us squeeze hands a ll round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves univer sally into the very milk and sperm of kindness (V III,172).
In the spera—a symbol of regeneration—Ishmael further
more washes him self clean of the pledge to destroy and
pursue, of his involvement in Ahab's blasphemous quest.
"I forgot all about our horrible oath," he confesses,
"In that inexpressable sperm, I washed my hands and heart
of it....I felt divinely free of all ill-w ill, or petu
lance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever" (VIII,172).
Ishmael's experience here serves, Fiedler suggests, as
a baptism of sperm; it is a counter-baptism to Ahab's 21 baptism of fire. J Realizing that man must place "his
conceit of attainable felicity" not "anywhere in the
intellect," but "in the heart" (VIII,172), Ishmael's
acceptance of the beauty of human love and brotherhood
washes away the sin of his implication in Ahab's quest,
and qualifies him for physical and spiritual salvation
at the end of the novel.
The cycle of Queequeg's thematic relationship to
Ishmael's developing spiritual identity is completed
in the hero's resurrection in the "Epilogue." The entire
voyage, coming to its disastrous termination in the
China Seas, Bewley suggests, becomes in a sense "a kind
23Fiedler, pp. 531-537 84
of long drawn out passion play for Ishmael, ending in his symbolic 'resurrection.'"^ Freed at least enough from his isolating Faustian drive for power and knowledge in his baptism of sperm to allow his desire for human interdependence to emerge, Ishmael is carried from the brink of death by embracing the coffin-buoy engraved with
Queequeg's "mystical treatise," a "mystical treatise" whose message is, as we have seen, faith and love com b in e d . ^
There is, however, little in Ishmael's salvation we may rightly call exuberant. He is still "another orphan"
(VIII,368), still the involuntary isolato we met on the first page of the novel. There is added only the in gredient of tranquility. As Ishmael reveals:
Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks with sheathed beaks (V III,368).
Rosenfeld points out that this mood of tranquility coming at so crucial a point in the novel recalls the admonish ment delivered to Taji—an Ahab type of isolato—from
Babbalanja's vision in Mardi:
...happiness is but exemption from great
^Bewley, p. 108. 25 It is interesting to note that Ishmael is rescued by the ship, Rachel, whose searchings were prompted by lo v e . 85
woes—no more. Great love is sad; and heaven is love. Sadness makes the silence throughout the realms of space; sadness is universal and eternal; but sadness is tranquility; tranquility the uttermost that souls may hope for (IV,379).
At the beginning of the novel Ishmael abandons sympathy
for his fellows, and in so doing suffers from the same malaise plaguing Ahab. Eventually the cannibal Queequeg
brings forth Ishmael's capacity for love, and the hero
surrenders his asociality, gaining, like Babbalanja,
spiritual tranquility. He and Babbalanja attain this
tranquility only after they relinquish the quest for
intellectual certainty which they for a time share with
Ahab and Taji.
The theme of isolation in Moby-Dick is thus in ti mately linked with the allegory of Ishmael's soul, a soul which emerges as a precarious blend of Ahab's Faustian drive for spiritual knowledge, and a desire for Queequeg's selfless love and stable religious faith. The hero is saved because he allows the latter impulse to dominate the former, proclaiming in the chapter "A Squeeze of the Hand" an ideal of social and racial community which saves him from the spiritual death inevitably resulting from Ahab's defiant self-reliance. Nevertheless, the sadness accompanying his resurrection indicates that
Ishmael is still a prototype of "the earnest man," in 86
th e PI i n i immon pamphlet of Pierre, "who, among all of his human frailties, is agonizingly conscious of the beauty of chronometric excellence" (IX,410). In the chapter entitled "The Gilder," Ishmael clearly expres ses an awareness of the difficulties besetting the
"earnest man" who is caught between Ahab's Faustian desire for intellectual certainty and a yearning for
Queequeg1s stable religious faith. The hero meditates:
Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof; calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradation, and at last one pause;—through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence'n doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then dis belief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of I f ...Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? ...Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it (V III,257).
M elville quite appropriately ends his novel with a note from Job, for like Job, Ishmael is on a troubled passage to faith, forced to subdue his isolating desire for intellectual certainty in order to embrace the saving ideals of uncertain faith and love combined.
The demoniac hero—rebellious, defiant, satanic— thus emerges as a type of Romantic hero clearly distinct from the early prototypes of the mal du siecle tradition. 87
Growing out of the cult of sentimentality permeating
eighteenth-century literature, heroes like Werther,
Rene or Childe Harold find civilized society toxic to
their sensitive souls and hence make their own pure hearts the crux of their existence. Unfortunately,
their hearts cannot sustain them, and unable to locate anything of enduring meaning outside the self, Werther,
Rene and Childe Harold become forlorn and hopeless in their solipsistic misery. Manfred, Ethan Brand and
Ahab too turn from civilization; but unlike those in the mal du siecle tradition, the demoniac hero has a heart blackened with satanic pride. Emerging from the Gothic tradition, a product of a Puritan consciousness fas cinated with evil, figures like Manfred, Ethan Brand and Ahab are hardly tinged with sentimentality; their compassion dwarfed by an unrelenting intellectual pur suit for certainty, these figures embody the very evil they seek to eradicate. For Byron, Hawthorne and
Melville, the naked alienated soul is hardly the source of moral purity and regeneration; rather, it is poten tially the storehouse of an evil far blacker than any characteristic of the "philistine" society which the
Romantic hero rejects.
Moby-Dick is a most significant novel in Romantic literature because it gives us both the descendant of 88
the mal du siecle tradition—Ishmael—and the epitome of the demoniac hero—Ahab, and then explores the tension created between them. In virtually all the literary works containing Romantic heroes we find a portrayal of the utter failure of solipsism; Werther, Rene, Childe
Harold, Faust, Manfred, Ahab a ll discover the individual soul incapable of providing the sense of permanence they desperately seek. M elville, in the relationship of
Ishmael to Queequeg, provides a tentative solution to the introverted Romantic hero's dilemma. The hero cannot, as Pope, Dryden or Moliere would suggest, commit himself to the civilized world of Catherine the Great, a decadent Greece, Albert, or the selfish, hypocritical ship-owners in Moby-Dick; nor can he, like Ethan Brand or Ahab, turn into his own soul, cutting him self off from his fellows. Instead, the hero must, after reject ing a debased, impersonal social and religious order, affirm the ideals of love and religious faith through a selfless interaction with other individual men. C h a p te r IV
Faust and Prometheus:
The Hero as Redemptive Agent
In his essay, "Historic Notes on Life and Letters in
New England," Ralph Emerson says that "there are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the
Future; the Establishment and the Movement."^ Though written more than fifty years after the Romantic move ment begins to emerge in Germany, this statement describes the conscious awareness of all the early Romantics that they are ushering in a new movement which w ill sweep away the sterile debris left by a decadent culture. The members of the Sturm und Drang group, the Wordsworth of the 1800 "Preface," or the Emerson of "Nature" all il lustrate the fundamentally Romantic desire to reject and to overthrow conventions—literary, moral, social, poli tical, theological—dogmatically revered and tenaciously defended by an establishment deemed debased and hypo critical. To replace these outmoded conventions, the
Romantic artist taps the vast resources of the individual,
^Selected Works of Ra]nh Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen Whicher (tfew York, 1955)» p. 263.
89 90
alienated soul. Fostering an aesthetic theory based on
the creative force of individual imagination, sympathiz
ing with figures—like Satan or the legendary Faust—who
defy conventional authority and are ruled only by their
own magnificent ego, and adopting a cult of heroism 2 based on allegiance to one's "own dark mind," the
Romantic artists very quickly become fascinated with
s o l i p s i s m .
Though intrigued by exaggerated solipsism , the
Romantic artists nevertheless see that it frequently
has a debilitating effect; in fact, as Y/erther, Reney,
Ethan Brand or Ahab reveal, solipsism can become dan gerously destructive. Ishmael's awareness of the salva
tion possible through an acceptance of religious faith
and human love provides the Romantic with an answer to
the toiment of brooding solipsism; it is the same answer which Coleridge's Ancient Mariner discovers when he breaks his awful curse by praising the beauty of "all
God's creatures, great and small." Heroism thus is eventually equated not with a defiant affirmation of
selfhood, but with a surrender of self to the good of mankind, and an awareness of the beauty of God's c r e a t i o n .
2 Byron calls Childe Harold, "the wandering out law of his own dark mind." 91
For some Romantics, however, even Ishm ael's renun ciation of his part in Ahab's quest is insufficient to qualify him for heroism. Increasingly, the Romantic artist becomes aware of his responsibility to his fellows.
Disillusioned with the outcome of the French Revolution, wary of uncontrolled solipsism , and desperately seeking a sense of permanence or order which w ill provide coher ence to their chaotic world, Romantics longed for the emergence of a figure of heroic stature to lead civ ili zation to a new dawn. Carlyle's vision of the monastic community of Jocelyn of Brakelond in Past and Present serves as an excellent example of the type of order the
Romantic artist eventually seeks—a perfectly harmonious society grounded in simple religious faith and espousing the sacred virtues of work and duty. Coleridge's and
Chateaubriand's passionate C hristianity, Goethe's and
Byron's fondness for classical Greece, Tennyson's lament over the destruction of Arthur's chivalric order, the abolitionist fervor, enthusiasm for the fanatic John
Brown, and experiments in Utopian living of the American
Transcendentalists—these illustrate the tendency of some
Romantics to escape solipsism through the restoration or the creation of a coherent, humane social order. The hero is thus no longer the melancholy, maladjusted introvert with the "belle ame" and exquisite sensibility; 92
nor is he the satanic, monomaniac figure of profound intellectual powers. Rather, the Romantic hero becomes an extroverted figure who, after rejecting and over throwing a corrupt social order, fights on behalf of his fellows to inaugurate a new culture. Faust and
Prometheus are Romantic heroes who become agents of redemption; completely sacrificing self to the welfare of their followers, they are the literary equivalents of // Nietzsche's Ubennenschen, the culmination of the evo lutionary progression of mankind envisioned by Tennyson in _In Memoriam.
The two parts of Goethe's Faust, written over a period of fifty years by a genius whose life span ranged from the Seven Years War to the Revolutionary uprisings a ll over Europe in the 1830's, from Richardson to Balzac,
Stendhal, and Poe, from Handel to Mendelssohn, provide us with a panoramic view of the entire Romantic movement.
The "Hauptgeschaft" of Goethe's life , Faust reveals what
Victor Lange calls "Goethe's evolving and maturing compre hension of the human purpose in an increasingly complex social setting";^ it sets out to explore and ultim ately to resolve the vital tension in Romantic thought between
^"Introduction," Goethe: A Collection of C ritical Essays, ed. Victor Lange (Englewood C liffs, TT7J., 1968), p . T. 93
the lure of solipsism on the one hand, and the search for permanence and meaning outside the individual ego, on the other. Goethe shows us in Faust the moral and spiritual education of a man who reflects the mind of the age—"radical in its claims to knowledge and power, emancipated from any sustaining orthodoxy, and driven to the tragic pursuit of truth in existence itself"^— a man who develops from the self-centered, W erther-like figure he appears to be at the drama's outset, to a
Promethean soul who reaches his "hochster Augenblick" in a renunciation of his quest for passionate self- fulfillm ent, and an acceptance of his social obligation to surrender his whole energies to the betterment of his fellow man.
As Goethe's play opens Faust emerges as a man of profound intellectual powers whose egotistical absorp tion in a quest for knowledge has totally alienated him from the community of men once honorably served by his father. Unlike the servant Wagner, who tells Faust,
"Mit Eifer hab* ich mich der Studien beflissen;/Zwar « 5 weiss ich viel, doch mocht ich alles wissen," Goethe's hero recognizes the sterility of his intellect, sees
^Lange, p.7.
^J. W. Goethe, Goethes Werke, 1 (Insel-Verlag, 1949)f 271. All references to ftaust are to this edition. 94
the tragic alienation accompanying his monomaniac pur
suit of knowledge: "Statt der lebendigen Natur,/Da
Gott die Menschen schuf hinein,/Gmgibt in Rauch und
Moder nur/Dich Tiergeripp und Totenbein" (p.266). Life has become for Faust an endless pageant that eludes his grasp; moreover, even nature, usually a source of regeneration for the isolated Romantic hero, is for
Faust only a reminder of his pathetic alienation from the spiritual solace commonly afforded humanity:
Welch Schauspiell Aber achl ein Schauspiel nurl Wo fassich dich, unendliche Natur? Euch Bruste, wo? Ihr Quellen alles Lebens, An denen Himmel und Erde hangt, Dahin die welke Brust sich drangt— Ihr quellt, ihr tr&ikt. und schmacht ich so vergebens? (p.267).
Unlike Ethan Brand, Faust clearly repudiates the quest for knowledge that has isolated him so completely from the vital pulses of life. His almost existential attack on learning echoes the peculiarly Romantic notion that the energy of the soul is sapped by excessive cultivation of the intellect; what the Age of Reason called life is not, Faust discovers, life at all.*’
Faust's debilitating isolation leads him to seek through
^For a discussion of Goethe's rejection of the cult of reason in the eighteenth-contury, see Erich Heller, "On Goethe's Faust," Goethet A Collection of C ritical Essays, p. 14^71 95
suicide a release from the prison of solipsism . As
serting, "Zu diesem Schritt sich heiter zu entschlies-
sen,/(Jnd war es mit Gefahr, ins Nichts dahinzufliessen"
(p.274), Goethe's hero in his profound despair echoes the spirit of negation and repudiation of life mani fested in Mephistopheles.
The omniscient Lord is, of course, aware of Faust's despair, and ironically sends Mephistopheles to spark him on to his eventual redemption: "Drum geb ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu,/Der reizt und wirkt und muss als
Teufel schaffen—" (p.264). As Faust prepares for suicide, he ceases to strive; in other words, he denies
God's vision of man as a perpetually dynamic figure, and is already in the state of resignation to which Mephis topheles hopes to lead him via black magic and sensual pleasure. Of Faust, God asserts: "So werd ich ihn bald in die Klarheit fuhren./W eiss doch der Gartner, wenn das
Baumchen grunt,/Dass Blut und Frucht die Kunftgen Jahre zieren" (p.263). The tree image here suggests that the gradual perfection of Faust—and man—is part of a natural organic process. In the songs celebrating
Easter—which save Faust from suicide—an angel fore shadows Faust's transcendence of solip sistic despair:
11 Re is set von Banden/Freudig euch losl" (p. 276). Love, an emotion which requires surrender rather than affir- 96 mation of self, is unknown to Faust. It is Mephis
topheles who eventually provides the arena where Faust—
via Gretchen, Helen, the peasants— is able to learn and
experience its rejuvenating power. Thus Mephistopheles
is indeed, as he admits, "Ein Teil von jeder Kraft,/Die
stets das Bose will und stets das Gute schafft" (p.291).
The theme of love is crucial to Faust, for it is
through love that Goethe's hero moves from egotistical,
destructive melancholy to an understanding of and participation in vital life forces. There are, however, two distinct concepts of love operative in the drama.
There is first of all the idea of love harbored by
Mephistopheles, a view which has its roots in the Ovidian
tradition. For Mephistopheles, love is equal to lust,
seduction and physical consummation; it significantly resembles the earthly attitude toward love underlying
such products of the Age of Reason as The Country Wife,
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or Tom Jones. Because he sees love only as a debased means of satisfying selfish desires,
Mephistopheles hopes to use love to capture Faust in a web of delightful sin which will provide the
satisfaction necessary to secure the hero's soul. Faust, however, hardly shares Mephistopheles' cynical concept of love; indeed, for Faust love is a spiritual force, which, though springing from an erotic, sensual base, moves the hero up a Platonic ladder toward a love of 97
Beauty, an appreciation of the wonder of God's creation, and a dedication to the welfare of all mankind. As in the poetry of Shelley or in Wuthering Heights, love for
Faust thus becomes a rejuvenating power; rather than providing the one supreme moment as M ephistopheles expects, it launches Faust's soul from its debased state at the play's outset to a condition of perpetual striving, an eternal yearning for the Absolute.
The inability of Mephistopheles to comprehend the true nature of the love which Faust seeks—and which eventually releases the hero from the prison of solip sism—provides an element of irony crucial to Goethe's drama. When the devil first determines the conditions of the fatal pact with Faust, he offers him unlimited sensual pleasure in exchange for the hero's soul in afterlife: "...du sollst in diesen Tagen/llflit Freuden meine Kunste sehn;/lch gebe dir, was noch kein Mensch gesehn" (p.299). Faust, however, demeans the devil's offer; he knows that Mephistopheles offers "du Speise, die nicht sattigt" (p.299). But he does agree to render his soul to the devil if Mephistopheles can ever make him satisfied with sensual joys:
Kannst du mich schmeichelnd je belugen, Dass ich mir selbst gefallen mag, Kannst du mich mit Genuss betrugen, Das sei fur mich der letzte TagI Die Wette biet ich! (p.300). 98
Unlike the traditional Faust, Goethe's hero does not
exchange his soul for the devil's service; rather, he makes a wager that Mephistopheles cannot content him with petty pleasures. Faust, in other words, wants to use Mephistopheles, to manipulate him as the Lord does, to help him escape his cold alienation from humanity.
As he admits later:
Musst ich sogar vor widerwartigen Streichen Zur Einsamkeit, zur W ildernis entweichen Und, urn nicht ganz versaumt, allein zu leben, Mich doch zuletzt dem Teufel ubergeben (p.339).
When Mephistopheles persists in his role as traditional devil, continues to dangle the lure of sensual pleasure in front of the despairing Faust, the hero becomes a n g e r e d :
Du htfrest ja, von Freud ist nicht die Rede. • • • Mein Busen, der vom Wissensdrang geheilt ist, Soli keinen Schmerzen kunftig sich ver- schliessen, Und was der ganzen Menschkeit zugeteilt ist, W ill ich in meinem innern Selbst geniessen, Mit meinem G eist das Hochst und Tiefste g r e i f e n , Ihr Wohl und Weh auf meinen Busen haufen, Und so mein eigen Selbst zu ihrem Selbst e r w e i t e m , Und, wie sie selbst, am End auch ich zerscheiteml (p.302).
The hero indeed wants love, which the devil promises to provide him with, but it is a love of a far different kind. For Mephistopheles love w ill be only another offering to what he considers Faust's profound selfish 99
ego; but to Faust love offers the avenue of escape from that selfish ego, a chance to reclaim his kinship with h u m a n ity .
This misunderstanding between M ephistopheles and
Faust is perhaps most apparent in the tragic episode with Gretchen. When Faust first sees a portrait of
Gretchen in a mirror, a vision which he equates with ideal Beauty, Mephistopheles responds only in sensual terms: "Neinl Neini Du sollst das Muster aller Frauen/
Nun bald leibhaftig vor dir sehn./Du siehst, mit diesem
Trank iTTi Leibe,/Bald Helenen in jedem Weibe" (p .325).
Thus aB far as the devil is concerned, Faust's sexual consummation with Gretchen culminates her usefulness; she has provided sensual pleasure, and hence can be destroyed. But for Faust the sexual act is irrelevant; his love for Gretchen enables him to transcend self- satisfaction, to embark on an eternal quest for ultimate self-surrender:
SichJiinzugeben ganz und eine Wonne Zu fuhlen, die ewig sein muss'. Ewigi —Ihr Ende wurde Verzweiflung sein. Nein, kein Endel Kein Endel (p.342).
The death of Gretchen, which Mephistopheles feels is inevitable and irrelevant now that Faust has possessed her sexually, plunges Faust into profound dejection and remorse. It even leads him again to deny the value of 1 0 0
existence, to lament, "0 war ich nie geborenJ" (p.383).
But through his love for Gretchen, Faust has learned
something valuable, has become aware through her love and simple religious faith of a sublime side of God's mysterious creation. Eventually this awareness enables him to transcend his remorse, and as the second part of
Goethe's play opens, Faust exhibits a new optim istic r e s o l v e :
Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig, Atherische Dammerung milde zu begrussen; Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht bestandig Und atmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen, Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu unigeben, Du regst und rtfhrat ein kraftiges Beschliessen, Zum hOchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.— ( p . 3 8 7 ) . Yet the private love he shares with Gretchen is not sufficient to satisfy Faust's longing; rather, he seems driven by a Promethean desire to exhibit his love for a ll mankind within a social sphere. The first hints of this
Promethean aspect of his wager with M ephistopheles emerge during their verbal exchange over the conditions of their pact. Faust tells the devil that he is willing to sur render his soul in the next life because "Das Druben kann mich wenig kummem;/Schl£gst du erst diese Welt zu
Tn2mmem,/Die andre mag damach entstehn" (p.299). The new world which Faust hopes to initiate w ill be one which w ill sweep away the abuses hampering the peasant 101
humanity to whom he feels drawn. He knows that the com mon man is oppressed by an antiquated social order, that he finds temporary release only on special occasions
like Easter when his spontaneous zest for life is per mitted to break through depressing social barriers:
Jeder sonnt sich heute so gem. Sie feiera die Auferstehung des Herrn, Denn sie sind selber auferstanden: Aus niedriger Hauser dumpfen Gemachern, Aus Handwerks—und Gewergesbanden, Aus dem Druck von Giebeln und Dachem, Aus der Strassen quetschender Enge, Aus der Kirchen ehrwurdiger Nacht Sind sie alle aim Licht gebracht (p.280).
Too, Faust agrees with Mephistopheles that the pillar of the current social order, the Church, is permeated with corruption. When the devil asserts, "Die Kirche hat einen guten Magen,/Hat ganze Lander aufgefressen,/Qnd doch noch nie sich ubergessen;/Die Kirch allein , meine lieben Frauen,/Kann ungerechtes Gut verdauen," Faust not only gives tacit agreement but extends Mephistoph eles1 cynicism to include other symbols of orthodox social order as well: "Das ist ein allgemeiner Brauch,/
Ein Jud und Konig kann es auch" (p.332). No doubt
Faust's discontent with the established order contrib utes to his reluctance to embrace Gretchen's orthodox
Christianity. During their famous "cathechism" scene,
Faust gives Gretchen cause for alann because of his refusal to adhere to homilies espoused by the Church; 102
however, Faust is hardly agnostic. Instead, he voices a religious faith grounded in a pantheistic affirmation of God's presence in the human heart and the natural world—a presence which, he claim s, the orthodox Church hides rather than reveals:
Schau ich nicht Aug in Auge dir, Und drangt nicht alles Nach Haupt und Herzen dir, Und webt in ewigem Geheimnis Unsichtbar sichtbar neben dir? Erfull davon dein Herz, so gross es ist, Und wenn du ganz in dem Gefuhle selig b ist, Nenn es denn, wie du w illst Nenns Gluck! Herz! Liebe! Gott! Ich habe keinen Namen Dafuri Gefdhl is alles; Name ist Schall und Rauch, Umnebelnd Himmelsglut (p .350).
In the second part of Faust Goethe's hero embarks upon his quest to improve the social order. He preserves an empire, saves a state from bankruptcy by instituting paper currency, and rises to a position of wealth and
social eminence. But, in his rise to power, Faust becomes a H itler-like figure, absorbed in fatal pride,
corrupted and fascinated by the forces of evil which
serve him. His quest for power—which Faust blindly assumes w ill benefit others—gradually leads him back
into a solipsistic prison. Absorbed once again in his own ego, Faust, for example, destroys Philemon and
Baucis because their simple piety seems a petty but annoying hindrance to his black power. Soon after this, 103
however, Faust is struck blind by an old woman—Care.
Li^'e M ilton's Samson Agonistes, Faust's blindness
enables him to see himself in a proper perspective for
the first time since the Gretchen disaster, and he
denounces the forces of black magic which had fascinated
and served him in his rise to power: "Konnt ich Magie
von meinem Pfad entfernen,/Die Zauberspruche ganz und
gar verlemen" (p.573).
This renunciation of black magic, like Ishmael's
renunciation of his part in Ahab's quest, frees Faust
again from his ego, and prepares him for eventual sal
vation. His vision of a land reclamation project which would transform pestiferous swamps into fertile land from which a republic of free men could emerge, serves for
Faust as the moment which would grant him satisfaction, a moment which he would be willing to surrender his
soul in order to preserve:
Jai diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben, Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss; Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, Der taglich sie erobern muss! Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr, Heir Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tuchtig Jahr. Solch ein Gewinnel mcJcht ich sehn, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn. Zum Augenblicke durft ich sagen: Verweile doch, du bist so schffnl ( p . 5 7 5 ) .
Mephistopheles, still unable to comprehend the idea of
self-surrender, thinks he has provided Faust with the 104
supreme moment, and hence has won the hero's soul. But
Faust, by offering his soul for the welfare of others,
makes his final escape from solipsism, from the tor
menting hell plaguing him at the play's outset, and hence
repudiates entirely the selfishness to which Mephistoph
eles caters. Thus, Faust finds ultimate satisfaction
in life not, as Mephistopheles thinks, because he is
sated with egotistical pleasures, but because he has
transcended them. Mephistopheles seems to have legal
claims on Faust's soul; however, what Erich Heller calls 7 "the intervention of the inscrutable grace of God," which grants the hero salvation at the play's con
clusion, does not seem unwarranted. For God, and for
Goethe, the Promethean figure who sacrifices his soul
for the bettermen of all mankind becomes truly heroic,
ready to move on to even greater planes of experience:
Alles Vergangliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis; Das Unzulahgliche, Hier wirds Ereignis; Das Unbeschreibliche, Hier ists getan; Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieth uns hinan (p.589).
The concept of the Promethean Romantic hero finds its clearest expression in English literature in Percy
Shelley's 1820 dramatic poem, Prometheus Unbound. Like 105
Goethe in Die Leiden des .1 ungen Werthers, Shelley had in
his early works exhibited some enthusiasm for the melan
choly, ill-adjusted, introverted hero whose hypersen
sitivity necessitates his own destruction. "Alastor,"
for example, portrays the plight of a young man who
rejects the sincere love of an Arab maiden to pursue a
visionary personification of ideal Beauty which—like
Werther's Lotte or Manfred's past love—seems in final
analysis a creation of the hero's own exquisite soul.
Like Werther or Manfred, Alastor is ill-fated; the ideal
is unattainable, and Alastor slowly withers away in a mundane world. Towards the end of the poem, Shelley
significantly links Alastor to the wandering Jew, who,
because he refused Jesus a place to rest on his way to
Calvary was condemned to wander the earth until the
Second Coming. Like the Wandering Jew, Alastor lacks humanity; totally ensnared by a monomaniac pursuit of self-fulfillm ent, he is really unable to love at all, unable to respond to sincere human affection.
