The figurative comparison to "a blue flush" helps make this vivid, joining earlier figures to give substance and a comic quality to the proceedings and to justify Baker’s aperçu that a jay’s language, sharing a conspicuous merit with written as well as oral American humor, just bristles with figures of speech. In the final paragraphs, after the old jay solves the mystery and announces his findings, his fellow jays become "a blue cloud," manifest vividly additional human traits, and prove their sense of humor is superior to an owl’s:

DeVoto felt that the last sentences "mar the effect of a passage in pure humor" because "they strain toward a joke, escaping from the clear medium of the tale itself into burlesque." Those who have heard an audience respond to the recitation of the sentences by a master—a Hal Holbrook, say—may disagree. Blemish or not, the sentences (as DeVoto adds) are typical of Mark Twain. And their mingling of horseplay with delicate fancifulness is typical of both printed and oral American tall tale humor.

 V. "The Principle of Life"

An exchange between Clemens and Joel Chandler Harris indicates that the humorist might well claim that this discussion so far has failed to deal

with the chief aim of this story. Clemens had complimented Harris on his picturing of Uncle Remus as he told Negro folktales to a boy on an antebellum Georgia plantation. Harris, as modest as he was shy, protested that the folktales were far more important than characterization: "my relations toward Uncle Remus are similar to those that exist between an almanac maker and a calendar." Nonsense, Clemens answered, "the principle of life" was in the frameworks. The enclosed tales were

Granted that Clemens overstated, he was sincere in praising an achievement that he admired and tried to duplicate: the using of a framework to make up for attritions—over and above those previously discussed—that an oral story suffers when it is reduced to print.

When Clemens refused to let that interviewer publish an accurate transcript of an interview he had granted, he explained that he did so because

fiction writer, this implies, has the obligation of so representing his listener and his storyteller as to relate them to the story. Somehow, by towing the pair in action and reaction, an artist must clarify such matters why the one hearkens to a long-winded monologue and why the other yes it the substance and form he does. Somehow, too, the writer must simulate what Twain called "the spontaneity of a personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest."

The "Mark Twain" who listens to the jay story, and enjoys it and repeats it in toto is characterized by the long first person account of his ramblings in the Black Forest and his recollection of a far away friend. He is a relatively complex and ingratiating person—a fact that is made clear when one compares him with the "Mark Twains" who were auditors for a couple of other mining camp storytellings. One of these "Mark Twains," gifted with as little humor, say, as a Canadian owl, is steered by a practical joker into the clutches of a monologist who mercilessly corners him and bores him to death with what he feels are irrelevant maunderings, but which are actually hilarious, before he gratefully escapes. He gives his account because he is outraged. The other "Mark Twain" has his curiosity raised to a fever heat by jocose miners. He therefore listens eagerly to a long-winded chatterbox who barely mentions his subject but spins out (very funny) irrelevancies till whiskey overcomes him, he falls asleep, and his listener at long last learns that he has been hoaxed.³² By contrast the Black Forest "Mark Twain" has humor and understanding. He relishes the "deep and mellow twilight" and the silence of the pine wood; he has enjoyed the German Märchen; he imagines that he glimpses "small flitting shapes here and there down the columned aisles of the forest." When the ravens jaw at him, he can relish their insults and joke about the way "the thing became more and more embarrassing." His amused and amusing account of his adventures has shown why he can hear Jim Baker’s monologue with delight, remember it, and at a much later date lovingly repeat it verbatim. He has prepared the reader for his mock-solemn claims that animals talk to each other, that Jim is the one man he has known who can understand them, and whimsical proof: "I knew he could . . . because he told me so himself."

Jim, like his auditor, benefits when compared with his counterparts in the two Mother Lode stories mentioned above. Both of the other story-tellers are non-stop babblers simply because they are cursed with total recall and are allergic to relevance. Besides, one of them is "tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk—not a hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to obscure his memory." By contrast, Jim is loquacious because he has an appreciative audience; he has endless leisure; and his way of living has given him his awe-struck reverence for birds which most normal people find completely unlovable.

The biography of this "middle-aged, simple-hearted miner" shows how he discovered that jays can talk and he can understand them. He has been pushed by solitude into a strange companionship that he fondly recalls and celebrates at length. He "had lived in a lonely corner of California, among the woods and mountains, a good many years, and has studied the ways of his only neighbors, the beasts and the birds." Finally—to put it more

bluntly than his compassionate portrayer does—this hermit has become a mite touched in the head. Seemingly random sentences give pertinent evidence: "Seven years ago, the last man in the region but me moved away. There stands his house—been empty ever since. . . ." And a bit later: "Well one Sunday morning I was sitting out here in front of my cabin with my cat, taking the sun, and looking at the blue hills, and listening to the leaves rustling so lonely in the trees The statistics, and the pathetic fallacy of "lonely" leaves are doubly poignant because they are unobtrusive. Equally unstressed is the casual relationship between the recluse’s history and (1) a misanthropy that equates the birds’ prodigious orneriness with human-ness, and (2) admiration for creatures that eloquently curse a thwarting world and that band together to jeer damfoolishness. Not surprisingly, he fantasizes about these kin-birds, and as DeVoto says, "His patient, explanatory mind actually works before our eyes and no one can doubt him."³³

