University of Virginia Library

2

"A Lot of Rules":

Mark Twain and Grammar

To the layman in nineteenth-century America, and even to
most men or women of letters, the study of language meant
grammar, and grammar meant rules. These rules were to be
found in books written by—to use a favorite phrase of Tom
Sawyer's—the "best authorities": Robert Lowth, Hugh Blair,
Noah Webster, Lindley Murray, authors of the standard rhetorics,
grammar texts, and dictionaries.[1] These men stand in relation
to modern linguists as Hammurabi and Solon to modern
political scientists; they were arbiters and lawgivers rather
than researchers who followed an empirical method. Linguistics
as we know it began with the German comparative philologists
who established the taxonomy of the Indo-European
languages in the first half of the century, but their work was
little known in the United States before the Civil War. In the
1860s, almost simultaneously, Max Müller in London and

William Dwight Whitney in Boston would deliver two celebrated
sets of lectures to introduce modern linguistic science
to the English-speaking world. But these writers on language
were unfamiliar to the American public, who instead read essays
by amateur critics of verbal usage like Richard Grant
White and George Washington Moon, legislators in the mold
of the eighteenth-century grammarians and rhetoricians,
whose books had been issued in dozens of editions by the
turn of the century. Although Mark Twain owned books by
White and Moon, there is no evidence that he ever read
Whitney or Müller.[2]

The adult Mark Twain would rebel against the God, the political
system, and even—as an ardent spelling reformer—the
orthography he had been taught as a child to respect, but his
iconoclasm never extended to the authority of the grammarians.
He never abandoned or even seriously questioned the
doctrines of the prescriptive grammarians whose texts he studied
as a schoolboy. Although he poked fun at Tom Sawyer's
devout submission to the "authorities" and their arbitrary
rules, he did not realize that in accepting a conventional definition
of good English he himself submitted to self-constituted
authorities whose qualifications were perhaps not demonstrably
superior to his own.

Twain's allegiance to prescriptive grammar should not surprise
us. The late twentieth century is heir to H. L. Mencken's
celebration of the American vulgate, Robert A. Hall's provocative
admonition Leave Your Language Alone!, and the forceful
advocacy of Black English and other nonstandard dialects, yet
linguistic relativism has gained little adherence outside the
academic world.[3] Twain's attitude was no different from that of
literary acquaintances like William Dean Howells, Charles
Dudley Warner, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce.[4] I stress
Twain's essential conventionality to balance an inaccurate
view of him as a folk hero who championed, as Walt Whitman
did, the customs and usages of socially marginal classes.
Twain's relation to the colloquial or vernacular language was
ambivalent throughout his life—even during the composition
of Huckleberry Finn, the novel in which rules come under the
heaviest attack. When a writer walks through life with George

Washington Harris's defiantly vernacular Sut Lovingood's Yarns
in one hand and Samuel Kirkham's English Grammar in the
other, it is of some interest to see just how he maintains his
balance. Richard Bridgman has proposed that the United
States as a whole moved from the formal pole to the informal
in the course of the century, causing a redefinition of "standard"
English: "For the aristocratic temperament, standard is
prescriptive. . . . The democratic inclination, however, is to
make the standard descriptive: . . . its features are understood
to be the mass norm. . . . If the vernacular is not regarded as
inevitably vulgar, but merely as ordinary, then it is clear that
as the century wore on, ordinary language became increasingly
identified with an ever-broadening middle class."[5] As a
rough generalization this picture is accurate. But it leaves out
anomalous trends and individual cases. One of the strongest
backlashes from the purists, in England as well as in the United
States, took place in the 1860s and 1870s. Among our nineteenth-century
writers not Mark Twain but Walt Whitman,
writing in the mid-1850s, comes closest to espousing a truly
demotic standard; Henry James, speaking at Bryn Mawr in
1905, most proudly wears the aristocracy's coat of arms. Whitman
carries a folio copy of Sut:
James trundles a grammar book weighing a ton:
It is possible to find isolated passages in Twain's writing that
approach one or the other of these extremes. But Twain's habitual
amusement at the awkward constructions of foreigners,
the ignorant, and the young in no way resembles James's reactionary
xenophobia. And when he plays outlaw—by going
west, by wearing a sealskin coat, by speaking with the voice of
Huck—he is not assaulting the standard codes, merely exploring
alternatives ones.