Eventually sharing with Goethe, Coleridge, M elville— indeed, most of the Romantic artists—a conviction that
"the great secret of morals is love; or a going out of O our own nature," Shelley presents in Prometheus Unbound
Q "Defense of Poetry," English Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Russell Noyes (New York, lS^bJ, p. 109o. 106
a hero who surrenders his desire for self-satisfaction q to the general welfare of mankind. Throughout Shelley's poetry we find an acute awareness of the gradual destruc tion of civilization; the generations of mankind are
"rapid, blind/And fleeting," and Shelley, as "Ozymandias" indicates, tends to dwell on the decay of empires. Baby lo n i s now d u s t ; "Rome h a s f a l l e n , y e s e e i t ly in g /H e a p e d in undistinguished ruin."^ But out of the decay can rise a new order—one which, Shelley hopes, w ill exhibit human itarian principles, w ill approximate a Platonic ideal community of free men. Convinced that, as Jupiter remarks in Prometheus Unbound, "The soul of man, like unextu'n- guished fire,/Y et bums toward heaven,""^ Shelley feels that a revolution of the human spirit is all that is necessary to launch civilization on its way to a new birth. In Prometheus, "the type of the highest perfec tion of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest
q ■'On this theme, see M. H. Abrams, Natural Super naturalism : Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Liter ature (riew York, 1971), pp. 299-107.
^ " F r a g m e n t: Rome and N a tu r e ," l i n e s 1 - 2 .
^The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. with preface by Mary Shelley, 1 (Bosxon, lbb4), J93. A ll references to Prometheus Unbound are to this edition, and w ill be noted parenthetically in the text. 107
12 ends," Shelley creates the hero with the moral strength
necessary to reform the world order; through love and
dedication, Shelley's Romantic hero becomes a redemptive
agent for a ll mankind.
As Shelley's drama opens, Prometheus emerges as a
defiant, proud hero, "eyeless in hate" and a declared
foe of Jupiter. Jupiter is, of course, the principle
of evil pervading the world order; he also represents the
powers of blackness devouring the human soul. Not only
is his rule linked to such social manifestations of
evil as war and cruelty, but also to such human malignity as "self-love or self-contempt" and "self-m istrust." He
is, in other words, an embodiment of a ll that withers
the sources of affirmation and love, all that "makes
the heart deny the yes it breathes." "Eyeless in hate,"
Prometheus is chained to a rock and tormented by furies who are "foul desire round" his "astonished heart."
David Perkins comments, "His situation may be interpre
ted as symbolic of the human soul when instead of es
caping from itself through love, it is shackled and 13 tormented by its own hostility." When Demogorgon says
in Act III, "All spirits are enslaved which serve things
12 "Preface," Prometheus Unbound, p. 314.
^ The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats (Cambridge, M ass.,"^959), pV I w.— ------108
evil," he seems to refer back to Prometheus in Act I; at any rate, in his calm hate, Shelley's hero in effect serves Jupiter.
But through his suffering Prometheus emerges a wiser man, realizing the power of love and relinquishing his hatred for Jupiter: "I speak in grief,/Not exalta tion, for I hate no more,/As then ere misery made me wise. The curse/Once breathed on thee I would recall"
(p.321). While chained to the rock, Prometheus is subjected to the cruel visions of the corruption of human ideals, most notably the perversion of Christianity and the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. He realizes that human idealism fa ils because men seem unable to escape selfish desires, because all men, like him self, seem dedicated to pursuing courses marred with hatred and revenge. In Prometheus' soul, as in Job's, good triumphs over evil, and with a simple—though forceful—exercise of w ill, Shelley's hero expels hatred and evil from his heart: "It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;/Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine./I wi,h no living thing to suffer pain" (p.333).
This renunciation of his desire for personal revenge— this act of unselfish love—culminates the hero's spiritual regeneration; the forces of Demogorgon, moral necessity, spring into action, tumbling Jupiter from 109
his throne, freeing Prometheus—and the spirit of man— from hatred's tyranny. Prometheus becomes a changed man:
"his pale wound-worn lim bs/Pell from him," and "the overpowering light/O f that immortal shape was shadowed o'er/By love..." (p.363).
Through his reformation of heart, Prometheus achieves a -union with the beautiful Asia—a symbol of the transcen dent power of Beauty and Love which provides the per manence the Shelleyan hero seeks. The two retire to a cave—"all overgrown with trailing odorous plants/Which curtain out the day" (p.399)—where Prometheus hopes to escape the flux and decay permeating human life . "We w ill sit and talk of time and change," he says, "As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged" (p.400).
Thus, unlike Faust, who sacrifices himself for a Utopian vision of an ideal society that continues in time, Pro metheus seems to withdraw from his fellow man, to achieve a salvation which at first glance seems purely p e r s o n a l.
Yet Shelley's hero is clearly a manifestation of the human spirit, and thus his personal salvation triggers the process which will eventually redeem all mankind.
In fact, even the earth mirrors the hero's regeneration.
While Prometheus is chained to the rock, only "blue thistles," "toads" and "poisonous weeds" emerge from the 110
earth's surface; but after love conquers in the hero's soul, "toads, and snakes, and efts" become beautiful.
As in the "Ancient Mariner," "All things put their evil nature off." Through the hero's suffering and love, a new humane social order begins its process of evolution:
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise I ... (p.4 1 4 ).
Shelley's Prometheus is thus the ideal Romantic hero; bravely opposing the malevolent forces operative in the universe, cleansing his own heart of its malignancy, and assuming responsibility for his fellow man, he ushers in a new world order.
The ability of Prometheus—and the human sp irit—to cast the force of evil from its tyranny over men's souls by an exercise of sheer w ill power well illustrates
Shelley's sincere conviction "that evil is not inherent in the system of creation, but an accident that might be expelled."^ It is this essential optimism which leads Shelley into disrepute among many twentieth-century
"humanist" critics, and even among such distinguished peers as Thomas Carlyle and Mark Twain. But in defense
^Mary Shelley, "Preface" to Prometheus Unbound, p . 4 4 4. I l l
of Shelley, it is crucial to remember that Prometheus
emerges a reformed man only after an arduous process of
suffering and regeneration; and, even then, the powers
of Jupiter—though considerably blunted—nevertheless
exert some malevolent influence over mankind. Man is
s t i l l n o t
...yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his w ill made or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, Prom chance, and death, and m utability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane (p.414).
And always accompanying the optim istic assumption that human nature can be purged of its demeaning qualities is
the acute awareness of those qualities which must be purged. And here Shelley joins the mainstream of Romantic
thought. Though the major Romantic artists were often plagued by melancholy and dejection, they strove to maintain a perspective on life optim istic in its funda mental premises, but, as David Perkins asserts, in the finest Romantic poetry "this optimism displays qualities of sternness and justice more often than Irving Babbitt 15 and his followers have been willing to admit." Of course, the Romantic poets wanted to believe with Blake that "all life is holy," but they nevertheless under stood the necessity of considering aspects of human
^Perkins, p. 157 112
experience which would seem to undermine their faith.
Hence in Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" the perception of
the beauty of God's creatures comes only after a long
ordeal of guilt and redemption which never really purges
a ll the guilt which the Mariner assumes. Paust comes
to his awareness of responsibility to his fellows only
after an agonizing search for meaning in life , a search
which leaves a whole series of innocent victims in its
path. Ishmael or Huck Finn may achieve salvation
through an acceptance of the demands made by love and
human fellowship—and indeed testify to the power of love
to change the human heart—but their faith at the end of
their respective voyages is at best tenuous. And, as
Perkins points out, the great lyrics like "The Tiger"
in Blake's Songs of Experience exhibit a depth and power
foreign to Songs of Innocence in part because they
triumphantly restate a faith in innocence broadened by a recognition of the counter claims of experience. Thus,
if one is to repudiate Shelley's optim istic vision, then he must be aware that he is rejecting a vision which
reflects the hopes and complexities of the entire Romantic
impulse in Western literature. 113
Afterword to Section One
The concept of the Romantic hero presents virtually insurmountable problems of definition, for taken as a group the heroes in Romantic literature are as varied and complex as the Romantic movement itse lf. C ritical and scholarly commentary devoted to the "Romantic hero" predictably reflects this variety and complexity. In their respective analyses of the Romantic hero, for example, Mario Praz, Irving Babbitt, Peter Thorslev and
Lilian Furst paint such divergent portraits of the hero in Romantic literature that they hardly seem to refer to the same Age, let alone to the same heroes. Curiously most scholars and critics do agree on one basic point: the primary characteristic of the Romantic movement is an affirmation of the individual ego, and the concept of the hero offers the artist an arena wherein he can exhibit the glory and the danger of what P. 0. M atthies- sen calls "selfhood uncontrolled." Morse Peckham claims that for the hero in Romantic literature the self becomes the sole source of value in an otherwise chaotic and indifferent universe: ...th e self does not emerge through the per ception of order and value in the world; rather, order and value emerge from the per ception of the self. Nature is not the source of value, but the occasion for 114
projecting it. 1
In the preceding study of types of Romantic heroes
I have made little attempt at definition; rather, I have tried to explore three of the major ways in which the heroic impulse in Romantic literature manifests itself.
But from this study there emerge certain aspects of
Romantic heroism which tend to undermine the unqualified emphasis scholars and critics traditionally place on the affirmation of selfhood. Admittedly the ego plays a prominent part in Romantic literature; nevertheless, the
Romantic hero reflects a sincere attempt on the part of the Romantic artist to escape the ego instead of glorify ing it. Werther, after becoming ensnared by the prison of solipsism , attempts to escape melancholy, despairing solipsism through suicide, hoping thereby to gain eternal union with Lotte under the providential gaze of a benev olent God; Rene, thrown back into ineffectual brooding, seeks spiritual regeneration with Amelia, and having failed, is left miserable and condemned by his creator,
Chateaubriand; Ishmael, sharing with Ahab an isolating quest for intellectual certainty, for the "ungraspable phantom of life" which is "the key to it all," finally disassociates him self from the mad captain, embracing
^""Reconsiderations," Studies in Romanticism, 1 (1 9 6 1 ), 4 . 115
instead the communal values of religious faith and
brotherhood; Faust, wrapped up in black magic and
intellectual pursuits, yearns for the opportunity to
surrender him self to humanity, to become a vital part
of the human community once admirably served by his
father; Prometheus, imprisoned by hate, escapes solip-
sistic misery by renouncing that hate and inaugurating
a new world order which w ill benefit a ll mankind. In
other words, the Romantic rebellion in literature is not
just a breakaway from conventions and traditions and a
consequent turning inward to the individual soul; it is
also an often desperate and sometimes unsuccessful at
tempt to locate something outside the ego which tran
scends a decadent culture— something which w ill provide meaning and order to chaotic existence. The Romantic hero at times belies Peckham's assertion that in Roman
ticism the self provides value and order to the outside world; rather, the hero in Romanticism finds ultimate
satisfaction only when he is able to become a part of
the general community of mankind which he had earlier
r e j e c t e d .
The next section of the dissertation w ill focus
specifically on the work of Mark Twain. The American author, writing several decades after Romanticism as a historical movement has come to an end, nevertheless 116
adopts the various modes of Romantic heroism to express his disillusionm ent with American ideals and the course
American culture takes in the late nineteenth century.
In the fundamental dichotomies of Romanticism—despair and hope, solipsism and community—Mark Twain finds extremely effective tools for his art. Section Two
C h a p te r V
I n n o c e n t 3 Abroad: The American as Hero
Mark Twain's 1869 sem i-fictitious record of his
travels to Europe, Innocents Abroad, establishes at the
outset of his literary career Mark Twain's close identi
fication with the American culture that produced him.
Alfred Kazin states, "Emerson, Thoreau, M elville and
Henry James a ll talked about 'the American,' ...B ut
the narrator of the Innocents Abroad became this char
acter."^" Creating a fictional persona whom Henry Nash
Smith labels "an American Adam resembling in many 2 respects ... the protagonist of Leaves of Grass,11 Mark
Twain in Innocents Abroad gives dramatic form to the
archetypical confrontation of American pioneer and
European tradition. The hero Mark Twain presents in
this book might seem at first glance hardly heroic at all; yet, practical, shrewd, humorous, irreverent,
self-reliant yet modest, the narrator of Innocents
^""Introduction," The Innocents Abroad (New York, 1964), p. 4. ^Mark Twain: The Development of a W riter (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 50.
117 118
Abroad emerges as a curious blend of those agrarian vir
tues the American people of the mid nineteenth century
found, or more accurately, created in such folk heroes
as Andrew Jackson, Abe Lincoln, Daniel Boone and Natty
Bumppo. His task— "to suggest to the reader how he
would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked
at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those
who traveled in those countries before him,"^—reflects
the narrator's conscious attempt to embody and represent
the values, prejudices and experiences of the American
people. He thus becomes a democratic folk-hero of
sorts, rising from the heart of the American people and
bolstering their provincial self-esteem by continually
asserting in the face of European tradition "the moral
and material superiority of the American present to the
historical past."^
To understand the heroic nature of the narrator of
Innocents Abroad we must first understand the process
employed by the American people in their selection of
national heroes. As Dixon Wecter points out, in America
■^Samuel L. Clemens, The W ritings of Mark Twain, ed. Albert B. Paine, 1 (New York, 1922)7 xxT. All references to Innocents Abroad w ill be made parenthetically in the text to this edition.
^Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, T9667T"pT- !I5T7” 119
the hero is never the infallible demigod of exceptional talents he appears to be in European mythology; rather, like Jackson, Lincoln, Huey Long or Spiro Agnew he is heroic because he becomes someone with whom the average 5 American—the "middle American"— can closely identify.
From its historical and cultural beginning America has been less a geographical place than a state of mind; populated, at least in a mythical sense, by yeoman farmers whom Jefferson labels the "chosen people of God," America selects for its heroes men who become symbols to the rest of the world of that fluid, ambiguous yet real phrase,
"the American way of Life." Those who defend and embody this phrase draw accolade from their peers; those who, like Aaron Burr, Jerry Rubin or the McCarthy kids, attack
"the American way of Life" either verbally or through life styles inconsistent with the agrarian, protestant mythology upon which American culture is based, receive the approbation of the American public. A brief look at the process through which the American people elevated
Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln to their pantheon of heroes clearly reveals that the real hero in America is, and always has been, America itself.
5 The Hero in America; A Chronicle of Hero-Worship (Ann Arbor, lS)63), P* 11 • 120
When Thomas Jefferson died, July 4, 1826, the
American people were at the beginning of a crucial stage in their search for a national identity. Living virtually without a past, in a nation void of conscious traditions or established institutions, caught in the grip of tremendous economic flux promoted by the emergent capi talism of the period, and vaulted to the center of world attention by the apparent success of their "great experi ment" in self-government, the American people more than ever before felt the need to develop a conscious identity, a peculiarly national consciousness which would adequately and favorably explain their unique character both to themselves and to the rest of the world.
The process implemented to create this conscious national identity revolved around the creation of three heroes, moulded through myth into the symbols of a self- image of the ethnocentric American people. Inheriting a system of values springing from a strong tradition of frontier individualism, the early nineteenth-century
American first looked to two men whom he perceived to be champions of the yeoman-farmer ideals. Although increasing urbanization and industrialization in the
North, and the emergence of a strong plantation economy in the South, accounted for a vast reduction in the actual number of yeoman farmers, the intellectual baggage 121
of nineteenth-century America remained exclusively
agrarian, and a value system which praised the individ
u alistic virtues of the yeoman-farmer prevailed.^
The first of the heroes created through this pro
cess of self-im age hero creation is Thomas Jefferson.
Unlike most heroes, however, Jefferson became extremely
important to nineteenth-century America not as an
individual possessing certain attributes but as the
embodiment of a particular system of thought. The hero
is, in other words, not so much Jefferson as Jefferson-
ianism. Naturally enough, Jefferson, the author of the
Declaration of Independence, is popularly hailed as
the "Father of Democracy"—an image enhanced by the
image of Hamilton as the opposing force, fearing and
attempting to suppress the common man, hoping to make
the Constitution "an instrument of aristocratic priv- 7 ilege." Virtually every major political dispute of the
time can be seen in terms of an either/or polar relation
ship between the Jeffersonian tradition of democracy, the
American West, States Rights, and agrarianism on the one
hand, and the Hamiltonian or anti-Jeffersonian tradition
^W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), pp. viii-ix. 7 M errill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (I960; rpt. New York, 1962), p. ITT 122
of industrial capitalism , the North, central governmental authority and the effete East on the other. While of
course issues were never in actuality this clearly divi ded, the American people perceived them to be so, and thus enhanced their identification of Jeffersonian thought with the agrarian ideals to which they subscribed.
Furthermore, the fact that Jefferson's death occurred on
July 4, 1826 (the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence) became for a religiously oriented people a testimony of God's favor for the principles espoused by this champion of the common man.
The widespread identification of Jeffersonian thought with the popular mind is well indicated by the extensive use of his writing by any and every element of society desiring to arouse popular support. Intellectually, for the common man the sanction of Jeffersonianism meant the sanction of God.
Whereas Jefferson stood to the nineteenth-century
American for a system of thought consistent with-the agrarian principles he espoused, Andrew Jackson, who fashioned himself as Jefferson's heir, became the living symbol to the American people of democracy and the common man. With Jackson, the personal characteristics of the hero rather than his ideas became significant. His miraculous victory over the B ritish at New Orleans had 123
already made him a national hero, and coupled with the legend surrounding his duel with Dickinson proved to the American people that Jackson, like Jefferson, was one of God's children. His fierce opposition to the
National Bank, an institution which, as Marvin Meyers points out, became for the American people a symbol of
"Constitutional impiety, consolidated national power,
O aristocratic privilege, and plutocratic corruption," likewise enhanced the identification of Jackson with the Jeffersonian ideals of the common man. Most impor tant, however, Andrew Jackson represents a desire of a people in the midst of great economic and social flux to restore the old agrarian values which the growing emphasis upon industrialization and the emergent capitalism was threatening to destroy. While making money rather than land the measure of economic success, the American chose Jackson as a pawn for his conscience.
Though actually following Hamiltonian ideals, the
American people hung tenaciously to their agrarian value system by making Jackson represent the value system to which they adhered but could no longer follow in an age
p The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, Calif., 1957), p. 11. 124
of rapid economic flux. He thus represents the attempt
of an Age, through a hero symbol, to graft a moral past q to the economic present.
The third of the major nineteenth-century heroes
created through the process of self-projection, Abraham
Lincoln, takes on a somewhat different character from the
two heroes preceding him, for in Lincoln, far more than
in either Jefferson or Jackson, morality becomes the
dominant issue. Coming at a time when the argument over
slavery had put the entire nation in a moral turmoil,
Lincoln understandably came to be viewed in highly moral
terms. The Northerner, violently opposing slavery because
it directly conflicted with the remnants of his Jeffer
sonian value system, yet unwilling to absorb the Negro into his economic system, saw in Lincoln the opportunity to sublimate his guilt feelings into widespread admir ation for and overt devotion to the symbol of his value system which Lincoln had become."^ When Lincoln was murdered the symbol of Lincoln as the moral crusader,
q ^This topic is considered in great detail by Meyers in The Jacksonian Persuasion, Peterson in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind,~pp. 69-87, and John William Ward, Sndrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (1953; rpt. New York, 1962), 225 pp.
^See Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Iafe (1959; rpt. New York, 1963), pp. 157-16T^ 125
exemplifying the humanitarian virtues of love and
brotherhood deepened considerably, until to many Ameri
cans he became, like Christ, a martyr who died in
expiation for the sins of mankind.
Lincoln likewise became to nineteenth-century
Americans the symbol of patriotism and commitment to the
cause of national unity, again expressing a deep concern
which the Civil War had developed within a heretofore
highly individualistic American society. His martyrdom,
while establishing the symbol of the humanitarian moral
crusader, also did a great deal to foster a keen sense
of obligation to continue with his dedication to national unity. Thus Lincoln well reflects the gradual modifica
tion of the "frontier virtues" which created heroes in
Jefferson and Jackson, and the emergence of the more
civilized virtues of love and compassion rather than
retaliation and violence, stronger central governmental
control and national unity rather than intense indi vidualism. These are virtues characteristic not so much of the agrarian farmer as of the free working man at the beginning of the Gilded Age, indicating a shift
in the character of American society.
None of the three nineteenth-century figures
incorporated into the pantheon of American heroes cor responds directly to the myth surrounding him, nor to 126
the symbol which he becomes. Jefferson's unprecedented use of Presidential power to purchase the Louisiana
Territory, for example, is hardly consistent with the image of the crusader against concentrated central authority. Likewise, Lincoln at the outset of the Civil
War hardly saw himself as a humanitarian moral crusader.
Thus, the process of hero creation in nineteenth-century
American society seems to provide much more illum inating insight into the people themselves than into the heroes; it is the people who, taking the raw materials provided by these three men's achievements and the legends con cerning them, moulded an image of a hero espousing and embodying moral viewpoints and character attributes which the American people deem praiseworthy.
The process that made heroes out of Jefferson,
Jackson and Lincoln seems to lie behind the narrator of
Innocents Abroad, an American representative of a time,
Alfred Kazin mentions, "when Americans still thought they were the only democrats and levellers in the world.
Henry Nash Smith asserts that "the implication that the history of Europe is but a burden to be cast off by the man of the new world was an important part of Mark
■^"Introduction," The Innocents Abroad, p. ix. 127
12 Twain's ideology." Certainly such an assumption seems to underlie Innocents Abroad, for in this novel Mark
Twain creates a hero who emerges as a precursor of
Hank Morgan—the Promethean American, a Romantic hero of history so to speak, who defends and celebrates the greatness of his nation, a greatness which offers sal vation to Western man long plagued by the decadence, depravity, inequality and fundamental evil of the Old
World. The Civil War behind him, slavery banished for ever from the Garden of Eden, the Adamic American felt the instinctive need to celebrate once again his divine majesty; and, though at the beginning of an Age in
America which was eventually to shatter his idealistic faith in his nation's destiny, Mark Twain's vision could nevertheless include in 1868 a hero who gave expression to his country's belief in itself.
In fact, the hero of Innocents Abroad is so vocal in his repudiation of European tradition and civilization and so overtly proud of his homeland that we are prone to agree with Alfred Kazin when he claims that for
Clemens, "the Old World is backward, the Old World is often unclean, the Old World is often Catholic, the Old
World is, more often than a progressive, up-to-date, well-washed American might have expected, without soap
^2Mark Twain: The Development of a W riter, p. 31. 128
and modern improvements."^ In his travels through the
Old World, the narrator of Innocents Abroad encounters
countless reminders of the technical and industrial
superiority which nineteenth-century America possessed
over the rest of the world; and, like the modem Ameri
can's response to our manned lunar flights, Mark Twain's hero equates America's technological expertise with over all cultural and moral superiority. The Azores, we learn, is a community which "is eminently Portuguese— that is to say, it is slow, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy"
(1,39). And though the Civita Vecchia is "the finest nest of dirt, vermin, and ignorance we have found yet" (I,
270), it has close rivals in Venice, with her "stagnant lagoons" and "poverty, neglect and melancholy decay" (I,
218), Athens, and virtually all the capitols of the
Arab world. In the Faubourg St. Antoine, Mark Twain tells us, "misery, poverty, vice, and crime go hand in hand, and the evidences of it stare one in the face from every side" (1,154); and Tangier is so dreadful that the narrator recommends "to the government of the United
States that when a man commits a crime so heinous that the law provides no adequate punishment for it, they make him Consul-General to Tangier" (1,79). Finally,
^"Introduction," The Innocents Abroad, p. i x . 129
Mark Twain leaves the Holy Land, populated with "igno
rant, depraved, superstitious, dirty, lousy, thieving" 14 Arabs, with the savage comment: "No Second Advent— 15 Christ been here once, w ill never come again."
Even when our hero encounters one of the Old
World's few remaining spots of natural beauty—a lake
in the Italian Alps, for example—he is quick to remind his audience that the European site pales in comparison with the natural beauty of our own country. Lake Como may have clear waters by European standards, "but how dull its waters are compared with the wonderful trans parence of Lake TahoeJ" (1,203). The Sea of Galilee may be "celebrated" by some, but to someone emerging from the
American West it seems hardly more than a mud puddle:
The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal—it is just about two-thirds as large. And when you speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this puddle cannot suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; those low, shaven, yel low hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, cannot suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and
Mark Twain1s Notebooks, ed. Albert B. Paine (New York, 1935), p. 93. 15 as quoted from J. Christ & Son: Notebook No. 9, Mark Twain Papers, by Kaplan, p. 54. 130
smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the ever lasting snows...16
Riding in a French railway car, our hero becomes aware
of the beauty of the countryside around him, but such
awareness serves only to remind him of America and her
"lim itless panoramas of bewildering perspective; of mimic cities, of pinnacled cathedrals, of massive
fortresses, counterfeited in the eternal rocks and
splendid with the crimson and gold of the setting sun;
of dizzy altitudes among fog-wreathed peaks and never- melting snows, where thunders and lightnings and tempests warred magnificently at our feet and the storm-clouds above swung their shredded banners in our very faces"
(I»99). If it is natural beauty the American seeks,
then he is well-advised to stay at home.
Clearly in his pilgrimage to the Old World, the
representative American seeks neither technological marvels nor natural beauty; he is in search of the
tradition and culture his own young and fluid nation
cannot possibly provide. Yet, though at times awed by
the historical sense radiating from European monuments,
Mark Twain's persona generally discovers in European
tradition reminders of the tyranny and repression which
■^Clemens, Traveling with the Innocents Abroad; Mark Twain's O riginal Reports from Europe and the"~TToly Land, ed. Daniel McKleithan (Norman, Okla., 195#), p. 225. 131
the nineteenth-century American thought characterized the Old World. His comments like, "...when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them all" (1,242), and his inability to appreciate the countless art treasures harbored in the Louvre or the Vatican, reveal the hero's provinciality, a provinciality which contemporary Ameri cans like to think they have outgrown. Mark Twain admits that many of the objects of culture he denigrates have intrinsic beauty; it is the tradition of human exploitation they represent which renders them disgusting:
I cannot help but see it, now and then, but I keep on protesting against the gro veling spirit that could persuade those masters to prostitute their noble talents in the adulation of such monsters as the French, Venetian, and Florentine princes of two and three hundred years ago, all the same. I am told that the old masters had to do these shameful things for bread, the princes and potentates being the only patrons of art. If a grandly gifted man may drag his pride and his manhood in the dirt for bread rather than starve with nobility that is in him untainted, the excuse is a valid one. It would excuse theft in Washingtons and Wel lingtons and unchastity in women as well (I, 2 6 8 ).
The real problem with the art which our hero encounters is not its lack of beauty, but the fact that it is the product of an Age "when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks and mortar and building an addition to a Church" (1,125). And though the nineteenth- 132
century European preferred to think that the Age of moral and cultural corruption had passed, the repre
sentative American discovered lingering traces of it pervading, manifesting itself in "Jesuit humbuggery"
(1,41), inhumane conditions in a Venetian prison, and
the abject servitude in which the Church held its fol lowers. Contrasting the immense wealth of the Catholic
Church with the dire poverty of its individual members,
Mark Twain's narrator at one point cries out: "Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self- reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye?
Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?" (1,266). What Europe needs is a Prome thean liberator, one who can usher in the freedoms and dignities characteristic of the New World; and twenty years later, in A Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain is to provide that Promethean figure, and he too, like the narrator of Innocents Abroad, is to be the representa tive American.
There seems, therefore, to exist in the narrator of Innocents Abroad a latent Promethean element; embody ing the values and prejudices of a people committed to democracy, he is painfully aware of the abuses and evil pervading the Old World. Yet Mark Twain's hero in this early novel is hardly Promethean; decidedly passive, he 133
seems instead to share affinities with heroes in the mal du si^cle tradition. Like Rene, Childe Harold, or
Ishmael, the narrator of Innocents Abroad flees his native land, stirred by a vague restlessness created because his civilization—as grand as it might appear— has been unable to fill a void that exists within him.
He embarks for Europe on a "new pilgrim ’s progress," and like Bunyan's hero in the original pilgrim 's progress, Mark Twain's persona ultim ately seems in quest of spiritual identity. In final analysis, there fore, Mark Twain's satiric novel seems to have a double vision; on the one hand, his naive narrator overtly denounces the moral and cultural perversions of the Old
World and vocally celebrates the democratic grandeur of the New; on the other hand, his very participation in the voyage links him to such heroes as Rene, Don Juan,
Childe Harold, Ishmael and Huck Finn— "innocent" char acters who covertly yet desperately seek a solution to a profound spiritual crisis created by their own inade quate civilization.
Hints of Mark Twain's dissatisfaction with the
American culture he represents emerge as the narrator of Innocents Abroad becomes increasingly alienated from the other Americans accompanying him on the Quaker City expedition. At the very outset of the voyage, Mark 134
Twain brings into question the validity of the religious veneer characteristic of most of the Quaker City pil grims. Noticing that the pilgrims would pray every night for fair winds even though they knew theirs was the only east-bound ship, all others were west-bound, the ship's Executive Officer expresses the narrator's sentiments when he exclaims: "It ain't good sense, it ain't good reason, it ain't good Christianity, it ain't common human charity. Avast with such nonsense!" (1,30).
Later, the narrator's praise of the Dominican friars contains within it implicit criticism of the empty religiosity of the pious, self-righteous pilgrims. When our hero asserts of the Dominicans, "Creeds mathemat ically precise, and hairsplitting niceties of doctrine, are absolutely necessary for the salvation of some kind of souls, but surely the charity, purity, the unselfish ness that are in the hearts of men like these would save their souls though they were bankrupt in the true religion—which is ours" (1,270), he is giving expres sion to the religious doctrine which covertly is to save Huck Finn and his Negro companion Jim, and impli citly to damn the pious, Church-attending slaveholders along the M ississippi river.
The hero of Innocents Abroad likewise finds dis tasteful the American's tendency to become pretentious and obnoxious while traveling through Europe. The 135
behavior of an American in a French restaurant draws particular censure from our narrator:
We were troubled a little at dinner today, by the conduct of an American, who talked very loudly and coarsely, and laughed boisterously where all others were so quiet and well-behaved. He ordered wine with a royal flourish, and said: ’I never dine without wine, sir* (which was a pitiful falsehood), and looked around upon the com pany to bask in the admiration he expected to find in their faces. All these airs in a land where they would as soon expect to leave the soup out of the bill of fare as the winei —in a land where wine is nearly as common among all ranks as water! This fellow said: ' I am a free-born sovereign, sir, an American, sir, and I want everybody to know it! ' He did not mention that he was a lineal descendant of Balaam's ass; but everybody knew that without his telling it. ( 1 ,9 1 - 9 2 ) .
Later, the narrator ridicules those Americans who seem to have forgotten their native tongue, who "cannot even writetheir address in English in a hotel-register" (I,
238). He offers as testimony evidences copied verbatim from the register in an Italian hotel lobby:
/ John P. Whitcomb, Etats Unis. William L. Ainsworth; travailleur (he meant traveler, I suppose), lEtais Unis. George P. Morton, et fils , (Plmerique. Lloyd B. Williams, et trois amis, ville de Boston, Amerique. J. EJllsworth Baker, tout de suite de France, place de naissance Amerique, cCe'sTinaiion la Grande~l3retagne ("1,238).
Such people are annoying, though not nearly so odious as the "old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a fresco and 136
fire-plug, and from that day forward feel privileged to
void their critical bathos on painting, sculpture, and
architecture forevermore" (11,72-73). Indeed, as Mark
Twain claims, the American can never imagine "what a
consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad" (I, 238).
Mark Twain’s harshest censure is reserved for those
Americans who proclaim their barbarity to the world by
defacing Europe's grand historical monuments:
One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Y/ilkinsons, and all other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Gome and Baalbec would inscribe their poor little names upon the walls of Baalbec's magnificent ruins, and would add the town, the county, and the state they came from—and, swearing thus, be infallibly correct. It is a pity some great ruin does not fall in and flatten out some of these reptiles, and scare their kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments again, forever (II, 1 7 0 -1 7 1 ).
The philistine Americans who engage in the practice of
advertising their pitiful lack of taste and cultural
sensitivity force the narrator of Innocents Abroad into
isolation from other representatives of his homeland.
He thus quickly becomes, like Byron's heroes, a lonely man embarked on a solitary quest.
There are certain hints in Innocents Abroad which
indicate that Mark Twain might well have had Byron's works in mind while designing the tale of his hero's 137
search in Europe for some sort of spiritual identity.
May Welland convincingly demonstrates, for example, a resemblance between Mark Twain's description of a
Venetian gondola as "an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it" and
Byron's description of a gondola in "Beppo"—a craft gliding "along the water looking blackly,/Just like a 17 coffin clapt in a canoe." Howard Baetzhold points out Mark Twain's awareness of Childe Harold when our hero proudly claims to be the only "man of mature age" to remember the fabled processions of gladiators, martyrs and lions without repeating Harold's phrase, "butchered "1 8 to make a Roman holiday." Later, Baetzhold points out, Mark Twain's narrator, during a voyage through the
Hellespont, recalls Don Juan's emulating Leander "merely iq for a flyer." J There are times when Mark Twain seems to employ Byron's technique in Don Juan of creating a serious situation which almost draws an emotional com mitment from the hero, only to destroy the effect with
17 "Mark Twain, the Great Victorian," Chicago Review (Pall 1955), p. 102.
^^Mark Twain and John B ull; The B ritish Con nection (Bloomington, Ind., 1970), p. 78.
1^Baetzhold, p. 78. 138
a humorous, satiric jibe. Meeting the Emperor of Russia, for example, Mark Twain's hero seems awed by his presence.
Here is a man "who could open his lip s and ships would fly through the waves, locomotives would speed over the plains, couriers would hurry from village to village, a hundred telegraphs would flash the word to the four corners of an empire that stretches its vast proportions over a seventh part of the habitable globe, and a count less multitude of men would spring to do his bidding"
( 1 1 ,1 0 9 ) . How does our hero end his panegyric on the
Emperor's power? He jokingly asserts, "If I c o u ld have stolen his coat, I would have done it. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by" (II,
1 1 0 ). A little later, the narrator engages in praise of the Emperor's palace, seemingly awestruck by its beauty and magnificence; yet he ends his comments with the observation that a fountain in the midst of beautiful flowers "may possibly breed mosquitoes" ( 1 1 ,1 1 1 ) . A f t e r marvelling at the finesse shown by a Grand Duke and
Duchess during a tea for the Americans, he comments:
"When it was time to go, we bade our distinguished hosts goodby, and they retired happy and contented to their 20 apartments to count their spoons" (11,114).
20 See John C. Gerber, "Mark Twain's Use of the Comic Pose," PMLA, 77 (J u n e 1962), 297-304, f o r a d i s cussion of the indigenous sources of his comic roles. 139
These are admittedly superficial resemblances
between Mark Twain's first major work and the poems of
Byron; yet they do at least suggest that Mark Twain had
Byron in mind while composing his 1868 novel. Of greater
significance is the definite correlation between the
nature of our hero's quest and the quest of other heroes
in the mal du siecle tradition. Like Ishmael, the nar
rator of Innocents Abroad finds release for his pent-up
spiritual anxieties as soon as he leaves his homeland behind and embarks into the mysterious, natural power of
th e s e a :
I thought there never was such gladness in the air before, such brightness in the sun, such beauty in the sea. I was satis fied with the picnic, then, and with all its belongings. All my malicious instincts were dead within me; and as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of charity rose up in their place that was as boundless ... as the broad ocean that was heaving its billows about us (1,17). 21
Mark Twain's hero thus shares with Rene, Werther, Don Juan and Ishmael the anticipation and excitement of embarking upon a voyage—a journey which is to carry them a ll away
21 The narrator's announcement here that "all my malicious instincts were dead within me" recalls Ish mael' s confession in the chapter "A Squeeze of the Hand," "I forgot all about our horrible oath. In that inex- pressable spenn, I washed my hands and heart of it .... I felt divinely free of all ill-w ill, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever." 140
from their native land into a new world, or a world at
least new to them. Like the nation which produced him,
Mark Twain's narrator lacks an identity; like Childe
Harold or Don Juan he seeks amid the ruins of Europe the
sense of historical, cultural and personal permanence his own infant nation cannot possibly provide. But, like other Romantic heroes embarked upon the quest for per manence, Mark Twain's hero discovers his search a futile one; Europe contains for him, as it did for Harold and
Don Juan, only reminders of decadence and decay.
Our first hints of the hero's concern with per manence come from his acute awareness of the contrast between the legendary, grand past of certain European capitols, and their pitiful present state. "Venice," our narrator informs us, "whose navies well nigh held dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every clime, is fallen prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay" (I,218). The degenerate condition of nineteenth-century Greece pains
Mark Twain's narrator almost as much as it earlier had pained Byron and his persona, Harold. Our hero asserts:
I suppose that ancient Greece and modern Greech compared, furnish the most extrav agant contrast to be found in history. George I., an infant of eighteen, and a scraggy nest of foreign office-holders, sit 141
in the places of Themistocles, Pericles, and the illustrious scholars and generals of the Golden Age of Greece. The fleets that were the wonder of the world when the Parthenon was new, are a beggarly hand ful of fishing-smacks now, and the manly people that perfomed such miracles of valor at Marathon are only a tribe of unconsidered slaves to-day. The classic Ilissus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian wealth and greatness.... (11,62 -63 ). The cumulative effect of a decaying Europe on the In nocent's imagination is to make him acutely aware of the impossibility of achieving the permanence he so desperately seeks. A lengthy and crucial discourse on the "vanity of human wishes" exposes the narrator's disappointment with the ultimate fruit of his quest through Europe for peraanence and identity:
After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiae, of Pompeii, and after glan cing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it never had before; the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives, in olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in general ship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong)— no history, no tradition, no poetry— nothing that can give it even a passing interest (11,43).
Mark Twain's narrator follows this reflection with an 142
imaginary entry in an Encyclopedia for A.D. 5868 on
Clemens' personal hero, Ulysses S. Grant. While the
entry is humorous in its asinine inaccuracy, it reflects
the author's deepening awareness of the fu tility of his
search for permanence; in the final analysis, he, as
artist, is little different from those "John Smiths
and George W ilkinsons, and a ll other p itifu l nobodies
between Kingdom Come and Baalbec" who deface public 22 monuments with their insignificant scrawlings.
In Innocents Abroad Mark Twain thus creates a fas
cinating, complex character, one who, like Jefferson,
Jackson and Lincoln becomes a folk-hero because he
embodies the essentially agrarian values and prejudices
of the American people. Self-appointed spokesman for and representative of his native land, the narrator of
Innocents Abroad denounces and ridicules the decadence and depravity of the Old World, while asserting the
22 The narrator's imagined encyclopedia entry on Grant reads: URIAH S . ( o r Z .) GRAUNT— p o p u la r p o e t o f ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote "Rock me to Sleep, Mother" (11,43). 143
natural beauty and democratic principles of his own
country. This characteristic of the narrator causes
many Mark Twain scholars, especially Henry Nash Smith,
Bernard DeVoto and Alfred Kazin, to see in Innocents
Abroad a confrontation between the new American and
the Old World.
Yet Mark Twain's satiric sword in Innocents Abroad
seems double-edged. Though admittedly dismayed by the
decadence and human misery he finds in Europe and the
Holy Land, the narrator of Innocents Abroad nevertheless
seems likewise alienated from the American people he
ostensibly represents. Their cultural pretensions and
insensitivity, and their religious hypocrisy render the
Americans on the Quaker City as unappealing to the nar
rator as the heirs of the Old World decadence he dis
covers in nineteenth-century Europe. More significantly,
Mark Twain's narrator begins to demonstrate affin ities with Romantic heroes in the mal du siecle tradition, as he leaves behind his inadequate homeland—a democratic nation which by principle is no more than a loose col
lection of individual egos—and embarks upon a journey which ultim ately becomes a futile quest for cultural
identity and permanence. Thus early in his artistic
career Mark Twain begins to adapt traditions of Romantic heroism to express latent reservations he harbors 144
regarding the democratic principles and destiny of the
America he comes to represent. As his disillusionm ent with America increases through the Gilded Age, Mark
Twain turns increasingly to patterns of Romantic heroism to provide artistic expression for his anxieties and frustrations over the disintegration of the American dream, until finally, towards the end of his career, he scornfully dismisses the American experience and identi fies temperamentally with the European culture he had overtly denounced in his 1868 travelogue. C hapter VI
The Light and Dark of Huck Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is revealed through the eyes of a young orphan—"the juvenile pariah of the village ... son of the town drunkard ... cordially hated by all the mothers of the town ... idle and lawless and vulgar and bad."'*' It is essentially a story of the subconscious quest of the alienated hero, whom Leslie 2 Fiedler calls a "boy-Ishmael," for an identity based on a system of humane moral values. Like Ishmael in
Moby-Dick, Huck, a fugitive from civilization flees to the water where he views in microcosm two types of alienated individuals, both Romantic heroes of sorts, who represent apparently conflicting facets of Huck's own maturing self. The first of these, the aristocratic
Colonel Sherburn, is an embittered, Carlylean figure who shares with Huck a self-imposed isolation from a civilization he despises. Unlike Huck, Sherburn has developed in his self-imposed isolation a heart darkened
■^Samuel L. Clemens, The W ritings of Mark Twain, ed. Albert B. Paine, 8 (New YorE,' TTT references to the writings of Mark Twain w ill be made parenthetically in the text to this edition, unless otherwise noted. 2 Love and Death in the American Novel (I960; rpt. Cleveland, 1962), p. 5^5. 146
with contempt for the "damned human race." The second type, represented by Miss Watson’s Negro slave Jim— a vestige of the Romantic notion of the "noble savage"— likewise shares with Huck and Sherburn a sense of alien ation from civilized society. Jim’s alienation is not self-imposed; it is instead the unfortunate result of his color and subsequent condition of servitude. Despite his isolation, Jim struggles to maintain an essential human dignity based not, as Sherburn's, on contempt and almost satanic pride, but on the elementary Christian virtues of love, compassion and endurance. A detailed examination of the causes and results of the alienation of these two figures reveals that Huck’s final identity represents a unique compromise of Sherburn's self-im posed alienation from civilization and Jim's simple Christian v i r t u e s .
Several distinguished critics have argued that the introduction of Colonel Sherburn into Mark Twain's novel presents serious structural difficulties. Henry Nash
Smith calls the presence of Sherburn "an intrusion in the story," one of the two "flaws in a work that otherwise approaches perfection as an embodiment of American experience in a radically new and appropriate literary 147
mode."^ Kenneth Lynn asserts that when he introduces
Sherburn, Mark Twain violates "Huck's point of view ... and speaks to the reader through another mask, in order that he might ram home his moral judgment of the society in explicit and unmistakable terms."^ Other critics, while admitting that the general episodic pattern of the novel allows for any structural difficulties which may result from the introduction of Sherburn, nevertheless miss much of the significance of the scene because they, like Lynn, insist on viewing the episode almost exclu sively in terms of Mark Twain's social criticism of the
"Arkansaw yahoos.The section is admittedly full of such criticism . The mass cowardice of the townspeople when confronting the powerful Sherburn, the stupidity leading them to place a heavy Bible on the breast of the dying Boggs, and the numerous insensitive and
%ark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cam bridge, Mass., 1962), p. 137.
^lark Twain and Southwestern Humor (New York, 1959),TT“110: 5 ^Robert Hunting, "Mark Twain's Arkansaw Yahoos," Modern Language Notes, 72 (April 1958), 265; Richard P. Adams, "The Unity and Coherence of Huckleberry Finn," Tulane Studies in English, 6 (1956), 101; Gilbert M. Rubenstein, "The Moral Structure of Huckleberry Finn," College English, 18 (November 1956), 74—a ll treat the Sherburn episode primarily as a social indictment of the Arkansas townspeople. 148
grotesque reconstructions of the shooting all provide more than ample verification of Sherburn*s harsh con demnation of the "average man." When we view Sherburn's episode exclusively, or even primarily, in terms of Mark
Twain's social criticism, however, the role of the embittered aristocrat in the novel's over-all pattern of alienation is diminished.
The Sherbum-Boggs episode, according to Dixon
Wecter, stems from Mark Twain's recollection of an inci dent which occurred during his early boyhood in Hannibal,
Missouri. The principals involved in the original murder included a harmless old buffoon, "Uncle Sam" Smarr, g and his assailant, a dandy named Owsley. In his Auto biography Mark Twain makes it clear that it is the stu pidity of the townspeople which most haunts him in his reminiscences of the original episode. He writes:
The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street at noon day supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again and again the grotesque closing picture— the great family Bible spread open on the profane old man's breast by some thoughtful idiot and rising and sinking to the labored breathings and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying straggles. Y/e are curiously made. In all the throng of gaping and sympathetic on lookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil
^Sam Clemens of Hannibal, ed. Elizabeth Wecter (Boston, 1952), pp. 106-109. 149
would have been in better taste than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism and swifter in its atrocious work. 7
In the novel this ludicrous incident becomes one of
the major illustrations of the cruel ineptitude of
the Arkansas townspeople. This would seem in itse lf suf
ficient to substantiate the general consensus among
critics that the episode is important primarily for its
social criticism . But Mark Twain, while using the original murder as a general guide for his fictitious one, significantly gives Sherburn certain ennobling characteristics Owsley lacked. In fact, Sherburn more
closely resembles a principal in another murder the author likewise viewed in his childhood: the murder of an "invading ruffian," who "woke the whole village with his ribald yells and coarse challenges and obscen
ities," by "a poor but quite respectable widow." Unlike
Owsley, but quite like Sherburn, the widow "warned the man that if he stayed where he was while she counted ten it would cost him his life," before coolly and O without hesitation shooting him down in the street.
7 Samuel L. Clemens, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York, 1959)» p. 44.
Autobiosra p. 45. See too, Walter Blair, Mark Tw ain (Berkeley, I960), pp. 306-308. 150
The speech with which Sherburn humbles the mob also
closely resembles a passage which Mark Twain deleted o from Life on the M ississippi.J Apparently this has no
source other than Mark Twain's imagination. These two
bits of external evidence cannot be ignored; they point
up the fact that Mark Twain intended Sherburn to play
a more significant role in the novel than has been
generally recognized. The Colonel's adherence to an
aristocratic code of honor, allowing his rival, as did
the "quite respectable widow," an opportunity to save his life , coupled with the awesome speech he delivers
(a speech which not only separates Sherburn from the
disgusting mob but sounds suspiciously like Mark Twain him self), leads to the most striking aspect of the
Sherburn-Boggs episode: the awe and admiration which
the Colonel, though his murder of the haimless Boggs is
senseless, elicits from both the author, and the nar rator, Huck.
Howard Baetzhold presents convincing evidence indi cating that Mark Twain might well have had the writings of Thomas Carlyle in mind while designing the Sherburn-
Boggs episode. We know that Mark Twain had admired
Carlyle long before he began work on Huckleberry Finn;
q ^Lynn, p. 111. 151
in 1877 he had labeled The French Hevolution "one of the greatest creations that ever flowed from a pen."1^ We likewise know that Mark Twain had reread The French
Revolution and Carlyle's edition of Letters and Speeches of Cromwell in 1882, shortly before he began work in earnest on Huckleberry Finn, In the Letters and
Speeches of Cromwell there is a summary of an incident in which Cromwell eliminated dissension among his troops, an incident which Baetzhold offers as a possible source for the Sherburn-Boggs affair.11 Commanding eleven mutineers to step from the ranks, Cromwell condemned them "by swift court-m artial to die; and Trooper Arnold, one of them, was accordingly shot there and then; which 12 extinguished the mutiny for that time." The same inci dent reappears in The French Revolution: "when that
Agitator Sergeant stept forth from the ranks, with plea of grievances of Thousands expectant there," the leader "discerned with those truculent eyes of his, how the matter lay; plucked a pistol from his holsters;
^Samuel L. Clemens in a letter to Mollie Fair banks, September 6, 1877, Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, ed. Dixon V/ecter (San Marino, 1949), p. 2t)7.
11Mark Twain and John B ull: The B ritish Connection (Bloomington, Ind., 1970), p. 90. 12 as quoted by Baetzhold, p. 90. 152
blew Agitator and Agitation instantly out. Noll was a man fit for such things."1-^
Baetzhold also asserts that Mark Twain is likewise indebted to Carlyle for Sherburn's subsequent defiance of the lynch mob. Certainly the details of the crowd’s movements and the actual picture of a powerful figure intim idating a mob were common to several of the books dealing with the French Revolution which Mark Twain had read. But Carlyle’s direct question in one section of
The French Revolution and the m ilitary imagery he adopts suggest that Sherburn's "slow and scornful" address to his would-be lynchers owes a considerable debt to Car lyle' s earlier work. "Is it not miraculous," Carlyle asks at one point in The French Revolution, "how one man moves hundreds of thousands; each unit of whom, it may be, loves him not, and singly fears him not, yet 14 has to obey him...?"
Whether or not Mark Twain consciously borrowed from
Carlyle in fashioning his aristocratic Colonel, as
Baetzhold insists, Sherburn emerges as a Carlylean figure harboring contempt for the masses,clinging to a seemingly outmoded code of honor, andexercising hyp-
^as quoted by Baetzhold, p. 90.
^as quoted by Baetzhold, p. 89. 153
notic power over all those with whom he has contact.
Sherburn gives expression to the reservations in Mark
Twain's own mind about the efficacy of democracy, the
future of any nation dependent upon the common man. In
an 1877 letter to Mollie Fairbanks, Mark Twain wrote:
You may easily suppose that I hate all shades & forms of republican government now—or rather with an intensified hatred, for I always hated them...Republican government, with a sharply restricted suffrage, is just as good as a Constitu tional monarchy with a virtuous & powerful aristocracy; but with an unrestricted suf frage it ought to ... perish because it is founded in wrong & is weak & bad & tyran n i c a l . 15
Any nation whose destiny lies in the hands of men like
Pap and the Bricksville mob is, Mark Twain fears, in a
dreadful condition. Sherburn thus affords Mark Twain
an opportunity to voice his contempt for the common man, and for the democratic traditions upon which the nation was founded. Such contempt is far removed from the optim istic outbursts about democracy characteristic of the naive narrator of Innocents Abroad; it indicates the author's increasing disillusionment with the American dream he had once championed. The figure of the Carlylean
Romantic hero affords Mark Twain the opportunity to express this disillusionment, and for this reason Sher burn is a magnetic, compelling figure despite his sense-
1S Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. 208. 154
less murder of the pitiful Boggs.
There is a great deal of internal evidence in
Huckleberry Finn which, when considered, leaves little doubt that Mark Twain intended Sherburn to stand above and apart from the pathetically weak and disgusting
"yahoos." As Sherburn first appears in the novel, "a proud looking man, ...a heap the best dressed man in that town," a man who owns "the biggest store in the town," everyone in the crowd drops "back on each side to let him come" (XIII,197). Living "up the street," in a house separated from the rest of the community by a fence and a "little twenty-foot yard" (X III,201),
Sherburn, Smith rightly asserts, "is a solitary figure, not identified with the townspeople, and because they 16 are hostile to him, an outcast." Sherburn1s ability to humble the angry lynching mob, "merely by the courage of his presence," Lauriat Lane, Jr., points out, links the Colonel to the epic hero asserting his bravery in 17 the face of a menacing multitude. Symbolically Mark
Twain has Sherburn, in confronting the mob, stand on the roof of his porch. The shotgun which Sherburn holds, the only weapon in sight, becomes as Smith contends, a
"^Smith, p. 136 17 '"Why Huckleberry Finn is a Great V/orld Novel," College English. 17 (October 1955), 4. 155
symbolic representation "of the personal force with 1 O which he dominates the community" he despises. The
comparison of Sherburn with Buck Harkness, the leader
of the enraged townspeople whom the aristocrat labels,
"half-a-man," finally seals Sherburn1s position as the IQ superior individual among a class of commons. ^ When
the Colonel successfully orders the enraged mob to
"leave—and take your half-a-man with you," there is
little remaining doubt as to his transcendent place in
the community.
Basically Sherburn's importance in the novel's pat
tern of alienation stems not so much from the fact that
he is indeed alienated from and superior to the dis
gusting "yahoos," as it does from the causes and effects
of this alienation, and the relationship of these causes
and effects to Huck. One of the major causes of Sher
burn' s alienation is of course the fact that he—to use
Goethe's metaphor in describing the prototype of the mal du siecle tradition, Werther—"is not cut of con
ventional cloth." Kore importantly, Sherburn's aliena
tion stems from his monomaniac desire to cling stead
fastly to an inhumane aristocratic code of honor, a code
^Smith, p. 136.
^Smith, p. 136. 156
which leads him to treat human beings not as individual
men but as inhuman abstractions. "Bom and raised in the
South," and having "lived in the North," the wandering
Sherburn tells the Arkansas mob, "I know the average all
around" (XIII,202). It is significant to note that
Sherburn, alienated from all those around him, knows
not individual men but some abstract concept of the
"average man." Just as the Grangerford code leads that
aristocratic family to see their rivals, the Shepherdsons,
in abstract rather than human terms, so Sherburn sees in
the Arkansas mob an embodiment of his abstractions, and
approaches them accordingly, yelling, "The thing for
you to do, is to droop your tails and go home and crawl
in a hole" (X III,203). Sherburn becomes, because of his monomaniac adherence to this aristocratic code of honor
and the self-imposed estrangement from humanity resulting
from it, an early predecessor of Philip Traum in The 20 Mysterious Stranger, a "transcendent figure," the
"elephant" among "red spiders," possessing intellectual
superiority and awesome power, and because he sees human 21 beings as abstractions, lacking a "moral sense." Though
20 The term "transcendent figure" is Smith's, p. 136. 21 See Clemens, The Mysterious Stranger in The Portable Mark Twain, ed. Bernard DeVoto TNew York, 1946), P . "6'9'3".------157
Satan's nephew later calls this "moral sense" the curse
of mankind, it is this lack of empathy for human depra
vity which causes the embittered aristocrat to remorse- pp lessly murder the harmless and pathetic Boggs.
