Tom Hubbard ::: MARK TWAIN AND SCOTLAND

Towards the end of 1873, the local newspaper of Hartford, Connecticut, printed transatlantic news of one of its best-known citizens. Mark Twain had been addressing a gathering of expatriate Scots, members of the St Andrews Society, in the Salutation Tavern, London, England:

I feel singularly at home in this Scotch society. I have spent so much time in Scotland that everything connected with Scotland is familiar to me. Last summer I passed five weeks in that magnificent city of Edinburgh, resting. I needed rest, and I did rest. I did not know anybody. I did not take any letters of introduction at all. I simply restedand enjoyed myself. From my experience of the Scotch everything belonging to them is familiar, the language, the peculiarities of expression, even the technical things that are national, are simple household words with me. I rememberwhen in Edinburgh I was nearly always taken for a Scotchman.Oh, yes! I had my clothes some part colored tartan, and I rather enjoyed being taken for a Scotchman. I stuck a big feather in my cap, too, and the people would follow me for miles. They thought I was a Highlander, and some of the bestjudges in Scotland said they had never seen a Highland costume like mine. What’s more, one of those judges fined mefor wearing it—out of mere envy, I suppose. 1

One would expect Mark Twain, of all people, to take advantage of the comic possibilities of culture clash. However, his view of Scotland, and Scotland’s view of him, was not always as cozy as an evening of cigars and whisky. Sure, one of his warmest literary friendships was with a Scotsman, and what follows turns very much on that relationship. So let’s invoke Robert Louis Stevenson right at the start. This isn’t one of the Scotsman’s best-known poems, nor indeed is it one of his best. But it sets our scene.

1 ‘Mark Twain on Scotland’, Hartford Courant (20 December 1873), 2, reprinted in Mark Twain Speaking. Ed. by Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976, repr. 2006), 82.

Some like drink In a pint pot, Some like to think; Some not.

Strong Dutch Cheese, Old Kentucky Rye, Some like these; Not I.

Some like Poe And others like Scott, Some like Mrs. Stowe; Some not.

Some like to laugh, Some like to cry. Some like chaff; Not I.2

Of some in Scotland who have not liked Mrs Stowe, I’ll have something to say in passing; of one who didn’t like Scott – Sir Walter Scott – I have rather more to say.

Mark Twain’s detestation of the novels of Sir Walter Scott is hismost famous response to the matter of Scotland. The key book by Twain here is Life on the Mississippi. After acknowledging the more benign achievements of the French Revolution and the successor régime of Napoleon, praising their ‘great and permanent services to liberty, humanity and progress’, Twain launches into this:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress,and even

2 Robert Louis Stevenson, Poems (Tusitala Edition, v. 22) (London: Heinemann, 1924), 181.

turns it back; sets the world in love with dreamsand phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded forms of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, shamgauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long- vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived a good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; butin our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.3

He begins his next paragraph with this breathtaking claim: ‘Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in a great measure responsiblefor the war.’ (We have no record of any sense of exoneration felt by Twain’s Hartford neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe: back in1862, following the aftermath of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Abraham Lincoln had greeted her as ‘the little woman who wrote the book that started the great war’.4)

Twain’s point is that Walter Scott’s medieval fantasies were lapped up by Southern readers and used to legitimize a feudal, slave-owning ideology that was at odds with the progressive, republican tendencies of Twain’s adopted North.

3 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. Ed. with an introduction by John Seelye (The World’s Classics) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 303-304.4 Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: a Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), vii.

He went further. Twain also attacked Scott on literary and artistic grounds, and enjoyed jousting – if that’s the right word– with his friend the academic literary critic Brander Matthews, who was an admirer of the Wizard of the North, as Walter Scott was often called by those who liked his books. Twain challenges Matthews to find in Scott ‘passages which burn with real fire – not punk, fox-fire, make-believe.’ A reading of Scott’s novels Rob Roy and Guy Mannering provokes this outburst: ‘ Lord, it’s all so juvenile, so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax figures and skeletons and specters. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk-and-water humbugs.’5 In A Connecticut Yankee he has Hank Morgan lay into Scott for the stiltedness of the speech of his medieval characters – Hank remarks that in reality these knights, damsels etc. would bea-cussin and a-swearin and telling the filthiest of stories. 6 (It’s deliciously ironic that, half a century earlier, Charles Dickens had addressed a Hartford audience on the greatness of Scott, and how the lack of international copyright law had deprived him – and, by implication, Dickens himself – of what would have been most welcome American royalties.7)

To be sure, there followed a certain mellowing in Twain’s attitude, for he did admire Scott’s novel Quentin Durward, finding in that work an actual critique of the foul realities of the MiddleAges. It’s recorded, too, that Twain purchased two sets of the twelve-volume edition of Scott’s thirty-two Waverley novels, one for his own library, and another one as a gift to his in-laws. Why not, indeed - if you’re a maniacal collector of books, you’llstuff your shelves even with the works of writers you don’t really care much for. Moreover, Walter Scott had famously gone bust and had to write furiously in order to pay off his debts

5 Quoted in Sydney J. Krause, Mark Twain as Critic (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1967), 148-189 (151, 152 and passim). See also Maurice Hewlett, ‘Mark on Sir Walter’, The Sewanee Review, 29:2 (April 1921), 130-133.6 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971),61-62, 153.7 Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. Revised and abridged (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 210.

