It grew
out of a distinct condition--the battle with the frontier. The fight was
so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that
they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. "Western
humor" was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world,
but there is tragedy behind it.
'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the
startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was.
It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was
true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist
disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a
condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This
was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland
travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is
essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on
fact.
The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated
nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate
accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by
exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often
came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in
acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had
supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand
copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end
of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same
period.
Pages:
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529