In the 1840s, the period of Samuel Clemens's boyhood,
American common school education sought to provide students
with a uniform set of social and moral values. Grammar,
as the very term grammar school indicates, was at the
heart of this process. The "students' right to their own language"
endorsed in the 1970s by the National Council of Teachers
of English would have made no more sense to Mark Twain's
schoolmasters than students' right to their own multiplication
tables. The various spoken dialects that nineteenth-century
schoolchildren brought into the classroom were thought to be
literally lawless, ungoverned by any regularities, and they
would have to be replaced with rule-governed "good English"
before children could be expected to assimilate other formal
systems of knowledge. "Over any fugitive colloquial dialect,
which has never been fixed by visible signs, grammar has no
control," wrote the most pedantic of the mid-century grammarians,
"and in proportion as books are multiplied, and the
knowledge of written language is diffused, local dialects,
which are beneath the dignity of grammar, will always be
found to grow fewer."[8] Throughout the nineteenth century,
grammarians argued violently over the details of individual
rules, but they never disagreed that correct English could be
embodied in rules of syntax and morphology that in every
case would allow one to judge whether a given usage was
right or wrong. When Twain, in one of the Mysterious Stranger
drafts, has a schoolmaster tell the new boy in class that to
learn English he must memorize a "grammar [that] has about
thirty rules," he is almost surely remembering one specific
textbook, Samuel Kirkham's English Grammar, which he studied
as a boy.[9]

The most striking feature of Kirkham's Grammar is an imposing
summary of the parts of speech and rules of syntax,
printed as a folio sheet, folded, and bound into the volume
opposite the title page. Along the top it reads, "A Compendium
of English Grammar, by Samuel Kirkham; Designed,
not to be studied, but to be spread before the learner in parsing,
previous to his having the definitions and rules committed
to memory."[10] The body of the sheet is divided into two
sections. Section 1, "Etymology," briefly defines the parts of
speech and explains the cases and persons of nouns and the
moods and tenses of verbs. Section 2, "Rules of Syntax,"
summarizes thirty-five rules that Kirkham explains at length
in the text. These rules, most of them borrowed from Lindley
Murray, clearly derive from the Latin-based grammars of the
eighteenth century. They are concerned with matters like
agreement between adjectives and nouns, and subjects and
verbs; the cases of relative pronouns; cases governed by verbs
and prepositions; and the functions of adjectives and adverbs.
And they are guaranteed to convince a child that grammar
has nothing whatever to do with everyday speech. Witness
rule 16: "When a nominative comes between the relative
and the verb, the relative is governed by the following verb, or
by some other word in its own member of the sentence." It is
probably this list of rules that Twain would remember in his
1898 "Comment on Tautology and Grammar": "I know grammar
by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. A generation
ago I knew the rules—knew them by heart, word for word,
though not their meanings—and I still know one of them: the
one which says—which says—but never mind, it will come
back to me presently" (MTA 1:173). Kirkham claimed that his
innovative "systematic order of parsing" would aid students to
apply the rules precisely so as to understand their meaning;[11]
unfortunately, Twain's teachers seem to have been indifferent
to Kirkham's pedagogical idealism. Two recollections of early
grammar classes indicate that in fact memory was valued more
highly than comprehension in the school run by J. D. Dawson,
Twain's Hannibal master. In Twain's own dramatization of
Tom Sawyer, the lessons described briefly in chapter 20 of the

novel are worked up into a full-scale farce. Ben Rogers, the
"best grammar scholar in the school," makes a farrago of
grammatical terminology when asked to parse the sentence
"How many persons constitute a multitude?"
An instance of Twain's lifelong delight in burlesquing technical
jargon by scrambling it into meaningless combinations,
this passage surely exaggerates classroom grammatical error
in degree but not in kind. In "Schoolhouse Hill" Twain recalls
a "grammar class of parsing parrots, who knew everything
about grammar except how to utilize its rules in common
speech" (MSM, 177); no wonder, since their instruction consists
principally in constant repetition of the rules.[13]

Twain never faulted the rules of grammar themselves, only
the instruction that made them impenetrable. Even when we
discount its humorous exaggeration, the following encomium
of "an excellent school" in Carson City indicates the mastery
of language Twain expected of well-taught schoolchildren:

The science of grammar, then, studies "what language is correct,
and what isn't"; in linguistically dividing sheep from
goats, it relies on "the people that made the books."[15] Deference
to these authorities was not merely for children, however.
During his early career as a California journalist, Twain
ridiculed the idea that adults could consciously defy the grammar
books. When he accuses his own Californian of being too
severe in criticizing the verbal shortcomings of other San
Francisco newspapers, he is merely being ironic: "If the local
of the Call gets to branching out into new and aggravating
combinations of words and phrases, they [the Californian]
don't stop to think that maybe he is humbly trying to start
something fresh in English composition and thus make his
productions more curious and entertaining—not they; they
just bite into him at once, and say he isn't writing grammar.
And why? . . . Why, merely because he don't choose to be the
slave of their notions and Murray's."[16] The joke is to call adherence
to the formal rules "notions." Murray does not have
notions about grammar any more than an assayer has notions
about the purity of gold in a nugget. To joke in this way requires
the belief that grammar is as exact a discipline as mathematics,
the grammar books as trustworthy as trigonometric
tables. The humorist Mark Twain is hardly more sympathetic
to linguistic mutability than was the lexicographer Samuel
Johnson, who linked it to "folly, vanity, and affectation" in the
preface to his Dictionary.

At times nineteenth-century grammarians justify their authority
in almost theological terms. "Natural grammar," according
to Kirkham, was as insufficient to linguistic salvation
as natural religion to Christian redemption. Knowledge of the
formal rules was indispensable, Kirkham told his young readers:
"Doubtless you have heard some persons assert, that they
could detect and correct any error in language by the ear, and
speak and write accurately without a knowledge of grammar.
Now your own observation will soon convince you, that this
assertion is incorrect. . . . Without the knowledge and application
of grammar rules, it is impossible for any one to think,
speak, read, or write with accuracy."[17] At least Kirkham puts
grammatical perfection on a democratic basis: the language of
the text, not that of the court, is standard, and the schoolmaster's
chance of mastering it is as good as the lord's—even

better: impeccable speech preeminently concerned the Victorian
middle classes, since it functioned as a belaying rope
for the social climber. The crevasses of good society were
filled with aspirants who had slipped on an "ain't" or a proscribed
regionalism. (William Dean Howells's Silas Lapham
would become the most notable American casualty.) Only the
established gentry could afford to ignore the dominion of the
schoolmaster or the linguistic self-help books intended for
those who had been poor scholars in their youth.[18]

No, a man could no more wield the English language by
ear than he could navigate the Mississippi by guesswork. Like
Twain's "marvellous science of piloting," grammar required a
prodigious memory and constant vigilance and correction at
the hands of experts. Throughout his career Twain was wary
of getting caught on snags. He was especially sensitive about
the quality of his English when his work was first beginning
to be read back East.[19] If Southern vernacular was Twain's "native
idiom," he takes curious pains to distance himself from it
when in Life on the Mississippi he describes his first trip to New
Orleans in twenty years. It is safe to call the genteel Southern
accent "music," but Twain's disapproval of grammatical and
idiomatic "infelicities" suggests his conservative picture of
Standard English in the early 1880s.

(WMT 12:360)

From the point of view of dialect geography and descriptive
linguistics, this is a random assortment of casual judgments
that are not uniquely true of Southern speech. Twain makes
no allowance for context; apparently an "educated gentleman"
is supposed to speak by the book under any circumstance.
The substitution of "like" for the conjunction "as," for
example, is anything but a Southern regionalism; as common
in Twain's time as it is today in informal speech on both sides
of the Atlantic, it was already one of the purists' favorite shibboleths.[20]
There is no hint that a first-person future with "will"
may be the normal and proper American form; Twain unhesitatingly
labels it a "careless deviation" from the rules prescribed
by the grammar texts, when in fact it was his own
ordinary usage in speech and casual writing.[21] The superfluous
"at" and "go to" for "intend to," on the other hand, are
valid regionalisms, as is "hadn't ought." "Don't" for "doesn't"
in the South was not identical with the "infelicity" that was
and still is found in general nonstandard American English.
Here, as in England, the upper classes received a dispensation
to use the form in defiance of the grammar books. (British
gentlemen were allowed to use "ain't" and to drop their
participial g's as well.) Mencken, citing Twain's own frequent
use of "don't" with a singular subject, notes that this usage
"rises almost to the level of cultivated speech" in the South.[22]