(see the Dickens comment above); Mark Twain could feel a certain sympathy for fellow-writers in that position.

However, as happens with Mark Twain, any refinement of attitude towards this or that fails to overcome the strength of the original vituperations. (His view of American Indians is a case in point.) Plus: it’s curious that another American writer, one very different from Mark Twain, had written about Walter Scott interms which anticipate Twain’s objection to the stuffy artificialities of the Scottish writer. Here is a 21-year-old Henry James, in what is believed to be his very first published book review. James is much kinder to Scott than Twain could normally bring himself to be, but his strictures are definitely there, expressed in his habitually feline manner – purr, claw, then purr again, then claw. Here’s Henry James :

The Waverley characters [of Walter Scott] were all instinct with something of the poetic fire. To our present taste [in 1864] many of them seem little better than lay-figures. [A lay figure is a mannequin, a dummy. - TH] But there are many kinds of lay-figures. A person who goes from the workshop of a carver of figure-heads for ships to an exhibition of wax-work, will find in the latter the very reflection of nature. And even when occasionally the waxen visages are somewhat inexpressive, he can console himself with the sight of unmistakable velvet and tartan. Scott went to his prose task with essentially the same spirit which he had broughtto the

composition of his poems. Between these two departments of his work the difference is very small. Portions of “Marmion” [a poem] are very good prose; portions of “Old Mortality” [a novel] are tolerable poetry.8

Miaow!

Twain’s dismissal of Scott’s historical fiction could co-exist with an attraction to Scotland’s history and accumulated culture.Twain, the innocent abroad, may have lacked reverence for Europe’s monuments but that didn’t mean that he lacked respect. Let me invoke Henry James again, in his novel The American of 1877. James’s protagonist here is Christopher Newman, an innocentabroad, who has made his considerable pile from the sale of leather and washtubs. (There’s no getting away from the nagging question: if he’s so rich, can he really be that much of an ‘innocent’, even when he’s trying to negotiate his way through that puzzling place ‘Europe’?) Anyway, he woos an aristocratic French lady and it all comes to naught due to her family’s intrigues - Europeanly feiine intrigues – against the match.

While he’s ‘doing’ Europe, Newman visits the Grande Place in Brussels, that magnificently preserved Gothic square, and gazes admiringly at the tower of the Hôtel de Ville, wondering (innocently?) ‘whether it would not be possible to “get up” something like it in San Francisco.’9

Well, Mark Twain admired an historic Scottish mantelpiece from Ayton Castle so much that he didn’t just ‘get up’ an imitation for his Hartford home – he had the real thing shipped over. As for his most important literary encounters with Scotland, he

8 Henry James, ‘Fiction and Sir Walter Scott’, first published as a book review in The North American Review, 99 (October 1864), 580-587, and reprinted in Henry James, Notes and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Dunster House, 1921), 1-15 (11-12).9 Henry James, The American (New York: Dell, 1960), 77.

didn’t have to have a living Scottish writer specially shipped over– that living Scottish writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, had actually shipped himself over. The two men met in New York on a sunny day of 1888, sat on a bench together, chatted and smoked. In a letter to Twain some five years later, Stevenson reminisced on that ‘ very pleasant afternoon we spent together in WashingtonSquare among the nursemaids like a couple of characters out of a story by Henry James.’10 For his part, this is how Twain recordedthe occasion: ‘He [Stevenson] was most scantily furnished with flesh, his clothes seemed to fall into billows as if there might be nothing inside but the frame for a sculptor’s statue. His longface and lank hair and dark complexion and musing and melancholy expression seemed to fit these details justly and harmoniously, and the altogether of it seemed especially planned to gather the rays of your observation and focalize them upon Stevenson’s special distinction and commanding feature, his splendid eyes. They burned with a smouldering rich fire under the penthouse of his brows, and they made him beautiful.’11

Twain and Stevenson formed a kind of two-man mutual admiration society, scratching each others’ backs, savoring each others’ books. Earlier that year, 1888, Stevenson had written to Twain tosay that, on his way south from Saranac Lake, he might well call in at Hartford ‘just to behold Huckleberry’s grandfather’.12 (TheWashington Square bench was the substitute for the Connecticut visit that never happened.) Twain replied to thank Stevenson for writing Kidnapped and Treasure Island and for liking Huckleberry Finn. The critic John Seelye has pointed to a possible influence of Tom Sawyer on Treasure Island. There’s the scene in Stevenson’s novelwhere young Jim Hawkins squats within the ship’s apple-barrel andoverhears Long John Silver’s dastardly plans for a mutiny. Seelye10 Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to Mark Twain [16 April 1893], in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, v. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 57.11 Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: the Chapters from The North American Review. With an introduction and notes by Michael J. Kiskis (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 18.12 Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to Mark Twain [c. April 1888], in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Booth and Mehew, v. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 162.