Mark Twain's remark, "What a man sees in the human
race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy p-j of his own heart," J is particularly relevant to an ap preciation of Sherburn's role in Huck's subconscious quest for a moral identity. The resemblances between
Huck and Sherburn are indeed so striking that it is not at all inappropriate to view the Colonel as mirroring, in many significant respects, the dark side of the "deep and honest privacy" of Huck's "own heart." The hero's defiantly self-imposed alienation from civilized society, and his almost morbid preoccupation with loneliness and death, link him from the outset with Sherburn and the mad. du siecle tradition. Disgusted with Widow Douglas' at tempts to "sivilize" him, and alienated from Miss Watson's hypocritical and coldly puritanical Christianity, Huck admits at the beginning of the novel that he would be
22 Smith makes the point that the introduction of Boggs' daughter is an "invitation" for the reader to consider Sherburn "an inhuman monster," p. 135. 23 Jas quoted by Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain; The Man and His Work, rev. ed. (Norman, 1961), p. 139. 158
willing to go to hell to escape the civilized world.
"All I wanted v/as to go somewheres," Huck confesses,
"All I wanted was a change, I warn't particular" (XIII,
3). Not only does such a confession suggest Werther,
Rene' or Childe Harold, foreshadowing his complete renunciation of, and alienation from, all values of civilized society in his famous decision on the raft,^ but it serves for the moment to illustrate the fact that
Huck willingly stands far apart from the world around him; indeed, as T. S. Eliot says, "There is no more soli- 25 tary character in fiction." His disillusionment deepened by Tom Sawyer's "romantic" raid on the "A-rabs and the elephants," Huck even enjoys "all but the cowhide part" of his sojourn in the woods with the miserable Pap.
When he learns of Judge Thatcher's attempts to remove him from his father's custody, Huck becomes extremely disap pointed. It "shook me up considerable," he remarks,
"because I didn't want to go back to the widow's anymore and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it"
(XIII,35). Like Werther, Rene' and Ishmael, the forlorn
Huck, because of his extreme alienation, harbors a grim fascination with death. Before going to the river Huck
^Leslie Fiedler in fact asserts that the Werther figure in the novel is Huck, p. 559. 25 "An Introduction to Huckleberry Finn," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, 1950), p. i x . 159
confesses, "I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead," hears the leaves rustling in the woods "ever so mournful," hears an owl "who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die," and notices the widow's "house was as still as death" (XIII,4-5). Certainly this projection of the sense of loneliness and fascination with death into the external world indicates Huck to be more than a mere carefree vagabond; indeed, he suffers from a melancholy as profound as that experienced by anyone in
\ the mal du siecle tradition.
Huck's reactions to Sherburn's murder of Boggs,
"the best-naturedest old fool in Arkansaw—never hurt nobody, drunk nor sober" (X III,196), provide further illustration of the hero's affinity to the satanic aris tocrat. The cool objectivity with which he describes the murder and later confrontation between Sherburn and the mob offers a striking contrast to the subjective comments he makes when viewing other instances of man's inhumanity to man. After viewing the grim Shepherdson-
Grangerford feud, Huck confesses, "It made me so sick that I most fell out of the tree" (XIII,160). The exploitation of the disgusting "yahoos" by the Duke and the Dauphin at the Arkansas revival meeting "was enough,"
Huck comments, "to make a body ashamed of the human 160
race" (X III,225). Finally, after viewing the enraged
townspeople tar and feather the Duke and Dauphin, Huck
remarks, "It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings
can be awful cruel to one another" (XIII,321). No such
comments accompany his description of the Boggs affair.
Even the appearance of Boggs' "sweet and gentle-looking,
but awful pale and scared" daughter, an appearance which
has no factual antecedent and thus seems intended to 26 avert sympathy from Sherburn, fails to unsettle Huck
emotionally. Fiedler suggests that it is even possible
the murder of Boggs draws admiration from Huck, for
Sherburn's slaughter of Boggs, "a man not very different
from Huck's Pap," becomes in a sense the symbolic murder 27 of the hero's detested father. While this seems a bit
tenuous, it is nevertheless true that Huck does not con
demn or even indicate an adverse reaction to the homicide;
indeed, he seems fascinated by the awesome and contemptu-
26Blair, p. 308. 27 'Fiedler, p. 583. While Fiedler's idea here is fascinating, it is not based on altogether accurate as sumptions. Boggs is not "a man not very different from Huck's Pap." Mark Twain explicitly makes the point that Boggs, in coming to town "for his little old monthly drunk," is completely haimless. Boggs is "the best- naturedest old fool in Arkansaw—never hurt nobody, drunk nor sober." The fact that he has a young daughter who "throws herself on her father, crying and saying, 'Oh, he's killed him, he's killed him'.'" suggests that Boggs is a man quite unlike Huck's Pap. 161
ous power Sherburn exerts over the townspeople, a group whom Huck calls "a mighty ornery lot" (XIII,192). After hearing Sherburn command the mob to "leave—and take your half-a-man with you," Huck points out how "tolerable cheap" Buck Harkness looks before admitting that he too is awed. "I could a staid, if I'd a wanted to," Huck asserts, "but I didn't want to" (XIII,204). He then scurries off to a circus, apparently free of depression or sympathy for the fate of poor Boggs.
Sherburn's significance in the novel lies primarily in his role as a projection of a certain facet, the dark facet if you w ill, of Huck's maturing self. Sharing with
Huck a self-imposed alienation from a civilization he despises, Sherburn perhaps epitomizes what the young orphan might become if the strain of melancholy in him were to nourish itself on the numerous incidents of man's ugly inhumanity to others he witnesses during his journey down the river. But Huck, while always sharing with Sherburn an alienation from civilization, never adopts his bitter contempt for humanity. He is saved, so to speak, by another isolated figure, the Negro slave
Jim .
The character of Jim offers an interesting contrast to that of the white aristocratic Sherburn. Although sharing with the Colonel a sense of estrangement from the mainstream of a racist slave-holding society, Jim 162
is not at all anti-social. "More looked up to than any nigger in that country," Jim enjoys a rather prominent place in the black social order of the Hannibal slave community (X III,8). Furthermore, in telling Huck that
"the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving money, and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife ... and then they would both work to buy the two children"
(XIII,123), Jim reveals that his flight to the river is an attempt not to escape civilization but to gain freedom so that he might become a member of the larger, predomi nantly white, social and economic order of free America.
While admittedly such a confession hardly qualifies Jim as a black Horatio Alger, it nevertheless elucidates an extremely significant point in the novel. Though unfor tunately alienated, Jim strives not for isolation but for integration into the larger civilized world, the same world, ironically, which Huck and the satanic Sher- bum repudiate.
Because Jim’s alienation is based neither on con tempt nor pride but on the unfortunate circumstance of his color, it is not at all inappropriate that he mir rors the virtues stemming from the Widow Douglas' definition of Christianity. This is not to say that
Jim is in any formal sense of the term a Christian.
Indeed, his humorous but sincere tirade against Solomon's 163
supposed "wisdom," and his adherence -to pagan rather than traditional Christian accounts of the mysteries of the universe convincingly seal his alienation from the Sunday-
School world satirized in Tom Sawyer. If, however,
Christianity means, as the widow tells Huck, "I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself" (X III,16-17), then Jim preeminently qualifies for a place in the spiritual hierarchy. His constant paternalistic concern for Huck, the almost incredible endurance he exhibits during Tom Sawyer's dangerously nonsensical escapades, and his willingness at the end of the novel to forego his coveted freedom to aid the injured Tom, not only make him, as E. Hudson pO Long insists, "the real hero of the book," but offer a significant contrast to the behavior of both the nominal Christians along the river and Jim's spiritual opposite, the self-centered Sherburn.
Mark Twain further emphasizes Jim 's moral stature by drawing certain overt parallels between the humble
Negro slave and Christ. It is not accidental, for example, that the Duke and the Dauphin, intimate associ-
^^Mark Twain Handbook (New York, 1957), p. 209. 164
ates of Jim, betray him as Judas betrayed Christ for
$40, or in nineteenth-century terms, forty pieces of 29 silver. ^ This parallel reappears at the end of the novel when another betrayer, Tom Sawyer, in repentance
for his outlandish deeds gives Jim forty pieces of silver
(XIII,403). Jim, however, more significantly resembles
Christ in his role as Priest—a god in the natural world of the river and an interpreter in the supernatural realm of "spirits, omens, and dark powers.Always wearing "that five center piece around his neck ... a charm the devil gave to him," "having seen the devil and been rode by witches," and performing "magic" with "a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox" (X III,23), Jim stands,
Daniel Hoffman contends, "as seer and shaman, interpreter of the dark secrets of nature which the white folks in the Church deny, secrets which Tom Sawyer and all the other romanticists along the M ississippi cannot dis c o v e r.
Once on the river, Jim, whom Huck says "knowed all
29 Rubenstein, p. 74.
•^Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1961), pp. 330-331.
■^Hoffman, p. 321. 165
kinds of signs ... knowed most everything” (X III,63), changes from a god of witchcraft to nature's Priest, instructing Huck "in the lore of the weather, in the omens of luck, in the talismans of death.” When his predictions come true, and they almost invariably do,
Jim becomes Huck's "devilish tantalization of the gods,” "a magician in sympathetic converse with the
Spirits that govern—often by malice or caprice—the
■jp world of things and men."J
The thematic significance of Jim's relationship to
Huck focuses primarily on the Negro's role as the boy's adopted father. Having rejected the hypocritical values of his guardians and fled from the cruelty of his pig gish father, Huck as the novel opens is "a love-starved 33 waif” spiritually floundering in a lonesome world.
When Jim appears on Jackson's Island, a fugitive from bondage seeking to rejoin his splintered family, his union with the orphan Huck becomes virtually inevitable.
They immediately fora a family, "a primitive community
... of saints,” Lionel Trilling labels them, and together 34 embark on a mutual quest for liberation. Jim, in his
^^Hoffman, p. 322.
•^Lynn, p. 114.
^The Liberal Imagination (1950; rpt. New York, 1 9 5 3 ), p . 1 G T . 166
role as father, soon begins his parental duties, in
structing Huck in the lore of their natural surroundings,
protecting him from the ugliness of Pap's dead body, and
lavishing upon him heretofore unknown parental affection
and concern. He is rewarded by Huck's filia l devotion,
a devotion transcending environmental sanctions and
codified morality. Leslie Piedler points out: "Huck
lies, runs, and hides for Jim's sake, even as he has
lied, run and hid for his own, ...not because he thinks
he is acting in behalf of some higher moral code, but
because he has extended his area of self-interest to a
•} 5 family of two." 7/hen Huck decides on the raft to go
to hell rather than to betray the Negro slave, he does so not so much from "instinctive humanity," as Leo Marx
i m p l i e s , ^ but from a filial-like devotion, remembering
how Jim "would always call me honey and pet me, and do everything he would think of for me" (XIII, 296).^
Jim's role as parent fuses with his role as Priest
-^Fiedler, p. 577.
^"M r. Eliot, Nr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn," The American Scholar, 22, No. 4 (Autumn 1953), 425T
^7 Fiedler and Trilling make sim ilar points, and I am indebted to each of them for the general theme of this paragraph. See Fiedler, pp. 575-579, and Trilling, pp. 104-108. 167
and Christ-figure when Huck subconsciously adopts him as spiritual as well as physical father. Despite his extreme alienation and self-reliance, Huck constantly seeks to embrace some authority, some system of moral behavior, for guidance in his loneBome world. As Lewis
Leary points out, this authority at first appears to O O be Tom Sawyer. When Huck attempts to escape from his
Pap, for example, he longs for Tom's advice to help him through the tense situation (XIII,46). When Huck does something well, like returning the stolen money to the orphan girls, he longs for Tom's praise (XIII,270). In reality Huck discards Tom's "romantic" ideals and civilized values, though he quite appropriately never intellectually links these values and ideals to the individual who embodies them. Even while longing for
Tom's advice when aboard the wrecked boat with the kil lers, Huck dismisses the type of suggestions which Tom would most likely offer, remarking, "But it w a m ' t no time to be sentimentering" (XIII,98). At the end of the novel Huck again rejects Tom's authority, dissenting to every "romantic" and ridiculous scheme which Tom devises to "aid" Jim in his flight to freedom. He
3®"Tom and Huck: Innocence on Trial," Virginia Quarterly Review, 30 (1954), 424. 168
offers instead practical alternatives "in such a way,"
Thomas Gullason contends, "that the reader realizes that
he is challenging Tom's previously unquestioned authori-
■j Q ty."J^ Thus despite the fact that Huck appeals to the
authority of Tom Sawyer, it is clear that he discards
Tom's values, and the values of the civilization Tom
represents. Floundering without the honest and humane
codified system of morality he seeks, Huck must therefore
act according to a personal, intuitive morality of the
heart, the same type of morality manifested by his
spiritual father, Jim .^ It is in this sense that Jim
becomes a projection of the "light side" of Huck, or
the "natural goodness" which, Richard P. Adams points
out, automatically emerges once Huck strips away the
veneer of civilized society and escapes "into a natural world which, though it is equally dangerous physically, 4.1 is much purer morally."
There are several indications in the novel that
Jim not only stands as a projection of the light side
■^"The 'Fatal' Ending of Huckleberry Finn," American Literature, 29 (March 1937;, 89.
^Richard P. Adams, "Introduction to Huckleberry Finn," American Literary Masters, ed. Charles Anderson e T a l . , 1 ( fTevTYorljr," TSfe), 1038-1050.
^Adams,"Introduction," pp. 1046-1047. 169
of Huck's heart but as a "spiritual father" who con tributes to Huck's moral development. Perhaps the most obvious of these is in Jim's denunciation of Huck after Huck adopts a typical Tom Sawyer trick, fooling and lying to Jim while the Negro is sincerely concerned that Huck has drowned. When Jim discovers what Huck has done, he reprimands him:
...When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no mo' what become er me an de raf'. En when I woke up en fine you back agin', all safe and soun', de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot I's so thankful, En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head es dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed (XIII,119).
Jim's brief sermon has the desired effect. Not only does Huck discard social conventions and "humble myself to a nigger," but he vows to do Jim "no more mean tricks"
(XIII,120). This undoubtedly accounts in part for Huck's opposition to Tom Sawyer's foolishness at the end of the novel.
Huck's famous decision on the raft, choosing to fol low the dictates of his heart and to go to hell rather than subscribing to what he "knows" is right and being
"saved," serves as the second and most convincing example illustrating Jim's moral influence over the young boy. 170
As previously pointed out, Huck's decision springs not
from adherence to some abstract higher moral code, but
solely from his love for the individual, Jim. The love and compassion which Jim lavishes on Huck throughout the
journey becomes in a sense an example which Huck at this point in the narrative subconsciously adopts, deciding to submit selflessly to a morality of the heart, even at the expense of social and religious damnation. Huck's decision on the raft thus becomes the climax of the novel. With the words, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," he rejects forever the conscience and values of
Tom Sawyer's civilization, and moves deep into the realm of Jim's spiritual jurisdiction. By living rather than merely preaching Christian morality, Jim provides Huck with the impetus needed to allow the "light side" of his heart to emerge triumphant over both the "dark side" of his heart and the civilization upon which the "dark side" festers. Once this happens, Huck's initiation is complete, and Jim, the spiritual father, is free to leave Huck, the disciple, behind. Viewing Jim as the "spiritual father" whom Huck dramatically though subconsciously adopts thus destroys Kenneth Lynn's contention that the inevitable separation of Huck and Jim at the end of Huckleberry
Finn proves the "final meaning" of the novel to be "that the liberation theme and the search for the father theme 171
are tragically at odds."^ After all, the paradox of
Christianity was that in order for Christians to have a spiritual father they had to lose him on the Cross.
In Moby-Dick, Ishmael loses his spiritual father,
Queequeg, once he embraces the truth which the savage imparts. In this same way, Jim, after nurturing Huck through his initiation, leaves him to weather alone the tribulations of a hostile world.
Huck's response after seeing the Arkansas mob tar and feather the Duke and Dauphin offers an excellent example of the ambivalent nature of his moral awareness at the end of the novel. Despite the abuse he and Jim had received from the pair, Huck comments:
Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another (XIII,320-321).
The most striking aspect of Huck's reaction is neither the boy's compassion for the "rascals" nor his pes sim istic view of cruel human nature, but as Leo Marx points out, "the extraordinary combination of the two, a mature blending of his instinctive suspicion of human
^Lynn, pp. 115-116 172
motives with his capacity for pity."^ The "dark side" of his heart, represented earlier by the satanic Colonel
Sherburn, has not subsided. Huck still enjoys a self- imposed alienation from a civilization he despises. As
Fiedler contends, Huck's decision at the end of the novel "to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest" (XIII,405) indicates that the mal du siecle strain in him is as strong as it ever was. He is still "neither hero nor citizen, neither son nor brother—but a stranger and outcast, a boy-Ishmael," who "rejects not only the claims which sanctify slavery (that was easy enough in
I 8 8 4 ), but also those which sanctify work, duty, home, cleanliness, marriage, chivalry—even motherhood!
The mal du siecle strain in Huck, however, is tempered by the "light side" of his heart, the side represented and nurtured by the Negro Jim. The forlorn young boy is free from the inhumanity and evil normally char acteristic of the Byronic hero in American fiction. By coupling his alienation and distaste for the values of civilization with the elementary Christian virtues of love, compassion, and endurance, Huck achieves a unique
^^Marx, pp. 429-430.
^Fiedler, p. 597. 173
and hamonious blending of the two conflicting facets
o f h is own m aturing s e l f .
In Huck's search for selfhood we find emerging a
pattern linking Mark Twain's orphan to the tradition of
the Romantic hero in nineteenth-century fiction. The
young Huck finds the conventions and values of his
civilization restrictive, hypocritical and debased;
thus in his decision on the raft he is forced, like all
Romantic heroes, to assert "the sense of the individual
(sens propre) over the ... (sens commun).11 To a certain
degree Huck's actions are, Campbell Tatham argues, purely 45 selfish; they are the dictates of individual conscience
and viewed within a social context, immoral. Leslie
Fiedler claims that this assertion of self links Huck to
the demoniacj and "for an instant at least, the marginal
loafer, the uncommitted idler is revealed as the American
Faust."4^ Huck is too modest and humane to be Faustian;
he lacks the monomaniac drive and evil intentions of a
Manfred, Chillingworth or Ahab. Instead, Mark Twain's
hero seems to bear a closer relation to” the development
of the Don Juan legend, falling somewhere between Byron's
45 "'Dismal and Lonesome': A New Look at Huckle berry Finn," M o d e m Fiction Studies, 14 (Spring 196b), 50.
46Fiedler, p. 597. 174
hero and Nietzsche's superman. Like Byron's Don Juan,
Huck is the hero buffeted by a civilization which is shallow and debased. Furthermore, like the superman or Shaw's Jack Tanner, Huck has within him the moral awareness necessary to salvage mankind. Yet unlike the superman, Huck is too modest to struggle to save civ ili zation; rather, like Werther or Rene', Huck decides to
"light out for the Territory ahead of the rest" (XIII,
405), hoping to find refuge isolated in a benevolent n a tu r e .
In a sense Huck's flight to the "Territory" reflects the hero's subconscious desire to remain an Adam in the
Garden of Eden, to resist the encroachment of culture on an intuitive moral awareness. The realization of such a desire is impossible, for in his journey down the river
Huck has lost his innocence, has obtained an insight into the nature of good and evil; moreover, Eden has virtually disappeared. Just five years after the appearance of
Huckleberry Finn, the Superintendent of the United States
Census for 1890 w ill declare no "Territory" remains. ^
Mark Twain's young orphan, having developed a system of morality running counter to accepted patterns of
^See Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, rev. ed., ed. George- Rogers Taylor (Boston, 1956), p. 1, behavior in America, see^.s doomed. As Jim tells him
"It's down in de b ills dat you's gwyne to git hung"
(XIII,25). Unfortunately, Eden has vanished, the
American Adam is left to wander homeless and immoral the American Dream is destroyed. Chapter VII
Hank Morgan: An Am erican F aust
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur1s Court was inspired by Mark Twain's anger over some derogatory remarks about American culture made by the Englishman
Matthew Arnold. In his preface to the novel, Mark Twain clearly implies that the abuses satirized and condemned in A Connecticut Yankee are those operative in Great
Britain during the nineteenth century. "It is not pretended that these laws and customs existed in England in the sixth century," Mark Twain writes; "no, it is only pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the
English and other civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day also."'*' James D. Williams comments that Mark
Twain hopes to "get at" Arnold by ridiculing "the shams, laws, and customs of today under pretense of dealing
1Samuel L. Clemens, The Writings of Mark Twain, ed. Albert B. Paine, 14 (New York, 1922-19^5), xxil 3fTl references to the writings of Mark Twain w ill be made parenthetically in the text to this edition, unless noted otherwise.
176 177
2 with the England of the sixth century." To a large
extent, therefore, A Connecticut Yankee reflects Mark
Twain's cultural defensiveness, his attempt to remind
his countrymen that the New Eden offers a cultural al
ternative to the debased social order of Western Europe.
Certainly this element of cultural defensiveness lies behind a letter Dan Beard, the novel's illustrator, wrote
to Mark Twain on 12 November 1889. "Unless the signs mislead me," Beard writes, "the time is right for Hank, the 'Boss,' to make himself felt both here and with our cousins across the water. I would like to see a copy of your book in every palace house and hut in the United
States, not because I had the honor of illustrating it but because I consider the story a great missionary work to bring Americans back to the safe, honest and manly position, intended for them to occupy, by their ancestors when they signed the declaration of Independence."^ In an article defending the American Press against Arnold's criticism s, Mark Twain asserts that "a discriminating irreverence"—that is, the irreverence characteristic of
2 "Revision and Intention in Mark Twain's A Con necticut Yankee,"American Literature, 36 (19647> 288.
■^Samuel L. Clemens and W. D. Howells, Selected Mark Twain—Howells Letters, 1872-1910, ed. Frederick Anderson e t al. (Cambridge, M ass., 1967), p . 285. 178
Hank Morgan, avatar of the American spirit— "is the
creator and protector of human liberty—even as the
other thing [i.e. solemnity and respect] is the creator
and protector of all forms of human slavery, bodily and
m en ta l.
Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee tells the story
of an American forced to survive by his own ingenuity
in the debased world of Arthurian England. Hank Morgan
is the embodiment of the spirit of nineteenth-century
America, "a national archetype," as Charles Holmes 5 expresses it. "I am an American," Hank tells the nar
rator of A Connecticut Yankee, "I was born and reared
in Hartford, in the state of Connecticut ... so I am a
Yankee of the Yankees—and practical; yet, and nearly
barren of sentiment, I suppose—or poetry, in other
words" (XIV, 5). Henry Nash Smith points out that Hank
is the image of that unique phenomenon of American history—the self-made man.^ "My father was a black
smith," Hank confesses, "my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to
4. Mark Twain, as quoted by Roger Salomon, Twain and the Image of History (New Haven, 1961), p. 97. 5 "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: Mark Twain's i*able of Uncertainty," £outh Atlantic Quarterly, 61 (Autumn 1962), 462.
Si ark Twain: The Development of a Writer (C bridge, Mass., 1962), p. 150. 179
the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything; guns, revolvers, cannons, boilers, engines.... I became head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me"
(XIV, 5). Viewed symbolically, A Connecticut Yankee thus presents the clash of two worlds, the war between nineteenth-century America—the Romantic hero of history upon whose shoulders the burden of Saviour of civilization falls—and the institution-ridden old social order of
Western Europe. Dismayed by the injustices and barbarity of medieval England, and possessing secrets and powers known only to the nineteenth century, Hank Morgan becomes a Promethean figure straggling to bring enlightenment to the oppressed masses, "to transform Arthur's kingdom 7 into a republic by means of an industrial revolution."
Significantly, however, Hank is a Promethean figure who comes to embody Faustian elements, and his almost mono maniac quest for unlimited power soon proves more than he can control, bringing death to countless thousands, and eventually ending in his own destruction. As satirist, therefore, Mark Twain presents a double-vision.
Overtly the novel exposes the abuses of the decadent social order of Western Europe; covertly Mark Twain's
^ S m ith , p. 153. 1 8 0
incorporation of Faustian elements into his mythical
American hero becomes an important commentary on the ominous future of American technological advancement.
Mark Twain's early feelings about the machine-age in America were for the most part optimistic. He realized, like most Americans, that technological pro gress was bringing with it a new world order, that it had "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country," and profoundly altered the O national character. In an unpublished preface to A
Connecticut Yankee, Mark Tv/ain indicated that the changes in American culture wrought by industrialism offered hope for an improved civilization. "If any are inclined to rail at our present civilization," Mark Twain wrote,
"why—there is no hindering him, but he ought to some times contrast it with what went before and take comfort q and hope, too."^ Van Wyck Brooks in fact claims that
Mark Twain became so involved with, and enthusiastic about, the emerging industrialism of the period that he
"assumed the whole character and point of view of the
O Samuel L. Clemens, The Gilded Age (New York, 1922-1925), p. 106.
%ark Twain, as quoted by Salomon, p. 103. 1 8 1
typical American magnate," and became the "spokesman
of the Philistine majority.Walter Taylor labels
Mark Twain an "American Macaulay," for "he recurrently
chanted the praises of mechanical invention and m aterial
progress.1,11 No doubt it was Mark Twain's faith in the
future of technology which accounted in part for his
great admiration of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.