Twain must have been relieved when in 1876 he learned
from reading Henry Breen that "the grossest solecisms and
the most palpable blunders" were "of frequent occurrence" in
the English of the most respected British writers and that
even the grammarians themselves were not sinless. (Rhetorician
Hugh Blair had sinned against every rule of grammar, according
to Breen.)[23] Breen's cheerful iconoclasm made his
Modern English Literature one of Twain's favorite books.[24] Over
the next quarter century variations on the maxim "Nobody
speaks perfect grammar" occur over and over in his writing:

The tone of these pronouncements ranges from straightforward
to ironic, but Twain is perfectly serious about his central
point. We all suffer from grammatical original sin, and if we
are ashamed of our speech, it is a result of the Fall. The biblical
echoes in Twain's remarks on grammar are not fortuitous.
Like the Hebrew law, prescriptive grammar was so complex
and troublesome that no one could hope to fulfill every commandment;
by the law all are condemned. Yet perfection in
grammar, as in deed, was treated as a moral imperative in
early nineteenth-century education. Good grammar and good
morals were thought to be inseparable.[26] At the beginning of
an address "To the Young Learner" that prefaces his text,
Kirkham takes pains to correct any "misguided youth" who
think that "grammar is dry and irksome, and a matter of little
consequence." No, grammar is "a study that tends to adorn
and dignify human nature," a branch of learning capable of
"elevating man to his proper rank in the scale of intellectual
existence."[27] In the peroration to this preface, Kirkham warns
his reader never to "be content to grovel in ignorance"; when
he concludes with the injunction "Love God and serve him,"
he makes it hard for the young scholar to tell where the grammar
leaves off and the prayer book begins.[28]

Mark Twain was perfectly capable of satirizing middle-class
faith in the connection between grammar and morality. The
vernacular of his good bad boys, Huck and Tom, serves as a
running commentary on the moral inadequacies of the standard
language with which social authority expresses itself.
The obverse of Huck and Tom is the "child-missionary" Mamie
Grant, whose gift of tongues enables her to speak like a tract:
"I am but an humble instrument, yet I feel that I am like, very
like, some of the infant prodigies in the Sunday School book.
I know that I use as fine language as they do."[29] Mamie, like
Sid Sawyer, is handled ironically because her "goodness" in
fact renounces childhood's innocence for the linguistic self-consciousness
of adulthood. Huck and other childlike vernacular
heroes in Twain's writings walk naked of grammar
and are unashamed.[30] But Twain expected men and women to
put away childish things. In rejecting his own youthful adherence
to Southern folkways and ideologies, he becomes
critical of parochial idioms as well. Soon after his 1882 visit to
Hannibal he recorded in his notebook a telling memorandum,
"The atrocious grammar of Hannibal & the West" (NJ2, 480).
This hint was expanded into two paragraphs that evaluate the
vernacular of the gentleman who narrates the Darnell-Watson
feud in Life on the Mississippi:

(WMT 12:222-23)

There is only the faintest patina of humor here. Twain is delivering
a serious lecture on social propriety: it is the duty of an
educated gentleman to speak the language appropriate to his
class. In this instance the demarcation between abstract morality
and the social code becomes hard to trace. The "highly
educated man" offends not so much against the abstract structures
of grammar, Kirkham's thirty-five rules, as against the
unspoken rules that establish the social connotations of words,
constructions, and pronunciations. In one sense prescriptive
grammars are simply linguistic etiquette manuals. That is
why it is difficult to classify the brief sketch used as an epigraph
to this chapter. Does it parody Kirkham, or is it an addition
to the burlesque etiquettes that Twain composed? "Don't
say it hain't so, but it ain't so. The former is vulgar." Written in
1896, during a period when he was intensely questioning the
relation of power to authority, this fragment shows Twain
coming as close as he ever will to the realization that rules of
usage may be arbitrary.

"Our linguistic opinions," wrote Brander Matthews, a professor
of English at Columbia University and a friend of Mark
Twain's, "are the results of habits acquired from those who
brought us up, so that aspersions on our parts of speech appear
to us to be reflections on our parents. To misuse words,
to make grammatical blunders is an evidence of illiteracy; and
to accuse a man of illiteracy is to disparage the social standing
of his father and mother."[31] To propose, as Van Wyck Brooks
did, that Twain's native idiom was Huck's is to make John Clemens
out to be Pap Finn. This is both historically and symbolically
wrong. The Clemenses classed themselves among
Hannibal's "aristocracy," partly because of John Clemens's professional
background, partly because of Jane Lampton Clemens's
distant relation to the Lambtons, Earls of Durham. Always
a "claimant" to whatever role appeared most exalted at
the time, Twain must have taken naturally to the language of
culture and breeding. Undoubtedly, correct English was spoken
and actively encouraged in the Clemens family. Jane Clemens
did not employ the local Missouri vernacular, when her