suggests that this may owe much to ‘the moment when Tom and Huck,hiding upstairs in the haunted house, witness Injun Joe’s discovery of the treasure the two boys have been seeking, and arevery nearly discovered by Joe’s accomplice.’13

But let me focus rather on Stevenson’s influence on Twain. Both writers were deeply obsessed with dualities – in human nature, innature generally. Stevenson’s autobiographical fragment, where herecalls his childhood explorations of his native Edinburgh in thecompany of his staunchly Calvinistic nurse, includes this startling, haunting sentence: ‘I seem to have born with a sentiment of something moving in things, of an infinite attraction and horror coupled.’14 Could that not apply equally tothe sensibility of Mark Twain? Stevenson’s most celebrated embodiment of that ‘attraction and horror coupled’ is his short novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of 1886, in which Dr Jekyll, a seemingly respectable, upright physician and pillar of the community decides to give free rein to his more reprehensibleinstincts by performing a chemical operation on himself: by meansof a drug, creating another person within his body, the gruesome,ape-like Mr Hyde. And so, Hyde can commit villainous acts while Dr Jekyll as Dr Jekyll can remain untainted … or so Dr Jekyll assumes …

13 John Seelye, Introduction to Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York:Penguin, 1999), xiii-xiv. Leland Krauth’s Mark Twain & Company: Six Literary Relations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 204, offers a useful summary of comparisons by critics (especially Edwin M. Eigner) of the young protagonists of Huckleberry Finn and Stevenson’s Kidnapped: ‘[the] two boys are newly orphaned; their lives are threatened by greedy men; both are kidnapped by relatives; both fake their deaths; both have interludes on islands; both then journey with a man who is a fugitive from justice; both undergo extensive wanderings through the heart of a country; and both struggle with their conscience to accept their outcast companions, a slave in one case, a defeated rebel in the other.’ Professor Krauth goes on to discuss the contrasts between Huck and the young man of Kidnapped, David Balfour. His chapter on Twain and Stevenson is aninvaluable account of the adventure story genre as practised by both writers, and of the various rites of initiation undergone by Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins and David Balfour.14 Robert Louis Stevenson, autobiographical fragment, quoted in Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. 12th edition, abridged (London: Methuen, 1913), 41.

For his part, Mark Twain made a remark that reads like a summing-up of Stevenson’s tale: ‘Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.’15 Moreover, in his posthumously-published Notebook, Twain offers a brief but valuable analysis of Jekyll and Hyde by way of commenting on his own short story, ‘The Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut’:

That was an attempt to account for our seeming duality – the presence in us of another person; not a slave of ours, but free and independent, and with a character distinctly its own. I made my conscience that other person and it came before me in the form of a malignant dwarf and told me plain things about myself and shamed me and scoffed at me and derided me. This creature was so much its own master that it would leave the premises – leave its post – forsake its duties – andgo off on a spree with other irresponsible consciences – and discuss their masters (no – their slaves).

He felt, though, that Stevenson’s story ‘was nearer the thing’. However, that, too, didn’t quite solve the problem.

J. and H. were the dual persons in one body, quite distinct in nature and character and presumably each with a conscience of its own. Nearer, yes, but not near enough. Or, to put it differently, a truth and a falsity harnessed together; the falsity

15 Mark Twain, Following the Equator (Hartford: The American Publishing Company, 1897), 654.

being the ability of the one person to step into the other person’s place, at will.16

He criticizes his own story for making his conscience another person, when the conscience was actually part of himself, and wasmoreover merely a machine. Jekyll and Hyde was also wrong, though, because it proposed that the two persons co-existing within one man could command each other. No: Twain argues that these two persons aren’t aware of each other’s existence, and can’t therefore communicate with each other.

Twain prefers to make a distinction between his waking self and his dream self, and in this respect he’s closer to the twentieth century insights of thinkers on psychology such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, though in this respect Stevenson also anticipates these gentlemen. Both Twain and Stevenson used dreams in their fiction, and there’s been some debate on the origin of Jekyll and Hyde in Stevenson’s slumbering self – ‘I have been dreaming a fine bogey tale’, he announced to his wife, though in the actual writing of the story, it developed into a great deal more than just a raw dream. Even so, Stevenson wrote an essay called ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ (1888; collected in his Across the Plains, 1892), where he ascribed his creative endeavors at least partly to his ‘Brownies’ as he called them, those little people who would invade his unconscious being at night and whose productions he could refine further when he was awake and at his desk. One of Twain’s fugitive manuscripts bore the title ‘Which Was the Dream?’, and indeed he posed just that intriguing question in a letter of 1893 to his sister-in-law Susan Crane:

I dreamed I was born and grew up and was a pilot on the Mississippi and a miner and a journalist in Nevada and a pilgrim in the Quaker City, and had a wife and children […] 16 Mark Twain’s Notebook. Prepared […] by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper, 1935), 348-9.

– and this dream goes on and on and sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is? But there is no way to tell, for if one applies tests they would be part of the dream, too, and so would simply aid the deceit. I wish I knew whether it is a dream or real.17

So: you and I aren’t really here. I’m not really giving this lecture, you’re not really listening to it, and any moment now we’ll all wake up.