Awareness of one of the humorist’s favorite devices may help the reader to notice a final touch in his portrayal of Baker. For years, Twain had been making use of counterpoint—repetitions with meaningful modulations: While writing A Tramp Abroad, he cited one use of the device and its effect. He would, he said, place cheek-by-jowl "a perfectly serious description of 5 very bloody student duels which I witnessed in Heidelberg" and a broadly burlesqued account of a pretentious but completely harmless French duel. "The contrast," he predicted, "will be silent but eloquent comment."³⁴ Another echoing with variations comes in "Blue-By Yarn" when the account of the jeering at "Mark Twain" by raucous ravens is followed by Baker’s account of the jeering at the befooled blue-jay by other jays. But note the contrast: Whereas the victim richly elaborates on "Twain’s" droll humiliation and abject retreat, Baker says not a word about the mental state, the retorts or the behavior of his embarrassed protagonist. This chief character, in fact, at this point vanishes from the story. The "silent but eloquent comment" that this contrast suggests is: So completely has Jim Baker identified with a woodland neighbor who, like him, has been defeated and, unlike him, has beautifully and directly voiced his feelings, that he skips any report on the jay’s humiliation.

A way of talking, telling a story, thinking and fantasizing that is delightful and funny thus is made probable by a characterization of Jim Baker which is complex enough to encompass a heartwarming touch of pathos.³⁵

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

NOTES

    ¹⁷Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. H. N. Smith and W. M. Gibson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), I, 26.
   ¹⁸"On Speech-Making Reform," Mark Twain’s Speeches (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), pp. 2–3.
   ¹⁹Again and again, Twain praised the rambling storyteller and imitated him. The frog story was an example, the ram story a more extreme one. In Life on the Mississippi (1883), Chapter XIII, he gave a sample of the art of Brown, who "could not forget anything." Huck tells a rambling history of English royalty in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XXIII. In "How to Tell a Story," Twain nominates as "about the funniest thing I have ever listened to" James Whitcomb Riley’s impersonation of an old farmer "who gets all mixed up and wanders hopelessly round and round" as he tries to tell an ancient joke.
   ²⁰"William Dean Howells," Definitive Edition, XXVI, 228–238.
   ²¹Tramp Abroad, p. 35. The humorist liked these birds so well that, carrying them to India and calling them Indian crows, he put them into Following the Equator (1897): "If I sat on one end of the balcony, the crows would gather on the railing at the other end and talk about me; . . . they would sit there, in the most unabashed way, and talk about my clothes, and my hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and politics, and how I came to be in India . . . and how I had happened to go unhanged so long . . . and so on, until I could no longer endure the embarrassment of it. . . ."
   ²²Notebook 14 (1879), Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
   ²³Eruption, p. 202.
   ²⁴"Mark Twain: An Inquiry" [1901], in My Mark Twain (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), p. 182.
   ²⁵Eruption, p. 361—autobiographical dictation of 1907.
   ²⁶Joel Chandler Harris, Editor and Essayist, ed. Julia Collier Harris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931), pp. 148–149.
   ²⁷Cf. Sut Lovingood telling in an 1867 book that Twain reviewed how it was when a rampaging bull smashed into a little bald-headed man: "he jis’ disappear’d frum mortul vishun sumhow, sorter like breff frum a lookin-glass."—Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, ed. M. Thomas Inge (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), p. 110. Twain listed George W. Harris, the author of this book, and its publishers in his notes on American humorists in 1880, and he included one of Sut’s stories in his anthology.
   ²⁸Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), pp. 76–80. Eastman cites as an example a memorable Arizona colloquialism: "He’s so stingy he wouldn’t pay ten cents to see Christ wrastle a bear."
   ²⁹"An Inquiry," p. 179. Twain in turn praised Howells for "translating . . . the vision of the eyes of flesh into words that reproduced their forms and colors."
   ³⁰Julia C. Harris, The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (Boston, 1918), p. 168; Mark Twain’s Letters, II, 401–402.
   ³¹Mark Twain’s Letters, II, 504-505.
   ³²The first "Mark Twain" is cornered by Simon Wheeler in the frog story; the second is inveigled into hearing the drunken Jim Blame tell about his grandfather’s ram and many unrelated matters.
   ³³Mark Twain’s America, p. 251. Another "Mark Twain" listens with pleasure to a long story and appreciates its mining camp teller—clearly Jim Baker although here he is called Dick Baker: "whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must

love something). And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it—maybe even supernatural." Roughing It, Chapter 61.
   ³⁴Walter Blair, Mark Twain & "Huck Finn" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 235–328, passim, treats numerous instances.
   ³⁵Brander Mathews, writing about "the immense variety" of Twain’s style, writes: "Consider the tale of the Blue Jay . . . wherein the humor is sustained by unstated pathos: what could be better told than this, with every word the right word and in the right place?"—"An Appreciation," in Mark Twain, Europe and Elsewhere (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923), p. xxviii. In Mark Twain &"Huck Finn," pp. 172–178, I have discussed various factors in the humorist’s personal situation that caused him to write sympathetically about the misanthropic Jim Baker and the frustrated blue-jay.