son made her the basis of Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly, he "fitted
her out with a dialect" for the purpose (MTA 1:102). In 1845
John Clemens attended a series of lectures on grammar given
by one Professor Hull and made a précis of "Rules for Parsing
by Transposition," which he gave to Orion, then an apprentice
printer.[32] The earliest piece of writing we have by Twain,
composed two months past his fifteenth birthday, is prophetic
of later work in its concern for language. Following the
practice of contemporary Southwestern humorists, Twain
puts his own first-person narrative in "fine language": "At the
fire, on Thursday morning, we were apprehensive of our own
safety . . . and commenced arranging our material in order to
remove them in case of necessity." The humor comes from Jim
Wolfe, the vernacular hero, who rescues a few valueless items,
returns in an hour, "and thinking he had immortalized himself,
threw his giant frame in a tragic attitude, and exclaimed,
with an eloquent expression: 'If that thar fire hadn't bin put
out, thar'd a' bin the greatest confirmation of the age!' "[33]
Twain would often have met such utterly conventional dialect and
malapropism in publications like the Spirit of the Times and the
Carpet-Bag.[34] The only unusual feature of the sketch is that it is
a fifteen-year-old author who so easily assumes the role of
"gentleman" narrator and leaves implicit his own sophisticated
awareness of the difference between confirmation and
conflagration. (The humor of malapropism is by nature elitist,
consolidating narrator and reader into a linguistic community
whose verbal knowledge is necessarily superior to that of the
error-prone object of the joke.)

The most memorable distinction between himself and the
ungrammatical that Twain draws anywhere occurs in Life on
the Mississippi, in the episode of his fight with the pilot Brown.
In a previous episode Twain has associated linguistic ability
with social rank. The mate on the Paul Jones swore and issued
commands with bravura; the "humblest official," the night
watchman, had bad grammar, worse construction, and profanity
void of art (WMT 12:41-42). Visiting pilots, who wore
silk hats and diamond breastpins, "were choice in their English,
and bore themselves with a dignity proper to men of

solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots" (WMT 12:
55). But the coarse vernacular of Brown, the hated "horse-faced,
ignorant . . . tyrant," symbolizes his lack of moral and
social authority over the cub pilot Twain. If the speech following
young Twain's protestation that he has had no orders is
based on biographical fact, Brown must have been one of the
inspirations for Pap Finn's aggressive ignorance.[35] Brown
mocks the cub pilot: "You've had no orders! My, what a fine
bird we are! We must have orders! Our father was a gentleman—owned
slaves—and we've been to school. . . . Dod dern
my skin, I'll learn you to swell yourself up and blow around
here about your dod-derned orders!" (WMT 12:166).

A short time later Twain describes how he physically subdues
Brown after the pilot has unjustly struck Twain's younger
brother. The fight is unremarkable, but it is followed by a peculiar
logomachy. Brown, having struggled to his feet, has
picked up a spyglass and ordered Twain out of the pilot-house.
"But I was not afraid of him now; so, instead of going,
I tarried, and criticized his grammar. I reformed his ferocious
speeches for him, and put them into good English, calling his
attention to the advantage of pure English over the bastard
dialect of the Pennsylvania collieries whence he was extracted.
He could have done his part to admiration in a cross-fire
of mere vituperation, of course; but he was not equipped for
this species of controversy" (WMT 12:173).[36] Brown retires,
muttering, to the wheel, apparently more daunted by the
cub's words than by his blows. Twain, in fact or in fancy, has
appropriated the ancient Greek and Irish satirists' weapon of
deadly invective. (A fragment of Archilochus reads, "One
great thing I know, how to recompense with evil reproaches
him that doeth me evil.")[37] He asserts the dominating power
of language, that power through which grammar turned into
glamour and gramarye, archaic synonyms for enchantment or
necromancy. But Twain draws his magical strength not from a
volume of Hermes Trismegistus but from Kirkham's Grammar.
The power he asserts is entirely secular and social. What he
does, as Matthews insisted, disparages the social standing of
Brown's father and mother, of the whole working-class Pennsylvania
coal district of his birth.