It’s claimed that Mark Twain’s last words included incoherent babbling about Jekyll and Hyde. 18 Could there have been an element in Twain’s childhood that connected culturally with that of Stevenson? According to L.T. Dickinson, we do indeed need to look at Twain’s childhood:

Mark Twain grew up in a land of sharp contrasts. Consider his upbringing in the Presbyterian Church. If there were fine points in its teaching, there were none in its basic position: that there are two kinds of people, the saved and the damned. The future lot of the former was so blissful, that of the damned so unspeakably miserable, that one would bend every effort, and beyond that would, quite literally, hope and pray, to be included in God’s elect. For

17 Mark Twain’s Letters. Arranged […] by Albert Bigelow Paine. 2 v. (New York: Harper, 1917), v.2, 581.18 Jerry Griswold, Introduction to Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper (New York: Penguin, 1997), xi.

there was no half-way house and no purgatory in the Calvinist scheme. Judgment Day would recognize no gradations; divine judgment would assign a soul to one of two groups only, the sheep or the goats, with a future prospect of Heaven or Hell. It has often been remarked that the strong moral sense, the lifelong concern with Satan, and the hyperactive conscience that were so much a part of Mark Twain stemmed from his early grounding in Calvinistic doctrine. It seems likely, too, that thisdoctrine, with its sharp and essential demarcation between salvation and perdition, and between the natural and the regenerate man, contributed to the development of Clemens’ dichotomous outlook. 19

Stevenson, too, had grown up in a Presbyterian household, though it was his nurse, Alison Cunningham, who grounded him in a hardline Scottish Calvinist culture. In evolving the moral complexities of Jekyll and Hyde and other works, not least by challenging us to consider that we often find evil people attractive and good people boring, Stevenson went beyond the simplistic, rigid dichotomies of Calvinism. Twain, too, in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), creates a universe where there are no black and white answers (in both the racial and moral senses), noclosure, only more increasingly disturbing questions. Man’s free will was denied by a determinism that evolved from a Calvinistic

19 Leon T. Dickinson, ‘Mark the Twain: the Double Vision of Samuel Clemens’, Revue des langues vivantes / Tijdschrift voor levende talen. U.S. Bicentennial issue (1976), 81-91 (84). In Chapter 18 of his book, Huck Finn, taken to church, hears a sermon in which (as he picks it up) the doctrine of ‘preforeordinestation’ is being expounded.

context towards one that was more Darwinian and based on the survival of the fittest - or more accurately, the survival of theluckiest and / or the most ruthless. ‘Circumstances make man’, wrote Twain in his Notebook, ‘not man circumstances.’ I think Stevenson and Twain, had they been aware of it, would have been amused by a little rhyme that satirizes Calvinism: We are the precious chosen few, Let all the rest be damned: There’s only room for one or two – We can’t have heaven crammed.

For both writers, that in essence was the starting point for their long labyrinthine journeys into the Great Dark. 20

20 Mark Twain’s Notebook, 379. Twain either expressed his interest in other Scottish writers or they expressed an interest in him. Of his responses to Dr John Brown and Marjorie Fleming (‘Pet Marjorie’), more later. Special mention can be made here of the Scots George MacDonald, Andrew Lang and J.M. Barrie. As far as Twain’s relations with these writers is concerned, the first-named is the most important. Twain’s rapport with MacDonald (1824-1905) developed sofar as to prompt him to declare that were it not for existing work pressures, he would be glad to collaborate with MacDonald on ‘the Great Scottish-Americannovel […] each doing his full half’. Granted, this may not have been more thanwarm-hearted (and tongue-in-cheek) rhetoric, but Twain’s reading of MacDonald’s novel Sir Gibbie (1879) may have had more serious consequences. In her article, ‘Mark Twain & George MacDonald: the Salty and the Sweet’, (http://www.george-macdonald.com/resources/mark_twain.html, accessed on 28 February 2011), Kathryn Lindskoog makes a convincing case for the possible influence of Sir Gibbie on Huckleberry Finn. Gibbie is a street-kid in a north-eastern Scottish city (Aberdeen, presumably); his father is an alcoholic, but he befriends a black sailor, and comes to the aid of a young lady in distress.Sir Gibbie deploys the north-east dialect of the Scots language, anticipating Huckleberry Finn’s use of varieties of American English.’Both Sir Gibbie and Huckleberry Finn’, writes Ms Lindskoog, ‘explore questions of ethics and truth through the life of an unusually bright and unusually unfortunate boy. Both are set in the colourful region where the author spent his boyhood. Both were written for children as well as adults. And they have at least twenty plot elements [which she goes on to itemize] in common.’

