soon becomes clear that Hank values nothing so much as making money, and his
schemes for doing so reveals a distinctly unattractive side of his character.
Hank’s language consistently reveals his true values. His is the diction of the
marketplace. He tells us, for example, that "It is no use to throw away a
good thing merely because the market isn’t ripe yet." After he has
destroyed Merlin’s Tower, he declares that "the account was square, the
books balanced." When another of his schemes fails to work out, he tells us
that he "sold it short." He mocks the knights because they all
"took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then," observing: There were
worlds of reputation in it, but no money, Why, they actually wanted me to put
in! Well, I should smile.(Miller, 122) After all, Hank is much too
"practical" to waste time on anything that is not financially
remunerative. It should not come then in any surprise that Hank wishes he could
remake man without a conscience because conscience "cannot be said to
pay." Ironically, when Hank is enslaved, he criticizes his master for
having a heart "solely for business." Hank is completely unaware that
the slave master is only a cruder version of himself; both see men in terms of
their commercial value, and neither is apt to allow sentiment to interfere with
business. That Twain himself saw a parallel between slave masters and financiers
is establishes by an illustration in the first edition of A Connecticut Yankee,
an illustration that Twain singled out for praise: The slave master was given
the features of Jay Gould, the great robber baron. And it is worth nothing, at
this point, that Hank is tied by his name to a capitalist of dubious reputation,
the great American banker, J.P. Morgan. (Miller, 122) In short, Hank Morgan
never learns. He arrives in Camelot with all the prejudices of a
nineteenth-century provincial. He encounters a civilization that is radically
different from his own- a civilization that is, without question, far from
perfect. But his understanding f that civilization never grows in either depth
or complexity. He is, in Twain’s own words, "a perfect ignoramus," and
his opinions cannot be accepted at face value. It would be a mistake, however,
to read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court as a satire at Hank’s sole
expense. Twain satirizes modern industrial society through Hank, whose faith in
advertising and cost effectiveness is naive to say at least. But Twain is no
simple romantic. Throughout the nineteenth century, many writers glorified the
Middle Ages, finding withing the distant past a soothing contrast to the dark
Satanic mills they saw before them. From Sir Walter Scott- who , as we know,
Twain absolutely loathed- on a Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelites, the
Gothic Revival in architecture, and a resurgence in Arthurian scholarship that
continues to this day, post-industrial man has been fascinated by the Age of
Chivalry and Faith. But A Connecticut Yankee is not a part of this tradition
(Miller, 133). Hank’s condemnation of Camelot is excessive, and through it we
discover many of his limitations. On the other hand, it must also be
acknowledged that Twain was not trying to idealize the past. Therefore, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court should not be read as an attack upon
the Middle Ages per se, any more than as a satire of modern American values. It
is, as Twain himself reminded us, a contrast. The contrast between the medieval
and the modern is comic in so far as it is grotesque- neither the past nor the
present is any more ideal than human nature itself. If humor seems eventually to
disappear toward the end of the novel, it is because the apocalyptic conclusion
denies us the possibility of hope. Presented with a vision of history in which
corruption seems to triumph, a vision in which the present is but a logical
extension of the past, we are ultimately left scorched by Twain’s anger at the
perpetual stupidity of men. As Hank Morgan observes, almost certainly speaking
for Twain: "I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt." (Miller,
135.)
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