The Brown episode does not appear in the original 1875 Atlantic
Monthly series "Old Times on the Mississippi." In Life on
the Mississippi, together with the narrative of Henry's death, it
forms a transition to the new material that begins with chapter
22. Its structural position is therefore significant: it bridges
the gap between Twain as cub pilot and Twain as writer, a gap
summarized in four paragraphs of chapter 21 that describe
how Twain became a "scribbler of books, and an immovable
fixture among the other rocks of New England." Twain wants
to call the attention of his Eastern readership, too, to his "good
English," his "pure English," the guarantee of his social acceptability
and of his right to join the literary "rocks" of the
Eastern Establishment. If Howells did not pronounce "Tu es
Petrus" loudly enough to suit him, Twain was perfectly capable
of consecrating himself.

In Hawaii, in 1866, Anson Burlingame gave Twain some advice
that long afterwards he would claim to have lived by for
forty years: "Avoid inferiors. Seek your comradeships among
your superiors in intellect and character; always climb" (MTA
2:125). Years later, he probably read in Thomas Lounsbury's
Standard of Usage in English advice that confirmed his own
course of action since leaving the river. Although grammar
books may be helpful in learning good usage, "in no case can
they ever be appealed to as final authorities. There is one way
and but one way of attaining to the end desired as a theoretical
accomplishment, and fortunately it is a course open to
every one. Knowledge of good usage can be acquired only by
associating in life with the best speakers or in literature with
the best writers."[38] By creating him honorary Litterarum Doctor
in 1907, Oxford University effectively proclaimed him one
of those "best speakers and writers" who were supposed to
promulgate the standard of usage for the rest. Despite his
jokes about the literary "doctoring" he meant to do, he took
the degree seriously. In an after-dinner speech at the Savage
Club a few days after the Oxford ceremony, Twain objected to
a newspaper interview that had put the adjective "bully" into
his mouth. He never used slang, he claimed, to an interviewer
or to anyone else; what he said was framed in good English.
The typical humor that caps this portion of his remarks deflects

but does not nullify the chivalric earnestness of his
dedication to the language: "I have a great respect for the English
language. I am one of its supporters, its promotors [sic],
its elevators. I don't degrade it. . . . I have always tried hard
and faithfully to improve my English, and never to degrade it.
I always try to use the best English to describe what I think
and what I feel or what I don't feel and what I don't think."[39]
We know from his comments on Scott and Cooper, and above
all from the beauty and suppleness of his own plain style, that
he believed overrefinement and sentimentality were the most
serious degraders of English. The "best English" he has in
mind here, however, is not the vernacular poetry in which
Huck describes a sunrise on the river but the pure and correct
English of a Thomas Macaulay. He can enjoy breaking the
rules because he is master of them; his "grammatical infelicities"
proceed from neither ignorance nor careless habit but
from calculated artistry. Twain's mediation between Whitman's
lawlessness and James's obsessive obedience parallels the
ordered license permitted by Alexander Pope's poetics:

(Essay on Criticism, 1:146-49)

Like most of his contemporaries, Twain never realized that
proscribed social and regional varieties of English are self-contained
systems structured by their own rules. So he could
never be satisfied to be known only as a great dialect writer,
the creator of an Uncle Remus or a Sut Lovingood. He wanted
to be judged by the exacting standards that Henry Breen and
Richard Grant White had applied to serious writers and to be
found pure in style and correct in grammar. He was delighted
to read a biographical sketch that "contained praises of the
very thing which I most loved to hear praised—the good quality
of my English," buttressed by citations from "four English and
American literary experts of high authority" ("Private History
of a MS. That Came to Grief," MTA 1:175-76). Yet Twain's
gradual recognition that he himself was a master of language
led him from time to time after about 1880 to rebel against the
restraints of prescriptive grammarians and arbiters of usage,
to assume the function Pope assigned to Homer as the artist
who creates the rules by following nature. Twain's essays and
marginalia on English hint at an organic view of language,
one that is tacitly at work in his best fiction. Twain almost
manages to see school grammar as a humbug; had Kirkham's
costume been slightly shabbier, Twain might have consigned
him to the literary hell whither he had long since sent Sir Walter
Scott.[40]