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a somewhat effete Anglo-Scottish product of St Andrews and Oxford Universities, but he made indispensable contributions tothe study of mythology and folklore. On a personal level, he warmed to Twain, but his views of the latter’s work are predictably conventional, on a par withthose of other Scottish and English critics of the day. Lang makes prim

Twain and Stevenson had much else in common. Their work draws on the folk traditions of their respective countries: in Stevenson’scase, there are echoes of the border ballads and the grim legendsof warlocks, bogles and other suchlike ghosts and devils; Twain’sfirst literary breakthrough, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ owed everything to the tall tales of the South-west. Those of us who write in the Scots language should give thanks daily to the shades of both writers, who proudly asserted the artistic value of non-standard modes of speech. Stevenson’s prose in Scots is to my mind superior to his poetry in that language: his short stories ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Tale of Tod Lapraik’ would lose all their force if they were translated into English. The speech of Huck Finn, the poor white Southern boy, and of African-American Jim, are the necessary rejoinder to the genteel evasions of the North-east. Twain and Stevenson valued authenticity, but on one occasion Twain gently chided his friend for not getting America quite right. He was referring to Stevenson’s novel The Wrecker of 1892, which is set in San Francisco and in the fictitious state of Muskegon. According to the Australian reporter who was interviewing Twain, our man called Stevenson ‘a great, a very great writer’ but went on to

denunciations of ‘profanities’ and ‘sins against good taste’. However, his comment ‘He’ll have a [Connecticut] Yankee in the Trojan war next’ is not altogether unfunny, and his statement that he had put aside Kenilworth to read Huckleberry Finn would have pleased the Scott-hating Twain. There was more than a hint of rivalry on Lang’s part when both writers were bringing out novels based on the life of Joan of Arc. Lang’s was A Monk of Fife (1896); Twain’s was Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (also 1896); neither work was worth such competitive angst. (See Andrew Lang, ‘The Art of Mark Twain’, Illustrated London News, 98 [February 14, 1891], 222, reprinted in Huck Finn Among the Critics: a Centennial Selection 1884-1984. Ed. M. Thomas Inge [Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, Division for the Study of the United States, 1984], 37-41;Friends Over the Ocean: Andrew Lang’s American Correspondents 1881-1912. Ed. Marysa Demoor [Gent: Uitgeverij Universa, 1989], 62, 103, 127-130.)

Twain read, in quick succession, The Little Minister (1891) and A Window in Thrums (1889) by J.M. Barrie (1860-1937); as someone who had found his own material in American backwaters, it’s possible that Twain relished Barrie’s depictions of Scottish small-town life. Circumstances deprived Twain and Barrie of those occasions for conversation that would have deepened an alreadypromising friendship (see Howard G. Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull: the British Connection [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970], 206.)

assert that ‘a man often oversteps the limits of probability in describing national characteristics, and yet somehow his exaggerated pictures are accepted by sensible people of other countries who don’t know that too often these pictures have no more solid basis than that the man who draws them knows a little about the characteristics of the people he has described.’ 21 (Twain was far harsher on Bret Harte as regards failures in authenticity: ‘I tell you’, he said to George Washington Cable, ‘when Harte tried to write frontier dialect it was idiocy … Why, he could have taken it to any miner and had it remedied; but he did not.’ 22 When Henry James asked Twain if he had ever met BretHarte, Twain replied, ‘Yes, I know the son of a bitch’ 23 – perhaps the only time Henry James’s ears were ever sullied by that expression.)

It has to be said that there are far more serious instances of where the representative of one culture has blundered into another and got it disastrously wrong. Twain’s neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had visited Scotland, went sightseeing, brought back a nice picture of Aberdeen’s Brig or Bridge of Balgownie which you can see in her Nook Farm home. But she also attempted to make excuses for her friend the Duchess of Sutherland, one of the nastier landowners in the Highlands. This was the time of theClearances, evictions, forced emigrations, and the Anglo-Scottishestablishment’s contempt for the language and culture of the Gaels – the Celtic folk - who remained. Stowe attracted opprobrium in both Scotland and America for her stance. She had written patronizingly of ‘the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilization’. 24 It’s as obnoxious in its way as Twain’s

21 [Louis Becke ?] ‘Mark Twain: a Talk About His Books’, Evening News (Sydney), supplement (September 21, 1895), 3, reprinted in Mark Twain: the Complete Interviews.Ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Tuscalosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 213-215 (215).22 Quoted in Arlin Turner, Mark Twain [and] G.W. Cable: the Record of a Literary Friendship (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), 79.23 Quoted in Gary Scharnhorst, ‘The Bret Harte-Mark Twain Feud: an Inside Narrative’, Mark Twain Journal, 31:1 (Spring 1993), 29-32 (29). 24 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreigh Lands, 2 v. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1854), v. 1, 313. See also George Shepperson, ‘Harriet

attitude to the American Indians (though later in life he made a sort of recantation of that). Both Twain and Stevenson could seriously misjudge the struggles of peoples of whom they knew little – Stevenson’s blind spot was Ireland – but in general, andespecially towards the end of their careers, they were both outspoken in their denunciations of colonialism and imperialism: witness Twain on Belgium’s King Léopold in the Congo, and on the US in the Philippines, and Stevenson on the meddling of the GreatPowers in the affairs of the South Pacific islands.