In letters of 3 and 19 December 1889, Mark Twain referred
to Bellamy as "the man who has made the accepted heaven
paltry by inventing a better one on earth," and to
Looking Backward as "the latest and best of all the
B i b l e s . " 12
To a large extent, A Connecticut Yankee emerges as an expression of Mark Twain's faith in the superiority
of technical advancement over the decadence of the old
European order. Henry Nash Smith contends that in Hank
Morgan, Mark Twain creates a character who embodies what he thought to be the Promethean qualities of the American
industrialist. Behind the creation of Hank Morgan,
Smith points out, lies James Welsh, a spokesman for the
^The Ordeal of Mark Twain, rev. ed. (1933; rpt. Cleveland, 1963)* P* 134. llnMark Twain and the Machine Age," South A tlantic Quarterly, 37 (1938), 389. 12Selected Mark Twain—Howells Letters, p. 291. 182
Philadelphia typographical union whom Mark Twain praised highly in a paper read before the Monday Evening Club of Hartford in 1886. Speaking of Welsh, Mark Twain c la im s :
He is the most stupendous product of the highest civilization the world has ever seen—and the worthiest and the best; and in no age but this, no land but this, and no lower civilization than this, could he ever have been brought forth. The average of his genuine, practical, valuable know ledge—and knowledge is the truest right divine to power—is an education contrasted with which the education possessed by the kings and nobles who ruled him for a hundred centuries is the untaught twaddle of a nursery, and beneath contempt. The sum of his education ... is a sum of know ledge compared to which the sum of human knowledge in any and all ages of the world previous to the birth-year of the eldest person here present in this room, was as a lake compared to the ocean, the foot-hills compared to the Alps ... Without his education, he had continued what he was, a slave; with it, he is what he is, a sovereign. 13
Possessing an even greater command of technology than
Welsh, the mythical Yankee emerges as a culture-hero in
Carlyle's sense of the term, a superman who like Shaw's
Jack Tanner struggles to overthrow an antiquated and corrupt social order and replace it with a new, more advanced, civilization. Consistent with all heroes in the Don Juan tradition, Hank Morgan rejects virtually
^Mark Twain, as quoted by Smith, pp. 153-154. 183
all aspects of the existing world order: to Hank,
Arthur's knights do "not seem to have brains enough
... to bait a fishhook with" (XIV,21); the medieval concept of loyalty and social gradation "is rightly an insult" (XIV,62); the Church is "a mighty power" that
"gets into selfish hands" and spells "death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought" (XIV,77); even womanhood comes under attack, for in Camelot it is "just a sort of polished up court of comanches, and there isn't a squaw in it who doesn't stand ready at the dropping of a hat to desert to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt" (XIV,119). In place of the rejected order, Hank strives to create a nineteenth-century world from medieval materials. "The first thing you want in a new country," Hank tells us, "is a patent office; then work up your school system; and after that, out v/ith your paper" (XIV,86). Soon under Hank's guidance, England becomes "a happy and prosperous country." The factory system is fully operative, schools and colleges are plentiful, a "complete variety of Protestant churches" is soon to replace the Established Church, and universal suffrage and a republican form of government are planned in the near future. Likewise, as Hank says, "slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, 184
the phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor. We had a steamboat or two on the Thames, we had steam warships, and the beginning of a steam commercial marine;
I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover
America" (XIV, 398).
Hank Morgan is thus a Promethean figure working to establish improved conditions amid a debased social order. Hank's Promethean spirit, however, frequently appears undercut by his buffoonery, buffoonery which
Smith contends links Hank to the tradition of rural and backwoods humor.^ It is probably the possibility for humor which most fascinated Mark Twain when he first conceived of the basic idea for A Connecticut Yankee.
He writes in an 1883 notebook entry:
Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the Middle Ages. Have the notions and habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pocket in the armor. Can't scratch. Cold in the head— can't blow. ... Iron gets redhot in the sun—leaks in the rain ... and freezes me solid in the winter ... can't dress or undress myself. Always getting struck by lightning. Fall down and can't get u p . 15
^Smith, p. 139. 15 'as quoted by Gladys Bellamy, Mark Twain as L iter ary A rtist (Norman, Okla., 1950), pp. 311-312. 185
Dragging knights around an arena with a lasso, or having
them wear placards advertising "Persimmon's Soap—all
the Prime-Donne use it" and "Use Peterson's Prophylactic
toothbrush—all the go," Hank Morgan at times seems more
clown than hero, more W. C. Fields than Nietzsche's
superman. Yet Mark Twain also clearly intended his hero to possess a noble spirit. When Howard Taylor dramatized the novel, Mark Twain became outraged at his failure to represent the Yankee's heroic nature. "He has captured but one side of the Yankee's character," Mark Twain complained of Taylor, "his rude animal side, his circus side; the good heart and the high intent are left out of him."'1'^ Rude, irreverent, disrespectful, yet pos sessing a noble spirit, Hank becomes, as Henry Smith contends, "an imaginative version of the central issue in American culture in the l880's ...—the need to adapt an agrarian system of values to an industrial 17 order...." No doubt Mark Twain wanted his hero to appear typically American, as much unlike a Matthew
Arnold as possible. Thus he makes him "a perfect
^ as quoted by Salomon, p. 116.
^Smith, p. 139. 186
1 R ignoramus;" nevertheless, Hank can still emerge as a culture-hero, a superman, "because he is motivated by idealism, and carries with him the technological acumen of nineteenth-century America,
Though an idealistic and noble Promethean figure,
Hank Morgan is significantly a Prometheus who develops certain definite Faustian characteristics. Following his motto, "just play that thing for all its worth, even if it’s only two pair and a jack" (XIV, 16), Hank's admitted goal from the outset is to "boss the whole country inside of three months" (XIV, 16), Though finding himself in an alien and inferior culture, apart from his loved ones, Hank soon feels comfortable and happy in Camelot. Significantly, it is not merely the opportunity to perform humanitarian deeds which makes sixth-century England attractive; rather, Hank seems equally motivated by dreams of almost superhuman power, power which makes him "equal to the king" (XIV, 62),
Soon after arriving in Camelot, Hank admits:
I was just as much at home in that country as I could have been in any other; and as
^^Mark Twain, in a letter to the novel's illustrator Dan Beard, wrote: "This Yankee of mine has neither the refinement nor the weakness of a college education; he is a perfect ignoramus." Mark Twain, as quoted by Salomon, p. 116, 187
for preference, I wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth. Look at the opportuni ties here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a man who wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capabilities; whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be a foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine downstreet any day and catch a hundred better men than myself (XIV, 60-61).
Pull of feelings of superhuman power, Hank soon sets up a factory where he can, almost like God, "turn groping and grubbing automata into men" (XIV, 147). He denounces absolute governmental control, claiming "an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst that is possible" (XIV, 78)} yet, as Holmes points out, Hank establishes a "total dictatorship based IQ on the power of his modern inventions." ^ The Yankee's feelings before combat with the knights, M erlin's emis saries, even more firmly illustrate Hank's Paustian nature. Describing the public enthusiasm for the battle,
Hank proudly asserts:
It was born of the fact that all the nation knew that this was not to be a duel between mere men, so to speak, but a duel between two mighty magicians; a duel not of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of superhuman art and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master enchanters of the age. It was realized that the most prodigious achievements of the most
i q Holmes, p. 463. 188
renowned knights could not be worthy of comparison with a spectacle like this; they could be but child's play, contrasted with this mysterious and awful battle of the gods (XIV,385).
Like Mark Twain's earlier Carlylean figure, Colonel
Sherburn, Hank soon becomes estranged from his fellow-
man. His early faith that "there is plenty good enough
material for a republic in the most degraded people that
ever existed" vanishes, as Smith convincingly illustrates,
for Hank realizes "that the basic manhood of the massof
the nation can be corrupted by vicious institutions. The
common people are subjected by their environment to
conditioning or 'training' that implants in them from
infancy a social heritage of wrong attitudes and be- 20 liefs." Here Mark Twain's theory of determinism be
comes operative. Ho matter how fiercely Hank struggles,
he can never alter a human nature moulded by the Church
and State into the practice of abject servitude. Clearly
the major impetus of Mark Twain's satiric thrust is
toward the corrupt and enslaving institutions and their
blind followers; yet, his double vision includes the
Yankee's egotistical response to the people's rejection
of his proposed changes. Hank, because of his disgust
for those who abandon his cause, develops like Sherburn
20Smith, p. 161. 189
a heart darkened with contempt for the "damned human race." "There are times," he admits, "when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce."
Shortly after the outbreak of the civil war, when all abandon Hank's "Republic" except a few young boys, the
Yankee becomes extremely b itter about human nature:
Ah, what a donkey I was! Toward the end of the week I began to get this large and disenchanting fact through my head: that the mass of the nation had swung their caps and shouted for the republic for about one day, and there an end! The Church, the nobles, and the gentry then turned one grand, all-disapproving frown upon them and shriveled them into sheep! . . .Why, even the very men who had lately been slaves were in the 'righteous cause;' and glorifying it, praying for it, sentimentally slobbering over it, just like all the other commoners. Imagine such human muck as this; conceive of this folly (XIV, 429-430).
Hank's reference to "human muck" sounds much like Sher- bum 's condemnation of the "average man"—both Faustian figures retain little empathy for the depravity of those around them.
Hank is further linked to the satanic Sherburn by his tendency to view other men not as separate human beings but as inhuman abstractions. After blowing up some knights with dynamite, for example, Hank exclaims:
"Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see.
It resembled a steamboat explosion on the M ississippi; and during the next fifteen minutes we stood under a 1 9 0
steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of knights and
hardware and horseflesh" (XIV, 272-273). Later Hank’s
dynamite is so effective, he claims, "we could not count
the dead, because they did not exist as individuals,
but merely as homogeneous protoplasm;" for Hank, men are
to be sacrificed callously if his quest demands it. Like
Ahab, who tells his crew, "Ye are not other men, but my 21 arms and my legs, so obey me," Hank seems not to fight
in conjunction with or on behalf of his comrades, but
uses them as mere instruments in his quest to establish
a new social order. Of all his followers, only Clarence
seems an individual; the rest he controls like a demagogue,
inspiring them with inflammatory rhetoric to murder
their countrymen.
Hank’s command and use of war machines with hereto-
21 Herman M elville, Moby-Lick, in The W ritings of Herman M elville, 8 (London, 1922), 308. Roger Salomon draws several additional parallels between Hank Morgan and Ahab: "Both Ahab and the Yankee are fabulous, half-symbolic figures—the one with his roots deep in Transcendentalism and Romantic Byronism, the other representative of the questing, enterprising, and, at the same time, aggressive spirit of American industri alism (with its roots in Transcendentalism and eighteenth-century rationalism). Both set out to destroy their own particular leviathans, and both are, of course, themselves destroyed in a final cataclysm, Ahab pinioned to his foe, the Yankee trapped by the bodies of those he has slaughtered and prostrate before the leering figure of Merlin" (pp. 113-114). 191
fore undreamed of destructive powers likewise place him
well within the mainstream of literary satanic heroes.
Traditionally in the Renaissance epic, diabolical
figures create from a divine nature instruments of
destruction which undermine God's law. Satan, in the
sixth book of Paradise Lost takes from "This continent
of spacious heav'n, adorned/With plant, fruit, flow'r ambrosial, gems and gold" m aterials that he moulds into a cannon which, he tells his followers, "Prom far with
thund'ring noises among our foes/...shall dash/To pieces and o'erwhelm whatever stand/Adverse..." (VI,471-491).
The diabolical invention sim ilarly appears in Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso (9:91, 11:21-28), Spenser's Faerie
Queen (1:7-13) and Daniel's Civil Wars (6:26-27). Hank
Morgan's electrical fence and his almost indiscriminate use of dynamite to a large degree fu lfill Satan's 22 prediction in Paradise Lost:
...yet haply of thy race In future days, if malice should abound, Some one intent on mischief, or inspired With dev'lish machination, might devise Like instrument to plague the sons of men For sin, or war and mutual slaughter bent. (VI, 501-506).
Powers which if properly developed could alleviate the
22 Coleman Parsons reports that "Paradise Lost was favored reading of Clemens' young manhood", "The Back- ground of 'The Mysterious Stranger,'" American Literature, 32 (March I960), 62. 192
suffering of mankind become, in the hands of the satanic
Hank Morgan, a diabolical means of insuring personal power at the expense of considerable human devastation.
Though enveloped in his monomaniac quest through most of the novel, Hank, like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, eventually comes to an awareness of the gruesome nature of his actions. He becomes a man trapped by his own technological acumen, and recoils in horror when faced with the destruction wrought by his own inventions.
When one of the knights attempts to assist a friend who had been electrocuted by Hank's fence, he lays "his hand on the corpse's shoulder—and just uttered a little soft moan and sunk down dead" (XIV,441). Hank seems greatly affected by the episode. "Killed by a dead man," Hank reflects, "you see—killed by a dead friend, in fact.
There was something awful about it." In order to get a better view of the charging enemy, Hank turns on some lights he had wired for the occasion. He responds, "Land, what a sighti We were enclosed in three walls of dead men! ...I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks! There was a groan you could hear! It voiced the death pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled out the night with awful pathos" (XIV,443-444). There are at this point only ten thousand knights remaining, and Hank gives the 193
signal to unleash the gatling guns, which, he says,
"began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand." The
choice of the verb "to vomit" here is revealing. Hank
realizes that his mastery of technology is a sickness, a disease which rages beyond control and eliminates the value of any attempt at humanitarian action. The Yankee makes one more attempt to aid his fellowman. He bends over the dying Sir Meliagraunce to help relieve the suf fering his machines had wrought, and is stabbed in the process. Though not seriously wounded, Hank realizes that he has been destroyed by his own technological prowess.
As Clarence puts it: "We were in a trap, you see—a trap of our own making. If we stayed where we were, our dead would k ill us; if we moved out of our defenses, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered; in turn we were conquered. The Boss recognized th is..."
(X IV ,4 4 6 ).
Mark Twain's 1878 short story, "The Great Revolution in Pitcairn," and a section of the Adamic sketches in
Letters From the Earth parallel the conclusion of A
Connecticut Yankee and offer insights into an under standing of Mark Twain's increasing distrust of American technological advancement and its accompanying ethic of progress. Written eleven years before A Connecticut
Yankee, "The Great Revolution in Pitcairn" tells of an 194
American Yankee, Butterworth Stavely, who invades the
peaceful Arcadian world of Pitcairn's island retreat.
Before Stavely's arrival Pitcairn is a primitive para
dise inhabited by people whose "sole occupations ...
were farming and fishing." Living "far from the world
and its ambitions and vexations, and neither knowing
or caring what was going on in the mighty empires that
lie beyond their lim itless ocean solitudes," the citi zens of Pitcairn live a simple life in a well-ordered,
static society. They "need no priest among them," for
isolated from any disruptive influence from the outside world, the Pitcaim s are a "people whose greatest pleas ure and privilege is to commune in prayer with their
God, and to join in hymns of praise ...;" moreover, they are "cheerful, diligent, and probably freer from vice than any other community...." Into this pastoral world, however, comes Butterworth Stavely, who, like Hank Mor gan, is a power-seeking avatar of the American concept of progress. A demonic figure, Stavely soon "began secretly to sow the seeds of discontent among the people," for "it was his deliberate purpose, from the beginning, to subvert the government," and to head a new realm devoted to the ethic of progress. Stavely conjures forth ridiculous charges of nepotism to dispose of the lawful emperor, and manipulates the people's religious zeal so effectively that "in one short month 195
the new magistrate had become the people's idol!" Though the isolated island has no need for Stavely's notions of progress, the power-crazed American establishes an army, taking "all the boys above the age of ten years away from their mothers," levels excessive taxes to pay for a needlessly complex governmental machine, and leaves the fields to lie barren for want of laborers. When
"everybody fell to complaining that the taxes levied for the support of the army, the navy, and the rest of the imperial establishment were intolerably burdensome, 27 and were reducing the nation to beggary," J Stavely ridicules the Pitcaim s, telling the people that they should follow the lead of such progressive nations as
Germany and Italy and seek "unification." By "unification" he means unification under his own iron rule. When the people finally rise against the American and oust him, reverting to their primitive life, Stavely re proaches them, as Bellamy points out, in "Hitleresque 24 oratory." Clearly there is no room in the Garden of
Eden for an American Faust.
In Letters From the Earth Mark Twain again reveals sincere reservations about American technological
27 J"The Great Revolution in Pitcairn," The Writings of Mark Twain, 20 (New York, 1922-1925), 356. All references are to this edition.
^Bellamy, p. 315. 196
development. The "Mad Philosopher" of the Adamic sketches tells of a "humble young shoemaker" who "did sweep the Double Continent from end to end with fire and sword ... to establish his autocratic sway over all its monarchies by merely the faculties that were born in him." Like Hank Morgan, therefore, the
"humble young shoemaker" is a self-made man who comes to possess dictatorial powers over a nation—"he handled a billion men in the field under a million generals trained by himself and subject to his sole will unhampered by meddling ministeries and legislatures, and left mountains of dead and wounded upon his battlefields..."
The shoemaker, also like Hank, maintains his power through knowledge of technology; he learns from "one
Napeer, an obscure person but learned in science" technological "means whereby he could sweep a whole army out of existence in an instant...." After learning this secret, the shoemaker has to face but one army, which "at a distance of twelve miles he blew ... into the air, leaving no vestige of it behind but a few rags and buttons." Thus, like Hank, he is able to claim "sovereignty of the globe;" yet, also like Hank, the shoemaker loses control of his tech nology, and "by accident, he blew himself up with his 197
25 machine, along with one of his vice-regal capitals."
The fate of the Faustian Hank, the demoniac Stavely,
and the "humble young shoemaker" testifies to Mark Twain's
reservations about the future of the technological New
Eden. Roger Salomon contends that in A Connecticut
Yankee and the section in Letters From the Earth, "the
'secret weapon' of science ultimately destroys the very
people who have sought omnipotence at its hands; it is
a harbinger, not of Utopia, but of chaos." By making
Hank Morgan, avatar of nineteenth-century America, a
Faustian figure who utilizes technology in his mono maniac quest for personal power, Mark Twain to a large
extent reverses the satiric thrust of his novel and, as Tony Tanner contends, exposes the latent dangers
emerging from "the corrupt post-civil-war years in which 27 the great American dream was so glaringly betrayed."
Hank is the supreme capitalist, and like the "robber- barons" of the Gilded Age, becomes so absorbed in his quest for personal power that he overlooks the general welfare of the nation. Just as Jay Gould attempts to
25 ^Letters From the Earth, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York, 1967)',' pp7"B5-B77 ------
^Salomon, p. 123. 27 '"The Lost America—The Despair of Henry Adams and Mark Twain," Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Henry tfash Smith (Englewood CliTTs, IT.J., 196?), p. 162. 198
destroy the American economy by cornering the gold mar ket, so Hank ravishes an entire world order to create a new civilization in his own image. The civilization he attempts to overturn is corrupt and debased; yet the new order he wants to institute bodes of dangers far more destructive. Nineteenth-century America, Mark
Twain writes in Letters From the Earth:
...is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways: wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advance ment, progress and other pet names; wonder ful in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her stubborn lav/s; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and its indifference as to how it is acquired; wonderful in the hitherto undreamed-of magnitude of its private fortunes and the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to the public culture; wonderful in its exhibitions of poverty; wonderful in the surprises which it gets out of that great new birth, Organi zation, the latest and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect,...; It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft-romance dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place. 2 b
The abuses which Kark Twain outlines in Letters From
^ L etter s From th e E arth , p. 88. 199
the Earth are those which accompany Hank Morgan's new
order. The Yankee begins to realize this when at the
end of the novel he sees the inhumane destruction wrought
by his inventions; yet it is far too late for him to
curb the irreversible and foreboding advancement of
technology. Like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, Hank must face
the fate reserved for the overreacher, yearning to return
to the old order which he had worked to destroy, but
forever alienated from it. Significantly, Hank, after
awakening in the nineteenth-century world, rejects modern
technological civilization and longs to return to Sandy
and the Arcadian world she represents. "Yes, I seemed
to have flown back out of that age into this of ours,"
Hank mumbles at the end of the novel, "and forward to
it again, and was set down, a stranger and forlorn in
that strange England, with an abyss of thirteen centuries
between me and you] Between me and my home and my
friendsI Between me and all that is dear to me, all
that could make life worth living I It was awful—awfuler
than you can ever imagine, Sandy. Ah, watch by me,
Sandy..." (XIV,449). Charles Holmes contends that Hank's
"marriage to Sandy, which at first seems merely a bur lesque or a sentimental gesture, takes on some impor tance. Sandy is the incarnation of the medieval past, of fantasy and illusion, and in marrying her, the Yankee 200
29 signifies his commitment to her world." Apparently
for Hank the American dream proves inadequate.
Mark Twain's satiric vision in A Connecticut Yankee is two-fold; furthermore, he adopts modifications of the concept of the Romantic hero to express both his contempt for the debased antiquated order of Western
Europe and his distrust of the future awaiting techno logical America. Hank Morgan is both Promethean hero and Faustian villain; he is at the same time a noble superman questing to overthrow a corrupt and enslaving world order and a satanic figure whose monomaniac quest for personal power proves a harbinger of chaos and destruction. Although Mark Twain's cultural defensive ness lies at the heart of the novel and he devotes his greatest attention to exposing the ills characteristic of the old order, Mark Twain no longer seems like an
"American Macaulay." He appears in a sense to be like the Southern Agrarians of the 1930's. Hank Morgan and the machine-age culture he represents seem on first glance to have succeeded; both Camelot and America become more prosperous, material comforts abound, and many of the old social abuses. Yet Hank, who is "nearly barren of sentiment ... or poetry," inaugurates a world
^Holmes, p. 472. 201
order which destroys "the simplicity and repose of life," replaces "its contentment, its poetry, its soft-romance dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions...." America, the
Romantic hero of history, has successfully uprooted the decadent European order; yet in its monomaniac com mitment to technology, and in its Faustian drive for world dominion, America faces an uncertain and fore boding future. Chapter VIII
Joan of Arc: Saint as Hero
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is an enigma in the Mark Twain canon. Clearly inferior in its art, lapsing at times into sheer sentimentality, the novel generally elicits unfavorable reactions from even the most ardent of Mark Twain supporters.'1' Yet for Mark
Twain, Joan of Arc held a particular fascination; in his refusal to publish the novel under the name Mark
Twain (he feared he would degrade the book if he signed it with the name of a humorist), he indicated an almost sacred regard for Joan of Arc. Mark Twain's comments pertaining to his own work likewise placed Joan of Arc on a special plane: "I like the Joan of Arc best of all
^lenry Nash Smith, for example, labels Joan of Arc, "little more than an outpouring of dated sentimentality," Mark Twain: The Development of a W riter (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 185; Bernard Shaw ridicules the novel's overly idealized portrait of the Maid of Orleans, calling her "an attempt to combine Bayard with Esther Summerson from Bleak House into an unimpeachable American school teacher in armor," The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw, 17 (New York, 1930)"^ 26; Albert Stone denounces the novel's "absurd excesses of melodramatic simplification," The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (New Haven, 1961), p. 216; andTames Cox insists that the novel is merely "a genteel historical narrative designed to make money," Mark Twain: The P ate o f Humor (P rin c e to n , 1966), p. 256.
202 203 my books; & it is the best; I know it perfectly well.
And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of prepara tion & 2 years of writing. The others needed no prepara- 2 tion, & got none." And in a letter to Mrs. Fairbanks,
Mark Twain wrote that Joan of Arc "is private & not for print, it's written for love & not for lucre, & to enter tain the family with, around the lamp by the fire."^
Indeed, hearing the aging author read Joan of Arc around the fire proved a most moving experience, as Suzy, Mark
Twain's daughter, reports: "Hearing the M.S. read aloud is an uplifting and revealing hour to us all. Many of
Joan's words and sayings are historically correct and
Papa cries when he reads them. In fact he almost always fills up v/hen reading any speech of hers."^
No doubt Mark Twain's almost irrational regard for his Joan of Arc sprang from his infatuation with its heroine. Sharing with the novel's narrator, the Sieur
Louis de Conte, a belief that Joan's is "the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One,"
2 as quoted by Cox, p. 250.
•i Jas quoted by Stone, p. 203.
^as quoted by Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain:The Man and His Work, rev. ed. (Norman, Okla., l9 6 l), p. 145. 5 Clemens, The Writings of Mark Twain, ed. Albert Paine, 17 (New York, 1922-19"55), xi. All references are to this edition. 204
Mark Twain writes of his heroine in the translator's preface to the novel:
Judged by the standards of one century, the noblest characters of an earlier one lose much of their luster; judged by the standards of to-day, there is probably no illustrious man of four or five centuries ago whose char acter could meet the test at all points. But the character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all times without misgivings or apprehension as to the result. Judged by any of them, judged by all of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached by any other mere mortal (XVII, xi).
In a later essay on Joan, Mark Twain tells us that "the spectacle of that solitary girl, forlorn and friendless, without advocate or adviser, and without ... help and guidance ... stands alone in its pathos and its sublim ity; it has nowhere its mate, either in the annals of fact or in the inventions of fiction" (XXII, 370).
To a large extent Mark Twain shares in the Romantic cult of Joan of Arc which became dominant in the early nineteenth century. Already in Germany and in England,
Schiller and Southey had made a Romantic hero out of the Maid of Orleans, and Mark Twain's heroine bears direct affinities to this tradition. She, like the
Neitzschean superman, is a rebellious figure struggling gallantly to overthrow a debased order; furthermore, Joan has within her the spiritual force necessary to salvage 205
mankind in a debilitating world of perverted faith. She
is Mark Twain's supreme Romantic hero—the transcendent
figure who, as Stone points out, becomes "the incarnation
of youth and purity and power ... the unique instance in
history of the young girl whose innocence not merely
existed but acted in the gross world of adult affairs."^
Like most Romantic heroes, Joan is doomed, crushed by
a tyrannical, ungrateful, corrupt social and political
order; yet in her purity of character, in the eternal
nobility of her spirit, Mark Twain locates a ray of
hope for the order. Joan offers to Mark Twain the ideal example of the moral individual rising above the dehu manizing and deterministic effects of immoral environ ment. Joan represents, according to Roger Salomon, Mark
Twain's "final, desperate attempt to establish values apart from the futile treadmill of sin and suffering 7 which constituted the life of man on earth." Joan is,
in effect, an answer to the pessimism of the stranger in
"Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," or of Philip Traum in
The M ysterious S tr a n g e r .
Mark Twain's portrayal of Joan clearly places her in the mainstream of the tradition of Romantic heroes.
^Stone, p. 207. 7 Twain and the Image of History (New Haven, 1961), p. 168. 206
A democratic culture-hero, Joan arises from humble peasant origins to save France from the tyranny of England. Yet, though Joan becomes leader of the French armies, she never loses the simplicity and natural virtue character istic of the non-demoniac Romantic hero. Like Werther,
Joan shares an affinity with nature—animals find her particularly sympathetic, and she "had more than was usual of pets or economical, because all the outcast cats came and took up with her, and homeless or unlovable animals of other kinds heard about it and came, ... the birds and other timid wild things of the woods were not afraid of her, but always had an idea she was a friend when they came across her..." (XVII,26). A "gentle little creature, that wouldn't hurt a fly, and couldn't bear the sight of blood" (XVII,42), Joan treated desolate human beings with the same kindness which she extended to her animal friends. When the "ragged road-straggler" entered her household begging for food, Joan was quick to offer him porridge despite the admonitions of her distrustful father. The others in the household launched into a lengthy and absurd philosophical discussion regarding the morality of feeding the poor; after finally deciding that it was morally proper to feed the man, they discovered "she had given the man the porridge long ago, ar-q he had already eaten it up. When she was asked 207
why she had not waited until a decision was arrived at,
she said the man's stomach was very hungry, and it
would not have been wise to w ait..." (XVII,32). While
others bantered and ridiculed the caged town lunatic,
Joan approached him with kindness and understanding.