Almost manages, but not quite. Mark Twain's criticism of prescriptive
grammar and grammarians is antipharisaic: he rebels
not against the idea of a normative language but against
those who presume to be its infallible legislators. Never is
there a hint that as a writer he has come to abolish the law
itself. When Twain burlesques the rules, as in the fragmentary
"grammar" I have used as a headnote to this chapter, he
merely inverts the norm: "Don't you know. There is no such
phrase; it is dontchuknow. . . . Don't say it hain't so, but it
ain't so. The former is vulgar."[41] (In his Grammar Kirkham explicitly
proscribes both "ain't" and "hain't," along with contractions
like "woodent" and "izzent" for "would not" and "is
not".)[42] The humor here derives from the incongruity between
the gentility of the generic form (etiquette manual) and
the vulgarity of the content, exploiting without calling into
serious question the dichotomy between genteel and vernacular.
Contrast the more radically subversive humor of
Gertrude Stein's mischievously titled How to Write: "A noun
should never be introduced into a sentence. If it is it is because
there is poverty poverty is at once and must be that they
are anxious to kiss. A noun should never be introduced into a
sentence. Also whenever should not be introduced into a sentence
because without a leaf they imitate that without reason."[43]
Stein's burlesque attacks the very categories of any
grammar that offers rational guidance to language, whether
prescriptive or descriptive. Rather than invert categories, she

shatters them into unrecognizability. All we know for certain
about the meaning of noun in Stein's context is that it is excluded
from the domain of all possible meanings of noun in
formal grammars. (In transformational grammar, the most
basic definition of a sentence rewrites it as noun phrase plus
verb phrase: S←NP+VP.) For her it is no disgrace that as
Twain had said of the Call reporter, she "don't choose to be
the slave of [Murray's Grammar]," instead "branching out into
new and aggravating combinations of words and phrases . . .
trying to start something fresh in English composition."[44]
A writer's grammar is generated by his or her own individual
work, or corpus: "It is impossible to avoid meaning and
if there is meaning and it says what it does there is grammar.
. . . Grammar is in our power."[45]

For Mark Twain, grammar, like grace, was out of our power.
A perfect standard language is an abstract construct, not the
reflection of anybody's actual usage; we are all born innocent
of it and approach it as a curve approaches a mathematical
limit that it can never reach. Our ultimate distance from perfection
is determined by a combination of "training and temperament"
(to use the vocabulary of What Is Man?). That we
"all have our limitations in the matter of grammar" allows
Twain in his 1880 Atlantic Monthly Contributors' Club column
to minimize his inattention to adverb placement as the result
of a constitutional defect. A "Boston Girl" had written him to
complain about his putting "adverbs between the particle and
verb in the Infinitive. For example: 'to even realize,' 'to mysteriously
disappear,' 'to wholly do away.' " Twain responds: "I
have certain instincts, and I wholly lack certain others. . . . I
am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb
is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference;
it can never give me a pang. . . . There are subtleties which I
cannot master at all,—they confuse me, they mean absolutely
nothing to me,—and this adverb plague is one of them."[46]
Even under the species of light irony, Twain's argument is a
curious one. In essence the passage is an example of the mildly
anti-intellectual humor that still flourishes in popular fiction
and essay: the author or a character claims that the element of

high-culture knowledge that he lacks is useless, pretentious,
or effete and therefore unnecessary. But even as he slights the
claims of formal English, Twain shoots back at his correspondent
with a tu quoque: I at least can punctuate; you cannot. Nor
does he deny, as he might have, that his adverbs and particles
are misplaced.[47] Instead, the subtext of his column coincides
with Pope's reason, in An Essay on Criticism, for advising the
writer to

(2:261-62)

This, in essence, was Twain's defense of Ulysses Grant
against Matthew Arnold's strictures on his grammar. In 1887
Arnold set off a minor furor in the United States when he reviewed
Grant's Memoirs (published by Twain's house); Americans
overlooked Arnold's general commendation of Grant's
"strong, resolute, and business-like" character and saw in Arnold's
comments on the Memoirs only an apparent verdict of
illiteracy: "I found a language all astray in its use of will and
shall, should and would, an English employing the verb to
conscript and the participle conscripting, and speaking in a
despatch to the Secretary of War of having badly whipped the
enemy; an English without charm and without high breeding."[48]
James Barnet Fry at once issued a rebuttal from the authoritative
pages of the North American Review, accusing Arnold
of committing the very errors he had diagnosed in Grant's
writing and patriotically championing Grant as the better
writer of the two.[49] In the same month that Fry's article appeared,
Twain, speaking at a military banquet held in honor
of General Grant's birthday, seconded Fry's condemnation of
Arnold. Twain plays Cicero to Arnold's Catiline in a masterfully
rhetorical reworking of Fry, whose piece he had evidently
just read. "What do we care for grammar," Twain asks
in the peroration, "when we think of the man that put together
that thunderous phrase: 'Unconditional and immediate
surrender!' " (MTS, 227). Even in this speech, however,
Twain does not attempt to refute Arnold's specific charges or
deny the validity of the rules he invokes. Instead, he claims
that grammar is a small virtue relative to the majesty of a man
like Grant, so that the general's errors are no more than spots
on the sun. Twain comes closest to a Whitman-like celebration
of lawlessness in declaring that the style of the Memoirs is
flawless and insisting that "great books are weighed and measured
by their style and matter, not by the trimmings and shadings
of their grammar" (MTS, 227). This assessment of Grant's
writing would not deter Twain from using those "spots" to
evaluate books in the future.[50]