Apart from Stevenson, who was a fan of Twain, how did the Scots first take to the work of the American? Did they ‘get it right’? Well, there was a favorable review of The Gilded Age in the Edinburgh paper, The Scotsman, in the issue for January 9, 1874, not all that long after the Clemens family had been staying in Edinburgh. The reviewer praised Twain’s ‘quick, quaint, dry humour, very considerable powers of grave and even poetic description, a penetrating good sense, and an abhorrence of all shams and hypocrisy, especially of those most prevalent among hisown countrymen’. 25 Interesting that a Scotsman praises Twain’s ‘dry humour’ – a quality usually associated with us Scots. However, later Scottish responses to Twain were at best lukewarm and at worst lacking in perceptiveness; in sum, they were pretty feeble. Reviewers in the Scottish periodicals 26 were at one withthe English ones in denouncing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as vulgar and as a come-down after the heights of Huckleberry Finn, not to mention all these cozily funny stories which he used to tell – as if America should always be as quaintly picturesque to the Scots and Brits as Scotland was supposed to be to the Americans. It didn’t occur to the Scottish and English press thatTwain’s satire in A Connecticut Yankee was double-edged: it was

Beecher Stowe and Scotland, 1852-3’, Scottish Historical Review, 32:113 (April 1953),40-46.25 Quoted in Mark Twain’s Letters, v. 5, 1872-1873 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 464.26 For example, the unsigned review [by W.E. Henley ?] in the Scots Observer (January 18, 1890), reprinted in Mark Twain: the Critical Heritage. Ed. Frederick Anders (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 164-166, and the unsigned article [also by Henley ?], ‘Mark Twain’ in the same periodical (September 20, 1890).

directed at nineteenth-century republican America as much as to sixth-century monarchical Britain.

Somewhat more considered Scottish responses to Twain’s writing came from the academic John Nichol and the miscellaneous writer Robert Ford. Nichol was Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow and one of the first academics across the pond to take American literature seriously, so much so that his book American Literature: an Historical Sketch, 1620-1880, first published in 1882, was considered a pioneering work on both sides of the Atlantic. 27 Note that date: 1882, so Nichol is obviously writingbefore the appearance of Twain’s ‘big’ novels such as Huck Finn, Connecticut Yankee, and Pudd’nhead Wilson. His less-than-enthusiastic judgment on Twain must be placed within that context. He begins his assessment, stuffily enough, by declaring that Twain ‘has done perhaps more than any other living writer to lower the literary tone of English-speaking people.’ However, Nichol then goes on to make useful comments on Twain’s deployment of the dead-pan and the faux-naïf : ‘The most conspicuous intellectual trait of Mr. Clemens seems to me an almost preternatural shrewdness, thinly veiled under an assumption of simplicity. […] One of [his] most successful tricks is to say exactly the opposite of what he means; another is an assumption of modesty, and habit of pretending to laugh at himself.’ 28 Robert Ford, in his book American Humourists of 1897, is more enthusiastic than sardonic in his application of the word ‘intellectual’ to Twain. In comparison to Artemus Ward, Ford finds Twain to be ‘far and away the more accomplished man of letters, having a wider sweep of mental vision […]’ 29 By this juxtaposition of the lightweightArtemus Ward with Mark Twain, Ford in effect is praising the latter more faintly than he realizes.

27 In Scotland it was published by A. & C. Black of Edinburgh. For further discussion of Nichol on American literature, see Andrew Hook, From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History (Phantassie, East Lothian, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 218 ff.28 Nichol, op.cit., 426-427.29 Robert Ford, American Humourists, Recent and Living (Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1897), 32-33.

My title is ‘Mark Twain and Scotland’, not ‘Mark Twain in Scotland’; I’m not so concerned with Twain’s travels in my country, though I will pick up on this a little towards the end. My interest is with Twain’s notions of Scottish people rather thanof Scottish topography, and indeed there are a few curious specimens of my race who flicker here and there through his writings. In Chapter 62 of the travel book Following the Equator, from 1897, the ship’s captain is never believed when he tells thetruth, whereas an ‘austere Scot’ among the passengers ‘delivers himself of the most abandoned lie with such an air of stern veracity that one is forced to believe it although one knows it isn’t so.’ 30 So: there you are, we Scots are an ingenious lot, but you shouldn’t really trust a single word we utter. An even more ‘dour’ Scot is the self-educated working-class intellectual Macfarlane, whom our author claims to have met in a Cincinnati boarding house as far back as the later 1850s, and whose gloomy proto-Darwinian philosophy is supposed to have influenced Twain’sown. 31 There’s been a lot of controversy over the ‘Macfarlane’ sketch, not least as to whether it’s an autobiographical fragment, or a piece of fiction. 32 It’s worthy of note, though, that in the novel bearing his name, Pudd’nhead Wilson, the resident intellectual in the town of Dawson’s Landing – actuallythe only resident intellectual in the town of Dawson’s Landing! –is of Scottish parentage. He’s one of Twain’s ‘outsiders’ who have settled themselves in a small town which stinks of complacency and self-righteousness, and he turns out to be far from the ‘pudd’nhead’ they had thought he was, what with his cranky ways and all. And it’s interesting to note that a writer contemporaneous with Twain, the New York Jewish novelist and short-storyist Abraham Cahan, somewhat unexpectedly takes up our

