The New Criterion

Just when it seemed that both the City of New York and the federal government were willing to let Grant’s Tomb, on upper Fifth Avenue, sink into neglect, desuetude, and decay, with few to protest this indignity to an American president and a national monument, along has come a curious publication of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. I hope that this Association has the requisite power to shame the politicians (which would be a great deal of power indeed, as politicians have little enough shame) into repairing and renovating and protecting the resting place of one of the great heroes of the Republic.

In any case, the curious publication is “General Grant” by Matthew Arnold, with a Rejoinder by Mark Twain. This item is in fact the second edition of the 1966 publication that launched the Association’s massive edition of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. John Y. Simon, the director of that edition, which now comprises twenty volumes, has written a new introduction.

The interest of this little book lies in Matthew Arnold’s long two-part review, published in Murray’s Magazine in 1886, of the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. Arnold’s aim was ostensibly to make British readers aware of an impressive, neglected military memoir by a taciturn general who had previously, in person, seemed to Arnold to have no recognizable point of interest. Arnold’s review—which elegantly and accurately summarized the principal facts of Grant’s life, his military career, and his stunning Civil War victories—is on the whole quite complimentary. It is not, however, perfectly controlled in tone. And when the Murray’s review was picked up, reprinted, and circulated in America, it raised a firestorm of protest.

One of the most vociferous protesters was Mark Twain. His speech at the Annual Reunion of the Army and Navy Club of Connecticut on April 27, 1887 (Grant’s birthday), is the rejoinder indicated in the booklet’s title. I think it fair to say that Twain was an anglophobe who deeply resented the snobbishness of Arnold and his condescension to civilization in the United States. In any case, Arnold—as the spokesman for “the best that has been thought and said in the world”—had complained at the tendency of Americans to brag that anything American, however mediocre, was the simply best durn thing going. Further, he had called America’s vulgar newspapers an offense to decency. And, finally, Arnold claimed that the low condition of American culture was defined by our addiction to “phunny phellows” such as Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and E. Epamonidas Adrastus Blab (a.k.a. Sam’l L. Clemens or Mark Twain). This criticism of rowdy newspapermen and platform comedians was a one-two punch to Twain, a professional instance of both; but he got his revenge in the uproarious rejoinder.

More than these complaints, however, what seemed to inflame American readers was Arnold’s criticism of Grant’s bad grammar, his uncertain use of “shall” and “will,” and the description of the plain style of the Memoirs as “an English without charm and without high breeding.” Twain, for one, went ballistic. In his rejoinder he pointed out that the English prose styles that supposedly reflect high breeding are all of them full of grammatical errors. And he cited the Englishman Henry H. Breen’s Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects as listing scores of grammatical lapses in Sheridan, Carlyle, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Milton, et al. Then, turning on Arnold’s essay, Twain picked it to pieces to the roar of the veterans and reproduced a long Arnold passage, hopelessly obscure in its pronoun references, of which he said: “To read that passage a couple of times would make a man dizzy, to read it four times would make him drunk.” Arnold’s prose, then, was for Twain no better than Grant’s. For all its bluntness of style, Grant’s Memoirs was “a great, (and in its peculiar department) unique and unapproachable literary masterpiece.”

Twain sincerely believed in Grant’s book and hoped others would like it. Of course he was not completely disinterested. The Charles L. Webster Company—which published and sold the Memoirs by subscription, and dispersed its agents throughout the land under orders to sell a copy to every household in America—was in fact a Twain family enterprise. Now let’s get that Tomb repaired.