She "fed him through the bars of his cage many times;
and last December, when they chopped off two of his
fingers to remind him to stop seizing and wounding people passing by, Joan dressed his hand every day
till it was well again" (XVII,45). Albert Stone mentions
that the village lunatic, as well as all other outcast perso n s and s tr a y anim als in Domremy, are p ro d u c ts o f
Q Mark Twain's imagination, and have no factual basis.
This only serves to reinforce the idea that Mark Twain wanted to impress upon the reader Joan's essential passion. Like Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn or Theodor Fischer,
Joan is never spared the sight of blood; she sees her friend the lunatic pitifully slaughtered by the cruel and ignorant townspeople (who in this scene appear remarkably similar to the Bricksville mob in Huckleberry
Finn), and of course witnesses the slaughter which ac companies warfare. Yet Joan never fails to respond with compassion. After a battle, the narrator tells us, "when all our host was shouting itself hoarse with rejoicings,
®Stone, pp. 215-216. 208
and there went up a cry for the General, for they wanted
to praise her and glorify her and do her homage for her victory, she was off by herself, sitting among a ruck of
corpses, with her face in her hands, crying—for she was a young girl ... She was thinking of the mothers of those dead friends and enemies” (XVII,239). Later, on the bloody fields of Patay, Louis de Conte "came upon her where the dead and dying lay stretched all about in heaps and winrows; our men had mortally wounded an English prisoner who was too poor to pay a ransom, and from a distance she had seen that cruel thing done; and had galloped to the place and sent for a priest, and now she was holding the head of her dying enemy in her lap, and easing him to his death with comforting soft words, just as his sister might have done; and the womanly tears running down her face all the time" (XVIII,18).
Joan’s inner goodness, her 3imple virtue stemming from "the heart, not the head" (XVII,161), links her, as such goodness links Queequeg or Jim, to Christ. From numerous Catholic sources, Mark Twain apparently perceived the sim ilarities between Joan and Jesus, especially the similarity between her trial before Cauchon and that of
Jesus before Pilate. Mark Twain in fact wrote above a page in Monsignor Richard's account of Joan's trials:
II y avait un charge reel contre J.C.—qu'il avait se nomme le roi des juifs, n'est-ce pas? 209
On ne pouvait pas l'eprouver; neaumoins on a-t-il condamme. L'Eglise n'apportait pas contre Jeanne que des soupconnes et Manquee les establir. 9
Here Mark Twain seems to be arguing that the Romans had
a more just case against Jesus than the Church had against
Joan—that, in effect, the Maid of Orleans is even more morally pure, less culpable, than the Saviour. Also,
the author, after reading in a footnote in Michelet's history of Joan that according to several Domremy women the girl never menstruated, tried to link Joan to the
Virgin, noting in the margin of his copy of Michelet that "the higher life absorbed her & suppressed her physical development."1^ Joan is clearly for Mark Twain the Christ-figure, an "ideally perfect" individual who
"had an indefinable something about her that testified that she was not made of common clay, that she was built on a grander plan than the mass of mankind, and moved on a higher plane" (XVII,135). Just as Christ, Joan forgives her enemies—both on the battlefields where she languishes over the corpses of the British soldiers, and on the way to her death at the stake where, just as Christ begged
God to forgive those who crucified him at Calvary, Joan forgives the satanic and deceitful Loyseleur "out of a
q ^as quoted by Salomon, p. 178.
10Stone, p. 209. 210
heart that knew nothing but forgiveness, nothing but
compassion, nothing but pity for all that suffer, let
their offense be what it may" (XVIII,276-277). Rising
"above the limitations and infirm ities of our human
nature" (XVIII,230) during her trial and Passion, Joan
becomes an innocent, pure, superhuman figure, or, as
Salomon contends, "the very incarnation of unfallen
man.
Perhaps Joan's most divine attribute—the quality which links her most closely to Christ and to traditional
Romantic heroes—is the young g irl's harmony with the mysterious, divine, forces of nature operative in the universe. These forces, symbolized early in the novel
by the Fairy Tree, provide the heroine with intuitive virtue and knowledge. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner,
Wordsworth's child in "We are Seven," M elville's Pip, or
Mark Twain's Jim, Joan enjoys sympathetic converse with
the mysterious spirits that govern the destinies of men.
These spirits—a primitive force of nature—are denied and condemned by the Established Church: the Priests of Domremy "held a religious function under the Fairy
Tree and denounced the spirits as being blood-kin of the Fiend and barred out from redemption" (XVII,14).
113alomon, p. 187. 211
Joan's staunch defense of the fairies pre-eminently qualifies her to receive the voices, which likewise are condemned by the Established Church as having satanic origins. These voices, however, which give the "untaught child of seventeen" an infallible gift of prophecy, a
"creating mouth" and a "seeing eye" (XVII,182), clearly emanate from the same forces underlying the Fairy Tree; they are together, Stone contends, "the talisman of 12 Joan's oneness with nature." The Fairy Tree episode which opens the novel is Mark Twain's most significant addition to the Joan of Arc legend; by including it, the author ignored the historical sources which indicated that Joan's family was composed not of simple, peasant farmers but of prosperous villagers who rarely allowed their children to roam the forests.^ Yet also by including the Fairy Tree episode, Mark Twain gives Joan's voices an additional dimension of meaning—their source ultimately seems natural rather than supernatural, coming intuitively to Joan because of her affinity with the regenerative forces of the natural world which a per verted, civilized, religious order denied. As the Louis de Conte tells us, Joan's "vast powers and capacities
■^Stone, p. 223.
"^Stone, pp. 214-215. 212 were born in her, and ... she applied them by an intui tion which could not err" (XYII,304).^
Though Mark Twain stresses Joan's divine nature, he nevertheless continually insists that she, like Jesus, is also human. "Divine as she was," Louis de Conte writes, "dauntless as she was in battle, she was human also. She was not solely a saint, an angel, she was a claymade girl also—as human a girl as any in the world, and full of a human girl's sensitivenesses and tender nesses and delicacies" (XVIII,170). This combination of divine and human attributes is of course crucial to orthodox Christology; yet in Joan the entire process is significantly reversed. V/hereas Christ is a divine per sonage who becomes human, Joan is a human—a mere peasant girl—who through choice, religious devotion and unselfish action becomes divine. She is able, in other words, to transcend her environment, to overthrow the debilitating shackles of a corrupt Church and a debased political order. In Joan, "the greatest soul in the universe"
^ In The Innocent Eye, Stone makes a point similar to this one: "A devotional exercise for a Roman Catholic girl couched in profoundly Protestant terms, it is also a celebration of the world's most perfect human by an oldish man who has lost his faith in mankind. The novel is, moreover, a case history of a religious mystic whose puissance seems to emanate from her own intuition rather than from the temporary indwelling of Holy Voices." p. 218. 213
(JVII,110), Mark Twain thus locates his superman—the one mortal who in defiance of deterministic environ mental influences testifies to the value and possibility o f m eaningful human a c tio n .
Central to Joan of Arc is the ever-present dichotomy between Joan and the brutal enslaving environment from which she arises. As I,lark Twain writes in his essay on
Caint Joan, "Out of a cattle-pasturing peasant village lost in the remoteness of an unvisited wilderness and atrophied with ages of stupefaction and ignorance we cannot see a Joan of Arc issue equipped to the last detail for her amazing career and hope to be able to explain the riddle of it" (1X11,378). An even more striking contrast between Joan and her environment appears in the translator's preface to the novel:
When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the con trast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honest was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon petty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was 214
steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true in an age that was false to the core; ... she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even the infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimagin able treacheries, butcheries, and beastiali- ties (XVII,xi-xii).
Joan is clearly not the product of her environment; nor is she appreciated by it. The fact that "the French king, whom she had crowned, stood supine and indifferent, while
French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have pro duced, and burned her alive at the stake" (XVII,xiv), leads the narrator to a view of human nature similar to that held by Satan's nephew in The Mysterious Stranger: he had naively believed reports that the king was going to ransom Joan only because he "was young and had not yet found out the littleness and meanness of our poor human race, which brags about itself so much, and thinks it is better and higher than the other animals" (XVIII,
109). Rejected by her sterile and diseased environment,
Joan becomes an embodiment of the spiritual resources necessary to salvage the French religious, social, and political order. Like the Neitzschean superman or the 215
Shavian hero, Joan is born into a chaotic, disordered
world. We learn that at the time of her birth, in the
French capitol "mobs roared through the streets nightly,
sacking, burning, killing, unmolested, uninterrupted.
The sun rose upon the wrecked and smoking buildings,
and upon mutilated corpses lying here, there and yonder
about the streets, just as they fell, and stripped naked
by thieves, the unholy gleaners after the mob. None
had the courage to gather these dead for burial; they
were left there to rot and create plagues" (XVII,3-4).
The reason for the chaotic conditions is that France
labors under a perverted order; the British, not the
French, tyrannically dominate the civic realm, an
impotent, self-seeking aristocracy cripples the social
fiber of the nation, and a debased, worldly clergy under mines the country’s spiritual health. Joan, striving
to restore the lawful monarch to the throne, inspiring
the peasants to assert their nobility, and challenging
the debased French clerical hierarchy, thus becomes the
representative of the true order, the real France:
"...she stood for France, indeed she was France to
both sides" (XVII,265).
The tension between Joan, an embodiment of true
order, and the corrupt powers illegitimately ruling
France emerges most clearly during the Rouen trials. 216
Here we have the allegorical confrontation between Joan, an ambassador of God, and Cauchon, the satanic emissary of the Established Church. Cauchon, whose name, Louis de Conte tells us, sounds like "cochon" (the French word for pig), is not at all a multi-dimensional figure; con ceived in melodramatic terms, he is, like Claggart in
Billy Budd, an embodiment of sheer evil. Cauchon's heart is "black," and "in his nature there was no such thing as pity. One wonders if he ever knew his mother or ever had a sister" (XVIII,18). The narrator's phy sical description of Cauchon places the satanic figure in the Victorian tradition of melodramatic villains:
"When I looked again at that obese president, puffing and wheezing there, his great belly distending and receding with each breath, and noted his three chins, fold above fo]d, and his knobby and knotty face, and his purple and splotchy complexion, and his repulsive cauliflower nose, and his cold and malignant eyes—a brute, every detail a brute—my heart sank lower still"
(XVIII,123-124). Speaking in "the devil's name" (XVIII,
207), Cauchon has the support of the illegitim ate powers dominating France. The university complimented him "on his zeal in hunting down this woman 'whose venom had infected the faithful of the whole west,' and as recom pense it as good as promised him 'a crown of imperishable 217
glory in heaven'" (XVIII,233). Prom the British, Cauchon
"had the half-promise of an enonnous prize—the arch bishopric of Rouen—if he should succeed in burning the body and damning the soul of this young girl who had never done him any harm; and such a prize as that, to a man like the Bishop of Beauvois, was worth the burning and damning of fifty harmless girls, let alone one"
(XVIII,198). In bis list of charges against Joan, the demoniac Cauchon expresses the perversion and chaos characteristic of the illegitimate order, an order which, as Louis de Conte contends, totally reverses the princi ples of truth and justice:
Consider some of the things it charges against her, and remember who it is it is speaking of. It calls her a sorceress, a false prophet, an invoker and companion of evil spirits, a dealer in magic, a per son ignorant of the Catholic faith, a schismatic; she is sacreligious, an idolator, an apostate, a blasphemer of God and His saints, scandalous, seditious, a disturber of the peace; she incites men to war, and to the spilling of human blood; she dis cards the decencies and proprieties of her sex, irreverently assuming the dre3s of a man and the vocation of a soldier; she beguiles both princes and people; she usurps divine honors, and has caused her self to be adored and venerated, offering her hands and vestments to be kissed....There it is—every fact of her life distorted, perverted, reversed (XVIII,201). Against the onslaught of abuse from the perverted order crippling her beloved France, Joan remains "the very genius of Fidelity, ... steadfastness incarnated." 218
She, like Huck Finn, finds herself alienated from the
dominant social and moral system, and thus is forced, as
all Romantic heroes, to look inward for an intuitive sense
of natural morality. To use Irving Babbitt's terms, Joan
asserts "the sense of the individual (sens propre) over
the ... (sens commun)," and she does so, again like Huck
fully aware of the disastrous consequences of her action.
Just as Huck decides on the raft to adhere to an inner
morality and go to hell rather than betray Jim, so Joan,
when told, "If you do not submit to the Church you will
be pronounced a heretic by these judges here present and
burned at the stake," reaffirms her allegiance to an
intuitive morality asserting, "I will not say otherwise
than I have said already; and if I saw the fire before
me I would say it again" (XVIII,219). This "superba
responsio" assures Joan's death; yet at the same time
her brave allegiance to a pure, natural morality of the
heart makes her one of Mark Twain's most heroic figures.
Joan, however, differs from Huck in one important
detail. James Cox says that the Maid of Orleans is a
conscious rebel who approves of her own behavior; Huck
Finn, on the other hand, could never gain his own ap
proval no matter how much he might rebel. Cox contends
that Joan of Arc lacks this ironic element of Huckleberry
Finn's dramatic complexity primarily because Mark Twain 219
portrayed the legend "in extremely melodramatic terms.
Because he could not see her rebellion as dangerous and perplexing, and because he would not see the churchmen as anything other than ignorant asces or hopeless devils, he could imagine no genuine resistance which would have in turn given Joan stature and complexity." And indeed, to a certain extent Cox is right—Joan is perhaps "the visionary embodiment of all the utterly conventional, utterly somber, utterly reverent attitudes," and her op ponent, Cauchon, is a narrow, single-dimensioned melo- 15 dramatic villain. moreover, mark Twain became so absorbed in his unmitigated contempt for Cauchon that after reading in one of his sources that Cauchon was not deliberately iniquitous, he contemptuously scribbled
"Chucks" across the page.^^ It is in the characteri sations of Joan and Cauchon that Bernard Shaw in Saint
Joan departs most radically from Mark Twain's version of the Joan of Arc legend; in fact, the British author, while conceding Mark Twain's "genius," contends that precisely because Shaw makes both Joan and Cauchon psychologically 17 complex, Saint Joan clearly excels Joan of Arc.
■*"^Cox, pp. 260-263.
Salomon, p. 176.
"^3haw, "Preface," Saint Joan, pp. 25-30. 220
Yet in reading Joan of Arc we must remember that Mark
Twain, despite his remarks about historical authenticity, is not particularly seeking a realistic portrayal of fact.
Mark Twain attempts to write neither history nor melo drama; rather, he makes an attempt—though perhaps unsuccessful—to construct an allegory, to portray the universal confrontation between good and evil, order and chaos. Joan therefore cannot be the complex blending o f good and e v il th a t Cox and Shaw demand, because fo r
Mark Twain she is emblematic of an ideal—the spiritually committed individual in a corrupt and debased world who has the ability to lay "her hand upon an accepted truth that is as old as the world" and crumble it "to dust and rubbish under touch" (XVIII,226). She is the universal superman, whom it took history "six thousand years to produce" (XVIII,143), and as such becomes the only force capable of transcending Cauchon, the avatar of a chaotic
-i O world's corruption.
uVIark Twain's belief in Joan's universality is indicated by a remark he scribbled in the margin of Michelet's The Life of Joan of Arc. Michelet contended that an English or German woman would not have made Joan's journey from Vaucouleurs to Chinon. Mark Twain, in response, wrote: "How stupid! A Joan of Arc would do it no matter what her nationality might be. A spirit has no nationality," as quoted by Salomon, p. 172. In like manner, the fact that Louis de Conte begins his narrative in 1492—the year of the discovery of America—may indicate a subtle relation between Mark Twain's novel and contemporary America. 221
Joan, as superman, clearly does represent the only force capable of salvaging Prance from the debilitating shackles of the perverted powers embodied in Cauchon.
Without Joan the nation is helpless and inert: "You will remember that whenever Joan was not at the front, the
French held back and ventured nothing; that whenever she led, they swept everything before them, so long as they could see her white armor or her banner; that every time she fell wounded or v/as reported killed—as at Compiegne— they broke in panic and fled like sheep. ...With her gone, everything was lost" (XVIII,107-108). With Joan in their midst, however, "that vague, formless inert mass, that mighty underlying force we call 'the people'" (XVIII,
28) rises up to assert the essential nobility latent in the human spirit. As Louis de Conte puts it, Joan "was the sun that melted the frozen torrents and set them boiling" (XVIII,18). "The only power in France that the
English did not despise, the only power in Prance that they considered formidable" (XVIII,18), Joan is able to transform the same ignorant mob that slaughtered the pa thetic lunatic early in the novel into a national redemp tive force, a power capable of purging Prance of an iniq uitous order. As the king's mother-in-law remarks:
...whether she comes of God or no, there is in her heart that which raises her above men— high above all men that breathe in Prance today—for in her is that mysterious some 222
thing that puts heart in soldiers, and turns mobs of cowards into armies of fighters that forget what fear is when they are in that presence—fighters who go into battle with joy in their eyes and songs on their lips, and sweep over the field like a storm— that is the spirit that can save France, and that alone, come whence it may! (XVII,129).
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, if not a
brilliant literary achievement, emerges as an important
document in the Mark Twain canon. Lapsing at times into
sub-literary melodrama, and engaging in sentimental hero-
worship, Mark Twain nevertheless creates in this novel a transcendent heroic figure. Joan combines Huck's
purity of heart with Hank Morgan's determination to act
in a world seemingly toxic to any form of meaningful human endeavor. And, though Joan, like Hank, is physically
crushed by the dominant order, her spirit, unlike that of the Faustian Hank, lives on in the hearts of men,
insuring the eventual liberation of her beloved France.
At a time of increasing personal pessimism, Mark Twain can find in the Maid of Orleans an embodiment of the
spiritual force which alone makes human life meaningful; this is no doubt why Mark Twain likes "the Joan of Arc best of all my books." After Joan of Arc Mark Twain's heroes offer no hope at all, no vision which, like that of the Fairy Tree, can redeem life; indeed, after Joan of Arc, Mark Twain's heroes illustrate only, like the stranger in "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," that 223
human nature is essentially hypocritical, debased, and corrupt, or, like Philip Traum in The Mysterious Stranger, that life is an illusion, a frightening nightmare. Chapter IX
"Determinism is Romanticism in Disillusioned Mood" Ivor Winters
The Mysterious Stranger and Goethe1s Faust
Joan of Arc is the last coherent expression of Mark
Twain's hitherto persistent faith in the ability of certain members of mankind to transcend the stifling, repressive and brutalizing chains of a debased social and religious order. Beset by relentless guilt stemming from family tragedies and from his sagging financial ventures,1 Mark Twain in his later life locates in his own dilemma a reflexion of the hopeless misery char acteristic of the human lot. In a letter to Reverend
J. II. Twichell in January, 1897—shortly after the death of his beloved daughter Suzy—he expresses the despair typical of the last fifteen years of his life:
You have seen us go to sea, a cloud of sail, and the flag at the peak; and you see us now, chartless, adrift—derelicts; battered, water logged, our sails a ruck of rags, our pride go n e. 2
■'"Por a discussion of Mark Twain's personal life during this period see Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York, 1966), pp. 336-357. 2 Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Albert B. Paine, 2 (New York, 1923 ), 640. 224 225
Such profound despair over personal misfortunes inevitably-
led Mark Twain to a view of the human condition permeated
with disillusionment and bitterness, and compelled him
to express this bitterness in his art. He wrote in a
letter to Howells:
It is the strangest thing that the world is not full of books that scoff at the pitiful world, and the useless universe and violent, contemptible human race—books that laugh at the whole paltry scheme and deride it. Curious, for millions of men die every year with these feelings in their hearts. 3
Driven by the compulsion to express his disillusionment,
Mark Twain said to Howells in 1899: "V/hat I have been
wanting is a chance to write a book without reserves ...
I believe I can make it tell what I think of Man, & how
he is constructed, & what a shabby poor ridiculous thing
he is, & how mistaken he is in his estimate of his
character & powers & qualities & his place among the
animals."^ The book Mark Twain wanted to write turned
out to be The Mysterious Stranger—a novel which Bernard
DeVoto claims afforded Mark Twain an opportunity to purge
his guilt feelings by portraying a meaningless world where 5 human choice and responsibility are delusion.
-^From Mark Twain's Notebooks, as quoted by John S. Tuckey, Marie ^wain and L ittle satan (Lafayette, Ind., 1963), p. 55. ^Mark Twain's Letters, II, 698-699.
'’Mark Twain a t Work (Cambridge, M ass., 1942), pp. v i i - i x l TD5-127. 226
The tradition in which Mark Twain chose to vent his
frustration and despair in The Mysterious Stranger is
the demoniac. Even while a cub pilot on the Mississippi,
after reading Milton, Mark Twain harbored a fascination with the satanic, writing in a letter to Orion, "What
is the grandest thing in 'Paradise Lost'—the Arch-Fiend's
terrible energy!"^ Such an assertion links Mark Twain
to a Romantic tradition initiated by Blake and fostered by Shelley; the Missouri author, like his English and
German Romantic counterparts, finds in Milton's villain the energy and self-assertion characteristic of the
Romantic hero. As his disillusionment with American civilization deepened in his later years, Mark Twain recalled his early fascination with the satanic, intro ducing and identifying with a series of satanic figures who visit the earth to pity and judge men; such preoc cupation with the satanic, Gibson claims, "dominated his imagination and guided his pen" during the whole of the 7 last decade of Mark Twain's writing life.
In The Mysterious Stranger Mark Twain relies heavily
^quoted by Albert B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biogra phy (New York, 1912), p. 146. See too, Coleman 0. Parsons, "The Devil and Samuel Clemens," Virginia Quarterly Review, 23 (Autumn 1947), 595-600. 7 William M. Gibson, ed., Mark Twain* s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Berkeley, 1969), pp. lo-19. 227
on a particular mode of the demoniac tradition: the
Faust legend. Both Frederick Cowper and Coleman Par
sons have called attention to certain direct affinities
between Mark Twain's novel and Goethe's play, though in
each instance their observations have focused on simi-
O larities which are, in final analysis, superficial. An extended comparison between Mark Twain's and Goethe's handling of the Faust motif provides an excellent illustration of the topic of my dissertation: Mark
Twain's employment of particular modes of Romantic heroism to express his profound disillusionment with the American dream, and ultimately, with life itself.
There are a number of direct sim ilarities between
The Mysterious Stranger and Goethe's Faust suggesting that
Mark Twain consciously had the Faust story in mind while composing his novel. The name of the beautiful, in nocent girl in Mark Twain's work, Marget (or Gretchen, as it is in one version), is of course the name of the innocent girl callously sacrificed by Mephistopheles in
Faust. The dog (a black poodle) who appears with Meph-
Q Cowper, "The Hermit Story, as Used by Voltaire and Mark Twain," In Honor of the Ninetieth Birthday of Charles Frederick~~7o!hnson, ed. Odell Shepard and ArtKur Adams (Hartford, 192b), p. 333* Parsons, "The Background of The Mysterious Stranger," American Literature, 32 (MarcE lybO), 5 t > - 7 4 . ------228
istopheles and who possesses demoniac powers, finds a
counterpart in The Mysterious Stranger in Philip Traum's
cat, Agnes—a cat who brings its owner material pros
perity. Theodor's fascination with Felix Brandt's tales
of experiences with ghosts, angels, "witches and enchant
ers," incubuses and "the great bat that sucks the blood
from the necks of people while they are asleep, fanning
them softly with its wings and so keeping them drowsy Q till they die" (p.44), immediately precedes the ap
pearance of Philip Traum, who quickly captures Theodor's
imagination with his own black magic—a supernatural
ability to satisfy sensual longings, to provide "breads,
cakes, sweets, nuts—whatever one wanted..." (p.46).
This occurrence recalls Faust's fascination with the
demoniac in his conjuring of satanic spirits, This im mediately precedes the appearance of Mephistopheles, who,
Q ^All references to The Mysterious Stranger are to "The Chronicle of Young Satan" version in Maric~Twain' s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. W. M. Gibson, and are made parenthetically in the text of my dissertation. The textual problems involved with The Mysterious Stranger are monumental. For background information see Tuckey, Mark Twain and L ittle Satan and Gibson's introduction to the manuscripts, pp. 1-34.' I agree fundamentally with James Cox's claim that the text of The Mysterious Stranger edited by Albert Paine and F. A. Duneka is reasonably close to the version Mark Twain intended (see Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, p. 271). At any rate for purposes of my discussion I have treated the controversial last chapter of the "#44 Mysterious Stranger" text as if it were part of the "Chronicle of Young Satan" version, as it is in the Paine and Duneka edition. 229
like Philip Traum, brings promises of sensual fulfillment via black magic. And, just as Kephistopheles whisks
Paust on a trip around the world—in defiance of the confines of time and space—to show him the sensual delights that are under his powers, so Philip Traum transports Theodor to China, and presents to him a tab leau of the history of civilization. Though the sights they exhibit to their followers differ, T.'ephistopheles and Traum share a similar motive: each desires to corrupt his more innocent worshipper. I.lephistopheles wants Faust to give in to epicurean pleasures, to be content with hedonistic joys and forget altruistic impulses; Philip Traum wants Theodor to abandon a sim plistic faith in God and mankind, to understand the depravity that seems the very fiber of existence:
"You p e rc e iv e ," he s a id , " th a t you have made continual progress. Cain did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military organisation and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gunpowder; two centuries from now he will have so greatly improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all men will confess that without the Christian Civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time" (pp. 135-136).
This aspect of Philip Traum's motives—the desire to corrupt the innocence of Theodor (whose name suggests
"gift of God")—is an aspect frequently ignored in s c h o la rly d is c u s s io n s o f I,lark T w ain's n o v el. For the 230
most part, critics are quick to identity Philip Traum with Mark Twain and therefore to assume that Philip's desire to awaken Theodor to the world around him is laudatory.^ The novel seems to be a reverse of the
Garden of Eden myth. The world the innocent Theodor inhabits resembles Eden: it "was far away from the world, and asleep; it was still the Kiddle Ages in Austria and promised to remain so forever....It drowsed in peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude where news from the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams, and was infinitely content..." (p.35). The inhabitants of this idyllic paradise seem, like Adam before the fall, free of knowledge:
V.'e were not over-much pestered with schooling. Kainly we were trained to be good Christians, to revere the Virgin, the Church, and the Saints above everything. Beyond these matters we were not required to know much; and, in fact, not allowed to. Knov/ledge was not good for the common people and could make them discontented with the lot God had appointed for them, and God would not endure discontentment with his plan (p.36).