30 Op.cit., 609.31 Mark Twain, ‘Macfarlane’ [written c. 1894], Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays 1891-1910. Ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 161-3.32 See Sherwood Cummings, ‘Mark Twain’s Social Darwinism’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 20:2 (February 1957), 163-175; Paul Baender, ‘Alias Macfarlane: a Revision of Mark Twain’s Biography’, American Literature, 38:2 (May 1966), 187-197; Wesley A. Britton, ‘Macfarlane, “Boarding House,” and “Bugs”: Mark Twain’s Cincinnati Apprenticeship’, Mark Twain Journal, 27:1 (Spring 1989), 14-17.

theme: in his novella The Imported Bridegroom of 1898, a young Jewishlady finds herself entering a working-men’s debating club, whose members include Gentiles. It’s a new experience for her, and she’s apprehensive, but she’s welcomed by one of the club’s leading lights, ‘a middle-aged man with a handsome and intensely intellectual Scotch face, who was a laborer by day and a philosopher by night.’ 33 Another Macfarlane, if you like. It does suggest that in the US, in the late nineteenth century, the Scots were regarded as strongly inclined towards the life of the mind. Far be it from me to challenge such an assumption. Then there’s the story he told about a Scottish Presbyterian minister – though he actually heard this one from Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. He acknowledges that; he isn’t deliberatelyplagiarizing Stoker’s joke, he’s just borrowing it, and I’m now going to borrow it from Twain. Twain starts by referring to this minister as a ‘Scotch Presbyterian, but I don’t know what that is’ – damn fine he knows what Scotch Presbyterianism is! Anyway, the minister is christening a baby. Twain goes on:

The house was full of the baby’s kinsfolk, and the minister was betrayed into oratory – oratory of the spread-eagle kind, which is very dangerous, as it gets you into the clouds, and without a parachute you cannot get down. He took the child from the father. The little thing was about the size of a sweet potato. He held it in his hands till the silence should work and then ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see in your faces disparagement. And why? Because he is little. Because he is little you disparage him. If there was

33 Abraham Cahan, Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom, and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (New York: Dover, 1970), 160.

more of him you would look into his future. But the great are framed out of the little. The vast oak tree grows from the little acorn. He may be the greatest general; he may be Napoleon and Alexander compacted into one. He may be a poet, the greatest poet the world has ever seen; a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Shelley, a Keats, a Byron compacted into one. He may sing songs that may live as long as the land. He may become – ‘What’s his name?’ – this last to the father. ‘Mary Ann’ replied the parent. 34

Clearly it’s a cigars-and-whisky joke, told just before one rejoins the ladies. Twain was one of the most prominent poet-clowns of American masculinity: it was a crowded field.

We move on to the later years of Twain’s career, and there’s muchcomment on his contradictions at that time. The polemicist against imperialism, we’re told, was also the sycophant of plutocracy. The anti-establishment iconoclast also wanted to become part of that establishment. George Orwell called Mark Twain a ‘licensed jester’; the Irish historian Owen Dudley Edwards, in a generally admiring essay, refers to him as ‘both satirist and victim of the box-office.’ 35 The mood-music is thatwe’re moving closer to Mark Twain’s Great Dark, and that he’s skulking behind not so much a Gilded Age as a Gilded Cage.

34 Mark Twain, speech at Lord Mayor’s banquet, June 29, 1907, as reported in The Daily Telegraph (July 1, 1907), and reprinted in Mark Twain’s Four Weeks in England, 1907 (Hartford: The Mark Twain House and Museum, 2006), 78.35 George Orwell, ‘Mark Twain – the Licensed Jester’, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters […]: My Country Right and Left, 1940-1943 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 325-329; Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Mark Twain: Historian of a Lost World’, The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence. Ed. Tom Dunne [Historical Studies, 16](Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), 197-226 (198).

Yet there’s a strong argument that Twain maintained his Presbyterian sense of right and wrong in satirizing the excesses of the later Gilded Age. His Hank Morgan, in A Connecticut Yankee, isportrayed as ruthless and amoral in his Arthurian-era go-getting.But if we want more direct assaults on turn-of-the-century commercial rapacity, we have to go to novels such as Frank Norris’s The Octopus of 1901, where the railroad company quite literally charges through the domains of the Californian landowners and brings them to ruin. It remains that Twain was attracted to big business as almost an alternative art form, requiring as much creativity as in the writing of novels. And he was not averse to the low cunning that’s often required for the accumulation of large sums of money. In his Notebook he quotes admiringly the dictum: ‘Put all your eggs in one basket and watchthat basket.’ 36 He ascribes this piece of wisdom to a Scotsman, Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie came from my own part of Scotland, the County of Fife, the peninsula that’s shaped like a dog’s head or a mitten-wearinghand and sticks out into the North Sea. Carnegie was born in the ancient city of Dunfermline, which boasts a Benedictine abbey, and it was once the capital of Scotland. Carnegie’s family cottage is now a museum.

