It was my
privilege to know the late
Samuel L. Clemens for a number of years. The first time I met him was
at his home in Hartford. Later I met him several times at his home in
New York City and at the Lotus Club. It may be I became attached to
Mr. Clemens all the more strongly because both of us were born in the
South. He had the Southern temperament, and most that he has written
has the flavor of the South in it. His interest in the Negro race is
perhaps expressed best in one of his most delightful stories,
"Huckleberry Finn." In this story, which contains many
pictures of Southern life as it was fifty or sixty years ago, there is
a poor, ignorant Negro boy who accompanies the heroes of the story,
Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, on a long journey down the
Mississippi on a raft.
It is possible the ordinary reader of this story has
been so absorbed in the adventures of the two white boys that he did
not think much about the part that "Jim" -- which was, as I
remember, the name of the colored boy -- played in all these
adventures. I do not believe any one can read this story closely,
however, without becoming aware of the deep sympathy of the author in
"Jim." In fact, before one gets through with the book, one
cannot fail to observe that in some way or other the author, without
making any comment and without going out of his way, has somehow
succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for
"Jim," in spite of the ignorance he displays. I cannot help
feeling that in this character Mark Twain has, perhaps unconsciously,
exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the Negro people.
My contact with him showed that Mr. Clemens had a kind
and generous heart. I think I have never known him to be so stirred up
on any one question as he was on that of the cruel treatment of the
natives in the Congo Free State. In his letter
to Leopold, the late King of the Belgians, in his own inimitable
way he did a service in calling to the attention of the world the
cruelties practiced upon the black natives of the Congo that had
far-reaching results. I saw him several times in connection with his
efforts to bring about reforms in the Congo Free State, and he never
seemed to tire of talking on the subject and planning for better
conditions.
As a literary man he was rare and unique, and I
believe that his success in literature rests largely upon the fact
that he came from among the common people. Practically all that he
wrote had an interest for the commonest man and woman. In a word, he
succeeded in literature as few men in any age have succeeded, because
he stuck close to nature and to the common people, and in doing so he
disregarded in a large degree many of the ordinary rules of rhetoric
which often serve merely to cramp and make writers unnatural and
uninteresting.
Few, if any, persons born in the South have shown in
their achievements what it is possible for one individual to
accomplish to the extent that Mr. Clemens has. Surrounded in his early
childhood by few opportunities for culture or conditions that tended
to give him high ideals, he continued to grow in popular estimation
and to exert a wholesome influence upon the public to the day of his
death.
The late Mr. H. H. Rogers, who was, perhaps, closer to
Mr. Clemens than any one else, said to me at one time that Mr. Clemens
often seemed irritated because people were not disposed to take him
seriously; because people generally take most that he said and wrote
as a mere jest. It was this fact to which he referred, I have no
doubt, when at a public meeting in the interest of Tuskegee at
Carnegie Hall a few years ago, he referred to himself in a humorous
vein as a moralist, saying that all his life he had been going about
trying to correct the morals of the people about him. As an
illustration of the deep earnestness of his nature, I may mention the
fact that Mr. Rogers told me that at one time Mr. Clemens was
seriously planning to write a life of Christ, and that his friends had
hard work to persuade him not to do it for fear that such a life might
prove a failure or would be misunderstood.
As to Mark Twain's successor, he can have none. No
more can such a man as Mark Twain have a successor than could Phillips
Brooks or Henry Ward Beecher. Other men may do equally interesting
work in a different manner, but Mark Twain, in my opinion, will always
stand out as an unique personality, the results of whose work and
influence will be more and more manifest as the years pass by.
Booker T. Washington.