Twain hated above all the critic who pretended to know
more grammar than anyone else and who freely and clumsily
corrected others' "errors." One of the autobiographical fragments,
assigned to 1900 by Albert Bigelow Paine, is "Private
History of a MS. That Came to Grief," a fifteen-page diatribe
against a British editor who had presumed to edit for style
and usage a piece on Joan of Arc he had solicited from Twain
(MTA 1:175-89). Another fragment from 1898, "Comment
on Tautology and Grammar," complains about a book reviewer
whose "grammar is foolishly correct, offensively precise":
"A person who is as self-righteous as that will do other
things. . . . When a man works up his grammar to that altitude,
it is a sign" (MTA 1:173-74). And the marginal comments
Twain made in George Washington Moon's Learned
Men's English, which he read in 1897, show that he had no patience
with the internecine squabbles of self-appointed experts
on usage, especially when conducted in a self-satisfied,
smirky tone.[51]

Yet Twain could always take the very position he had just
been denouncing. When he returned home in 1900 from
nearly a decade of life abroad, the vox Americana jarred him
just as it would Henry James five years later. Here is the opening
of a talk he made at a New York Woman's Press Club tea
soon afterwards:

(MTS, 346-47)

This is a protest against the trahison des clercs, the apparent
unwillingness of "the people that made the books" to acknowledge
the validity of their own rules. Raised on Kirkham's
Grammar and the Presbyterian Bible, Twain retains to
the end a Protestant conviction that the authority of the Book
is to be taken on faith. The ghost of Kirkham's grammar walking
always beside him prevented him from celebrating without
reservation an ungoverned heteroglossia; even Huck Finn's
language is meaningful only in relation to the rules it flouts.

Mark Twain would never believe that "grammar is in our
power," and the extent to which he remained a prescriptivist
measures how thoroughly he is after all a product of nineteenth-century
middle-class American culture. But his deep
respect for the authority of grammar, even when he kicks
against it, leads him to an implicit formulation that in the end
is sounder sociolinguistics than Stein's: grammar is power.
This is true in the trivial sense that those who have mastered
it can ridicule those who have not. More profoundly, however,
Twain knew what in our day has best been taught by
George Orwell: that authority over language translates directly
into authority over other people and, conversely, that
illiteracy means powerlessness—something equally clear to
both Pap Finn and Hank Morgan, even though the practical
consequences they adduce are different, Hank giving language
to his foster son Clarence, Pap taking it away from
Huck.

When the English radical William Cobbett dedicated his
1818 Grammar of the English Language to his fourteen-year-old
son, the furthest thing from his mind was to suggest that the
boy should free himself from the shackles of rules. Anybody
can, "without rules or instructions, put masses of words upon

paper," but to use language properly we must learn certain
"principles and rules [that] constitute what is called Grammar."[52]
But one learns these rules not for neutral or innocent
purposes but to "make use of words" for political and social
ends, chiefly to "assert with effect the rights and liberties of
his country."[53] Because one corollary of this statement is that
those already in power perpetrate the most dangerous abuse
of language, Cobbett devotes an entire chapter to "Errors and
Nonsense in a King's Speech." Faith in the authority of grammar
ultimately allies itself with a reformist strain in nineteenth-century
liberalism: purifying the language of the tribe
ought to purify the tribe as well. In the 1870s Mark Twain still
shares this optimism. Thus in his most carefully focused
work of polemical fiction, The Gilded Age (written jointly with
Charles Dudley Warner), social criticism and a critique of language
are intimately allied.