Into this seeming paradise comes Satan—dangling the lure of black magic which captures the natural curiosity of
Theodor:
Roger Salomon asserts that "Satan is the one expli citly Adamic figure in the book," Twain and the Image of History (New Haven, 1961), p. 203. See to o , Cox, p. 2TH; and E. H. Eby, "Kark Twain's Testament," Modem Language Quarterly, 23 (September 1962), 254-262. 231
And he was bent on making us feel as he did, and of course his magic accomplished his desire. ...In a little while we were dancing on that grave and he was playing to us on a strange, sweet instrument which he took out of his pocket; and the music— but there is no music like that, unless perhaps in heaven ... It made one mad, for pleasure; and we could not take our eyes from him, and the looks that went out of our eyes came from our hearts and their dumb speech was worship (p.52).
At this point the Garden of Eden motif reverses. For
after their fall, the children hardly share Adam’s
repentance; indeed, instead of regretting the loss of paradise, Theodor and his companions believe the land
they once thought paradise to be permeated with hypoc
risy,selfishness and corruption. In the controversial
last chapter, Philip Traum claims to be a dream, a projection of Theodor's imagination. He then vanishes after making a last vehement denunciation of the world order; for Philip, the God who created the supposed paradise is a God
who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one o f them happy, y e t nev er made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, forgiveness multiplied seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the 232
responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship himl ... (pp.404-405). The novel ends with Theodor accepting all that Traum has revealed to him: "He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he said was true"
(p.405). Philip Traum's notorious uncle could hardly have been more adept at corrupting innocence!
There are several elements in The Mysterious Stranger suggesting that Philip Traum may not be the innocent angel he claims to be; indeed, at times he appears to be his uncle, Satan. Philip tells Theodor, "No, the Fall did not affect me nor the rest of the relationship. It was only he that I was named for who ate the fruit of the tree and then beguiled the man and woman with it. We others are still ignorant of sin; we are not able to commit it; we are without blemish...." Immediately after protesting his fundamental innocence, however,
"Satan reached out his hand and crushed the life out of them (the little people he has created) with his fingers, threw them away, wiped the red from his fingers on his handkerchief, and went on talking where he had left off:
'We cannot do wrong; neither have we any disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is" (p.49). Satan's action here recalls Gloucester's assertion in King Lear, 233
"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport," and probably reflects Mark Twain's attempt to lash against the indifferent malice -underlying a supposedly benevolent world order. But Philip Traum reveals here an indifference to suffering hardly char acteristic of an unfallen angel; further, he tries to dwarf the feelings of compassion springing innately from the boys, who "were so shocked and grieved at the wanton murder he had committed" (p.49). Compassion and mercy, the only two virtues humans have to offset their funda mental brutality and the virtues Satan later esteems in the old hermit's abused dog, are here subject to satanic ridicule. And Satan is successful; he
. . .worked his enchantments upon us again with that fatal music of his voice. He made us forget everything; we could only listen to him and be his slaves, to do with us as he would. He made u s drunk w ith the joy o f b ein g w ith him and of looking into the heaven of his eyes, and feeling the ecstasy that thrilled along our veins from the touch of his hand (p.50).
Satan seems to delight in corrupting innocence—a trait he no doubt inherited from his uncle. Marget, after learning that Philip Traum has an uncle "down in the tropics" expresses a wish "that their two uncles would meet some day." Though the boys shudder, Philip is pleased by the possibility; "Philip said he hoped so, too" (p.68). A short while later, Traum tells the boys that the innocent Marget "was a fine woman and hoped 234
some day to bring her and his uncle together" (p.71).
The desire to corrupt innocence, to damn souls to per
dition, certainly brings into question Satan's protes
tations of innocence. It serves, in fact, to link Philip
Traum very closely to the Mephistopheles of the traditional
Paust legend.
One might find vindication for Philip Traum if
indeed the angel's assertion that he has no moral sense,
that he has no knowledge of evil, were true. But the
facts of The Mysterious Stranger belie Traum's assertions.
He seems all too aware of evil, always quick to point
out man's evil to Theodor and his friends. He is careful
to select which portions of man's history to present to
Theodor on their tour through the history of civilization,
choosing to represent only those reflecting the evil
inherent in the human condition. Further, he passes the
kind of judgment on human behavior possible only for
someone who knows full well what is evil and what is not.
He condemns the old hermit who abuses his dog, but praises
a dumb animal's virtues of compassion and mercy, asserting:
There—he wouldn't drive children mad with hunger and fright and loneliness, and then burn them for confessing to things invented for them which had never happened. And neither would he break the hearts of innocent, poor old women and make them afraid to trust them selves among their own race, and he would not insult them in their death-agony. For he is not besmirched with the Moral Sense, but is 235
as the angels are, and knows no wrong, and never does it (p.80).
This speech indicates a keen awareness of what behavior
is praiseworthy and what behavior is not. If Satan were
as he claims, free of knowledge of evil, then he, like
the dog or bullock, would be incapable of passing judg ment on the old hermit, or upon the hermit's neighbors.
But in fact he is not like the dog at all. The dog, in his compassion, resembles more closely the boy and
Marget than he does Satan—for Satan preaches intel
lectual theories to the boys designed only to sour them on humanity, to dwarf what little compassion they have
rem aining.
To illustrate Philip Traum's isolation from the
compassion characteristic of the dog, one needs only
compare his responses when offended to those of Prau
Brandt, the old woman accused of blasphemy and witchcraft and burned at the stake. Whenever insulted, Traum becomes vindictive, bent on revenge. When censured by three townspeople for not throwing a stone at a witch, Traum
"smiled and answered, pleasantly: 'To see three cowards
stoning a dying lady when they were so near death them selves'" (p.153). All three men die in the next five minutes. Later, while in India v/ith Theodor, Satan is insulted and struck by a selfish old man "in white linen 236
and sun-helmet" (p.169). Angered, Traum withers the man's
tree and tells the man he must care for the tree, for
"its health and yours are bound together ... water its
roots once in each hour every night—and do it yourself;
it must not be done by proxy, and to do it in daylight
will not answer. If you fail only once in any night,
the tree v/ill die, and you likewise" (p.169). Frau
Brandt, on the other hand, lacks Philip's strain of
vindictiveness; abused, condemned and burned at the stake,
she forgives her adversaries, despite the fact that she possesses the Moral Sense: "We played together once, in
the long-agone days when we were innocent little creatures.
For the sake of that, I forgive you" (p.133). Albert
Stone argues that in Frau Brandt Mark Twain finds a voice
for his own compassion: "This pardon in the name of
childhood for society's inhumanity evokes at once the whole of Mark Twain's past. ... Symbolically, at least,
Prospero is laying down his wand."^
Mark Twain's Satan thus in many respects resembles
Goethe's Mephistopheles. He like Goethe's devil attempts to lure his victim from faith in God, to destroy idealis tic or altruistic impulses he cannot comprehend, to provide sensual satisfaction via black magic. Further,
^The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (New Haven , 19^1), p. 237 he provides "du Speise, die nicht satieght," for after meeting Philip, Theodor can never recapture the content ment and idyllic bliss of innocence he once enjoyed.
Coupled with other affinities to the Faust legend, the sim ilarities between Philip Traum and Mephistopheles suggest the considerable debt The Mysterious Stranger owes to Goethe's Faust.
Yet we are misguided if we see in Mark Twain's novel merely an Americanized version of Goethe's play, for the differences between The Mysterious Stranger and
Faust are even more striking than their sim ilarities.
V/hile borrowing the trappings from Faust, Mark Twain's work completely lacks the Romantic, idealistic affir mation of the greatness of man and the glory of God's creation characteristic of the end of Goethe's drama.
Goethe's devil is "Sin Teil von jeder Kraft,/Die stats das Bose will und stets das Gute schafft," an instrument of divine providence sent by God to propel Faust's soul from a state of lethargic denial to a state of vigorous optimistic resolve. Philip Traum is no instrument of
God at all; there is no room in Mark Twain's world view for the operation of divine providence. Like Moby-Dick,
The Mysterious Stranger has a divided focus. Satan, who like Ahab embodies an intellectual, amoral and fundamentally nihilistic world view, confronts Theodor, 238
who like Ishmael clings tenuously to emotional and moral
values in the process of dissolution. Satan’s actions,
Stone contends, "are directed toward illuminating
Theodor's Ishmael-like mind with a sense of the true nature of things. What is happening is a cosmic initi
ation, with Theodor as the neophyte and Philip Traum the 12 master of ceremonies." Unlike Goethe in Faust or
Melville in Moby-hick, however, Mark Twain in The Myster
ious Stranger explores the confrontation of these two types of Romantic heroes not to affirm the value of life but to deny it. His early faith in America completely
shattered, struggling in utter despair, Mark Twain sees
"the true nature of things" as depraved.
Perhaps the major aspect of The Mysterious Stranger impressing upon us the hopeless despair of its author is
Mark Twain's thorough identification with Satan. In
Faust Goethe associates himself with the hero and not with
Mephistopheles; thus Faust's affirmation of human dignity and God's glorious creation at the end of part II becomes
Goethe's own. In Moby-Dick, Melville lets Ahab voice his own despair at times, but the novel remains Ishmael's, and the hero's recognition of the necessity and beauty of religious faith and human love reflects M elville's
12Stone, p. 242. 239
mood. Mark Twain speaks through Satan, however; and the
assimilation of Philip Traum into Theodor in the con
cluding chapter, the fusion of the two central figures
of the novel, results in a unified and devastating
expression of the validity of Satan's pessimistic view
of the human condition. Theodor's curse of God, his
realization that all Satan had said was true, his
awareness, Cox asserts, "that life is not worth living—
that Death is the blessing and not the curse of man,"^
becomes Mark Twain's personal expression of disgust and
despair, an expression he makes in his other works of the
period like "What is Man?" or Letters From the Earth,
and in his personal correspondence, like this note from
a letter to Howells:
Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it. God had His opportunity; He could have made a r e p u ta tio n . But no, He must commit this grotesque folly—a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over & observe effects. 14
Mark Twain's despair and contempt in The Mysterious
1-^Cox, p. 280.
^Mark Twain and William L. Howells, Mark Twain— Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D~HoweTTst Ib?2h-l9l0f ed. Henry NasE Smith and 7/illiam IT7 Gibson with the assistance of Frederick Anderson, 2 (Cambridge, Mass., I960), 716. 240
Stranger is aimed in two directions. First, he expresses profound disillusionment with the progress and effects of civilization, the same civilization he once esteemed in
Innocents Abroad and in his speech praising James Welch delivered in 1886 to the Monday Evening Club of Hartford
(cf. pp. 181-182). Rather like Childe Harold, Don Juan or Rene, Theodor goes on a voyage around the world and back into time, hoping to find testimonies of man's glorious accomplishments, evidence of beauty and harmon ious stability. He finds, as did those in the mal du siecle tradition, reminders of decay and brutality; Satan shows him on Theodor's tour through the "History of
Civilization" only examples of man's callousness and selfish inhumanity. Yet "the vast majority of the race,"
Satan tells Theodor, "...are secretly kind hearted and shrink from inflicting pain...." Social institutions,
"monarchies, aristocracies, and religions," all based on man's fears, inculcate and cultivate brutal behavior
(pp.154-155). The factory system, lavishly praised by
Mark Twain in his 1886 address to the Hartford Club, is exploitation of workers by "rich and holy" proprietors, who "pay to these poor brothers and sisters of theirs ... only enough to keep them from dropping dead from hunger."
Satan argues that the factory system is even worse than medieval torture: 241
"They broke him on the wheel and smashed him to rags and pulp after we left, and he is dead now and free of your precious race, but these poor slaves here—why they have been dying for years and some of them will not escane from l i f e f o r y e a rs to come" (p.73). "15 The second target of Mark Twain's contempt in The
Mysterious Stranger is the nature of man. While civili zation debases and exploits, for Mark Twain "the ultimate cause of the endless cycle of slaughter," Salomon points out, "...finally is human nature: the usurpations of minorities; the acquiescence of the majority.Satan reveals to Theodor: "The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities -which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built." Human corruption is here viewed as a trait inherent in Adam; no fall of man is involved.
Hark Twain's lack of faith in human nature becomes clear in the behavior of Theodor while watching a witch persecuted:
They hanged the lady and I threw a stone at her, although in my heart I was sorry for her, but all were throwing stones and each was watching his neighbor, and if I had not done as the others did it would have been noticed and spoken of (p. 1 5 2 ).
Earlier in the novel Theodor wanted to warn Marget and
Ursula of impending danger, but failed to do so because
^See Salomon, p. 202.
Salomon, p. 2 0 2 . 242
of cowardice: "We boys wanted to warn them but we backed down when it came to the pinch, being afraid. We found that we were not manly enough to do a generous action when there was a chance it could get us into trouble"
(p.82). Theodor's behavior in these two instances reveals that for Mark Twain even childhood has lost its innocence.
Theodor lacks, Gladys Bellamy writes, the intuitive 17 virtue and compassion characteristic of Huck Finn.
Civilization may be responsible for brutal deeds, but in human nature it has a devastatingly effective tool.
Mark Twain's attitude that human nature, even in its infant stages, is corrupt and depraved runs counter to one strain of traditional Romantic ideology. Rousseau,
Wordsworth, Goethe, Blake—indeed most Romantic artists— exhibit an optimistic affirmation of innate natural virtue. For the Romantic, civilization is brutal and ugly because it destroys the virtue of natural man; as
Shelley demonstrates in Prometheus Unbound, mankind can improve his condition by allowing his natural virtue to emerge triumphant over the shackles of a dehumanizing environment. Clearly, The Mysterious Stranger is not a
Romantic novel; ironically, perhaps, its exposure of innate human depravity resembles traditional Christian
Mark Twain as a Literary Artist (Norman, 1950), p. 354. 243
assumptions. But for Mark Twain at this stage of his career there is no redeemer—no Jesus, not even a Joan of Arc. The human being is irrevocably trapped by his own brutal nature.
Though The Mysterious Stranger runs counter to the dominant trend in Romantic literature, it does bear affinities to the strong undercurrent in Romanticism which Peckham calls "negative Romanticism." Rot all
Romantic artists share the optimistic resolve of Goethe,
Blake or Shelley, and Mark Twain's acute awareness of the evil inherent in the nature of man has its prede cessors in such Romantic artists as Hawthorne and Byron.
Mark Twain seems to reverse the movement from despair to affirmation in such Romantic works as Rime of the
Ancient Mariner and Sartor Resartus, the movement which
Peckham sees as a hallmark of the entire Romantic move ment. In his early career, Mark Twain seems to share the faith characteristic of Carlyle's "Everlasting Yea";
Innocents Abroad, and even, one might argue, Huckleberry
Finn, give us a qualified celebration of the virtue inherent in natural man. Civilization might be a corrupting influence, but the reservoir of positive virtue in the "American" or in Huck Finn offers at least a ray of hope; even as late as 1892 Mark Twain locates in the Joan of Arc legend testimony to the ability of some members of mankind to assert their natural nobility 244
of spirit. But by the middle of the 1890's Mark Twain
has moved to a condition resembling Carlyle's despair
in the "Everlasting Nay," Convinced of the absence of
divine providence, agonizingly aware of the depravity
that lurks at the very heart of man, Mark Twain writhes
in the despair of a beaten, suffering man, without hope
or belief in the universe, mankind or himself.
An argument could be made that the vision of the
late Mark Tv/ain closely resembles that of his German
contemporary, Fredrich Nietzsche. In Der Antichrist
(1895), Nietzsche writes:
Man lasse sich nicht irrefuhren: grosse Geister sind Skeptiker. Zarathustra ist ein Skeptiker. Die Starke, die Preiheit aus der Kraft und Uberkraft des Geistes beweist sich durch Skepsis. Menschen der Uberzeugung kommen fur alles Grundsatzliche von 7/erth und Unwerth gar nicht in Betracht. Uberzeugungen sind Gefangnisse. ... Ein Geist, der Grosses will, der auch die Mittel dazu will, ist mit Noth- wendigkeit Skeptiker. Die Preiheit von jeder Art Uberzeugungen gehort zur Starke, das Frei-Blicken-konnen... 18
Philip Traum, who in final analysis is but a dream vision
of Theodor, is like Zarathustra the complete skeptic.
Traum's comparison of himself to mankind—the "elephant"
among "red spiders"—resembles Zarathustra's comparison of himself (or the Ubermenschen) to the mass of men:
T A Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausga.be, ed. Giorgio Colli und Mazz'ino Montinari, 3 (Berlin, 1969), 234. 245
"Was ist der Affe fur den Menschen? Ein Gelachter Oder
eine schmerzliche Scham. Und ebendas soil der Mensch
fur den Ubermenschen sein: ein Gelachter oder eine 19 schmerzliche Scham." Traum believes and teaches, like
Zarathustra, that "Gutes und Boses, das unverganglich
ware—das giebt es nicht.' Aus sich selber muss es sich 20 immer wieder uberwinden." And Theodor's denunciation
at the end of The Mysterious Stranger of the providential
deity of Christian theology parallels Nietzsche's con
demnation of the Christian God in Der A ntichrist:
Der christliche Gottesbegriff—Gott als Krankengott, Gott als Spinne, Gott als Geist— ist einer der corruptesten Gottesbegriffe, die auf Erden erreicht worden sind; er stellt vielleicht selbst den Pegel des Tiefstands in der absteigenden Entwicklung des Gotter-Typus dar. Gott zum V/iderspruch des Lebens abgeartet, statt dessen Verklarung und ewiges Ja zu sein! In Gott dem Leben, der Natur, dem Villen zum Leben die Feindschaft angesagt! Gott die Formel fur jede Verleumdung des "Diesseits", fur jede Luge vom "Janseits"! In Gott das Nichts vergottlicht, der V/ille zum Nichts heilig gesprochenl 21
At the conclusion of The Mysterious Stranger, Theodor
emerges as the consummate solipsistic hero. Everything,
including Philip Traum (whose name means dream), is a mere projection of Theodor's imagination. Completely
^Nietzsche V/erke, I, 8. 20 Nietzsche V/erke, I, 145.
^Nietzsche V/erke, III, 183. 246
cut off from social and religious conventions, he
acquires the kind of angelic existence frequently desired
by Mark Twain in his later writing. He is like the // Nietzschean Ubermenschen, beyond good and evil.
The resemblances between Mark Twain's later thought
and Nietzsche's ideas are not surprising when one re members that they emerged in part out of similar tradi
tions. Both were intimately aware of Goethe, Shelley,
Carlyle, Darwin and Tennyson, and both illustrate in
their work a concern with modes of heroism which these writers developed. Mark Twain and Nietzsche both depart
from their predecessors in that their hero becomes a man concerned with self-development rather than social welfare. V/hereas Faust, Prometheus or Carlyle's culture- hero struggle to improve the lot of their fellows,
Theodor and the Ubermenschen retreat away from other men back into their own souls. As we have seen, such introversion meant destruction and misery for Werther,
Rene', Manfred, Ethan Brand and Ahab; but for Nietzsche it becomes the only path leading to regeneration, and for Mark Twain it offers a momentary escape from the bleakness of human existence.
Despite striking sim ilarities, Mark Twain and
Nietzsche nevertheless exhibit a crucial difference in n their respective visions. The German sees the Uber menschen as the answer to despair, a portent of an 247
evolutionary development toward a higher and considerably improved species. Ke shares the idealistic vision of human destiny characteristic of the mainstream of
Romantic literature and of nineteenth-century German philosophy. Hark Twain, though repudiating his Puritan
Christian heritage, retains the Christian assumptions of innate depravity; while discarding Christianity1s redeeming vision of the Resurrection, he clings to its pessimistic belief in the inevitable destruction of the temporal world. Further, he believes with his Christian forefathers that such destruction is the result of some thing innate in the scheme of things, something which when divorced from the over-all perspective of the
Resurrection, seems malevolent and incomprehensible.
His response is a purely emotional one; he rails against the nature of things, attacks the notion of divine providence, devaetatingly exposes the apparent malice in the world order, and having no faith in the nature of man, retreats into bitter, bleak despair. C onclusion
Throughout his literary career, Mark Twain seems fascinated by modes of heroism rising out of the Romantic movement in Europe, England and mid-nineteenth century
America. In his first book, Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain creates a fictional persona embodying the essential hopes and prejudices of the American people; self-reliant, irreverent, modest yet proudly aware of his role as a symbol of American progress and moral purity on a con tinent beset by decay and moral decadence, the narrator of Innocents Abroad becomes an example of the American as hero. Yet the narrator of Innocents Abroad is a hero in search of a cultural and spiritual identity, and as such bears relation to Romantic heroes in the mal du si&cle tradition. His dissatisfaction v/ith his American co-travelers and the spiritual void that exists within him make Mark Twain's persona an embodiment of latent misgivings about the nation he overtly celebrates. These misgivings emerge full force in Mark Twain's later fiction, and in Adventures of Huckleberry Einn and A Connecticut
Yankee Mark Twain adapts specific modes of Romantic heroism—the mal du siecle in the first, the Faustian in the second—to express his disillusionment with the course which American civilization takes in the late
248 249
nineteenth century. Joan of Arc, an enigma in the Park
Twain canon, seems to o ffe r a ray of hope, as i t pre
sents a Promethean figure who transcends the debilitating
shackles of environment and affirms an essential nobility
of spirit. Put in The I'ysterious Stranger, begun the
year Joan of Arc first appears in print, hark Twain
lapses back into despair, modifying the Faust legend
to create a novel which denies America's fundamental
premises about the value of civilization and the innate
dignity of the individual.
The subject of lurk Twain's re lotion to European
2 iterary trad it1ons is both intriguing and multi-faceted.
To explore Park Twain's adaptation of modes of European
Ponantic heroism or to call attention to his familiarity with and fondness for men like Joethe, Byron, Carlyle and Darwin is not, however, to deny his native origins.
He is, as virtually all scholars of American literature
believe, the artist who best reflects in hi3 work what it is to be an American. Yet he is also a man of the nineteenth century, and the community of l e t t e r s to which he belongs includes Goethe, Carlyle and Pietzsche as well as Artenus hard, George Aashington Harris and '.Villiam
Dean Howells. Tie adopts and modifies a variety of lite ra r y -odes and traditi ns to express a view of life which is bis own. The purpose of this dissertation has 250
been to examine his adoption of various modes of heroism which arise from European Romanticism and to explore the ways in which Mark Twain modifies them to express his increasing despair and disillusionment with the nation which produced him. Bibliography
Primary Sources:
Byron. Poetic and Dramatic Works. Ed. Paul E. More. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905.
Chateaubriand. Atala et Rene''. Ed. Gilbert Chinard. Paris: Editions ’Fernand Roches, 1930.
Clemens, Samuel L. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: An Annotated Text,"Backgrounds, and Sources, Essays~in Criticism. EcT. Sculley Bradley, R. C. Beatty, E. H. Long. Hew York: Norton, 1962.
Clemens, Samuel L. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. Ed. with an Introduction by Cnarles Neider. Hew York: Harper, 1959.
Clemens, Samuel L. Letters from the Earth. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper, 1962.
Clemens, Samuel L. Mark Twain's Letters. Ed. Albert 3. Paine. 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1923.
Clemens, Samuel L. Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. Ed. William M. Gibson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Clemens, Samuel L. Mark Twain's Notebooks. Ed. Albert B. Paine. New York: Harper^ 1935.
Clemens, Samuel L. Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks. Ed. Dixon Wecter. San Marino, C alif.: Huntington Library, 1949.
Clemens, Samuel L. The Portable Mark Twain. Ed. Bernard DeVoto. New York: Viking, 194'6.
Clemens, Samuel L. and William Dean Howells. Selected Mark Twa in--Ho we11s L etters, 1872-1910. Ed. Frederick Anderson et al. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1UF7.
Clemens, Samuel L. Traveling with the Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain's Original Reports from Europe and the Holy Land. Ed. Daniel McKeithan. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. 251 252
Clemens, Samuel L. The Writings of Mark Twain. Ed. Albert B. Paine. 37 volsT TTew York"; Harper, 1922-1925. Emerson, Ralph W. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Stephen Whicher. Boston: Houghton Hifflin, 1965. Goethe, Johann W. Goethe Werke. 6 vols. Insel-Verlag, 1949. Goethe, Johann W. Werke Goethes. Berlin: Der Deutschen Akademie der V/issenschaften, 1952ff.
Hawthorne, Hathaniel. The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. George P. Lathrop. 12“vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, I 083 .
Melville, Herman. The Works of Herman M elville. 16 vols. London: Constable, 1922-1924.
Moliere. Oeuvres conpletres de Moliere. 4 vols. Paris,
Nietzsche, Eriedrich. Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesantausgabe. Ed. Ciorgio Colli und Mazzino MontinariT 5 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & C o., 1969.
Shelley, Percy B. The Poetical Works of Perev Bysshe Shelley. Ed. with a Memoir by Mrs. Shelley. 3 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1864.
Secondary Sources:
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and th e C r i t i c a l T r a d itio n . New Yorlci Oxford University Press, 1953.
Abrams, M. H. Natural Suffernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. Hew York: Norton, 157T7
Adams, Richard P. "Introduction to Huckleberry Finn." American Literary Masters. Ed. Charles Anderson et al. 2 vols. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Wlnsfon, 1965. I, 1035-1050.
Adams, Richard P. "The Unity and Coherence of Iluckle- 253
berry Finn." Tulane Studies in English, 6 (1956), b t-1 0 3 .
Altick, Richard D. "Mark Twain's Despair: An Explanation in Terns of his Humanity." South Atlantic Quarterly, 34 (1935), 359-367.
Anon. "Literature and Life Mirrored in Mark Twain's Letters." Current Opinion, 64 (January 1918), 50-51.
Asselineau, Roger. The Literary Reputation of Mark Twain: From 1910-1950. Paris: M. Didier, 1954.
Atkins, Stuart. The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama. Cambridge, Mass.: Sarvar3~University P F £s¥7“rg49. Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and Romanticism. 1919; rpt. Cleveland: Meridian Press, 1955.
Baender, Paul. "Mark Twain and the Byron Scandal." American Literature, 30 (January 1959), 467-485.
Baetzhold, Howard G. "The Course of Composition of A Connecticut Yankee: A Reinterpretation." American Titerature, 33 (ilay 1 9 6 1), 195- 2 1 4 .
Baetzhold, Howard G. Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection^ Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1970.
Baldanza, Frank. Mark Twain: An Introduction and Interpretation. Hew York: Barnes and Hoble, 1961.
Banquero, Arcadio. Don Juan % su Evolucion Dramatica: El Personaje Teatral en seTs comedias Espaholas. P“ voTsT M adrid,' T$66T.------
Bellamy, Gladys Camen. Mark Twain as a Literary A rtist. ITormian, O k la .: U n iv e rs ity o f OlcIaHoma P re s s , 1950.
Bewley, Marius. The Eccentric Design: Fom in the Classic American Novel. London: Chatto and Hindus, 1959.
Blair, Walter. Mark Twain and Huck Finn. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, I960.
Blair, Walter. Native American Humor. New York: American Book Co. , 1937. 254
Bowden, Edwin T. The Dungeon of the Heart: Human Isolation and the American Hovel. New York: Macmillan, 1961.