In March 1909, Mark Twain was the speaker at a dinner in honor ofCarnegie, and at the beginning of his address (entitled ‘Carnegiethe Benefactor’) he paid fulsome tribute to the Scot’s home town:‘If Dunfermline contributed so much to the United States in contributing Mr Carnegie, what would have happened if all Scotland had turned out? These Dunfermline folk have acquired advantages in coming to America.’ 37 Back in Scotland, in Fife, Carnegie is not so universally loved, in spite of his museum and his philanthropic legacy. Fife is a formerly industrial area – coal-mining, mainly, in the recent past – and many folk feel thatCarnegie was ultimately responsible for the bloody outcome of hisstrike-breaking directives at the Pennsylvania steelworks. Mark

36 Mark Twain’s Notebook, 231.37 Mark Twain, Speeches (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 345-6 (345).

Twain could praise the benefactors: he could also denounce the exploiters - some of the time.

He had long been beset by a struggle between his roughneck rebelliousness and a compulsion towards genteel, domestic conformity. In Edinburgh, Twain enjoyed a warm friendship with DrJohn Brown, the author of Rab and His Friends, a collection of sentimental sketches of Scottish life. We’re talking about a real bond here – almost as if the good doctor was one of the family. Twain recalled Brown’s ‘sweet and winning face’, and Brown for his part nicknamed little Susy ‘Megalopis’ because, ‘her large eyes seemed to him to warrant that sounding Greek epithet’. It appears, too, that Brown possessed that dry Scottishsense of humour I was talking about earlier – he was a medical doctor, and once when he had to leave the Clemens family to attend to a patient he said, ‘Entertain yourselves while I […] reduce the population.’ 38 One of Dr Brown’s sketches in particular touched Twain: the story of Marjorie Fleming, nicknamed ‘Pet Marjorie’, a young girl who wrote precocious poetry and died at the age of eight. She’s best-known for her lines to a monkey: ‘O lovely and most charming pug / Thy gracefulair and heavenly mug’ and so forth. Marjorie is buried in old graveyard of Abbotshall Kirk or Church in the Fife town of Kirkcaldy, her home town and mine; in fact the grave is only about fifteen minutes walk from my house. Mark Twain was so takenby the story fo her short life that he decided to write his own essay about her. 39 Duncan Glen and I reprinted part of it in ourFife anthology, Fringe of Gold. 40 (We also included excerpts from Herman Melville, whose ancestors came from our county and who writes about Fife in Moby Dick and elsewhere – so if you think Moby Dick rather than Huck Finn is the Great American Novel, why, Moby Dick is also the Great Fife Novel.)

38 These remarks are quoted in Mark Twain’s Letters [as above, note 25], 428-9.39 Mark Twain, ‘Marjorie Fleming , the Wonder Child’, The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. […] Ed. and with an introduction by Charles Neider (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 455-465.40 Fringe of Gold: the Fife Anthology. Ed. Duncan Glen and Tom Hubbard (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008), 74.

A sympathetic reviewer was bemused that we’d included two Americans in our very locally-focused book. But the local, they say, is also the universal. Now, Mark Twain’s piece on Marjorie is pretty saccharine. We have a word for that Scotside, ‘twee’, meaning sentimentally dainty. The old man seemed to have gone soft. All right, so it’s not Mark Twain at his vinegary best, butthere are times when our human sympathies become so strong that they make our more critical standards seem petty and priggish, and this is one of them. The essay on Marjorie Fleming was firstpublished in December 1909, just a few months before his death. He’d already lost his daughter Susy at the age of 24, his wife Livy, and in that very month, December 1909, on Christmas Eve, his daughter Jean, long a sufferer from epilepsy, also died. Can it be wondered, in these last grim years, that he would find it therapeutic to write about Marjorie Fleming, taking refuge in herchildishly unconscious humor? A Scottish poet once defined Scottish optimism as ‘Through a gless [glass], darkly.’ He defined Scottish pessimism as ‘Nae gless [No glass].’ 41 Mark Twain, a lover of Scotch whisky, wouldhave concurred. But at the beginning of this talk, I gave you some daft verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, called ‘Not I’. Did Mark Twain, in his final tragic years, really need lessons from dour Scots on how to stare into the Great Dark? Not he.

This is an edited and expanded text of the University of Connecticut Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professor of British Literature Lecture for 2011. It amalgamates two versions of the oral presentation, the first of which was made in the Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT on April 12, 2011; the second version was presented at the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, on April 19, 2011. I would like to thank Professor Wayne Franklin for his support and encouragement, likewise Steve Courtney of the Mark Twain House and Museum, as well as the fine young people who were members of my class on ‘Childhood and Innocence in Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson’.

41 The Collected Poems of Alexander Scott. Ed. David Robb (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1994, 148.

I was delighted to be contacted by Dr Roger Swearingen, the noted Stevenson scholar, who kindly sent me the text and slides of his lecture, ‘Did Robert Louis Stevenson Ever Meet Mark Twain? And Other Biographical Byways’, which he presented in the Robert Louis Stevenson Silverado Museum at the other side of the country, in Napa Valley, California, on April 6, 2011. I had already written my own address, and would like to think that our two papers are complementary. Dr Swearingen is preparing a new biography of Stevenson for Faber and Faber.

I would also like to acknowledge the audience member (at the Hartford version of my presentation), who discussed with me Mark Twain’s links with George MacDonald.

My thanks also to the staff at my two university libraries over the past year, the Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut, and the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Grenoble.