haps the townspeople of Dawson’s Landing in Pudd’nhead Wilson (written about ten years earlier), who fail to understand Wilson’s ironic joke and thus doom him to twenty years of mislabeling as a pudd’nhead. Another ten years before that, we have the numerous ironies of Huckleberry Finn, notably Huck’s failure to under- stand that the most seless act of his life has not condemned him to hell (and, between the two, such ironies as those produced by transposing a Yankee to King Arthur’s Court). It seems clear when retracing the development of Twain’s style through his career that his use of irony—always one of his key rhetorical devices—becomes increasingly heavy- handed the older and the angrier he became. Huck’s “failure” is innocent; that of the con- gregation in “The War-Prayer” is not.
Albert Bigelow Paine quotes Twain as writing on New Year’s Eve 1900-01:
A GREETING FROM THE NINETEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phil- ippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass. (Europe xxxiv)
Here, only the adjective “stately” tells us that the intended tone is irony, before Twain starts hammering home his point; and it is precisely the behavior of Christendom in the Philippines that would lead, in 1904-5, to the barely disguised fury that makes “The War- Prayer”’s irony so unsubtle. Unsubtle is not the same as ineffective, of course, but insidi- ousness usually serves irony better.
It was still Twain’s only appropriate rhetorical device, however, given that irony is inherently dualistic: it says or implies one thing, it means another; it has a stated (often false) meaning, and a silent (true) meaning; and it is only possible to negotiate how to read it “correctly” because it is, as Wayne Booth says, a dual “operation . . . performed together by authors and readers” (8). Twain’s life, always marked by dualism (as all the twins and doubles in his work attest), was at the time of “The War-Prayer” consumed by it: “Clemens the man was at odds with Twain the image,” producing “tension between the private and the public gure, his tragic and comic qualities” (Gribben 38). His concern—or, rather, his wife’s—for his image was one chief reason such works as “The War-Prayer” were