Bowra, C. M. The Romantic Imagination. 1949; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961.
Branch, Edgar M. The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
Brashear, Minnie M. Mark Twain, Son of Missouri. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University olT"North Carolina Press, 1934.
Brooks, Van 7/yck. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Rev. ed. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1933.
Callan, Richard J. "The Burden of Innocence in Melville and Twain." Renascence, 17 (Summer 1965), 191-194.
Canby, Henry. "Mark Twain Himself." Saturday Review of Literature, 9 (October 29, 1932), 201-202.
Cash, 7/. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Random House, 1941.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, N.YT1 Doubleday, 1957.
Clemens, Cyril. "George Bernard Shaw." Saturday Review of Literature, 27 (August 12, 1944), 15.
Clemens, Cyril. "Mark Twain's Reading." Commonweal, 24 (August 7, 1936), 363-364.
Cowper, Frederick. "The Hermit Story, as Used by Voltaire and Mark Twain." In Honor of the Ninetieth Birthday of Charles Frederick Johnson. 'Ed. Odell Shepard and Arthur Adams. Uartford, Conn., 1928.
Cox, James M. Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1 9 6 6.
Daiches, David. "Mark Twain as Hamlet." Encounter, 22 (February 1964), 70-76.
Denny, Margaret and William H. Gilman, eds. The Ameri can Writer and the European Tradition. Minneapolis Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1950. 255
DeVoto, Bernard. Mark Twain*a America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1932.
DeVoto, Bernard. Mark Twain at Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942.
Dickinson, Leon T. Mark Twain1s Innocents Abroad: Its Origin, Composition,"Popularity. Piss. University of Chicago 1945.
Eby, E. II. "Mark Twain's Testament." Modern Language Quarterly, 23 (September 1962), 254-262.
Eliot, T. S. "Introduction." Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ITew York: Cresset, 1950.
Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. 1959; rpt. ITew York: (Trosset and Dunlap, 1963.
Fairley, Barker. A Study of Goethe. Oxford: Oxford University Press! 19477
Feidelson, Charles Jr. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: University of dhicago Press, 1353!
Ferguson, DeLancey. Mark Twain: Man and Legend. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Uerrill, 194-3.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. I960; rpt. Cleveland: Meridian Press, 1 9 6 2.
Frye, Northrop. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House,~T9667
Furst, Lilian R. Romanticism: The Critical Idiom. London: Methuen, 1969.
Furst, Lilian R. Romanticism in Perspective: A Compar ative Study of Aspects of”The Romantic Movement in E ngland, T rance and (Termany! London! M acm illan. T 9 6 9 T
Gerber, John C. "Mark Twain's Use of the Comic Pose." PMLA, 77 (June 1962), 297-304.
Gohdes, Clarence. "The Reception of Some Nineteenth- Century American Authors in Europe." The American Writer and the European Tradition. Ed. Margaret Denny and William H. Gilman. 1950; rpt. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. pp. 106-120. 256
Gossman, Lionel. Men and Masks: A Study of Moliere. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963.
Gullason, Thomas. "The 'Fatal' Ending of Huckleberry Finn." American Literature, 29 (March 1^57), 3 5 = 9 1 . ------
Hansen, Chadwick. "The Character of Jim and the Ending of Huckleberry Finn." Massachusetts Review, 5 (Autumn T%TT, T 5 = 5 6 . ------Harnsberger, Caroline T. "Bernard Shaw Welcomes the Author of 'Mark Twain at Your Fingertips."' Twainian, 7, No 6 (1948), 1-2.
Hart, James D. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 4th ed. New York: Uxford University ’Press7~T96'5 • Hartman, Geoffrey. "Romanticism and Antiself-Conscious- ness." Centennial Review, 6 , No 4 (Fall 1962), 553- 565. Heller, Erich. "On Goethe's Faust.» Goethe: A Col lection of Critical Essays. Ed. Victor Lange. EnglewoocT"Cliffs, N .J.: Prentice Hall, i 9 6 0, pp. 132-144. Hemminghaus, Edgar H. Mark Twain in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.
Henderson, Archibald. "The International Fame of Mark Twain." North American Review, 192 (December 1910), 804-815.
Herrick, Robert. "Mark Twain and the American Tradition." Mark Twain Quarterly, 2 (Winter 1937), 8-11.
Hoffman, Daniel G. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, l96l.
Holman, C. Hugh. "The Reconciliation of Ishmael: Hoby- Dick and the Book of Job." South Atlantic Quarterly, 5TT1958), 477-490.
Holmes, Charles S. "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: Mark Twain's Fable of Uncertainty." South Atlantic Quarterly, 61 (Autumn 1962), 462-472. 257
Howard, Leon. "Americanization of the European Heritage." The American Writer and the European Tradition. Ed. Margaret Denny and William H. Gilman. 1950; rpt. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. pp. 78-89.
Howard, Leon. Literature and the American Tradition. Garden City, N.Yt : Doubleday"J I960.
Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticism. New York: Harper, 1910.
Hunting, Robert. "Mark Twain's Arkansaw Yahoos." Modern Language Notes, 73 (April 1958), 264-268.
Jensen, Franklin L. "Mark Twain's Comments on Books and Authors." Emporia State Research Studies, 12 (June 1964), 5-53. Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and S c h u ste 1 966.
Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, A n t i c h r i s t . P rin c e to n , N.T71 P rin c e to n U n iv e rs ity Press, 1950.
Kazin, Alfred. "Introduction." The Innocents Abroad. New York: Harper, 1964.
Klett, Ada M. "Meisterschaft, or the True State of Mark Twain's German." Arnerican—German Review, 7, No 2 (December 1940), 10-11.
Klotz, Marvin. "Goethe and Mark Twain." Notes and Queries, 7 (April I960), 150-151.
Koht, Halvdan. The American Spirit in Europe: A Survey of Transatlantic Influences. PTTTladelphia: Univer- sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.
Erumpelmann, John. I:!ark Twain and the German Language. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1953. Lane, Lauriat Jr. "Why Huckleberry Finn is a Great World Novel." College English, 17 (October 1955),
Lange, Victor, ed. Goethe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N .J.: Frentice-Hall. 19687" 258
Laverty, C. D. "The Genesis of The Mysterious Stranger," Mark Twain Quarterly, 8 (1947), 15-19.
Leary, Lewis. "Tom and Huck: Innocence on Trial." Virginia Quarterly Review, 30 (Summer 1954), 417- 4T07
Leavis, F. R. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Hoefry. London: Chatto and Windus, T343"T
Levin, Harry. The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. Hew York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1958.
Lewis, Richard IV. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in th e Nineteenth Century. C h ica g o: University o f U h ic a g o Press, 1955.
Lilijegren, Sven. "The Revolt against Romanticism in American Literature .as Evidenced in the Works of S. L. Clemens." Studia Neophilologica, 17 (1945). 207 - 258 . --- Long, E. Hudson. Hark Twain Handbook. New York: Hendricks House, 1958.
Lovejoy, A. 0. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Hass.: Harvard University Lress, 1936.
Lovejoy, A. 0. "The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas." Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), 237-27^
Lovejoy, A. 0. "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms." PHLA, 34 (1924), 229-253.
Lovell, Ernest J ., Jr. "Irony and Image in Don Juan." The Major English Romantic Poets: A Symposium in Reappraisal. Ed. Clarence Thorp, Carlos Baker, and Bennett Weaver. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957. pp. 129-148.
Lucas, F. L. The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal. Cambridge: Cambridge University tress, 1936.
Lynn, Kenneth S. Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. Boston: Little, Brown, I960.
Marx, Leo. "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn." The American Scholar, 22, No 4 (Autumn 1953). 433=440. 259
Matthiessen, F. 0. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 194-1.
McClelland, C. P. "Mark Twain and Bret Harte." Methodist Review, 5th Ser., 22 (January 1916), 72-76.
McCloskey, John C. "Mark Twain as Critic in The Inno- cents Abroad." American Literature, 25 (1953), TWTL5T:------
Meyers, Marvin. The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957.
Michel, Robert. "The Popularity of Mark Twain in Austria." Mark Twain Quarterly, 8 (Winter 1950), 5-6.
Mohle, Gunter.. Las Europabild Mark Twains. Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt Verlag, 1940.
Moore, O lin H. "Mark Twain and Don Q uixote." PMLA, 37 (June 1922), 324-346.
Murray, Henry A. "In Nomine Diaboli." New England Quarterly, 24 (1951), 435-452.
Neider, Charles. Mark Twain and the Russians: An Exchange of Views. New York: Hill and Wang, I960.
Noyes, Russell, ed. English Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
O'Connor, William Van. The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays. Carbondale, i l l .: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962.
Orians, G. Harrison. "Walter Scott, Mark Twain, and the Civil War." South Atlantic Quarterly, 40 (October 1941), 377-339”
Paine, Albert B. Mark Twain: A Biography. The Per sonal and Literary life of~Samuel Langhome Clemens. 3 vols. New York: Harper, 1912.
Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. 3 vols. New York: HarcourTT 8race and 75771927, 1930. Parsons, Coleman 0. "The Backgrounds of the 'Mysterious Stranger.'" American Literature, 32 (March I960), 55-74. 260
Parsons, Coleman 0. "The Devil and Samuel Clemens." Virginia Quarterly Review, 23 (Autumn 1947). 595- W v .
Pater, Valter. The Renaissance. Cleveland: Meridian Press, 1961.
Peckham, Morse. "Reconsiderations." Studies in Roman ticism, 1 (1961), 1-8.
Peckham, Morse. "Toward a Theory of Romanticism." PM1A, 66 (1951), 5-23.
Perkins, David. The Quest for Permanence: The Symbolism of 7/ordsworth, Shelley and Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Perry, Bliss. The American Mind. Boston: Little, Brown, 1 9 1 2.
Peterson, Merrill D. The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. I960; rpt. Hew York: Oxford University Press, TUU2. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Trans, from the Italian by Angus Davidson. 2nd ed. 1933; rpt. New York: Meridian Press, 1956.
Regan, Robert. Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and His Characters. Berkeley7 C alif.: University of Oalifomia Press, 1966.
Reiss, Hans. Goethe *s Hovels. Coral Gables, Pla.: Miami University Press, 1971.
Richards, P. "Reminiscences." Library Review, No 25 (1933), 19-22. Roades, Sister Mary T. "Don Quixote and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court." Mark Twain Quarterly, '2/ 7T6— 4”TFaTx 193^), ’8-9“------Robertson, John G. Goethe and Byron. London: A. Moring, 1925. Rodney, Robert M. Mark Twain in England; A Study of the English Criticism of and XTtiiude towards MarlT"Twain: Idb7-l947n hiss. University of Wisconsin 1946•
Roerich, Nicholas. "Mark Twain in Russia." Mark Twain Quarterly, 3, No 2 (Spring 1939), 7. 261
Rose, William. From Goethe to Byron. The Development of Weltschmerz in German Literature. London: Macmillan, 1924.
Rosenfeld, William. "Uncertain Faith: Queequeg's Coffin and M elville's Use of the Bible." Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 7 (Winter 1966) ,■ ■3T7-3?77 ------Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. ITew York: Harcourt, Brace, T 5 JT. ------
Rubenstein, Gilbert M. "The Moral Structure of Huckle berry Finn." College English, 18 (November 1956), 72-76.
Sails, H. H. "Joan of Arc in English and American Literature." South Atlantic Quarterly, 25 (April 1936), 167-184':
Salomon, Roger. Twain and the Image of History. New Haven, Conn.7 Yale University Press, 1961.
Schoenemann, Friedrich. "Mark Twain and Adolph Wil- brandt." Modern Language Notes, 34 (June 1919), 373-384.
Schoenemann, Friedrich. Mark Twain als Literarische Personlichkeit. Jena, Germany, 192"57
Schoenemann, Friedrich. "Mark Twain und Deutschland." Hochschule und Ausland (January 1936), 37-43.
Schoenemann, Friedrich. "Mark Twains 'Weltanschauung." Englische Studien, 55 (1921), 53-84.
Scott, Arthur L. Mark Twain as a Critic of Europe. Diss. University of Michigan 1947.
Scott, Arthur L. "Mark Twain Looks at Europe." South Atlantic Quarterly, 52 (July 1953), 399-413.
Simpson, Lewis P. "Literary Ecumenicalism of the American Enlightenment." The Ibero-American Enlightenment. Ed. A. Owen Aldridge. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1971, pp. 317-332.
Simpson, Lev/is P. "Mark Twain: Critical Perspectives." Southern Review, NS 4 (April 1968), 493.-4 9 2. 262
Smith, Henry Nash. "Origins of a Native American Literary Tradition." The American Writer and the European Tradition. Ed.MargaretDenny and William H. Gilman" 1950; rpt. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. pp. 63-77.
Smith, Henry Nash. Mark Twain: The Development of a W riter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.
Smith, Henry Nash. Mark Tw ain1s Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Idea's in A Connecticut Y ankee i New Brunswick, N .J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American '.Vest as Symbol and MythP Cambridge, T’assTi Harvard UnT^ versity Press, 1950.
Spiller, Robert E. The Cycle of American Literature. New York: Macr illan, I955T
Spiller, Robert E., _et a l., eds. Literary History of the United States. 3rd ed., rev. New York: Mac- m illa n , 19637
Stone, Albert E. The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain 1s Im a g in a tio n . New Haven, C onn.: YaTe Uni versity Press, 1961.
Tanner, Tony. "The Lost America—The Despair of Henry Adams and Mark Twain." Mark Twain: A Collection o f C r i t i c a l E s s a y s . Ed. He'nry Hash Sm ith. E ngle wood Cliffs, N.J« : Prentice-Hall, 1963. up. 159- 174.
Tathara, Campbell. " ’Dismal and Lonesome’: A New Look at Huckleberry Finn." Modern Fiction Studies, 14 (Spring 196b), 47-55.
Taylor, Walter. "Mark Twain and the Machine Age." South Atlantic Quarterly, 37 (1938), 384-396.
Thorslev, Peter. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis, MinnT: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.
Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. 1950; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday7 1953. 263
Tuckey, John S. Mark Twain and Little Satan. Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Hress, 1963.
Turner, Arlin. "Mark Twain and the South: An Affair of Love and Anger." Southern Review, NS 4 (Spring 1968), 493-519.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Rev. ed. IIcT. George Rogers Taylor. Boston: Heath, 1956.
W'agenknecht, Edward. Mark Twain: The Man and His Work. Rev. ed. Borman, OTcla.’ : University o'f Oklahoma Press, 1961.
Waggoner, Hyatt H. "Science in the Thought of Mark Twain." American Literature, 8 (January 1937), 357- 370.
Walzel, Oskar. German Romanticism. 1932; rpt. New York: Frederick Ungar, 19b5.
Ward, John William. Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age. 1953; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1^62.
Watters, R. E. "Melville's 'Isolatoes.'" PMLA, 60 (1945), 1138-1148.
Watters, R. E. "Melville's 'Sociality.'" American Literature, 17 (1945), 33-49.
Wecter, Dixon. The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-Worship. Ann ArEor, Mich,: University oT Michigan Press, 1963.
Wecter, Dixon. "Mark Twain as Translator from the Ger man." American Literature, 13 (November 1941), 257-2637
Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Ed. Elizabeth Wecter. Boston': Houghton, Mifflin, 1952.
Welland, Dennis. "Mark Twain, the Great Victorian." Chicago Review, 9 (Fall 1955), 101-109.
Wellek, Rene". "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History." Comparative Literature, 1 (1949), 1-23, 147-172. 264
Williams, James D. "Revision and Intention in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee." American Literature, 36 (November 1964), 288-297.
Williams, Mentor L. "Mark Twain's Joan of Arc." Michi gan Alumnus Quarterly Review, 54 (May 8, 1948), 843-
Vagts, Alfred. >#"Mark Twain at the Courts of Europe." Jahrbuch fur Amerikastudien, No 9 (1964), 149-
Vietor, Karl. Goethe the Poet. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949. Appendix
The following are English translations of the
French, German and Spanish quotations appearing in the
text of my dissertation. page 24 "Ich kehre...", I turn in upon myself, and find a world there.
26-27 "un caballero..." A Spanish gentleman who is preoccupied solely with seducing, enjoying, and possessing all the women he desires.
27 "Esta es..." It is the justice of God that you pay for what you do.
27 "un simbolo..." a symbol of sick and rebellious belief to demonstrate divine justice in action.
28 "il se plait..." It pleases him to /ander from place to place, and he never desires to settle down.
28 "Pour moi..." Beauty overwhelms me completely where I find it, and I give in easily to that sweet violence which leads me astray.
29 "J’ai fait..." I realized that to marry you I had to take you away from the convent, that you had to break the vows that bound you once and that heaven is very envious of such things.
37 "Was ich von..." Whatever I could find con cerning the story of poor Werther I have col lected and presented it to you herewith, in the belief that you will thank me for it. You will not want to deny his spirit and character your admiration and love, nor his fate your compassion.
37 "Ich ehre die..." I respect our religion, you know t h a t . I f e e l th a t i t i s a s t a f f fo r many
Passages from The Sorrows of Young Werther are from the translation by Catherine EutTer (itfew York: New American Library, 1962). 265 266
a weary man and a comfort to him who is pining away. Only—can religion, must religion mean the same thing to every man? Doesn’t the son of God Himself say that those will be with Him whom His Father gives unto Him? But what if my Father wants to keep me for Himself, which is what my heart tells me?
38 "Und was i s t . . . " And what d iffe re n c e does i t make that Albert is your husband? Husband— that’s a word for this world, and for this world it's a sin that I love you and would wrench you out of his arms into mine. A sin? Very v/ell then, and I punish myself for it. I have tasted this sin in all its divine rapture, I have sucked its balm and strength into my heart.
38 "Ich gehe voran..." I go ahead to my Father. To Him I will complain, and He will comfort me until you come, and I fly to meet you and enfold you and remain at your side in the sight of Infinite God in one eternal embrace.
39 "Mein G ott..." My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
40 "weil ich so..." I am so preoccupied with myself, and my heart is so tempestuous, I prefer to let others go their way—if only they would let me go minej
41 "Man erzahlt..." I have heard tell of a noble breed of stallion who, when they are overheated and run wild, instinctively bite open one of their veins to relieve themselves. I feel like that often. I would like to open the vein that would give me eternal freedom.
42 "mon humeur..." Spirited by temper, and erratic by nature. 2
43 "j'avois deja devore..." had already consumed c e n tu r ie s .
Passages from Rene'' are from the translation by Irving Putter, Atala et Rene'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, l95"27. 267
43 "un juene hom m e..." a young man in f a tu a te d with illusions, satisfied with nothing, with drawn from the burdens of society, and wrapped up in idle dreams.
43 "plein d'ardeur..." all alone and full of spirit on the stormy ocean of the world.
43 "Que sont..." what has become of those figures whose fame was so widespread? Time has taken a step and the face of the earth has been made over.
44 "Cependant..." However, I am so tired. There is nothing certain among the ancients, nothing beautiful among the moderns. The past and the present are two incomplete statues: one cor rupted with the debris of the ages, the other has not yet reached the perfection of the f u t u r e .
44 "Heureux sauvages..." Happy Indiansi ...Oh, why cannot I enjoy the peace which always goes with you.' 7/hile my fruitless wanderings led me through so many lands, you, sitting quietly under your oaks, let the days slip by without counting them. Your needs were your only guides and, far better than I, you have reached wisdom's goal through your play and your sleep—like children.
44-45 "Levez-vous..." Rise swiftly, coveted storms, coming to bear me off to the spaces of another l i f e .
45 "Je me figurais..." I imagined the unknown shores and distant climes for which they were bound—and I would have loved to be on their wings.
45 "j'ai toujours..." the religious life has always attracted me ... the time has come to heed heaven's call.
45_46 "...se trouve..." began to feel himself crushed by the burdens of his corruption and incapable of anything great or noble or just. 268
46 "Tantot nous..." Sometimes we strolled in silence harkening to the muffled rumbling of the autumn or the crackling of the dry leaves trailing sadly under our feet. In our innocent games we ran after the swallow in the meadows or the rainbow on the stomn-swept hills. At other times we would whisper poetry inspired in us by the spectacle of nature.
46 "On peut..." There is strength in our soul to sustain us in our own misfortune, but to become the involuntary cause of someone else's misfortune is completely unbearable.
47 "II vaut mieux..." It is better to resemble ordinary men a little more and be a little less m is e ra b le .
47 "...la solitude..." Solitude is bad for the man who does not live with God. It increases the soul's power while robbing it at the same time of every opportunity to find expression. Whoever has been endowed with talent must devote it to serving his fellow men, for if he does not make use of it, he is first punished by an inner misery, and sooner or later heaven visits on him a fearful retribution.
93 "Kit Eifer hab..." I've learnt a great deal, made books my drink and meat, But cannot rest until knowledge is complete. 3
94 "Statt der..." Instead of all that life can hold, of nature's free, God-given breath, I take to me the smoke and mould of skeletons and dust and death.
94 "Welch Schauspiel,.." An endless pageantJ —But a pageant still. A Show that mocks my touch or grasp or will. Where are the nipples, Nature's springs, Ah where the living source that feeds the universe? You flow, you give
^Passages from the first part of Faust are from the translation by Philip Wayne, Faust: Part One (Baltimore: Penguin, 1949); those from the second part are from the translation by Bayard Taylor, Faust: Part Two, ed. and rev. Stuart Atkins (London: Kacmillan, 1962). 269
to drink, mysterious nurse, And yet my soul is withered in despair.
95 "Zu diesem..." This step I take in cheerful resolution, Risk more than death, yea, dare my dissolution.
95 "Drum g e b ..." I send t h i s fello w who must goad and tease and toil to serve creation, though a d e v il.
95 "So werd ich..." My light shall lead him from his despairing. Does not the grower see in leafy days his sapling* s years of blossom and of bearing.
95 "Reisset von..." Do, from your prison, love sets you f r e e .
96 "Ein Teil von..." Part of a power that would alone work evil, but engenders good.
97 "...du sollst..." I ’ll show you arts and joys I 'll give you more than any mortal eye has seen b e fo re .
97 "Kannst du mich..." If ever flattering lies of yours can please and soothe my soul to self- sufficiency, and make me one of pleasure's devotees, then take my soul....
97 "du Speise..." the bread that satisfies never.
98 "Musst i c h . . . " When, from h o s t i l e m alice f le d , to solitude and wilderness I went instead—Then that I might not live alone, neglected, 'twas to the Devil I at last defected.
98 "Du horest ja..." Have you not heard?—I do not ask for joy ... my heart, from learning's tyran ny set free, Shall no more shun distress, but take its toll of all the hazards of humanity.... I'll sound the heights and depths that man can know, their every souls with mine entwined, I'll load my bosom with their weal and woe, and share with them the shipwreck of mankind.
99 "Neini Neini ..."Nayi Nay] that paragon of woman hood shall soon reward your gazing in the flesh. A dose like that within your guts, my boy, and every other wench is Helen of Troy. 270
99 "Sich hinzugeben..." Ah, love, wholly to yield one's self, to know deep bliss that has no ending, marked for eternity, so deep, this cannot endI
100 "0 war..." V/ould I had never been born!
100 "Des Lebens Pulse..." Life's pulses now with fresh new force awaken to greet the mild ethereal twilight o'er me. This night, 0 Earth1 thou also wert unshaken, And now thou breathest new and refreshed before me; So thou beginnst as joy to me is granted, in vigorous resolve here to restore me: to seek life's highest forms.
100 "Das Druben..." The other side weighs little on my mind. Lay first this world in ruins, shattered, blind! That done, the new may rise its place to fill.
101 "Jeder sonnt..." In sunshine will they walk abroad to keep the PLising of the Lord. For they themselves are resurrected from the hovels and oppressive rooms and ugly walls and garret glooms, and trades and guilds where they're subjected. From streets that stifle, crowds that crush, from the dark Church's cloistered hush, They all come tumbling to the light.
101 "Die Kirche..." The Church can swallow gold and lands and such, and never feel she has had too much; for only to the Church there ap pertains a good digestion for ill-gotten gains.
101 "Das ist ein..." A saying true of others too: a King for instance, or a Jew.
102 "Shau ich nicht..." Is not life teeming around the head and heart of you weaving eternal mysteries seen and unseen, even at your side? Oh, let them fill your heart, your generous heart, and, when you lose your being in that b l i s s , give i t what name you w i l l — your joy, love, heart, your God. For me, I have no name I give i t : f e e l i n g 's s u re ly a l l . Names are but noise and smoke, obscuring heavenly light.
103 "Ja! diesem Sinne..." Aye! wedded to this con cept like a wife, I find this wisdom's final form! He only earns his freedom and his life who takes them every day by stom. And so a 271
man, beset by dangers here, as child, man, old man, spends his manly year. Oh to see such activity, treading free ground with people that are free] Then could I bid the passing moment: 'Linger awhile, thou are so f a i r ! '
104 "Alles Vergangliche..." All that is transient but as symbol is sent; the unattainable here is event; the indescribable here it is done; the Eternal, in woman leaps upward and on.
244 "Man lasse sich..." One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is bora of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons... A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convic tions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength... 4
245 "Was i s t d e r . . . " What i s th e ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And j u s t so s h a ll men be to th e Superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. 5
245 "Gutes und Boses..." Unchanging good and evil does not exist: From out of themselves they must overcome themselves again and again.
245 "Der christliche..." The Christian conception of God—God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt con ceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types. God degenerated into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration
^Passages from the Antichrist are from the trans lation by Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vilcing Press, 19^4).
Passages from Thus Spake Zarathustra are from the translation by R. J. flollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1961). 272
and eternal Yes! God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against th e w ill to liv e ! God— th e form ula f o r every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond"! God—the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy! V ita
Janes Darrell V/ilson was born in Memphis, Tennessee on July 27, 1946. He was graduated from West Technical
High School of Cleveland, Ohio in 1964 and received his
B.A. degree from Baldwin-V/allace College of Berea, Ohio in 1968. Mr. Wilson received his I,I.A. degree in English from Louisiana State University in 1970, and during the
1970-1971 academic year he was a visiting student in
Comparative Literary Studies at the University of
Manchester in England. In June, 1970 he married Mary Ann
Tortorici of Bessemer, Alabama. Mr. Wilson was an ULEA
Fellow from 1968 to 1971, and is a member of Phi Kappa
Phi, Phi Sigma Tau, Lambda I c ua Tau and Omicron Delta
Kappa honor societies. He has been a Special Lecturer in English at Iouisiana State University in Baton Rouge since August, 1971, and in September, 1972 he will become an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia
State University in Atlanta.
273 EXAMINATION AND THESIS REPORT
Candidate: James Darrell Wilson
Major Field: English
Title of Thesis: Studies in Modes of Romantic Herbism with Special Reference to the Work of Mark Twain
Approved:
Major Professor and Chairman'
E X A M I N I N G C O M M I T T E E :
/ / M L e /
Date of Examination:
Mav 10. 1972