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S E P T E M B E R 1 8 8 3
Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain
Of the first fifteen chapters of Mr. Clemens's book, twelve
are reprinted from The Atlantic; but they are so full of entertaining and instructive
matter that they will repay a second reading. In the three introductory ones
which precede these, the physical character of the river is sketched, and brief
reference is made to the early travelers and explorers of the stream, -- De
Soto, Marquette, and La Salle; these latter belonging to the epoch of what Mr.
Clemens quaintly calls "historical history," as distinguished from that other
unconventional history, which he does not define, but certainly embodies in the
most graphic form. There are some good touches in this opening portion; as
where the author refers to "Louis XIV., of inflated memory," and, speaking of
indifference which attended the discovery of the Mississippi, remarks,
"Apparently, nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was
curious about it; so, for a century and a half, the Mississippi remained out of
the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a
river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it,
or even take any particular notice of it." We are also presented with a chapter
from an unpublished work by the writer, detailing the adventures of a
Southwestern boy a quarter of a century ago, which places before us in vivid
colors the rough, hilarious, swaggering, fighting, superstitious ways of the
bygone raftsmen. Rude, sturdy, unflinching, and raw though the picture is, it
is likely to stand a long while as a wonderful transcript from nature, and as a
memorial of the phase of existence which is describes that will not easily be
surpassed in the future. The chapter on Racing Days is perhaps a little
disappointing, although suggestive. Then there comes a short autobiographic
summary of Mr. Clemen's life after he had ceased to be a pilot and several
other things, and until he became a New Englander; followed by an account of
the trip which he made down and up the Mississippi, twenty-one years from the
time when he last sailed upon it in charge of a steamer's course. At St. Louis
he found a steamer which was to stop at the old French settlements sixty miles
below St. Louis. "She was a venerable rack-heap, and a fraud to boot; for she
was playing herself for personal property, whereas the good honest dirt was so
thickly caked over her that she was righteously taxable as real estate. There
are places in New England where her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and
fifty dollars an acre. The soil on her forecastle was quite good; the new crop
of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places. The
companion-way was of a dry, sandy character, and would have been well suited
for grapes, with a southern exposure and a little subsoiling. The soil of the
boiler-deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes." He
finally concluded not to take this boat, but another, called the Gold Dust,
upon which he was subsequently anxious to make the return trip from New
Orleans; but luckily he was prevented by circumstances from doing so, for the
Gold Dust was blown up on her way back to St. Louis, during the voyage he had
intended making with her. The material offered by observations on the journey
is various beyond enumeration, and much of it is extremely amusing. Hoaxes and
exaggerations palmed off by pilots and other natives along the way upon
supposed ignorant strangers; stories of gamblers and obsolete robbers; glimpses
of character and manners; descriptions of scenery and places; statistics of
trade; Indian legends; extracts from the comments of foreign travelers, -- all
these occur, interspersed with two or three stories of either humorous or
tragic import, or of both together. One of the tales thus interpolated --
Ritter's Narrative -- is not only complicated and ingenious in plot, but bears
witness also to its author's startling power of weird imagination; and a
perhaps still more remarkable thing about it is the manner in which at last it
is given a sudden turn, which carries the reader away from one of the most
ghastly situations imaginable with a sensation of amusement and of humorous
surprise. At the same time, the story, with consummate skill, is made tributary
to the main current of the book, and of the river with which it deals. Mr.
Clemens is never tired of noting the extraordinary changes which take place in
the course of the Mississippi and the conformation of its banks; the appearance
and disappearance of islands; the sudden action of the mighty flood in making
new "cut-offs," which play havoc with state boundary-lines, and playfully
transfer towns from one riverbank to the other. The general reader stands in
some peril of finding these observations wearisome; but just as he is on the
brink of fatigue, Mr. Clemens enlivens him with a dry remark like this: "We
dashed along without anxiety; for the hidden rock which used to lie right in
the way has moved up stream a long distance out of the channel; or rather,
about one county has gone into the river from the Missouri point, and the Cairo
point has 'made down,' and added to its long tongue of territory
correspondingly. The Mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never
tumbles one man's farm overboard without building another farm just like it for
that man's neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings." The peculiarities of local
speech occasionally draw down severe condemnation from the author, who appears
to be sharply on the lookout for offenses against grammar, -- something that
savors of ingratitude in one who has profited so well by the colloquial
crudities upon which he now turns. In considering the cemetery at New Orleans,
which is kept in very fine order, "If those people down there," at the levee or
in the business streets, says Mr. Clemens, "would live as neatly while they are
alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it."
Of the memorial wreaths: "The immortelle requires no attention; you just hang
it up, and there you are. Just leave it alone; it will take care of your grief
for you, and keep it in mind better than you can." He declares himself in favor
of cremation, and considers unjustifiable the old form of burial, which
preserves disease germs to such an extent that even "a dead saint enters upon a
century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his
corpse."All this in keeping with the grimness which is a constituent of the
author's humor. There is a good deal of grimness and soberness in the book,
underlying he surface of fun and incident and panoramic diversity of scene.
There is also a good deal of solid sense and of information. What the future
investigation -- if people of the twentieth century have any time left for
investigating the past -- will conclude concerning the life depicted in these
pages we can conjecture only from our own impression; which is that the
Mississippi has developed prosperity and misery in about even measure, and that
the type of character most frequent along the line of its flow has combined
with great hardiness and practical dexterity a Greek love of skillful lying and
a peculiarly American recklessness of personal safety. Meanwhile we are very
sure that Mr. Clemens has given us the most thorough and racy report of the
whole phenomenon which has yet been forthcoming, and that much more
significance is contained in it than we are able to concentrate in these few
words.
The Atlantic Monthly,September 1883
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